Another brick in the wall
According to Marx, there are four main sins of mass society:
- Alienating people from nature
- Alienating people from each other
- Alienating people from the meaningful work
- Alienating people from ourselves
The fourth is the most unforgivable, cuz it’s definitely the sin against the holy ghost. One who allows society to determine one’s identity loses touch with oneself. Let’s see this identity which society provides just like education or health care. Those identities we don’t have to earn every single day I consider conterproductive identities. Cultural, linguistic, religious, national. The people need nothing to add to these identities, but they can add nothing to them either. Those are predetermined, static, and self-tyranizating identities which are given for an entire life, and have nothing to do with individual self-improvement.
What the collectivists tend to forget, the personal and individual experience the only one carrier of reality. In other words our identity is not only what links the individual and the society together, but what separates them either. The identity is not a static but a dynamic phenomenon, which changes day by day by acquiring new experiences, knowledge, and consequences. This is an individual process in all cases. The beginning of wisdom is self-denial. You sacrifice your own present self for the truth, for getting better.
You are not a same person today like you were yesterday. Tomorrow you’ll be a slightly different than you are today. To those who are proud of the identity they received at birth, I say. No matter what you were born to be. It doesn’t matter what you are now. All that matters is what you can still become. You have to sacrifice previous versions of yourself to get a better one. This is the most fearful challenge to mass society.
However the human being is designed for challenge not for stagnation. Most live in boxes for their entire lives without leaving their comfort zone. But box is for storing not for living.
The serfdom of modernism
It’s mindblowing to think about what two serfs can talk about to each other. They cannot talk about what the seers are talking about, namely, what an unparalleled opportunity life is for instance. Suppose they are each other’s co-workers, hence they’re talking about their job they hate. They complain. That can be useful in some cases indeed. Let’s assume, they are both football fans, thus the subject of conversation is given. Who scored or missed what a goal.
They may have political differences with each other. They scold or praise the government. Whatever two modern average people talk about, I guarantee it has no intellectual value. And it’s not a coincidence.
Mass society and the current political-economic status quo are built on millions of people who have no purpose in life. And their lives are thus a forced path they choose involuntarily. I personally can’t even imagine that one works in the tax office or in the passport issuance and renewal department, and found a passion, moreover a life goal in it. Of course you can claim, there’s a need for executors. And that’s right. But this is precisely because people have no life.
If the majority of people would have a life, there would be no need for executors and their work. And the world we live in today would be unrecognizable. Of course, rulers do everything they can to keep people from feeling the need for a purpose in life. They are constantly distracted by the fast-acting, and passing dopamine shoots and stimulus from facing emptiness. Antidepressant propaganda, gigantic military parades and sporting events, cheap loans on cars and consumer goods, provoking hypersexuality by porn industry, and so on. None of these makes you happy, but makes you believe you are happy. Or they make you forget the necessity of change.
And if all that weren’t enough, they’ll hysterize the masses with an image of enemies created. The masses are trained to stagnate by provoking fear and anxiety.
Seers and blinds
I think Socrates’ most bitter realization was not his death sentence, but the fact his irrefutable arguments found deaf ears amongst Athenians. He triggered the anger of Athenians by exposing their hypocrisy and pseudo ethics. He unveiled not only his accusers, but indirectly all of his fellow citizens.
The truth lasts forever, but the lie lasts as long as it was said. The weird irony of propaganda that it’s efficient only when it was repeated constantly. And it’s interesting to see the panic that only one honest voice causes among millions of liars and hypocrites. That’s why there is a need for political correctness, which makes the whole society an intellectual wasteland. But the real trouble begins when no one wants to hear the truth, and no one wants to tell it.
Indeed they do every possible thing to keep the honest away from public, and discourage anyone from telling truth. And if that doesn’t work out, they make sure at least they don’t have the last word. Thus the right ones get slandered with the most ignoble and ridiculous accusations by agents of the Matrix.
I met so many anti-philosophers in various Facebook groups who qualify themselves ‘philosopher’ just because they are capable to formulate three words into one sentence, ‘where is God’, or ‘there is God’, or ‘prove God exists’. While they fail to see through the most obvious logical conclusions either, for example about the nature of power. This is, what I call the proletarian revolution of philosophy, or the plebeian philosophy, or fake intellectualism. Thus the philosophy is democratized. What I mean by that?
We make way for consumerism in philosophy by demolishing the wall between false and true intellectualism. We make philosophy more swallowable for masses in order to avoid stigmatization, or breach political correctness. But philosophy loses mainwhile its function, the intellectual superriority. Because we all equal, providing room for neither bright nor dumb.
We are privileged to be witnesses of rising the new European race, the herd animal, quoting Nietzsche. Or the mediocrate domesticated consumidiot as final stage of human evolution. We did it. But I warn you, not only the philosophy which is at the stake now, but free speech as well. There is a price of making avarageness feel better, more comfortable, without feeling urge to change. And this price we have to pay is the intellectualism. The first victim is a philosophy, the second the free speech, the third will be the chance for living better life. And I wait that moment when the last stand of true philosophers chooses the voluntary blindness by self-censorship, to gain cheap popularity and social validation. This is the final sacrifice of philosophy, or the rather suicide of philosophy. In the age of science which is considerable the best of all ages, the most advanced, the most enlightened.
The task of philosophy is to set an example to mediocrity how to think. But if the mediocracy sets example to philosophers how not to think, that is undoubtedly the beginning of end. Here we are now, in post-philosophical world, where comfort and intellectual indolence are above all. This is the reality of the world today, blind leads seer. And a society that is intellectually dead will be dead in every other way, sooner or later.
Individuals vs. Components
I define the intellectual development from Dr. Gabor Maté’s perspective as a way where we find ourselves, or the connection with ourselves. This is a unique and individual process for everyone. The modern mass society we live in, however, is necessarily conformizes and uniformizes the individual into, let’s say, ‘pattern citizen’ in order to maintain the social stability and national unity. But this inevitably damages the individual’s spontaneous authenticity and uniqueness. In other words the spiritual connection of individuals with themselves, or the process of intellectual development. The larger the scale of a society, the more conformism is required to maintain the status quo. Hence all societies in mass scale force the individual to choose between authenticity and conformity, or between happiness or prosperity, or between connection with him/herself and with society. This is a political or ideological union where everyone must be integrated in, and no one can afford to have own moral judgement that beats this social ‘contract’. Because one must dominate. And in the worst scenario the society forces you to break the union with your true self (totalitarianism). This is the price of whole social integrity.
In fact, all social problems arise from this. Hence, all social problems would be solved simultaneously if societies were on a human scale, and as small as possible. Small societies rely on individuals instead of masses. And masses consist of components rather than individuals. Where the individual is not forced to make choices, the individuals who make up society are happier, more efficient, more creative, more prosperous. As result the society is happier, more efficient, more creative, more prosperous, indirectly. Mass societies, on other hand, are all doomed to collapse for this reason on long run, albeit they do every possible thing to survive the present. They are all built upon infantilist, uprooted, damaged individuals, are individuals only in figurative sense, but they are components only.
Mass societies are like some toxic waste flood, sweep everything and everyone which are in their way. It’s obvious, because if the individual can’t fix his own life, it’s not possible to shift it to upper level, especially in mass scale. And this phenomena that we can observe right now, in series of crises.
Because components are designed to work in the structure, no matter how, not to correct structure. Correcting structure would be a duty of government, but and this is a tricky part, the government is elected by components and consisting of components. And this is a logical loop of collectivism often overlooked, because it’s irrational and unethical treating people as components of structure. Every person has an individual personality independently of others no matter how advanced. Therefore the individual experience is the only carrier of reality. All person is unique universe.
According to the current state of science, the human mind is the most complex phenomenon in the universe, containing more nerve cells than stars are in the universe. We are NOT components of the society, but a creators. This is why all societies what ignore this rule must collapse by their own illogical existence. Those are the mass societies with no exception.
But we have another need which is authenticity, now authenticity auto-self means being connected to ourselves just knowing what we feel and being able to act on it so that means our gut feelings.
Gabor Maté
So let’s look at how human beings evolved for hundreds and thousands of years, and for a hundred thousand years or so of this species existing on earth how did we live. We didn’t live in cities and houses, and so we lived there out there in the wild, until very recently in human um existance now. Just how long do you survive in a wild if you’re not connected to your gut feelings, not very long.
Gabor Maté
Authenticity is a survival need. To our survival in this more modern setting where to stay authentic is to threaten attachment. And so we give up authenticity, and then we wonder how the hell we are, and whose life is this, and who’s experiencing all this. And this life doesn’t you know, and who am I really.
Gabor Maté
The fundamental problem with mass-oriented societies
Everything what individual creates, can’t be superior to individual itself. The problem is not with the group or the herd spirit itself, but with the divine value attributed to the group, and with tendency of raising the group above the individual. The individual was created in image of God, not an arbitrary separated, and fenced group, this guarantees that no one will have to be punished for another person’s sin. As the human created thing can’t be superior to human, the God created thing can’t be superior to God at the same way. Created can’t be superior to creator. It’s not possible.
The idolatry of any arbitrarily defined group of people is irrational and unethical. In addition, mass societies do not meet any of the criteria for a group as an entity. The nationalism for example, or any linguistic, ethnic, cultural, political, and ideological imaginary entity. Because they are not in human scale. There is no daily interaction and mutual acquaintance between individuals, which is the cohesive force of real groups. And because they are not a real groups, can’t be real groups, they seem formidable, invizible, utopian, impersonal, mystic, and divine. But they are not. They are illusions merely.
The divine will reflects on individuals not on nations, crowd, people, and masses. If groups were created, as real groups were created, based upon such principle that two minds more than one, three minds more than two, and so on, in order to balance the limitations of each other, and redistribute labor, that’s a wonderful idea. And I’m convinced that groups can work only this way. They work for each other in union while working for themselves. This is how civilization works.
In these groups the individual never confronts group, because in group everyone is an individual, and if individual suffers, indirectly the group suffers.
Collectivism, on the other hand, is not based on this principle. As masses are not a group, the individual is treated like component. The component is disposable, replacable, only the whole that matters. There is only one will, one banner, one leader. And a cult leader’s will represents the whole. The leader is the group. The leader raises himself over man to divine height, with repelling subjects to under man.
The totalitarianism is inevitably the final conclusion of power, which seems oversimplified with regards to characterizing today’s societies. But one principle must dominate, which is either Individual or masses.
If you interested in this topic in more detail, please visit my previous posts relating to it:
Thanks for reading me!