Are we playing a fictional role in life?

[coberst]

Are we playing a fictional role in life?

Sapiens are a species that has lost many of their animal instincts and our “soul” replaces these instincts. I use the word ‘soul’ to signify what many might call consciousness, spirit, conscience, mind, reason, etc. We are thus thrust out of the arms of Mother Nature and onto our own ability to adapt and survive. We are forced into replacing the natural selection process, which has led to our evolution, and we are thrown upon our own abilities to adapt or to be extinguished. It is our “soul” that creates the games we play. These games replace natural selection; and determine our survival as a species.

Socrates was an intuitive genius, who may have been the first to understand that man needs to function in a shared social fiction before he can earn his own social honor, and social approval. But even Socrates could not intuit the degree to which this need was rooted. He could not see how deep ‘social performance’ goes and the degree that it is rooted in the anxiety of all sapiens. Humans cannot recognize their own self-worth without the word from their own social group.

We have successfully struggled against Mother Nature to gain great material wealth only to discover that, as Pogo might say, “we have met the enemy and it is us”. The enemy is our great material play-form itself; it is our own profit-and-loss economy, our money-over-the-counter game that is defeating us. We have lost all relationship with our nature. Our created fiction has crippled our ability to rationally adapt to our world we have created. We run as fast as we can from school to shopping center to the bank and back home in our new SUV only to discover that the gods have already made us mad. Our own fictions are killing us.

War itself is a fiction, it is a game, and it is a play-form. Roman civilization itself was a great “potlatch spirit” (a ceremonial feast of the American Indian of the northwest coast marked by the host’s lavish distribution of gifts or sometimes destruction of property to demonstrate wealth and generosity with the expectation of eventual reciprocation). What begins as simple contests, develop into complex play-forms. “Poetry, art, law, philosophy, war—all are contests or play-forms.”

To call them play-forms is not to say that they are not serious. In our great game of society we create meaning; fictional meaning but nevertheless these fictions are life-meaning fictions. Me and Earnest agree, our problem is that we must create better fictions to live by, because our present fictions are killing us.

What is the difference between playing a fictional role in life versus a non-fictional role?

Ideas and quotes from Beyond Alienation by Ernest Becker

[Kindle]

coberst;1159753 wrote: .....man needs to function in a shared social fiction before he can earn his own social honor, and social approval. But even Socrates could not intuit the degree to which this need was rooted. He could not see how deep ‘social performance’ goes and the degree that it is rooted in the anxiety of all sapiens. Humans cannot recognize their own self-worth without the word from their own social group.[/b]................

What is the difference between playing a fictional role in life versus a non-fictional role?




Wouldn't a shared social fiction exclude all those who think differently? Wouldn't we then just be in the same isolated groups of people as we are now?

Isn't self-worth based on the ideals you seek to immulate? Does this make the person less if they have chosen the wrong ideal to compare themselves to?



A fictional role would be trying to be someone you really aren't. I think we change throughout our lifetime and whatever we are at the time, is true to who we are then. How are we to know the basic core of ourselves as change is ever evolving within us?

[coberst]

As one example I think that our role as consumer is very large, it is a fictional role, and is alien to our nature.

[Devonin]

You feel that consuming is alien to human nature? One wonders how it is that we're so incredibly good at it.

[coberst]

Devonin;1160014 wrote: You feel that consuming is alien to human nature? One wonders how it is that we're so incredibly good at it.


We are incredible good at shopping because Corporate America is incredibly good at manipulating us.

[along-for-the-ride]

I refuse to believe that my life is work of fiction. It is an autobiography with several chapters and still in the works. Someone else will write the final page.

[Devonin]

coberst;1160032 wrote: We are incredible good at shopping because Corporate America is incredibly good at manipulating us.


You're confusing "corporate consumerism" with "consuming" then, because I'm pretty sure that well before Corporations -OR- America, humanity has been the undisputed king of consuming for our own ends.

[coberst]

Devonin;1160259 wrote: You're confusing "corporate consumerism" with "consuming" then, because I'm pretty sure that well before Corporations -OR- America, humanity has been the undisputed king of consuming for our own ends.


Corporate America has given us the title of "Consumer" and we have unwittingly and foolishly embraced it!

[Clodhopper]

...it's certainly arguable that human history has been a record of humanity increasing its ability to consume the Earth's natural resources - there seems to be a link between the first arrival of humans in America and New Zealand with the extinction of large land animals.

Also, I suspect the word "fiction" is being used in a jargon sense describing the difference between what we perceive, and reality. (Rather than the traditional sense of a made up story or a lie.)

[coberst]

Clodhopper;1160331 wrote:

Also, I suspect the word "fiction" is being used in a jargon sense describing the difference between what we perceive, and reality. (Rather than the traditional sense of a made up story or a lie.)


I use it as meaning not natural, i.e. alien to our nature.

[Clodhopper]

War itself is a fiction, it is a game, and it is a play-form


Hard to see war as not natural to us...:-1

But certainly agree that what you refer to as our fictions are killing us.

[Devonin]

You agree that our fictions are killing us, but you disagree with which things he calls our fictions...

If consuming and competing aren't actually alien to our nature (And they are, I'd suggest, wholly intrinsic to our nature) then how can you characterize these things as simultaneously not alien to our nature, but fictional?

[Clodhopper]

You agree that our fictions are killing us, but you disagree with which things he calls our fictions...


:wah:



Yes. I think the things he calls fictions are killing us, but think that's what they have in common - that they are killing us. I tend to agree that they are natural to us. Civilisation is in may ways about curbing what's natural to us, but that's rather a different argument.

[Devonin]

Alright, so what you're saying is "Yes those things are killing us, but no they aren't actually fictions alien to us"?

If that's so...what does that say, that things which are intrinsic to being human are somehow responsible for destroying humanity? Are we inherantly flawed, or just trying too hard to resist our own natural impulses?

[Clodhopper]

I would say calling us "inherently flawed" would be to make a value judgement inappropriately. So far, we have resisted destruction by nuclear warfare, but the consequences of endless population growth have yet to be adequately recognised, for example.

We face the consequences of being ourselves. We are Shakespeare as well as Mengele, Stalin as well as Mandela. Whether we can govern the instincts that will destroy us as a species or not remains an open question. In that sense we are just another species facing the questions raised by evolution. Survive. Reproduce.

[qsducks]

Starting in the fall of the last year, I became the GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE. We had a little probs with mice invading my space. I hunted them all down, threw some in the toilet bye bye and got rid of the rest of them through various poisons and glue traps.:wah

[Clodhopper]

:yh_rotfl

Simple issue: it's you or the mice.

A mouse family tried it on me once. Their decaying corpses on a gibbet out the front seem to have effectively solved the problem. Bwahahahahaha.