Citizen becomes Cipher
Rugged individualism might be an appropriate expression for all the creatures in the world, with one exception. Humans have, in the last few hundred years, moved from being rugged individuals to our present state in which we have fashioned an alien environment in which we have become chess pieces or ciphers. We have invented the Artificial Kingdom where, as Simone Weil once noted, “it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of the thing.
I think that we, women and men, have become chess pieces. We have become objects to be manipulated by the market and the corporation. We spend our days like the chess piece; we have a quantified value and are placed on the board and used as desired by some one who may be a real person. The real person has still the human characteristics of creativity, spontaneity, improvisation, spontaneously reactive, discontinuous, a mosaic more than syntax or cipher. Just what we find is missing when using the telephone to contact someone out there.
In an effort to understand where we are now it might help to start back in time and move forward. In frontier days each person was very much an individual. Rugged individualism was a popular expression. Each man and woman was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Each husband and wife was a team that together could and had to do everything that was needed.
In early America we were an agricultural economy. Most families were farm families we were all rugged individualist. The farmer was very much the jack-of-all-trades and the master of his or her domain.
As we move forward in time we see this team become a man working in a factory or office and the woman was at home raising the children and maintaining the day to day necessities for all family members. She washed, cleaned, shopped, sewed, and was still much of a rugged individual. Slowly the man became a specialized worker in a clockwork factory or office.
Moving forward in history we arrive at the present moment where not only is the man working in the factory or office but the woman joins him there also.
When we examine the factory or office workspace we find a very different occupation for the man and woman than the rugged individualism of emerging history of human evolution. We no longer are masters of our own domain but are ciphers in a clockwork that functions upon modern economic principles.
A pertinent example of this mode of commodification is how we have converted what was political economics into the modern economics. Political economy is the study of social relations. It is the study of culture. Political economy focuses upon the problem of how to regulate industrialization within the context of a healthy society, it worries about the problems of labor within a context of the laborer as an end and not a commodity—an object of commerce.
Economics, however, in its modern form, has replaced political economics. Economics has removed the pesky concern about labor as being human and has replaced labor as being a commodity—an object of commerce. Modern economics is now the study of scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. Economics has legislated that labor, as an end, is no longer a legitimate domain of knowledge for economic consideration. In doing so, over time, society has become ignorant of such concerns. Our culture has replaced concern about humans as ends with humans as means to some other end.
In the rugged individualist mode of living the individual was creative and master even though the domain of mastery was small. An individual’s personality is dramatically affected. Labor has become an abstract quantity and calculated into the commodity produced. We are the only creatures who have completely removed our self from what we were evolved to be. We are the only creatures removed from our grounding in an organic world. We came from a long ancestry of rugged individualist and now reside in the Artificial Kingdom. To what end only time will tell.
Do you feel like a cipher in our culture?
Citizen becomes Cipher
Citizen becomes Cipher
Do you feel like a cipher in our culture?
No but then thankfully my cultural background is very different from yours. You do seem to have very bleak view of things.
No but then thankfully my cultural background is very different from yours. You do seem to have very bleak view of things.
Citizen becomes Cipher
Let’s try to empathize with the frontier family who is a farmer or small merchant. Such a family must face alone all the tsunamis of everyday existence without help from anyone other than a few neighbors. Such a family has no “safety net of any kind. There is no insurance, pension, social security, hospital, and no hardware store with all the technology to help when things go wrong. Such a family must reconstruct reality constantly when faced with a reality that they are unprepared for. Such a family must constantly recreate a new reality as reality constantly shakes the foundation of their understanding.
Citizen becomes Cipher
coberst;733538 wrote: Let’s try to empathize with the frontier family who is a farmer or small merchant. Such a family must face alone all the tsunamis of everyday existence without help from anyone other than a few neighbors. Such a family has no “safety net of any kind. There is no insurance, pension, social security, hospital, and no hardware store with all the technology to help when things go wrong. Such a family must reconstruct reality constantly when faced with a reality that they are unprepared for. Such a family must constantly recreate a new reality as reality constantly shakes the foundation of their understanding.
Difficult to do when you live in one of the most densely populated and industrialised countries on the planet. Pension, social security, hospital all these are there if needed for we are a liberal democracy and we tell government what to do and what we expect. If they don't listen we get someone else.
You need to understand that your culture is unique to your people and others do not live as you do.
Difficult to do when you live in one of the most densely populated and industrialised countries on the planet. Pension, social security, hospital all these are there if needed for we are a liberal democracy and we tell government what to do and what we expect. If they don't listen we get someone else.
You need to understand that your culture is unique to your people and others do not live as you do.