Rethinking an Aspect of the Hive

In my original articulation of my weird cultural theory, I reached a conclusion which I am now reconsidering.  Now, I'm sure that anyone who happens to read this blog on the reg is hoping that what I'm reconsidering is the general thrust of my weird cultural theory, but that would require meaningful counter-evidence against it, which nobody seems able to provide.

What I am reconsidering is the extent of signaling, the independence of the distractions, and the role of popular culture (see points 1.1 and 3).  More specifically, I'm no longer convinced that popular culture serves solely as a distraction.  I think it's highly likely that popular culture can serve both as a distraction and as a signal.  I am working on a paradigm for this.  My original thought was that popular culture can be split into categories of signal-culture and distraction-culture.  Upon further consideration, I suspect that these exist as a continuum rather than distinct categories.

My working theory for the continuum is as follows:  popular culture has two possible functions: to send signals on the behalf of the economy, and to distract people from the true nature of civilization.  These functions exist on a continuum, with the most acceptably mainstream elements of popular culture being those which serve more effectively as the economy's behavioral signals.  Especially vapid popular culture may at times serve very little distracting purpose, and portray civilization largely as it is, because the people among whom it is popular do not need to be distracted; they are either suited better as drones for the economy than as autonomous people, or they just don't do enough thinking to be in danger of being woke.

I also have a working theory for why I missed popular culture's signaling function the first time around, and it's a pretty simple one:  I'm a weirdo.  I conscientiously avoid the most accepted forms of popular culture, and I'm also largely immune to the economy's signals.  Also, nobody needs a distraction from life more than the person who actually knows the true nature of life.  Being weird is, in general, immensely useful for observing the way the world works.  To understand the unthinking assumptions of others, those assumptions more or less need to be foreign enough to require thinking about them.  To observe assumptions common to all of human civilization, one needs to be, essentially, a foreigner to humanity.  This provides the best big-picture understanding of the nature of civilization, but leaves me with easiest access to a less-than-ideal model for how humanity responds to, and is meant to respond to, civilization.  Basically, because I don't respond to popular culture as though it is a signal from the economy to work or spend, I assumed that I'm not supposed to.

As previously stated, I now believe that assumption to have been made in error.  Oops.

How Do You Train Seven Billion Monkeys?

We are an incredibly diverse species, representing millions of different cultures, beliefs, and ways of life.  At least, we are on the outside.

We are, excepting the edges of the bell-curve, a species that exhibits the same pattern of a few learned behaviors based on the same few beliefs that we don't know we espouse.  And, of course, you don't believe me.  How could a person believe something that he or she doesn't know she believes?

How could she?



What kind of television programs did you watch the most of when you were very young?  How long were they?  Who was in them?  What were they about?  Was the plot different in each episode?







I am asking seriously.  Please answer these questions.  Write the answers down, if that helps.  Put it in the comments, if you want.









So, what is your answer?  Actually, it doesn't matter what your answer was.  Unless your answer was "my parents didn't let me watch TV," your answer is almost certainly wrong.  Among the people who did watch TV in their preschool years, the programs they think they watched the most will vary, but the programs they actually watched the most are the same.  People remember watching a lot of fifteen-minute animated shows depicting various, whacky antics of oddly-shaped people or anthropomorphic animals.  They remember watching half-hour shows featuring both puppets and live actors.  They probably watched those as well.

In between those fifteen-minute animated TV shows and thirty-minute puppet shows, almost all television stations air a different kind of show, though, and these are incredibly formulaic.  All of them are fifteen or thirty seconds long.  All of them feature actors whose names and faces you would not recognize today.  The vast majority of them have a simple, three-part plot featuring an emotional journey and a McGuffin.  In the first part of the plot, our characters are downcast, somewhere between miserable and just unbearably bored.  In the second part of the plot, our characters are introduced to the McGuffin, which they find fascinating.  They are consumed with interest in it, with desire for it.  This is the turning point.  In the third part of the plot, our characters possess the McGuffin, and they have been cured of their misery or boredom.  It has been replaced with liveliness, happiness, excitment.

In case you haven't figured it out, I'm describing television advertisements targeting young children.  They are incredibly simple and formulaic.  That is not an accident.  Advertising aimed at children isn't really salesmanship.  It's training.  As a society, we train our children to solve their imperfect lives by engaging in consumerism.  We indoctrinate them with a belief that if they are not presently happy, finding something they want to buy and buying it can make them happy.

And does it work?  Oh boy, howdy!  Have you been to a shopping mall?

Heck, even if you don't consciously believe that consumerism will make you happy, you very likely behave as though you do.  Almost everyone identifies items that they want, becomes excited about buying them, buys them, and then lives out the remainder of life in the same emotional equilibrium as before the purchase.  I do it, and I'm the guy telling you how ridiculous it is!  But then I look around me, and I can remember a time before I owned each of the five objects closest to me.  I was no unhappier in that time.  Try it.  Were you?

Occasionally, a purchase really does improve a person's life.  Purchases related to a passionately-held hobby can certainly be money well spent.  However, even some of these are irrelevant to our emotional well-being.  Avid sports fans often get excited about buying better television to watch sports on.  For a while, this television will be new and remarkable.  Soon, sports fans return to normal, and they will be exactly as happy or as unhappy as they would have been watching a game with the same results on the old TV.  If the new TV breaks, and the old one happens to have been sitting in the garage, complaints about the relative quality of the old TV will disappear within a couple of weeks.  It is being able to watch the desired games that makes a difference, not the television.

Worthwhile purchases are the ones that allow us to pursue our passions more often or more thoroughly.  These are surprisingly few and far between, to the degree that there are almost none that are universal.  A bed that allows us to rest well might be the only one.  Purchases that increase convenience would seem good candidates in theory, but in practice, they tend to save too little time to make a difference, or to open up time that we fill with more dissatisfying obligations rather than hobbies.  If you feel desperate to buy something you can barely afford, or make a purchase that is otherwise inconvenient, carefully consider the things you already own.  Are any one of them, or the set as a whole, preventing you from pursuing your passions as thoroughly as you like?  Take a while to think about it thoroughly before you decide on a final answer.  If the answer is still yes, a purchase may be the way to go.  If not, try to circumvent your training by focusing more on what you do, not what you have.

You might be surprised by the results.

The Few, the Crowd, and the Priest

An old man traced by step by step

Long life behind and life still left

Through dusty streets bespecked with crowds,

Most bowed and humble. Fewer, proud,

Of colors bold and raiment new

Stopped to talk. Others could not pass through.

Others milled about. At last,

The old man found his own way past.

He bumped a proud man. Once he'd gone first,

Some followed. The people blocked had half dispersed

When the proud man drawled, “well, excuse me.”

His tone threatened, if sarcastically,

The, pretense dropped, “what's wrong with you.”

Said the oldster, “others needed through.”

Said the proud, “and I should mind the last, the least?”

Then he saw the oldster's clothes. “A priest?

You think you're above me, holy man?

My need for labor feeds this land.

My money's real. False, futile platitudes

Would leave this city unbathed, nude,

Unsheltered on unmaintained streets,

But I should mind to you, the least,

The fool who would make peasants king.

Your words lack both in legs and wings.”

The priest said, “I'm just tired, old.

You our labor, not our lives control.

In want of home, in want of rest,

We seek return to each our nests,

and in the moment, I brushed past.

Those few inches ope'd a way at last.

None of our best moments, I'd admit.

I'm half-ready to be done with it.”

“Well, I'm not,” said the merchant next.”

“I want you whipped for disrespect,”

He ordered the re-gath'ring throng.

Their murmured cry: “let him go on.”

Go on he did, though not away.

“I'm tired, yes, most tired of the way

Your kind use money as a leash

and tell us that it makes us free.

Without it, we would work to live.

Instead, we work for what you give.

We could be free, could be unlead.

Instead, we just pull you ahead.

You feed us, in the strictest sense,

A barest pittance, recompense

For years of work which you do not–

Then we're judged by what we've got.

How much time would we regain

If work was free, from coin unchained?”

The crowed, enrapt at hearing this,

Cried “burn this man! This man's a witch!”

This Is The Original Purpose of This Blog (In Pathos Form)

Blind the Soul

We paved over our months and our hours

The same time we covered the forests and flowers.

The calendar directs our time

With lights and signals, man-made lines

That leave our fourth dimension lamed,

Though culture's not alone to blame.

The world – the wild and the paved –

Appears before us every day

Until, as though behind a cloud

The sights don't come through quite as loud.

Life's less than human, less than whole.

Routine and habit blind the soul.

Institutionalized

Your concrete jungle's stiff to rise –

No leaves or creepers, just straight lines.

The constant bustle holds them fast –

Planned obsolescence built to last.

Your money pays and takes its toll.

It's half convenience, half control.

The banks and buildings, roads and cars

Are really all the same thing – bars.

This IS the Original Purpose of This Blog

1. All “advanced” human cultures are a hive.

Our culture exhibits many characteristics that are found only in hive animals, including exclusive dependence on large scale harvesting and agriculture, individuals who represent replaceable parts in the society, rather than indispensable contributors, being awarded our means of sustenance by the culture overall rather than producing our own means for survival individually or in small groups, and living space that is both organized & regimented and awash in masses of other individuals with which we have few or no dealings.

1.1. The economy is the queen of the hive.

All of our work goes toward the benefit/growth of the economy. It sends us signals to entice us to work, called "money," "advertising," and "peer pressure," though encoded culturally rather than chemically. Thus, it occupies the role of queen.

2. Humans are psychologically unsuited for this lifestyle.

The only other animals known to live in hives are those with unintelligent, indistinct individual automatons. Just on its face, this seems like an unlikely or unsuitable lifestyle for a highly emotional, individuated, opinionated species like Homo Sapiens. Quite logically, humanity, for nearly all of its history, lived in various variations on family, pack, tribe or troop structures. In simplified, metaphorical terms, we grew up living one way and don't really know how to live in this other way. The formation of groups, cliques, fandoms, subcultures, political parties and gangs, each variously positive or negative, is an attempt to return to our native cultural structure by creating new tribes to replace those that were destroyed by the rise of the human hive.

3. Popular culture as a distraction

Regardless of any arguments about its quality as a whole, or that of any of its respective elements, popular culture's primary function in today's society is to distract us from the hive nature of our modern life, and to advertise and normalize it through fiction and semi-fiction in which salaried or wage work figures heavily. Its secondary function is to serve as an outlet for tribal tendencies via the formation of fandoms and subcultures, which may divide further into 'ships or cliques. Any other function may be valuable, but is certainly tertiary from a cultural standpoint.

3.1 Definition of popular culture

Politics, fashion, hobbies and sports also fall under the heading of The Distractions, because they serve the same primary and secondary functions.

3.2 Relative popularity of The Distractions

The Distractions can be grouped by their popularity, and this popularity will correlate very strongly with the potential commercialization of the particular distraction. Television, movies and music have the highest commercialization potential:  people pay for them, they are easily accompanied by advertising, and they are easily used to normalize the hive lifestyle.  There is actually a social stigma attached to not following these things.  Conversely, think of fanfiction:  one needn't pay to read or write it; advertising potential is minimal; unscreened individuals retain creative control, meaning the message can deviate significantly.  This sort of Distraction has a social stigma attached to it.