Ever since humans began to practice an agricultural lifestyle, we have become entwined in a larger social structure than the family or tribe. The much greater population density made possible by agriculture guarantees that independent existence disappears. You live in a town or a district along with other farmers and tradesmen and the employees of the government that guarantee that the king (or duke or headman) gets his piece of the pie from your harvest. And then there’s the Temple of the Gods and their priests who also need to be paid.
But in exchange for this taxation, you are protected by the king’s soldiers. And the priests pray to the gods for you. And living in this society you have access to coinage which simplifies the process of buying and selling the things you have and want. And in this society, there are doctors (sort of) and craftsmen of all kinds producing products made of wood, stone, glass, clay, copper, bronze, iron and all the other materials that men work. And if you happen to live in a really enlightened place you might get to watch a dramatic, poetry or music performance. And if you are among the elite, you might even become a scholar and learn to read.
And over the centuries, the advantages of living in a civilized state have grown increasingly valuable. If you live in an advanced society like ours, you will have access to cutting edge healthcare that has the potential to extend your lifetime to close to a century. You can board an airplane and fly to a country halfway around the Earth within the same day. You can learn science that explains the secrets of the universe.
But you can never be free. You can never be independent. You are tied to this society with ten thousand threads that bind you to the gigantic machine that is our civilization. No single man. No grouping of men can ignore the rules and the requirements of our human world. Not even someone like Elon Musk can just do what he wants. We all exist in the matrix of this human construct that carries us all along in a direction that we don’t control and can’t even predict. We’re like cells in a collective organism. We think of ourselves as independent entities. But we are pulled along by the collective and must live in its shadow and survive its actions.
But how does it get better? Well, human society is only something less than ten thousand years old. So, this new multicellular organism is in its infancy. It hasn’t had a chance to evolve very much yet. And that is the hope. That we will evolve this organism into an efficient and healthy creature that keeps all of its component cells healthy (and mentally happy). It’s possible democracy is a mutation that will improve the self-regulation feedback loops that keep the organism healthy. Or maybe not. Maybe it will be replaced by something else. From inside the beast, it’s hard to tell whether any progress is being made. Mostly it feels like chaos. But after all, the whole thing’s a miracle to start with. So, bring it on.