Ever since humans began to practice an agricultural lifestyle, we have become entwined in a larger social structure than the family or tribe.\u00a0 The much greater population density made possible by agriculture guarantees that independent existence disappears.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And then there\u2019s the Temple of the Gods and their priests who also need to be paid.<\/p>\n
But in exchange for this taxation, you are protected by the king\u2019s soldiers.\u00a0 And the priests pray to the gods for you.\u00a0 And living in this society you have access to coinage which simplifies the process of buying and selling the things you have and want.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And if you happen to live in a really enlightened place you might get to watch a dramatic, poetry or music performance.\u00a0 And if you are among the elite, you might even become a scholar and learn to read.<\/p>\n
And over the centuries, the advantages of living in a civilized state have grown increasingly valuable.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You can board an airplane and fly to a country halfway around the Earth within the same day.\u00a0 You can learn science that explains the secrets of the universe.<\/p>\n
But you can never be free.\u00a0 You can never be independent.\u00a0 You are tied to this society with ten thousand threads that bind you to the gigantic machine that is our civilization.\u00a0 No single man.\u00a0 No grouping of men can ignore the rules and the requirements of our human world.\u00a0 Not even someone like Elon Musk can just do what he wants.\u00a0 We all exist in the matrix of this human construct that carries us all along in a direction that we don\u2019t control and can\u2019t even predict.\u00a0 We\u2019re like cells in a collective organism.\u00a0 We think of ourselves as independent entities.\u00a0 But we are pulled along by the collective and must live in its shadow and survive its actions.<\/p>\n
But how does it get better?\u00a0 Well, human society is only something less than ten thousand years old.\u00a0 So, this new multicellular organism is in its infancy.\u00a0 It hasn\u2019t had a chance to evolve very much yet.\u00a0 And that is the hope.\u00a0 That we will evolve this organism into an efficient and healthy creature that keeps all of its component cells healthy (and mentally happy).\u00a0 It\u2019s possible democracy is a mutation that will improve the self-regulation feedback loops that keep the organism healthy.\u00a0 Or maybe not.\u00a0 Maybe it will be replaced by something else.\u00a0 From inside the beast, it\u2019s hard to tell whether any progress is being made.\u00a0 Mostly it feels like chaos.\u00a0 But after all, the whole thing\u2019s a miracle to start with.\u00a0 So, bring it on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ever since humans began to practice an agricultural lifestyle, we have become entwined in a larger social structure than the family or tribe.\u00a0 The much<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1263],"tags":[725,3149,3895],"class_list":["post-35137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-civilization","tag-human-evolution","tag-humanity"],"yoast_head":"\n