Humanity, viewed as a single organism, has a disease. Like a forest in relation to the trees therein, conditions may exist that do not directly apply to the trees, individually, but rather to the forest as a whole. Or conditions that, although seemingly beneficial or natural to an individual tree, could effect the forest as a whole in a detrimental way, returning the adverse effect back to the individual trees. As mind-driven individuals, the forest of minds that we together form is our aggregate mind. Our collective consciousness is the forest to the tree that is one single mind. [*] Being that this collective consciousness is not carried within a traditional body as ours are, the mind-driven reality - or the notion - is the only place in which such a consciousness can exist (or for that matter that such a disease could exist) although such does not make it any less of a reality. Is the forest not real, simply because it is not a tree? Preposterous! This disease is a mindset. It is a disease of the aggregate mind, a disease of the collective consciousness. Represented within an individual mind, the disease does not seem a disease at all, and for that matter at times such a mindset can be viewed as individually beneficial, even praised. However, that mindset has propagated beyond the individual mind, and appears rampantly as a fundamental mindset of our collective mind, and is clearly, within such scope, a disease.
In our modern society, most of us have some notion of a larger force of humanity, of some form of collective operation or awareness. Empirically and most popularly manifested in our 21st-century lives, we are constantly reminded of our markets, our money, our resources, the economy, jobs, products, Wall-Street, and the like. We are reminded every day of our collective movements through farsicles like the stock market. As confidence grows, so do transactions, profits, and investments. Instability - sickness - hits the market in the form of "collective doubt." Parades such as Wall-Street echo the root of the collective mindset disorder as much as they acknowledge the existence of such a consciousness.[*] I have chosen to call the disease, The Capitalist Mindset. Let me explain...
Our American two-party system is admittedly gratuitous. A sideshow of symbolism, ritual, and self-inflation. Most smart men, or even knowingly simple men, understand America is the independents. The swing, middle voters pick the president. Within this army of relatively aware and conscientious Americans, there is a division in the camp. I hear every day the informed debates between two men - both caring for the greater good, and unable to see how from such empathy one could see what the other does - men who call themselves, relatively, liberal and conservative. Stripping away as much ignorance and partisanship as possible, the remaining America - the bulk of the collective consciousness - is knee deep in a methodological, humanitarian polarization. The dilemma and the desired outcome are shared, even if unknowingly so. Both search for freedom and equality. The libertarians bark freedom while the socialists scream equality; both unaware of the almost comical symbiosis of such ideologies. Put simply; if everyone is free, they are equal. However more profoundly and more devastatingly, what they don't realize is that this argument is designed. Whether by conscious invention or as a reaction to an awkward evolutionary step, the reality is the same; this argument is fascinated, unnecessary, and most importantly distracting to humanity as a whole.
There's an old adage that goes something like, "If I have a thing, and I give it to you, well, one of us has a thing. But if I have an idea, and I give it to you, well, we both have an idea." Let's trace the collective back, philosophically, through its evolutionary history to its simplest form; the family, or tribe. In this place, the collective mind is relatively simple; or to say it is not filled with television history or the periodic table or whatever other major-masses of information we hold today. The most important factor in this collective is that all information it has is free; any perceptions or advancements or learnings - any ideas - propagate instantly to all elements therein; promoting health, survival, and even evolution; individually as well as socially. Let me now get allegorical, merging the wise words about the multiplication of ideas with the old "Give a man a fish..." adage. Originally, the idea of fishing was found, and its benefits seen; in the form of both fish and the spreading of the idea. More ideas appear, more diverse skills, all beneficial. Soon you have a community with a multitude of trades taking place. In this community, the knowledge is still free, and propagating well. As in any well-settled community, however, different people perform different trades, and they trade their resulting wares, mostly because one man did not have the time to be a baker and a smith and a hunter and a fisherman, etc. Obvious, right? What may not be so obvious is that this is the first market, and an early, growing, diverse collective mind. We all know that ideas don't feed people, people feed people. You can know how to fish, but you still have to catch one. The knowledge, therefore the fish, was free. The only "currency" was willingness, and time. This collective has different members all performing separate tasks, all tasks that in effect manifest the knowledge, through an investment of willingness and time, because the knowledge that could be manifested to help the collective was more than one man could have time for. What is important and not so obvious about this primitive community is that the "currency" was a direct manifestation of the collective knowledge. Two men can both freely know how to fish and how to smith, so each invest their time separately, yielding two manifestations of the shared knowledge, and trade these manifestations of the collective mind - these wares - directly in place of the time spent. In modern terms, it was a "collective knowledge standard" instead of a gold standard; "Backed by the full faith and credit of the collective consciousness, payed for by good-old-fashioned time." You see, this collective mind did not yet suffer from the disease, the Capitalist Mindset. Back to the parable: Instead of teaching a man to fish, you give him a fish; because instead of teaching you to make a spear, he gave you a spear. That was a free market. When someone invented a new way to tie a net, the old way was discarded. New idea after new idea tumbled and propagated; the elements slowly compartmentalized and organized, developing into a grandiose display of the wonders of humanity; leaps in civilization. Obviously this was before modern patent laws...
So we have man A and man B. Man A knows how to fish and man B is hungry, well guess what? There's plenty of fish in the sea, no man is hungry. So what would happen if man C comes in, knowing how to fish, to find men A and B both hungry, not knowing how to fish? What if man C did not share the knowledge of fishing, but rather caught only one and sat it in front of the two men? What would happen next? A multitude of things, some more profound than others. Man A says to man B, "Why don't we split it?"
To which man B replies, "I'm so hungry, I don't think it will be enough; there is only enough fish here for one of us. I think we should have a competition."
From this, an argument arises. One is convinced that less fish than needed for both of them is better than watching one die; while the other believes they will both be dead with half a fish and it is far better for one to be full and healthy, able to carry on, perhaps even help the other. To compound the problem, while the argument carries on the fish is being whittled away by bugs and varmint. Perhaps you haven't noticed yet, but this is the argument of the socialists and libertarians, in parallel, and a reflection of our current state of affairs economically. This is the disease. Moreover, what ever happened to man C? A and B got so lost in their ideological fight for the one fish (not the idea; ideas don't feed people, remember? Fish do.) that they forgot about man with the idea, the man with the fish. You see, knowledge is power. Why? Because knowledge is within the collective. Knowledge is the manifestation or response of the collective consciousness, the aggregate mind; and wares are the manifestation of that knowledge. Knowledge can be as powerful as the full scope of the collective - and therefore the correlating wares - although can be rewarding to and manipulated by even just one. If it is collective knowledge, how is this possible?
Let's revisit man C. He finds men D, E, and F. He tells D how to tie the net, E how to throw it, and F how to reel it in. He also tells them whoever does a better job will get to keep more fish. Now they are competing with each other, keeping their knowledge to themselves, because in their awareness the idea of fishing - the collective knowledge of D, E, and F - is not what provides them food, man C is. Instead of realizing their collective potential - three fishermen - they were blinded by their hunger and working in competition. Yet together, they manage to catch four fish, which they give to man C. He keeps one, and tosses one to his old friends A and B, re-igniting their perpetual argument. He then throws the remaining two to D, E, and F. This cycle repeats and A and B grow to be ever-battling enemies, while D, E, and F resent each other, hence perpetuating the lack of realization of their collective knowledge, and C eats well with little work involved, not bothered by the others who are too busy fighting amongst themselves to realize the heist he just executed.
Through the compartmentalization of the collective knowledge, the disincentive to connect to such, and the monetization of the trade of direct manifestations of that collective knowledge - products - some "third party" can literally subdue, manipulate, and leech from the collective, and can effectively grind the evolution of humanity to a halt. Our ideas have been privatized if not fully compartmentalized. We have today, exactly, a parallel to our allegory. We have the social and the conservative, the left and the right, too busy arguing to notice the robbery; too indoctrinated to ask a couple of simple questions; too busy with "reality" to bother with the red pill, yet they are hungry. We also have the "trained" and the "working," locked in competition and many other psychological means to stifle the propagation of the knowledge we are all a part of and all meant to benefit from, who are "fed enough" to not revolt. And then we have man C, who does not even need, himself, to hold the knowledge of the collective, nor does he need invest the effort required for the manifestation; yet ye reaps the greatest reward of the collective, and everyone else is hungry. When a man has a great idea, or a great innovation, he is urged in every way possible - for his own well-being - to keep it to himself. We have laws, for that matter, that prevent people from learning from an innovation or attempting to improve upon it; at least for 7 years or so.
In an economy that bases its currency on anything other than the products or services it makes - especially one involving the federal reserve - you will see inflation. With privatized ideas in an inflating, competative market, the competition becomes lateral. Instead of competing against the fringe of innovation, propelled by the full power of the collective mind, we compete against each other, and we compete against price. Inevitably, in a market with privatized and compartmentalized knowledge that operates within an inflationary currency, humanitarian innovation halts, product quality plummets, people go hungry, and the wealth accumilates on Man C. Welcome to 2012, welcome to reality. Welcome to the Capitalist Mindset; a disease on the collective mind. We're sick, and in some plausible worst case scenarios, it could do us in. Can we fix it? Legislations like ACTA and SOPA[*] bring the struggle for the privatization of ideas to the mainstream, within the massively-swelling, no-longer-so-pseudo-world of the internet. Not afraid of a good segue, I introduce to you the cure: The Internet.
That's basically as far as I am willing to take this. I can not pretend to know what the solution is, I can only be a part of it. The disease is of the collective mind, and so the cure must be also. My understanding of the internet is as an evolutionary sybiote, a virus of its own, attacking the Capitalist mindset, eradicating the disease. All I feel equipped to do is to diagnose the issue, and do my best to propagate such into the collective. The internet is truly, the re-awakening of the collective mind, the re-tapping of the vein of collective knowledge; an immuno-reaction and evolutionary "fix" for humanity, and Man C is scared. Keep it alive, tap in, ask questions, and share what you find, and we might just make it.
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