The Limits Of Society
The isolated individual has reached their peak—they cannot be more alone. Our rationalistic society has reached its limit—our technology will not become more human than this. Our financial capital has reached its peak—the rich are already too rich, it doesn’t matter if they get richer from here. Our ideas of growth have reached their limit—we’re running out of forests to cut down.
Maybe the destiny of this game was to remind us of our limits. Maybe it was for us to also commit the severe mistakes that have wiped out previous civilisations of humans as well. Why are we so lost?
What a question to ask; why is the sky blue?
The mind seeks so we grasp on simple truths that alleviate our misery and therefore help us to get trapped into a cycle of half-truth and full security. Maybe the world is all chaos and mankind wants to make it make sense. Maybe the world is complete order, a higher kind of order than we could imagine or understand but our irrational minds take priority and do not allow us a simple understanding of this order so inevitably we descend into chaos. We are not equipped like the forces of the cosmos to keep the planets revolving in the solar systems, to keep the galaxies spinning and to destroy and give birth to new stars. We have a limit and we seem to have reached it on many fronts.
As Jean Baudrillard observed in “Simulacra and Simulation”: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” This simple paradox defines our modern condition: a society that has reached its limits not through scarcity, but through excess. A lot of our progress has been fuelled by technology and now with the internet flooding us with information, we live in a virtual reality—a bubble of information specifically curated for us. This what Baudrillard calls a “desert of the real,” where the map doesn’t just come before the territory, but has replaced it entirely.
But let’s look at this without demonising technology. A common assumption one can make is that it is the nature of machines to isolate us from our experience. This might be wrong. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, an aviator, explains that airplanes take us away from the Earth but they allow us to see it more clearly.
But the rational approach to life has twisted our experiences. Naturally humans saw the logic of the machine as simple, familiar and even akin to their own and so, it was an easy logical step to assume there was something inside us all that was machine-like. With the advent of AI we are now flipping the equation to project the ideals of human beings into the machines we use. Will AI finally replace us? Is it better than us? All these thoughts arise from a fear that AI may have a component inside it that is human-like.
Our fears eventually descend into a need for control. We can drive our imagination crazy thinking of all the ways the machines might take over. For it is impossible for us to imagine a harmonious existence between mankind and machine. This is because we secretly believe, if we were the machine we would readily rule over humans—clearly a lesser species.
The amount of information we have been able to process and understand has not been able to improve our inner lives. We have not eradicated the problems of the world with our technology. We’ve merely reworded them and added new ones. Yes, we can now organise our houses, gardens, schedules and our work thanks to computers and their rational logic but they cannot tell us how to process our grief, nor how to create habits of our virtues. Our human emotions lay on the side and have been sitting for a long time. Enough for them to rot and develop into neuroses that our society has been treating through SSRI’s, antidepressants and the like. It’s almost like a quiet, desperate whisper from within:
“I cannot deal with being a tormented human being, so let me reduce my humanness and at least rid myself of the torment.”
We thought human stupidity would end with the advent of the internet. People would be well informed and thus be able to make better decisions. This hasn’t played out quite as we hoped and we found ourselves with even more misinformation, misunderstanding and miscommunication. It seems we missed the point all together. The interpretation of information is far more important than the amount of information available.
We also cannot easily teach or tell people how to interpret what they read for that easily leads to brainwashing and conditioning—something already so rampant today. So we are stuck and yet we continue pumping out and glorifying information and rationality, all the while our world slowly descends into a heated swamp we now find so difficult to get out of.
Our data obsession has physical consequences too because even the storage of our digital lives consumes the natural world. The cool climates that once nurtured diverse ecosystems are now home to vast datacentres, their servers generating endless heat just to store our selfies and social media posts. These once natural areas have become electronic warehouses, their transformation is a perfect metaphor for our wider relationship with nature—converting living systems into technological infrastructure.
I won’t bore you with the facts of our intentions and actions on the natural world, there is the internet for that. What I can say is we have not treated mother nature well and if she remembers well our actions, then, well, we’re fucked.
The isolation of the individual has hit new peaks where we’re sitting pretty in our own little bubbles while an algorithm decides to keep providing us with more information and entertainment that aligns with our beliefs. Even people with the most resources, i.e. the people that can just throw money at their problems, are more in a bubble than ever before. It is possible that the aristocrats and nobles of antiquity were more cut off from the life of the normal person but today it is different. Where back in the day, the reality of the common person had a direct impact on the life of a noble now, if you control the economy you control the common person.
Computer logic cannot risk providing you with controversial content for if you strongly disagree with it you will stop clicking and stop watching. If a million people stopped using their smartphones, at least one rich family would be out of business—while this is just speculation I use it to make a point, which is: economies of scale have grown in interesting ways. We have more and more penetration of data in our lives and it is designed to create patterns of what we want, what we desire. Then the market can offer us what we want. So essentially, if we only bought what we needed—food, clothing, a house—then large parts of the economy would collapse and with it our hidden desires to buy a Ferrari.
The limits of rationality give us another problem to deal with. Dry, cold logic cannot go any further. You can keep reworking old ideas but in the end, they won’t magically turn into something new just because you found a new way to present them. You can take a large portion of information on the internet and make a theory out of it but there’s nothing to confirm your conclusions except people in your own bubble.
It is natural that people outside your bubble will have different conclusions because they are being offered different information. In the end, the only conclusion that matters is one that survives contact with reality and in today’s age of virtual reality it is ever more confusing to know what is real and what is not. We’re stuck, we’re confused and yet we’re trying very hard to make it all make sense but something is off, we can feel it—but who cares about feelings, right? Silly us.
We spend so much time fighting and hating the establishment that we never thought to start the battle with the establishment within us. We’re all products of a past generation whose interests were status, power, the glorification of the economy and so on. In the baby boomer generation there were few who thought ecological preservation is important. Today there are still few who are actually making a difference. The rest are following the train of sustainability and green this or green that which is all, in the final analysis, just good for business.
No company has sustainability policies that are bad for business. And using 1-2% of profits to mother Earth when 100% of your product comes from it? A strange ratio. An oil company uses natural resources, cement uses natural resources, a company that provides only services also uses natural resources—for let us not be so quick to forget that humans are parts of nature and thus are aptly called human resources.
This exploitation of nature and human resources springs from the same root – a worldview that sees everything as a resource to be used rather than a relationship to be nurtured. When we reduce nature to mere resources, we inevitably do the same to ourselves, becoming what we most fear: resources to be optimized, extracted, and discarded when depleted. Our “human resources” departments are a reflection of this deeper paradigm.
Naturally, we help ourselves sleep better by planting trees here and there and keeping large sums of money for ourselves. Of course we take more than we give back, but who’s watching? Of all the business deals and activities that happen behind closed doors, what kind of accountability do the leaders of business really have? And to whom?
The exploitation of human beings has also reached a limit where now, people are waking up a little and demanding shorter work weeks. Burnout, exhaustion, depression and a host of other illnesses of our being are now common. Our souls are tired and somehow now we are realising ‘this is not what I was put on Earth for’. To live by working and die having worked more than half one’s life, done nothing else and even neglected one’s family for numbers on a screen so one could buy them nice things that would distract them from the ill-feelings of one’s absence. Sounds nice eh?
It is incidentally a kind and objectifying term to use human resources to define the work, and time of their lives, humans give to corporations who spread God knows what on this planet. Our internalised capitalism is so strong now that we might not see how wrong it is to exploit anyone or anything like this. We are the generation of utility who constantly asks: ‘what is the use of this?’ Be it a person, a piece of natural land, an animal or even life itself, we think of how it will benefit us and so we will use it like this.
Research in behavioural economics has revealed something interesting: while most humans favour cooperation and fairness—behaviour that diverges from purely rational economic behaviour—there are two groups that consistently follow the theoretical model of “rational economic self-interest”:
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Those trained extensively in economic theory
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Individuals scoring high on measures of psychopathy.
This doesn’t intend to equate economists with psychopaths, but rather to highlight how our economic models often assume a kind of behaviour that’s actually quite rare in natural human interaction.
I really don’t know where it goes from here because the train of progress doesn’t seem to be stopping. The leaders of business are making more and more promises and pumping money into the system—while, of course, pocketing their “fair” share—and so, extending our horizons of when all this will get better.
But what if it doesn’t get better?
What does better look like?
What if this is it and our limits in so many ways have been reached?
How can we endeavour to see our participation in all this?
How can we begin to choose differently?
The situation of our society on a global level is laid bare for all to see, you only need to use the internet properly. You will find groups that are gaining affluence and groups that are being exploited. These can be as small as neighbourhoods in a city to countries in the north and the south to even continents exploiting other continents just to keep their power, their economy running.
What we all need to understand is that we all need each other on this planet and if the people in power are using us in ways we do not accept then we should understand this maxim: the shepherd needs the sheep more than the sheep need him, for the sheep still may be able to garner security in numbers while being attacked by wild predators.
Of course it’s not so bad, but consult your feelings. Try to regain a sense of the basic principles of life and realise that even your time on this Earth is limited. From that final vantage point, look back and see what mattered, if anything. Live in this way and all will be okay. For the signs that come to you when you ponder your death come straight from the soul. The vital part of this whole equation we so dearly miss. Don’t ever forget you have a soul—it’s beating your heart.