The Big Picture

The big picture as presented here in these postings can be, I suppose, a rather daunting challenge for many people because it is such a departure from what is now in place. But what we need to realize is that what is now in place is actually out of place. It is out of place with the nature of things, with the prevalent technologies that are reconfiguring and shrinking the old world into a global village and with the great body of knowledge we now have about ourselves, the biosphere and our place within the whole scope of the natural realm.

Basically what we have realized is that we are not in the driver’s seat. We cannot make things conform to how we might imagine they should be. I refer you to the Soviet Union, for example. Also, we used to make boasts about conquering nature. We were, for instance, going to rid the world of disease once and for all! And now here we are horribly confounded by AIDS, untreatable TB and other diseases resistant to current methods of treatment.

We may find ways of genetically altering the agents of these diseases in order to defeat them but that will probably open the door to the rise of other viruses that will be able to compromise our genetic code in insidious ways - perhaps causing horrific mutations to take hold in the blink of an eye.

Who knows for sure, but that is the way the arms race between us and the viral world seems to go.

Our belief systems are also out of place. We have a totally wrongheaded Hobbesian view of them. We are operating under the impression that to be human means to exist in opposition to nature. We believe that religion was sent to us from some other world, some divine world that instructs us to take on the mantle of divinity in contradiction to our natural inclinations.

But religions were actually formed in opposition to the effects that civilized constructs have had on the nature of human beings. Our natural inclinations were once effectively modified and advantageously conditioned by the natural world which prompted us to form cohesive social groups that benefitted our survival. Freed from the constraints of the natural world by the imposition of civilizations our instincts, drives and appetites needed to be harnessed by some reasonable facsimile of the natural realm that attempted to match its conditioning power.

To the extent that religions are mock-ups of the natural state they are all the same.

Religion attaches self-interest to an after life which is good while self-interest in this life is bad.

But that’s looking at self-interest erroneously as some kind of isolated factor that needs to be dealt with in an exclusive manner.

In reality, however, we see that self-interest forms a natural dynamic with collective interests and we need to rearrange things, rearrange everything with reference to that dynamic.

This, along with the fact that everything is made-up from small discrete units, is the basis for the vision of things unfolding here in The Big Picture.

Collective-interest would be realized by giving free reign to self-interest - an enlightened self-interest that is not regarded as inherently evil and is immanently connected with collective-interests.

One’s self-interest is realized through collective-interests and collective-interest is realized through self-interest. All is realized from the microcosm on an individual basis inexorably connecting each and every individual to the society-at-large which is a direct expression of everyone’s self-interest.

Self-interest is dependent on collectives. The condition of the collective must be kept viable by the self-interested parties involved in forming the collective for their own self-interest.

Our self-interest needs to be released from grand institutions that claim to be operating on behalf of our self-interest while actually using us to pursue their own.

Individual self-interest left, in effect, alone and naked would soon join with the enlightened self-interest of others to form collectives that would genuinely benefit self-interest.

That is the recipe for a far less convoluted and much more user-friendly social system that will be explored further in subsequent posts.