Tribalism and Evolved Solidarity
This framework views biological and social evolution as two separate but concurrent paths of co-evolution. That load of gibberish is as much to say: I believe humans evolve biologically, and the superorganisms we play host to evolve socially. As noted in the introduction, facets of each reality influence and shape the other: social vehicles must eat because humans biologically require food. At the same time, humans are vastly better equipped to eat when working together. If you thought of social interaction as another living thing instead of an abstraction, then you might identify a commensal relationship between the social and biological entities in which the social entity gets the benefit of existing and the biological entities get the benefit of eating better.
Of course eating better means reproducing better, and you’re on your way to biological evolution. However, the time horizon for biological evolution is much too vast to explain the extreme amount of change our species has exhibited in an ecological picosecond. What did change during that time though? Society. The way people live, how they organize, what they believe, who they listen to. Though initially defined by and subservient to biology, social vehicles now exert more power over the ecology of the planet than any organism.
It makes sense that evolution of social superorganisms so quickly outpaces our own slow genetic code. And by now, we are social creatures. As tied to our vehicles as they are to us. We use separation from society as punishment - see banishment and solitary confinement. Our brains crave social interaction- who’s to say that certain vehicles haven’t evolved to fully capitalize on that.
Much of manufacturing consent is playing with the neurochemical dials of belonging and togetherness and love and otherness and wrongness and fear in the population. In what way is a newscast that raises adrenaline and cortisol different from a drug that does the same? Suppose you give that drug to an animal while always showing it pictures of people wearing hats. How do you think the animal is going to respond to people wearing hats, even when it isn’t on the drug?
Habituation and operant condition are real, and have been extensively studied. I am not asserting that anyone is consciously going around trying to mentally condition people into behaving in certain ways. Just because a dog gets a treat whenever it sits on just its hind legs, it doesn’t mean that the dog understands it is being cute. It just knows this action = treat. The democratic party knows urban center = stronghold. The Catholitc Church knew that people would pay to be told they were going to heaven. No one intentionally maneuvered the situation into the place it is now, but it is here anyways. You can decide to see history as a series of random events, or as a series of selection events.
The reason that Vehicles Exhibit these learning, evolutionary properties is that they live in us. They are the sum of their whole, and we are their constituents. They parasitize our learning to advance themselves. Would it be functionally any different for the company if someone else controlled your body while you did your job? No. You merely loan your person to a buyer in the same way a program might need to pay for processing time on a server. Though both exist in abstraction, they affect the material world by requiring hosts to execute their recipes/code/instructions.
On that note, go watch severance- it’s amazing and about exactly that. Until next time!
