Neo-Humanism in the Social Imagination... the Future is Bumping Around!

 

I blogged a five years ago about a possible social reality which I called "Bumping Around". Let's recap... 

 

    Is the social imagination morphing into a hopeless bumping around collective mentality?  It seems so... How is that possible? Technology is replacing our livelihood and sense of place. And, moreover, it is changing the meaning of individual lives and families and how we consume.

    Technology is largely controlled by the power elites who through global top down entities and their implemented systems control work; and thus, control the money. What will the social imagination be able to do? It will conform as best it can... people will be bumping around. They will live with no permanent sense of place or partner or family because there is no job that can support a home, a spouse or family.

    To better grasp how this will come to be, we can look to the past. The communism of the past century is the best and nearest example. Everyone was socialized to care... socially engineered to care - to care about the State. The propaganda used was aimed to get everyone on board with the State. 

 

    Once it appeared that everyone was cared about the State, then everything else that matter to them became secondary or discarded. Essentially, people had 'equality' but only to the extent that everyone had little to own, little to do and little to care about... Sure, they appeared to look busy, have a life... but people were just bumping around.

    Again, the first modus operandi is to get people to love or 'care about' the State because it cares about you and then you can love 'care about' others because they love 'care about' the state as much as you.  Once those at the top see that you care about the State (the), they start a propaganda to get you to collaborate with them to remove caring about anything else that might get you to not care about them and that means to watch out for those who might not be so caring about the State.

 

    In the future of the coming global communism, there is already a call for neo-humanism. The new caring mode of being and all controlled by the new 'State' of social media directed from the top down. There won't be the kind of intimacy between people as we know it now (quickly fading) and there won't be concern for gender of any kind. 

    There won't be any skilled labor or specialization either since that will be taken over by elites and their robots. People will be bumping around passing small courier packages, hard copy information like official notices, fines/tickets, medical waste and body parts, food delivery, and also some small human comforts to be exchanged along the way. 

    People will sleep where they end up at the end of the day (no more individual housing), they will share their day with strangers but they won't be strangers really... just people like them doing the same kind of work: bumping around and not caring about it.  There won't be anything to really care about since everyone has been made the same. Evgeny Zamyatin wrote book about this called "WE"!

Given that recap on Bumping Around, you may ask, what is neo-humanism? According to the so-called experts, neo-humanism is supposed to offer an alternative, empowering way toward a sustainable world. Neo-humanism traces the origins of unsustainability in people’s private efforts to address public problems. Ah ha... Bring on the STATE! The neo-humanist solution would be to  deprioritize economic growth in people’s lives – we would live in a post-growth society, in which our ability to enjoy life is decoupled from consumption. Say what???

 

They say that a common misconception of neo-humanism is that, by giving up consumption and the comfort of modern lives, we would doom current generations to live a lifetime of sacrifices for the sake of future generations as research belies this misconception: it shows that consumption contributes to well-being ONLY at early stages of economic development. Beyond a certain threshold, its contribution to additional well-being is negligible. 

 

Now, that sounds like consumption is NOT for the long term well-being of society... guess they forgot that consumption means eating and drinking. And, now, you should wonder are they talking about depopulation... right? Oh, in sum, they say that promoting social relations would decouple well-being from consumption: people could lead satisfactory lives independently from what they consume, thus reducing their negative environmental impact. Not sure what that means... guess it means = Bumping Around!

 

 

Commentary: "Does controlling consumption result in 'bumping around'?

Answer: “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

— Henry Kissinger

Addendum... Man and Technology in the Social Imagination!

 

What baffles me today, in Sociology dept. (s) across the country and even worldwide with their so-called experts and or mouth pieces, is that we find way to much discussion about what already doesn't matter. Its a dead poets society...

Today's colleges/universities talk way to much about what can best described as self-obsessed vanity. What? Yes, they do! They are dead poets and don't know it. They are too concerned with gender studies (been there done that), racism, (been there done that), immigration (been there done that), economy and society (been there done that). I say let's get off the dirt road that we have all been down time and time again... and get on the highway to the future!

Technology, that's where we its at, that's where we should be. Technology, eventually, is going to eliminate gender, race, immigration, politics and economics as we know it. We should be talking about technology and how technology will and is already changing the world, let alone humanity. 

Sadly, instead we are obsessed with gender identity... Oh, the poor soul who thinks they are either a man or woman even though born with the evidence to prove that they are either one or the other.Whether they know it or not, the elites don't give a ... what you think you are.

Those that are promoting transhumanism and AI see the end of gender and the evolution of a new form of human. This means that sociology is lagging behind the momentum of technological changes planned for the human race. If sociology wants to be relevant then its time to leave behind ancient ideas of class/gender conflict and neo-Marxist ramblings. 

We need to be discussing the physio-cultural changes being thrust upon our species which will radically alter our civilization in ways far beyond tired old political ideologies and what they have imagined, most of which are relics of the 19th century. 

Its the work of sociologists to lead these discussions and make our society aware of the great questions that stand before us as this tidal wave of technological revolution hits all of our lives. An example of such issues that need to be discussed is the loss of the means of making a living to artificial intelligence and robotics. 

What will we do with millions of unemployed purposeless individuals - now unable support themselves let alone a family? In what ways will we have to create new forms of government and economics to prevent a complete collapse of the human race on Earth? Issues of class gender, race, economics (money as we understand it) and lastly, immigration as it happens today (individuals crossing a river/border)... all are meaningless in this new world order social imagination.

 

Man's fascination with Robots in the Social Imagination...

 

Why are we so fascinated with robots?

Perhaps, its because we like seeing the human form expressed in art; a 'reimagining' of ourselves in a kind of permanent ongoing state of being. Paintings and sculpture produce that effect and have had such an effect across the ages. 

Lately, mechanism is being more used as a medium for expressing our 'reimagined' selves. This 'reimagining' may seem a 21st century phenomenon, the natural result of a sci-fi-saturated culture, coupled with recent advances in computer technology, but that's not true. Thousands of years before machine learning and self-driving cars became reality, the tales of giant bronze robot Talos, artificial woman Pandora and their creator god, Hephaestus, filled the imaginations of people in ancient Greece, [https://news.stanford.edu/2019/02/28/ancient-myths-reveal-early-fantasies-artificial-life...].

Before we return to the posed question above, we should review famous science fiction writers and by doing so, find the answer. Isaac Asimov was a Russian-Jewish immigrant born in 1920 in Petrovichi, Russia; already known as the Soviet Union. Asimov was brought by his parents to the United States at age of three. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Columbia University in 1939. During World War II, he worked at the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia along with science-fiction authors Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp. After the war, in 1948, he obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia, [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Asimov].

Asimov then joined the faculty of Boston University, with which he remained associated thereafter. He was a successful American science fiction author and biochemist. As for his books, he was and is most famous for his classic Robot series and the Foundation which is a retelling in outer space of the fall of the Roman Empire, [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Asimov].

R. Daneel Olivaw was the infamous fictional robot created by Isaac Asimov. The "R" initial in his name stands for "Robot,". In his introduction story, Daneel is said to be not only made in the likeness of one of his creators but is also the first robot physically indistinguishable from humans. Asimov's laws of robotics are not scientific laws, they are instructions built in to every robot in his stories to prevent them malfunctioning in a way that could be dangerous. The first law is that a robot shall not harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm, [Wikipedia].

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in the Soviet Union, other Jewish science fiction writers were flourishing. The most prominent were the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They survived the Siege of Leningrad as children. Their Jewish father did not. The Strugatsky Brothers went on to write such classics as Roadside Picnic (1972) and the many tales of the Noon universe, which imagines a Socialist utopia extending far into space. In Poland, the Jewish Stanislaw Lem became one of the leading writers of SF in the world: he is best known in the West for his classic novel, Solaris (1961), [https://lithub.com/jews-in-space-on-the-unsung-history-of-jewish-writers-and-the-birth-of-science-fiction/].

Jewish writers seem to have had cornered the market regarding such far reaching science fiction. However, American Ray Bradbury, of Swedish and English descent, who was considered a giant of science fiction, wrote two classic robot short stories: There Will Come Soft Rains and I Sing the Body Electric (aka The Electric Grandmother, [https://raybradbury.com/life/]. Let's not forget to mention among science fiction writers Frank Herbert and his imagined Dune universe. 

And, so here we are again, being brought back to face the question... what is man’s fascination with robots? I like the idea of man loving to see him/herself in art; and, now in mechanism as an 'art-form'. That may sound like self-worship; however, its much more about understanding the self in context of a creator. Truly, I think Asimov had it correct when he wrote of his created robot character, R. Daneel Olivaw. 

Asimov said he had to be not only made in the likeness of (at least) one of his creators, but also had to be realized as the first robot physically indistinguishable from humans. For me, that goes beyond art. That reflects man's desire (back to ancient times) to be eternal... moreover, to know his creator and to be in his image.

They Way we 'Time Order' the World in the Social Imagination...

 

The majority of people have a linear understanding of history; historical events that have played out over time. We may know an impressive number of details about two particular events while not realizing that they actually happened nearly or about the same time. Effectively, most people would never be able to grasp that most historical events were actually taking place simultaneously.

Unfortunately, history classes are structured in a way that we don’t realize most of history happened much more recently than one would think. For example, Cleopatra lived closer to the first moon landing than she did to the building of the Great Pyramids and Mississippi only ratified slavery in 2013.

 

One of the most renowned universities in the world, England's Oxford University has existed (in some form) since 1096. In 1231, the masters were officially recognized as a "universitas." The Atzec Empire, which is commonly thought of as the oldest empire in the world, wasn't established until 1430—nearly 200 years after Oxford officially became a university.

The Eastern Roman Empire (aka the Byzantine Empire) fell in 1453. Forty years later, in 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in America. Meaning that plenty of people who thought of themselves as Romans (one of the oldest civilizations in the world) had heard of the discovery of a new continent which probably blew their world apart...their social imagination.

The first major wagon train of nearly 1,000 pioneers left Elm Grove, Mo., and set out to follow the Oregon Trail in search of a new future on May 22, 1843. Five days later, on May 27, 1843, Alexander Bain filed his patent for the fax machine. It's crazy to think that newly arrived pioneers could have sent a fax to their east coast family to let them know they'd arrived safely.

On April 14, 1865, when Samuel J. Seymour was 5 years old, his parents took him to a production of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. the same night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. In 1956, Seymour recounted the experience on the CBS game show "I've Got a Secret." 

In 2001, Steve Jobs changed the world when he launched the first version of the iPod. With room to hold 1,000–2,000 songs and a battery life of 10 hours, the first-generation iPod now sits in history museums. Five years later, when the sixth-generation iPod was launched, slavery was abolished in Mauritania, the last country on earth where it was still legal. And while technically the practice is criminalized here, Mauritania is still widely regarded as slavery's last stronghold.

 https://stacker.com/history/50-historical-facts-will-warp-your-sense-time

 

Commentary: The point being of the above is to stress that man, in his social imagination, likes linear order; however, in the bigger picture, its anything but. Why is that? Perhaps, its the social imagination's way of dealing with the experience of time and space. We prefer to think that things happen in a given order as in one after another and thus, the previous event is less of an event as the next one occurs... Less in the sense of being important in comparison to the next one and all future events. 

Man tends to think in the present with the past behind him and the future always ready to be grabbed with enthusiasm ...always for the better. But, that's not usually the case. Many civilizations have come and gone and many have had their high times when nothing else mattered more than the present. 

Everything else pales, everyone else who ever came before could never be as smart, creative or skillful. Maybe that is why politicians, experts/scientists bury ancient wisdom, relics or ideas and even relationships from the past because their own wisdom, objects and ideas would seem trivial...or pale in comparison today.

"YouTube" ~ The Best Practice of Social Captial Theory in the Social Imagination...

    

 Social capital in structural dimension refers to relationships, networks, associations, and institutions that link people and groups (Coleman 1988). Structural social capital can be measured by the analysis of linkages and network density (Bourdieu 1986). 

If you are not familiar with the term social capital, then let me inform you.The term social capital refers to a positive product of human interaction. The positive outcome may be tangible or intangible and may include favors, useful information, innovative ideas, and future opportunities. Social capital is not held by an individual, but instead appears in the potential between social network connections between individuals - [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/socialcapital.asp].

According to Online Britannica, social capital involves the potential of individuals to secure benefits and invent solutions to problems through membership in social networks. Social capital revolves around three dimensions: interconnected networks of relationships between individuals and groups (social ties or social participation), levels of trust that characterize these ties, and resources or benefits that are both gained and transferred by virtue of social ties and social participation.

A high degree of trust among network participants fosters a sense of mutual obligation and permits them to be more effective in pursuing shared objectives. Social participation may take place in political, civil, or religious arenas or even in the workplace - [https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-capital].

This sounds really fantastic, incredible. In fact, if we look at such social interaction as not only highly positive but truly creative; especially, if we compare what we humans already do to 'programmed' Ai. Moreover, what we just read sounds like humans are quite capable of self-determination, self-government, self-management not only in terms of the individual but also the group. Why do we need any kind of controls? Doesn't social capital suggest that participation in social capital is self and group regulating? Indeed... 

Let's consider YouTube in this respect. Everyone on earth must surely know of or heard of YouTube. There are all kinds of channels; educational, informative, instructive as well as entertaining, relaxing, inspiring and so on. Channels created by individuals from all over the world. Channels that truly represent social capital theory. YouTube, is its own global reality and for the most part, all those things listed: education, informative, instructive, entertaining, relaxing, inspiriting etc. So, why are channel creators being mobbed, shutdown and or demonetized? 

Some people (those who own or represent certain platforms of political/corporate entities) argue that content creators (YouTubers) deliver false information and use this social media to disseminate conspiracy. One should ask, based on the very fact that social capital theory and its actual practice as in functional purpose has 'built in' measures as to what is good info and what is bad; filtered in terms of profitable use and or capital outcome for those who participate. It has its own 'built in' invisible hand an expression coined by Adam Smith. 

We need to ask, who is concerned about so-called 'bad information'? Because, as I see it, people use only what works for them in the place where they are... even if that place is worldwide or just around the corner. Its a viable thing to capitalize on what works and YouTube has freed individuals worldwide to capitalize on what works for them. Therefore, it should be of more concern that someone or a group of someone (s) don't like that 'working' application. Who are they?

They are power elites and they are controllers... they want total control. The power elites are people with money, power and prestige. They are corporate rulers, investors, global bullies, fascist politicians, military industrialists and even some who appear to be rational, wise experts within academia that secretly lust for prestige and or position. 

Human beings generally can manage themselves until they build up government or establish any top down form of organization (including the entertainment biz) into a beast system that creates and caters to power elites... why/how? 

Because, all human beings are fallen creatures who will do bad things when given over to greedy and reprobate minds...they will seek their own good first. Ironically, they stand out in their behavior and are even encouraged to climb to the top of the heap. They are applauded to do so as they appear charming, charismatic, good looking and or ambitious. 

The means to take over practically handed to them. But, just as ironic as their ability to take over, is our practical ability to control them through social media. Understand, they still need the majority of users for support of their fortunes, their prestige, power and position. So, those who speak out on social media (you/me) can practically reign them in and control them. 

This is what they don't like...   the truth in our hands!

PS... Some of the most popular YouTube Channels are creating celebrities of their own because they are incredibly interesting and entertaining without vulgarity. Why/how? They are better scripted and edited by smart, talented individuals; I dare say, they are even better than the so called entertainment biz puts out.