The Virus
Something has gone wrong with the human experiment. Problems worsen, like the days before a flu kicks into high gear, so we tighten our belts and charge ahead as best we can. Doubt itches and burns and infects our sleep, but we can't find a clear source of the problem. We know we do not feel well, and even use the term sickness. Could it be we're infected with a thought-virus?
Diseases are organisms which have adapted to a parasitic role. While a cold makes you sick, it is living off of your nutrients and spreading outside of you. Each sneeze spreads it further, and every meal goes in part to the cold. Idea viruses live in your mind and spread through your acts. Every time you go into work and every person seems to be repeating a clever phrase from a television comic or radio commentator, you have seen the thought-virus in action.
A virus appeals with partial truth, like a catchy melody or plausible explanation, and uses it to crowd out any concept of a whole truth in your brain. It is so simple it does not limit itself to a type of politics or social idea, but infests all ideas. It sickens us by directing our energies toward its own needs, and by obscuring the whole truth, preventing us from getting well. Like disease, it uses us and then discards us -- and sometimes kills.
Virii obscure the more complete truths that would make us healthy. "Saddam Hussein had WMDs" or "ghost-ride the whip" promote their creators and obliterate your chances of seeing the bigger picture. Modern society is founded politically on a partial truth: the principle of the self-organizing society. This society does away with leaders like kings, and brings about "control" by assuming each person can be motivated by self-interest. If society imposes a moral standard, self-interest will include it, and people will do what is right with a little nudging from above, or so goes the theory.
This creates the public ego, or the part that is nudged, because we need to demonstrate public morality by making a good show of it. The public ego is an infectious virus because it allows us to do whatever benefits us, without regard for the consequences, so long as we maintain a public face of goodwill. Like fundamentalist religion, it allows us to be sinners, then say a prayer for forgiveness and pass out ten percent of our income, and then we're saints again. We all want to be seen as "good."
You can see the public ego at work when someone who lied, cheated and stole to get rich makes a token donation to some charity that does not act in a way that prevents the profits from flowing. Like all successful virii, it begins with an incomplete truth: we have to act in our self-interest. The whole truth is that thinking in terms of self-interest and public ego makes us publically good, and privately greedy, especially as we must compete with others.
The public ego infests us through a need to find an identity as a good person. We each come up with a unique worldview, and find it incompatible with others, so that environmentalists vote green and traditionalists vote republican and everyone else gets angry and votes liberal, but none agree. We fall into bickering which devolves from finding the right solution to proving that we are _personally_ right. At home, we keep up with the Joneses in buying new products and being more giving when the charity bucket comes around, even if the charity won't help society at large.
A self-organizing society penalizes those who do right without demanding credit for it, and gives the advantage to those who do wrong and then give ten percent to a charity and call themselves heroes. While our politicians and civic leaders emphasize their charity, and turn to increasingly liberal-idealistic solutions that help no one, the oligarchs or corrupt business leaders behind the scenes are helping themselves to a bigger slice of the pie made by our labor.
Inundated in parasites as it is, our society has become decadent, in that any action to fix the problem opposes the public ego of someone and so other public egos will defend it. Our values dissipate. We increasingly pursue material wealth and excess of comfort, but like a cold running its course the problems accumulate as does the number of symptoms we must avoid, usually by paying more money for special services or housing in the suburbs. We are prisoners in our own diseased body.
This explanation summarizes 2,000 years of a slowly worsening society (albeit with more comfy technology) that continues to decline. No other explanation shows exactly why all of our attempts to fix these problems have failed. We caught a virus. And like someone with a cold, we're not going to get rid of it until we take steps to strengthen the body and remove the parasite. The first step is recognizing the virus, and ejecting it from our values system.
Our best thinkers, artists and writers have given us other things to live for, outside of the public ego. Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato noted its presence when they spoke of a public mythos of shadows in the parable of the cave. We have to stop being wimps who do what is convenient for us and ignore the consequences of a gradually sickening society. Until we do this, the symptoms will continue -- and eventually kill us.
by Brett Stevens
February 7, 2007
|
| 
