The Double Hermeneutic (notes on the BIP).

[Cain]

The rational, autonomous individual, as we understand it, does not exist.  People do not come into a world as a tabula rasa, they are not placed in neutral environments from where they can learn about the wider world, and they do not think in cool, detached and rational ways.

These problems are already well noted.  But the above is only a starting point for further thought.  Language is one area we have not looked into, not just yet at least.  It is hard to consider a concept if you do not have a word for it.  Control of language as a method of wider political control was recognized as far back as Orwell.  By removing the ways to describe rebellion and subversion, the Party made the spread of such ideas much harder.

The hard sciences, biology, chemistry and physics, are good for drawing fairly well determined limits to our understanding.  Without the aid of technology, we cannot survive in deep space, or under the ocean, or see into the infra-red spectrum.  I cannot last more than three days without water, or around a month without food.  Neurophysiologists and related disciplines that study the brain can also tell us about the limits of our minds.  How many things can we concentrate on at any one time?  What sort of optical illusions can trick our minds?  That kind of thing.

What interests me most is the social aspect, however.  I do not have a lab.  However I do, as does everyone else, live in a society.  I am immersed in it, surrounded by it every day.  And so, my thoughts turn to that far more often than the sciences.  The hard limits, the ones which are built into our very being, I am afraid to say, do not hold much fascination for me.  While useful to know, there is little hope of overcoming them, not without the help of specialist equipment or genetic engineering, at least.

Society however is more...flexible.  More mutable.  At the same time however, its bars are less visible.  Less open to discovery.  You have to think about them harder.

Lets put it this way.  As I started, the individual as we understand it, does not exist.  Every single one of us is, in part, a product of our socio-cultural and linguistic environment.  Imagine, if you will, that these various factors create a structure, which is then repeated through time and space.  Part of our selves is created on the base of this structure, in the same way our physical structure is in part determined by our DNA.  The secret code of life itself, as it were.  Or to quote the Hermetic dictum, "as above, so below".

Naturally, this is not all there is to a person.  Other parts will be more open to other forms of determination.  Actual genetic determination, for example, will define the sex of a person, though what that signifies, in any given culture, will of course vary.  Not to mention the various hormonal and surgical strategies one can use to subvert, reverse or otherwise alter that.

Some things will be determined by environment, as in the literal one.  Height is highly dependent on diet, as anyone who has travelled in Asia or South America can testify to.  In protein rich diets, sustained over generations, you get taller people, generally.  In those reliant mainly on seafood or very small, rare sources for their protein, are often quite short by our standards.

Parents, equally, will be a factor, in early years, as will anyone with sustained contact with a child.  But if a human being were simply nothing more than a repetition of their culture and society, writ small, then it would not matter.  Because the pattern would be all there is, it would be repeated from parents to child without change for all time, allowing for a level of stability in the means of transmission and the environment.

But that is clearly not the case.  Even allowing for the plurality of culture within any given society, we can see this is clearly not true.

So, the individual is not entirely constructed of these factors.  There is...something else.  Something that alters the structure on a very small level, but can have very large impacts.  If we imagine again all the social factors as a structure, then the "bricks" of the structure, us, are also in the process of rearranging the structure itself, changing it in a myriad of ways, some of which are more useful, or widely adopted, or have a more radical impact on the nature of the structure itself, than others.

What does this consist of, this factor?  I'm not sure.  Its tempting to say "free will", but I don't believe it is that simple.  Its not just a matter of the individual will overcoming "social conditioning", if even such a thing is possible.  No doubt if too much social conditioning were to be undone, we could not survive in society.  Think of the cases of feral children, raised by wolves or other animals.  Creating one's personal 'social' structure will only lead to incomprehension and the appearance, if not the fact, of insanity.  Yet, on the other hand, an individual cannot even be understood except within the conditions of a society.  For our actions to be recognized as those of an individuals, to have that meaning, they must be recognizable as such, and capable of being understood as that in the first place.  It is a tricky problem.

Maybe we should think of it this way.  Society in part determines the individual.  Government is a part of society that spends a great deal of time trying to determine the individual.  This seems fair enough.  Dividing them into classes based on income, on nationality, on social status, on moral ("legal") grounds and on a myriad of other reasons.  Determinations also run further than that.  If certain social scientists are to be believed (namely Karl Polanyi) then via use of various methods, governments with the help of existing social elites, creates what we understand as human nature, as well. 

It is a very bleak world view, when we consider the actions of our current governments.  Individuals are constructed according to possible threat.  The use of surveillance, shame, managerial power and real time data allocation and analysis, show a society where discipline and economic rationality are considered of the highest priority. 

But why go to all that length?  Again, because there is an irreducible factor at the heart of this, a factor which cannot be controlled.  If it were the case that government, or any other powerful group, could entirely determine society, it would.  And that would be that.  There wouldn't need to be CCTV camera's on every corner.  There wouldn't need to soldiers and police to enforce the law.  People would do as they were told, and that would be that.

But it isn't that, is it?  People do not do as they are told, and that is the problem.  The best way I have seen of framing this "problem", of trying to explain why the societal structure is not completely reproduced at the individual level, is that of resistance.  The act of saying "no", acting in a contrary manner, refusing to do as one is expected or told.  That is what screws it up.  However, at the same time, this resistance may be part of the wider social milieu as well, insofar as it is available to everyone.

All of the attempts of society, of language, or of other factors, to determine us, rely on power.  I don't think this is too controversial. Power is the ability to make people do other than they would, if we accept what resistance is, above.  Governments try to control people because they act otherwise.  People lock doors because other people will attempt to open them.  Something needs to be accounted for, all the time.  Equally, if we are not concerned with how someone acts, we do not attempt to change that.  Yet that would result in children growing up into adults, yet with a babies mentality (though some would suggest this already happens), unable to communicate with society at large.  Government is just one example, though it is a useful one. 

At  the same time, our ability to resist must in some way be connected to power.  It needs power, in the sense that without power, without something acting on us, we cannot resist.  It may even be a form of power itself, situated at the individual level.  There are ways of resisting involving groups, of course, but they require power relations to coordinate, there are power relations inherent in the fact they can communicate and discuss at all. 

This is the double hermeneutic I referred to in the title.  We are in a sense, carrying society in our own heads, where ever we go.  At the same time, we struggle against and subvert this coding, rewriting and re-forming it to suit our needs.

More thinking on this is needed.

[LMNO]

Cain wins.

I withdraw my idle speculation into then nature of God and Religion, and now will think about this.

[Cait M. R.]

This is very interesting. I'm going to pop open notepad and start making a text flowchart of this. Maybe something important will jump out at me.

Currently I feel you're missing something regarding "social deviants" such as the feral children you mention, or the criminally insane. There's almost certainly something else there, I just can't put my finger on it yet. I'll get back to this after some lengthy thought and the flowchart.

[Cain]

I'm not totally convinced by the whole thing, either.

Imma go read some Gramsci, brb

[Cramulus]

For those that haven't read it,
The Art of Memetics agrees with Cain about the individual being an elusive character. We exist as parts of social networks, and we're just one node in a larger structure.

AoM posits that these nodes have relationships to themselves, and certain nodes are more influential than other nodes. Some nodes have more freedom than other nodes. This largely has to do with the nodal inter-relationships. Most of the book is about how one node can affect a change in the entire network.

AoM also posits that all networks act on the same principles. They say that (moving from small to large) individuals, corporations, governments, and religions are nearly identical except for the scale. The  processes which made the Church accept that the world was round, the processes that made US citizens choose Obama over McCain, are also operating inside your head. They're exactly the same processes, just on a different scale. One influential node pushes against other influential nodes, and they continue, until over time the entire network has been influenced by the individual.

Under this model, there's no room for bedtime stories like free will. And only a little room for the individual.

[Cait M. R.]

While making the flowchart I came across something interesting.

Society defines social deviancy (as in "stepping beyond the boundaries of society")as "wrong" and often "insane". Even you said that people who deviate too much in their internal model of How Things Are can look insane, assuming that they aren't batshit bonkers already.

The only definition I can think of for individual, though, is "social deviant, not insane." And "not insane" applies both to the perception others have of the individual and to the fact of his psychological state.

Thus, I gave up on the flowchart. So much for that.

I'm not sure if you people keep a "dictionary" of concepts you've discovered. If you do, though, perhaps you could show me it -- it would probably make my time here easier, since I wouldn't be reinventing the wheel.

[Herbertina Merrique V]

Do you have any idea how disturbing this is?
To think of something for some days, then try to write some of the thoughts and questions and ponderings down, end up just sitting with the pen in your hand because you can't really get to anything, then finally give up and just go open the laptop to try to think of something else for a while - and here it is, written by someone else at PDdotfuckingcom. And this just keeps happening.

As of now, I don't really have anything groundbreaking to say on the subject, but anyway.
This free will you mentioned - did you mean a core of some kind, like something in us even deeper than the social and physical limitations, ideals and things we are constructed of? A soul or something? (Blah. And I guess that's not relevant, as it can't really be proved that it exists, nor that it doesn't, but well.)

The resistance then. As the bricks in each person are arranged very differently, making it impossible for governments and suchlikes to shape everyone in the same pattern without causing different reactions, the people will not do as the government tells them because, well, the bricks the government is trying to feed them are in conflict with the other bricks. Uh, I don't know if I'm making any sense now, or if I'm just stating the obvious, or whatever.
But moar thinking shall occur, and I might write some more sense-making stuff later, or then just keep lurking. (Cramulus is my excuse for not being able to make sense, as I've been spreading Easter eggs all over the town today and am dead tired at the moment. Fuck this, it's not even Easter yet! But come on, Spiderman eggs. Filled with red-blue-silver glitter. They deserved it.)

Also, the kind wish for a concept dictionary, seconded.

[Cramulus]

       re: concept dictonary

blackironprison.com is supposed to be an index of our great ideas and discussions,
but I think it's only RWHN and I that update it,
and we do that very seldomly.

volunteers requested!

/tangent

[Cait M. R.]

Herbertina, I got what you were saying. But about the bricks, it might be more accurate to use Tetris as a metaphor here, and maybe jokingly call a much larger extension to the BIP metaphor (which is on a society-wide level) the "Black Tetris-Block Prison" for a few seconds.

The government would like our prisons to be uniform and neat, because we would be predictable then. But the people they work with give them the blocks they have to use to make the prisons nice and neat, meaning they will inevitably fail when they need the long straight block and get the T instead. This leaves a hole, a hole through which resistance can escape.

[LMNO]

Do you have any idea how disturbing this is?
To think of something for some days, then try to write some of the thoughts and questions and ponderings down, end up just sitting with the pen in your hand because you can't really get to anything, then finally give up and just go open the laptop to try to think of something else for a while - and here it is, written by someone else at PDdotfuckingcom. And this just keeps happening.

Hivemind, ITT.

[Herbertina Merrique V]

Do you have any idea how disturbing this is?
To think of something for some days, then try to write some of the thoughts and questions and ponderings down, end up just sitting with the pen in your hand because you can't really get to anything, then finally give up and just go open the laptop to try to think of something else for a while - and here it is, written by someone else at PDdotfuckingcom. And this just keeps happening.

Hivemind, ITT.

... aw crap. A PD hivemind. Why not, I don't know, Sileny Ota or something? Now that would be something to hivemind to.
From this day forth, I shall quit thinking of all this BIP shit, and instead, run into walls.

[Reginald Ret]

Methinks the 'free will' here isn't really compatible with this bricks metaphore, the metaphore, though making it easier to think about this stuff, oversimplifies what happens with these bricks when they interact. This simplification may make it harder to see that personality is emergent.


compare the development of personality with how DNA acts during sexual recombination.

Not all parts of a parent's DNA are used // Not all memes within a memeplex are incorporated into the forming personality.

[some very weird and complicated stuff happens]

...

dammit my brain shut down, i hope i got my point across.

[Honey]

The Double Hermeneutic is stunning, magnificent, brilliant - takes my breath away!  Putting the pieces together in a wonderful & yet somehow intuitive manner!  Don't have much to add here but one thought as I was reading.  The symptoms may provide a solution.  Not yet sure what that even means.

Thanks Cain & much respect.    

[P3nT4gR4m]

I get the impression that the part you are missing is due, in part, to the overwhelming complexity of the human psyche. Society may well be contained therein but it, or aspects of it, may, equally well, be in conflict with large portions of the individual psychological construct.

A lot of who we are, as you so rightly point out, is taught through social conditioning but our inherent problem solving and pattern matching mechanisms may well formulate independent models which run counter to these principles and, at that point, there is the possibility of rebellion.

For example - a baby will not be taught what it can and can't eat by conditioning alone, a fact which any parent will attest to. Instead the little fucker will attempt to put in it's mouth anything that looks as if it has the slightest possibility of fitting there. It's only by trying something and, either liking or hating the taste that it will make it's decision and no amount of coaxing and cajoling will change it's mind about the issue.

Society, try as it may to enforce it's own agenda, will always be fighting a hard battle for dominion. TFYS is part of our basic programming and it's only by continued and concentrated force of effort that they can beat that shit out of you.

[LMNO]

Society, try as it may to enforce it's own agenda, will always be fighting a hard battle for dominion. TFYS is part of our basic programming and it's only by continued and concentrated force of effort that they can beat that shit out of you.

That crazy motherfucker has a point!