Holotopia: Socialized reality
Contents
H O L O T O P I A: F I V E I N S I G H T S
Socialized reality
Here we'll talk about the core of our proposal—to change the very relationship we have with information. And through information, the relationship we have with the world; and with ourselves.
The relationship we have with information, and through information with the world and with ourselves, is founded on unstated beliefs and values. Like the foundations of a house, they hold the entire edifice of our culture, while themselves remaining invisible. That's why we call them simply foundations.
Needless to say, a cultural revival is really just a natural result of a fundamental shift in those foundations. Wasn't that what the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, were really all about?
From the traditional culture we have adopted a myth, incomparably more subversive than the myth of creation. That myth now serves the foundation stone on which the edifice of our culture has been erected.
Stories
A clue to cultural revival
As movies tend to, Alain Resnais' "My American Uncle" follows its characters through strained relationships with parents, career ups and downs and love-related hopes and disappointments. But "My American Uncle" offers also a meta-narrative, which (we propose) turns it into a new paradigm art project.
In that way, the movie federates a socially relevant insight of a researcher, neuroscientist Henri Laborit. At the end of the movie, Laborit appears on the screen in person, and summarizes this insight:
The unconscious is a formidable instrument. Not only because it holds all that we have repressed, things too painful for us to express, because we'd be punished by society. But also because all that is authorized, even rewarded by society, has been placed in our brain since birth. We're unaware of its presence, and yet it guides our actions. This unconscious, which is not Freud's, is the most dangerous. What we call the personality of an individual is built up from a grab-bag of value judgments, prejudices and platitudes. As he grows older, they become more and more rigid, less and less subject to question. Take away one single stone from this edifice, and it all crumbles. The result is anguish. And anguish stops at nothing, neither murder, nor genocide, nor war, in the case of social groups.
We are beginning to understand by what mechanism, why and how, throughout the history and in the present, the hierarchies of dominance have been established. To go to the moon, we must know the laws of gravity. Knowing the laws of gravity doesn't make us free of gravity. It merely allows us to utilize it.
Until we have shown the inhabitants of this planet the way their brain functions, the way they use it, until they know it has always been used to dominate others, there is little chance that anything will change.
Reality and beyond
Did Moses really return from Mount Sinai with ten commandments written in stone by God himself?
For centuries, our ancestors considered this a fact. But to a modern mind, the fact that this would violate certain "laws of physics" makes such beliefs untenable.
When Nietzsche observed, famously, that "God is dead", he did not of course mean that God had physically died. Or even that the belief in God lost its bearings in our culture, which was an obvious fact. What he meant was that we, as culture, lost a compendium of functions that had earlier rested on the belief in God as foundations.
Can we survive in a complex world, develop human quality, renew culture...—without principles to live by? Without even a foundation on which such principles could emerge?
"Reality" is a myth
Our contemporary culture too is founded a popular belief—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality"; that "correspondence with reality" can be rationally verified; and that "the scientific worldview" is a result of such verification, and therefore "objectively true".
"Correspondence with reality" cannot be verified
In "Evolution of Physics", Einstein and Infeld explained why "correspondence to reality" cannot be rationally verified, by using the parable of a closed watch. Einstein, furthermore, held the position that the belief that the results of our speculation or reflection correspond to reality is a common product of illusion. Both arguments are summarized and commented [here].
Since our goal is not to give a new "objectively true reality picture", but only to submit a legitimate way of looking at our theme, nothing more needs to be said.
Our culture too has been founded on a myth
It follows that our culture too is founded on a myth.
This can easily be understood, and forgiven, if one takes into account that the belief that "truth" means "correspondence with reality" is deeply engrained in our 'cultural DNA', and even in our language. When I write "worldviews", my word processor underlines the word in red. The word "worldview" doesn't have a plural; since there is only one world, there can be only one worldview—the one that corresponds to that world.
"Reality" is a product of socialization
... the mother embracing a child, the decoration that will flatter the narcissism of a warrior, the applause that will accompany a narration of an actor. All this frees will free certain chemical substances in the brain and result in pleasure. (...) Finally, we need to be aware that what penetrates into our nervous system from birth and perhaps even before, in utero, the stimuli that will penetrate into our nervous system come to us essentially from the others, and that we are the others. When we die, it will be the others that we've internalized in our nervous system, who have constructed us, who have constructed our brain, who have filled it up, that will die.
Bourdieu's theory of socialization
In his "theory of practice", Pierre Bourdieu gave us a comprehensive sociological theory of socialization. Here it may be sufficient to just mention his keyword doxa (which he adopted from Max Weber, and whose usage dates all the way back to Plato), which Bourdieu used to point to the experience that the societal order of things in which we live constitutes the only possible one. "Orthodoxy" leaves room for alternatives, of which only one, ours, is "right". Doxa ignores even the possibility of alternatives.
What makes a king "real"
The king enters the room and everyone bows. Naturally, you bow too. Even if you may not feel like doing that, deep inside you know that if you don't bow down your head, you may lose it.
So what is it, really, that makes the difference between "a real king", and an imposter who "only believes" that he's a king? Both consider themselves as kings, and impersonate the corresponding "habitus". In the former case, however, everyone else has also been successfully socialized accordingly.
A "real king" will be treated with highest honors. An imposter will be incarcerated in an appropriate institution. Despite the fact that all too often, a single "real king" caused far more suffering and destruction than all the madmen and criminals combined.