Super-Entities, Macroorganisms, Memetic Beings, and National Spirits

The slow-motion hivemind

I was thinking yesterday about how humans are a sort of hive mind in slow motion. Think about it. The cells in your body all carry out their roles, oblivious to the fact that their combined efforts culminate in the creation of a singular conscious entity; you. And yet they do have their own individual lives. Trillions of them! But when you consider yourself in your mind, you don’t think of yourself as a hive mind of trillions of tiny little creatures working together to produce a whole. You simply consider the whole. You are one being.

Your cells produce this singular being by communicating chemically and electrically with each other. So too do we communicate with each other with chemicals and electricity. Electric currents are directed toward different areas of your brain, forming ideas that you then verbally or nonverbally communicate to the people around you. Our bodies give off pheromones that have emotional and hormonal effects on those around us; altering thinking and ultimately producing new ideas that are then communicated again with language, verbal or nonverbal, but understandable either way.

Just like the hive mind, each of us is like an individual neuron in a brain that communicates in extremely slow motion, at least when compared to an individual mind. This gives rise to the idea of entire cultures being conscious, probably in ways we can’t understand. Perhaps thought patterns in this cultural super-conscious mirror those of an individual human life, but instead happen over the course of a thousand years; the lifespan of a nation, and perhaps those thoughts are actually perceived by this greater entity that we project into existence, that we call a “nation”. Or a community. Or a race. Or a people. Or even a subculture. The lifespan of this super-entity increasing as the speed of communication decreases, which we could expect to happen with an increase in size. Therefore, a nation lasts longer than a subculture, a race lasts longer than both, and a unified “human culture”, if such a thing could ever be created, and perhaps we’re witnessing the creation of something like that right now, would last the longest.

So, just as above cells we exist as a higher entity with a sort of individualism, despite the fact that we’re made up of trillions of actual individual creatures, it logically extends that above each culture must exist a higher unifying identity. Does it consider itself an individual? Does it have a will? Does it inject thoughts through our subconscious that manifest in what we perceive as original ideas? Are we puppets to the will of these great spirits or are they puppets to ours?

So, we humans exist on multiple planes of consciousness and experience. We exist as trillions of mindless cells, we exist above the cells as organs that can be seen as individual organisms as they have individual functions and are differentiable from each other, we exist as subconscious and as conscious beings, we exist as families in that in our families we all play unique roles and are unified in a common goal, and we exist as communities and nations that are made up of many families and individuals communicating information to each other in much the same way neurons pass information between each other in the brain, and so we ultimately form a sort of slow-motion hive mind that we call the nation or the culture or the race.

The question becomes, if we exist on all these different levels, which should we identify with the most? Other people will have different ways of figuring this out, and may come to different conclusions, although I don’t think anyone would say we should identify with individual cells or individual organs. Why is that? I can only assume it’s for two reasons; they aren’t conscious (at least not in a way that we can understand), and they can’t survive on their own.

Well, if that’s what we’re using to determine which identity we should consider first, then many people would likely think that, surely, it’s the individual human that we should identify most with. However, I question the assumption that an individual can survive on its own. Of course, one could learn to acquire the resources necessary to sustain an individual life for as long as is natural, but an individual cannot reproduce, and so will ultimately die. If we extend the definition of an individual life to include that individual’s offspring (and why shouldn’t we do this, considering that an individual life is defined by the ability of cells to use DNA to produce exact replicas of themselves over and over?), then it makes sense that we should say that the family is the basic unit of identity, and that we should identify most with the family, rather than our individual selves. The family varies from culture to culture. The nuclear family certainly isn’t universal, but it’s what we have in the West. This conclusion seems logical, but we can take it further.

The family will degenerate and die over time if you just “keep it in the family”. Some genetic diversity is needed. The family may not be able to survive long-term if it doesn’t join, or produce on its own, a community of families, of size necessary to maintain genetic health. So, perhaps it’s the community that we should identify with, primarily.

To go even further is necessary depending on your ideals. Do you consider yourself homo-sapien, or homo-humanitas, that is, “civilized man”, or man who builds and lives within a civilization, which I would define as a collection of communities that rely on each other in a complex economic system? Here, a community may be forced to specialize in a particular industry in order to support the survival of the civilizational whole; farming communities, lumber communities, industrial communities, even, and I loathe to even mention them, merchant communities, the least independent of them all. Now the community becomes dependent on others and cannot survive on its own without what would necessarily have to be an extremely stressful lifestyle shift. If you consider yourself a civilizationist, or a believer in the idea of nations and empires and even “progress”, then it is only principled for you to identify primarily with the super-organism that is the nation, seeing individual communities as organs and individual humans as cells. Some reject this path and advocate for a more rural, independent lifestyle. They reject civilizationalism and advocate for a libertine notion of “individual freedom” as the ultimate ideal. If you find yourself agreeing more with these types, the Alex Joneses and the Ron Swansons and the anarcho-primitivists of the world, then perhaps the family or the community is a better fit for you as far as where the foundation of your identity should lie.

Why shouldn’t the civilizationist identify with all of humanity, or at least the entire industrial world? After all, we’ve formed this global economy, and most nations are not entirely self-sufficient anymore. We rely on Taiwan for computer chips, America for food, China for manufacturing, France for electricity, Saudi Arabia for oil, etc, all depending on where you live. Are these not analogous to the organs in a body, an even-higher entity that is industrial society as a whole? No, they’re not, because global trade could blink out of existence or possibility tomorrow and the individual nations would survive. It would be a dramatic, tumultuous, and stressful shift, even for individual humans, for families, and for communities, but the nation would, without a doubt, adapt and persist within its same borders as before, so long as those borders encompassed communities that care to continue cooperation after the destruction of economic ties.

I specify this because some nations are made up of communities that wouldn’t necessarily care to continue cooperation in the event of a breakdown of economic ties. If communities are the organs of the nation, then foreign communities; African communities in France, Turkish communities in Germany, Pakistani communities in the UK, Chinese communities in Australia, white communities in virtually any nonwhite nation, could be seen as incompatible organ transplants. This isn’t a statement of prejudice toward individual members of any of these groups, it’s a simple observation of the fact that the described communities do not care about integration, do not consider themselves part of their host nations, and wouldn’t want to be in the first place. They are implicitly imperialistic colonization ventures whether they realize it or not; extensions of the territory of their home nations, for all intents and purposes.