Widescreen
As a qualitative researcher in the social sciences, I'm not one to form hypotheses about social situations without cross-checking among the members of a given milieu. So recently, when I polled The Family's senior officers about the events of the last month or so, I was amused to find out the places where the stories matched and did not match. It all depended on who told what to whom, and very often, what was told to one was not what was told to another. The whole thing was a very complex web of interwoven narratives boiling down to several foci of consensus.
It strikes me that life is indeed less of a life-and-death struggle than many would have you think. It's just that all these interwoven narratives tend to convince us that the immediate milieu and the local interactions are paramount, of the same scale as the clash of civilisations. The big picture and the massive externals are often ignored in our up-close-and-personal knife-fights. To the big fish in a small pond, the idea of human intervention against them must be particularly threatening; to us, the idea of divine intervention against us is as terrible. We'd rather just keep our parochial mindsets, thank you very much.
People who squat in the same pond for years tend to get possessive of their pond and their way of squatting. I am no exception; most of us are not. We do tend to become increasingly more alert to some minor changes in our environment, while less sensitive to other changes. In intrinsically more social animals, this takes the form of sensitivity towards social phenomena such as relative dominance, patronage, symbolic posturing, and so on. Some speculate the human brain has developed to such a large size simply because of the need to keep track of such social interactions.
This is why convincing people of the big picture is such a difficult thing. Until the price of rice rises 350% in 5 years, until the price of soyabeans makes that crop the most expensive food crop in the world, until people begin to find out that cannabis sativa is the second best (and most reviled) food crop available to humans, things just don't have an impact on us. We continue to reinforce our socially-constructed myths and power structures while the physical and spiritual facts of the world dictate their obsolescence. How sad.
It strikes me that life is indeed less of a life-and-death struggle than many would have you think. It's just that all these interwoven narratives tend to convince us that the immediate milieu and the local interactions are paramount, of the same scale as the clash of civilisations. The big picture and the massive externals are often ignored in our up-close-and-personal knife-fights. To the big fish in a small pond, the idea of human intervention against them must be particularly threatening; to us, the idea of divine intervention against us is as terrible. We'd rather just keep our parochial mindsets, thank you very much.
People who squat in the same pond for years tend to get possessive of their pond and their way of squatting. I am no exception; most of us are not. We do tend to become increasingly more alert to some minor changes in our environment, while less sensitive to other changes. In intrinsically more social animals, this takes the form of sensitivity towards social phenomena such as relative dominance, patronage, symbolic posturing, and so on. Some speculate the human brain has developed to such a large size simply because of the need to keep track of such social interactions.
This is why convincing people of the big picture is such a difficult thing. Until the price of rice rises 350% in 5 years, until the price of soyabeans makes that crop the most expensive food crop in the world, until people begin to find out that cannabis sativa is the second best (and most reviled) food crop available to humans, things just don't have an impact on us. We continue to reinforce our socially-constructed myths and power structures while the physical and spiritual facts of the world dictate their obsolescence. How sad.
etched with acid at 7:42:00 am
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