Hivemind

Science teaches that every member of a hive is genetically related and every member of humanity is genetically related. The difference lies in perception beyond quantifiable, input/output function behavior. The difference lies in hived versus conscious living as bio-physical adaptation. Hivemind implements life as a fatal program that no amount of fortune or crisis can alter. The members of a hived colony simply play out its program independent of thriving or collapse.

But being human exposes a meta reality beyond life as an identifiable input, output device. Being human cannot be quantified by surveilling, storing, measuring and aggregating atomized identifiers, scores, inputs and outputs. That is the Turin Horse of Nietzsche's existential dilemma — that the fundamental question for conscious living is: Fatality, then what? If life is finite, or finitely infinite, then What is a good life? The pessimism of the function, the algorithm, the refinable but unending program posited through eternal recurrence resonates as the God Is Dead wind chasing machine's answer. An insect in lizard infinity, where you're useless unless it garners more output from you than you from it is hivemind eternity.

In my experience, elites thrive by forming, honoring and retaining connection to the power of authority. Governments, corporations, tribes, teams, gangs, secret societies and fraternities demonstrate this, that questioning and reform fails except under the auspice of connection to authority and through assumption of power. But for most of us, our natural or learned inclination is cooperation, peace and fairness, not conflict, power and war. We flail, learning to recognize, analyze and question authority instinctively, as a survival mechanism, but soon realize acceptance without understanding that our connection to power was born or learned broken. A laissez-faire inculcated majority never rules, it simply abides unchosen necessity to elitism through determinism under a reactionary, algorithmic culture of labels, scores, morally hollow institutions and classically suspect choices that a majority of good people would never choose except as a lesser of evils. While it's true that quality, equality and power are not the same things, for all of its inherited miseducation, trauma and self interest, humankind perpetuates through good faith, even as stabilizing goodness is portrayed by intellects and elites as powerless to transcend an alienating (otherness), game theory, hive organized, forever universe.

The modernity of urbanization, corporate employment, nuclear families, warehoused bell curve education and consumerism that existentialism predicted has isolated people from classical thought and understanding of human dependence on nature and each other. Specialized division of labor pits one worker against another in a necessary salary race. Household scale sociology renders families and individuals less resilient to the trauma of natural and technological acceleration. Neoliberal economic reforms create a zero-sum game that stifles fair competition for ideas behind hidden, unaccountable broker networks trafficking in unassailable capital, status and politics. Defense becomes war. War becomes genocide. And surveillance, tokenized disenfranchisement and depopulation shapes the course of technology.

And what are better choices? Doom scrolling, disconnection, homesteading, homeschooling, identity, land and capital sovereignty, faith in the superiority of discernment, citizen reportage, personal and government reform, experience, stuff, wealth, rebellion? We tell ourselves not to stay forever remnant, adjacent and late to catch up our portfolio of broken will to power as the state of living our whatever world's way. We can eat better. Think better. Fail better. Experience more. Put another boat on the water. By continuously renewing bills of health, we can abide even existentialism's forever human prospect. The Dude abides... when Heaven becomes the myth of meritocracy in a thought trap. We have no choice but the machinating sound of settling into an infinite loop. There is nothing new under the sun. Utopia is as possible as chasing the wind under resignation to the unmeasurable Divine, said Solomon in Ecclesiastes.

When prompted for his ideal job, my father said: The one I'm jealous of; I said: Retired. Was I weakened by my mother's sufficiency under our mutual good provider? Did I misread my Gospel to act from love and that God, not me or choices, changes the world? Was I born or have I grown jealous seeking authority under Heaven and not infernal self redefinition? Every day I pray and promise to embody a mission I never found here, except in Christ Jesus. But mostly I pray for grace and hope not to live, die or live again, forever correcting a self loop coded in the language of hivemind pessimism.