Please try to imagine for yourself a large picture, as complete as possible of the ideal scene of group creation, participation, growth and maintenance in a time probably long ago and possibly in a different place altogether. In fact, the time and place is really not an important part of the picture. The idea is to get a clearer picture of what to strive for as the ideal scene.
There would have been elements that we still see today, at least to some degree, but there also would have been other elements that are very rare or missing in today’s world.
First, there would have been a high degree of literacy and mastery of language, including grammar. Although in the local area one language would most likely predominate, it would be safer if the civilization included several different languages that would act in a similar way to water-tight compartments in a ship. If a social aberration that tended toward “sinking” the civilization developed in one area it would be more difficult for it to spread rapidly throughout the rest of the civilization. Such aberration would be concentrated in the non-analytical or less analytical areas of culture. Those who could speak more than one language, and so were able to pass through a “water-tight door” into another language area, would be on average more analytical, and so less likely to transmit or carry with them such aberration from one area to another. Of course, there could be some “bleed-through” of aberration from one language area to another, but hopefully the rate of spread would be slowed enough to allow the analytical elements of the culture to effectively deal with it.
Individuals would have a strong sense for and awareness of self-determination in themselves and others. They would respect and value the competent application of same towards advancement of pro-life purposes and achievement of pro-life goals. They would be motivated by a desire for self-improvement and work towards accumulating good life experience to achieve this. They would recognize that self-determination was an active ingredient in gaining such worthwhile experience, and that self-improvement was not possible without it. They would not embrace any religion or philosophy that did not support the self-determination of the individual.
Each person would be able to apply themselves with simple or more advanced tools in carrying out small pieces of work or small projects. They would have a good sense of how to optimize their resources of time, space and material to best carry out such work. They would have developed a good ability to face up to, understand, operate and maintain machines and equipment to carry out larger projects or higher volumes of specialized work.
Having achieved a good understanding, judgement and “feel” for the application of optimized systems of interconnected parts (machinery or equipment) to the successful carrying out of purposes, it would an easy step for an individual to integrate himself or herself into larger optimized systems that included other individuals for the achievement of larger and long-range goals beyond what they were capable of themselves. They would value such groups as a large-scale servo-mechanism for their own self-determination which allowed them to achieve their own long-range goals, and so would be quite interested in developing them, correcting them, maintaining their health, growing and operating them.
Individuals would accumulate skills in developing, modifying or expanding the “DNA” or policy of a group that would contain base DNA common to all groups, with layers of more and more particular DNA laid on top of each other. These skills would also be used in protecting and better controlling their private lives.
If a person did not want to interact personally with someone, or not include them in their personal life, then he or she would have the analytical skills to develop “on-the-fly” and utilize the impersonal interface of that part of a formal group that would be inclusive of and appropriate to the interaction with that other person. He or she would also be confident that the not-so-well-liked party of the other part would have the analytical skills to recognize and respond appropriately to the desire of the party of the first part to interact on a formal, non-personal basis. This would be the case because the second party would value and respect the self-determination of the first party (and visa versa) to a greater degree than any desire they may have to interact personally, and so would respect the wish to interact impersonally. People would value not only in themselves, but in others, the skills in creating these optimized formal interfaces on-the-fly. Thus it would be possible even for individuals who did not like each other to still have good experience in working together in a formal group to achieve a common self-determined purpose. This would be true even if that formal activity was only temporary-- as in a clerk/customer, teacher/student, or driver/passenger or just a citizen/citizen interaction. Both parties could have confidence that the other’s reservoir of good experience in group participation would allow them to easily stay focused on the common purpose and forward it to a successful conclusion.
There would be a large pool of individuals who were deaberrated enough in the area of work and groups that they could be counted on to respond towards opportunities to participate in groups that were organized towards achieving one of their own goals, or at least one similar to their own, or just towards a general pro-life goal that allowed for good experience in organization and participation at a high level. A person with a specific goal could form up a set of group DNA (policy) and present it to members of the pool. If it was a good enough purpose, and the group DNA was formed up well enough around it, then he could expect to elicit some self-determined desires to join and participate in this new group. If there were enough positive responses the group could go forward to form up and grow and carry out the purpose—hopefully to a successful end.
An individual looking to forward his self-determined purpose would not always need to start from scratch. Often an existing group would have a purpose line matching closely enough to his own purpose. He might then be able to join, participate in and help grow this group as a means to forwarding his original purpose.
This scene, or at least an approximation of it must actually have occurred at some point in the past. That is because it is the optimal operating basis to allow the most “bang for the buck” in terms of progress made along self-determined purposes for a given amount of effort by the largest number of individuals. So a large number of individuals, all of which were well aware of the game of gaining good experience, and with the intention of growing their own self-determination and respectful of the desire of others to do the same, all working to optimize resources to allow the most success along this line would have formed themselves into just such an optimal configuration. What would have held it together was the awareness of and respect for the self-determined purposes of others more than just those of self, and the desire to allow the opportunity for others to be successful in forwarding those purposes as much as for self. The motivation for this would just be the recognition that this whole scene depended on a large pool of deaberrated group members capable of going into agreement with and operating on a self-determined basis being available, and that the best way to guarantee such a pool would continue and grow into the future would be to allow each an opportunity for success along these lines, so as to give each a reason to stay in the area and accumulate more good experience.
Actually this scene may have been only a sub-scene of a wider, less optimal scene, and maybe it did not happen everywhere, but I think it is still a good philosophical tool to help point the way from the current scene we find ourselves in towards an improved civilization. Please take a moment to imagine a civilization operating in this manner before reading on.
How did this scene devolve into what we see today? One way to look at it is that the average level of group health must have declined for various reasons. The environment could have changed more quickly than the ability of the group to modify its policy framework to accommodate it. The group members may have had less than adequate training on their jobs, which led to mistakes and errors which were withheld or hidden from the rest of the group, which led to poor communication and withdrawal and individuation of the group member or a subsection of a group from the group as a whole, which led to less than complete agreement on the group policy set, which led to fractionation of the group into factions, which led to worsening production, etc. The pool of available group members shrank so that fewer and fewer new groups would be able to be manned up.
Finally a point was reached where someone who had developed a set of group DNA (a policy set) for their own particular purpose was selfish enough to adopt the attitude of “I want my purpose forwarded and I don’t care about your self-determination and your purposes”, and solved his problem of not having enough self-determined response to participate in his group by forcing participation on those unwilling, or not willing enough. Thus slavery came into being. It is a not facing up to or non-confront of the pro-life way to organize and participate in groups. It is a lazy, selfish solution that sells out the future of the overall scene for what seems to be a temporary gain in the ability to forward the slaver’s selfish purposes in the present.
Slavery institutionalizes a lack of regard for and a closing of the door on the forwarding of the self-determined purposes of others. This was a vital motivation that held the ideal scene together, so progress towards it is effectively barred.
A slaver does not want to face up to this truth, or he would not be able to stand himself for very long, so he tells himself some lies. One of the main lies he uses is the false notion that position or case state is a mandate to arbitrary rule. Arbitrariness does away with agreement on group DNA or policy sets. An arbitrary is the antithesis of policy, so this degrades group health further. Institutionalizing arbitrary rule on a large or small scale acts as a further barrier to progress. The slaver is continually committing the crime of barring the way, or at least making it more difficult to forward the pro-life purpose of approaching and operating in the ideal scene of civilization in his environment. This contra-life activity is enough to bar his own success in the game of recovery of self. To “win” he must now drop into a lower game of materialism and lie to himself about the existence of the higher game in which he has failed. He becomes less and less able to face up to not only the ideal scene of group health and anything that approaches it, but even anything that seems to be going in that direction. Since a high ability to align data is required to put together group DNA or hierarchies of policy that forward a group purpose, or even to understand and operate an existing set of policy, this cutting across or thwarting progress towards higher levels of group causation results in a degradation of analytical abilities to align data in those responsible. The slaver becomes very dirty in the area of group causation, group health, group dynamics. He loses his abilities to face up to and deal with systems of policy, and to a lesser degree, any other kind of system. He now must reach for something simple enough that he can still understand that he can use as a substitute for a healthy group. The most common substitute is a personality-based hierarchy. It doesn’t require much in the way of analytical abilities to apply. In fact, you could call it an analytical cop-out. To operate in such a hierarchy you just have to keep in mind 1) “Who is my boss?” 2) “Who do I supervise?” This is in common use by organized religion, organized crime and other areas of high levels of dirtiness in the area of groups.
