How Things Go Wrong

Let me count the ways ... here are a few.

Society Rules!

The whole social process depends on you identifying and respecting the duality: personal milieu v social milieu. Despite the dominance of personal over social at higher levels, your social environment appears to be controlling in practice.

No Escape

Although the account has been described from the perspective of an independent individual, this is possibly misleading. As a person you are far weaker than society and dependent on your social milieu. If that milieu collapses, you, as an individual, could be in big difficulties. If it is your cultural milieu, you may disintegrate and live a death in life or simply die. By contrast, if an individual dies, the social world continues.

You could argue that a lot of persons who think like you could band together and become stronger in regard to the social world. But that just re-generates the issue at a different level. You are simply adjusting the social milieu within which you perceive unity. The same issues may arise in this more limited sphere, and it would eventually end by your becoming a disconnected alienated person, who can never lead a good life because there is no world within which you can live.

However, we are not imagining here that any person, no matter how powerful, can run or control their society. The goal is more modest: handling yourself within social situations in such a way that your egocentricity is held in check and the Primal Injunctions and related Primal Precepts come into play.

Seeing Unity v Interacting-for-Benefit

By uniting with others, a social milieu that can be characterised as «good» comes into being. It is characterized as good, because of the Precept "Treat others as yourself". Because you want what is good, you assume that others do so as well. The basics of social interaction should ensure justice and common decencies.

There are no expectations built into seeing unity. There are no demands. There are no entitlements. There are no obligations. All that exists is a deep sense of everyone being identical at some deep spiritual level. If it is deep enough, that will include all of humanity. If it is not very deep, it may only extend to part or all of the immediate family.

This is a very different existential situation from interaction for benefit, which is a framework based in social values. Groups here form around different ideas of what counts as a benefit (i.e. good). So each views others with feelings that vary from sympathy to intense antagonism.
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That framework emerged from purpose-PH6 and ethical choices-PH'6 as they occur within societies. Each approach interprets the notion of «goodness» in terms of its own benefit-ideology. Like all THEE typologies, there is intense divisiveness rather than unity. People associate preferentially with those who share their specific form of goodness-benefit. The particular ideology determines how much unity, if any, there is in that association: e.g. unity is high in Kinship-centredness, to the point of suffocating members. Unity is low in Perspective-centredness because of the intense drive for autonomy.

Herding Undermines Good Choices

Each of us must somehow provide for ourselves without impinging on others in a way that might fracture unity. There is obviously a danger of turmoil, but what everyone intuitively wants is sufficient stability such that each can flourish by minding their own business and with some basic decency.

There is, however, a danger: herding and groupthink. At these moments, you cannot enable a better social world, because you cannot think for yourself.

It all must go wrong when you want to do what everybody else does or be like everyone else. Then you are made miserable by keeping up with the Jones's; irritated as you are herded like cattle into security lines; manipulated into going to war by propaganda; crowded like sheep in stadiums; cheated into paying over the odds for a fad of the moment.

This framework requires the very opposite of the herding and the mindlessness beloved of advertisers for mass-produced goods and services, and governments for their own controlling ends.

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Originally posted: 15-Feb-2013