Society, Status, Progress & 3rd World

Why did we climb out of the trees? Why did we leave the caves? Why did we leave the wattle and daub houses? Why did we stop walking? Why did we leave the land-line? Why did we leave the 4x2?

One force is evolution. One force is practicality. But I suspect now that the biggest force was status. A study in rabbits found that rabbits spend half their time watching out for preditors and half their time watching out for each other. In rabbit society you are in a battle of life and death for social status. I am noticing that is true for humans also. Thus we worry about the size of our car not because a 4x4 is better but because it has become a status symbol.

Ask anyone why they got a mobile or a 4x4 and you will not get that answer however. It is odd that people don't recognise this primary driving force in our lives. At root arguments go on the lines that the next generation of gadgets and must-haves are qualitatively better than the last - that there has been actual progress and our lives will be "better" for getting them.

My simple counter-argument to that it means our lives were worse before and they will be even better in the future: so what is so good about now then? The truth of course is that we must stay ahead of the game to maintain our status.

If only this was just a game played out in isolation. The problem is that our status seeking leads automatically to judgements being made about other people. People who are not "up with it" must be a lower status. Naturally we deem the rest of the world as lower status then, we even place in them in a status order 1st(us/U.S.), 2nd and 3rd worlds. Then our conscience decides to get involved and wishes that their ststus be improved... which means that they get judged alongside our own status games.

Of course in the 2nd and 3rd worlds they have their own status measures. Things like ownership of sea shells, cows or feathers, ability to jump, obesity, number of wives etc. Just as in our societies status is metered out and people vie for the symbols of status.

To our eyes their status symbols are idiotic. Equally are not our own? Mobile phones, big houses, 4x4 cars etc? or if you are a teenager: the amount you can drink, the amount of sex you get, the drugs you've done?

There are rules that determine what makes a good status symbol, primarily scarcity and ability to control its distribution. Thus OBE and MBE becomes a status symbol because the establishment controls the distribution. Alva Gosson OBE. If that were possible then it would be meaningless.

Behind all this we try and justify the "value" of these things just as try to justify Forms, Species, Boundaries and Property. The 3rd world is poor and this is characterised by the poverty and starvation - surely that is Real and not just arbitrary status.

The problem with psychoses and misunderstandings is that they have an odd way of self fulfillment. What I had only suspected before was confirmed for me by someone I met on holiday. It is indeed the case that the industrialisation of the 3rd world agriculture: the closure of farms, de-education of traditional farming, the shifting to non-native cash crops and the refocusing of farming to export leaves countries very vulnerable to famine. Obviously you have a single non-native species dominating the argiculture so that land-owners can make money. A drought and the entire country is thrown into famine. People have forgotten how to get native food off the land and the infrastructure to do this has been replaced by the failed cash crops. International food prices go up and the country cannot appord to buy back its own produce. Thus starvation is caused in the source country, and all we the consumers notice is a shift in the place of origin of our cheap imports.

Pseudo-valiantoly the WHO has a meeting and plans the creation of better crops which encourage more industrialisation of the 3rd world, and a greater cost to the seeds, and we hand back a fraction of the crops as charitable AID. Local people then become expectant and dependent upon AID which fuels the deterioration in traditional skills and independence. People in Ethiopia now not only don't remember that they once could live off the land even during drought, they don't even know any more how to make cash crops for export!

When infact all it took was the removal of outside investment, slightly higher prices in our shops, and the support of traditional farming and ways of life: which we mistakenly deemed lower status.

So our misunderstandings about status are deeply involved in the creation of the very famines and poverty that our misguided consciences tried to deal with. This is the problem with misunderstanding, ignorance and what is virtually a mass-psychosis: and one that the West has had for over a thousand years and which it propagates through education both in the home countries and around the world.

Now it is a huge thing for 1 person to be saying this about such a vast system with so many great people. And, I do say this with respect and humility because it is a preposterous thing to say. And, I'm not saying that all the people have got it wrong all the time, it is just the putty with which we try to stick the world together with, to make a tidy whole that we might call Western Civilisation and Society doesn't actually exist and it is the trying to stick it together which leads great men into battle and nation building and usually ends up with them and thousands if not millions of other people dying. I speak not of Tony Blair or Henry the Eighth but Hitler and Stalin but it doesn't matter they are all the putty in a world that doesn't stick that way cos it isn't that shape.

So what shape is it? That is the question and would be a happy conclusion to the question in this blog : what is life about?