Pretend we can all go outside on the sidewalk and lay our entire lives out to give them a look over. Starting from the beginning and going through all the way until we kick the bucket, to the end. Some lives will be longer than others. If I came over and asked you about yours on the sidewalk, what would you tell me? What would you let me know about the experience called your life?
Everyone can point to some big and cool milestones, like you might show me where your kid was born, or here's where you got married. Maybe another big one is the biggest promotion you got, and here's where you finally retired. But what about all the stuff in between the milestones you're telling me about? If we look into that, what do we see? What's in those parts? That part, the biggest part, is what you did day-to-day, week-to-week for most of your life, whether it's sitting at a computer desk 9-5, being a housewife, the biggest Manning fan every Sunday, or collecting Warhammer 40k figures. You did
somethingthat's sitting there on the sidewalk now. That something is some kind of activity.
Something you buy has a purpose, else you wouldn't buy it. A plunger is a pretty darn useful thing, so are underwear. You can obviously buy lots of stuff, like an iphone or droid that you can do lots of cool things with. So let's go back to our sidewalk with this in mind: we move along, visit other people, seeing what they have to say, and we notice that, for example, a guy born in 2000 says lots of different things than a guy born in 1850.
This guy born in 1850 is interesting to us because a lot of his explanations of his life are different than ours. He can't point to things like the biggest Manning fan or collecting Warhammer 40k figures. If we go see the guy born in 2000 again, he might show us getting his first iphone as a big thing for him. It seems that the guy born in 2000 has access to buy more stuff than the guy in 1850 did. And what we notice is that when we're relating our lives there on the sidewalk, the 2000 guy keeps mentioning things that didn't exist for the other guy in 1850. We definitely notice the life experiences of those two are totally different, and it seems to us the more stuff they have access to buy, the more those things occupy their thoughts: they relate more and more of their life experience in terms of those stuffs as we move along. We're really interested to hear what a guy from 2150 has to tell us if he was around.
If we remember that the things we buy have a purpose, and we keep in mind that we keep getting access to more stuff to buy, then we can have some idea of what this 2150 future guy might tell us about his life, which would be even vastly more different than our friend from 1850. And what this is telling us, what these different explanations are showing us, is that the stuff people buy affects their life experience. They don't just buy plungers or underwear anymore, but stuff that is designed to provide an emotion for them, like maybe excitement or sadness in an NFL game or arousal from the latest 50 Shades of Gray. The stuff we buy today is mostly all created by us, all man-made, and lots of those things don't exist in reality. By exist in reality, I mean the only thing there is the concept, like the football game. A football game is a set of rules we made up and men play together according to them with a ball. However, this set of rules and ball provides a huge range of emotions for many millions of people all around the world. And the question we would love to ask, is if this made up thing was never made up, what kind of activity would people do to feel those things?
There is obviously some kind of phenomenon to what we just talked about. What do you think it is? I'd like to show a good example of how this phenomenon affects the way we think:
hodj_sl said:
If you were going to be popular in the tribe, you needed to bring home meat or food and share it,essentially purchasing good favor from the communityin order to be welcome there.
The bolded is a very interesting point for us. The words used to describe what's taking place is something we really want to explore. This guy, here in 2013, is describing an activity of sharing food by some member of an ancient tribe as purchasing good favor. This is very important because hodj didn't realize what he was doing, and the language used wasn't a choice - it was a natural one to him. The tribal guy had no concept of
purchasinganything or what a market even is, but we're here seeing it being thought about that way.
It seems the concept of a market structure is applied
retroactivelyto activity that was done before it even existed. But what's even more strange, why? Do you remember that phrase I asked everyone to ponder and reflect upon? We get to see it in action here :
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
hodj's conscious thought was thinking about sharing food as purchasing favor, and he wasn't aware that he was doing it. This is what that phrase is describing: that your thoughts are formed by
what you do. Your activity is not determined by
how you think.
And so,
our lives and experience in them are formed by our social being, and ours in this society is one of a market structure being applied to everything, and more and more stuff being produced to consume. Do you want to tell me when we visit your sidewalk, that lots of what you felt and thought throughout your life came from the stuff you bought?
