The Search for a Fair Society: Cars’ Impact on our Ability to Cooperate
October 28. The start of a new week and we got this. Time for a coffee break and a chat about a realistic utopia of a fair society. It’s only by setting us this objective that we will have a chance to eliminate violence and war from our lives.
Today I want to talk about cars. And no, I will not talk about their impact on the environment even though that’s bad. Walking to the train station yesterday drove home once again for me, what impact cars have on our society.
Let’s start with the fact that driving a car infuses us with a sense of power, the more, the bigger and fancier the car. That’s the result of a study which has been reproduced again and again all around the world. The important thing that this study showed as well is that this sense of power makes us believe that rules are for other people as we are above the law. In the test, the drivers drove right through a pedestrian crossing despite a pedestrian having been present, wanting to cross.
What does it mean to believe one is above the law in the context of society? Society is a cooperation of people toward common goals. To be able to formulate common goals the people coming together to cooperate must start from a shared reality. Every human self-generates their own models of the world, hence they are naturally diverse. A sliver of shared reality can only be created when all cooperators replace some of the data, they would choose themselves to create the best model of the world for their circumstances, with a shared dataset that contains all the motives, goals, rules, and structures that govern their cooperation. They must do so at all times and fully. The belief to be above the law describes a situation in which the cooperator doesn’t do what it takes to keep the cooperation alive. The belief that is born behind the wheel (but also by holding positions like manager or politician for any length of time) creeps from there into the rest of the driver’s life.
But there’s a much deeper problem with cars. The replacement dataset governing the cooperation must not only be compiled, and in a fair society compiled in such a way that all cooperators have the same say in its configuration and can agree to all aspects of it because it will give them exactly what motivated them to cooperate in the first place, it must be constantly maintained and adjusted as we gather new information. It’s a process that must happen from the bottom up through interactions, conversations and debates with the people in our surroundings. Before we developed the habit of using cars to go everywhere, we couldn’t avoid interactions with the most diverse people everywhere. The conversations were as important as the place we intended to reach. Now, even when we don’t use a car, all we have in mind while moving is our personal destination and our individual goal there. There’s no room left to communicate the differences between our models of the world to see what alignment must happen to enable us to cooperate.
What takes us to my last point: cars make us forget that the other is not a thing and thus make us forget that there are even other realities to discover, what again has an impact on our understanding of us and the reality we experience in our heads. How so? We, like other animals, have the gift of mirroring. We see someone else move and 30% of the motor neurons in our own brain fire as if we are doing the movement ourselves. Every emotion shows in our bodies with a physical reaction, so these mirror neurons are connected to the area of the brain where our emotions are located, and we feel what the other creature in our sight feels. One thing it does, it helps us to distinguish between arbitrary motions and goal-oriented action. Goal-orientated action means intelligence, but more importantly a body with a mind. By reproducing what the other creature does we recognize consciousness. In German there are even two words that make the distinction clear. Körper is the body as a thing. It can be dead or alive. Leib is a body with a conscious mind attached. That makes a Leib a far more interesting energy pattern to interact and possibly cooperate with than a Körper, that’s something to exploit only. As cars leave little of the body that we can see, a human in a car becomes a Körper, a thing to exploit, not someone to reflect a possible reality of the physical universe back at us and exchange information.
Here's the thing though, we have no proof for the existence of our own conscious mind other than the conscious mind at work in other creatures. By turning others like us into Körper, things to exploit, we develop an understanding of ourselves as a thing without mind and agency, especially no agency to generate our own world. We delegate that to an outside source that we give the power to exploit us and destroy us at their pleasure, too. Something totally unfree.
Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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