Humans: Not Actually Individuals...

We are pod animals

The ‘pod’ animal is an animal that prospers not so much by competition amongst individuals as by competition ‘like a team’ (with and for each other). Unfortunately, for our species, this is a process fraught with complex problems. These problems are made vastly more dangerous by the capacity for representational cognition, because this establishes an endless series of ‘false worlds and identities’ which, in human cultures, are wont to compete against (and convert or eradicate) that which they survive by feigning. We also believe that we are individuals, which, while partly true, is not true in the ways we too often pretend.

Yet we have the capacity, at all times and in all situations, to establish, develop and participate in a mutualized context, with and for each other and the preservation of this context. Intelligently, sustainably and survivably. To assemble ‘instant teams’ to solve a problem or rapidly establish, eradicate or evolve aspects of context. We do this all the time ... in false costumes, against each other. When we will shed the costumes and acquire the treasure that is everywhere instead on masquerade by mimics?

One of the deepest assets hidden by cultures of the individual and the society-at-large... is as simple as it is profound. Our nature is neither precisely individual nor entirely social. We are pod animals. We prosper... most profoundly... when we ‘can have a meaningful role in meaningful thought, speech, action, occupation and identity’. In relatively small, highly adaptive groups whose purposes mutualize their activities in nature, and culture.

I speak of small, highly adaptive ‘teams’, whose accessible intelligences reflexively magnify and extend the abilities and scope of effect of the group. What we call ‘sports’ are the shattered remnant of what we used to »be together, with and for each other and our world.

We have capacities we have never been able to discover or explore simply because the contexts we are familiar with (and prone to produce) have to inhibit them in order to dominate the scene. If our natures and potentials were not constantly inhibited, our cultures would fail immediately. They literally thrive on the frustration produced by this invisible inhibition and this is why, in part, they are explicitly pornographic.

The frustration has become so extreme that it is wiping out our souls and replacing them with inflamed urges, compulsions, addictions, and diseases that result from our own complicit behavior in the process.

We were born to assemble small, highly adaptive teams capable of mutual superfunction. To solve problems. To radically alter a context we appear trapped in. To give birth to both the human and the future. When we are deprived of this, we get sports, war, addiction, pornography, and cults of identification and belief.

When we are not deprived of this, we become liquid prodigy. This is our birthright, and it is our nature. We were born to do this and frankly little else.