Throughout all of its history, the human race has lived within some form of society. I will stake anything and everything that if you were to magically look at any time, at any place on earth (inhabited by human beings) the people you observe will be part of some society or community. Whether it be the hunter gathers of early man, the first city states of Mesopotamia, to the Democracies of nations such as France and Germany. Mankind has always resided in some form of social world. By “social world”, what I mean is a set of forces acting on people. Directing their behaviour, and their understanding of the physical world. A “social world” accounts for all those characteristics of humankind which have no direct physical existence. These characteristics are all concepts which we understand to be human traits, such as morality, culture, norms of behaviour, this also includes the “objective” understanding we have of our physical world.The social world co-exists with the physical world, wherever human beings or any other entity possessing freewill and an ego may be. Much like scientists would explain the physical world as having underlying laws which govern physical phenomena. In a similar way the social world can be understood to be a set of laws governing social phenomena.
What is a society? This is the first question for us to address. I encourage everyone with their own thoughts to share them. From my understanding of our social worlds, only one conclusion can be made, that society is in fact the human beings equivalent to the giraffes neck. Society is mealy a human evolutionary characteristic, developed in order to increase our survival chances in the physical world. With this, I reject the ridged (and lets face it, big headed) view that human beings have evolved a “superior intelligence”. Which has led to a complex system of organisation. Our development of society is an alternate method of survival, which happens to include self awareness, free will, “rational reasoning”, emotions, complex psychology etc. Now I will stress that this is not an evolutionary step up the ladder from a more primal existence which had not yet developed these characteristics. As this implies that other animals on earth will, given time become similar to us, and we see no real evidence of that so far. This evolutionary difference, towards a more social and “rational” state, is mealy a different tier to that of conventional organisms, we as human beings are not a more sophisticated step in an evolutionary ladder, but rather a different branch in the evolutionary tree.
I shall leave this entry for now. As reading large amounts can easily become a chore. Also I would like to reduce risk of going on a tangent and ultimately making no sense!
