The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life

by Luther Blissett

I feel immediately apologetic about the title. It's more formal than I really intend to be. In short: I think I've come up with a pretty good explanation for why so many people seem to be so unhappy and dysfunctional while all around them society succeeds in so many lofty tasks; the title is my summary.

I've got about half-a-dozen notebooks that I've been carrying around with me to scribble thoughts in as I work on translating my ideas into something presentable. One of the notebooks is currently being held as evidence in People v. Blissett (and has already been used by the prosecution as evidence of the defendant's "disordered thought processes"). They're mostly filled with attempts to find new angles to tell this story.

I've tried my hand at everything from science fiction to mythic poetry, with plenty of essays of a more serious bent taking up much of the space in between. Now I'm trying something more like a personal letter to you - it seems like a natural format for trying to share an idea.

An explanation for why so many people seem so unhappy while all around them society succeeds in so many lofty tasks

Our Culture's Myth

Every culture has a myth explaining who they are and how they came to be doing whatever it is that they do. I've been examining my culture's myth with an eye to refining it in the light of current knowledge. Our culture's myth has a part that goes something like this:

As long as there have been human beings, they have looked about and tried to come up with new and better ways of doing things. As time went on, people acquired new knowledge and skills and technology that gave each new generation benefits that its predecessors could only dream of. Of course, there have been a lot of missteps and dead-ends along the way, due to flaws in the human make-up, such as our superstitious, selfish nature. Sometimes these missteps erupt into bizarre and ornate cultural displays - sometimes terrible, sometimes just baffling. We still engage in barbaric wars and the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power, but at some level we really know better, and over time we're improving. Just as today people live free from the fear of smallpox and the plague, some day (if we're lucky) we'll stabilize our population growth, solve group conflicts peacefully, and distribute resources fairly.

Okay - more or less that's how it goes. And, with maybe a change or addition here or there, you'd probably agree that it matches up with common sense. I think that it's fundamentally wrong.

Like myths of a flat earth, a cartesian universe, the distinct natures of matter and energy, and a god-created set of species, this myth fit well what we knew about the world at some point in the past, but it is an inadequate explanation for the facts of the world as we know it today. I think that like those myths, it is wrong on a fundamental level. Although like the replacement myths of a round earth, a universe of warped and relative space/time, matter/energy unity, and evolved species, my reformulated myth may also be fundamentally inaccurate and in need of revisions, I do think that it tells us more and allows us to frame our questions in a more well-informed context.

I've got a seriously hard sell to make here. The standard myth is incorporated inferentially in so many of our other myths and metaphors that its assumptions are easily visualized and portrayed in shorthand. I notice that in my summary above, I spontaneously used words like "misstep" and "dead-end" - and without explicitly comparing human history to a journey with a destination, I used imagery that reinforced that idea.

For my own "new and improved" myth, since at many points it directly contradicts common sense (by which I mean the instantiation of our cultural myth in the form of evaluation and prediction), I have to be more deliberate and careful.

Our culture's myth is an inadequate explanation for the facts of the world as we know it today

A New Myth

In my myth, cultural and technological progress has been accompanied by an erosion in the happiness, satisfaction, and standard of living of the typical human being. In my myth, there is a reason why we have conquered smallpox and haven't conquered hunger and war. In my myth, the human species is undergoing an unprecedented and frightening transition the nature of which has rarely even been hinted at.

So this may take a while. To start, each myth that expects any credibility today must explain why we live so differently today from the way people lived 100 years ago, and why they lived so differently from people 100 years before that, and so on.

According to the standard myth, the "progress model," this process is explained by the fact that humans are propelled by cleverness, imagination and unfulfilled desires to change their environments and their habits, and that the best of these changes survive and are passed on from generation to generation, being improved along the way - each generation building on the accomplishments of the generation before it, and being the beneficiary of the accumulated improvements of the ancestors.

For instance (says the myth) for a long time people couldn't get to somewhere 100 miles distant without taking a few days out of their busy schedules and putting in a lot of effort; today, thanks to the automobile, it's a comfortable two-hour ride. Now a huge number of people own cars, and a long-unfulfilled human need has been met.

But in fact most car trips are taken today not to fulfil some deep longing to be 100 miles away two hours from now, but because those of us in automotive societies have so little time in which so many tasks are demanded of us over such a great geographical area that it would be impossible to accomplish them without driving. The technology has succeeded not by meeting an ancient need so much as it has by helping to create the needs which necessitate it.

Many people spend over an hour commuting to-and-from work. Many people live in cities where the atmosphere is so thick with accumulated exhaust fumes that they cannot see through the sky and their lives are shortened by smog-related health problems. Many people do not own cars, but live around modern cities that were shaped by the automobile and must live their lives in a system that expects human beings to occasionally reach highway speeds. Any idea how many people worldwide are killed by cars?

Offer someone in the 19th Century the total transformation in the life of a human being that the proliferation of the automobile is bringing - giving the complete story, pros and cons - and I'd bet that person would turn down your offer.

The financial cost alone might discourage. It takes hundreds or thousands of dollars just to buy a car, then there are the accumulating costs of registration, repairs, insurance, tickets, fuel and routine maintenance. If money grew on trees, this would be one thing, but for most people, money translates to time performing labor that they would not be doing if they were not getting paid for it. I'd guess that recently my annual direct payments for the operation of my automobile (not counting the proportion of my tax money that supports the automobile infrastructure) would be at least $2,000, probably significantly more.

At my salary, back when I had one, that's about 80 hours of doing stuff I wouldn't be doing if I didn't need to support my money habit (and those hours don't count the time I spent pumping gas, pacing at the mechanic's or waiting in line at the DMV). If I weren't so fortunate and had to work a minimum wage job, it'd be more like 400 hours.

So okay, Mr. & Mrs. Nineteenth-Century, I've got a deal for you. If you work an extra 80-400 hours a year, and don't mind spending a lot of time sitting alone concentrating on a task you've done time and time again, don't care if the sky isn't blue most of the year or the air smells funny, if you just can't see enough asphalt, and if you don't mind sacrificing thousands of children and adults alike in the process - Well, then: I can give you a deal whereby you can sleep in an extra 45 minutes on Sunday morning and still get to church on time, you can visit your brother in Des Moines more often, if you get sick you can get to the hospital more quickly and safely, and the oranges that were picked in Florida yesterday morning will be on your breakfast table tomorrow.

The automobile doesn't exist to serve an unmet need so much as because it was packaged along with the needs it meets

What do you say?

You ever go through this process? You ever know anyone who did? Can you think of a time in history where mankind pondered this question and said, "well, I've given it some thought and weighed the pros and cons and I think on the whole it's worth the sacrifice and risk to go forward with an automotive society." Never happened - nobody made the decision. We live in an automotive society because we live in an automotive society, and one of its properties is that it fortifies its position by creating conditions that necessitate and perpetuate it.

The Disowned Ugly Side of Progress

Under close examination, many of the great examples of progress turn out to be the pretty side of a two-sided phenomenon, the ugly side of which more than compensates in its toll of dependence and harm for the benefits of the pretty side.

When we tell the story in the context of our culture's myth, we leave out the ugly side of the elements of progress - after all, according to our myth, these elements are invented and chosen and improved by people seeking to advance their condition and satisfy their wants; nobody would choose the ugly-side things, so they can't be explained by the myth (which is to say, the myth must ignore them or write them off as inexplanable).

Even those technological wonders that seem unassailably benevolent - I'm thinking here of the advances in medicine - turn out to have an ugly side.

I'm getting a good lesson here from watching my grandparents die. My grandfather is barely animated. His fingers are stuck in a weird, stiff pose, and he's not strong enough to stand on his own. His day consists of getting dressed by someone else, being wheeled into the living room, watching TV all day long with the sound off since he can't hear anyway (sometimes he only watches one channel if he forgets how to work the remote control), eating the easy-to-prepare food that's been made for him, being helped to the toilet seat next to his chair and having his butt wiped, or having someone hold a urinal jar up to his penis, being put in pajamas at night and wheeled back to bed, having his teeth taken out and put away, getting his shots and taking his medicine, having a condom-catheter put on so he can pee at night without someone having to get him up. He also takes lots of naps. On special days one of us takes him outside and wheels him half-way up the block.

Grandma is much better off - she can walk around the house. But she doesn't watch TV because she sometimes sees and hears things that other people don't, and these things can keep her frightened all day.

The advances in medicine that allow people with terrible vision to go 20/20 in the course of an office visit - that have made infant mortality a rarity in some places - that correct fatal and/or painful disorders - that have probably saved my life with antibiotics and immunizations many times over without me even being aware of it - these advances have a dark side that is killing my grandparents slowly and terribly.

There seems to be a new, unnatural obligation that has come along with medical progress: that people use cutting-edge medical techniques whether or not they find them to be useful or helpful or beneficial to their lives.

My grandparents have explicitly wanted to die for a long time now. They're ready to go, and (though they wouldn't admit it) are rather impatiently waiting for Jesus to send his chariot down after them. As a practical matter, all they'd have to do is to stop taking the preservatives that medical science has devised to keep people alive long after their bodies stop working. But they are more concerned, strangely, with serving the medical process than in using that process to serve their own interests.

They have an odd loyalty to medicine as an institution, as a dogma almost. Medicine becomes not something you seek out when you need it, but a creed, the embodiment of a sacred quest to frustrate mortality to which no honorable person can be a traitor. Live as long as you can still breathe - or longer if possible! Live! Never give up! Live for me - a doctrine, a demand, a policy, a religion - not for yourself!

This is just plain nuts! People get hurt and feel pain and suffer from sickness and deformity and fear death - not dogmas. People should be the ones deciding how to interact with medicine, and not vice versa.

Medical advances somehow make medicine our master rather than our servant

But to end this digression, I don't want to argue that all progress is bad, or even that all examples of progress have an inevitably worse dark side. I do believe, however, that cultural and technological progress in general is more harmful than helpful to individual human beings. Not just a few human beings - what I'm saying is that your typical human being is most likely to be worse off in the aftermath of any given element of cultural "progress."

I want to stress that this is not a pessimistic outlook based on my subjective ideas about particular historical examples of progress. As I will explain, it is an inevitable result of how cultural evolution unfolds.

Judging the Quality of Life

If I'm going to talk about how human beings feel and how their quality of life changes over time, I've got to come up with a method for describing how people make qualitative judgements about their lives. In general, if our lives are full of pleasant things, we consider our lives pleasant; and if our lives are full of painful things, we consider ourselves to be suffering. The task then becomes to determine how to classify something as pleasurable or painful, and to decide whether a given process that shapes culture is more likely to produce pleasurable side-effects or painful ones.

On the most fundamental level, human beings suffer or frolic in response to sensations and emotions conveyed and processed by a nervous system belonging to an organism that was designed by natural selection, a process that (by and large) rewards organisms that survive and reproduce. So it's no surprise that things that help us survive and reproduce (eating, winning, falling in love) are encouraged by feeling good, while things that have the opposite effect (lung cancer, third-degree burns, public humiliation) feel rotten.

There are exceptions to the rule, some because even the patient and extremely creative process of natural selection is doomed to never reach perfection, others because a competing organism or predator has learned to masquerade and manipulate our preferences to its own advantages. Many examples of exceptions, perhaps most, come in the form of novel things - things that weren't on the scene while we were evolving, and so our preferences in regard to them were not shaped to coincide with the interests of our reproductive success.

Heroin, for example, may feel great, but it may also cut your reproductive success down to zero in a hurry. Similarly, being immunized isn't a particularly pleasurable or fulfilling process, but it's great for you.

How can we decide what changes are helpful and what changes are harmful?

In a fairly stable environment, members of a species like ours are pretty well off just following their instincts - in other words, do what feels like the best course of action, it's probably good for you (or, if not, maybe it'll get you laid). Mother nature is constantly kicking out creatures designed to do best by doing what they feel most inclined to do.

In a changing environment, however, what was once an adaptive tendency or inclination can become maladaptive. The right thing to do to save your skin can be a painful and nonintuitive thing, and on the other hand, things that feel perfectly wonderful and wholesome can kill or maim you.

A species that wants its members to feel most happy, satisfied, at home, etc. will have a reason to defend the environmental status quo - or more accurately, to shape the environment to one that somehow simulates a blending of the environments in which the preferences of the species have evolved.

Our species has spent incredible effort in an attempt to completely redesign our environment into one that in strikingly many ways is different from that in which the species evolved. We've become so fucked up in the process that not only do lots of us fight and kill each other like rats in a crowded cage, but some of us even kill ourselves, and lots of us are miserable.

The question: Why?

The progress-myth answer is that our species has learned ways to maximize our pleasure far beyond the capabilities of our natural environment. We like the safety and security of the campfire - now we have electric light. We hate the pain of injury - now we have aspirin and morphine. We enjoy boinking like Bonobos on ecstasy - now we have birth control and antibiotics. The "dark-side" of this is nothing but unforseen and unfortunate side-effects that represent bugs we're still working on.

Our species has remodeled our environment, and this has made many of us dissatisfied

The Answer is Memes

My answer - memes. If you aren't already familiar with the emerging science of memetics, I'd encourage you to take a look at the collection of papers Dave Gross has put together on-line. Familiarize yourself with the concept - it's essential to understanding my argument, and to understanding the world we live in.

In each generation, memes mutate and emerge. Some survive, others are forgotten and lost. Those that are good at surviving tend to, those that aren't so good at surviving dwindle and vanish.

Ideas that serve us, which is to say "memes that when posessed and transmitted tend to increase the reproductive success of the host organism," have an obvious edge. And that's good for us. But ideas that serve themselves first and us second (or not at all) will always win out in the final count.

So the ideas that survive the test of time tend to have some ratio to how much service they give us, to how much service they give themselves. But when I say "they give" I'm disguising the fact that we're doing all the work - a meme is just an abstraction that is empowered through enaction by a human being, the way a virus is dead matter until it has a cell to hijack.

It would be more accurate to say that memes tend to have some ratio of how much they direct our energy into action that benefits ourselves, to how much of our energy they use on themselves purely to aid in their own reproduction and survival.

Part of what memes do to serve themselves is to alter our environment in ways that lead to the memes' survival and reproduction. They may mimic things that trigger emotional or other aversion/pleasure responses in us, for instance. They will frequently adapt to alter their environment (which to a large extent is human culture) in such a way that it becomes dependent on them or necessitates them.

Each meme produces action of some sort, if only replicative action. And a percentage of that action will be beneficial to the meme but wasteful or even harmful to the host. Yet the host is the only one expending energy on the process, and the only one capable of making a good/bad, pleasurable/painful judgment of the process.

It would clearly be to the advantage of the host in this circumstance to dislodge all of the memes that are wasting its time and energy, and devote itself to the hedonistic pursuit of those behaviors that are personally advantageous.

Unfortunately, the memes have changed our environments so much that their effects, even the terribly unpleasant "side-effects" or dark-side effects, are necessary for our survival, livelihood, and mating success. So in one fell swoop, or maybe a couple of swell foops, the process of living has become more unpleasant, and memes have made themselves indispensable parasites.

One of the keys to their success has been to increase the reproductive success of us, their hosts. The increase in population density, and the pressure for migration, warfare and trade that results, has been instrumental to the success of memes in the recent history of humanity.

But this symbiosis should not be misinterpreted as evidence of the benevolence of memetic parasites. They increase our reproductive success by providing artificial encouragement to engage in unpleasant behavior that has become beneficial to reproductive success only because of the meme-induced changes in our environment - changes that have made Eden into a minefield, and memes the only map.

Memetic parasitism may explain why our species has been acting so strangely over the past 10,000 years.

Exceptions to the Rule

Okay; now I want to back up a bit and expand on a couple of things I said earlier. I want to go into that idea of a superorganism that is in the process of assimilating humanity (a pretty out-there sci-fi concept on its face), but first I want to expand on the "by and large" I inserted parenthetically in my earlier statement that

On the most fundamental level, human beings suffer or frolic in response to sensations and emotions conveyed and processed by a nervous system belonging to an organism that was designed by natural selection, a process that (by and large) rewards organisms that survive and reproduce.

There are a few exceptions to the general rule that natural selection rewards organisms for engaging in behavior that aids in their survival and reproduction.

If a monkey is blissfully swinging on a branch and it breaks and the monkey crashes to the forest floor, breaking its back, and it's eaten by a lucky tiger; the monkey was being rewarded for branch-swinging behavior that ended up killing it. Okay, so natural selection isn't perfect. It can't predict and adjust for every rotten branch. It works with probabilities and averages and plays the cost/benefit game as best it can.

There are also cases where an animal will give assistance to mate, kin, and offspring, at risk to its own hide. This is all behavior that is understandable using the premise that natural selection is operating on the genes that promote such behavior, and those genes are quite likely to exist in the close relatives and offspring of an individual who has the gene. A somewhat risky sacrifice that is very beneficial to such a relative will help the gene survive and reproduce, and therefore natural selection may encourage such behavior.

Reciprocal altruism is another exception that's attracting attention. Seemingly selfless acts of sacrifice that benefit one's fellows are compensated for by a relationship in which one's fellows will return the favor and offset the sacrifice by a personal benefit.

Another important exception, and one which is most relevant here, is that of the hive insects. A bee, for instance, will sting a threat to the hive, killing itself in the process. How could such a clearly self-destructive impulse evolve, when a gene which discouraged such self-sacrifice would enable its host-organisms to survive longer?

The answer has to do with the structure of the hive: a single insect that does the reproducing, and a bevy of closely-related insects keeping the reproductive "queen" protected and well-fed. The self-sacrificing bee can only reproduce its genes through the agency of its reproductively-inclined sister, the queen, and so protecting the queen is worth the sacrifice of a pawn or two. From the viewpoint of natural selection, the hive itself is an organism, and the individual insects its cells or organs.

What I'm going to suggest is that for some memes anyway, to the extent that a human being is devoting energy to that meme's life and reproduction, the person becomes a potentially expendable cell or organ in that meme's organism. Some of these memetic hives run into the millions of human cells.

It is in the interest of a successful meme to protect the healthy cells that make up its "body," but, just as our body is willing to sacrifice cells to perform important tasks like defense and reproduction, and just as the hive is willing to sacrifice individual insects, so are memetic bodies willing to martyr their human cells for the good of the cause.

Examples of memetic hives and sacrificial insects should be springing into your head - I'd mention some likely candidates, but that would risk stirring up a hornet's nest.

The hive model is one in which individuals are sacrificed to the reproductive success of the replicating entity

The Puzzle of Human Identity

But what is a person, anyway? Who are you? We aren't just the animal formed by natural selection warping this branch of primates. We are also a creature formed by memetic evolution. We define our selves partially by those memes we've grown attached to (or the ones that have attached to us).

So the person we feel we are and owe our loyalty to is (and I would add: "and is becoming more so day by day") partially at least a being created by memetic, not just genetic, replicators. Some believe that the important part of a person is the "soul" or "ego" or "consciousness" - things that are almost entirely memetic in nature.

What does it mean that our identity is partially (or even largely) shaped by a replicator system that does not have the same interests as the replicators that created and shaped our pleasure/pain instincts, and seems to reproduce well in the hive model in which one source disseminates and many cells serve and defend?

It means that we will have motives that our ancestors weren't plagued with to do unpleasant and harmful things. Things that we do not out of self-interest, or altruism, but in order to help a parasitic meme propagate.

Is there a way out of this trap? I'd like to think the Buddhists were on to something with their denial of the reality or importance of the ego/soul and their skepticism towards words and symbols. On the other hand, there's no meme-hive quite so stunningly illustrative as, say, a Tibetan monastery.

The perennial "back to the garden" movements also seem appealing, but it may be too late to disinfect the planet of its memes and memetic infrastructure without taking us with it.

There's a problem with confronting these ideas and then formulating an answer like "just be natural." As appealing as it sounds, it was good advice only when we were still in Eden; after the fall it was no longer useful. Part of being natural, for reasons I can go into at another time, is to want to play with memes.

We think of ourselves as hybrid genetic/memetic organisms

We must learn how to play safely - to play with memes without letting them attach to us, or us (as it would be more conventionally put) to them. This is my understanding of "non-attachment" in the Buddhist sense.

If this attitude becomes a doctrine rather than a skill, it is self-defeating. Buddhism at its best isn't designed to make people into Buddhists but into buddhas.

The solution includes turning every action into a spontaneously chosen one, and not surrendering to the direction of a script - either one designed by the vicissitudes of individual psychology or by selective pressure acting on social rôles and mores.

Whether such infection can be countered by exposure to intensive care in the form of an anti-spontaneous, ritual-centered, dogma-infused tradition like Buddhism is quite a riddle. While many Buddhists would complain that this is an invalid description of Buddhism, even the renegade Zen heroes were operating within a heavily-scripted tradition.

A form of weaning, perhaps, is necessary, or an inoculation with a relatively benign and protective memetic hive that shelters the practitioner as s/he tries to cast off even Buddhism - as the saying goes: if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!

An absolute war of extermination on meme hives such as churches, mass media and governments may be an unavoidable step as well, if our species does not relish a hive-model future.

The only alternative would be to somehow embrace the collective hive as the next evolutionary step of our species and our planet. Abandon the outdated individualist models and merge your ego with the meme queen. This could be advocated, but it'll have to wait for someone with a stronger stomach than my own.

How can we avoid a future as slaves to a memetic hive?


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