Walking through the San Francisco Natural History Museum, over a decade ago, I happened upon an exhibit of lady bugs. Hundreds, in two 15” x 15” or so, acrylic display cases. The exhibit was showcasing spot pattern individuality yet, I remember looking at them, all pinned up in their neat little deceased rows, and thinking probably out loud, that they all no doubt behaved like ladybugs. And that we could observe both aspects in them, was their fortune.
For the observation of lady bug individuality is unlikely an obstacle to also observing what hinders and helps lady bugs thrive. And thus what is most valuable to them as a species. For most animals this is a process largely driven by more having yums, less being yums. For us things tend toward more complex.
What hinders and what helps a human thrive, has been largely seen as the responsibility of the individual human. We may be social creatures and live in social structures but our understanding of interdependence and our roll in it, is significantly warped. The individual’s ability to discern value is rarely educated in any clearly defined way. Any knowledge of what is truly of benefit to us, while also being beneficially (or at least without harm) to everyone else, barely existent.
The direful fact in todays world is that with most social movement tracked as data, this information very likely exists, in some other hands. The search engine savvy of us know that plenty of suggestions can be found for behaviors shown to provide benefit to us in research, as well as legions of experiential data pointing one way or another. All of it more and more accurate, year after year. Still human motivations and behaviors remain a round-about intersection. Of chemicals and nutrients, stimuli, hardwiring and ever increasingly novel external input. Without anyone having a handle on novelty. How are we to distinguish what is of value for us?
Nearly every substance or magnitude has a specialized unit of measure. Calories to kilowatts to cosmic radiation. Each delineated as the most accurate way to arrive at amounts for any certain subset of existence. And yet we are all a part of an ever circulating and expanding collection of subjective measuring. Each unit within making decisions of value to their own existence, every single day. Ever affecting the whole. Almost entirely unrecognized. Largely, even to ourselves.
Are there any attributes of any given choice which, in all instances, are valuable to the individual? While thusly to the whole of individuals?
Market analysts proffer ideas about worth found in the willingness to acquire, that the value of something is measured by individual cost. But this is an entirely dependent process, correct? One dictated by circumstance and upbringing, culture, political, economic and actual climate and lastly, resources. I would argue hormone and hunger levels too.
Supply and demand, while an efficient enough process for moving stores of goods at maximum profit to the seller, hardly a proper scale system to measure what is valuable to any individual. Nor for any individual. Nowhere near all individuals. Or situations.
Cost inescapable. Would not then the most profitable trade off be the least costly and most rewarding, either in quantity or quality or meaning or all three? The supply and demand model seems to functions opposite this logic. While also following curves similar to predatory/pray models. Too much of one leading quickly and mercilessly to too little of the other. Profitability today is for personhood, and getting what you pay for, the plight of most individual human beings.
Morality sits atop as slippery of a slope as market economics when it comes to forging paths towards finding objective value. Good and bad, right and wrong? Subjective land mines. Which can often impede best efforts. Especially when directed at individuals rather than isolated to behaviors. Punishment to about as ineffective a model there is. Judgment unlikely far behind. What might be in some situations necessary, appalling in others.
The wave of ourselves that both morality and currency systems ride, is change. All things ride it, that ever constant that demands preparation and embracing. Only ever a question about how? For it is within the ways change is chosen and the results of those changes, that lessons can likely be found for some of our more solution-less questions.
In grand scales and minute, changes erupt and swirl. Ions bond, atoms split. More fundamental bits spin, shine and charm. Energy is a continuous exchange. Ever variable movement.At scales biological, change occurs as a process of synapse and selection. Natural selection itself was named, “to mark its relation” to artificial selection, which man had be practicing for thousands of years prior. All that time for us to see where we got the idea.
Nowhere in Darwin’s Origins of Species is the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, instead just a considered sentence explaining the underlying mechanism.
‘… this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved.’
This concept of choice towards betterment. In longevity or performance must then be largely innate. Something, something inside all things strives towards. The variation process ultimately, a call and response . A subtle what about and result. The result is the true catalyst of selection, the variation merely the instigator. Yet all this instigation happens first in the individual, where all selection results for the lineages. But what measures result? Who chooses the instigation? In most species survival plays its part in both. And for us? More than necessary it fails to be ourselves.
With survival as the chore, usefulness then the pinnacle result of any change. That is to say, that which is useful to an individuals survival is likely useful to future individuals survival. But as population growth shows, pure survival, rarely our issue. For a large portion of the resource holders. Though I’d agree it seldom feels that way.
Profitability has been a gamed system for many a century. The natural recipe for a balanced ecosystem, runs amok everyday amidst our overgrown frontal cortexes and under-developed planetary consciousness. Throughout history, the interest of human individuals to forge wealth for themselves rarely ends in the interest of many other then, or future individuals. Even the best intentions are easily captured.
Society today, an astonishing array. Still there has never been, in the history of humanity, a society that has prevented its own demise. Individuals though, have been surviving as long as any have existed. And so the responsibility of selection to address any collective longevity, must lay somewhere within ourselves. We’ve been lucky so far that all that disappears of us is the implementation of ways we organize: our civilizations. Our species, for now, persists.
Whether we continue to, depends a great deal on the instigations we implement and the results we recognize. With all that any given individual has on their plate any given day, it perhaps seems too much to ask of ourselves. Alas, there can be plenty of joy in the process. Making slight alterations to how we behave, and noticing the results from those changes can be great play.
For millennia our ideal selves have lay encased in myths and lore. Tales told round fires and in cathedrals. Their lessons hone our aim, but being able to hit those targets requires our prioritizing as valuable what can be often overlooked. Clean, well lit environments, proper hydration, meditative moments of reflection, any type. To relearn, revamp, reorganize what nourishes ourselves in order to best support our grandest aims.
Doing for one’s self, feels good, even when difficult. Doing for others also feels good, even when costly. Doing for ourselves so that we are better positioned to do for others, is a way out of any rat race. An incredibly useful hack to the selfish accepts of our instincts. Those same instincts that spur on the greediest of us. There is little to be gained from denying or suppressing or even punishing such instincts, as so much of our current world is built around their indulgence. But elevating them to their highest expression and pointing them in better directions, has the potential to change their influence. To change their results.
All evolution begins within an individual. For us, that has to look like reflective self exploration. Improvisational daily routines and habits. A conscious attack on the Pareto principle. A greater openness to what can be of us then in what has been, all while preserving the useful. Is it possible to create profitable change for many, in the changes we create for ourselves? I know I’d like to hope so, and whether we alter our fate or more vividly live the last days of it, any effort given, could hardly be wasted.
Til next time.