Complex societies

The functioning of today's complex societies

Affirmation and structure of complex societies

We have seen how, from a certain age onrwards (but just a moment ago in the chronology of our planet), the grouping of more or less primitive human creatures have started producing phenomena and events of a different kind from all those who had so far characterized the animal world. They were behavioral events (tool making, body care and decoration, communication of information, etc.) originating from the psyche. Over the course of a few millennia, this type of phenomena has undergone a rapid evolution, up to the remarkable changes of the last two centuries. Civilization has originated not only by the expansion of the psyche's faculties, through the elaboration of primordial myths and their rooting in our collective consciousness, but also by the increase in the number of the members of the groups and the emergence among them of particular relations for the communication and transmission of information. The existence of civilization is not absolutely necessary for the life of man as an animal species, but since in the historical past of humankind it happened that humans have passed from natural life to cultural life, and then to civil life, we must recognize that the need for this transformation has been perceived as a command coming from the human psyche. Humans, or at least some of them, must have felt the charm and advantage, even emotionally, of the cultural life and of the first developments of civilization.

Typical of the development of civilizations has always been the coercive element of the domain. Even before than in the relationship between individuals and social groups (up to the complex societies of our times), the drive to be a leader must have been forcibly present in the consciousness of some individuals. The benefits that civilization offers to individuals, in exchange for their renunciation of a state of nature characterized by risks and dangers, but also by liberty, are just one side of the coin. The other face is the strong impulse that forces some individuals or groups to rule people, either by persuasion or by coercion: almost all of the great civilizations of the past prevailed by force. However, the state of nature, for our civilized consciousness, is now unbearable as well as impracticable. In fact, the number of human beings on our planet has become so high that if all of us had to rely solely on the resources directly offered by the natural world, we would reduce to less than a twentieth just in the phase of struggle for the control of such resources. And even if in some areas there were primitive cultures whose members live satisfied in the state of nature, these would be progressively destroyed by the impact with the most advanced civilizations, as has already happened to American Indians or Australian Aborigines.

All major civilizations have a ruling, minority group that differs, in a more or less conflicting way, from a governed human mass. The ability and strength to rule is defined as power. The rulers exert their power over the governed (today kindly defined citizens or people, in other times more explicitly called subjects). This phenomenon is inevitable even in today's democracies, where the power is delegated to people's representatives for a limited period of time. In complex societies are also at work other forms of power, economic or financial, which try to develop appropriate tools for directing the consensus and manipulating, as has always happened, the psyche's tunings of the ruled citizens. In essence, the ruled people live, in a more or less conscious way, at a rather naive cultural level (though they can enjoy cutting-edge technological devices). Their tendency is to behave within the limits of the will to survive, in an effort to avoid suffering and to obtain the pleasures and emotions that human psyche can produce. Cultural conditioning, social pressures and forms of coercion devised by the system are sufficient to program and control the behavior of individuals of this kind. The life of a ruled is conditioned by socio-cultural forces in the same way that the life of an animal (who can suffer from illness, famine, and attacks by other animals) is completely at the mercy of natural laws, even when it suffers: should these natural forces return to be favorable, the animal would feel satisfied again.

Rulers base their lives on the search for some form of power. Even though they are almost always little aware about the reasons that drive them in this direction, they can not help but commit their energies and resources to a goal that goes beyond the behavior of the governed. They can be unpleasant and inhuman persons, if considered from the point of view of those who think that life should be enjoyable and quiet. Rulers, pushed to the extreme, can claim the work and the sacrifice of those who are under their power. Whether they are great conquerors like Alexander the Great or Napoleon, to whose aims hundreds of thousands of human lives were sacrificed, or simple bureaucratic organizers like those who planned the Nazi concentration camps, dominators are always active, almost always restless, often sleepless: they can resemble prey animals, full of resources and energy.

Natural destructive forces, wars and anti-social phenomena

When natural forces show humans their devastating features, the ruled people feel lost and increasingly rely on the energies and abilities of the rulers, because only the organization of human energies and resources can protect the masses when natural disasters strike, including that particular form of apparently unnatural tragedy which is war. Indeed, war is governed by rulers who try to subtract the power and control of human and material resources to others, but even a population who did not want war would need, if attacked, a leader or a team able to organize their defense. There is thus a tacit deal between the rulers and the ruled, which expresses an unstable balance between the natural tendency to initiative and enjoyment (the so-called freedom), the fear of the destructive forces of nature, and the power of certain individuals to amalgamate, to organize and to manage human energies. The rebels, the asocials, the criminal organizations, are deviant phenomena that confirm the norm, and can also thrive within an advanced society as long as there are sufficient resources to allow their activity. The rebels are driven by a destructive or self-destructive psyche's impulse, which can also reflect the tensions present in the social environment in which the rebel lives or lived. Sometimes rebels associate with some form of organization that reproduces, in a more primitive form, the scheme of the relationship between leaders and governed, or exasperate their rebellion to confront themselves directly with society or with nature. Criminal organizations are secondary social nuclei more or less conflicting with the primary nucleus (usually the state organization): they are still group structures organized by their rules and ranks, not dissimilar to those of a company, even though their goals are different and tend to subdue by force other individuals or social organizations.

Deterioration of the principle of authority

For a few decades, in complex societies of the Western world may be noticed a partial and progressive deterioration of the principle of authority, so the power of the ruling class decreases over time. In democratic systems those who are governed are increasingly aware that the power of the rulers depends largely on their consent. There are for sure some individuals who hold a considerable and autonomous power founded on money control, especially in the economic and financial field, while in democratic societies political power no longer has the coercive and dominating character that it had until even the recent past. Politicians need to gain consensus, which is done by increasingly subtle and careful means, because every political opponent is ready to take advantage of any misstep of those who govern. Moreover, those who hold some economic power try to influence the political power, controlling it even without replacing it. In the end, the only truly important social contracts are those between the workers and their employers and those between the producers of goods and services and their clients, both based on market laws but also dominated by the economic interests of the parties involved. Thus, the political power and the government are increasingly subdued to the demands of economic power, through which enterprises (business, banks or financial companies) exercise their influence on potential customers, on whose purchasing power also depends their success, at least in a dynamic collective view.

It is difficult to say whether this experiment will be successful or is destined to decline in a more or less chaotic way, as a consequence of the ever-increasing complexity of social systems and the deterioration of state power. The workers must support the sacrifice needed to sustain the social system, in exchange not only for the goods necessary for their own lives, but also for the power deriving from their belonging to the mass of consumers and voters. The citizens, paying taxes, finance and support the whole system that governs them. And if it is true that the system forces them to pay taxes with its own power, it is also true that today's rulers run the risk of being replaced by others at any time, a very likely event if a deterioration of the economic system occurs. Ultimately, it is always history that determines the course of things, that is, a bunch of more or less conflicting forces which, expressing themselves within the context of the human psyche as a reaction to the changes in the environmental conditions, constantly exert their influence on the behavior of humans, in part outside their control.

Elitist character of scientific knowledge

The current cultural model of complex societies, based on the method of scientific knowledge and on technology, has made tremendous progress in the control and transformation of energy and matter, thus achieving a top-class operational capacity, far superior to any result achieved by previous cultures or by other contemporary cultures. Current technology is truly capable of transforming the face of the world, and this means that the mental system on which this knowledge is based can understand and reflect natural laws with sufficient precision, so to give us a good control over the resources of Earth. However, the scientific mentality, which exerts some cultural conditioning also on those who aspire to a leading social role, is a form of elite culture because it requires intellectual abilities much higher than the average. It can only propose itself as a method of knowledge and present its results as beneficial, but the method of scientific knowledge, to be adopted as normal mental functioning, requires an uncommon intelligence which currently only a minority of individuals have. In terms of the benefits produced, they are evaluated according to the mentality of the masses and the manipulators of mass culture, who usually are not endowed with scientific mentality. It may so happen, as actually happens, that a chief of government or an enterprise manager find it profitable to use scientists and researchers on whom they can exercise some form of control to produce weapons or other tools that allow them to maintain or increase their power.

Limits of scientific understanding of the functioning of human mind

Our current civilization is therefore a hybrid between the culture determined by scientific mentality and various sediments inherited from previous and still active cultures, linked to psyche's elaborations and visions of the world not particularly evolved. The reason for this situation is that scientific culture, even though it is a product of human intelligence, has so far failed to produce any form of knowledge capable of understanding, interpreting and controlling the psyche itself and its activities. Although neurosciences have made significant advances in brain knowledge over the last few decades, they are still far from being able to translate that knowledge into a form of understanding and control of the mind functioning and of the psyche's phenomena.

The risks of multicultural societies

The functioning of the single individuals within the social context they are part of, and from which they are conditioned, leads to the strangest and contradictory results. Anyone who has been able to observe and study different cultures, even contemporaries, is well aware of the profound differences of mental tuning that characterize individuals bred in other cultural contexts. Now, within our Western system, we are experiencing a flaking of the cultural identification model, which allows also radically different attunements of the psiche to coexist, confront and, not rarely, collide. Add to this the remixing caused by the migrations of people coming from different cultures, and one can understand why the near future will be characterized by the lack of ingrained cultural models, shared by a large majority of individuals: if, on the one hand, this event could favor tolerance towards diversity, with the objective of creating the conditions for peaceful coexistence in mutual respect, on the other hand it will increase conflicts, intransigence and intolerance, determined both by those cultural forms that favor coercion and violence, and by the fear and reaction of the current and potential victims of those aggressions. This phenomenon is not a novelty in humankind history, as the encounters between different cultures has often turned into struggles and wars, with all these events entail in terms of destruction, oppression and violence. However, in the future, conflicts, in addition to being those forms of more or less organized aggression between different nations that we know from the testimonies of the past and present, could transform into internal discords, perhaps less bloody and destructive, but sufficient to create a widespread social desease over long periods of time, until a different cultural model will emerge, capable of harmonizing at a planetary level a very large human mass.

A balance with lights and (many) shadows

This is the heritage that we receive by our civilization in relation to the problem of human happiness during this life. It brings with it the ambiguity that has hitherto characterized the development of all advanced societies: after declaring that the socio-cultural model of a civilization must have the primary purpose of allowing as many people as possible to be humanly happy, the goal achieved is to have created an increasingly complex society, equipped with advanced technologies and capable of transforming the face of the world, but not advanced. At present, we are behaving and interacting as if the two goals were the same, but in fact every advanced social model must be inclined to sacrifice individual happiness for the efficient functioning of a complex society. It may then be suspected that even the hostility of the natural forces to human happiness may be used as an alibi to deny any chance of living more easily in this world, so that the mind can conform more docilely to the current social model.

It must be kept in mind that the resistances we can feel against the criticisms of the cultural system we belong to, depends on the fact that the psyche's tunings we are operating with are compatible with that system: questioning it poses a threat to our mental patterns, and this can cause reactions of insecurity and distress. Once again, we face the tremendous obstacle represented by the functioning of the psyche, the control of which escapes us. As has been said, our cultural system is unable to provide us with effective tools that can allow our conscious Ego to control its mind. No matter how much affection we can feel for the culture in which we were brought up, and how great our admiration and pride can be for the knowledge and technological achievements of this culture, for what concerns the conscious and harmonious management of our psychic tunings we are still at a rudimentary level, and far from being able to live a fully happy life.

The control of mind

There are people who, brought up in a culture like ours, driven by a profound impulse, out of a spirit of adventure or a thirst for knowledge, have committed themselves to coming into contact with different cultures. Although the purpose of these cultural explorations was not the conscious search for happiness, some of these explorers of the tunings of the psyche, in contact with other cultures, have achieved a good state of mental control. One of the disciplines that has the purpose of gaining control of mind is yoga: some adepts can reach a mental state of bliss, although not all practitioners achieve it. The cultures that in the past influenced the minds of yoga practitioners and developed the techniques practiced, had characteristics that tended to help the search for such control as an instrument of spiritual evolution, while, especially in more recent centuries, our civilization privileged knowledge and the transformation of the world through action. In fact, our culture, when submits us to forms of discipline aimed at gaining control of some mental faculties, does so for social purposes, that is, to enable us to better carry out our collective tasks. We essentially manage to be enough disciplined to work eight or ten hours a day, but we are not able to practice yoga meditation for a couple of hours without feeling a kind of intolerance, a strong impulse to act and the urge to let us be carried away here and there by our psyche.

We Westerners are also accustomed to investing resources and energies in order to gain guaranteed results: we want to be sure, for example, that the car we paid for with our money works, and also well. In addition, our mind manifests a negative mood when faced with the prospect of undergoing years of somewhat boring practices whose results are uncertain and often not so clear. We can not ignore these facts, because acritic enthusiasm can play bad tricks, and experimenting with disciplines developed by different cultures without taking into account our cultural constraints may be not so healthy, or in any case can make us waste time, energy and even money without achieving the expected results. On the other hand, the imbalance which manifests in our civilization creates disorder and violence in the emotional dynamics, a disorder that inevitably involves the activities of the mind, which ends with losing that control of the situation achieved with so much commitment. Thus adaptation effort becomes maladaptation, the social order deteriorates, and consumer welfare can turn into existential malaise. Apparently, there is a collective commitment to defending the achievements of social progress, but the leap forward towards an increasingly complex world produces an unsustainable consumption of energy, even on a human level. There are no more choices but forced paths, under penalty of being eliminated from the competition, and the state of emergency created by new needs, that is, by the detrimental effects of the choices of the same system that promised progress, is more and more invoked.

Reconciliation of nature and psyche

This constant state of tension leads to a reaction, and other tunings of the psyche begin to prevail, pouring into the social environment the most detrimental elements of the level of decadence in which we find ourselves: superstition, violence, vulgarity, distorted eroticism, abuse, contempt for the truth, ignorance. But the very affirmation and tangible presence of these anti-values induces then in the conscious Ego an intense need for evolution: not in every mind, of course, and not at the same time and with the same intensity, but the need for a spiritual evolution will be felt more and more. In fact, what we feel more intensively today is the need for a meaning, that is, integration, concord, a fusion that may allow us both to live in harmony with this world and with our fellow men, and to get out of this life according to our destiny. We therefore desire a reconciliation of nature and spirit, of which we feel we are children in equal measure, whose effects may be reflected in the dynamics of our psyche, as only this reconciliation could be the catalyst element of our mental evolution. I fear, however, that this process can not occur in a short time.