The Meaning of Society: How Progress is Caught with the Fabric of Humanity

Sociology and Psychology

Photograph: John Lau

As humans, the purpose of life is controversial. As John Stuart Mill proposes in his renowned theory of utilitarianism, rational individuals aim to minimise the pain they receive and maximise the utility, or pleasure, they obtain in life. Alternatively, John Rawls argues that our identity, race and gender comes down to the fundamental notion of luck as we have no control over how we are born or what we are born into. Finally, some people may like to describe the world as a hamster wheel in which we run until time, and subsequently death, catch up with us.

This is a cruel conception, but it draws onto the cyclical function of nature: as our happiness is directly correlated behind the notion of the hedonic treadmill, our economy is beautifully sketched by the business cycle and we repeat the same industrial processes day to day to build simple products.

Nature even works like this, maintaining seasons and habits to sustain life on the planet itself. But unlike the cyclical nature of our economy, nature to human psychology comes across as harsh, cruel and ultimately unpredictable in its ways to sustain life that is often responsible for destroying livelihoods.

This premise has been what primitive humans strive to escape from - to escape from the “unforgiving cycle” of not knowing when you will get your next meal and so forth. Humans form civilisations in the pursuit of survival in the most efficient and promising terms, organising society through the division of labor such as a monarchy or a caste oriented society.

On the other hand, in a state of nature, everything is liberal. You are able to do anything you want, but everything is tied directly to survival. Novel and unpredictable forces us to play by the rules of the game and continue because who knows what happens when we venture into wrong lands and who knows what happens when we eat the wrong crops? It goes against the predictability that gives us security. Seeking comfort, we form bonds and group dynamics to become wiser, safer and more adaptable. But yet reaching the point of predictability is impossible - we can only reach predictability where it is comfortable.

So what makes humanity comfortable? This question often boils down not to what the individual wants but what humanity needs or wants to break boundaries; that spawns through multilevel natural selection, which suppresses our own self interests for a bigger group-related interest.

As humans we share this common matrix of thought and ideals (shared intentionality) that Marx explains as “creating a world of false consciousness” in which we are all living in a state of a “class in itself”, which is defined as a “category of people having a common relation to the means of production,” often pointing to the economy.

This “class in itself” is directly strengthened and groomed by social constructs. Similar to how we do not like nature playing the cards, companies do not like it when they have to choose whether they should buy or ignore one's products.

Corporations understand that gaining predictability is to influence or, more extremely, control human psychology; living in a society run by the economy, we rely on everyone's participation to spend and work. We need to understand that, like how hunters in a tribe feed one's village, demand is food for the economy, to the point it is shaped as an ideal that draws and promotes the purchasing of ever-increasing quantities of goods and services and the economy through suppressing individual interests and prioritising specific entities or the economy. Since companies no longer have to rely on the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of the invisible hand as they can deal the cards and influence human behaviour, creating a bubble of predictability at the expense of our desires for the efficiency and profits of businesses will be inevitable.