the population organism

warning: this is a very rough idea and could easily be characterized as half-baked, which it is in fairness. but it's been on my mind and i'm just curious to see what kind of responses might come through on a thread about it. piss on it if ya like.

here's the hypothesis in a nutshell: human population-level phenomena like capitalism are organisms with a will to live, but there is no relationship between individual beliefs and values held and even actions done by people -- alone or in groups -- and the life of the larger population-level organism (empire, the old flavor, or capitalism, the new one). usually there is an assumption that there is some kind of direct correlation between the values and actions of individuals and the values and actions of the population-level organism. a textbook example of what most people instinctually believe about this is in the dr. seuss book the lorax: "unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. it's not." my idea is that this is totally false. my feeling is that the only significant relationship between the two is one of numbers: population goes up, the strength of the social, systemic population-level organism goes up.

people who have egos which is all of us tend to not like this idea because it completely cuts off systemic, population-level issues from individual wills, characters, and actions. we like to think that we can direct how things look for us, as a species. my hypothesis is that we're fundamentally unable to do that. which imho means that we should stop trying. oo i feel pitchforks being reached for just typing out those words. i don't know if i would ever go to bat for this, and i'm honestly not trying to rile anyone up, just expressing something that has been on my mind recently. i'm starting to think that accepting this hypothesis in degrees can help make a person kinder. ok submit post lol.

might need to account for why those "organisms" are not universal through geography and history, how they originate and how they change. otherwise you're suggesting some kind of "unmoved mover" deal?

definitely. i see those changes happening in large degree because of population-level ruptures - things like plagues, technological shifts that happen in the context of competing cultures, or even actions that are to some degree individual wills exercised en masse - wars for instance. though of course those require a large amount of coercion.

i also see the rising level of the human population basically taking us through new, more intense, and always somewhat unprecedented population-level phenomena.

basically my view is that shifts in the population-level organism happen due to the forces of a chaotic god combined with the rising population number, in dialogue with the larger earth-system, not whether i take out my recycling or drive an electric vehicle, etc. which sounds a bit biblical and non-starter sort of like the unmoved mover. though the bible does emphasize individual morality quite a bit.

nb if anyone wants to help me pay for a new ev, you can reach out to me here. it would go a long way toward disproving this theory of mine.

Not completely sure I understand this, and I think my question may be similar to NV's. There are lots of different populations/'organisms' as you look back across history, so there must be something other than just population headcount involved.... In other words, ideas clearly have an impact. Thinking of Buddhism for example, this basically started with one person, and their followers, the spread of Buddhism had no relationship as far as I know to 'population rupture' or 'technological shift'.