The Problem of Scale

Trigger Warning: Philosophical thought, profanity.

The world is so much fucking larger than us; we're individuals in a planet of six, no seven billion people. And we've got to figure out what that means; how we're supposed to live or die in the face of that reality. And it boggles the mind, beggars the quickness of its wit and the miracle of its imagination. Actually, we're in every respect an iteration in a plane of countless others, where even in our most particular aspects we overlap inavoidably with others. So we're forced, in a certain ontological sense, to contend with the larger superstructure of lives, our place in a system, in a way we wouldn't in a smaller, more limited world. Blame the internet if you want, but it's still the way it is. It is a system that is decisively beyond us, and even if we are very strong and very bold, we cannot exceed it or fundamentally transform it. We will all, without exception, live and die within the framework of this world, and so if we are to give our lives any meaning we have to recognize it and deal with it. Step one is to wrap your head around that number; seven billion. Fuck if I know what step two is. Many, confronted by these extremes of scale, turn violent and lash out destructively at anything they can actually touch, impact and destroy. Equally many turn despondent, and to intellectual self-obliteration, through intoxicants or mental decoherence, to undo this awareness and subside into proto-sentience. Lesser numbers move towards denialism, and take up religion or other aggrandizing schemes that discount the substance of most of that seven billion number, and reduce their perspective to tolerable 'consequential' numbers. But none of these are really ways of coping with it; they all look away from the geist that that bigness engenders. To actually look at it, that's a different road.

The easiest answer is subsumption into the system; itself a form of intellectual auto-annihilation. The awareness is achieved, then surrendered to and dismantled by deliberately becoming a consistent operator within it, filling the place of simple exchanges and functions. We've all done this with some things, where we've seen the bone staring at us and then quietly set it aside. The result of this answer is like the Zen death-acceptance, where one proceeds exactly the same way as formerly, having already seen and accepted the outcome. It is a legitimate answer, because even though it unmakes the awareness, the decision is still made at that state of awareness, however brief. For a bit of imagery, think of the second hand of a clock achieving epiphany, disengaging itself, and stepping back to apprehend the clock as a whole, with its intricate and interdependent gears all meshing and constantly working to sustain the motion, then stepping back into its former place, to continue its faithful march around the face. This answer is the most cold, the most direct, and makes no pretense of ascension. Another, closely related answer of self-annihilation is suicide. One apprehends the inapproachable totality, understands their own insignificance, and promptly offs themselves to shortcut the farce. It is functionally identical for the person involved to the previous answer, except for flipping the coin to non-participation. The individual has already recognized their inconsequence, so whether to remain or leave is purely arbitrary.

A second, different answer could perhaps be best shorthanded as the "alchemist's" or "gnostic's" approach. That is to apprehend the totality, and instead of dealing sheerly with it, to hunt after progressively lesser and lesser constituents, through processes of categorization and derivation looking for more fundamental bases for the superstructure; looking for the bolts and beams which hold it all together and give it life. This is the one associated with philosophy, science, magic, and law, and likely the answer I personally am at. All forms of such inquisitive, searching knowledge follow this answer. Asking after language and its roots, trying to trace back to the original bases of human thought, is one such example. What this answer provides is a manifest process, direction in itself, searching always after more fundamental elements; substituting the be-all-end-all of the totality for a manifestation of a scheme, a system, of even greater importance. In this answer, the pain and trauma of the totality can be assuaged or downplayed with perceived progress in elemental derivation; by giving us schemes and methods by which to categorize and reduce the visible reality, we're able to cope with larger and larger presentations. For instance the immense span of the animal kingdom is rendered tolerable, interperable by a well-organized taxonomy extending all the way down to species. By becoming engineers, architects in our own regard, we are better able to deal with the system we encounter in the natural world, despite its greater size and complexity. And progress in our own work can be rewarded with ease with the larger. In a very real sense, this answer offers another dimension to the first, where change and operation can be meaningful in changing our mental relation to the superstructure, without the fallacy of changing our own inconsequence. This second answer provides an open-ended future, an axis along which to move, so long as we do not actually sort out the real fundamentals at play, and reach the ultimates. When we believe we've done that, it engenders a unique crisis; a precondition is that the elements we've unveiled actually perform the necessary roles in our cognitive system, if not the literal world they describe. Even a descriptive scheme, if coherent, creates a crisis. And the nature of that point; its view and emotions and resolution, I don't know; I've never been there. But it's possible it doesn't break the second answer, and is simply the furthest point along the axis; this implies that the progressive feeling of greater ease we achieve moving down the line may have a maximum, where the totality will no longer discomfit or unease us, and one will achieve a state of perfect contentment. The most enlightened persons we have on record, who have pursued the gnostic paths, give an account of utter tranquility and ineffable peace; whether we believe their answers, their deductions, are correct, I think we can believe them that this is what the maximal gnostic condition would entail, the same phenomena suggested by earlier steps along the path. In fact, it is worth stipulating that there is a wide range of gnostic thresholds extant, in terms of the depth of complete mastery, or in our terms, the length of the axis. The theosophists, for example, and occult magicians generally profess there to be a severe number of degrees. Practitioners of science concede many lifetimes have been and will be spent without achieving a unified theory, and are not too put off by this. The Buddhists believe that the fundamental understanding is one very short jump, actually, and their study is just to realize it personally; so short in fact I can iterate it here: "nothing has intrinsic existence". Read both ways, it is accurate, but the reading 'no thing has intrinsic existence' is more informative. So in sum varying persons would set the length of the abstract gnostic axis at different spans, in the case of some very short indeed, in others longer than the history of the human species up until this point. For our purposes, it really doesn't matter; only that there is an additional orthogonal dimension to that of the first answer in the second matters. The second offers something, some transition, not reducible to the first.

As for a third, or even more, it's very hard to say. I myself am still at the second, and while I may see some further potentially, it will take inspiration to understand them and commit them to words. Of cardinal importance is looking at the reactions of people to the totality, and the ways they lash out or bend themselves in response. And some, I know, react creatively, not examining analytically the fundamental components of the totality, but bending themselves furiously to the act of creating something new, tracing an entirely different path. It is oblique, it is strange, and unintellectual, but it seems the most promising candidate for a third answer, however hard its nature may be to unravel.

Perhaps these answers are limited, provincial in their own regard, or hold no real position of abstract grip; in substance they were derived from the empirical reactions of instantiated men, not a logical analysis of the totality itself, which seems impossible to approach rationally without a ready-made tool, a hatchet, already in hand, but with open palms. Exposure to problems of scale tends to be a visceral experience, intellectually paralyzing; the consequences one would be expect from attempting to internalize an infinity. What comes out of such tends to be reactions of necessity, forced adaptations, rather than considered and selected ones. Any port in a storm; a man does not choose whether on facing death he will be struck with fear, rage, or sorrow. The Seven Billion demands an answer, a reaction, an accounting, and these are just some of the more common of results. It is possible even bolder men, or ones with extraordinary mentalities which can tolerate a bare exposure to the totality for longer without devolving to conceptuality, may yet yield more, new ways of living in awareness of the remainder that always exceeds the eyes, and to answer that most pressing problem.