To be interdependent means to live symbiotically with the other, in a mutual exchange system that benefits a greater stasis. Interdependency is established between structural units within some kind of boundary. Sets and subsets contain each other endlessly, like the fractal nature of this universe, like the approximately 50 trillion cells in our body that cooperate seamlessly to make “this life of ours” fit living. The next scale up from these boundaries would be the community contours of social beings. If human society is to be as efficient as the cells in our body, a form of collective society will emerge. Thoroughly and gracefully, the realignment of real value, gifts, and cooperation, will replace the takeaway, what’s in it for me, “dog eat dog” mentality of modern economics.
May we call it rediscovering gift relationships? If we were to value giving as much or more than taking, we would focus on “the other.” The wealth of the other would be our real measure of value. We would not measure ourselves by the individuated accumulation of things in a hoarding frenzy, under the illusion of scarcity, in competition and die hard self-interest. Like the subset cell systems, relationships in cooperation need to be primary. The role of sentient collectives of individuated units of consciousness is to get along. When we get along we cooperate. Cooperation can be accomplished in relationships based on mutual benefits, like the spectacularly successful aggregates of multicellular organisms that have populated most earthly habitats.
Cooperation also can happen through enforcement and domination. In this form, we are coerced into participation, like the virus that subjugates its host through submission. Viruses can only survive in the cell body of the host. This parasitic relationship is destructive, very dependent, and not as successful as the ebb and flow of life forms and cell structure. It seems clear that nature would favor systems that aggregate for mutual benefit and not invaders that kill and infest life systems. If the drive to populate the universe were driven by parasites and viruses, we would have reached a dead end eons ago. Nature is so intelligent that it capitalizes on viral infestations, extracting immunization from this interaction and correcting the genomes chemical coding. This transcription promotes advantages, creating beneficial permutations out of chaos. The omega point that pushes and attracts nature forward toward complexity, lowers the entropic system, flooding the probable realities by forming emergent intricate life structures in interdependence and cooperation. Can our modern society with its capitalistic economy grasp this principle before we cannibalize each other?
The germ cell of social interaction is the family unit. At this substrate level, continued cooperation is essential. In domestic agrarian times, for example, running a farm or household involved every family member in production. The success of this social fabric is based on cooperation and job diversification. A cell breaks up into many pieces creating a system that grows and diversifies participation of its constituents. As it expands and accepts other individuals, the borders of this household bubble outward. When the social boundaries scale up to become communities and villages, it becomes harder to identify who belongs to the household or family clan. Interaction and diversification bring close integration and interdependence among households within small communities.
Fast forwarding to the urbanization of Europe in the nineteenth century, industrial societies brought in a new era that ended the dominance of household production. The small scale agricultural homesteads, guilds, and craftsmen gave way to the unskilled labor of factory assembly lines in industrial England. The first mills employed as many as 800 workers. This unprecedented new system of interdependence had the capacity to produce and manufacture the mechanized and hi-tech world of the twenty-first century. The domestic system only needed a few dozen skilled laborers and it was not interested in maximizing outputs beyond their circle of gifts. The new urban economy replaced the intricately knit familial relationships of the household production unit. Love based relationships were replaced with mass-market commodities. When industrial society began to supply and replace what was once the sole output of the family function, the relationships within the family structure dramatically changed. We became less dependent on domestic relationships, especially for day to day struggle and subsistence. We discovered individuality and personal entitlement. We broke up the dependency ties that kept us disconnected from exploration and personal pursuits.
This acquired sense of independence and separation engrossed us in the spell of personal power. The surplus of factory goods replaced family staple products and service economies replaced the exchange of gifts in soul communities. In this expansion, goods and services became necessities. In this new system, one paid for what was needed. Familial exchanges stopped being necessary negotiations. Contractual labor and wage economies replaced the personal services and subsistence economies of agrarian homesteads. Life was negotiated outside the house and away from the family. This allowed a smaller family nucleus to become increasingly private. The greater role of the society freed families within the intimacy of their home; our modern families have gained an emotional repertoire in this process. In a sense, we are now more interdependent from each other for acceptance, empathy, love and emotional validation. Today we choose whom to love and whom to marry; it has not always been like this. Our enhanced appreciation for emotions shows in the display and outpouring of love displayed by modern families towards their children.
The pampering of the twentieth-century child has produced a pathology of self-indulgence, irreverence, and passion for youth culture. Children of modern Western society have accessed unimaginable amounts of education, information, and mass media with its carousel of distractions, like no other generation in the history of humankind. Today an average child in Europe can excel expediently in areas that were previously only reserved for nobles and privileged family lineage over lifetimes.
We have never been freer to love to love ourselves and to love others. In contrast, agrarian domesticity limited personal growth and restricted freedom of choice. Back then our choices were limited to the interests of patriarchies, manors, and guilds. Agrarian domesticity kept us limited to the techniques and skills for which we had little or no choice. The crass and down practical manner in which eighteenth-century families adopted members for skilled labor, filling the manor houses with strangers, reflected the uncustomary show of affection or tenderness for each other. Relationships appeared a matter of fact and cold. Kissing, fondling, and embracing were considered unseemly among all members of the extended family. Except for toddlers, the family production unit had no interest in individual emotional needs.
With the urbanization of the West, specialized agrarian workers and craftsmen became free day laborers ready to migrate. Rent and lodging have their origins in this mobilization, business-like transactions for money and rendering of service were exchanged for permanent residency. One was sought as initiated into a fraternity, clan, neighborhood or simple factory household within walking distance of each other. Unlike on the family farm, the day laborers traveling to the city in search of lodging and pensions, became tenants who had to submit to the authority of the landlord or head of the house. These contractual relationships were need-based and they set the tone for the creation of modern states.
In this process of density population, social aggregation intensified; specialization grew exponentially. The assembly line and sweatshop factories of the West propelled the thrust of industrialization. Efficiency and balance sheets thrived at the expense of the human condition. People have been equated with replaceable robots in this chain of production. To this day, we continue to be expendable parts in this social paradigm. The exploitation and inhumane treatment of factory workers in the England of Charles Dickens is an example of this predatory system of interdependence.
Relationships in true interdependence need to cooperate for common goals and mutual benefits. They should not be mistaken with independent interest groups that enslave humanity to maximize their profits. As stated earlier, in nature the opposite of symbiosis is parasitic behavior. Societies of domination resemble these parasitic relationships.
Human interdependence cannot be derived through compliance out of persuasion. Coercive persuasion and tactical deception defined much of the family dynamics of provincial Europe. Today coercive tactics flood the workplace and people are forced into wage labor and factory jobs. These not willful systems can be very efficient and successful. They can achieve monumental structures and objectives through enforced cooperation. An example of this is the westward railroad expansion which was built with the hard labor of the prison population and immigrants. Since the eighteenth century, American prison labor has been subcontracted to build infrastructure. The robber barons of this wheel of servitude have profited immensely. In these worker camps, inmates generally included those living under one household. These interpersonal systems created nested subsets of interdependency where impersonal victims endured great strife and misery.
If we are to increase compassion and cooperation among everyone in the global and regional scales, a coercive interpersonal pressure will not work and will take us nowhere. We need to get along sharing gifts and ensuring love. To be truly independent and empathic we must come to this exchange out of love.
In competition, we come from fear and we fight with others for the goods. We need love based relationships, not need-based contracts among parties.
The capital economies of the West have rolled out a competitive turf that gridlocks our lives. The medieval families of Europe operated out of intricate dependency, where each member was essential to the success of the household. This environment promoted the idea of sharing and exchange. The more hands available for this exchange, the more production on a local scale. The industrial revolution fragmented these household markets and led us to develop a society of individuals with independent goals dependent on the state. The post-industrial system designed consumerism as desirable. The glorification of “I” has created an unbalanced system. We have forgotten the role of contributions, the recognition of the other.
The team effort of the medieval household was replicated by the first assembly line factories of the industrial age. In these dark and despotic warehouses, human cooperation produced high yields for the captains of industry. All this was done at the expense of gruesome exploitation of people and children. These oppressive systems are incredibly efficient in producing stuff we don’t need and the misery that comes with it.
The quintessential challenge is the reexamination of these goods. We have to wonder if this consumerist society that has arrived is going to help us move forward.
We have to examine whether we can accept any system of oppression. We cannot sustain the modern corporatist banking takeover of populations and resources. We cannot continue the sweatshops of Asia and the displacement of Indian farmers in the state of Rajasthan, nor the yoke of patriarchal and monastic lords and manors of the past. The role of the patriarchal societies of medieval Europe was not a good model. These societies established the central authority and monopoly takeover of the postindustrial state. These social models of interdependency were certainly not based on a hub of voluntary cooperation and egalitarianism, but rather on domination and tyranny.
The smaller family circle, on the other hand, has cultivated the individual. With the separation of work and home, voluntary personal emotional exchanges between the members of the family have grown rich and intimate, but also strangely pathological.
This story of individuation and its compulsive self-emancipation has given birth to a hideous and insecure consumer consumed in self-interest and hedonism. By the same token, this dysfunctional society that cultivates personality has opened the possibilities of a relationship. By being less dependent on the family as a production unit, we appear to have been freed and given the leisure to make intimacy a top priority. In this sense, the post-modern world has liberated the potential for relational diversity. But choices in relationships imply responsibility and understanding. The more free will you give to a relationship the more likely you are to evolve as a group. We need not dominate or suppress the other. Instead, our choices need to express the act of giving and sharing out of love. We can get along and cooperate in the realm of gifts and still pursue our individual unlimited potentials. Out of the act of caring and wanting to contribute to the greater whole, we will have a renaissance of beauty that will reach every heart.
It’s not a secret that some social groups have managed to live in empathic cooperation. A magnificent example of this social system was the urban settlement of Caral in Peru, dating back 5 thousand years. In the shockingly majestic and mysterious Supe Valle, a wise and advanced society flourished in harmony. Surrounded by the jagged foothills of the Andes, this valley north of Lima extended for 80 km and was only 20 km to the Pacific Ocean. At Caral, urban engineers devised intricate astronomical architecture, pyramids, math, dikes, weaving and amphitheaters. It has been concluded that this society did not practice war, nor did they display acts of violence. A study by archeologist Shady, suggests it was a wisdom based society with a culture of commerce, music, and pleasure. He bases his conclusions after discovering collections of music flutes made out of pelican bones and no trace of warfare, no battlements, no weapons, and no mutilated bodies. Perhaps this civilization lived in a state of bliss, in understanding, connected to the cosmos and in full cooperation with each other. We could assume that to accomplish such a system, this society must have had strong interdependency. A sense of reverence in the relationship with other and the life we have in common. They also owed their success to commerce with smaller communities along the coast, mountains, and jungles. Evidence of this interaction is found in trading practices found all the way into the Amazon and along the coast, suggesting extensive relationships and exchange of goods and artifacts.
Approaching each other with care rather than with ego will make our global society better. Social beings, like this conscious universe, come coded for interaction. Beings, like structures, do not sit still. They thrive making connections and establishing exchanges. Stable structures come to life through optimal states of interaction. Optimal relationships lower the entropy of a system. Like love among units of a family, the secret of getting along is to be aware that you are part of something larger than yourself. This awareness means recognizing that it’s not primarily about you, it’s about the other; it’s not about getting, it’s about giving. Contractual need base relationships have degenerated into tyranny and submission. This system promotes animosity and competition, the other system promotes love and sharing. As individuated units of consciousness, we need to rediscover relationships. We think of relationships as things. Relationships are constantly changing processes that happen between structures. Broken into complex parts like the many cells in our bodies, our challenge is to thrive in a relationship in the age of loving interdependence.
Additionally let’s not forget that every subatomic particle and every proton in this universe such as in your body, is completely connected or entangled with every other particle of our same universe.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Cuellar Brown is a New York City media artist and essayist who has written on new media, social theory and metaphysics. His essays have been posted online by Opendemocracy, The Global Dispatches, The Pelican Web, Kosmos Journal, and STARDRIVE.
In 2013 his essay “Intermedial Being” was published by A Journal of Performance and Art PAJ #106 MIT Press Journals. In 2015 Mr. Brown was nominated for the TWOTY awards out of the Netherlands for his essay “Blueprint for Change”. He has been a regular columnist for Second Sight Magazine and Fullinsight.
His book, In Search of Singularity: Reflections and Chronicles from the End of Time, published 29 January 2017, is a series of reflections on the current cultural evolution from competition to cooperation, from patriarchy to reciprocity between humanity and the human habitat.
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