I woke up one morning, thinking as I usually do about the question of mass hysteria. Or to put it differently, mass concurrence on ideas, images and values that may not be connected to anything in the tangible world.
I may have gone to sleep after watching a few ants walking across my bathroom sink. The great physicist, Richard Feynman, was motivated in some of his early thinking by watching ants as well.
What I woke up thinking was that humans may be part of a hive rather than freestanding individuals. Individual ants exist and operate as part of a hive. They function in an almost complete autonomous relationship to the operation of a hive. Most don’t know what other ants are doing.
This is very close to a perfect description of the way human beings operate. We operate in the commercial environment in which we have only the vaguest notion of how any part of our life is operated. The computer screen you are looking at in front of you this moment was created by 1 million different people carrying on hundreds of thousands of separate operations none of which are apparent to you or me nor would they be understandable if we saw them operating.
The delivery of the content from me to you proceeds through a complex process, through the hive of commerce without either of us being even slightly aware of how it works much less knowing how it works…. even if we saw each of the details.
I'm always struck by how every god-damn person in San Francisco believes the same thing every day about the same stupid Lefty political ideas. They don't have to talk to each other to learn about it. They don't actually understand anything about it. Millions of Bay Area people believe that the government can raise the minimum wage and it will be beneficial. They have no idea how it would work nor do they have in mind a dollar amount where businesses would totally cease operating. They are ignorant all at the same time.
To my mind we are part of a hive. We are not individuals operating autonomously.