How do we bring multiple life concepts together in an emergency of survival of all humanity?
It is not something one can easily put ones hands on, but perhaps there is a perspective of some common ground? I don’t have a clue myself, and have not heard anything that would indicate such a necessary cross-cultural understanding or comprehension of the danger all humanity is currently facing. There are those who sense this. There is almost no political dialogue. Environmentalists are at this moment most aware of the collective threat. Others, particularly in the universe of biological behavior and systems, also are aware of our endangered species.
We can speculate and talk on and on, but one-on-one, two-on-two, ten-on-ten is the minimum dimension of relationship in order to get a basic breadth of individual and group behavior.
If we take ten pairs of 20 individuals and seek to assemble them in a core meeting of essentials while living together, “What is the criteria, the expectation? What are the elements of coherence?”
This begins in confusion. A rational setting would be unclear and uncertain to us, and to the twenty people of a certain age, chosen from 20 different cultures, languages and territories around the planet, innocently placed together as the object of learning and understanding of what is basic to functional response in group living. What would be a “natural” setting? What are the primitive neural patterns of concept, feeling, and response that characterize these individualities from different cultures?
Then we come to selecting their age. The complexity of their maturity, or its lacking, would bring us to some core differences in how one individual, or one pair, would relate to the other nine.
Then if we chose an age bracket for our composition, selecting from 7, 14, 21, 28, 50, 60 or 80? Each is a different dimension and level of character of the natural, biological, neural development, so that if we mixed one age level with another, we would already be altering the character of their dialogue among each other. (The law of the experimenter unavoidably influencing the experiment. Heisenberg principle.) How would we choose and why? Next we need to ask about the circumstances of when, where, and how to meet? How long should they be given to encounter each other meaningfully? A week, a year, three years?
What is the circumstance, or combination of circumstances, required for them to experience in order to “discover” what lies in the nature of their kind? Relationships, fear, sex, openness, educational development, depth and breadth of their awareness? Are they connected emotionally, mentally, neurologically, and physically to the world they live in?
What I see is that the best that one could do if we are seeking to consciously design an objective study, is to decide, “Is it possible to create an artificial mind that would produce any real reflection of the universal characterization of a consciousness that is a common reflection of a human being’s organic response?” In other words, might there be something beyond rational measure when it comes to generalizing about human behavior?
So what does bring a common generality to and from each culture and society?
The most obvious are collective values. Is there a commonality? Which ones are formalized in custom, belief, and the rules of authority? The latter being the agreements of power and its responsibility, limitations, and formal ‘rights”. Do they have anything that would apply to all in a common intent, even if in different content?
Predominantly the rules and expectations of behavior are founded in religion and its tenets of the expectation of believing. This is also an aspect in process of embedding belief in young minds and developing their images of life in concepts. These are not determined by, or with, what is of their own choosing. It is the difference between learning to read what is given in life openly in the development of thinking rationally vs historic dogma to secure arcane values and believing. In any case this has been a historic process via religious belief, provided habitually to each new member of their family embedded in its conviction and certainty.
This is telling me that the concepts of social living are thought about both in concept and in the character of the social/cultural context that then brings a generalized commonality and unity of behavior, concept and perception outside what the individual learns and perceives through the learning and perceiving on their own. So, the 10 pairs, 20 individual strangers, meet from mostly a cultural/social common feeling and image, guiding responses from the past rather than the present, in an individual’s observation, objective and otherwise.
So what is individuality vs social/cultural identity?
With the explosion of population, global communication, marketing, and exposure from and to one culture to another, and as their respective boundary of awareness expands in an impossible demanding of provision, space, place and need, “How does this impact, alter, the cultural concepts, religious beliefs, and incoherent behavior of all and each?
What is the impact on the 20 individuals? Why did we choose them with expectations of providing us with insight and understanding of what we collectively need to analyze and understand rationally, to find what we need to do collectively to meet the needs of all in the living dialogue of 7.6 Billion human beings and still counting? One obvious behavior change is the concept of “ownership” and the exclusivity of wealth. Does this mean that, “If you can’t provide for yourself, you don’t have a right to exist?”