- Society has its own structure, which corresponds with the Sacral , right after Seminal.
- Society has Foreclosure in the structure of society
- You can divorce your spouse, foreclose a house, divide people into groups.
- Detached: hunter-gatherer
- Psychotic: agricultural
- Neurotic: bronze age / temple economy
- Perverse: iron age / slave economy, Roman/Greek
- Seminal: feudalism
- Sacral: capitalism
- So the working theory is that basically an individual in one of these economies can’t progress farther than the society itself has, and usually is much earlier
- But working together, given the institutions, the body of knowledge, and so on, the society can create explicit information and processes that are more complex than any given person could construct on their own
- And in turn this more well-structured society provides support that allows succeeding generations of individuals to progress farther into later structures than their parents
- Almost everyone is a later structure than their parents, or at least at the same phase, it’s really quite remarkable, I actually don’t understand how that’s possible given how long people have been on earth, but maybe it’s been speeding up lately or something. The exception would be, I expect, people who were adopted or abandoned by their parents. tiffani-hypothesis
- some evidence to support the correlation between structures and modes of production is, for example, whenever you find a pocket of society that lives at an earlier mode of production (hunter-gatherer tribes, for instance, or very small farming communities) they’re mostly populated by people of the relevant structure
- how people feel in different environments too, a big part of the reason detached and psychotic people are often fascinated by this “retvrn to monke” mentality is, I think, that it just feels psychologically more comfortable for them
- From the Middle Ages onward, humans are no longer subject to external evolutionary pressure. Now we are the pressure, and the environment must adapt to us. The Big Other is dead.
- People often wrongly think about earlier societies as a primitive proto-capitalism, instead of something entirely different.
- e.g. privacy
- Didn’t exist before capitalism / Sacral structure.
- Middle Ages people and earlier all had sex in front of their children.
- Kings and Queens would use toilets next to each other.
- The beginning of the medieval period is when the world became Seminal, directly following the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
- The Black Death was society’s Seminal crisis.