Thursday, December 1, 2011

-8- The two men scenario

To assess society as a whole, I decided to take a look at the basic interactions between people on a personal level, starting from the bare minimum, the scenario of two men. Any single person cannot have interactions with anyone but himself or his nature (although in a society, isolation is quite common). Nonetheless, what happens when any two people meet?

I apologize in advance, for I do not have enough time to give this subject enough coverage, but nonetheless, I will proceed.

First of all, I'd like to clear up one major misconception that was given to us courtesy of Thomas Jefferson. All men are not created equal. Everyone's different, and what he should have stated in this particular case was that there is no system of evaluating men to declare them different/incapable/capable. This goes hand in hand with the school entry of yesterday; since that system's whole purpose is to differentiate people (contradictory to Jefferson, no?) So with that known, at the level of two people, they will always have to be different. Even identical twins are different people, they are born with different experiences in life (although similar, they are seen through different perspectives, etc.) This will never change. No two people will ever be alike.

So knowing that, upon the initial encounter of any two different people, the result will be an automatic ranking of control. That is because between any two people, there are three possible outcomes, the first being that the first man is stronger than the second (man, in this case, stands for human, not "male"), the second being that the second and first man are equals, and the third being that the first man is weaker than the second. In this case, the definition of how one would be stronger than the other would be decided according to the time period. Without any particular society, it would likely be decided by physical strength, nowadays it is more based on intelligence and charisma. The point being is that in every interaction between people, no matter how basic, people's differences will clash and lead to a power for control, deciding which one is stronger, etc. This effect is multiplied many times over in a larger society.

What I am getting at here is that Nietzsche's will to power does not even have to be a conscious will to power; it is a natural occurrence that happens upon every interaction possible. Furthermore, this is not a primitive trait that people will outgrow; this is more of a natural mechanism that people possess in order to orient their social stature. Instead, to branch back to the previous entry, this mechanism is greatly offset by institutions such as school, by teaching people the mantra that everyone is created equal. This disturbs the orientation that people have. If everyone is created equal, how does one decide who rules, and who is ruled? And here yet again, education comes into play, teaching that there are no rulers, or people who are being ruled. Instead, it tells us, we rule ourselves. Is that truly so? If we cannot determine our social standing, and have no definite way to decide who rules, (and we definitely do not rule ourselves), there is no way to know how to define power, government, and even social classes. You can state that we do have social classes, and that is a true statement. However, that is because not only does education seek to offset the natural orientation of power, it attempts to bring in it's own.

Next entry will have more details

No comments:

Post a Comment