“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
-Albert Camus, The Stranger
Forced to attend a general assembly at my public high school gym in Atlanta circa 2003 — in the back row of bleachers, disconnected — I arrived at the inescapable conclusion that the myriad 2,000 bodies before me were alien abstractions.
They weren’t individuals – just identity-free biological dots on the landscape.
Like tiny ant-like cars crawling on the road from 10,000 feet above in an aircraft, my peers at that Atlanta public high school were external entities; nameless, faceless blips in the cosmopolitan jungle. I felt no connection, nor loyalty, nor concern for their welfare.
A kid, once, in my sophomore year, hung himself in his parents’ basement. The school administrators announced it on the intercom in somber tones. We had a moment of silence to commemorate his short life. I never knew him. His existence meant nothing beyond another vague name on a homeroom roster, and so I felt nothing.
At the time, so young and uninitiated in the world, I didn’t appreciate the political implications.
——–
Theoretical physicists, way smarter than me, have posited that we are all one, a unified consciousness experiencing itself. And, if you’ve ever done psychedelics, in fleeting moments you might have genuinely bridged the theoretical gap to experience it – the sort of wondrous interconnectivity of everything.
But we are only primates – so back to the limited cognitive box of neurons and synapses we inevitably return from the trip, encased in mortal flesh and atomized within space-time.
Transhumanism may hold promise to transcend, as it were, these limitations, but that is irrelevant to the current predicament we find ourselves in.
High-minded liberals often speak reverentially of a “united” global community as the ideal model for human relations moving forward, a singular melding of culture and politics into a great, diverse mass of mutual care and trust.
Artists – sometimes loosely defined – and advertisers (who often, not coincidentally, work on behalf of multinational corporations that have a profit motive to tear down national identities) have often echoed these sentiments in marketing campaigns:
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
And I’d like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company
(That’s the song I hear)
-Coca-Cola ad campaign
More recently, social engineers have adapted this messaging of global unity as a strategy to coax more people into getting their COVID-19 “vaccine” shots and, more generally, into complying with their agenda:
<image redacted>
The cynical takeaway is that this messaging is purely manufactured and foisted upon the populace to sell more Coke and Pfizer shots. The more charitable conclusion is that such messages genuinely speak to a humanistic yearning for world peace and cooperation.
Regardless of intent, the psychological and anthropological literature indicates that such globalist aspirations are incompatible with human nature.
———-
The so-called Dunbar Number shines insight into just how many people we can muster concern for at any given moment. Predictably, the figure is significantly smaller than the global population of 7-8 billion, or the US population of 350 million, or even the average state population of a few million:
“In monkeys and apes, there is correlation between primate brain size and the size of their social groups, and by extrapolating this relationship we would expect humans to have a natural upper limit to the number of people in their group to about 150…
Historically, it was the average size of English villages. It is also the ideal size for church parishes, and is the size of the basic military unit, the company. Although an individual’s social network may include many more people, 150 contacts marks the cognitive limit on those with whom we can maintain a stable social relationship involving trust and obligation – move beyond 150 and people are mere acquaintances.”
<image redacted>
Beyond maintaining relationships, humans are only capable, according to the theory, of merely recognizing 1,500 faces – the rest are blurs.
Even the smallest state population-wise, Wyoming, with 578,759 residents as of the last census, expects each of its two senators to represent 289,379 constituents in the US legislature – an impossibly high bar given the Dunbar number. The largest, California, theoretically requires its two senators to each represent 19,718,731 constituents.
Given the enormous discrepancies between the Dunbar figures and the governing reality of the 350-million-member US union (not to mention the incentives for corruption and vice in US politics), bona fide statistical analysis shows that “average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence [over US policy].”
How could we — mere humans that we are?
Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Contact him via his blog, Armageddon Prose. Support his independent True North journalism via Patreon or PayPal
