I'm increasingly of the opinion that humans are largely failed creatures, and that the structures we create and maintain are monuments to failure.
It sort of feels to me like the ever-recurring pattern of empires/civilizations rising to a peak and then rapidly sinking to their demise through a process of snowballing decadence can be abstractly considered at different scales and in different domains, and that human civilization itself (with the accompanying elements of information (theory) and technology) are themselves rapidly deteriorating, in a really long process the end of which I kinda hope I won't be seeing (because of cowardice, truth be told), though for which I really wish to happen once and for all.
I too think human thinks very highly of himself for being able to change his enviroment, and creating "culture"; I'd like it if we could be like dolphins, roaming unbounded and unchained by material burden of attachment and instead singing our songs for the development of our creative drives. Reality, however, has come to show two things: one, humans simply cannot be kept from innovating, and this means civilization is bound to unfold naturally; second, physical reality is crude, raw, the kind of magic seen in fiction such as the vedas and fantastic literature mere fantasy. Were this real, were we able to chant a mantra and invoke change through it, technology would not need to happen. But we were put in a shitty world.
But by the creative power of men, the ability to change his enviroment, his ego has found it necessary to enlarge the scope of his material monuments, his influence on others, leading to centralization of power, one that agglutinates ever more to create the social structures that we now know.
Now the whole range of social and political theory has lead to a total state of disarray, one which ironically emerges from an anxious need to order and subject reality to one's limited perception and one's biological secretion of hormones.
The only solace I can ever find is in the ever continuing of a tradition of thought. The immaterial traditions of the word and the platonic idea. It is, of course, a part of both culture and technological development, ever by it stimulated, ever from it drawing inspiration, ever through the very fabric of society being transmitted, refined and ordered. And yet in this state of global spiritual misery, seems to be a golden thread worth partaking in, joining the collective effort f
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