Is society really a battle for power?

[Onecirrus]

I feel like the only real daily concern of the entire populace is better meeting your own survival needs. Everyday, whether through labor or education or spending money, I inch myself closer and closer toward a better position. With everyone else also doing this, competition for resources and opportunities is fierce, and anyone who manages to get into a better position will fight relentlessly to maintain that position, and are willing to disempower others to do so. 

In this human jungle, those with less power and leverage are obedient and subservient to those with more. There are chains of authority that stretch from a kindergartener getting scolded by a teacher, all the way to an autocratic ordering millions of men to invade a neighboring country. We’ve been at this game for 500,000 years.

Is society really just an artificial human jungle where we fight to preserve and promote ourselves and our loved ones? Is that really all that’s actually going on?
 

 

[Twentyfirst]

In my opinion. Sort of. My thinking would be to separate the human jungle and society into two distinct things. The human jungle is the natural world you are born into and the artificial society is just a man made creation designed as a weapon to basically enslave you. So once you are born you are part of that system called society primarily starting off with birth certificates and governments automatically owning you. The people controlling society live outside of it and only created society to toy around with you. Its better for them that you get born into their bullshit matrix system rather than the natural human jungle world because it keeps competition at bay. Imagine the world being controlled by like I don't know like 10,000 people. So they have their own world of 10,000 people instead of what would naturally be 10,000 plus 8 billion people. And they just shuffle the 8 billion extra people into a reality overlay system one layer over. It's all done through social conditioning mostly. If you wake up you realize the mechanics of it all and go back into the natural world of pure consciousness without conceptual man made creations. Its actually pretty smart 

I think enlightenment is when you escape society and then you can shift in and out how you please 

Edited Saturday at 12:57 AM by Twentyfirst

[whh2222]

I like to wear a train conductor hat like immortal technique wears and get into a rap cypher and start rapping about the pyramids. 

[Sugarcoat]

Most people aren’t even competing or battling, they’re just following the herd and the norm, getting basic education then a basic job to make a living. They aren’t even trying to climb some ladder or improve their position much. The competition happens among a minority. If you are among that minority it might seem like competition is everywhere but it just seems that way because you’re caught up in communities of your own type of people that are competing. One can zoom out a little for a more proper perspective 

 

Edited Saturday at 01:18 AM by Sugarcoat

[Nivsch]

11 hours ago, Twentyfirst said:

 The people controlling society live outside of it and only created society to toy around with you.  

In my opinion, they are as participants and ignorant as the rest, and overall nobody is totally "outside" the SM but it is all about gradations and there are matrices of many kinds including spiritual, solipsist and deconstructist ones. Any of those can become hurmful if displayed or imposed as the best or right one.

Edited Saturday at 12:54 PM by Nivsch

[Breakingthewall]

Everything is perfect until one day your dick gets hard, then everything becomes very complicated, so complicated that one day you are at the siege of Stalingrad without really understanding what you are doing there.

Life seeks efficient evolutionary paths, and war at all levels is very efficient. We humans try to ride the wave of life in the best way possible, and at one point that meant challenging a guy to a sword duel because he had not yielded to you at the entrance of a theater, and killing him. At another point it means being terribly dissapointed because your neighbor has bought a nicer car than yours.

Some of us try not to let life manipulate us like puppets, which is paradoxical since we are the life.

[sholomar]

For the most part, we act to fulfill our genetic imperative in a matter acceptable to "society."   That means for a man to be his best with the ultimate goal of trying to get a woman to want him and have his babies.  How society goes about it varies somewhat culture to culture but most people don't necessarily fight for causes, nor are they into politics.    Personally I think the people who think they are so much "smarter" than everyone else because they see themselves as "enlightened" or "intellectual" or whatever are deluding themselves. I used to be one of them... oh 95% are sheep, so it's easy to dismiss what they have to say... nonsense. These types can become dangerous in time because they then think it's their job to impose their values on everyone else, whether they're part of the red, blue, orange, or green cults.  To a degree it's human nature to take a self centric view and believe one's own values are best though.  It's another thing to yet be forgiven via radical acceptance of what is... our shared flawed genetic nature. Miniature pieces of computer software/hardware with societal and genetic programming, part of a larger whole yet diverse and unique with our own perspectives.

We do have that polarity in us as Breakingthewall said, our higher self can get hijacked by our lower selves... it's like in yellowstone when Rip says "no more women in the bunkhouse" ... if you're familiar with that storyline, enough said. Not even billionaires are immune to human nature. Some of them probably mastered it well to achieve the wealth they have. Plenty of people have been taken to the "train station" to amass their fortunes...

Edited Saturday at 09:09 PM by sholomar

[Ero]

22 hours ago, Onecirrus said:

Is society really just an artificial human jungle where we fight to preserve and promote ourselves and our loved ones? Is that really all that’s actually going on?

From a local/micro-perspective it certainly may look or feel this way. But if you zoom out, you can see the phase transitions in complexity and societal organisation. The emergence of such patterns cannot be accounted by simply looking at power dynamics.