My current working thesis: we must imagine the collective 8 billions human as a corpus (Corpus) with its own conscious, subconscious, ego, shadow mind with its own psychological drives (eg Eros/Thanatos) and emotion.

Background: Desire is the history of humanity. On a micro scale, humans pursue this desire through effort. But the human desire has alway been to achieve this desire with low effort. The pursuit of desires drives our human emotions – sure, there is the pleasure of taking action but also anxiety (that we wont have the capability for effort later, that we havent done enought), guilt (of lack of effort or even of our effort, which may be bring pain to others or our planet), shame (of our actions or lack of effort), difficult emotions of pursuing complex and hard to reach goals.

But the systems we create on a micro individual level, when iterated across 10,000 years for 8 billion people, create a macro system as well. The Corpus is a macro/global iteration of this pain playing out for 8 billion humans playing out for the last 10,000 years. Micro solutions to difficult feelings create a macro solution.

The macro Corpus solution to difficult micro feelings is dopamine-centric systems like social media, AI-doomprompting, overuse of nicotine and alcohol cultures. The modern world, with all its dopamine-high activities (with low effort high results) is representative of this and the pursuit of the satsifaction of these difficult feelings.

The Corpus attempted to solve its inherent anxiety of being born in a world where it was subject to the inherent volition of nature through exercising control of effort. But our solutions have created their own problems. In the same way that problems in the micro done to avoid difficult feelings create their own problems. There is no in-built regulatory system to stop or act as a ceiling as we race to the brainstem for dopamine pleasure.

Dopamine addiction is a structural addiction built into the system for the Corpus. Future human innovation will still go to these aspects (pushing the human boundaries) till these difficult feelings are felt and we accept our lack of control and lack of inherent natural restrictions.

The story of humans is a story of a corpus growing, with this corpus on its own search for human desires. There is the corpus of nations/cultures/ethnicities where culture creates certain desires and certain pain. The natrue of growth speeds past deeper desires for meaning in such a blurring way to go straight to the brainstem.

Lack of integration of the shadow. What level does nature inherently integrate this shadow – we are nature and we are being produced by it.

It has never been about the substance but the human addictive tendency and removing the substance does not get rid of this tendency on a global scale. What is our pain and how can we deeply deal with this pain in a better way.

Global rejection to choose a better path: see re cigarettes, alcohol, junk food. The world develops a sense of maturity about its structural addiciton.

Culture is not going anywhere. It is built to perpetuate it and all the negative side effects are means of achieving that, even at the cost of other things. We have to asssume that culture knows the cost subconsciously and the corpus chooses certain things in pursuit of them as a way of perpetuating it.