The denial of relationality

[SkepticBowtie98]

“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...”.The words spoken here in Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” reverberate through the gallows of the existential movement and through the depths of political philosophies. Nietzsche is correct about this motivational aspect of human existence. Indeed, it is true that throughout the psychology of each individual that there is a certain pragmatic will to power, expression of self, domination of self, domination of others, domination of the Earth. The impetus of human activity. Thus, observe the economic frameworks designed to create a hierarchy of few individuals over some, the undying cries for help of those who only have expression left to distinguish themselves from a blur of humanity, and the crumbling dissonance of a now fragile world. The active psyche for power and competition is by no means an alienation of what it means to be essentially human. Rather, it is a biological predisposition of the way humans have evolved.

Because the species arose from complex social groups, both individual and collective approaches to motivation are both fervently present within the development of human behavior. From within the group, the motivation to acquire resources for survival and to reproduce is an imperative; and the likewise for the group as a whole. So, the individual is intrinsically motivated to express and empower herself as well as her tribe, to out-compete, out-survive, and out-reproduce both her rivals in the group and the rivals of her group. She fights a battle to estrange her tribe from its relation to existence and estrange herself from the existence of the tribe. Humanity relies upon the tactics of estrangement; to become self-reliant, independent, and distinctly powerful enough to acquire maximal resources. Upon thousands of years of development and moral justification from both the individual and the collection, individuals, groups, and frameworks are set up for abuse through an illusion of power. The species marches to the embattlement, genocide, slaughter, and enslavement of masses and professes divine providence. They imbed themselves in a materialistic world view to the extent of destroying the world that created the resources, exhausting populations of those resources, and legitimizes it as human flourishing. They seek out to see that they are superior to all existence, and through ideological and metaphysical inquisition, they unequivocally believe so. Fallibly discovering the right to exhaust, enslave, and slaughter not only their own species but the entirety of physical existence. Thus, the denial of relationality.

We have entered an unwinnable eternal expedition. To become so powerful as to estrange ourselves from existence itself. We have sought to manifest ourselves as divinities. Yet, we can not deny a certain relationship to the universe that we actively attempt estrange from. The mass of cells that makeup a human is over ninety percent non-human. We are intrinsically enchained to the world itself, in sullying it we will destroy ourselves. We are intrinsically enchained to the rest of the flora and fauna, in eradicating them we will destroy ourselves. We are intrinsically enchained to each other, through the entrancement of the means to destroy each other and in doing so, we will destroy ourselves. The fall of man is the pragmatic ignorance of fact; what he sought so sedulously to master. The acceptance of the underlying relationality of existence yet is human kind’s one hope of salvation. That, in a web of relationality, by strengthening the ties of the web strengthens not only the web in itself, but the agents interwoven. By strengthening existence, we strengthen ourselves..