One great arc through humanity's whole existence has been towards ever more mobility, distance from biological governance, and symbolic analysis.
No legislation can undo this iron law. No religion can control this through ethical constraints. To be human is to try to move to the next hyper-stage of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing without all other humans following the same uptake.
This creates stratifications. Stratifications to the point of enslaving those who have not equally graduated to the upper limits of the arc -these stratifications are not wrong but the enslavement is.
Equality of all ways of being or equality of opportunity? That is the question that divides many progressives. My stance: Equating every strata as equal with the current upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing is a mistake, a lie, and nothing to do with social justice. Being progressive is allowing all to move towards the upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing.
One is not an equal within humanity's upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing until one participates in its creation and maintenance.
Those who permanently oppose, or fundamentally abstain from, the upper limits of this "Arc of Human Activity" generate a unique class in the "Arc of Human Activity". An antithetical arc to the larger human enterprise, historically this class began as religious aesthetics in various cultures after the great migrations of 800 BC. Today the antithetical arc has matured, enabled by cheap, ubiquitous lethal technology and distributed informational warfare; resulting in a formidable religious aesthetic militancy.
The religious aesthetic militants, whether propagandists or violence professionals, benefit from cognitive dissonance -they oppose the classes and cultures representative of the current upper limits of mobility/anti-biology/symbolic-processing; and also use every last shred of those culture's industrial output artifacts in inventive ways to wage their opposition. This is not new, the Middle Ages had even more of this phenomenon present in wars that spanned out from Central Asia. What is new is the lethality of our portable and affordable technologies.
"The Arc of Activity called Humanity" is not going to cease, and the antithesis is always going to have practitioners. It will be interesting to see the mutations and adaptations humans are forced into through this great war of the Arc and Antithesis. Ironically, the religious aesthetic militants may push human evolution (through cultural induced evolution) to a more permanent and mechanical class difference.
We'll see.
Forget the Frankfurt School (a compatible writing, more accessible terminology and developed critique.)
Supporting and supplemental documents:
Terraforming War
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