The inverse of the cost of self-regulation is biologically evident. All organisms rely on cues from the environment to regulate internal metabolism and biochemistry. Circadian rhythms regulate sleep and waking states based on sunlight exposure. Migrating species such as monarch butterflies bank on magnetic signaling or unknown environmental mechanisms as a means to return to mating grounds or more favorable weather. Thunder still cues an impulse to hide for many creatures with which we are more familiar. (There is an extent to which consciousness likely participates in all of these processes, but my presumption is that the unconscious mechanisms dwarf the conscious to an extent that it makes little sense to explicate, e.g., a pet dog's thought process in seeking the exact middle of the house during a storm.) For many of our ancestors, the rooster's crow was the signal to wake in the morning. In the case of social creatures, such as homo sapiens, one innovation is being able to "store" such cues in the built world--as with clocks, for example--but also the lived social environment.
It is likely that social co-regulation begins before we are born. It is well-established that babies' cries regulate mothers' mammary processes. Yet we also know--again, only anecdotally--that pregnant mothers "crave" particular foods in which they had little interest before pregnancy. Whatever biochemical process drives that craving and wherever it leaps the conceptual dividing line from the fetus to the mother is surely complicated but just as unimportant. It signals simply that human beings nest their needs in one another.
Solitary confinement is the extreme inverse of embeddedness in a structuring environment. Most of what we can understand of solitary confinement is anecdotal. Little scientific research has been done, perhaps because most researchers understand solitary confinement as tantamount to torture. Recent expats of Guantanamo Bay describe periods of incarceration where they had no idea how time was passing. By all accounts, people emerge from such periods of isolation in a psychologically fragile state. Why? One potential answer is that the costs of self-regulation are too great without any environmental waypoints.
From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Ayn Rand's work views all of this talk askance. Each individual straddles the world. Contemptible social needs sprawl far beneath the summit of pure reason instantiated--freestanding--in the ubermensche. Rand's philosophy skews conventional, secular attitudes toward individualism in America but not by much. Indeed, not a few Silicon Valley "disruptors" privately viewed her as a patron saint as they laid the foundation for the digital world.
Without any appreciation for co-dependence, the systems that have taken hold of American society have qualitatively degraded the social environment. Text messages are faster and more convenient for the individual, for instance, but convey information less certainly and less efficiently than a word in person. Facebook, it is true, allows us to remain "connected" with more people than we had before, whatever questions may linger about the quality of that connection.
But step into the shoes of the generation coming of age today. Supposedly efficacious disruptions to not only their working environments but to civil society itself have orphaned all but the most socially embedded in a desert of flawed assumptions. Answers that used to be reflexive require a treatise of lived experience to answer. When does the workday end? Who are their closest friends? What is the gender of their child?
Is this progress? With the advent of remote work, the cost of recreating regulatory cues from whole cloth is particularly a propos.
As I type this, a schizophrenic man murmurs into an earpiece behind me, speaking to--who? Who will account for his displacement? Is he, after all, substituting fantasy for the absence of a social embrace?
To be continued...
It is likely that social co-regulation begins before we are born. It is well-established that babies' cries regulate mothers' mammary processes. Yet we also know--again, only anecdotally--that pregnant mothers "crave" particular foods in which they had little interest before pregnancy. Whatever biochemical process drives that craving and wherever it leaps the conceptual dividing line from the fetus to the mother is surely complicated but just as unimportant. It signals simply that human beings nest their needs in one another.
Solitary confinement is the extreme inverse of embeddedness in a structuring environment. Most of what we can understand of solitary confinement is anecdotal. Little scientific research has been done, perhaps because most researchers understand solitary confinement as tantamount to torture. Recent expats of Guantanamo Bay describe periods of incarceration where they had no idea how time was passing. By all accounts, people emerge from such periods of isolation in a psychologically fragile state. Why? One potential answer is that the costs of self-regulation are too great without any environmental waypoints.
From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Ayn Rand's work views all of this talk askance. Each individual straddles the world. Contemptible social needs sprawl far beneath the summit of pure reason instantiated--freestanding--in the ubermensche. Rand's philosophy skews conventional, secular attitudes toward individualism in America but not by much. Indeed, not a few Silicon Valley "disruptors" privately viewed her as a patron saint as they laid the foundation for the digital world.
Without any appreciation for co-dependence, the systems that have taken hold of American society have qualitatively degraded the social environment. Text messages are faster and more convenient for the individual, for instance, but convey information less certainly and less efficiently than a word in person. Facebook, it is true, allows us to remain "connected" with more people than we had before, whatever questions may linger about the quality of that connection.
But step into the shoes of the generation coming of age today. Supposedly efficacious disruptions to not only their working environments but to civil society itself have orphaned all but the most socially embedded in a desert of flawed assumptions. Answers that used to be reflexive require a treatise of lived experience to answer. When does the workday end? Who are their closest friends? What is the gender of their child?
Is this progress? With the advent of remote work, the cost of recreating regulatory cues from whole cloth is particularly a propos.
As I type this, a schizophrenic man murmurs into an earpiece behind me, speaking to--who? Who will account for his displacement? Is he, after all, substituting fantasy for the absence of a social embrace?
To be continued...