The Architecture of Human Society

I am not trying to convince anyone of anything with this piece. I am merely trying to show where my pieces come from, why they exist and why they exist in their forms.

If something in this doesn’t quite make sense, stay with it.

This isn’t about agreeing or disagreeing. It’s about seeing what is usually taken for granted.

We are social animals. Social organisation is necessary for our survival. It is the evolutionary innovation that has led us to dominate the planet whilst competing species have fallen by the wayside. (It is interesting that the only other species as ubiquitous as us have high levels of social organisation e.g. insects.)

Human society consists of a series of nested systems of organisations that I call architectures.

The first, most basic, most essential architecture, is the family. After that we have friendshipn groups, mother’s groups, professional associations, sporting groups, community associations, political ideologies, political parties, ethnic groups, nationalities, religions, and so on. We belong to many of these simultaneously (and move in and out of them) and how important or valuable each group is will vary from individual to individual. That is, the hierarchy of importance and influence on the individual will vary.

The creation of architectures is an evolutionary process, that is, there is no “intelligent” design behind them. Architectures arise. They exist because they have survived.

All have a few features in common.

They are created to deliver the greatest good to the most people. Unfortunately, they cannot be perfect because we humans are imperfect so that means they cannot deliver “good” to all people.

Some people have to be “sacrificed” for the greater good. We are not ants. Our social organisations are more sophisticated. In fact, the evolution of architectures requires these sacrifices, whether we intend them or not.

Once created the primary purpose of an architecture is self-sustainment, survival in other words.

An architecture arises because it makes the lives of the individuals who belong to it “better” in some meaningful way. Therefore, it must survive to continue to deliver that value.

Once established, the architecture will resist change. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Change is a threat to what has been proven to work in the past. It risks “chaos”. Changes must be made slowly and only after it has been proved that disruption will be minimal.

They each have their own internal power structures, individuals who become the champions of the architecture, its priests and warriors, who will battle to preserve it.

The architecture will always sacrifice the individual (or a sub-group) if it perceives them as a threat. (See Run With the Pack.)

“All for one and one for all

You pay a price for every bone

Run with the pack or run alone.”

If under threat from an alternative architecture, the priests and warriors will attempt to mobilise their individual members to combat the threat. See “Guantanamo Bay.”

The architecture must survive.

Not only are there many nested architectures that we inhabit but some of them are competing.

Some of them, like political ideologies, religions, economic systems, have no qualms about taking life or causing individual harm to not only ensure their survival but to ensure the eradication of the competitor. Eradication is the best guarantee to survival after all.

We are born into our first architecture, the family. Over time we absorb, and later learn, its rules, power structures, limits, right and wrong actions that lead to pleasure and pain, its view of our place in the world, where we belong, how we fit, etc. And crucially, what meaning we attribute to all of these experiences.

As we grow, we sometimes choose which additional architectures we join, sometimes they’re just thrust upon us, sometimes we stumble into them by accident.

Mostly we just accept these architectures. Firstly, because we are not conscious of them. They are all around us, they arrive in the guise of “truth” not as a construct. Not just “truth” but with emotional weight and the unstated but ever-present threat of ostracism if they are not accepted. How can you challenge or reject something that you don’t know exists and you can’t actually see an alternative?

It is in our teenage years and sometimes in our twenties that the first cracks begin to appear in the architectures in which we live. We start to question. Does this make sense? What’s this really doing to me? Are there better ways of living? No surprise that this is the time when families face their biggest stresses. Their children don’t see the architecture, but they see that something is constraining them, that things have been assumed without being “proven”, that other families seem to work in different ways, etc. The architecture is threatened and it pushes back through parents, the broader family structure, other architectures that are aligned with the family one.

There are usually only three outcomes from this struggle. They aren’t necessarily permanent.

The existing architecture (without being named as such) is accepted as truth. The child becomes a carrier of the architecture. Stress, anxiety, tension is removed. The child becomes a “proto conservative” (not in a glib political way but as an inevitable result of accepting the architecture. You think it’s good, so you obviously want to preserve it.)

The existing architecture is rejected as a whole or in part. The child cleaves towards a competing architecture. Something they see as carrying more “truth” but still with agency. They become proto “anti-conservatives”. (Same as above but you think that a “new” architecture will be better.)

Both the existing and competing architectures are rejected and the child looks for architectures that are more “fringe”. Something that allows them to reject their architecture but is not (as yet) a significant competitor.

The thing to note with the above is that, irrespective of which option the individual chooses, they are still in architecture, and the rules of architecture will still apply. No matter how “fringe” the group is, it still has its political structures, its stated and unstated rules, it will still turn on an individual to ensure its survival. And should it gain ascendancy, it will behave just like the existing dominant architecture. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

On reading the above, you might conclude that there is no hope. We can’t escape architecture. Whatever move we make we will be inside it, shaped by it, risk that whichever architecture we inhabit will become just as bad, or worse, than the one we used to inhabit. This is all true.

However, architecture is not our enemy. It is a condition, like gravity or our necessity to breathe. It would be ludicrous to label gravity as an enemy. Just like gravity, architecture is necessary for our survival. An architecture only becomes an enemy when we inhabit a competing architecture.

Where we find hope is when we recognise the architecture that we are inhabiting and consciously decide how to respond to it.

We recognise architecture functioning when it cracks. When it doesn’t quite make sense. We do this easily with competing architectures via logic and emotion. There “logical” inconsistency is obvious, verging on stupidity, they make us angry or sad. Innumerable counter arguments come to mind unbidden. We have been trained to do this by the architecture that we inhabit.

It’s much more difficult to perceive the cracks in our own architecture. These bypass logic and emotion. They manifest in different ways. Firstly, directly through the body, we feel unnamed physical discomforts. Secondly through more subtle and complex psychological states such as stress, tension, anxiety and even depression. When we notice this it’s a sign that we’ve comeacross a crack in our architecture.

Our most natural, programmed response is to attempt to dismiss the cracks. Mostly we succeed. We have developed very sophisticated mechanisms to maintain our architectures.

Rather than deflecting or running away we must try to stay in the crack. Because only through staying there will our architecture be consciously revealed and only once revealed can we understand the issue that caused the crack.

Once we know that understanding we reach the point where freedom and hope become possible, because we can choose consciously how we want to respond. We can choose to stay in our architecture (but this is now a conscious choice, not an unconscious imperative), adopt another, or exercise our human level freedom to respond and modify our architecture. With this act, we attempt (and sometimes succeed) to resolve the crack.

For some reason, I fell into the cracks and saw the architectures and wondered: what’s going on?

My work, inhabits architectures as does everything, however, it inhabits them through conscious choice and with a specific goal: to make the architecture visible and conscious. It sits and stays in cracks. Avoids judgement. Leaves resolution hanging, because any attempt to judge or resolve is just a way of creating another architecture.

The Autumn Stones inhabits a terrain in which two architectures are battling for supremacy: “the world is summer” from the child, and “the world is autumn” from the mother. It shows why they are both right but neither can win. We’re inside both architectures, the cycle feels eternal and eternally painful. We stay there and there is no escape.

But, any reader will see the answer. Someone has to change their mind. They have to step outside their architecture. The tragedy is that neither can.

If one of them could, what would be the true authentic human response? Would another response be possible?

So, when you’re reading my pieces try to see the architecture(s). Try to stay in the crack. See what you see and do what you want with it.