The Evolution of Evolution: Money, The State, and Psychoanalysis (part 1)
The world has evolved away from the kindness of our families and communities and towards the professionalism of strangers. This is not to say we care more for money than our families, rather that the process of monetary exchange inscribes our loved ones into a system of ruled by the cold professionalism of the other. We can interact and define our families only insofar as it interacts with the cold professional. This is the same idea that our desire is inscribed into language to the point where desire for humans can not be spoken of outside of language, we can also say that society and our interactions can not be understood without the idea of money.
We live by trading with strangers in their capacity as professionals. We deal with corporations who are not any one individual and yet can speak to us and demand from us. Complex trinkets and ideas exchange between humans, but we rely on the alienated parts of man to survive. The coldest parts of us define the most important methods for us to Actualize our Desire and Drive, thus we have a symptom within us that can only be understood as the Actuality of Money in the world.
Darwin’s seemingly benign observation that humans sometimes select arbitrary qualities to extend in pigeons did not touch on the larger version of commodity exchange which becomes the fruit of human selection. Different houses in different neighborhoods with different levels of agency varying between people to choose where and how they want to live. We work and extract the only nectar that counts, money, which can transform into anything.
What other animal has the substance of money that man has? Pollen or honey for the bee is not equivalent to money. Money has the ability to transform into food, housing, labor, no matter who you are, so long as it isn’t poisoned money, as long as you aren’t friends with the wrong person like Putin, and your money gets frozen. None the less, the substance is still frozen, the real important substance, not yourself, but your money.
You are disposable, your money is not. Your money could get lost, but it would never be stepped over on the street if it could be automatically deposited and become someone else’s money. Your mother may not be an adequate substitute for another person’s mother, they may only appear as something else entirely, a stranger. But your money can always be money for the other, the pure evolved substance of mankind.
Money creates social relations and organizes material conditions along the lines of its accumulation. There is very little stressors that a million dollars would not help. The ultimate substance is magic, it is something which can transform, not the end objects themselves.
There is a crisis of alienation because mankind’s most evolved substance is something whose material has little to no meaning, only its essential potential to transform. In the background of human selection was this second interesting process, human selection where Drive evolved out of instinct and intelligence. With humanity’s desire to articulate itselves and consume, a method evolved in order to do make all that a human could dream reality. Money: the transformer.
Human preference can seem arbitrary, thus the evolutionary process takes a seemingly arbitrary turn once enough intelligence is produced.
Besides Money, there is language.
Evolution leaves natural selection behind as it begins the pathway of becoming the evolution of ideas simultaneously as it becomes the evolution of drive. Ideas interact as well as Psychoanalytic Drives which distort Ideas towards the Self-Interest (or psychological well-being and/or desire) of the individual. Money adds power to our ideas like no other substance can. Money buys people, professionals, and organizes communities around these Ideas which language and society has created. The way our world is evolving is the extension of various Ideas of freedom and group choice, as well as the ideas of tradition, the glory of power, and the need for class consciousness. The interactions between these major themes in world spirit interact and evolve in ways which natural selection does not account for.
Certainly we see power and the social in wolf packs, but we don’t see direct democracy. Only Drive can extend instinct into something like a vote. If we go by the measure of natural selection, we can human select tendencies of natural selection and go by our own Ideas of improvements od natural selection, as some try to create offspring while ensuring the survival of ourselves and the thriving of our families.
Language and Money become the Lacanian Sinthomes of mankind, the thing that desire can’t overcome and our power can’t escape.