Notes on the Super Person 1

In everyday speech, "I" and "we" mean different things. but the boundaries can be fuzzy. To our ear, the "Royal We" is somewhat comical - the Queen seems to be bound by custom never to use "I". Yet, historically, the Crown is, in some sense, the personification of the state. The Queen is, in some sense, always plural.

In everyday life, we are often presented with an individual claiming to represent something larger than themselves - sometimes an annoyingly vague group, as in "we don't allow blue jeans on the golf course".

Many, if not most, of the important decisions in our lives are made in cooperation with some kind of "we". "We" decide to get married, hopefully to a person our respective families will accept into the family "we". On the job, we work with others in teams, often on jobs that are initiated behind closed doors by shady high-status individuals. If we serve in the military, our team work is rigidly structured. The structure itself is remarkably stable even though the work itself sometimes seems to proceed in fits and starts as portrayed by the phrases often heard among the ranks "FUBAR" and "Hurry up and wait". Military organizations tackle their jobs with a creaky kind of efficiency (perhaps the best efficiency possible considering they are made up of human beings). In all human organizations, we see a hierarchy of organization and control, corresponding to military platoons, companies, regiments an divisions. We see it as natural and inevitable that any organization of any size will have an "organization chart" that parcels out responsibilities and control into "chunks" that result in comprehensible work plans for individual human beings, but result in the overall organization pursuing tasks of mind boggling complexity, such as governing a country.

For most of us, our jobs and daily experience are conducted in the context of some kind of collective - sometimes more than one overlapping collective. For example, we can be both family members and employees - citizens and rap fans.

It is interesting to ask if there is any sense in which we act truly on our own - independent of any kind of "we". Such action would, for example, require that we don't use language, since language is a vast social project conducted over centuries. For example, I can't write this blog entry without actively participating in the "we" of English speakers. And, of course, I assume the existence of the reader, "you", which makes us a "we".

But suppose I and engaging in an all-absorbing wordless task like sailing a boat? Unless I built the boat without reference to other boats and sailed it without training, I am again participating in a wordless "we" that, in spite of its silence, has a powerful effect on my experience of sailing. This consideration creeps into the simplest of acts, such as opening a door or flushing a toilet.

In an important sense, I am never alone. I am always part of a "we".

Many claim that mindfulness meditation can, for a few moments at least, free us from the chatter of inner thoughts and the influence of preconceptions to experience the world as it "really is", truly on our own. I am skeptical. When I hear accounts of the "emptiness" experienced in deep meditation, I still hear a mind fully equipped with knowledge of the world acquired through many years of instruction from culture. I maintain that we cannot see the world, make any decision or perform any action in a truly independent way. "I" am always "we". This is not to say that "I" don't exist at all. It is rather to say that "I" am a unique combination of influences. For example, my ideas tend to draw from the teachings of more than 200 people I can name. However, even if some other person knew the same 200 people, the combination of ideas, the priority and interaction between these ideas would be differnent from my own.