In the Service of Giants

When he was young Phaedrus used to think about cows and pigs and chickens and how they never knew that the nice farmer who provided food and shelter was doing so only so that he could sell them to be killed and eaten. They would "oink," or "cluck," and he would come with food, so they probably thought he was some sort of servant.

He also used to wonder if there was a higher farmer that did the same thing to people, a different kind of organism that they saw every day and thought of as beneficial, providing food and shelter and protection from enemies, but an organism that secretly was raising these people for its own sustenance, feeding upon them for and using their accumulated energy for its own independent purposes. Later he saw there was: this Giant. People look upon the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer; different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can accomplish alone.

The metaphysics of substance makes it difficult to see the Giant. It makes it customary to think of a city like New York as a "work of man" but what man invented it? What group of men invented it? Who sat around and thought up how it should all go together?

If "man" invented societies and cities, why are all societies and cities so repressive of "man"? Why would "man" want to invent internally contradictory standards and arbitrary social institutions for the purpose of giving himself a bad time? This "man" who goes around inventing societies to repress himself seems real as long as you deal with him in the abstract, but he evaporates as you get more specific.

Sometimes people think there are some evil individual "men" somewhere who are exploiting them, some secret cabal of capitalists, or "400," or "Wall Street bankers," or WASPs or name-any-minority group that gets together periodically and has secret conferences on how to exploit them personally. These "men" are supposed to be enemies of "man." It gets confusing, but nobody seems to notice the confusion.

A metaphysics of substances makes us think that all evolution stops with the highest evolved substance, the physical body of man. It makes us think that cities and societies and thought structures are all subordinate creations of this physical body of man. But it's as foolish to think of a city or a society as created by human bodies as it is to think of human bodies as a creation of the cells, or to think of cells as created by protein and DNA molecules, or to think of DNA as created by carbon and other inorganic atoms. If you follow that fallacy long enough you come out with the conclusion that individual electrons contain the intelligence needed to build New York City all by themselves. Absurd.

If it's possible to imagine two red blood cells sitting side by side asking, "Will there ever be a higher form of evolution than us?" and looking around and seeing nothing deciding there isn't, then you can imagine the ridiculousness of two people walking down a street of Manhattan asking if there will ever be any form of evolution higher than "man," meaning biological man.

Biological man doesn't invent cities or societies any more than pigs and chickens invent the farmer that feeds them. The force of evolutionary creation isn't contained by substance. Substance is just one kind of static pattern left behind by the creative force.

This city is another static pattern left behind by the creative force. It's composed of substance but substance didn't create it all by itself. Neither did a biological organism called "man" create it all by himself. This city is a higher pattern than either a substance or a biological pattern called man. Just as biology exploits substance for its own purposes, so does this social pattern called a city exploit biology for its own purposes. Just as a farmer raises cows for the sole purpose of devouring them, this pattern grows living human  bodies for the sole purpose of devouring them. That is what the Giant really does. It converts accumulated biological energy into forms that serve itself.

When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as inventions of "man" but as higher organisms than biological man the phenomena of war and genocide and all the other forms of human exploitation become more intelligible. "Mankind" has never been interested in getting itself killed. But the super organism, the Giant, who is a pattern of values superimposed on top of biological human bodies, doesn't mind losing a few bodies to protect his greater interests.

~Robert Pirsig, Lila