Existential threats

The relationship between people and things reflects the nature of human thinking. The overemphasis of boundaries, the differences, between things is what distinguish them. But that overemphasis is in some ways a vital attempt at staving off the asphyxiation of one meaning or its obverse twin, no meaning. And in the final summation, that's the only meaning: one, none. The work of humans, as creative beings, is to split the one into opposing wholes while using the none as a boundary condition for a system of signs that, for all intents, represent a world out there. And we use a system of signs as an outward facing element of the simulation of reality. The fatal linchpin is that the simulation is the reality. The physical contours of this simulation are the coordinating elements between symbol and matter. For instance, our symbol system has a spoken component with an alphabet that represents all the discrete sounds occurring in a vocabulary. This alphabet is both an artifact of symbol making and speaking as it is a tool for transmitting speech through time as well as providing the symbolic means for initiates to form a reality through engagement with self, other, and world. In some realms of this symbolic mediation, the material conditions of its deployment effectively perform a specific relationship between user and world. The ones in particular that I am most concerned with are the senses of well-being and normalcy. When threats to these senses occur both the weakness of the simulation and its defense reveal themselves. While threats to well-being and normalcy hardly constitute existence they represent some broad aspects of one's preferences in one's existence. When the person, detached from the actual event considers the threat an imminent and existential threat, this person reacts in an absolute manner. For example, amidst the 2008 financial crisis resulting in the 'Great Recession' several people, facing the loss of their savings or some other financial means, reacted by committing suicide or killing their families and pets and then killing themselves. Imagine for a moment a man, facing the imminent loss of his house, his car, and virtually all of his leisure activity dressing up in a Santa costume, gunning down his family, and then turning the gun on himself. Consider a man in a Florida movie theater escalating an argument with another man about his cellular phone use in the theater finishing it with a gun. These outstanding, and rare, examples point to the very fragile realities through which people make fateful decisions. Killing a man who interrupts your movie experience or mass murdering your whole family over a severe financial hardship demonstrate how people can ante it all over a perceived existential threat.

A threat to a way of life is often, in fact, not much of a thing at all. At most it can be a disruption in a routine of actions, which substantiate the normalcy one experiences. Some aspects of an existence that are no longer used does not constitute a loss of existence entirely but merely a change in existence. Intersections between life activities and market-provided commodity applications occur all over in a modern world. Water, food, and fuel are broad categories, which entail countless applications that affect the way we experience ourselves and the world. The ability to infinitely change components of how one experiences a life is the gift that human praxis brings. The changes can lead to pleasant experiences or terror, but to the extent that the body remains intact, fed, and shielded from the elements is a basic, a modicum of living, which counts as an existence. One could imagine that it is out of this kind of experience that modern humanity emerged, and it was on the shared ties of a community that knowledge and practice were passed down for millennia until now. But now is no different in essence just in kind--we have avatars of the past to teach us: institutions.