Elon University

A vision for the future

This is one of nearly a thousand foresight statements shared by people from around the world. To return to the Voices of the People home page or to refine your search, click here.

Name: paul dekker

Bio: Alive in the year 2006

Area of Expertise: Technology Developer/Administrator

Topic: Global Relationships/Politics

Headline: The objectification of the social mind

Nutshell: Each human's mind is a social creation. Can we talk intelligently and collectively?

Vision:

What people think in general not in particular, will be the object of a great study in the near future. In the next 5 to 10 years perhaps, collectively ever more people will be realising like myself that each individual’s life although seperately challenged by the requirements of survival is no different to the next.

We are and always have been a collective and more importantly our minds are not our own. Our minds are an individualy located derivative of what we percieve of the general social sense. All our methods of defining our selves are socially derived: e.g. I am taller than him, shorter than him, browner than him or her, quicker than him, more or less likeable than him or her – all socially relative definitions of our selves. This is how we know our selves and how we build up an idea of our selves.

All of these definitions add up to just general noise. What is most important is that we (collectively) think about and perscribe to our selves what we actually are and how we react when challenged by various human and otherwise contrived circumstances.

We are all the same, we all want to survive and thrive, we all want to reproduce, we all want to live and know we have lived a life. We have to understand the front-end-loaded instinctual pattern of human existence, our tribalism in near and global forms, our racism based in our ability to recognise and differentiate, our killer instinct, our

sexuality, but we need to form an agreed idea of all our behaviours and be able to feed it to our children to humanise them.

Objectification of the social mind. What do we think we are up to? Can we talk intelligently and collectively? I see signs all over that we are; I know I am a social derivative and that what has produced my thinking will have done the same to many others.

Date Submitted: February 1, 2006

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