I was talking last night with a good friend and towards the end of the conversation the topic shifted towards college and employment.
He related a story of a woman he knows who, without a college degree, started working at KFC as a server and eventually worked her way up to the corporate office. She started at the bottom and worked her way up to the top.
I can relate to this. I left college halfway though and started working at a temp agency, which had me calling dentists as part of a product recall for a dental company. That turned into a full-time job with the company, which turned into a job at the corporate office, which turned into the full-time consulting gig I eventually left, more or less, to pursue music.
The idea of working your way "up" - that you start at the bottom somewhere and work your way higher in an organization and / or in life and status, that's the basis of "The American Dream" isn't it? To make something of yourself from nothing.
It wasn't long before the conversation turned to politics and the thought, "well, the system is fucked up" popped into my head, right before my friend verbalized it. But what about the (specifically US) system is fucked up? That's a complicated question that has 320 million answers.
This whole idea of there even being a bottom and a top is the basis of a hierarchy. A hierarchy as defined by a quick google search is "a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority."
Reading that definition makes me cringe. The idea that people or groups are ranked feels unethical and seems to me to be at least partially responsible for some of the toxic attitudes and behaviors that exist in this country. All I need to do is open up my Facebook feed and I can read any number of articles or posts that make it clear that there are those who are in authority, those with power, and those who are not in authority and who suffer because of it. It was only recently that I realized my place in the hierarchy as a white cis male...and subsequently realized how that's a contributing factor to why I'm so emotionally messed up sometimes. But that's a different discussion.
In a ranked system, as above, so below, in order for certain individuals to have power or authority over others, there must exist others who have less or no authority. In other words, the authority of some is defined be the lack of authority of others. Both must exist simultaneously in order for the dichotomy to exist, as each defines the other.
This works great for capitalism, right? My product is better than yours, it's differentiated in the market and so it has value. Kraft mac & cheese is better than the generic brand by virtue of the generic brand even being called "generic."
Ranking systems help us sort out the big mess that is life, how we make sense of things. But when we're ranking people, that's a funny thing because, at the end of the day, at the fundamental human level, what makes you so different than me? Take two random people, a fortune 500 CEO and a homeless person, and put them on a desert island. What's the difference between them? Both are living, breathing human beings that eat and shit and have the same capacity for love and the same capacity for suffering and in the end have the same basic needs. Outside of the system they are the same. Within the system, they have a rank, which reinforces the system itself. And where does the system exist? On paper in the form of laws and regulations, certainly, but I would say it exists even more so in the minds of the people itself, in their attitudes and beliefs about themselves and where they fit into the model. Racism doesn't necessarily exist on paper but it is certainly alive and well in this country. So to me, the collective human mind is an operating system whose programming instructions are distributed amongst everyone in the form of attitudes and beliefs, which drive behavior.
I said to my friend, "You know, I read an article someone posted on Facebook the other day about how things are changing, how millennials are fed up with the old model and how the internet is connecting and changing things." That resonated with me. I can feel it and I believe a lot of other people can feel it too: things are changing. They must change or our species will eradicate itself. But what must change? The change must be in how we organize the world, how we think about it and our place in it, and especially how we view time.
The way I see it, the most fundamental thing we must deal with is ourselves, which is to say human beings. On a day-to-day basis, all you ever really deal with are humans - whether that be other humans or yourself. So why don't we have a more human-centric model, if all there really is, practically speaking, are other humans? Why does so much hatred exist in the world? Why do we hate ourselves? Why can't we see that the other is not separate from self, that they are one complete, connected whole? And when I say we, I mean I struggle with this as well.
I've spent a lot of time getting deep into the study of music over the past three years. One thing that became immediately clear to me early on is that music is circular, it is periodic. That is to say, if I play the note "C" on a piano and play all of the other keys sequentially going in either direction, eventually I'll play another "C" that sounds essentially the same as the original "C." And yet, the language of music, excepting the circle of fifths, obfuscates the true periodic, circular nature of music. Instead, it's presented linearly. The lines on a page of music are, well, lines. The piano is linear and hierarchically organized, with the white keys given preference, and the key of "C" (and related modes) having preference. Notes start at "A" and end at "G."
Linear thinking and hierarchies go hand-in-hand. But why all this linear thinking? It might sound sound strange to bring religion into this now, but I view the Christian cross, the one that is intended to symbolize Jesus' death and resurrection and all that, as almost more a symbol of linear thinking than anything else.
Whether you believe in Christianity or not, the fact is that the cross is a pair of lines that, well, cross each other. Lines bread hierarchies. And where does one of the largest and most historically entrenched hierarchies exist? The Catholic church. I don't intend this as a criticism of Christianity or Catholicism, but more to point out the hierarchy of it. I am criticizing hierarchies and linear thinking.
We think of time as linear. There's a past and a future and they never connect. But what in this universe is not circular? Galaxies swirl. Even the straightest of roads exist on the curved surface of the earth. The fucking earth is a sphere that goes around the sun in a circular (OK, elliptical) orbit. We come back to the same point in space in relation to the sun once a year. It is the same, but it is different. It is another "C" that is distinct from the first and yet it's the same "C," to use the music metaphor from above.
So what is the alternative? Anarchy is one thing that comes to mind, but anarchy is still an "archy" that defines itself by the absence of organization or authority. In that regard, in my mind, it's just the other side of the hierarchy coin.
Is there a way of organizing that takes into account both the part and the whole, that doesn't have linear ranking but recognizes each part as both a piece of and reflection of the whole and a whole in and of itself? After all, I can think of myself as having many different levels that have existence in and of themselves but are dependent and interrelated to all other levels without preference. There's this mind with these ideas, this body sitting here typing them out, the organs and various systems that keep my body operating, the cells that make up those organs, molecules, atoms, etc. Not to mention the environment in which this body exists, the earth, the air, the sun, other humans. It's all one connected whole. All of it is necessary for me to function and exist.
It turns out there is such a method of organization, called a "holarchy." Where a hierarchy is a linear ranking system with clearly defined tops and bottoms, a holarchy is more like a fractal. Zoom into any level in a holarchy and you're looking at a whole complete part that reflects both the larger and smaller related wholes.
So how does this apply to humans? Well, this is where I falter, because I don't know. Humanity is large and messy and historically violent. And I can't claim to have any of the answers. All I know is it seems clear to me that the current way of thinking about ourselves is not working - because the operating system I've been given doesn't work for me - and we need to expand our understanding of what the fuck this spinning ball of life is, beyond traditional concepts and ways of seeing things. I feel like we're close to some sort of shift, maybe. But who knows.
I've driven myself crazy thinking about all this stuff and have realized that I need to apply this obsession of deep thinking to something more practical and manageable, lest I wither in a big ball of anxiety and dread. So I've been looking at music and looking at it very deeply and looking at it without existing language as much as possible. That it to say, the challenge I've given myself is this: can I produce a theory of western music that doesn't use existing terminology or language as its basis, that doesn't use ratios to describe intervals, that doesn't rely on complex math, and especially doesn't organize things hierarchically? I believe I've found a way, and that way is to fundamentally never lose sight of the fact that music is circular and that each note, each chord is always played in relation to other notes and other chords. I believe I can describe music holarchically. And, I don't know, maybe I think that if we replace notes and chords with humans and societies, maybe a theory like this can have some wider applications.
Until then, you'll find me drawing simple geometric shapes and playing guitar, trying to figure out what all this is for.
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