“So I began to think more and more about The Individual, and I looked into what that actually meant. And what it was, was a structure that was pretty much created… The Ego structure was created out of what Julian Jaynes calls The Bicameral Mind becoming One Mind.
And apparently – according to him – he says that back in the old days of the Greeks, and the earliest writing of the world, people didn’t have self-consciousness in the way that we have.
They didn’t have Egos. They didn’t understand themselves as “I” in the same way that we do. Because the corpus callosum – that connects the two hemispheres of the brain – wasn’t connected.
So if you heard A Voice, That Voice was God.
And Homer, and all those guys, you’ve got plenty of examples of people hearing The Voice of God, and acting on that.
Alexander constantly acted on The Voice of God.
Julian Jaynes suggests that it wasn’t The Voice of God – it was The Voice of The Left Hemisphere of The Brain communicating with The Right Hemisphere of The Brain, interpreted AS a God.
So okay : now we’ve got the two things joined together. We’ve got This Beautiful Bridge in The Middle that links The Two.
But we have The Ego Structure – which was created when those things linked.
Suddenly we’re like: “Oh fuck. I am I. I am the I Am. This is my.. my god is this. I am separate; I am one.”
We made This Idea that we’re somehow separated from Nature.
No we’re not. Bullshit!
Again, I read New Scientist last month, right – and They’re talking about Nature: “We must control Nature; we must do this. How do we deal with our relationship with Nature?”
We are fucking Nature!
There’s nothing on this planet that is not “Nature”.
Power Stations are Nature;
Atom Bombs are Nature. Because Nature made us to make those things.
Either you Trust Nature, or you don’t Trust Nature – and I Trust Nature.
So we have to ask: What is Nature getting at here?
If we ignore this crap that we’re somehow isolated from Nature; that we somehow have to tame Nature…
Nature Knows Exactly What it’s Doing.
The Planet is NOT in Danger. We are.
The Planet’ll survive. The Planet’s been through, like, ammonia atmospheres and impossible-to-live-on, and everything dead – and it gets its way back out of it.
We’re in Danger. Or So We Think, because our hubris tells us that we are in danger.
Our hubris tells us that we’re about to Destroy The World; We’re gonna Destroy The Planet; We’ll fuck The Atmosphere.
No. We’ll fuck our atmosphere. But some trilobites’ll come along and live in anything we create.
So that is not The Problem.
The Problem is we’re standing here at the 21st century, stuck with Individuality. Because we’ve believed in it so much; it seemed so important that we should all be distinct. What happens if we stop being distinct?
And what happens if we think about Individuality as something that was actually just scaffolding for where we are now?
So if you create a skyscraper, you put up your scaffolding, you build the building – and what’s happened here is that we’ve overlooked the building, and focussed on the scaffolding.
Y’know – why aren’t we taking the scaffolding down?
Let’s do it today: take the scaffolding down.
Because the individual was a way to get us to this point. And what I really think.. and basically why I’m here is to try and punt this notion.
After doing this comic book for six years; after thinking about this stuff for six years; after proving that it works for six years, I’m left with this notion:
We’ve Been Fooled, and We’ve Fooled Ourselves, and We Continue to Fool Ourselves –
And, like Doug said:
There is No “Us” and No “Them” – There’s Just Us.
And somehow we’re trying to make This Thing work.
And it does Work.
