Flying Blind

I learned about hyperobjects from a philosopher and academic named James Madden. Before I continue, I feel duty-bound to plug his book here, even though I have yet to read it. I am further duty-bound to reassure annoyed readers that this is NOT another essay about UFOs; I have to make that disclaimer because the book is entitled, Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosphy, and the End of the World.

So, what is a hyperobject?

The example Madden often uses to define hyperobjects is the Pizza Hut Corporation. He begins by asking the question, what is Pizza Hut? Is it the restaurants? The workers? Its executives? The shareholders who own tiny pieces of its parent company?

Madden argues that Pizza Hut is both all of these things and none of these things.

Consider: every single restaurant, employee, executive, and shareholder could be replaced and Pizza Hut would remain Pizza Hut. None of its individual components are “Pizza Hut” and more than any single cell in your body is “you.” In fact, our cells are constantly being replaced. The object that you consider you has none of its original components, yet we still consider ourselves to be ourselves.

This is us.

Similarly, Pizza Hut is, in a sense, its own “organism” that operates according to its own sense of logic and order, a sense of logic and order which is not under the control of any individual. We might even propose that Pizza Hut self-organizes, since its organizational structure dictates that it must continually grow, innovate, reorganize, and replicate. Self-organization and replication are, of course, two of the defining characteristics of life.

So that’s a hyperobject. I have almost certainly mangled Madden’s explanation but, like the old saying goes about horseshoes and hand grenades, it’s probably close enough.

While I spent more than my fair share of time at Pizza Huts when I was a young promotional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle traveling the nation in support of the “Coming Out of Our Shells Tour,” Pizza Hut is not the hyperobject on my mind these days. My energies are instead focused on the hyperobject known as the United States of America.

My naïve view of nations used to be that countries are comprised of individuals who form an affiliation for the purpose of creating something known as “the common good.” What comprises the common good dictates national direction. Is safety the citizenry’s primary concern? Economic growth? Health and welfare? The arts? (It’s never the arts, but wouldn’t it be neat if it were?) Each nation must define its priorities and make choices about how best to expend its limited resources in support of those priorities.

I believed that any nation, ultimately, was in the hands of its citizenry. Even highly repressive countries must have the consent of the governed, however begrudging that consent is offered. Without such consent, I thought, no nation can continue. In other words, nations are bottom-up entities, even though they are always governed from the top down.

Lately, though, I’ve begun questioning that premise. Instead, I’m coming around to the idea of nation as hyperobject, which implies that it’s a system which eventually must evolve (or metastasize, depending on your outlook) into something distinct from the people who live within its borders. Every nation is like a Pizza Hut writ large, and the USA is the biggest Pizza Hut in the history of the world.

Viewed in this way, the USA has become an “organism” operating out of our control. I’m going to take it a step further and suggest that it’s possible – maybe even likely – that the US is not a collection of people and laws and airports and monetary policy. Instead, it may be something broader, something like an intelligence.

I don’t mean to suggest that it’s “conscious” in the way that we think of consciousness, only that we believe ourselves to be in control of the nation when it might actually be the reverse.

It might literally be true that the country is controlling us instead of the other way around.

When the nation is attacked, for example, what is our initial instinct? To fight back. When the nation is maligned, the instinct is to defend. When the nation suffers, the instinct is to “rally around the flag.” Why? Why do we instinctively move to protect this thing known as the USA?

We are only on this landmass by virtue of birth or circumstance. We call ourselves “Americans,” as if that says something about us. Does it? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.

Does being an American say anything more about us than being a Pizza Hut consumer? I would say from the perspective of the nation – if a nation can be said to have a perspective – we are far more like Pizza Hut employees than customers.

As I said, any nation must maximize its resources for the good of the whole. Which means that, from the national perspective, each of us must have a role to fill to ensure success of the nation. But what does it mean for a nation to be “successful?”

What happens when a nation’s success comes at the expense of the people within it? A crude example: it may benefit “the nation” to set taxes at a high rate even though such a high tax rate may hurt the individuals who are obligated to pay such tax. Most of us do so willingly because we have been conditioned to believe that we “owe” something to the country. But how can we owe anything to something that does not, in fact, exist?

The United States, like every country, is a fiction. Just like the dollar is fiction. Go far enough down that particular rabbit hole and you might discover that nearly everything is fictive, but let’s stay away from that conversation.

Once a nation like the United States becomes sufficiently “advanced,” (I don’t mean in the economic or technological sense, only in the sense that it has become complex enough that it cannot be ruled, or even understood by any individual) it becomes akin to a contract whose terms are set by the hyperobject itself. Yes, we have some modest say in the nation’s direction, but even the President can only point in a direction and hope that the nation follows suit. It is a contract imposed on us over which we have almost no say. Which means we have to be conditioned to accept it.

The national contract is less obvious when our individual aspirations align with the nation’s. But when these two things do not align, we sense that something is disjointed.

I suspect that’s what’s going on now.

A large majority believes the nation is “on the wrong track.” Moreover we’ve felt that way through the past several presidential administrations, of both parties, which may explain why we keep vacillating back and forth from the Democratic-led governments to Republican-led governments. We’re dissatisfied with both because neither can figure out how to get the country ‘back on track.”

The examples are everywhere. You just have to consider our various “crises” the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the mental health crisis, poor infrastructure, horrible inequality, and all the attendant woes that accompany them. It feels like nobody can fix it because nobody can.

The United States of America has grown so complex, so byzantine, so hyper, that it’s beyond the ability of any single person or any single government to control. We feel as if we are passengers on a plane encountering extreme turbulence. Who is ultimately stronger – the captain or the world outside the windshield?

I know I’m not alone when I say it feels like we’re flying towards something which we can neither identify or define.

The problem is compounded when you consider that US is only a small hyperobject within the larger hyperobject of the world of nations. Individual nations are also hyperobjects acting in concert with us, and us with them. And that hyperobject is acting in accordance – or discordance – with the still-larger hyperobject known as Earth.

It’s all a muddle. A dispiriting muddle at that, because it implies that individuals have almost no ability to reshape their nation or their world. We’re just along for the ride. Even the politicians, oligarchs, and spiritual leaders are unable to do much more than strap their seatbelts securely and hope the plane doesn’t go down.

For every person advocating one side of an issue, there’s somebody arguing the opposite. For every measure there is a counter-measure. For every initiative a counter-initiative. We live in unresolved tension, a world and nation of unstoppable forces and immovable objects. The result is stasis. We’re paralyzed by our inability to control the very thing we’ve created.

The obvious solution is to change the terms of the contract. The problem is, once set in motion, a hyperobject becomes less and less “willing” to comport itself to anybody’s will but its own, and so the effort to redirect it becomes exponentially harder as its complexity increases. My question: have we gotten to the point in this country where the total power of the citizenry to affect change is now dwarfed by the hyperobject’s unwillingness to change? I think that might now be the case.