Human beings — autonomous individuals, consciously integrated into a single, integrated network

Question from the Internet:

“Are we mainly autonomous agents whose dignity and worth come from the individual choices we make with our lives, or is our most important characteristic the web of social relations in which we exist?”

It is actually both.

We are all born as autonomous agents, feeling ourselves as standalone, egocentric, subjective beings, seemingly making individual choices, shaping our own lives.

Now, at the height of our inherently self-centered, subjective human development, where each individual feels oneself as a world on one’s own, when we all — knowingly, unknowingly — survive, succeed at each other’s expense, we need to learn how to exist as a single, mutually integrated “super-organism”, where we all act as individual cells, making our choices, calculations only for the wellbeing, benefit of the whole collective.

This is a process that is forced upon us by Nature’s laws of integration, and by evolution’s relentless plan progressing towards a most optimally integrated system — we are also integral parts of.

The fact that we have to make and we can the conscious, willing, proactive integration through each other into Nature — above and against our original nature — is our Human advantage, uniqueness above other animals that are blindly, instinctively integrated by birth.

This gives us the ability, the unparalleled role in Nature to observe, partner the system consciously, with an independent — still integrated, insider — point of view.

As a result, with the help of the conscious, insider attainment of the system, we will tangibly, realistically feel as if we ourselves designed, governed the whole system.