Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Rise of the functional person within the King-God plane

 The second mythical plane, which we can call the King-God corresponds to the complete social development of the temple cities and their subsequent transformation into city-states, such as Ur, Uruk, Kish, Eshunna, Memphis, or Heliopolis. The limits of this mythical plane are more easily understood from a mythopoetic point of view than from historical urban examples, since the passage to the next mythical plane, that of universal law, such as the one that opens in Babylon and continues in Luoyang or in Rome is more visible in economic and primitive narratives, especially the latter, than in aspects of urban or imperial configuration. The economic specialization implicit in the figure of the shaman germinated in the different social people that it effectively synthesized. This mythical plane could be called the “functional person plane”, thereby emphasizing the explosion of new economic persons brought about by urban complexification, although the functional person designation may be misleading because the social persons of the previous mythical plane also have a functional origin, are the result of economic activities. However, the specific difference given by the Anima person, from which an epistemological superclass was derived that gave synthetic unity to the narrative of the identity of the human and the world, was possible not by an economic action, but by the construction of primitive determination that made the linguistic person of the ancestor a social person. 

The conceptual unity that allowed the Anima person gave the conditions of possibility for the development of complex social structures, the totems, which, in turn, under the pressure of new economic actions, underwent a transformation in the direction of the creation of a functional or caste person. In the caste, the psychological elements of the identity of the totem are incorporated, as well as the general implicit idea of ​​a division of the vital actions according to the abilities and according to the needs. The totem is an intuitive understanding of the force of the variety within the group. The complexity reached by human societies is due to a process of interaction of economic and primitive determinations that have a mimetic relationship with each other and with the environment. For their part, narratives of primitive determination develop inertia of resistance to change, the weight of the past, which can result, in contrast to the economic actions that serve as a reference, mythical-ritual ideological structures whose representations about the world and the human are contradictory with the vital processes.

Social stratification came about from the unequal distribution of the surplus generated by the division of labor. In Karl Marx's terms, this primitive accumulation was nothing other than the historical process of divorce between the producer and the means of production, which implies that at some point they were “married”, and gives a wrong image of the actors of cold societies. The social person who produces in archaic societies is not the same person who later, in agricultural cultures, is deprived of the means of production in whose process he is involved. The producers in the mythical plane of the Anima Mundi are the people of the economic genre, hunters, gatherers, or small seasonal planters (tasks carried out by men and women). The fundamental production of these groups is food and human beings, and both their production and the subjects themselves belong to the clan, the phratry, or the tribe; in fact, that is the basis of solidarity of the totem, solidarity that extends beyond the human race, which makes even the hunter-gatherer production subsumed under the Anima Mundi law. However, in the planting communities, we witness a rupture of solidarity due to the predominant effective action of some social persons over others, a rupture of identity (to which the same totems gave rise) that made a large community function as a multiple organism. In times of technique as basic as that of the Neolithic, production capacity depended fundamentally on labor, so that the differences in wealth between communities were directly proportional to the population. 

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