It's time to talk about the birth of a Giant
by Sojourner
No I don't mean an author, I mean the one we call THE Giant. The one we call THE giant, is the one we're a part of. RMP used the term and we all seemed to intuitively grasp what he meant by that, but what DID he mean by the giant? The Boys Scouts could be considered a Giant, a societal organization bigger and gestalt from its components, and yet when I think of the Boy Scouts I think of my dad and my friends who were scouts. Organic bits of life called cells and such make up people, and we know how those are born, but what about the giant? Where did it come from?
Oİinn slew the Giant Ymir to create the universe. David felled his Goliath, and Gandhi overran the British Empire. The Giant AT&T was dealt a crippling blow by the Giant The United States. I've seen Giant battles all my life. The Giants of the Union family have been fighting the clan of the Giants known as Management. Several Giants who are allies decided to intervene in a domestic dispute in the Middle East. Giants fight, giants die, we all know this. We cheer most times when our Giant is winning, and we complain the loudest when our Giant loses. But how are they born?
The labor signs are everywhere. The word "foment" will get used a lot in your Giant's spokepieces (the "media" in modern terms). The word foment is precise, because its like a seed pod bursting open. It's the skin of a tomato growing riper, and firmer, and more red and juicy and delicious and then bursting its skin, spewing forth its juices. It's like a boil sickeningly feasting on your flesh, growing larger and more tumescent daily, and finally gushing its vomitorious contents. The quality of ripening is always visible. Anytime there is a firm spot, that's where one is growing. If every person who made up the flesh of a Giant was a thread, then the Giant would be a blanket. Only every thread is moving and pulsing, pushing and pulling. And where the threads get pushed at, wrinkles and then tangles start to appear. Long before Patrick Henry and Paul Revere shouted incendiary words, one thread alone resented the presence of the British, and let his feelings be known. A tired, single thread named Rosa Parks got sick of giving up her seat. A disgusted and angry baseball pitcher thread decided to give up his career and move back to Cuba. A miserable painter decided he'd rather hang out in beer halls in Germany than Austria. Or a brilliant mathematician moves to Montana and decides to stick his twig in the river of fate.
If all Giants were corporations, and many of them are, it might be a lot easier to see. Gigantic multinationals like the Giant named Shell Oil Company are so large their very breathing moves smaller Giants like the Giant named Nigeria around. There was the megalithic Giant named AT&T, but she got torn up into pieces, and yet now her children live on and are now growing so large they are resorting to cannibalism. Just the other day the Giant named Bell Atlantic made a move to eat the Giant named GTE (his fraternal brother) not only alive, but in one giant swallow. But where do these Giants come from?
Same place we do. As I just alluded to in the previous paragraph, they come from their parents. The telephone system in the United States is an obvious analog, but there are many many others, from the murder of the Giants of Monopoly status. But you say, where did the original monopolies come from? Take the Giant named Microsoft for example, where did it come from? It certainly did not come from a division of any former company, and you can't say it grew from the side of a larger company, because the technology which they control is new and completely generated by themselves. Where did Microsoft come from, or more importantly, how was it born? Don't get lost here by trying to follow the trail of the individual founders. Yes, Bill Gates worked at IBM, but the thinking that IBM is one of the parents of Microsoft. Or that Bill Gates grew up in a state, and a town, and a family, and these smaller Giants are his parents. Because then you'll realize that there is no way to distinguish all the parents the Giant Microsoft has. You can try and guess like doing a DNA analysis from a child with unknown parentage, but you'll only get the genetic similarities. I have the same color eyes as my mother, but I might take after my father's personality more.
The more valuable path is the one which we should be sticking to all along. RMP's path. And assuming the cultural relativistic term, the path slopes upwards. Except for some scientific inquiry, all life as we know it now exists on this planet and not anywhere else. There is no place you have ever gone that was not on this planet, or, on the exceedingly rare chance you have been an astronaut, no place where you have gone entirely within materials of this planet. Even in your space suit, you were surrounded by material and air you manufactured with this planet's materials, and never even touched something not of this planet. But let's assume that all life (as we know it) is of this planet. If you're going to look for parents, let's start with the "mother" of us all, "Mother Earth".
I know some religious people like to think a male God created the planet, but even providing for that, "Mother Earth" gave birth to all our physical existence. Stars formed, then planets, and then cooled off, and life forms began to appear, and evolved, and presto, us. Of course, societies and Giants were formed long before humans were, and that's something we forget.
ALL living things participate in their own Giants, and if you don't believe me go check out some dolphins herding fish. We like to think of ourselves as "higher" or perhaps some kind of quasi-exempt from the rest of the life forms on this planet, but that's ok, because of the Intellectual level. But ask an Icelander or a rural Australian or a tropical forest aborigine in Brazil and they will more than confirm how close we are tied to the super Giant named "Mother Earth". Some people call her Gaia, but any name is fine I'm sure. We are clearly made up of bodies which the Giant Gaia grew, and will organize and in turn, harvest. We are as helpless to stop growing in the Giant as a stalk of corn can resist growing in a farmer's field. This might disturb you a little, but luckily we've got an escape hatch (in the ceiling) and it takes us up to a safe area called the Intellectual Level.
Thought we were talking about the societal level, the level of Giants right? Well the best way to describe a stripe of white on the American flag is to say it's got a red one over and under it. The Intellectual level is the level of what is called our "will", or alternatively "ability to think for ourselves", etc etc. The corn can't stop growing, but it can decide which way it's gonna grow. And maybe it'll pick up its roots altogether and walk around for a while. We are fantastically more complex than corn (even physiologically) and of course the analogy is rough and coarse. The issue of will we can discuss somewhere else, but now you can see how Giants are born.
Mother Earth devises her Giants as her Quality dictates, but we have the ability to tug against her pull, and a million drops all leaning to the left divert a mighty river. A lot of people nowadays use the motto "Think Globally, Act Locally". That's pretty much an excellent summation of the interplay between the Intellectual and the Societal level. All you can EVER do is act locally. You can't change a person, a family, a town, or country without all the other individuals involved deciding to act locally too. We know that the President of the United States cannot do what he likes if the American people do not want to do that. Your partner will not stop being an alcoholic until he decides to stop being one. Only you can change anyone, and that's only you. I could go on more about this somewhere else, let's return to the land of the Giants.
All the Giants come from their Mother, and that's the Giant named "planet Earth". She of course has HER parents, which are unnamed but you can ask an astronomer about how she was born. And so on and so on. The truth of the matter is that ALL Giants come from her. To say otherwise would be like telling a cell that he made the body he is a part of get created. Intellectual level will does not create countries, the stack of parents starting with the planet Earth does. Bill Gates didn't create Microsoft. The planet earth created amoebae, animals, monkeys, people, more people, Bill Gates' parents, Bill Gates, and then Microsoft. With millions of other of her children omitted from that list. Microsoft would have nothing to sell if nobody wanted computers, or DOS. If they were selling lead forks and spoons, they'd be out of business because the Giants do not need lead forks. They do not also need the need of needing lead forks.
In any event, this is a short analysis of the birth of Giants. I wanted to offer this more of as a perspective, rather than a comprehensive break-down of the terms and levels involved. I hope to add more flesh to the bones of this sometime in the near future, but only Quality will tell what happens. Do you feel that the Giant we belong to needs these words?
