There are three obvious orders of human relation wherein our innate capacities are co-opted, abstracted, represented, and sold back to us in crippled form. The forms we acquire and adopt re-make us in their image, resulting in the cognitive and relational analog of catastrophic metabolic misfunction. Cancer is a reasonable analog.

In a sense, this can be imagined as being a bit like a cell’s intelligence being exploited to harm it by the constant introduction of the imposing physical structure of a poison, or a medicine; like a misfolded protein that redirects our active and developmental momentum into forms that damage us and force misfunction.

The first order is educational, and this sets up the next two by instilling bizarre misrepresentations of what learning is, means, and can be. But it also misrepresents the identity, meaningfulness, and activities of animals, plants, humans, intelligence, relation, and nearly everything else, including the languages used to describe these matters.

The second order is the political. This seething mess of toxic relational and discursive effluent not only attacks our cultures from within but lays waste to our minds and world in the process. It is within our capacity to be exceptionally wise and skillful in these domains. Yet, and largely because of the toxic character of our educational inductions, we always manage to avoid this. Astonishing.

And the third is religion. This latter order is really the more interesting. What is hidden behind the monsters we have erected it its place is far too astonishing for any extant human culture to survive its exposure.

I find this endlessly fascinating. Essentially, the cultures set traps at each point of the trinity of our personhood and how we assemble consensus. But they can be disarmed. Particularly if one is aware of them.