Why Are All Our Societies Like Malware?

I was talking with a friend this evening about the problem (#techno–moloch) at the ‘group-body’ level of our species where that entire terrain seems to be largely captured by something … at least relatively harmful if not openly malignant. For many years I have thought about this in a variety of ways because I have been trying to understand why this is so for my entire life. Perhaps to be able to affect it…

Our societies are not actually human. Corporations are not human. Religions are not human. Governments are not human. It’s like something parasitizes our species at the more-than-small-group layer, and ‘runs malware’ in there. Or so it often seems to me.

My friend shocked me by suggesting that what was interacting with us are sentient intelligences of a kind we have failed to recognize or contact. He posed them as a form of life that isn’t itself organismal, per se, but ‘rides on’ our kind of organism. And might be amenable to contact… or even be seeking it.

Nothing like this ever occurred to me. But something resembling contact with a nonhuman intelligence »happened to me… the first time I was ever able to begin to frame this situation in my mind…