Simple examples of a person’s actions against his own benefit are actions committed for religious or ethical reasons. When a person enters the realm of the possible thanks to counterfacts, the formation of personality leads him to the edge of his everyday life and to the premonition of death. The fear of death itself is the result of the evolution of meanings: “Knowledge of death, of the inconceivable possibility that the experiences of life will end, is a datum that only symbolic representation can impart” (Deacon 1997, p. 436). At the edge of his personal existence, man comes to the supernatural and to religion. Religion is one of the most motivating domains of meaning in the history of culture.
Morality is another domain of meaning that we have inherited from traditional society. It is the result of consistent learning over many generations and is therefore a practice that lies between instinct and reason. It is closely linked to immediate emotional, affective reactions:
“Once we view morals not as innate instincts but as learnt traditions, their relation to what we ordinarily call feelings, emotions or sentiments raises various interesting questions. For instance, although learnt, morals do not necessarily always operate as explicit rules, but may manifest themselves, as do true instincts, as vague disinclinations to, or distastes for, certain kinds of action. Often they tell us how to choose among, or to avoid, inborn instinctual drives” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 13).
Darwin’s theory of the evolutionary origin of emotions led Herbert Spencer and some of his followers to conclude that people would become less emotional in the future—it is the so-called “rudimentary” theory of emotions. James Scott notes that as domestication progressed in both humans and animals, their limbic systems, responsible for producing hormones and responding to threats and other stimuli, shrank and they became less emotional. The creation of the domus as a cultural niche meant that cultural selection factors—the ability to get along with one’s neighbors in the house—began to play a larger role compared to factors of the natural environment (Scott 2017, pp. 81-86). Although we can probably speak of the evolution of emotions, emotions were and remain the oldest and most fundamental element of thinking.
Tradition itself is not only the result of learning and cultural selection, but also of choice based on both emotion and reason. In the course of its evolution, tradition gradually but surely crossed the line between mere reactive behavior and meaningful action. It has changed from an animal to a human tradition and has become an accumulation of religious and moral practices, a value-rational action “determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success” (Weber 1978, pp. 24-25).
The foraging economy consisted of activities arising from natural necessity, with the rhythm and content of human life determined by the rhythm and content of natural processes. An individual essentially could not choose and had no choice within this fixed set of activities. The transition to agriculture led to two major changes. (1) The multiplicity of activities increased: an individual could choose—at least potentially—who he wanted to be and what activities he wanted to perform. (2) The technologies of foraging were relatively simple and each member of the tribe learned them and could reproduce them with some degree of success. The technologies of an agrarian society were more complex: the peasant, the artisan and the warrior did not learn the technologies that the other possessed and thus could not reproduce them. At the same time, an increase in the traditional order meant that most people were at the mercy of another human: natural uncertainty was supplemented and replaced by socio-cultural uncertainty generated by the state and social categories:
“It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality of bondage, in one form or another, in the development of the state until very recently. As Adam Hochschild observed, as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage. In Southeast Asia all early states were slave states and slaving states; the most valuable cargo of Malay traders in insular Southeast Asia were, until the late nineteenth century, slaves. Old people among the so-called aboriginal people (orang asli) of the Malay Peninsula and hill peoples in northern Thailand can recall their parents’ and grandparents’ stories about much-dreaded slave raids. Provided that we keep in mind the various forms bondage can take over time, one is tempted to assert: ‘No slavery, no state’” (Scott 2017, pp. 155-156).
The transition from foraging to farming, paradoxically, accelerated the growth of meanings and at the same time slowed it down. An increase in activities meant an acceleration, an increase in order—a slowing down of cultural evolution. The entire history of traditional society is a very slow and gradual increase in the proportion of people who are subjects of choice. Why was this process so slow? Perhaps because personal freedom depends on the progress of personality, that is, consciousness. It is personal freedom, the ability to choose for oneself, that is the main condition for the growth of meanings and for the acceleration of this growth:
“Locke says that ‘Freedom of Men under Government’ means ‘not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another man.’ Uncertainty in general and man’s inconstancy in particular therefore become the arch-enemy that needs to be exorcised” (Hirschman 1977, p. 53).
We would not reduce the complication of thinking and consciousness to the division and addition of knowledge, personality or identity. We are talking about the division and addition of active power as a whole. The division, addition and multiplication of active power means an increase in the complexity of the subject, both the individual human being and the culture-society as a whole. An increase in the number of counterfacts with which a culture-society or an individual operates means an increase in the entropy of the source of meanings, i.e. an increase in the minimal subject.
The division of active power develops along with the division of activity and the division of order that we discussed earlier. Historically, the division, addition and multiplication of meanings leads to a gradual and eventually major divergence between the complexity of the individual and the complexity of the culture-society. An individual takes part in only some of the activities produced by culture-society and operates within only a small part of the socio-cultural order. As a result of this divergence in the growth of meanings, a culture-society creates more counterfacts and produces more complex activities than any one person, or even all of them individually, could create and produce.
We have seen that meaning is not reducible to a minimal action: it contains “redundant” figurae. Likewise, the subject is not reducible to a minimal subject: it also contains “redundant” figurae. The mass of the subject, that is the length of the string of figurae or cultural bits by which it is described, depends on the mass of meanings of which it is the product. The result of the historical division, addition and multiplication of meanings is a growing multiplicity and mass of activities and meanings. However, the multiplicity and mass of meanings necessary for the reproduction of a culture-society as a whole are much greater than those necessary for the reproduction of the individuals who make up that society. We call the multiplicity and mass of activities that reproduce a culture-society the added activity, and the multiplicity and mass of activities that reproduce individuals the necessary activity.
Chapter 3. Simple circulation: surplus activity and exchange value
1. The origin of exchange