Also available on YouTube and Spotify.
Being raised by robots was difficult. How could someone become a person when the only thing that lived in metal eyes was the reflection of yourself that you couldn’t yet understand? You were an infant, a wailing mass of hunger, fear, anger, discomfort, and a desire to be held in the safe arms of a being who was capable of co-creating affection. However soft they’d made those mechanical arms, it was only enough to teach you rules, not show you how to be cared for and to care in return.
In a technofeudalist society, in which the raising of our young has been handed to AI controlled by corporations seeking a profit, what exactly is lost? How would that differ in a solarpunk society? This is one that’s egalitarian, and full of lush, green nature, while still providing the beauty and benefit that advanced technology can provide.
In this essay we’ll be discussing how socialization gives us maps that shape our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world. If we want to create a solarpunk mythos, a story that can guide us beyond the dehumanizing, silicon dystopia in which we’ve found ourselves, then it’s necessary that we understand how our culture has filled us with profit-driven stories, mass-produced archetypes, and narcissistic desires.
We’ll first begin with what I mean by socialization. This is the process by which your society, your parents, teachers, and media teach you how to navigate that society. What is right, wrong, normal, natural, what does it mean to live a good life, and how do you actually live that good life given all of that? They, in effect, teach you what it means to be a person, and, importantly, why their vision of personhood and a good life is justified as true, good, and beautiful.
Henriques defines a system of justifications as a system of propositions that map the world to, “coordinate and legitimize action,” and as such, “humans are transformed into persons as a function of being socialized into systems of justification.”1
Through socialization, you learn what it means to be a legitimate person, a legitimate man, woman, and definitely not any other gender… You also learn what counts as a legitimate justification for believing what counts as a legitimate person or legitimate belief. Why do you believe the reasons given to you for why you ought to believe something? Almost certainly because of the decade long training program we’re all forced to attend 5 days a week throughout our childhood. I’m not against the concept of school by any stretch of the imagination, but is it any wonder it’s so easy to assume that all these beliefs are the natural, “real”, and best way of things?
Lacan conceptualized socialization as your introduction into a specific Symbolic Order. This includes a language, knowledge, law, morality, and more. In very short, a culture milieu and social order. He thought that your entire understanding of yourself was defined by your culture, and thus, by something other than yourself.2 I think this is a bit overstated, but I do think that our culture has an enormous influence on how we can understand ourselves. This is despite our very real biology and despite self-initiated, non-cultural learning such as the process of learning to walk.3
Yet even before you walk you’re already being socialized. The psychoanalyst Fink can help us understand why this is the case. Think about a baby who feels some discomfort and so begins to cry. The parents, not knowing what the problem is, might respond to that discomfort as if it were coldness, hunger, or pain. Without knowing why their baby is crying, the parent can only guess until the baby stops crying. If they only ever respond to cries with food, the baby will slowly learn that these discomforts “mean” hunger, and so learn, even before it can speak, that discomfort equals hunger equals, “I must go find food”.2
The key point here is that we learn that an experience must be responded to as if it meant something altogether different. We learn to associate specific problems with specific solutions. That means we’ll be biased toward pursuing that learned solution for hunger, fear, discomfort, even if it doesn’t actually fit with the problem.
For better or worse, things never work quite that simply. Robots shape infants according to their corporation’s programming, responsive parents can get better at identifying their infant’s needs because they can care. Yet the point is that your experience of yourself is never truly personal, even if your parents were always responsive enough. Sloterdijk writes that intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity and this seems to have been borne out by 4E cognitive science.4,5 In other words, “I” am an “I”, only insofar as I have been taught to relate to myself through other people. Fink adds that:2
“The Other, in this sense, can be seen as an insidious, uninvited intruder that unceremoniously and unpropitiously transforms our wishes; it is, however, at the same time that which enables us to clue each other in to our desires and ‘communicate.’”
That is to say, when we’re given a specific language by a specific culture to understand ourselves and the world, we’re ultimately constrained by what our culture teaches us certain words are supposed to mean and what is associated with those words. Yet, again, that language is often the only way we can communicate with others what we want and need. However biological our needs as humans may be, we cannot escape the influence language and culture has as our guide to understand ourselves and to help others understand us.
Think about the difference between the language of humours or demons vs. the language of medical science. Clearly, our language matters in understanding ourselves and solving real problems in the world.
I think this is an important point to keep in mind. However violent the process of socialization may be, it is 100% necessary. In the process of creating solarpunk, we want to socialize people in the norms, rules, and regulations that allow solarpunk to continue to be possible. We want people who care deeply for each other, to know the difference between mindless stimulation and those experiences that are truly meaningful to us as human beings. It’s not as simple as assuming that people just know that.
Yet, given that the process of socialization can constitute a violence, we must always be aware of how socialization works so that we can overcome it when it stops working for human flourishing.
Lacan can again help us with the following table, which shows how our biological needs are interpreted by the language our culture gives us to produce our desires for specific things, experiences, and people:2
This means that you’re born with certain needs. You experience cold and need warmth. You experience hunger and need food. You also need love, you need laughter, you need all sorts of things. The problem is that you can only understand your needs through a Symbolic Order that defines with language and specific moral codes what those needs are, how they can be satisfied, and thus, what you desire to get in order to satisfy them. Through socialization into a culture, you’re given a conceptual map for understanding your bodies and how you must respond to the experiences of this body you, at least in part, are.
To understand that body, we first need to begin with what your needs are. Some have criticized Lacan and his lineage of thinkers for having reduced humans to language rather than honouring our embodied existence as biological organisms.6,7,8 The fact is that your needs are, in part, biologically determined in the sense that your biology creates the conditions of possibility for you to need anything at all.
This brings us to the very important distinction between a need and a desire. A need is something biologically determined, whether that means it’s something you need for your survival such as food or it’s something you want because your biology allows you to want it. You don’t “need” to have a romantic partner in order to survive, or even to have an incredibly fulfilling life, because there are examples of people who have done both.
Yet, your biology is structured in such a way so as to make romance have the potential to be fulfilling and meaningful, and a lack to be so incredibly painful that fighting for romance can be a fight for survival and even a justification for violence. There is a need, an experience within you that can be satisfied by pursuing a romantic or sexual relationship, and that experience could possibly be meaningful, fulfilling, and good for you.
The fact that there are spectrums of asexuality and aromanticity means that it’s possible you could have the experience in which you’d never want to have sex or romance.
Let’s then say that you, as an aromantic, were forced by your culture to pursue romance and all the responsibility to another human being who demands romance from you. That could lead you to a life that made you feel nihilistic and resentful, potentially even to the point of seeing it as a fight for survival and justification for violence.
Even if such experiences are statistically unlikely, the exception demonstrates how biology creates the conditions for romance being possible. Regardless of how much the environment may influence the extent to which you experience a need for romance or not, human biology is variable enough that you can experience that need or not.
That said, how you actually go about responding to any need is defined by your culture and the language you use to understand your needs. Desire then, is an experience you have for something that your culture has taught you will satisfy the need you experience within your body because of how your biology affords or makes possible that need and the methods of its satisfaction.
This of course doesn’t mean that anyone can desire anything, but that everything you desire to get in order to satisfy a need has been socially constructed. You’ve been taught by other people that a certain biological need can only be satisfied by a certain thing. Again, you can teach yourself things that no culture has taught you, but the point is that culture is powerful enough to supersede this in some cases.
Again, our biology constrains what could possibly satisfy your needs. In fact, my precise point is that however much you may desire something, it may not actually satisfy your needs. This is called satisficing, and it is, at least one force, that is destroying our planet. Satisficing is when you’ve been taught that a certain thing can satisfy your needs, but it either satisfies it well enough while also causing you problems or doesn’t actually satisfy your needs despite your continued desire, your continued pursuit.
As an example of the first, junk food satisfices your hunger because you can eat and survive with junk food. The issue is that junk food can make you so unhealthy that it eventually kills you because it lacks essential nutrients. It never truly “satisfies” your hunger in the way whole foods do, it merely satisfices because it attracts you more while providing you with less. When not kept in moderation, it actively prevents true human flourishing despite it contributing to your survival.
Here then, I want to define edification as responding to a need in a way that contributes to flourishing. In that sense then, we can build a spectrum in which satisficing is on one end and edification is on the other, with satisfaction lying somewhere in between.
For example, a banana might satisfy your hunger, chocolate might satisfice your hunger, but a well-balanced meal of whole foods with a little bit of chocolate every once in a while would edify your hunger. If it’s still unclear, an example of the second sense of satisficing can help us understand the difference better.
Before we continue, if you like this essay so far, then please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. It really helps with visibility in the algorithm. It also really helps if you share this essay with people you know. Thank you so much.
Drugs satisfice by soothing the pain of dissatisfaction, whether that pain is anxiety, loneliness, or something else. Video games can also satisfice, filling in for the pain of a lack of accomplishment, meaning, and purpose. Even accomplishment itself can become a stand-in for the need for belonging, satisficing belonging.
The point is that we become addicted to these things when we learn that any pain we feel can be solved with our addiction. Yet, despite our desire for them, they never truly “satisfy” the underlying need. This shows us clearly that our needs can be bound to desires that have nothing to do with actually satisfying those needs. Drugs can only ever temporarily soothe our pain. They can never satisfy our loneliness, which means that our loneliness is never properly associated with the functions meant to contribute to our social survival, let alone flourishing.
The key takeaway so far is to see how we are a complex web of biological needs and socialized desire. When they’re adaptive, when they function well, our socialized desires direct us toward those things that will satisfy or edify those needs in a way that contributes to our general well-being or even flourishing.
Sometimes understanding the difference between a biological need and a socialized desire is difficult because some needs are conflated and then we’re taught that desiring a certain method for satisfaction or edification works for several needs, when it really doesn’t. Remember that our need for accomplishment can be conflated with a need for belonging, and then we pursue accomplishment hoping that it’ll finally, one day, bring us intimacy and love. That’s of course not even getting into what our society teaches us “accomplishment” or “intimacy” are supposed to look like or how we’re supposed to pursue them.
Another example is that we have a biological need, a condition of possibility, for a loving-sexual partnership. This is certainly a nuanced point, but unless you’re asexual or aromantic, this is true enough. In either case, our culture can give us very different narratives that turn our pursuit of romance into satisficing.
A man who’s been taught by Incels that he can have a fulfilling enough relationship with pornography or OnlyFans because feminism has destroyed Western women has a satisficing relation with his need for intimacy. Such men can get to a place where they desire porn more than women, but porn and OnlyFans can only ever be a facsimile that satisfices but never edifies a need to contribute to true human flourishing.
Related to this is being convinced that pursuing social status is the path to romantic fulfillment. This could be a woman who chases a wealthy man in the hopes that this is what will truly edify her, allowing her to live the best, most fulfilling romance. This is another nuanced point.
Her biology creates the conditions of possibility for social status being attractive at all. Yet, it’s the culture that constructs what is believed to be high or low social status, and how important she believes social status will be relative to other features of an attractive partner. The more she chases social status to the exclusion of other attractive factors, the more she satisfices her need for romance rather than edifying it, despite the fact that she continues to believe it will one day edify her.
Researchers suggest that it’s likely that social status is attractive because we need a certain level of resource safety, social belonging, and learning from skilled teachers. Yet, there is no guarantee that what you view as being high social status is actually tied in any way to what will satisfy your biological need. It could very well be something that merely satisfices.9,10
This manifests as a socialized desire for social status as a promissory note for these biological needs, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that matters or that it even has to matter when you have access to other things that can be attractive. This is particularly true since women are no longer so dependent on a partner for social belonging and resource safety.
Yet, if you believe that wealth and social status are the primary path to edifying a need for intimacy within you, then you’ll desire education for a certain career that promises a certain amount of wealth. You’ll be spun up in systems of justification that give you beliefs about how the economic system ought to work, which then feeds back around into the perpetuation of culture that teaches children that wealth and specific capitalist definitions of social status are the primary or even only paths to success, happiness, and the good life.
What all of this shows us, is how your needs and desires get wrapped up within a justification system. This justification system emerges from and depends on, and then further justifies certain material conditions. That justification system must include how to socialize your children into the kind of people who can navigate those material conditions well enough to survive and achieve some vision of a good life.
In addition to this, Lacan says that your desire for intimacy with others functions in the following way. You desire both a thing that you believe will satisfy or edify your needs for intimacy while also desiring to become that which what you desire desires.11
To put that in more concrete terms, you desire a specific kind of woman who your culture has taught you will edify your need for intimacy. Your culture has also taught you that this woman desires a certain kind of man. In order to get that woman, you feel pressured to become that kind of man. If your culture teaches you that women desire wealthy, powerful men, then you’ll desire to become wealthy and to have a certain kind of social status. You’ll thus desire to become a specific kind of man that could possibly become wealthy and powerful within the bounds set by a very specific culture and socio-economic system.
You don’t believe this merely to satisfy a need so you can survive, but to edify a need so that you can contribute to human flourishing, to what you’ve been taught by your culture is truly good, true, and beautiful, whether that’s true or not. This same process obviously works with all genders and sexualities, sometimes creating competing narratives that put us at odds with each other for no real reason.
Importantly then, these narratives are not the territory. Your desires for things act as maps guiding you toward the satisfaction of your needs, but the things they point you to are not themselves your needs. In other words, your desires emerge from the archetypes your culture has given you about the heroes, villains, lovers, teachers, and other characters that inhabit your culture and world. You desire to aspire to be a certain kind of person. You desire to be with a certain kind of person. You desire to fight or flee from certain threats. You desire to transform this technofeudalist mythology so that you can make a better world.
Technofeudalism gives us myths and maps that mold our needs into desires that direct us toward content and toys that satisfice, yet rarely satisfy let alone truly edify. Corporations, our technofeudal lords, seek to extract from us whatever makes them the most profit, not what gives us the most meaning in life.
Solarpunk would give us myths and maps that mold our needs into desires that direct us toward experiences and people that truly edify us. We seek to relate with another in ways that honour ourselves, honour the other, and honour the natural world that create the conditions for any of this to be have been possible in the first place.
That’s what we’ll continue to discuss in the next essay.
Assignment:
1. We often conflate “need” with “intensity of feeling”. Next time you feel a desire for something, ask yourself if it’s a “need”. How do you know? Is the intensity of the feeling enough? Become conscious of how you say something is “needed” and how that shapes your behaviour.
2. What have you been taught will satisfy or edify a need? How do you know it’s true or false?
3. What are those things that truly satisfice, satisfy, and edify your needs?
4. What are the needs that are most important for you to satisfy or edify? In other words, what are those things that require mere satisfaction and what are those things that require edification?
Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Henriques, G. (2022). A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. Palgrave MacMillan.
2 – Fink, B. (n.d.). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press.
3 – Mills, J., & Goodwyn, E. (2023). Archetypal Ontology: New Directions in Analytical Psychology. Routledge.
4 – Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology (W. Hoban, Trans.). Semiotext.
5 – Newen, A., Bruin, L. D., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.). (2020). The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford University Press.
6 – Lakoff, G. (20). Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.
7 – Storm, J. A. J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of Chicago Press.
8 – Lewis, M. D., & Granic, I. (Eds.). (2002). Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development. Cambridge University Press.
9 – Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4
10 – Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(1), 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030398
11 – Creed, B. (2024). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.