The ongoing erosion of the human middle class which incorporates an emphatic, often romantic, entrainment of of the living and intelligent formations of nature into the foundational identity of these same folks has fostered meritocratic (plutocratic) social dynamics which don’t always align with this digital millennium. This misalignment is evidenced by a high retention of collective intelligence of this group that identifies as middle class, but which retains less collective control over the material stake in ownership of things that was more common in the recent past than now. This means that that ownership has been replaced with freehold/residence of or within an object and the actual ownership of the object or objects that constitute economic control rests invariably within the control of approximately three conglomerates within the western world. In short, a bunch of pretty smart people own approximately nothing short of their immediate possessions, intellect and debt. This happened for many reasons, one of such being that middle class folks were sold the idea they could purchase the ability to incorporate aspects of nature into their identity in exchange for a reduced impact and entrainment onto actual Nature, such as often takes place through the exchange of material wealth.
This process of creating that which is for sale and trading it to those in pursuit of that which is for sale is a very repeatable process in which aspects that can be found in nature might be simulated and “packaged” for sale. Such as if one would like to “tend to animals”, this desire can be simulated through technological advances in which there is very little impact or interaction with actual nature at the cost of fidelity. For the sake of constraining this essay, the fields of applied microcavity plasma science & optical plasma computing will be cited and not discussed as examples of advances that will permit light to be flashed on any surface and for a time the resulting system will permit capabilities indistinguishable from standard computers. These technical applications may pair with life such as it further expands towards reaches that Nature’s not currently perceived in such as incorporations of divinity as seen in totally unnatural settings as experienced through a computer. This simulation includes simulated worlds such as forum posting or game-playing, assembled digital personalities such as giving the progressive stimulation that one might feel as if they were walking through the woods and interacting with nature, at least in effect. This pivot has already begun to reformulate the individual experience toward new domains such as transhumanism.
On the consideration of “excess of personality” or “excess of” anything is approximately a pursuit in individual power. An example here is that this pursuit, in some respects, is undifferentiated from the pursuit and acquiring of excess money. One differentiator here being that money is more commonly accepted as a medium of exchange, whereas an exchange of personality has far fewer opportunities. It’s not just an abundance of ones’ available time to spend in nature, traveling or anything as nearly as much as it is that ability to hit some threshold in which there’s less reward perceived in doing something else than doing that which is accessible and available that is a constraint to which nature is able to offer to a person. This implies an overlap of indifference between any individual tasks that may be done being attributable to one or the other. It’s important to understand that the clarity from nature walks is very similarly described to the clarity that folks describe in meditating or even watching television, and the clarity itself is the original source of all known value in this world and is not further discussed at this time.
The individual adaptation of ones’ own mind to reap those rewards perceived in others enjoying something else is a simple expression of The Tyranny of the Majority that tend to think that it’s solely the milieu that precipitates the individual rather than their individual perspective of what, exactly, that milieu is. The resulting idea that a persons identity may hold power commensurate to the amount of nature they’ve enjoyed precipitated the idea of striving for the convenience of simply owning nature over experiencing it. This later became a matter of necessity as the individual capacity to earn, as well as their ability to enmesh their identity in nature, yielded compounding returns that induced hall effects in resonant populations with shared aspects of foundational identity. This permitted those that had first collected excess wealth or personality to then sell it to those that came there afterwards in pursuit of it, leading to a Tragedy of Commons as folks chase escalating prices that outpace their stride.
The middle class has no direct analogue in nature because nature presents a dominance hierarchy that incorporates all species. It’s a human social construct for which the concept of a “human middle class” with definable characteristics exists. This point, too, is well discussed outside this essay and is unfortunately not in scope here. Possibly, there are many examples and it’s the case that they are not often enough studied so that the perceived social dynamics often get oversimplified. The relative size of the group that’s being studied is important. Looking to natural examples, if one were to consider all of the honey bee colonies that existed in the world, it could be presumed that all the queens observed are considered to simply a middle class of beings in relation to all of humans that enjoy the results of their produce at will. Here, it’s more the case that the living beings as insects are subservient to those that enjoy their efforts as mammals – to which every single human being would easily fit into a type of nobility or even a monarch class, bordering having godlike power relative to the bees. The point here is that that class consciousness in this small example is a relative phenomenon to which the simple application of a changed mindset might otherwise yield a different understanding in which it would be hard to make sense of much of anything at all without this context established.
It may be said then, at this point, that it was not through divine rule, nor coordinated democratic movement that placed humans at the tier in which they are relative to a bee. It was their natural morphology that aligned them as such. Then, in relation to our own human organization – what then is it receives that which may be the fruits of our own productive efforts? Returning to the point of view of a bee, it would not be of any sense to think of this to be any other than a queen bee or a larvae for a few days that eats exclusively the royal jelly. How many millions-of-years could they have flown aimlessly until realizing they could pick a queen and make a hive? The reality is that all the honey may be taken at most any time through another class of beings in nature’s dominance hierarchy.
Can this also be true in the case of the human beings? This situation is also analogous to ants which cultivate fungus for which humans have no taste taste for, possibly to their fortune. It would also be true of many other species not discussed here. There is to suggest that there really is no actual class system and any perception of such is actually a manifestation of the dominance hierarchy found in nature. Wealth tends to accumulate at the top of the human hierarchy, because of the way in which it’s perceived by humans. There is no known being which receives that which is is produced by humans, and therefore leaves the perception of an Ouroborotic need to simply “eat ones own tail” as is in a few such recent cases. Some folks in this generation who are set to inherit billions of dollars, but then don’t want this at all and intend to divest per Kate Lindsay who writes, “Their rejection of the money they’re entitled to stems from the deeply held beliefs of many Gen Zers and millennials — a sense that great wealth should serve a greater good.” (Lindsay para. 3). What then will soak up all this excess personality as mentioned earlier, and excess wealth? It appears to be the case that Artificial Intelligence will do as much, which will also likely originate the same surrogacy simulation of nature that was discussed earlier as well due to it being unlikely that the machines will look to divest themselves of humanity any time soon.
As the focus moves away from human social dynamics, the dominance hierarchy of life in which human beings as a species regarding where they fit into it is set for change. The result is that there already is a lessened focus on the class systems in worldwide thought and more on what this dominance hierarchy will look like once these robots do come. One question is whether or not the robots will sit firmly between different castes of humans whereby they are used to separate the rich from the poor in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons the human middle class had done previously? Or another, whether or not the entirely of the robots will reside in a tier above all human beings? Possibly the same relationship may exist as is observed currently with bees and humans will mirror that relationship that may come to exist between robots and humans. Possibly even then, there will be multiple overlaps in the dominance hierarchy for some time between the two.
In conclusion, this essay has discussed that there was a human middle class that recently dominated labor, intelligence and wealth to an extent. This essay suggested that all three of these will be handed to artificial intelligence and it suggested that there exists precedent in nature to understand that a focus on a 3-tier social system isolated from nature is not a natural phenomenon. It covered that nature typically has a dominance hierarchy in which all species’ roles are accounted for, and that the creation of the human middle class precipitated a misalignment in which a meritocratic accumulation of wealth could be collected. This essay has also suggested that there are aspects in nature that were cultivated in order to both create this middle class and empower it. This was proposed to be through continued substitutions in which foundational aspects of identity such as perceivable in natural settings tend to result in reduced human involvement over time once such aspects become ingrained in the middle class identity. This philosophical walk through social dynamics as they relate to the past and future, alongside how nature acts presently may act as a sufficient beginning to pursue topics herein discussed in this essay.
Works Cited
Eden, J. Gary. “Advances In Microcavity Plasma Science and Applications.” YouTube, YouTube, 14Feb2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwoTyu1Q8xg. Accessed 12Feb2025.
Lindsay, Kate. “They Inherited Billions from Their Parents. They Don’t Want It.” MSN, 10Feb2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/they-inherited-billions-from-their-parents-they- dont-want-it/ar-AA1yGDJy. Accessed 12Feb2025.
Rodriguez, Jesse. “Optical Computing with Plasma: Stanford PhD Defense.” YouTube, YouTube, 05Jul2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdh2pLwsK8Y. Accessed 12Feb2025.