Admittedly, a strange title for a documentary but after many weeks I still can’t get the concepts explained in it, out of my head.

The examples used by Adam Curtis in the documentary were illustrations of what caused me to think of this concept in the first place.  What I can’t get out of my head is the concept itself.

It is possible that just knowing the ideas laid out in this documentary  has changed my life in ways I have no way of perceiving at this moment.

The core proposal Adam brings to light is that humans and all living things may be nothing more in the bigger picture than “Self Replicating Gene Machines. “    Not the best wording of the concept, but the idea is that we, while we are individuals, we are not nearly as unique or separate from one another as we think we are.   This concept came from observations looking at human behavior in groups.   We all tend to do pretty much the same things, giving the same set of influences.    Our unique ability we claim to have,  of free will,  while in a true sense is there,  is also somewhat of a misnomer  because our automatic responses and programmed  feelings have are  embedded into our DNA  and therefore what we think of as free will, could be nothing more than embedded  programmed behavior  rooted so deep in our DNA, that we can’t consciously tell that its even there.

Not to get hung up on only the behavior aspects of the concepts, take for example (not cited in the documentary) what happens in our body when an infection appears.  Sometimes it dormant or silent without any  symptoms for years until it finally takes it toll on your life and by that time, often it’s too late,  (as in the case of syphilis) or it might be painful within the first few minutes of contracting it Our body’s immune system goes to work, by first identifying the attacking infection, figuring out what makes it unique and then creates receptors for it on the white blood cells and then starts reproducing millions of white blood cells sending them to the infected area with the idea that the white blood cells will kill the invading infection.

Take that to the larger social scale   :

What does society do, when faced with a threat like an attacking enemy ?    A threat which could, if allowed to go unchecked would take over, causing a civilization/tribe/camp/country to be and submit to the will of the aggressor, if not outright killed.
We do pretty much the same thing on a as our cell’s and genes do, all without much conscious thought.

We examine the enemy, size it up, calculate how much effort we need to push it back, find their weakness  and then use whatever weapons we can make out of materials we find.  When ready we launch an assault or create a barricade to stave out the intruder.   Sometimes these methods work, sometimes not, but our  social reaction to an attack is always the same.  We protect those who we consider part of our group.

Think about what our bodies  do with unwanted toxins.   Our liver either filters them out or when our filter is no longer working properly and the toxin are allowed to run throughout the rest of our body and organs, killing them slowly.

How is this process all that much different than a social toxin  i.e. Thieves, Drug addicts,  Psychopaths, and other dangerous elements to society?   Don’t we either lock them in a prison or attempt to treat them in hospitals, basically keeping them away from healthy society in the whole?   Just as our liver and kidneys do for our life essence, keeping our body’s life fluids as pure and healthy as possible.    What happens when we have prison overcrowding?  We let these  people(social toxins)  return to society with the hope they won’t harm  and  kill the rest of us.   Just as when our liver has had enough alcohol, doesn’t it just let the toxins into our blood stream without doing a proper job of filtering and cleaning it.

Our body’s nerve system is just a micro version of the world’s communication systems, regardless if we are talking about smoke signals, GPS or the internet, they all serve the same basic function, to alert another part of the system of danger.

We didn’t develop these social patterns knowing that we were modeling our society on our physical body, we just did it without too much thought.   We looked at the challenges facing us and developed solutions to overcome them and survive and replicate ourselves.

The function of Replication is the most common and achievable goal any human has.  Just  the same as our  biological brothers (cells)     No matter the society we  study,  every society is built around the concept of child bearing and rearing, we all value children (especially our own) , because in  them  not ourselves, but we see the actual  realization that life doesn’t end in death but it continues with our next generation. Its in our core DNA  to make sure that life itself continues.    Its why mothers love their children more than they can begin to describe in words,  its why we love sex more than anything else ,    its why we naturally want to protect  a close family member  and people from other tribes are not quite as important to us.

My Lineage, My Life has to continue; regardless of costs or pain I might have to put onto someone else  I have to live. I don’t know why . But I have to.  It’s in my GENES,  it’s what I do,  it makes sense and it make me alive.

June 2012

Follow up :

“Through the Wormhole”   Season 2 Episode 3.
The show discussed  some of the same elements of All Watched over,  except on a much larger scale.    There is a new scientific theory that maybe the universe itself may be is in fact alive and life on our planet, is nothing more than extension of the universal life we see all around us.  We just have been unable till now to see it due to our language and definition of life.

As an example of life in a non traditional sense could be   a city.
The show points out that a city might be a version of life, with its roadways acting as veins and arteries, cars and people as the blood vessels, and based on the size of a city, the heart beat is at a rate of two beats a day, one the morning rush hour, one the afternoon rush.

They discuss the concept of life in ever growing mass to now include the universe itself, and the big bang, might be nothing more than a heartbeat to life form we define as the universe.   Continually expanding and contrasting, over such a long time we have just been unable to imagine it.

All this to say that the universe itself might be a life form – and the elements in it being made of the same stuff, are all life.   In many ways a very similar topic to the argument in   “All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace”.