He’d seen drawings of how the manholes led down to staggeringly complex underground networks of systems that made this whole island happen: electric power networks, telephone networks, water pipe networks, gas line networks, sewage networks, subway tunnels, TV cables, and who knows how many special-purpose networks he had never even heard of, like the nerves and arteries and muscle fibers of a giant organism.
The Giant of his dreams.
It was spooky how it all worked with an intelligence of its own that was way beyond the intelligence of any person. He would never know how to fix one of these systems of wire and tubes down below the ground that ran it all. Yet there was someone who did. And there was a system for finding that person if he was needed, and a system for finding that system that would find him. The cohesive force that held all these systems together: that was the Giant.
When he was young Phædrus used to think about cows and pigs and chickens and how they never knew that the nice farmer who provided food and shelter was doing so only so that he could sell them to be killed and eaten. They would oink, or cluck, and he would come with food, so they probably thought he was some sort of servant.
He also used to wonder if there was a higher farmer that did the same thing to people, a different kind of organism that they saw every day and thought of as beneficial, providing food and shelter and protection from enemies, but an organism that secretly was raising these people for its own sustenance, feeding upon them and using their accumulated energy for its own independent purposes. Later he saw there was: this Giant. People look upon the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer; different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can accomplish alone.
The metaphysics of substance makes it difficult to see the Giant. It makes it customary to think of a city like New York as a work of man, but what man invented it? What group of men invented it? Who sat around and thought up how it should all go together?
If man invented societies and cities, why are all societies and cities so repressive of man? Why would man want to invent internally contradictory standards and arbitrary social institutions for the purpose of giving himself a bad time? This man who goes around inventing societies to repress himself seems real as long as you deal with him in the abstract, but he evaporates as you get more specific.
Sometimes people think there are some evil individual men somewhere who are exploiting them, some secret cabal of capitalists, or 400, or Wall Street bankers, or WASPs or name-any-minority group that gets together periodically and has secret conferences on how to exploit them personally. These men are supposed to be enemies of man. It gets confusing, but nobody seems to notice the confusion.
A metaphysics of substance makes us think that all evolution stops with the highest evolved substance, the physical body of man. It makes us think that cities and societies and thought structures are all subordinate creations of this physical body of man. But it’s as foolish to think of a city or a society as created by human bodies as it is to think of human bodies as a creation of the cells, or to think of cells as created by protein and DNA molecules, or to think of DNA as created by carbon and other inorganic atoms. If you follow that fallacy long enough you come out with the conclusion that individual electrons contain the intelligence needed to build New York City all by themselves. Absurd.
If it’s possible to imagine two red blood cells sitting side by side asking, Will there ever be a higher form of evolution than us? and looking around and seeing nothing, deciding there isn’t, then you can imagine the ridiculousness of two people walking down a street of Manhattan asking if there will ever be any form of evolution higher than man, meaning biological man.
Biological man doesn’t invent cities or societies any more than pigs and chickens invent the farmer that feeds them. The force of evolutionary creation isn’t contained by substance. Substance is just one kind of static pattern left behind by the creative force.
This city is another static pattern left behind by the creative force. It’s composed of substance but substance didn’t create it all by itself. Neither did a biological organism called man create it all by himself. This city is a higher pattern than either a substance or a biological pattern called man. Just as biology exploits substance for its own purposes, so does this social pattern called a city exploit biology for its own purposes. Just as a farmer raises cows for the sole purpose of devouring them, this pattern grows living human bodies for the sole purpose of devouring them. That is what the Giant really does. It converts accumulated biological energy into forms that serve itself.
When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as inventions of man but as higher organisms than biological man, the phenomena of war and genocide and all the other forms of human exploitation become more intelligible. Mankind has never been interested in getting itself killed. But the superorganism, the Giant, who is a pattern of values superimposed on top of biological human bodies, doesn’t mind losing a few bodies to protect his greater interests.
The Giant began to materialize out of Phædrus' Dynamic dreams when he was in college. A professor of chemistry had mentioned at his fraternity that a large chemical firm was offering excellent jobs for graduates of the school and almost every member of the fraternity thought it was wonderful news. The Second World War had just ended and good jobs were all that anyone seemed to think of. The revolution of the sixties was still twenty years off. No one had thought of making the film, The Graduate, back then.
Phædrus had always believed science is a search for truth. A real scientist is not supposed to sell out that goal to corporations who are searching for mere profit. Or, if he had to sell out in order to live that was nothing to be happy about. These fraternity brothers of his acted like they never heard of science as truth. Phædrus had suddenly seen a tentacle of the Giant reaching out and he was the only one who could see it.
So here was this Giant, this nameless, faceless system reaching for him, ready to devour him and digest him. It would use his energy to grow stronger and stronger throughout his life while he grew older and weaker until, when he was no longer of much use, it would excrete him and find another younger person full of energy to take his place and do the same thing all over again.
That was why he had run that day through all this traffic — through all these systems and sub-systems of the island. He was on his way to India, done with this corporate pseudo-science, still pursuing truth, knowing that to find it he would have to get free of the Giant first.
Here up in the sky above him right now were the heads of the corporation that had prompted the chemistry professor to make that talk to that fraternity so many years ago. This was the brain center of that corporate network, surrounded by other networks: financial networks, information networks, electronic transmission networks. That’s what all those tiny bodies were doing up there suspended so many hundreds of feet up in the sky. Participating in the Giant.