An Ant Contemplates Its Anthill
By: Zachary Bartell
Tags: History, Capitalism, USA, Socialism, Sociology

In times of crisis, the anthill becomes upset; the stomach undigests its food. The social hierarchy is become a palpable thing among the underclasses, if they can take their gazes away from their televisions long enough to think about it.

But the crisis is only a starting point; it is the condition of their existence that the ants must mind first before descending upon more interesting matters. Without the consolidation of social experience around common emotions, the anthill is not a palpable phenomenon; sociality is a medium without an empowering message, but rather a means of subduing the ants in a collective subconscious fugue. The crisis enables something approaching collective metacognition, the ability to perceive the social order in its profound mortality.

The anthill is disturbed. A virus is being reticulated among its populace, and the antmasters are concerned about the possible breakdown of the social order. Ants, they believe, are dangerous creatures; that’s why their consciousness must be suppressed and they must be kept busy with trivial survival processes. Should their innate ability to perceive reality through critical, self-interested eyes be restored, it could mean the end of the antmasters’ power, and likely the death of many millions of ants as well.

The antmasters are not all evil, though some lack access to even the most basic human morality. Most, or at the least, many of these elite subjects of the social order believe in the worthiness of ant existence; they just believe, at a deeper and so less speakable level, that they, the antmasters, are worthier of protection by the state; their interests must be upheld, because in their self-perpetuation rests the survival of the masses. The masses must be kept in a state of doctrinal obedience to the masters, so that the ants’ labor power might be exploited for the betterment of the anthill.

The hierarchical nature of the anthill interjects into the bare existence of public subjects a vague but known classification system assigning disparate values to the lives of organisms living within the anthill. Antmasters’ lives are the most important, and thus must be protected at all times, for in them is invested the mortal power over all lower living beings. A small cadre of untouchable masters bestows all significant honors and powers upon a larger group of smaller masters. Beneath these, the value of lives dwindles fast. The bottom of the anthill is where you’ll find its convicts, slaves, deviants, and the insane, crawling or captive in low, dark caves. Dig deeper, and you’ll discover the vast caverns that contain organisms who are bred as food for worthier, more powerful animals. Beneath them is the bare muddy soil tinged red by eons of slaughter and sacrifice.

The anthill is a kind of factory processing minds and bodies into fuel for its own growth and domination. It can be seen to possess a composite mind with interests that emerge from the interactions of millions of subjects; this mind exists in an abstract way, never sublimating into a real substance. Instead, the anthill’s mind is a mass illusion, as it is impressed into the minds of subjects from birth that there is an order in which all beings have a role and a station, that this order is good, and that the highest good is to benefit the order that brings all good into the universe. The anthill: a factory that, through the force of compelling illusion, refines the fuel of millions of lives into a sacrifice of the masses.

Recently, however, this illusion has been disturbed. The most recent crisis, a virus damaging the systems necessary for perpetuating the social order, is but the most urgent manifestation of a prolonged fragmentation in the public’s ability to believe that their anthill’s perpetuation is worth living for. The stratification of society, a feature of social life that many throughout history believed to exist by divine mandate, no longer seems justified when the average ant’s life has less and less value as the years march on. A crucial promise that the antmasters have made, that the ants’ sacrifices will be rewarded with honors and powers, is increasingly seen to be a hollow one, indeed, a malicious and self-interested lie.

So the antmasters gather in the shadows to reformulate their position. It isn’t honors and powers that their subjects should be encouraged to desire and sacrifice for, but rather they should desire to see their in-group’s reflection when they look up at higher orders of ants. Brown ants should desire to see brown ants higher up in the hierarchy; black ants should fight not for their own economic betterment, but for the elevation of their own to positions of power. They should be taught to see this elevation of their own kind as an end in itself, the highest end, in fact, and never mind whether or not the social order is in all other ways unchanged. The overwhelming majority of ants, black, brown, and white, will remain deep underground; and they will be made to be always suspicious of one another through a culture of continuous conflict and competition. Partly, this culture exists because hierarchies stratify society along a multitude of intersecting axes, and are codified in institutionalized belief systems that the masses must profess in order to lay claim to a public identity. White ants have been permitted, through centuries of material prejudice, an enhanced access to the products of social labor, and have long been trained to suppress the efforts of all other ants to share in the collective bounty. This injustice has forced all other ants to fight for leftover scraps and hate the oppressors who have wronged them.

What the ants sometimes realize is that there is something fundamentally wrong about the social order, and that it is this something that oppresses them all, that creates oppressors of them all. It is as if the anthill has a fatal structural flaw, as if the labors of a millennium have been entirely, profoundly misguided. But the anthill is complex and, in times of normalcy, virtually imperceptible as an entity subject to public scrutiny. The crises of a strange, new generation are bringing the hellish dimensions of the anthill into a renewed focus. Perhaps the ants will realize what they have become and radically alter the nature of their society so that it serves the interests of the ants, and not of the antmasters. Perhaps a revolution, that business that once animated the subjects of clear-sighted and passionate consciousness to remake their worlds in their image, is possible in such circumstances, even in this, the most subconcious anthill in human history.

Or perhaps not. Historical intertia and the efficaciousness of a lifelong indoctrination into the system for millions may be sufficient to keep us plastered to our desks, to our cars, to our debts, until the whole superstructure collapses, and we are left homeless, powerless, in a world of unfamiliar organisms without any common story to keep us from eating each other.

I hope that we still have a chance to make this right.