The Clergy's task... and The Wild and Crazy World

Hah, accidentally deleted Liam's comment on my last post. Stupid blogger. Thats okay, I had a lot to say as a response, so I'm just making full post as a response.

In respect to your comment on Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadore race(those that experience the entirety of existence simultaneously) I feel that the original purpose of the clergy (before statism really took over) were to have the overarching understanding of all known knowledge at the time and make the general decisions. Now though, we seem to know too much, the world, and every individual in it (at least those that break the window and step outside) is in a permanent state of information overload.

I would argue that this isn't the first time it happened though. Before we had shamans, just one or a few men in a village that is considered the wisest, who's purpose was to guide the confused masses, albeit much smaller. Then as we advanced, we gained too much, and we needed coalitions of wise men (the clergy) to handle all the information passing between people. I think it eventually became (or maybe always was) a tool to keep the knowledge secret so the masses would not go into the perils of information shock. It may be an argument for secrecy: to keep the illusion of order and peace by reducing the number of people who truly understand that we each hold what is a supercomputer (a god in old terms...) in our own head. Imagine a world with 6.9 billion people each understood the full potential of their own individual mind. It would be wild.

Now though, we have empiricism, and materialism (science) mixed in the bag, which is essentially antithetical to the old ways, and these are creating some very complex problems. I sure as hell don't fully understand them.

Back to the Tralfamadores, one could argue that the groups of those that amalgamate the important pieces of information are the closest things we humans have to this (holding to the assumption that experiencing reality like they do is inherently impossible). Consider that we think of groups as more important than individuals (hey, corporations have rights of citizens now right?). Corporations, States, and Religions are the wolves, lions, and Dinosaurs of the wild world we live in now. Blogs are just bacterium, and I'm just a highly complex virus. (whats the internet then? a primordial soup? I wonder what legged critters are going to walk out of it)