- When the individual cannot survive on its own, a group of such individuals is formed, that enables and secures the survival of its members, thus being dependent of each other – the Social Being is a weak, a vulnerable one.
- This vulnerability causes a fear for everything that could destabilize the group, causing an inherent hostility against individuals with a deviating behavior from the established one, which is an imperative condition for the group to remain intact – the Social Being is a conservative one.
- This condition manifests itself as the Might of the group, to which its members are subjected, ultimately on the penalty of death when going against it. This Might manifests itself as the prime, the core drive of the Social Being, which is the one of Social Acceptance, from which all other drives are derived and subordinated to, including the individual one of survival.
- The drive of social acceptance is so fundamental that it becomes oppressive, stressing the individual not to become socially isolated, causing the devastating feeling of shame, or worthlessness, the highest state of mental suffering, which drives the individual to extremes, ultimately to suicide. Inversely, it rewards the successful individual with admiration, increasing his/hers social value, causing the elevating feeling of pride, to stand out from the crowd. This fundamentalism causes the awareness of Good and Evil, which constitute the objective values of the Social Being, over which it has no control and therefore are universal values. This awareness is often called “cognizance”, distinguishing humans from social animals.
- Although the individuals understand that they formed their group and that it comes with the obligations of solidarity and loyalty, which are the imperative principles of the group and its members, they do not see this as the source of “cognizance”, by which, and due to its universality, an independent, an autonomous and undefined entity, is perceived as the source instead, generally called “soul”, or “mind”.
- The thus arisen entity is created by what it created, the Cognizant Social Being, thus transcending into a ambivalent one of threat and promise, of fear and hope, the individual’s dependence of which causes the feelings of love and hate, resulting in a schizophrenic state of mind that no psychologist ever has been able to formulate, but is best characterized as “submission to slavery in freedom”, being the existential State of Mind of the Cognizant Social Being, that the Human is. (This is why oppressive doctrines are successful, the more, the greater the dependence is, whether real, or imagined.)
- Whereas the objective values are universal, the conditions of a group’s survival vary with the environment in which it lives, thus requiring to organize itself into what becomes a society with subjective values, defining Right and Wrong, as expressed in its laws and rules of conduct, the latter defining morals and ethics, best characterized as “culture”.
- To formulate and enforce the laws of a society, a leadership is required, which is inherent to the manifestation of the social being, as no society can function without it. Thus an authority arises that is very similar to the one of the objective values, but being the one of the subjective values instead.
- The leader of a society is the representative of this authority, but can also become the personification of it, like the French king Louis IV once formulated it: “L’etat c’est le roi, et le roi c’est moi” (The state is the king and the king is me). Likewise, the authority of the objective values can become personified, by which the entity as in (6) becomes a god, with religious leaders as its representatives, who formulate religious values on divine authority.
- If the divine authority dominates over the secular one, even more if it unifies with it, the distinction between Good and Right, between Evil and Wrong vanishes, by which the distinction between the objective and the subjective values vanishes, thus making the resulting society a schizophrenic one, characterized by inevitable oppression. Therefore, religion and politics must be kept strictly separated.
- Ironically, no rebellion against the present system of a society can change anything of the above, but can only change names and laws, for better or worse, while the principles as outlined here remain invariantly the same. This is the Manifestation of the Cognizant Social Being.