Welcome to the Symbiosis Project blog. In this first post I’d like to tell you a little about us and the Monument for the Common Man.
Sometimes it seems like there are an infinite number of ways to group human beings together. Nothing proves this point better than the internet. While it’s all but impossible to count the number of small groups there are some very large groups. Nationalities, religions, race. Millions of people, even billions, belong to some of these groups. But the largest group by far are average working people. As of this writing there are 6,878,892,903 humans on the planet earth.
I have no firm statistics on how many are or have been working people but I will hazard a guess and say over 95%. As a group there is nothing else that comes close.
Since before recorded history humans have found special ways to honor certain individuals, events and ideas. Most school children can recite by memory the various monuments scattered around the world though they may not be able to tell you who built them or why.
You may remember that Jay Leno used to have a segment on the Tonight Show called Jay Walking. Jay would go outside with a mike and crew and ask people on the street simple questions.
For instance – if you asked someone under 40 where the Space Needle was do you think they would be able to give you correct answer? How about if you asked them when and why it was built? Does anybody outside of the St. Louis region know what the St. Louis Arch commemorates? If you went onto any college campus and asked people who built the Eiffel Tower how many do you think would get it wrong?
There are monuments to Presidents and kings, soldiers and the battles they fought, ideas like freedom, justice and liberty but their relevance to an age where you can send a video half way around the world over a telephone 2 minutes after you shot it is, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent.
However the most important monument to ever be build has not yet been erected.
It’s the story behind that monument that makes it so important at this particular moment in history.
This story will take several posts to complete but I would like to start off with a definition.
Symbiosis.
I checked several sources including Webster’s Unabridged and the Oxford English Dictionary but the definition I like the best is at Dictonary.com.
any interdependent or mutually beneficial relationship between two persons, groups, etc.
Using that definition essentially everyone on the planet is currently in or has been in a symbiotic relationship. There is absolutely no doubt, from the moment we're born to the instant we die we need each other to survive.
Welcome to the Symbiosis Project Blog
9:45 PM
Charles Quinn
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