The limits of the individual are porous
As a fan of pro cycling, one of the most amazing things is watching the peloton guide along the tarmac at breathtaking speeds, a living organism that is unquestionably more than the sum of its parts.1
Its cohesion is so real that the limits of the individual are porous. Skewered by the marrow, every rider sheds some blood in the melting pot of the peloton’s formidable heart, puts existence and breath at the service of the monster with a hundred mouths. Even when you consider those who ride apart from one another, the effort of a rider is never totally independent from the efforts of all the others.
The hydra has the dimensions of the sea and the fluidity of water. —Olivier Haralambon, The Cyclist and His Shadow
It’s one thing to watch a flock of starlings or school of minnows, it’s another thing altogether to watch a couple hundred flesh and blood humans on machines do it.
- previously: the external world is as much you as your own body, your skin doesn’t actually separate you from the world
- see also: holobionts are both more and less than one—the closer we look, the flimsier the idea of an individual, bounded self becomes
- see also: we exist only in relationship to others — we are not separate, we define each other
Hugh Trenchard hypothesizes about the peloton’s “protocooperative” behavior, a form of cooperation that emerges naturally from physical interactive principles as opposed to ones driven by human competitive, sociological or economic motivations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloton#Protocooperative_behavior_in_pelotons ↩︎