The Organization Man is but one instance of a larger class, the System Man.

Eusocial humanity is predisposed to generalization, by selection. Therefore, he generalizes himself, and his role. The modern manifestation of tribal identity is the Organization Man, who’s identity and teleology is inextricably intertwined with his found clan, the institution. But the generalization of this pattern to a System is natural and inevitable.

The organization is one kind of structured system, with well-defined patterns and causal relationships that operate according to relatively fixed laws. The capacity to abstract the laws of the organization provides collaterally the capacity to abstract laws in general, leading to the general ability to integrate with a system of laws, social or non-social. Thus the crystalline purity of metamathematics arises organically from the eusocial mind.

Introduce into this formula a new element: The self-creative capacity unique to humanity. If ever it were true to say that man is made in the image of God, it is true in this sense: That, god-like, man creates and defines himself by self-conscious adaptation of self to environment, no less than environment to self. The Organization Man, is man adapted to the higher structures of his clan, whether given or found or constructed. The System Man is man adapted to the higher structures of his environment, given, found, or constructed.

Aye, there’s the rub: As we construct our own environments by the creation of a virtuality that insulates us from reality, or becomes our quotidian reality, we create new selves, which are the product of that created environment. This inseparable causal chain coheres a new creation, as our ego-boundaries gradually become broadened to include the support mechanisms we have created as tools.

The I of imagination is a corporeal I. We conceive of our souls as ethereal bodies. We image our eternal selves as idealized representations of our self-image, which, as primarily visual perceivers, are visually defined, implying a three-dimensional geometry of active being, conducting Euclidean operations in a larger environment. Because of this language of thought, we are inevitably required to formulate our identities in terms of the corporeal systems within which we interact, geometrically, perceptibly.

Humanity has recreated itself, then, as an augmented, transhuman product of its own design. Futurists of various stripes have hypothesized future amalgams of man and machine, of genetic augmentation, &c., but today, here and now, people are becoming networked creations of their own design, egos with boundaries which incorporate augmentive elements of a wide variety of kinds, hardware and software, chemical and behavioural, to create a new person, with new capabilities, new approaches to the world of experience, and new modes of ideation.

Surely, however, these new modes are but contemporary manifestations of patterns as old as human consciousness: Language, recording, art, tool-making, these are (tautologically, according to the case), as old as our knowledge of human history.