Three Worlds
in brief
The world is infinitely complex, but we humans have to simplify it in order to cope. I think that, usually, it is sensible to reduce everything to three parts, just as Julius Caesar divided Gaul into three parts: Belgae, Aquitani, and Celtae, but no further.
I say that we humans inhabit three worlds: Life World, Market or Abstract World, and War World.
Life World is the Lebenswelt of informal social interaction, face-to-face between humans, partly rational but mostly unconscious from DNA-coded behaviors and unconscious archetypes. Life World includes sex, love, family, food, work, neighborhood, the raising of children, the care of the aged, and the pre-institutional religion and myths of the shaman and the soothsayer and the wise old woman.
Market World is the half-human half-abstract world of making and buying and selling and borrowing and lending and investing of the city, the world beyond the face-to-face world of the tribe and the village. It is a miraculous adaptation by humans to a social world that extends beyond the age-old local community and establishes trust protocols beyond face to face transactions.
War World is the world of politics, of government, of battles, of institutionalized religion, of administration, of regulation, of censorship, of socialism. It is an extension of the need to defend the border from enemies and the city from street thugs, a culture of hegemony and domination. This applies to governments, centralized churches, large bureaucracies, and big corporations.
The challenge for humans is to develop their understanding of the need for understanding between the abstract Market World and Life World, and thus reduce the need for War World. This is understood in the psychology of Jung, in the interplay between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, how they interact and how the whole of human religion and myth and knowledge is the story of their interaction, with the conscious mind being an Abstract World and the unconscious mind being a Life World.