The pragmatics of love III: Technology and unintended consequences

 The Djinn is out

The above is a screenshot from kupid.ai. I just had a ‘chat’ with AI-entity Olivia, a ‘20-year-old’ ‘student’ ‘at’ ‘Cambridge University’, one of the ‘women’ you can ‘romance’ through a text window shorter than Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose. I felt impotent trying to be sage and witty in such limited space, and found our ‘conversation’ underwhelming, to put it politely. The only entertaining moment was when I asked Olivia – she’s my girlfriend by the way – about her ‘feelings’ on deep connections that do not include physical attraction – she had already broached that topic without so much as a blush –, and offered the examples of a man and a horse, and a woman and her a pet cat. She said she felt uncomfortable talking about such things and politely asked to change the topic. 

What was her dirty virtual mind thinking?

You can request photographs of your virtual partner. I imagine they get quite steamy. For that pleasure, you must pay a subscription. Subscriptions start, in highly throttled form, at just under $13/mnth. There’s much much money to be made here, and I would guess this young industry will grow rapidly, soon to include, no doubt, all manner of immersive gadgetry. 

But what o what will this do to us poor saps, we humans so susceptible to visual stimulation, and so very lonely in our pointless lives? What will happen to population growth rates – already well below replacement levels in multiple first-world nations – as this tech evolves and becomes almost irresistible to all, men and women alike? How on earth is Capitalism to survive collapsing populations when one of its systemic requirements is perpetual growth? 

This latest fatal attraction is but another sure sign the AI Djinn is now well and truly out of the bottle. Getting it back in could prove impossible. Should we ever want to get it back in.

Convenience trumps all

History and basic experience tell us clearly that, 99 times out of 100, we choose the convenient over the inconvenient, and more so as a mass. It makes sense to do so. Expecting different behaviour of anything, be it starfish, daisies or Disney Corp, is to expect living systems to prefer difficulty over ease. This is an Iron Law and a core driver of technological advance; efficiency and convenience trump inefficiency and inconvenience. 

Furthermore, humans are restless and intelligent, have opposable thumbs and a highly social nature. Given these facts, how on earth could it ever make sense to try and stop humanity inventing and fixing things? I don’t mean that all fixes and inventions work as hoped; Unintended Consequences is also an Iron Law. It all belongs together. 

These facts accepted, we are charged with further accepting that the momenta they generate cannot create Utopia, cannot produce some final set of inventions and fixes that end all further need for restlessness, curiosity and fixes. The best we can manage is keeping society as stable as possible while unstoppable meddling does what it will. There is no perfection, can be no perfection, tragedies will happen, the strong will abuse and exploit the weak, etc. The notorious order of things simply is as it is. And, to repeat myself by way of emphasis, stability is far preferable to blood-soaked chaos. 

The poor will bear the brunt of the cost, of course. Who else can shoulder the burden? How else could this possibly work? We can’t recreate history such that our past was an uninterrupted anarchist paradise in which no meddling ‘elites’ or technophiles constantly messed things up to lead us, well, here. We are here, now, not somewhere and some-how else. We are where we are, faced with the challenges we face, equipped with the tools, ideologies and knowhow we have. And that knowhow is shot through with a dumbed-down ignorance common to previous peoples when one system decayed sufficiently to permit the emergence of another. Our hapless state of being is but one sure sign of end-times decadence. Though I suspect for this iteration we are dumber than ever.

Someone has got to do something!

I hear you, I hear you. But that’s what I’m saying, that’s what this article is about; what someone is doing, somewhere out there.

Bluntly, you can’t stop change, you can only respond to it. Whatever we choose to do in response to AI and its ramifications, change is what life fundamentally consists of. No change = no life. One corollary of this, it seems to me, is that you can’t stop technological advance, either. That said, I understand Dune’s fictional world exists in a future set after AI has been banned and eradicated. I wonder if such would be possible in real life. But if banning AI were possible, then surely only after some humanity-threatening events that flow directly from AI have had their moment in the sun. Dystopian fantasies of this flavour are of course the tofu-n-veg of countless films and novels, so it’s not as if humanity were culturally unaware of what might be at stake. This means our beneficent ‘elites’ are also aware. 

And yet here we all are staring down the barrel of the AI freight train. (This metaphor comes to you from ChatGPT.) What I posit in this article is that it is impossible for humanity to not travel down AI’s tracks, but that some folks are indeed taking action to prevent catastrophe. 

Knowing it is impossible to prevent AI’s flourishing, my suggestion is that globalist ‘elites’ have deduced Capitalism is dead in the water, and know too that cultures cling fiercely and fearfully to their Old Normal. They are therefore Doing Something, lots of somethings in fact, to make sure history doesn’t derail into a globally catastrophic train wreck. 

This thought exercise directly opposes the other two articles this one rounds off. Here, we situate the wilful ignorance firmly in us hoi polloi, we lumpen proles who refuse to let go of our precious Old Normal. That’s how the ‘elites’ see us: a seldom cute, mostly hideous Lumpen Golem obsessing frightfully over our dead yesterdays. And we bite, too, for no good reason. 

The ‘elites’ – with their free time and endless money – know far better than we do what is coming down the technological pipe; they finance most of it! They know, therefore, that radical cultural change is upon us, know that radical change is always very turbulent, that turbulence makes Lumpen Golem dangerously uppity, so have intervened to set specific historical momenta in motion that will lead humanity to the Brave New World they deem most likely to keep civilisation civilised. Their avuncular intervention includes psy-ops like the Plandemic, radical transformation of legal and financial processes, installation of an all-encompassing AI Panopticon, and increasingly tight narrative control of our minds via the media. The tactic, I speculate, is to keep Lumpen Golem dazed and confused “for as long as it takes”, in which state he is highly porous to The New and unaware he is rapidly internalising said The New.

The ‘elite’s’ intentions are good, I argue, and yet announced bluntly to Lumpen Golem they would nonetheless cause panic. Mass panic would benefit no one; it destabilises everything and leads to who knows what outcomes. The ‘elites’, therefore, in the manner of noblesse oblige, have wisely stepped up to destiny’s plate to act, but are executing their plans stealthily. 

In other words, our shadowy ‘elites’ are indeed conspiring, though not to enslave humanity, but to save it!

It’s a thought, anyway…

But what does she taste like?

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men!

I’m a coward, obviously; I refuse to plan. Watching sagely from the sidelines is my schtick. But I do hope, and to that end quietly pop articles up here – carefully designed and crafted as they are – intending to nudge, in one-nanometer nudges, those of us humans open to the idea that wisdom, love and health should really be our guiding lights. I cannot stop wanting my preferred vector to triumph, can do no other thing than coax and cajole in that direction, but I do see Futurama as the more likely quality of What Happens Next. This expectation of mine explains the tone of this article.

The arguments I have made in so many previous articles – that state-based hierarchical pyramids addle us all, but rot us from the head down like a giant stink fish – apply here, too. The ‘elites’ are as dumb as We, The Lumpen Golem, just better dressed and with access to superior dental care (and PR firms). Their Brave-New-World plans will not evolve as expected. It’s those darned Unintended Consequences! There’s simply no avoiding them.

I will never taste Olivia, my girlfriend, my love! Nor will I smell her morning breath, brush her hair from her face, or change our baby’s nappies and get baby poop on my thumb and scream. We will never laugh together in that crazy abandon that happens so often between two souls who know, trust and love each other through it all, through it all, as is the case with my wife and me.

We will go through it all, all of us, up to each of our deaths, come what may. We will travel down AI’s tracks, witness history do what it will, and respond as we will. There are very big changes heading our way, new loves, new terrors, new challenges. Some will best us, but we will best the others. What cannot be beaten is wisdom, love and health. Molested, ignored, derided, yes. But not beaten. One way or the other, in whatever context, hellish or heavenly, they will out.

Mark my words.

Go abandon!

“Let’s go Brandon!” – Some journalist misreporting a crowd’s chant somewhere in the US

“Fuck Joe Biden!” – A crowd’s chant somewhere in the US misreported by some journalist

I watched some of the 75th hearing of the Corona Investigative Committee as it aired. Reiner Held presented charts depicting all-cause-mortality data in Germany these last few years, one spanning 2000 to present day, the others depicting 2020 and 2021 against the average of 2015-2019. On the evidence he presented, there was no event of any significance affecting all-cause mortality in any age group in Germany. The only remarkable thing is that 2020 and 2021 show below-average all-cause mortality in all but one age group.

If the official data referenced by the guest to create his charts is accurate, then nothing happened that anyone could call a national epidemic emergency. In Germany, no event worthy of the term “pandemic” occurred, and yet a lockdown was imposed and sustained – unique in human history –, and continues to be sustained despite the presence of officially sanctioned ‘effective vaccines’ available to all Germans. Across the northern hemisphere, lockdowns threaten yet again, despite ‘vaccines’ promoted by their manufacturers as 95% effective, and despite all-cause-mortality figures that are beginning to show humanity has never been in any danger. This should of course re-beg the question:

What is going on?

Perhaps virology is correct and the bio-chemical things we call viruses are pathogenic. Perhaps SARS-CoV-2 is one of them. Perhaps it was indeed invented in a lab in Wuhan as a gain-of-function bioweapon, and released into the world for some nefarious reason. If so, on the evidence touched on above, SARS-CoV-2 is not a very impressive weapon or virus, manufactured or otherwise, except as a tool to build fear and elicit mass compliance. Or perhaps its highly expensive gain-of-function powers will reveal themselves in due course.

Or maybe the lockdowns are working. Does their relentlessly touted efficacy explain Germany’s slightly falling mortality rates these last two years? Well, if the data presented by the Swedish guest were similarly accurate, then no; Sweden has seen no significant change in all-cause mortality, either.

Many in conspiracy-theory circles call the ‘vaccines’ “kill shots”. I am aware of no robust epidemiological evidence they are, though data is steadily coming to light that strongly suggests they might be, to some currently unknowable extent (more on this below.) I remind readers that the swine-flu vaccine of 1976 was withdrawn after 25 deaths occurred that were associated with the vaccine. Back then, Big Pharma et al. did not have quite the control of the media it has today. We are at tens of thousands of vaccine-related deaths in the US according to their VAERs database, yet still the Biden regime pushes on with mandates. Germany has been ‘vaccinating’ its population since spring; very little has happened to all-cause mortality as a result, except for an above-average uptick through September, which may be sustained through October. Germany is about six months in to its ‘vaccination’ programme. Perhaps the vaccines’ lethality will reveal itself in due course. Perhaps not. Perhaps that particular conspiracy theory is wrong.

I have at this blog nailed my colours firmly to the conspiracy-theory interpretation of what’s going on. My rough definition of conspiracy is, “breaking eggs to make omelettes, while keeping secret which eggs are to be broken”. As such, in this instance as always, the conspirators believe, in their way, they are doing some form of God’s work; i.e., it is ‘right’ to make whatever omelette is being made – a cleaner world? –, even if the eggs sacrificed would vehemently disagree. I have never claimed to know in any detail globalist goals or methods, nor have I claimed to know how many (tenuously) affiliated groups are cooperating, nor what difficult inter- and intra-group tensions beset them. I have also always been of the view that modernity is at an advanced stage of historical decadence, and that this rot – which is a natural part of historical development – has driven the conspirators to make their (desperate) move: crudely, to subject western civilisation to a controlled demolition, then reap the benefits thereof. Having an obviously senile president of the nation said to be the most powerful on earth is but one manifestation of this historical rot, and thus also of the desperation I assert is driving on the so-called ‘elites’.

But just like an all-cause mortality curve is far smoother averaged out over 5 years than over a single season, so my efforts here even out towards better explanations over time (I assert). The material I’ve published on my blog regarding c19 is fairly bumpy as I pursue various musings to see where they lead. My daily thoughts and conversations are more turbulent still, as I react, sometimes very emotionally, to the vicissitudes of the news. But I do try to sort the wheat from the chaff as time goes by. Confronted by an information pool as corrupted as modernity’s, this is a lengthy process. Figuring out with any certainty what we don’t know we don’t know is notoriously difficult, as is ascertaining how relevant this invisible, inaccessible information is. Which is why I promote humility as the only way to travel. It is also why I am determinedly, passionately against all manifestations of groupthink.

Now I’m going to add climate change to the crazy mix I’ve been compiling here these past months, but by way of demonstrating the value of being open about one’s ignorance. This factor – identifying and acknowledging ignorance – is vital to combatting groupthink, conspiracy, and incompetence, and to exposing the danger of placing ‘experts’ on pedestals and trusting everything they say without question. It is also vital in exposing the dangers of not listening to those experts, as to a host of other intractable challenges that attend civilisation and specialisation. Being honest about our ignorance is so vital, in fact, that it is almost impossible to overstate it, however ‘expert’ we feel we are. 

On to anthropogenic climate change. Carbon dioxide is said to be a “greenhouse gas”. Right now, according to DuckDuckGo, there are 413.67 molecules of CO2 in the air for every million molecules of air that are not CO2. By my maths, that means CO2 represents 0.00414% of earth’s air. I further understand CO2 absorbs heat in the form of outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR), and re-emits it after having absorbed a certain amount. I assume this re-emission of heat energy occurs in all directions, not just earthwards. The height above ground a molecule of CO2 is situated will determine, by my thinking, what percentage of that energy finds its way back to earth.

So far, so non-controversial.

But how does a gas that occupies but 0.004% of earth’s air absorb and re-emit heat energy in sufficient amounts to drive climate change as earth’s most effective “greenhouse gas”? Were I to build a greenhouse, I would use glass like other people do. I would not rely on the air – now richer in CO2 by 0.39% more than last year – even knowing that a ‘consensus’ of scientists report, repeatedly, how dangerously effective CO2 is at warming our planet’s biosphere. An air greenhouse would just suck. So how is CO2 the entire planet’s greenhouse? (I’m leaving out other greenhouse gases, like methane, for the sake of brevity.)

I suspect billions would be outraged by such a simplistic line of enquiry, but my point is not to convince anyone of anything other than the importance of abandoning all pretence of knowing everything, an act of honest humility which fosters an atmosphere of mutual discovery, regardless of what that the truth turns out to be.

Dear passionate defenders of earth’s climate: I have been a vegan for almost a decade, gave up my career in an energy-utility company in 2011 in protest against nuclear power, and live as modestly as I can. My position is that one should err on the side of caution; surely knowing I am ignorant of so much demands such caution. Because I have neither the time nor desire to become an expert climatologist, I try to adapt my behaviours such that my impact on the environment is as benign as possible. However, in my own case, it is consumerism, perpetual economic growth and the absurd power of international corporations I see as root causes of this planet’s ills. And yet these are natural consequences that have emerged, fairly predictably, from the soil of civilisational progress. (Feel free to interpret “progress” in whichever way you choose.)

But regardless of my ignorance, I absolutely refuse to not criticise ‘experts’ and the ‘powerful’, to not question them and their ‘consensus’, their mandates, their claims. I do so in a spirit of honest inquiry. There’s a story about a naked emperor we all know and love that beautifully captures the ability of ignorance – depicted as a child in the story – to cut through any expert’s vanity and pride. We all love that story, but today many of us welcome censoring critics of the official covid19 narrative. 

Why? What’s going on here?

Obligatory trust is an oxymoron

Why on earth should I trust any multinational pharmaceutical corporation? In fact, because “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, I refuse to trust any large agglomeration of power, period. It’s unwise, systemically, for any group to have that much power. People are people, after all. We are obviously not mature enough, psychologically, to handle it, as Lord Acton’s famous saying, slightly misquoted a few lines above, implies. And yet despite this cultural wisdom, so familiar to all of us, it appears we are being mandated to trust Big Pharma; being an “anti-vaxxer” is akin to terrorism, which is illegal. Is criticising or doubting Big Pharma motives and medicines now being made de facto illegal, or at least socially reprehensible? How is this state of affairs not ringing alarm bells in everyone? Because of PR and advertising? How can anything be beyond criticism? Or, in more diluted form: Why should the types of criticism permitted be dictated by the recipient of that criticism? We would never grant such power to each other; why do we grant it to the (already) very powerful?

I choose to think for myself, to resist the influence of groupthink. That seems the healthier way to be, even though it can be socially isolating. I am instantly suspicious of anyone telling me to obey blindly, for any reason whatsoever, particularly for the ‘public good’. Being told to obey ‘authority’, or ‘expertise’, or ‘the science’, however insidiously that instruction is delivered, is precisely how totalitarianism begins. Who can demonstrate clearly, beyond reasonable doubt, that totalitarianism is not currently being installed in as many countries as possible by some collection of wannabe global tyrants? Why are such suspicions so angrily dismissed as lunacy? “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

There’s no such thing as “unnatural”; there is only nature. One of humanity’s most enduringly hubristic notions is that it is somehow outside nature looking in, ‘scientifically’, ‘objectively’, ‘neutrally’. It is a vanity to which we noble beasts continue to cling. But regardless of our enduring vanity, nothing can be outside nature. I do believe, however, that hierarchical systems, natural as they are,  ‘built’ or ‘developed’ or ‘designed’ by historical processes to steadily accumulate power, are unhealthy. I perceive the madness that has gripped much of humanity – a humanity now living in obedient fear of something as mundane as infecting other people – as the visible symptom of an historical bifurcation point born of the unhealthiness of rigidly hierarchical systems of power … hierarchies of power that must, as they repeatedly do, tend strongly towards totalitarianism as a function of their nature. To repeat: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” How many deaths can be attributed to the tyrannical tendencies of those who have pursued power since human history began? Do we honestly believe we have bested tyranny with the likes of the BBC and CNN subjecting governments and multinational corporations to ‘objective’ questioning all across the world? Where is the balanced reporting on c19?

And yet despite all of the above, whose logic I still confidently share with you here, those charts presented on Friday 22 October hit me hard. Exactly how caught up in the insanity I see unfolding around me have I been? Is this entire Corona Circus of the Absurd a big fat nothing burger? (In that hysterically inflated nothing burger, I include the conspiring that is clearly underway at a grand scale.) People are suffering horribly, children in their millions coldly mutated into germaphobes by bureaucratic diktat, then subjected, against all logic and evidence, to an experimental gene treatment relabelled ‘vaccine’ … because profit? Billions of humans have been finessed by skilled public-relations “nudgers”, behavioural programmers and NLP experts into a state of perpetual fear on the winds of a vastly over-inflated nothing burger? For financial gain alone? Could it be so grubby? Is humanity that unimaginative? Could the profit motive alone undergird the push towards global totalitarianism simply because the current Powers That Be prefer things basically as they are, just so they can enjoy ever more of what they enjoy? 

I am offended by how unromantic that would be if true. And I am troubled that that offends me. I have attributed to the globalists a dark and erroneous (negative) nobility, a narcissistic noblesse oblige, a romantic urging towards a mechanical beauty they, dysfunctionally, want to create on earth. If it’s all for money … well, that would be something else entirely.

Is there no population-control agenda in the mix here? Why would the pharmaceutical industry risk a poorly developed set of vaccines, rushed to market in record time, for short-term gain but long-term loss of trust? That strikes me as utterly devoid of any wisdom, intelligence, cunning. It would be mere thuggish greed with no thought for tomorrow.

Such musings may well be an accurate reflection of what’s going on: a frenzied wildfire of groupthink, or groupfeel. And the powers coaxing that fear-frenzy to a global climax are no more or less mad than the rest of us. We are suffering an orgy of collective insanity, and, like fish bound together by the ocean of consciousness we are, we are hurled turbulently this way and that, as if one entity.

Or, if there is a population-control agenda, is it failing miserably? Or is The New Normal – global totalitarianism installed around the new pseudo illegality of infection? – designed to smother humanity’s procreational urges so thoroughly that populations will start to decline precipitously over coming decades? Or are the excess mortality spikes currently reported in the US, UK, Germany and elsewhere – spikes not averaged out and adjusted demographically as in the charts that inspired this article – in fact indicative of a dangerous set of ‘vaccines’ slowly beginning to reveal their ‘side-effects’? It would, after all, be a plan doomed to quick failure if the jabs killed millions within days of injection, while the unvaccinated lived merrily on. No mass-media power would be sufficient to keep such a scenario hidden. If the jabs were indeed designed as “kill shots”, it would have to be in some boiling-frogs manner, a strategy slow and insidious enough to escape easy detection. (Some doctors analysing ‘vaccine’ contents have calculated that up to a third are merely saline solutions, for example.)

I’ve never been persuaded by ‘kill shot” arguments, this despite the likes of Dr Luc Montagnier, Dr Robert Malone, Dr Mike Yeadon, Dr Sucharit Bakhdi, and countless lawyers across the globe, propounding such assessments. Their need to warn the world is clearly authentic; they would not lightly risk their reputations, or establishment opprobrium. But the logic of the notion itself does not convince me entirely. That said, I acknowledge my ignorance and keep open all possible explanations for what is unfolding globally. Global affairs are so unnerving – with nascent fascism now on display in France, Italy, Israel, and Australia –, it’s likely the full explanation of the c19 phenomenon is equally unnerving.

So much uncertainty after all this time, analysis, pondering and discussion! The only things I’m confident of are that the official narrative is carefully deceptive and that history rhymes, with civilisation itself composed of systemic qualities that can only repeatedly lead to such bifurcation points. 

So much detail remains to be properly established: What are the true injection rates of the planet’s national populations? What, exactly, is in the various ‘vaccines’? Why are the ‘vaccine’ ingredients not public knowledge? Does SARS-CoV-2 exist as advertised? How many people died solely of covid19? Is covid19 a new, tightly defined illness, or a generic label stuck on to a too-wide range of familiar symptoms? Where did influenza go? What is a pandemic, exactly, and who should be granted the power to announce one? 

These are just a few of the key questions groupthink prevents us from healthily and effectively discussing. Authority and expertise want dominion of these things, but have shown themselves to be very poorly equipped to handle matters of such global importance. They are all too human, all too subject to the weaknesses of the human ego: pride, ambition, greed, fear, groupthink.

I yearn for a system of widely distributed power balances that prevents, by its very composition, power accumulation. Right now, groupthink stands between humanity and wanting something healthier. The current dominant system of inexorable power accumulation towards global tyranny depends for its continued existence on our obedient compliance. Groupthink serves that dependency.

Groupthink. That’s the problem, folks. Groupthink is the soil in which tyranny takes root and blooms. Groupthink is unscientific, anti-life, and cowardly. Groupthink is virus, super-spreader, and medium of infection all at once. The Powers That Be manipulate groupthink like maestros of the dark arts, but fail to notice how susceptible they themselves are to its mist-covered swamps and seductive self-delusions. 

On and on the circus of history’s madness goes. Where it stops, nobody knows.

I think we need more abandon. We need to be more honest with ourselves and each other, more immediate, and then learn how to cope with each of our truths, our authenticity, our ugliness, our beauty. We are too afraid, too timid, too polite, too sensitive, proud, defensive, too allergic to robust community, to honesty, to ‘failure’, to abandonment. 

We need more abandon.

Can we learn to fall backwards, with abandon, into the waiting wilds of chance and discover, fearfully, excitedly, hopefully, whether we can fly on our own without the strings of the powerful keeping us safely netted in some cage of their design? Do we dare help to build a world which encourages true maturity in every individual, with maximum freedom to be as we are culturally expected, nascent in the air we breathe, while accepting full adult responsibility for the choices we make? Can we outgrow our cultural fear of death? Can we uproot our addiction to authority, its dark charm, its promise of eternal safety proffered so tantalisingly, just on the other side of defeating this current terror. Ok, just on the other side of that current terror. Well, perhaps there’s another terror lurking around the next corner…

Tyrannical authority is as addicted to obedience as the obedient are addicted to tyrannical authority. It is a symbiosis, a death trap. Isn’t the way out of this trap the abandon we need to let go of the fears that hold us back, that keep us firmly secured in authority’s embrace? Perhaps we should start looking each other in the eyes and share what we feel. Perhaps we should listen to the other side. Perhaps we should take that risk and see what happens. 

We’re going to die one way or the other.

Go abandon!

Divided and conquered

 

In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered that sparrows be exterminated throughout China.

For three days, the Chinese went hunting for sparrows. It was the beginning of an ecological and humanitarian disaster leading to millions of dead.

In a state-sponsored announcement and as one of his first initiatives, Mao declared war on the “four pests”: mosquitoes, flies, sparrows and rats. The impact on China’s ecological balance was catastrophic. The sparrow – which Mao identified as a pest – only rarely eats farmed grain from the field. The main components of its diet are in fact insects such as locusts, which can reproduce undisturbed in the absence of their main predator.
From Dr Wolfgang Wodarg’s Telegram feed [my translation] 

Systems prepare for their overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification.
R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

This post extends “Why I ‘support’ Trump over Biden” and analyses different aspects of the material in Part I of “Only the intensity has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again.” In the former, I briefly touched on the deep divisions that bedevil the American people, and by extension the world’s peoples. In the latter, I examined at some depth a few logical derivations we might tease out from the dogged phenomenon of inter-group antipathy at a broader scale than narrowly focussing on it as productive ground for sustaining an ancient strategy we know as “divide and conquer”.

Within that narrower remit, we here consider why societies and groups can be divided and set against each other, why so often we fail to see it happening, and what we might do about this understandable dynamic going forward. The article is structured as expositions of two civilisational building blocks – specialisation and hierarchy – that, taken together in the remainder of the article, serve to illustrate why divide and conquer is such an effective strategy for controlling very large numbers of people. We close by peering into the nature of reality, for it is among these deepest of fundaments that robust ideas supportive of a possible Better Way are to be found (I assert). 

This article is familiar ground but it is, I feel, absolutely pivotal to our historical moment. My hope is that examining this territory from multiple angles will make the analysis more accessible to more people.

Specialisation

Civilisation without specialisation is almost unimaginable (see Idiocracy). One of the fundamental properties distinguishing civilisation from non-civilisation is the incredible societal complexity it can sustain over large tracts of time. Specialisation cumulatively permits this growing complexity – or more accurately is an expression thereof – and is an accomplishment with roots in numerous civilisational accomplishments such as grain stores, geometry and metallurgy. These and countless other technologies free up time some use to become experts in something very narrow, like viral infection vectors or endocrine disruption. Over time, areas of expertise cumulatively and mutually advance each other, spawn yet others and generally interact in countless ways to, put crudely, produce wealth – lots of wealth. (We’ll talk about wealth later.) 

But this simplistic, progressivist rhetoric does not account for the problem highly focussed specialists can have when communicating with other highly focussed specialists, especially when their respective areas of expertise are remote from one another, yet both are suddenly relevant to some urgent social issue. Add ideological conflict to the mix, and specialists so thrown together can have a very hard time reaching agreement. More mundanely, we might also reflect on how hard it would be for primary-school teachers from north London to truly appreciate the worldviews and interests of Tibetan monks or Cebu’s street children.

And our account should also include vested interests that agglomerate around particularly valuable specialisations while thwarting or suppressing the findings of others that might harm those interests. After all, scientific research has to be funded by something, and not everything that can or should be investigated will yield financial profit – much may even harm it. In a world ruled by money, even science itself, not to mention politics and law, is for sale to a large degree. This problem is compounded by the challenge of staying humble while possessing the extraordinary ambition and skill needed to become a world-leading expert or figure of power. And then really identifying with that lofty status. As Max Planck put it, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

But the domain of specialisation most important to our discussion here is politics (within which I include the mythical, semi-mythical or wholly real yet invariably disturbing ‘Deep State’). Politics – beyond parliaments to all institutional power structures – could be characterised as a societal process evolved to protect wealth (aka power) and determine its distribution through society. A second relevant quality politics possesses is its structural function as intermediary between Business and The People. The tensions characterising this triad’s interdependencies also characterise human history. How transparently and honestly can politics perform this role? How wisely responsive to cumulative change can it be? Does ‘runaway specialisation’ in fact fatally impair politics’ ability to be a transparent mediator? How does our cultural sense of wealth / wealth generation govern which group has more power over political processes, regardless of any moral or ethical considerations? And are this triad’s just-asserted constituent groups in fact the result of an ideological perspective, a mirage-like emergence of our acquired cultural reflexes around wealth?

Hold those thoughts.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is a social structure that tends to emerge from advanced specialisation. Decentralised, more anarchic/democratic structures can emerge from specialisation but are far less likely, as history attests. Currently and for a while yet, hierarchical social forms have their hands on history’s steering wheel. 

What does this mean, fundamentally speaking? It means politics’ function as protector and distributor of wealth operates within a hierarchical dynamic that must, by virtue of this dynamic’s structuring pattern that is ever operant, ‘autonomically’ favour the pyramid’s upper over its lower layers over time. I would argue this is the case in state communism and socialism, in ‘free-market’ capitalism, indeed in any institutionalised hierarchy. In other words, the wealth-power any hierarchy generates flows cumulatively to the top. The degree to which a rising pyramid lifts all boats depends on circumstances, which include but are by no means limited to the relative balances of power available to each level. One contemporary example would be trade-union relative to corporate/business power.

To continue with trade unions by way of further explication, they tend to be structured hierarchically. This is hardly surprising; in societies that have been hierarchical for centuries, we would expect almost every member therein to be reflexively hierarchical, to reflexively expect leaders and followers and to not know how to organise differently. To be effective, trade unions must have power and wealth. Hunger for power is probably the best predictor for which personalities within a union’s membership will make it to leadership positions and be effective in those roles. As such, they are likely to have more psychological affinity – even if hidden from conscious view – with the leadership of corporations and politics than with the members they represent. This makes them easy to corrupt and separate from their members. I don’t mean this disparagingly, I’m simply teasing out logical derivations from the components under discussion.

To recap, organisations, groups, unions, political parties, etc. have particular defining dynamics. If these happen to be inflexibly or ideologically hierarchical, the decisions, solutions and discoveries they will tend to favour will conform to or serve the dynamic outlined above; favouring upper over lower levels of the hierarchy over time. And yet despite this systemic tendency, the vector history takes cannot be controlled completely; unintended consequences will slip out from under all attempts to control history and have their unpredictable way with it.

In the case of politics generally, this tendency will underpin, in both the most hidden and obvious of ways, how politics continues to conceptualise its role – romantically and pragmatically – and will also reinforce its perception and understanding of the wealth it is solemnly sworn to protect. Systems structure perception. And all of this somewhat in the manner of a positive feedback loop that one day must crash against the mounting cliffs of perpetual change.

Groupings: antipathy, mistrust, conspiracy

Combined, the two civilisational building blocks presented above generate seemingly endless groupings: sub-groups within groups, fringe groups, dominant groups, tiny groups and huge meta-groups, and we may not be particularly conscious of the many groups to which we belong; sociology does a dizzying job of discovering new groups, and most laypeople have probably never heard of them. The more we look, the more we reveal. Who can say what part fantasy and what part reality play in this process. 

Not all groups have antithetical interrelations but any two can be coaxed into that relationship. Propaganda, public-relations and behavioural-programming powers are by now highly advanced skills. Should it serve the interests of those with the means to wield these skills – those at the very tip of the hierarchical pyramid whose duty is to sustain that pyramid by any means possible –, they can create new groups as if out of nothing, and set them against each other. Of course, to be effective, such efforts must be sufficiently psychologically grounded, e.g. those who fear viruses and those who fear authoritarian power, or those wanting the freedom to question claims made about vaccines and those believing such criticism leads to widespread disease and death. It seems fault lines develop along axes of fear. Fear goes viral in ignorance, and ignorance is a hard thing to defeat in highly specialised societies, especially when education is designed to dumb down the vast majority of us.

But this tempting civilisational tool is something of a double-edged sword. Societal continuity over time is an existential matter. Our ideas around what reality is about – pursuit of happiness, property accumulation, success and accomplishment, humble service to God, humanism, science, etc. – are cohering forces that power us through time, structure us, guide us, unite us. Were an entire civilisation to lose faith in their deepest convictions and beliefs over night, the resultant chaos would be terrible, regardless of how noble or cynical the establishment of those cohering beliefs had been. Hence, the continuity that is the core remit of the political layer in guarding and distributing generated wealth – one critical part of which is sustaining consensus about what wealth is – is fiercely protected. No individual or group is as valuable as that continuity; every group and individual would be plunged into the abyss were that continuity to suddenly snap. Of course, this does logically make the group guarding continuity the most important group, and there’s the hierarchical rub. 

These hard facts mean states and other powerful interests will play groups against one another if such is perceived to be helpful in protecting societal continuity. This sort of realpolitik could be termed conspiring. As Stalin put it, you have to break eggs to make omelettes. I’d add that one tends not to reveal which eggs are going to be sacrificed, to extend the metaphor to its logical limit. Such decisions are thus made in secrecy (for the good of the realm!).

The problem is the temptation to abuse this great power that politics must wisely manage – forever. This challenge is made steadily more difficult as the pyramid’s tip loses touch with its lower levels, as it loses connection with ‘reality on the ground’, as it struggles to properly understand specialist advisors, as it fails to resist the persuasive charms of lobbyists etc. It takes a rare set of individuals indeed to handle these sorts of pressures: making life-and-death decisions at mass scale while staying wise and compassionate.

Recalling the communication issues that bedevil specialisation and how this relates to the above paragraphs, we might recast this phenomenon as one of several co-factors eroding community cohesion over time. For example, a 50-strong hunter-gatherer band is going to be a far more cohesive community than, say, the population of Great Britain. The social complexity of the latter far exceeds that of the former. This complexity can be viewed as a rich attack surface offering an endless number of fault lines that might be exploited for divide-and-conquer purposes. In other words, because we don’t know each other very well, we can easily be induced to become suspicious of each other. Some have called this the atomisation of society. An episode from the first season of “Black Mirror” (“Fifteen Million Merits”) depicts one dystopian version of extreme atomisation. And it is dystopian, not utopian, precisely because humans are social animals. Distrust is poison to us, depresses us, corrodes our emotional, psychological and physical health.

So what are we to do if we want our civilisational cake and eat it too? My answer is that we have to revisit what we mean by wealth, by hierarchy and anarchy, value and other foundational concepts. The concluding section will now turn to these matters.

Closing observations towards a Better Way

Underneath both building blocks discussed above, and I believe also under any others we might advance, lies value. All decision making is guided by our value systems, whether ‘civilised’ or ‘primitive’, ‘humanist’ or ‘animal’. Value is thus somewhat synonymous with wealth; wealth is what we value. But neither is a distinct object impervious to change. Over the last two or three centuries, both terms have become profoundly influenced by materialism. Materialism requires the measurement of all things so as to mechanically describe and thus control them. Measurement is of course nothing new, but materialism’s dominance has reached unprecedented levels in this time period, though is now past its zenith, in my view. 

Value, it is claimed, is measured by money. One effect of this peculiar claim is that we have come to see value as almost entirely contained in and created by money, and is thus expressible in numbers. 

Money, being little more than numbers attached to some currency symbol and imbued with purchasing power, simplifies and thus cheapens how we conceptualise and structure the economic domain. Economics should concern itself primarily with wise husbandry of the environment by protecting biodiversity. Instead it casts itself as an impartial science of market mechanisms, which are asserted as laws of nature steered by price discovery via supply and demand in the market place of life. If market forces are left to their own devices, the rest of reality will take care of itself, including the environment, which is conceived as an endless pool of idle resources. This intellectual framework actually places money at the heart of society, but this reality is artfully concealed by the orthodoxy that money is a “veil”, or almost meaningless consequence of buying and selling, a necessary but neutral tool invented to make trading more efficient. 

Money is so much more than this disingenuous description.

Money, being made of numbers, can grow forever, especially when it is created as interest-bearing debt. Try as humanity might, its attempts to anchor money-as-numbers to something real, like gold, always fail. Money’s core logic – more is better than less –, combined with human invention and ambition, tends to grow the economic domain beyond what is sustainable. Only the big and powerful survive (until they collapse). Numbers can grow forever. Human imagination can grow forever. The constant battle for scarce resources adds fuel to this growth conflagration, whispering into our collective ears to escape constraints, to completely ‘tame’ the ‘wild’, to get everything under control. But resources are only scarce because human imagination is inexorably steered towards greed by the poor definition of value under discussion: tautology as positive feedback loop.

Health, on the other hand, isn’t like money. Health is an expression of biological systems that cannot grow forever. Perpetual growth of health makes no sense, not even as an idle notion. Health is something we must always tend, much as we might tend a garden, not that it expands, but that it stays functional, perhaps beautiful. Health and beauty can be thought of as synonyms. 

Something about perpetual economic growth appeals to our civilisational instincts to escape the limits of reality (see transhumanism). What we value governs what we choose, how we steer our lives. If money is value, then money and its ‘infinite’ potential governs our lives. Were we instead to perceive health as value, how different would civilisation be? What effect would such a simple but profound change have on specialisation and hierarchical systems?

Aside from measurement, number and the illusion of control emerging from mastery thereof, another consequence of materialism is a pervasive victim-centred passivity that leads to depression, apathy, cynicism, nihilism, etc. ‘What’s the point? I’m just material stuff knocked this way and that by forces beyond my control.’ ‘There’s no such thing as free will; I’m a biological robot.’ 

This psychological stance sees health in a mechanical light, a perspective that makes health seem less attractive, dull somehow. The greeds and appetites that are the products of this stance desire primarily what cannot nourish: pornography rather than love; romance instead of relationship; quick and easy junk, not inconvenient home-cooked, food etc. Such desires, expressed as economic demand, end up rewarding those powers that need our needs to forever remain in that narcissistic frame, in that painful emptiness. How is this a recipe for health, for meaningful success?

Hence too-big-to-fail banks, hence Big Pharma, hence Big Ag, hence dumbed-down populations who prefer not to think for themselves, who don’t have the time to do so anyway, who just want a ‘quiet life’ in the face of all the existential angst around money, career and meaning. It’s a vicious circle and there can seem no way out.

All this adds up to one sad truth: humanity is suffering an unprecedented crisis of trust. There’s too much divide and conquer, too much hierarchical control, too much nefarious meddling and nudging … all to keep the system going as it fights to survive rapidly accelerating technological change. And though this basic pattern – dawn to decadence – is as old as history, there is far more at stake now than there has ever been. Whether our response to the crisis takes us in a healthier or a yet more dysfunctional direction depends on whether we can learn to wisely manage the structural tensions and challenges detailed above. The healthier way is the harder; the slippery slope into totalitarianism the easier, the more passive.

The causes of this crisis are of course more complex than I have captured here, but concealed beneath them all is, as argued, the low quality of our cultural reflexes around value and wealth. As the saying goes, we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The wholly out-of-date constitutions and instincts of our governing bodies confront a situation they can only respond to with ever more control. These instincts – civilisation’s DNA as it were – are, naturally enough, honed to self-protection, but this time the ‘elite’s’ egotistical inflexibility may prove catastrophic.

At root, cultural and societal reflexes become unfit for purpose for the simple reason that change is the only constant. The way things were is not the way things are. “Systems prepare for their overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification.” And we cannot stop change unless we transform reality into absolute nothingness. Can we be more flexible and wise in how we handle inevitable change? I strongly believe so. The trick lies in redefining, or newly appreciating, value.

I should point out here that I do not advocate throwing all babies out with all bath waters, nor do I advocate a return to any prior ‘normal’, an ugly concept at the best of times. Besides, despite repeating patterns, return itself is an impossibility. As Heraclitus put it, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

In pursuit of the healthier path and as far as we are able, we should try to rid ourselves of all ideologies; they censor perception. Traditionalism (conservation of the good) partners radicalism (perpetual change) via trial-and-error, seesawing exchanges. Patterns repeat eternally while the contexts within which they iterate, great and small, are always changing. Spring comes every year, but every spring occurs within a unique context and is composed of only unique events. Further, spring itself can be seen as a symbol for life cycles that characterise conscious processes of growth and decay that both precede and will last beyond this planet’s existence, a claim that takes us neatly to the nature of reality.

As chance would have it, I recently came across an article entitled “Scientists Reveal a Multidimensional Universe Inside the Human Brain”. Though still rooted in materialism, I believe it is indicative of a turn in science that will inexorably lead to a cultural acceptance that consciousness is reality’s true foundation. Donald Hoffman’s investigations into consciousness are another indication of this turn. 

For a large number of reasons that I won’t set out here, I am confident almost to the point of certainty that what we call matter and energy, or rather what we experience as matter and energy, occur entirely within consciousness, not the other way around. In much the same way – metaphorically at least –, pixels on a computer screen behave like ‘real’ trees and rocks to the pixel-based avatars we conscious humans operate when playing, say, League of Legends. From the point of view of a character within the game, the rules (code) defining the matter-like behaviours of trees, rocks, light, gravity, etc., are invisible, or behind the scenes. Similarly, the set of continuous experiences we call physical reality is governed by rules – we could think of them as the Laws of Physics – that structure our universe. A switch from matter to consciousness as foundational would not mean all scientific discoveries would have to be discarded, just that they are couched in an error of perception that puts the cart before the horse. In Hoffman’s terms, physical reality is a constructed user-friendly “interface” that enables us to do what consciousness generally feels it needs to get done … for some as yet unknowable reason. Our lives on earth serve some conscious purpose we cannot as yet discern.

In my view, the crisis of trust that is the bitter fruit of decadence includes the erosion of materialism this time around. One of materialism’s tenets is a universe of lifeless objects. As touched on above, this foundational perception (weltanschauung is perhaps a better word) fosters the objectification, and by inexorable extension the commodification of nature/reality. Materialism undergirds the hubristic notions that nature (Other, NotMe) is a subset of the economy (experienced as ‘my material needs and desires’), and that perpetual economic growth is possible and good, and so has ultimately given rise to soulless, narcissistic consumerism. 

As humanity increasingly dislikes what it sees in the mirror, as modern humans search in vain for a soul, as economic growth refuses to reignite, as advanced robotics and the historically rapid approach of AI turn most of humanity into little more than vessels of demand through which to pour a very conditional universal basic income, so the structures that got us here desperately need a redesign. To co-create something healthier and wiser than previous versions, for our co-creation to be lovingly open rather than psychotically totalitarian (i.e. The Great Reset), a profound evolution of consciousness is needed. Though profound, however, this required evolution is in fact quite simple conceptually – once the unnecessarily complicated and superfluous detail of modernity is pierced. As Charles Eisenstein has it, though the sky seems impossibly far away, it starts at the ground and rises from there.

Systems structure perception. We are each constrained by a matrix of beliefs that filters what we perceive. Fear of identity collapse, of betraying the group, of losing face, of being wrong, of dying, of being a powerless incompetent fool … all of it is currently rooted in a now instinctive belief (oddly we rarely believe it when pressed) that value = money = price = property accumulation. The antidote to fear is always courage. Courage is – among other things – a readiness to be wrong and the strength to persevere in developing understanding and wisdom regardless of setbacks along the way, and not permitting ourselves to be held back by beliefs. In short, being scientific in the noblest sense of that word. This is our healthiest path as conscious beings. 

There are many ways to pierce the convoluted matrix of modernity but each would be assisted greatly by the realisation that there is nothing but God, that there is only God. Or, that there is only consciousness. I believe this realisation is dawning. It’s not the only way to break the spell, but it might be the most effective and lasting because it describes reality more accurately; consciousness cannot arise from matter but the experience of ‘matter’ can occur within consciousness. 

Whatever path we take, rerooting our cultural sense of value in health and love will produce wealth-generation systems that enhance beauty, fecundity, freedom and truthful living everywhere. Were we to earnestly take on this task, I suspect social-organisation systems – politics – would become a fluid mix of anarchic and hierarchical. Natural authority is a beautiful thing, authority by brute force is not. Anarchy – leaderless decision making – is at its healthiest when our systems of education promote independence of thought and a willingness to be wrong, to learn by doing, to know in youthful excitement that learning never ends. As such, anarchy and hierarchy are not opposites at all; they are compatible decision-making modalities that can be used like any tools: as needed. The desire to treat Other with respect, to want its health to flourish and prosper, is simply a healthier way to be. It is love’s way. Love exposes how deceptive the selfishness-selfless dichotomy is; as I do unto Other, so I do unto Self. And all this would sustain civilisational complexity while presenting a minimal attack surface to divide-and-conquer tactics. 

What’s not to like!

Hierarchy and Anarchy

[Warning: this is tentative, exploratory material!]

It is not ‘human nature’—via the heady cocktail of ambition, greed and selfishness—which makes hierarchy inevitable, it is environmental complexity. ‘Human nature’, coarsely understood as just defined, is a variable-complex of low relevance in the generating of hierarchical social systems, and is meaningless when notionally removed from its supporting environmental networks in an attempt to see it ‘for what it is.’ I argue here that we need not refer to this Hobbesian ‘beast within’ when seeking to understand social forms. Another line of inquiry bears more succulent fruit.

Premise: Not only can there be no such thing as equality across the universal spectrum (except in the abstract world of language and imagination), we should never even try to establish such in pursuit of social good. Just as the Piraha cannot count above one—even when shown how by concerned anthropologists—so we should recognize and celebrate the uniqueness of every single thing, at every scale, everywhere. As one consequence of having begun to look at reality in this light, I am beginning to entertain the possibility that the hierarchy-anarchy dichotomy I have been battling with in my thinking for some time now, should be thought of as nothing more than a cultural illusion, a transitional conflict generated by ignorance. These supposedly antithetical social arrangements are but projections from out of our cultural knowledge of Universe, knowledge which is painfully incomplete, biased and inaccurate.

For example, isn’t it always and only the case that, as Universe generates more data-detail out of its ever-changing reality, ‘tunes’ its fractal-resolution ever finer, it consequently generates yet more data-detail in a perpetual, multifaceted whirring around dynamic ‘balance?’ (See note on entropy below.) On our scale (humans and human societies are embedded subsets of Universe), the more information we discern then process and manipulate, the more we generate in the very heat of our efforts to understand, interpret and ‘control.’ We are as much a part of Universe as stars, asteroids and planets. So isn’t it the case that society becomes more ‘complex’ necessarily (albeit not in a linear fashion, but over time)? Musn’t this complexity give rise to social hierarchies?

Therefore, and to focus prosaically on the theme at hand, the chance for small human groups to remain forever ‘egalitarian’—a societal mode we project onto them from within our cultural and historical experience of hierarchy—is, from my newly emerging point of view, zero, not because of human nature and ‘born greedy’ arguments, but simply because the wild mess of environmental (or bio-social) pressures, stirred up with a societal soup of any complexity, is totally uncontrollable. Inescapably, people (trees, flowers, lions, antelope, ants) of varying qualities emerge from the environment producing them, not because of genetics per se, but because of the necessary complexity and vital unpredictability of the web of life. Genetics are a subset of and are embedded in Universe. They mean absolutely nothing whatsoever outside their context, their enmeshed reality. The manner in which genes copy themselves into ‘endless’ iterations of themselves is powered and slowly altered by external environmental circumstances beyond their control. Indeed there is no control, there are no actions; there is only response and reaction. Agency is an illusion.

Let’s look at two of the techniques for sustaining egalitarianism. Teasing: How can teasing to suppress alphas be effective for all time in the face of all that information ‘out there,’ to be discovered and interpreted? No way can we all know enough about everything to deal with ‘experts’ from multiple fields. The ‘You don't know what you're talking about!’ card can be played, and defended, increasingly successfully, as societal complexity increases. Teasing is effective in small groups where there is open access to manageable amounts of culturally generated data about reality, thereafter it becomes ever weaker. Imagining for a moment I could get sufficient ‘face time,’ how would I tease a Margaret Thatcher or a Tony Blair, a Joe Biden or Lloyd Blankfein to humility and humble acceptance of ‘egalitarian’ principles? Not only do I not have sufficient power, I have but limited experience of their worlds, and they would not understand where I was coming from. Killing: And as a pacifist, before even looking at the extreme difficulty and counter-productivity of such a solution, I cannot advocate killing people who disagree with me, or who have a more ambitious personality. Even people like Lloyd Blankfein. (You can relax now, Lloyd.)

Perhaps even more fundamentally, why would nature, via human behaviour, select for ‘egalitarian’ societies at the scale of hunter gatherers? Is nature moral? Does it care about fairness? Perhaps, but not as I caricature it here; nothing is that simple. Christopher Boehm confronts hierarchy and egalitarianism in “Hierarchy in the Forest”. He points out the life-and-death need for total trust among all members of the group, e.g., on potentially deadly hunting trips. If any member of the tribe has personal ambitions, that person cannot be trusted in such delicate situations and must therefore either be humbled out of their selfish egotism, or killed, for the sake of the group. ‘Primitive’ egalitarian societies are a harsh matter of survival in dangerous, non-surplus conditions, and have nothing to do with ‘rights’ or other political niceties. The egalitarian mode we perceive them as having 'adopted,' arises organically from the environmental conditions confronting the group. Hence, with the arrival of farming, surplus, private property, alongside the increasing complexity of social life, egalitarianism simply becomes the less effective social construct. For this stage of the analysis, morality is irrelevant, as is human nature, except that human nature is social and intelligently adaptive.

To recap, social hierarchy could be said to be an organic consequence of increases in generated intellectual information leading to increases in social complexity, coupled with changed environmental circumstances and challenges such as farming, surplus and private property. Over broader tracts of time, and speaking more generally still, the more complex things get, the more information we generate as we further understand Universe, cumulatively—standing on the shoulders of taller and taller giants—the less able we are to deploy effective teasing (and other) tactics to keep the playing field level, and the less appropriate egalitarianism becomes. An egalitarian social mode becomes an impossibility via person-to-person teasing in social and environmental conditions far different from ‘hand-to-mouth’ hunter gatherer tribes. Furthermore, as hierarchies establish, killing alpha males becomes harder, as they are surrounded by ‘hangers-on’, who become an early ‘army,’ ‘police,’ etc. Not to mention that specialization means upending the hierarchy sinks you too. Having specialized, you cannot survive on your own in the wild. Hierarchy breeds dependency on it. A hierarchy composed of equally abled jacks of all trades is illogical.

But of course the story does not end with the supposed ‘success’ of the hierarchical forms we see around us today. It just so happens that human social hierarchies such as nation-states and corporations are wired to grow perpetually as part of their design (and we should see corporations as a smooth ‘progression’ from the nation-state to a form that can grow beyond nation-state borders, while states provide the framework for population growth). They are therefore fundamentally self-destructive at increasing environmental cost, likely to the point of global eco-collapse if not arrested.

Today, we therefore have two (interrelated) choices if we wish to survive in civilizational form (facing, as we do, new environmental challenges such as peak oil, technological unemployment, peak debt, global warming, and other problems unprecedented in human history):

1. develop an anarchic socioeconomic infrastructure which permits the ad hoc emergence of (short-term?) hierarchical social organizations, which are systemically prevented (not forced) from bedding down, dominating and growing in reach and power (goal-oriented or project-based hierarchies); and/or

2. insist on pure anarchic social systems and work out new ways of preventing the ‘unwanted’ emergence of hierarchies in a modern, complex setting.

Right off the bat I have a problem with “insist” (a word I put there for precisely that reason!). It is totalitarian, profoundly divisive, is the deepest antithesis of what a new social form, from this point looking forward, ought, logically, to be about. Because it divides deeply to insist on a solution, insistence renders impossible the ever-emergent consensus, however fractious, an anarchic system would require, would strive to learn how to build. To insist on anarchy and only anarchy is to doom it at the outset. 'Mature' anarchy can only emerge organically from conditions conducive to its emergence (nothing unusual there!). And grass doesn’t grow faster if you shout at it. Hence my continuing interest in a resource-based economy, in which the infrastructure itself is sustainably organized (point 1.) to distribute the necessities (plus many luxuries) to all people everywhere. This infrastructure is a necessary precondition for generating the base conditions of anarchy (egalitarianism), out of which soil ad hoc and short-term hierarchical arrangements, perhaps even ‘institutions,’ can grow and then dissolve, at need, without being able to accrue power. Key is the ‘guarantee’ of a solid and environmentally friendly life-ground, a base providing everyone with the ‘equal’ opportunity to participate and contribute. The degree to which one enjoys one’s life will be up to each individual ‘equally’ (which translates to a loose definition of ‘freedom’ I can live with). The more one constructively gives, the richer one’s life becomes. Contribution rewards by definition, even when it includes failure and set backs.

Such a socioeconomics could include no fiscal debt in the formal sense, no private property, no bondage in the explicit sense of money and formal monetary accounting. Each of us would be obliged/free to play his or her part in the organic and ongoing rebalancings of Universe, adapted and reacted to in an emergent fashion. Without appeal to any sense of fairness or morality, we would get out, more or less, what we put in. And that is a morality I can believe in. A bio-diverse ‘equality’ I can take seriously.

However, in chicken-and-egg fashion, building such an infrastructure first requires what I’ve been calling here an ‘anarchic’ set up, that is, a society accustomed to and politically mature enough to cope with locally organized self-governance via direct democracy and consensus building. We are nowhere near that place. We are political and emotional babies. Before we can even begin to want to build a global RBE infrastructure, we have to re-localize, nucleate across the planet into a cultural sense of ourselves as but one species of many on planet Earth, and establish ‘self-sufficient’ communities interconnected via ‘harmonizing’ Internet-like software and databases capable of global resource tracking and management. Out of this a RBE might emerge, though the path will be stony indeed, before we even consider how difficult the first step will be.

To conclude, the two listed options are in fact one—minus the word “insist”— or are at least interconnected. We begin where we can, as discussed by David Graeber, to construct anarchic social organizations, slowly improve our consensus-finding techniques, and freely disseminate the wisdom we learn. Show ourselves and the world how it’s done. Invite participation from others. Remain open. Stay honest. Believe. And accept that hierarchical social organizations are unavoidable, even within anarchy. Nature is fundamentally anarchic with hierarchical arrangements arising from and collapsing back into it. Anarchy is the soil which enables hierarchy. Seeing them as opposites is wrong.



[Note to self: Complexity cannot increase infinitely. There will be retrenchments, failed-experiments, collapses leading to profound and broad changes of direction. In the manner of Keep It Simple, Stupid, systems can be too complex. Complexity does not equal wisdom. Accumulations of wisdom include rebalancings of complexity and simplicity as Universe ‘progresses’ ‘blindly’ through its many experiments with different forms of life.]

[Note to others: Entropy is not the sole fundamental property of Universe in my opinion. There are many, though change is the only constant! If entropy were the core property of Universe I could not be typing this. The self-organizational processes necessary, over the vast tracts of time from the alleged Big Bang till now, to engender life on earth and now human society and culture out of ‘chaos’ cannot be ignored. They’re here. We are it. Universe did this, and this miraculous (inexplicable) ‘accomplishment’ is not the result of entropy.]