Well, one of the fascinating things that anthropologists point out is that every society succeeds by-and-large in getting the children to behave like (that society's version of) adults. In other words, culture is somehow stable even though it gets renewed from generation to generation. So we are programmed in a way, and for that to work as well as it does, parts of the program have to remain stable, and that implies that the conscious ego cannot be allowed direct control over all parts of the internal model. And, in fact, there are only a few autonomous functions that are also (partially) subject to conscious control: breathing, blinking, and a third one that I just forgot... heh
In other words, the rigidity you're talking about is "works as intended" for the original context: small tribal groups living in the wild. What we call civilization is only about 12K years old, eh? With most of the action happening just in the last two or three centuries the complexities in geopolitics are entirely novel.
However, since about the 60's information about reprogramming ourselves has become more and more available (Just for example, "Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory & Experiments" by John C. Lilly was published in '67 I believe.) Rapid progress has been made, but a concerted effort to apply this information as part of an overall political shift has not arisen.
Bucky Fuller pointed out that we have the technological capability to create a kind of utopia, from my POV it seems we also have the psychological "technology" to get over our problems and actually do it.
We have very rigid notions of the ways that laws should work, or property ownership.
Undoubtedly we are programmed to some degree, but is there anyone that claims to know with any sort of precision how much we are programmed, and to what degree that contributes to our success? People like Sam Harris "point out" that rationality should be all we need to continue succeeding into the future as we have in the past, but the problem is, this is largely speculation.
> and for that to work as well as it does, parts of the program have to remain stable, and that implies that the conscious ego cannot be allowed direct control over all parts of the internal model.
It may be beneficial and easier for things to be stable, but how stable do they need to be? The environment (society, politics, technology, etc) that humans live in is certainly not stable, and we continue to be successful, but how can we accurately attribute this result to programming of some sort? Take away our technology for example and cast modern day mankind back into the past a decade or three (say, due to an extremely severe recession/depression) - could we handle it psychologically and societally? To what degree is modern day society psychologically dependent upon the comforts that scientists have delivered to us? How do we proclaim to know such things?
> And, in fact, there are only a few autonomous functions that are also (partially) subject to conscious control: breathing, blinking, and a third one that I just forgot... heh
Getting a short haircut, catching a flight to a far away land, and trying to kill as many of the people your government has told you are your enemy? Working two jobs and sparing yourself even the smallest comforts of life so your children can have a chance at a better life than you, instead of blowing your brains out which would be so much easier? Biting your tongue for the hundredth time when your boss pins another case of his incompetence on you? I speculate that all of these things involve both conscious and unconscious functions, but again we don't know. Some people can pull them off, others can't.
> In other words, the rigidity you're talking about is "works as intended" for the original context: small tribal groups living in the wild. What we call civilization is only about 12K years old, eh? With most of the action happening just in the last two or three centuries the complexities in geopolitics are entirely novel.
Exactly. Might it be foolhardy to rush headlong at maximum possible speed into financially optimizing every last thing we can, with zero thought for whether we are psychologically operating in the shiny new world we are building? Are there any signs of rapidly increasing strange behavior in societies? It seems like we're often told to worry very much about such events, but the remedy is even more change, and faster!
> Rapid progress has been made, but a concerted effort to apply this information as part of an overall political shift has not arisen. Bucky Fuller pointed out that we have the technological capability to create a kind of utopia, from my POV it seems we also have the psychological "technology" to get over our problems and actually do it.
Boom. Well, I would say it has arisen many times, and to varying degrees, but the people who have been appointed to run our societies have tended to not be terribly supportive of such movements, wish makes me feel even more uncomfortable.
I too believe we easily have what it takes to run our societies fairly and properly, and have for quite some time....or at least we used to - I'm start to worry that we might be starting to lose some of the psychological and other less intangible prerequisities to make such a world happen, and I don't share Sam Harris' optimism that rationalism is enough to carry the day. It seems to me there is far more evidence against that theory than supporting it.
On the bright side, it's nice that you and I mostly agree on something for a change! :)
I think you make a good (and very underappreciated) point about the relevance of the ideas in this article to geopolitics, or how humanity ~chooses (or so we think) to organize itself.
[didericis] also makes some good points that are relevant to this perspective:
> Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could.
> I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart.
The dangerous part imho when it comes to a geopolitical application is, while most of us can recognize the complexities and tradeoffs in a computer system, at least when they're pointed out to us, very few seem to be able to see similar complexities in geopolitics (a massively more complex system), even when it's pointed out. It's as if we've developed an intuition that passionately rejects the very suggestion, a behavior which in itself highlights the complexity involved.