Reforming Ant Society, The Reality Show: Team 1

If one were to observe the tendencies of ants, how would one improve or ‘reform’ an ant society?

One could either:

-Find ways to force the ants to behave in the desired way.  Create an intricate system of micro-management and coercion that consumes lots of time and energy.

-Find ways to work with the nature of the ants using as little force and micro-management as possible.  Direct the ants by striving to make the desired action the most easily, least riskily obtainable positive payoff.

Imagine a game show with two teams who have to accomplish a goal given them by the game show host using nothing but an ant colony.  Let’s say two types of foods have been mixed.  The food is in the form of tiny grains that no human could efficiently sort out.  The goal is to induce the ants to act as a biological filter by separating one substance from another.  The food that must be isolated is called ‘good.’  The second, undesirable variety of food is called ‘evil.’  The team that has the largest harvest of ‘good’ with the least proportionally ‘evil’ ant society wins.  The game show host gives the signal and the game begins:

Left to their own devices when presented with this pile of food, let’s say the ants bring back 60% evil and 40% good back to their colony.  Evil has a somewhat higher payoff than good amongst ants, so it gets natural preference.  It’s up to the contestants to reverse this reprehensible trend.

Team 1 is composed of disciples of order and discipline.  They begin by assigning every single ant an identification tag and number.  Using these numbers, a comprehensive record is kept of every ant’s personal history.  They build a series of closed tubes and connect it to the anthole so that the only way of leaving the hole is through the tube.  The end of the tube is positioned by the food source.  At the end of the tube a gate is attached so that the members of team 1 can regulate how many ants can approach the food at any given time.  They do this so that the number of foraging ants never exceeds their ability to regulate and micro-manage, so they can keep track of ‘who’ is harvesting what kind of food.

Now, there has to be a return gate and tube to the colony.  Only the ants who pick up the ‘good’ food are allowed passage into the return tube.  Ants who picked up the ‘evil’ food are picked up with tweezers, given a weak electric shock, and put in a holding area while the next batch of foragers is allowed through the entry gates.

Since team one wants as many active, productive foragers as possible, the ‘evil’ ants cannot be left in the holding area for very long.  They are soon given another chance.  After awhile, the data recorders will find that there are some repeat offenders.  Team 1 builds several more containment areas for varying grades of offenders.  After a certain number of offenses, an individual ant is either removed permanently from the game or killed.  It’s not contributing enough to Team 1’s effort; it’s dead weight on the finite regulatory capacity of their system.  Any forager that represents a net loss of time and energy for the system must be disposed of.

Before long, the ants start digging new holes closer to the food source and away from the elaborate system of tubes.  Each new hole must be destroyed as it is dug.  The ants pursue their instinctive course, escalating production of new holes, digging anew as quickly as their efforts are demolished.

Just maintaining order requires round the clock constant supervision by every member of Team 1.  At first, they at least had the option of closing the gates for awhile and leaving the ants imprisoned and unproductive.  Now, they can never take their eyes away for even an instant.  Finally, one of team one’s members falls asleep on duty.  During this nap, the ants voraciously seize nothing but the evil food.  The artificial shortage has resulted in soaring demand for precisely what they’re not supposed to have.  The sleepy team one member is shaken awake when his teammate comes to relieve him and both of them are horrified when they look at what has happened.  In one tiny lapse, a system in disequilibrium has done everything possible to correct itself.  Some of the ant colony’s food storage chambers are visible through the transparent glass wall of the terrarium.  It is immediately obvious that an appreciable amount of ‘evil’ food was collected and stored away.  Newly dug holes are destroyed.  The ant gates are shut.  In the furor of restoring order, all of the ants caught carrying the wrong food are immediately killed.

In reaction to the complete breakdown of the system from a single breach, Team separates the food pile from all the rest of the terrarium by jamming a metal plate of  precise dimensions down into the soil.  There is now a wall that prevents the ants from getting to the food by either walking or digging.  Unfortunately for team one, some of the ants are able to climb the metal wall and make it back over again with ‘evil’ food.  Team 1 responds by spraying down the metal wall with glycerin and any other slippery substance they can think of.  Now, the system is foolproof!  The ants are moved over to the food by direct human intervention.  Unfortunately, the ants are so disoriented by being picked up and moved around that they do not readily pick up the food and try to bring it back to the colony.  They never followed a food trail, they have no food trail to follow back.  The few ants that do pick up food, usually drop it as soon as they are picked up again and try to struggle and defend themselves.  The system has grown so complex and so heavily compromised the nature of the ants that the attempted reforms finally lead to a complete breakdown in productivity.  No food is collected at all.

To pull out the metal plate and regress is to bring an end to progress admit a fatal excess of order yet Team 1 has to if they want to continue to compete.  The former system is reinstated and as time wears on, there are more errors than before as everyone on team 1 is steadily worn down by the relentless upkeep.  Team one’s leader gives the group a last desperate speech:

“This system would have worked perfectly if we just could have done it perfectly.”

“But we’re people.  We make mistakes.” Someone points out.  “In this system even the smallest mistake is disastrous.”

“Then don’t make mistakes.” Commands the leader.

“We’re trying not to!” Exclaims someone else.

“Then you’re not trying hard enough!  If only we were perfect.” Responds the leader  “We clearly need a system to control us controlling the ants.  Ha!  The perfect idea.”

The other members of team 1 just stare blankly at the idea of having yet more systematic constructs to maintain.  They are only human.  They are exhausted.

Team 1 maintains the system as best they can for the next few days.  They are so disheartened that they make more mistakes than ever.  Some almost stop caring, convinced they’ve lost and the whole contest is a supreme waste of time.

Finally, the last of the food pile is gone.  The game show personnel emerge to congratulate them and appraise the results.  Team 1 is for the most part just happy it’s over now.  The moment their system is gone, the ants start behaving exactly as before.  It is as if team 1 never existed.

Sculpting Nature and Societies

Humans can’t go backwards as much as they might often like to.  Any group that becomes less competitive than its neighbors will surely be pushed aside and reduced to a historical footnote.  Yet societies as we know them must be repressive.  This is because modern mass societies are in inherent conflict with the human being’s animal nature.

Furthermore, fleeing to nature is no paradise or solution.  When instincts rule, there’s a lot of zero sum mating games and conflicts over resources.  Technology is older than Homo sapiens, our species is not properly developed to survive without it.  There is no stamping out or eliminating it.  In a way of thinking, we are unnatural by nature.

There’s nothing inherently sacred about nature.  It’s a spontaneously occurring system of genetic selection.  Human technology based societies simply have a somewhat different, slightly less spontaneous system of selection.  Our system is not necessarily any less valid than nature.  In many ways our notion of separation from the natural world is fallacious.

Take an ant colony for instance.  It’s an enclosed territory that is governed by the reality of their collective.  The laws that govern ant survival are considerably different within the colony than in the outside world.  Few of us would say however, that these ants exist outside of nature or are unnatural.  Humans live in societies and laws of survival in societies are very different from those in the outside world.  In the case of ants, we view their collective as a single entity and judge its survival accordingly.  We readily take note of its tendencies, its strengths, its weakness, and its fitness.  It would be a small and intuitively achievable matter to plan the best, most effective circumstances for an ant society based on all the observed characteristics.

It would never occur to the human observer to instead try to change ant society without first changing the nature of the ants themselves.  Yet this is the approach adopted by nearly every reformer, every ideologically motivated individual throughout human history.

Humans have commonly attempted to solve social problems by punishing individuals, making changes in the rules, rule enforcement procedures, group ideologies…

Thousands of years of recorded history tells us that adopting this reactive strategy is like fighting a perpetual battle against the winds and the tide.  It is to labor in opposition to the characteristic tendencies of human beings.

The Arbitrary Nature of Nature

‘Nature’ and ‘natural’ are held up as the ultimate sacred standards yet should they be?  Why should we revere the natural order of things?

‘Because it is natural’ we usually reason circularly.  What’s so great about being natural?

All that matters in nature is whether we succeed in passing on our genes.  Whatever function serves that purpose gets passed down.  If people with chronic excruciating pain all over their bodies reproduced more than other people, then each successive generation of humanity would become progressively more prone to chronic pain.

Our enjoyment and fulfillment in life are inconsequential in the balance of nature.  Fullness of life and lifespan only matters so long as it results in more surviving offspring who in turn succeed in reproducing.

Already, human beings are a creature able to frame existential questions but without the ability to divine conclusive answers.  We are more susceptible to things we consider bad than good.  Depression is a major problem.  Excessive happiness is not.  Nature needs to give people an incentive to follow the right course towards reproduction but the most ‘fit’ person ought never to be satisfied for long.  Meanwhile, if a grown offspring of ‘fit’ parents cannot succeed in prosperity and reproduction, their discontentment ought to know no end.  The only way we come out on top it seems is by  ‘cheating’ nature.

By becoming happy with ourselves as we are, we ‘defy’ nature.  By using condoms during intercourse we ‘defy’ nature.  Ordinarily, we would get to enjoy ourselves a few times and nature’s purpose would be done until childbirth.  Why should nature have allowed us the capacity to ‘defy’ it and continuously get the chemical reward of reproduction without actually reproducing?

I suppose like a short-sighted investor or corporation, nature selected for certain highly advantageous capabilities in humans.  The same cranial capacity that gave human beings the ability to plan for a long winter seems also to have given us that ability to ask “what happens when I die?”  The ability to look forward and ask questions had unintended consequences for the selective process.  The result was a creature that could actually kill itself or destroy all of its own species, an unprecedented feat of unsurvival.  To date, the ability to act outside the parameters of pure survival has been more of a benefit than a loss in spite of its significant drawbacks.

We can say that ‘pure survival’ is the state in which animals exist.  A state in which each creature has a fixed survival strategy to follow.  It can never act against its own best reproductive interests.  It cannot deviate from the plan that allowed its parents to reproduce.  Brains are expensive and the ideal brain does no more than exactly what it needs to.  Extra accessories are usually just wasted energy.

If nature just drives us to reproduce by any means, what lends it any particular legitimacy?  We know that we would all be hard-wired for depression or legs too weak for walking if that’s what resulted in more babies.  Since nature selects for only the bare minimum required to reproduce, human beings have no problem making machines that can perform processes with super-biological speed and precision.

If nature favors whatever reproduces, surely in a few generations the ordinary human being will start to perceive the city as sublimely beautiful and the wilderness as an ugly wasteland full of savage creatures competing for bare survival.

Right now, it is part of human instinct to enjoy being in a peaceful forest and to enjoy the sounds of birds.

Why should it continue to be so considering the current trend of more and more people moving into cities to find work.

Since being drawn to cities must increase chances of successful reproduction, surely it’s possible that our instinctual attachments could change from natural vistas to vast cityscapes.  Why couldn’t people begin to perceive urban noise as harmonious and peaceful and the chirping of birds as an obnoxious racket?

One of the most peaceful sounds a human being can hear is the sound of a flowing stream.  I’ve asked myself, why does this make us feel peaceful?  Maybe because we’re instinctually programmed to want to be near flowing water because people with this tendency reproduced more effectively.  Living by a water source makes sense.

Yet why would people be fascinated by mountain peaks and vast deserts?  There have never been large human populations of people in these areas and yet we are somehow drawn to them.

This sort of inquiry invites delving into complicated business that has yet to be unraveled.  But on the most basic level, if a dog can be bred for its affinity for very specific tasks such as herding sheep, why can’t people breed themselves to finally love their hives better than the wild world outside?

Why then should the natural be unconditionally revered?

The Nobility of Savagery

A big cat or bear is seen pacing restlessly back and forth every time we go to the zoo.  The animal in question need not have any worries.  All of its needs are fulfilled.  Yet it is clear when we watch it that it is not fulfilled.  Even a small child quickly understands that the animal chafes within the bounds of captivity.  It would rather be hunting prey and fighting for its life in the wild than sitting in a safe and comfortable cage.

However, even adults rarely relate that pacing tiger or lion to the human experience.  Human beings when regarded purely as an animal are bizarrely removed from the animalistic experience.  Living in a mass society requires laws and all sorts of enforced restraint on instinctive behavior.  So intense is the repression of organized life that people are eager to imbibe alcohol and other drugs that remove inhibitions at the very first opportunity.  Often they have to drug themselves in order for their biological selves to surface.  After a lifetime of indoctrination and a highly structured existence, people everywhere want nothing more than to reduce themselves to the elemental and the savage.  Even in studies in which the drinks have no alcohol, everyone begins to act drunk all the same.  It’s all about everyone giving each other permission to let loose for a little while before returning to the grind.

Many idealists have searched for a human utopia and every one has failed miserably.  Perhaps people don’t want a utopia.

No story about a utopia or happily ever after has ever been told or listened to.  Utopia is inhuman, perfection, death.  Yet dystopian stories, the stories of failed utopias sell well to this day.  All manner of human strife makes money while ‘happy’ events receive no such attention.  Cynics see this fact as a condemnation of humankind.  Another might see it as an affirmation of what is means to be human.

Idealists have looked everywhere for a perfect, or at least a better society, but it simply doesn’t exist.  At one time, there were those who believed in a Noble Savage, a human free from the weight of laws, the state, rules, employers, all that complicated dead weight of society.  At about the same time there were those who believed in a Savage Savage who without laws and a state was locked in mortal struggle with every other human being.  The debate has gone on ever since.  Clearly there is merit to both sides and a point at which they are reconciled.

There is something unquestionably pure and noble about living as the animal we were meant to be.  We yearn for the simple existence in which we are guided easily through life by our instinctual programming, like any other animal.  We crave an elemental life with an absence of repression, internal conflict, and quandary.

Does this mean a paradise?  Quite the contrary.  Every ‘primitive’ tribe has been shown to be in constant conflict with neighbors and rife with internal status struggles.  It is indeed a savage, tough existence.  Life expectancy is not as high as in civilization.  For every male, there is a significant probability of dying a violent death.  Proportionately speaking, it is like a never-ending World War II.

Furthermore, I’ve seen artifacts from Polynesian islands studded with the teeth of victims.  The word ‘taboo’ itself comes from Polynesian islanders and refers to any number of superstitious, repressive practices that defined their lives.  On these islands with limited resources, the inhabitants are some of the tallest, strongest, most physically powerful people on earth.  Clearly there was a high payoff to being the biggest and strongest when there just wasn’t enough resources for everyone.

Yet from within comfortable houses we look to these past barbaric lifestyles with fascination, even as we are endlessly bored by an existence that comes with warning labels on every conceivable surface.  Many of us watch action movies full of death and mayhem with rapt attention and are absorbed by sports events that celebrate the ‘thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.’  We settle for a vicarious experience, but even the most cloistered person must sometimes suspect that the real thing is our birthright.  In realizing this birthright, no matter how terrible and savage it might be, there is a redeeming nobility in being in accordance with our true natures.

Should we go back to our roots?  Probably not.

Would we want to in our rational minds?  No.

Could we?  Certainly not.

Yet the matter is critical in understanding humanity as a whole.  Surely, a society can repress only to an extent before the animal nature of humanity is confined in an unbearably small space.  Surely, an effective society is one that balances repression with permissible outlets.  Surely the best possible society is one that permits and promotes fulfillment of the human animal insofar as possible while still managing to prevent a Hobbesian nightmare of perpetual, universal warfare.

Does the best possible society err on the side of savagery or repression?  A five year old watching a restless, bored tiger at the zoo could quickly answer this question.  Best to take off the safety rails.  Someone might fall over and perish every now and then, but a five year old could tell you it is all worth it for those who can drape themselves over that precipice, see the full view, risk themselves, feel the chill, high winds and then walk away having had an adventure.  Since we must die sooner or later, why is even the slightest risk of death deemed unacceptable?  While we’re here and alive isn’t it the greater crime to hold us back from truly living in what little time we have?  Since our lives are equally long or short when measured against infinity, surely it’s all about what our time contains rather than its duration.  Even duration is of little importance next to our perception of the passage of time.  We perceive time as faster when our experience is routine and predictable, long when it is varied and meaningful.

When I traveled through Western Europe, every tourist attraction was pristinely protected, cordoned off, and packaged into an assembly line of visitors.  No matter how fantastic, famous, or beautiful the location, one is still restricted and led around like a small child.  In some ways, it is only marginally better than the coffee table book.  A place can never be quite as large as life under these repressive circumstances.

I’ll never forget the thrill when I went to St. Stephen’s cathedral in Budapest, Hungary and discovered a near absence of restrictions.  I was free to leave the beaten path and spent a long while wandering through a system of hollow chambers inside the walls the church’s vast dome.  Still not encountering any signs or guards, I all but climbed a series of catwalks and ladders until I made it to the very top of that dome.  I opened a hatch and climbed out to see a breathtaking view of the city all around me.  There were no safety measures at all.  I could easily have slipped and slid down the length of that dome to my death below.  Yet this danger made the experience more memorable than many a famous museum, cathedral, or palace.  I suppose I could have died but what is length of life next to intensity of life?  I will die soon enough no matter what kills me.

A zoo animal would live a much harder, shorter life in the wild, but its nature would be fulfilled.  Whether, safe or suffering, victorious or defeated, thriving or dying it would be in accordance with its plan.  There would be no place for doubt, boredom, or restlessness.

Many modern persons make the mistake of measuring the ‘good’ of life itself by a tally of individual pains and pleasures.  Fulfillment of one’s nature is to feel fulfilled whether one experiences individual pain or pleasure events.

Thus, neither the five year old kid nor its parent question for a moment whether a wild animal at the zoo would be better off in the wild.  Humans likewise live in repression so long as they are separated from the nobility of their savage and elemental selves.  Surely Levi-Strauss’ evolutionary principle is a matter of common sense: It should be expected that any species removed from the environment it evolved in will quickly become pathological.  The human animal has proven to be no exception.

Innovation As Exception To The Rules

In every human society, one must follow rules.  Lots of rules.  More rules than any one person can possibly know.

In particular to practice in any profession or field, one must have completed the proper studies and earned the proper certifications.

Most societies use caste or exclusive licenses to decisively divide tasks.  Each discipline is given to a handful of experts.  Naturally, an orthodoxy forms around each of these groups.  Only those who can best mirror their tendencies can enter their group.  Each specialty group has a specialized terminology and language that closes it off from all others.

To be succinct, it’s not a system that encourages those who do things differently.

We are taught that it is the nature of our present human society to change and technologically progress.  We are told society is driven by innovation.

If we look at the history of progress and invention, however, only the barest handful of people are responsible for the biggest breakthroughs.  Orthodoxies of experts excel at improving and refining what they are already doing, but it always seems to take persons who try out new things to bring on innovation.

The problem: what kind of person makes it into the orthodoxy and finds themself in any kind of position to bring on improvements?  Someone who’s followed the rules well enough to be assigned to expert level training.  Once the training is completed, they follow the rules of their orthodoxy well enough to succeed professionally.  It takes a lifetime of rule following and imitation to make it to the top and earn credibility in the larger society.  It would seem to me if one wanted to weed out innovators, this method would be precisely the way to do it:  A long succession of filters and gateways that are sure to block the progress of any person with a hint of a spontaneous or creative nature.  It would seem to me that innovation happens in spite of the system.

Apparently there are a very, very few people who have both the creative gift and the ability to stick with the countless conventions required to rise.  These people manage to make it into an orthodoxy of acknowledged experts and then use their authority and resources to achieve some form of advancement.  Progress and innovation are dependent on the tiny margin of error in the filtering mechanisms.  Every once in awhile they’ll let through a brilliant person who has a mind of their own.  Ironically, progress is dependent upon the failure of the process of selection.

Best Possible Persons

In my previous post I addressed a dilemma: The concept of a nation state no longer has the same ideological appeal and the family is rapidly decaying.  Now what?

There’s lots of people who bemoan the present situation and advocate a return to ‘traditional values.’  It is silly, however, to think that it is possible to go back.  Every society is a product of the conditions of its times.  The conditions that influence societies have changed.

What does not occur is that these seemingly dark times will give rise to something better than we had before.

In short people need belonging and meaning.  If the state and family can no longer reliably fulfill these needs, people will do whatever is necessary to find another way.

In an age of mass communication, people will inevitably find ways to group together by every conceivable interest and similarity.  In any given group of people, there will be those who are the most compatible relative to all others.  For all of human history, we’ve only been able to choose from a handful of people we could meet face to face.  Now, we can find those persons who most correlate with us and join with them.

Over time, we have an entirely new social unit, a sort of tribe of ‘best possible persons.’  Throughout human history, the social units of family, clan, tribe, nation have all been based on accident of birth.  Our new society will see the emergence of social units based on shared interests, shared values and objectives, as well as ideal chemistry in interpersonal interactions.  Since groups function as more than the sum of their parts these highly cohesive groups would be quite powerful.  As such they would have the potential to replace existing structures.

People need not form such association deliberately, nor is extraordinary to believe that such a thing will happen.  In our face to face lives, we readily notice that professions and bars both attract very specific kinds of persons.  When people are forced to reach out through mass communication to find gathering places, the exact same phenomenon will manifest, naturally on a massive scale.  Because it will be on a massive scale, people will have much higher odds of finding those with whom they have extremely close correlation of interests and values.

For example:  Let’s think of a biker bar.  They all like Harleys.  Now lets assume there’s a million bikers.  The larger quantity of bikers triggers increasingly greater subtelty in distinguishing characteristics.  Soon we have a bar for bikers who like Harleys and whose favorite movie is ‘Love, Actually’ and then another bar opens for bikers who love Harley Davidson, ‘Love, Actually’ , and Barney the Purple dinosaur… And so on.

If we envision a venn diagram of all our traits, values, and preferences then we would suppose that the larger the sample size, the larger the probability of people falling in the central region where all characteristics overlap.  Mass communication allows a very large sample size.  At this point it has not yet become easy for anyone to find the ‘best possible people’ amidst this chaotic crowd.  However, even now on the net, one can go through a lengthy process of moving up through progressively more specific biker bars until one finally finds themselves in the company of the best possible people.

The Obsoletion of Nation States and the Family: What Inevitably Fills The Void?

Just as those who lived in an old monarchy could have scarcely imagined representative democracy or commoners rising to become all-powerful dictators, we in our own time are shortsighted.  We are innovative persons constantly perceiving change in our daily lives, but like the frog in the slowly boiled pot of water, we don’t notice the comparatively glacial transitions or the potential for these transitions until they have already transpired.

With the coming of the internet and mass communication the way has been opened for an entirely new era of social relations.

With the gradual transition from powerful monarchs to elected representatives/autocrats, there was a fundamental change at the top of the system.  The next transition is already affecting how we live our lives at the most fundamental level.

In the present era, regardless of how they are administrated, we live in what could generally be referred to as nation states.

Some basic characteristics of a nation state: (the central assumptions haven’t changed much throughout history thus far.)

  1. Encloses a piece of land.
  2. Claims all those born on the piece of land by default.
  3. Reserves the rights to tax/conscript those it has claimed.
  4. Is expected to protect and work in the interests of those it has claimed or at least maintain a degree of order greater than would exist in the absence of the state.
  5. Whether or not it has elected representatives, justifies its rights to claim individuals by of an idea of ‘national identity.’  National identity is often predicated upon an ethnic group or at least some shared tradition of unity.
  6. Has the strength and the right to force everyone to participate in its functioning.  It is generally understood and accepted that some degree of coercion is necessary for a state to continue to exist.

With present development many of these basic premises of a state have been considerably weakened or invalidated.

‘National identity’ is a core concept that is quickly unraveling in many of the world’s most influential states.

Europe and the United States have experienced massive influxes of immigrants on account of their high level of prosperity.  These immigrants have reached critical mass and now live in neighborhoods strictly populated by their own kind.  They arrive too quickly and in too great of numbers to be assimilated by the pre-existing culture.  The pre-existing cultures in these Western countries have largely lost their sense of shared tradition and purpose.  Monolithic impersonal corporations define every aspect their lives while the traditions of their ancestors are forgotten.  The pre-existing affluent communities have no purpose beyond attaining wealth and power.  They have no reason to stick together or have children.  The vital, thriving traditional communities of immigrants quickly displace them.  Without a shared ethnic group, a shared tradition, or a shared sense of purpose there is no source of justification for a nation state beyond keeping order.  At best it is a Leviathan, at worst it is simply an uncommonly large protection racket.  Citizens have little reason to comply with the state so long as they are reasonably sure their possessions are safe from their neighbors.  Without some kind of ideological glue, the governing body of the state must rely increasingly upon coercion to exist for another day.

As traditional ideas of national identity fall to pieces, family and clan are also decaying in the prosperous nations that set trends and define aspirations for the rest of the world.  When children are no longer profitable and the pursuit of status becomes an end to itself, the establishment of family and blood bonds become secondary priorities.  For the first time in human history, there are millions of human beings who lack any deep sense of group identity.  Human beings are social creatures who crave connection.  Thus, millions of people are already searching for the next great source of purpose and belonging.  Purpose and belonging that the state, the community, and the family have ceased to provide.  These people are tinder lying about waiting to catch fire.

What provides the spark?  I would suppose that the answer lies in the internet and mass communication.  Let us look back on the first assumption of what comprises a state: It encloses a piece of land.  Yet barring the interference of governments, we can now communicate and send information in total disregard of political borders.  For the first time in history, millions of human beings have the ability to communicate with any person capable of mutually intelligible exchange.  As innocuous as most communication may seem, the greatest power of a state is drastically reduced.  The simple yet all important ability to keep people closed within a piece of land has been severely compromised.  Before mass communication, only people of the same region and social class in the same nation could easily meet and form social bonds.  From the image of one’s highly localized social relationships arose the abstraction of a united state.  Now, someone could form many of those once local bonds with people thousands of miles away in other nations, or in the most distant provinces of their own nation.  If one’s social relationships are no longer defined only by geographical and economic constraints, does the concept of a state necessarily remain tied to a piece of land?

The subset of people that can be encountered face to face by one person in one place in one lifetime is quite limited.  The odds of these people being the best possible people to bond with is also quite low.  The advent of mass communication enables each person to search for the best possible persons to associate with.  Over time, one would predict that pairs of ‘best possible persons’ would increase in number and eventually coalesce into tribes.  Being founded on the most earnest of premises and deepest of commonalities, these groups would enjoy greater loyalty than was ever inspired by a state.

Next, there is the family to consider.  Even in the absence of a concrete political boundary, families have long tied people to one place and provided a basic sense of belonging.  The sharing of genetic material itself makes it highly likely that there will be deep commonalities between closely related family members.  Yet that is not how things have worked.  In a modern society where children are a drain on resources, offspring must be forced to leave the family and fend for themselves.  Fending for oneself demands that one be willing to move wherever the best livelihood is to be found.  This often means living far away from family.  Furthermore, the rapid pace of change in modern societies results in generation gaps.  Entire lifetimes of parents’ experiences are rendered obsolete as children face entirely different challenges.  Respect for age inevitably erodes and transmission of ideas, values, and traditions through the family deteriorates.  The need for each person to fend for the self plus the enormous burden of raising one’s own children results in the reduction of family size and a decrease in the number of families established.  Within a couple of generations you have the present situation.  The family just isn’t as important as it used to be.  Once children no longer live with parents and siblings are scattered across hundreds of miles, family are no longer the purpose of life.  At best, they are like good friends.  At worst, they are casual acquaintances or even non-entities in one’s adult life.  The fading of the family makes it easy to go through life without any real roots or purpose.  There is inevitably an inner void in millions of people as they prove unable to live without some structure that defines them.  Everyone needs community and identity.  At the present time, people are being forced to fulfill these needs by using mass communication.

Given the present trends continue, i.e. no massive collapse of society as we know it, the nature of social relationships inevitably shifts from local acquaintances to ‘best possible persons.’  Loyalty to land-bound nation states is replaced by ‘tribes’ united by kindred spirits and unrestrained by physical location.

The Pitfalls of Micro-Specialization in Mass Societies

To compete on any mass market, one must be an extreme specialist in something someone is willing to pay for.  It is this idea that all of modern industrial society is built upon.  Each worker has a tiny slot of expertise that they fit into.  The larger the society the smaller the ranges of expertise, the larger the social machine, the smaller the parts and the more precise their function.  As each worker becomes more and more focused, each has less and less capability to consider the big picture.

In a microspecialist society, each limited field is cordoned off from every other by a set of precise terminology and shorthand that amounts to a plethora of mutually unintelligible languages.  The idea is that big projects are accomplished through countless tiny pieces smoothly interlocking into a comprehensible and logical whole.  Unfortunately, when each person obediently does their part without knowing anything of the whole, the result wildly diverges from the original intent.  Worse, entire populations and social classes can be crushed underneath a great machine that has no awareness of the damage it does.  So the process grinds on, continuing only because somebody started it.

People have always pursued trades and specializations in even the smallest of communities, but the modern specialization differs from the pre-industrial sort.

-In a village type of situation, each specialist had a stake in their community and it was in their interest to care about the output of the process that they were feeding into.  The end result of labor was clearly visible to everyone in the community.

-Though each person had a trade, much of their daily needs were produced in the household.  Even a specialist had to know a wide variety of skills and had a great deal of responsibility over many aspects of their life.

In a modern situation:

-There is little sense of community.  It is easy to have no idea how one’s labors affect humanity as a whole.  One feeds labor into the machine, the ultimate output of the system of labor is invisible, irrelevant, and obscure.

-Each person goes to work and does just one thing.  Failure to microspecialize means being outcompeted by someone who does.  Other microspecialists take care of every need in a laborer’s of life outside of their field of micro-expertise.

    -Ultimately, no single person has any knowledge of or responsibility for the output of the system.  A gigantic, reckless, inexorable machine is set into motion that exists independently of human desires and wellbeing.  The one thing it is sure to do is to attempt to perpetuate itself, just as if it were an organism.  Otherwise, whether this machine helps or harms humanity is a function of chance.  Whenever it gives to the human race it takes, whenever it brings improvement, it also debases.

    A further dilemma:  when everyone performs but one task through their own labor and the end result for each laborer is invisible, there can be no incentive beyond immediate gain.  That is, no laborer will do any more than it takes to be compensated.  If the consumer on the other end is deceived or sold a less than optimal product, it makes no difference.  The laborers would never even know about it anyway.  It’s not their department!  No single person is responsible for less than honest or lazy practices, it’s no one’s department.

    The market selects for the cheapest product that can still sell relative to all others.  Thus, someone will always find a way to market a cheaper good that can be passed off as equivalent or comparable to its predecessors.  In theory, the pressure to sell cheaper products results in the best quality merchandise sold for as little as possible.  In a mass society of micro-specialists however, the result is the merchandise with the best appearance of quality sold for as little as possible.

    In a society where no one can afford to know much outside of a microniche, appearances are everything.  If the product is shiny, slick, and cheap enough, it will be consumed en-masse by masses who simply don’t know that much about what they’re actually buying and how it compares to what they could be buying.

    The aggregate result is that over the course of generations, the way is open for standards to continue to slide.  The food industry is illustrative, as it is one of the most important of services in one’s life.  It is conceivable that not so many generations ago it would have been inconceivable to outsource one’s daily nourishment to hordes of faceless microspecialists with no larger knowledge and no incentives on the personal level.  There is no reason for the aggregate clusters of specialists to care about the consumer’s best interests beyond the degree they are forced to care by public regulations.

    The result?  The countries most given to the ethic of industrialization have food industries that consistently cause epidemics of previously unheard of health problems across massive populations.  After a couple of generations, these unnecessary problems are taken for granted by consumers; there is no incentive whatever to remedy them.  There are ample incentives to keep the consumers oblivious so that highly profitable harmful or substandard products can continue to be produced.  Better still, industries that cause new problems produce new industries devoted to appearing to remedy those problems!  A true remedy of course would put the new problem busting industries out of business!

    The mass production of anonymously provided services selects for those entities best able to hack the system.  That is, a system of supply and demand can only be predicated on what individuals know to demand.  What markets provide is relative to the expectations and personal experience of the consumer.  This is an axiom that industries in aggregate operate by.  There is no conspiracy.  No one has that much responsibility or knowledge.  Rather the present state is emergent from the properties of the system.

    Most products could be made much more durable, but there is a major disincentive to do so.  If no one knows exactly how long a shovel can be made to last, then entities can sell shovels designed for planned obsolescence.  That is, they maximize profitability by making their product last as short an amount of time as consumer expectations will permit.  Ironically, a company that produces shovels that last 20 years will be outcompeted by those who produce shovels identical in appearance designed to last only 2 years.  The companies selling products designed for planned obsolescence easily destroy their competitor who foolishly sells merchandise of the highest possible quality.  Before long, people suppose that a good shovel lasts for two years.  In a generation or so, perhaps people can be sold shovels that last for only one year…

    Millions labor away, each oblivious in their own little corner.  The food specialists screw over everyone, including themselves by flooding the market with harmful food.  Clothing makers make life harder for everyone by making garments designed to quickly wear out.  As each person struggles to make a profit from their labors, they do so ultimately at the expense of everyone, ironically forcing everyone to labor harder still to survive.  It’s an endless treadmill, a Sisyphean undertaking, a task that feeds upon itself.  Ultimately, things are produced for the sake of production.  What goods are being produced and even whether they are any good becomes increasingly irrelevant.

    The system self perpetuates because each field of knowledge is made inaccessible to every other by the highly specialized conventions and jargon of each respective clique.  Thus, the beautiful finale:  it is made nearly impossible to assemble the ample information out there into a coherent revelation.  Protective obfuscation is an emergent property of the system.  That is why it is still here.

    The Obsolescence of ‘Conventional’ Military Operations

    As military technology continues to grow, its usefulness lessens.  It has reached a point where a less advanced opponent can expect only annihilation in open conflict.  However, opponents with equivalent technology can no longer engage one another directly because of nuclear weapons.  Opponents who stand no chance in open conflict avoid open conflict.

    Thus we end up with the ironic modern situation.  An arsenal of expensive toys that are useless against a handful of men with boxcutters.  In a sense the bombs, tanks, and cruise missiles have become antiquated and obsolete.  War has gone back to essentials.  It is not so much about the weapons as it is the people behind them.  If one person with hostile intent can be put in the right place at the right time, it almost doesn’t matter what weapon they have or even if they have any physical weapon.

    One person is in terms of supply and demand dirt cheap.  There are always more people than anyone needs at any given time.  One can walk through any city in the world and see the poor lying around as unwanted as pennies dropped in between cracks in the pavement.  People regenerate, usually faster than they can possibly be killed off.  Males, especially, are mostly superfluous in biological terms.  Millions can die and the women can get pregnant just as before.  People are versatile, they can be deployed anywhere in society at any time.  One person is very easily lost in the endless crowd of humanity.  One human being who doesn’t want to be found is far superior to high-tech stealth weaponry.

    Advanced weaponry on the other hand is so expensive that only the richest countries can afford to develop and purchase it.  Entire expensive facilities must be built for its safekeeping and storage.  Entire armies of personnel have to be trained and paid for its successful operation and maintenance.  The cost of operating a ‘conventional’ force is such that even a military occupation relatively modest by historical standards drains its nation of resources.  Such is the expense that ‘overwhelming force’ becomes impossible.

    Hi-tech weapons kill people off with industrial grade efficiency and with minimal losses on the side that uses them, but in all cases the cost is so monumental, that they only stand a chance of doing their value worth in damage against like forces.  Namely, forces that could never be confronted without nuclear war and mutually assured destruction.

    Against what the modern military calls ‘irregular’ forces, they are mostly useless.

    A cruise missile might be able to easily wipe out a hundred men, but the cost of the weapon exceeds any damage inflicted.  The cruise missile costs millions of dollars.  A hundred men cost less than nothing.  Each one who dies just makes a little more elbow room for everyone else…and even so this loss just takes an insignificant bite out of population growth in an already overpopulated world.  In the Vietanam war, the US military had an unprecedented kill ratio, losing tens of thousands of troops in the whole conflict while liquidating hundreds of thousands of enemies per year.  However, over 2,000,000 new North Vietnamese males were reaching the age of conscription each year…

    Deployment of modern weaponry against an expendable population is a losing proposal…unless the said weaponry wipes out the population’s capacity to produce more people.  This is easily done, but still cost far exceeds gains.  If any population now wiped another off the map, it would be in the direct interest of every other population to turn unanimously on the offender to ensure their own preservation.  The loss of trade alone would make wiping out an expendable population a cost ineffective proposal, as the wealth of modern states is dependent upon trade.

    One might still make the case that hi-tech warfare still is preferable when one takes non-material considerations into account—that the hundred people killed by the cruise missile are a hundred of the right people to kill.  The argument is that one needn’t kill off even a large portion of an expendable population but only the few offenders.  The problem with this proposal is that each of the 100 people killed belongs to a family, clan, and tribe.  Each of the hundred killed only multiplies the portion of the expendable population with cause for resentment towards the technologically advanced power.  ‘Insurgents’ enjoy success because they are members of a community that actively supports and hides them.  There is no destroying them without inciting their supporters to riot.  If anything, when considered on a non-material level, the case against modern weaponry is more compelling.  When one factors in emotion in tight knit communities, there can be no ‘surgical’ removal of undesirables as with buildings.  Buildings usually stand on their own while human beings as fundamentally social beings never do.  Killing off a hundred men impacts the lives of hundreds, if not thousands more who knew them.  Not only was the cruise missile ineffective, its deployment on guys with AK-47s could be considered a lost battle for the advanced nation.

    If a nation is unwilling or unable to move in overwhelming force and is unable to cost effectively fight a given population, victory through greater technology is not a likely outcome.  Without a conventional military opponent, there can be no conventional victory.  As far as the locals are concerned the conflict can drag on for generations—as many conflicts in their respective lands already have.  They’re at home with all the time in the world.  They don’t have to win any open confrontation, all they have to do at minimum is make their homeland cost ineffective to govern.  When their enemy is using a huge arsenal of expensive equipment, it is almost absurdly easy to exceed this goal.  The invader is losing resources from the moment they invade!  All resistance has to do is keep it that way!

    I, Giovanni Dannato, was a most pre-eminent Italian scholar in the sixteenth century.  My teachings  in my time were deemed heretical and I was burnt at the stake forthwith!  I still remember how the roaring of fire drowned out even the loudest of the jeering and shouting. ..

    Now, I have returned unto humanity that I may question generally accepted assumptions and examine the nature of societies.  Once a heretic, always a heretic I suppose…