I have read and reviewed four books: “The Machiavellians”, “The Revolt of the Public”, “The Lucifer Principle”, “The Status Game” There are some learning to take away. And I think these learning are not comforting.
At least to me, they paint a picture of humanity and human societies that is far less favorably, much darker and maybe much more in want of hard constraints than I have thought so far.
Let me summarize the key takeaways of these books and explain why I do believe that these books, although about ostensibly very different topics, political philosophy, the effect of technology on the expert class, the speculative effects of group level selection and a psychological phenomenon have a very lot in common.
The Machiavellians The Iron Law of Oligarchy: there will always be a ruling class, because those at the very top need someone to implement and manage their interests, and those at the bottom want someone to manage for them.
Pareto considers a person’s conduct as logical, when her action is motivated by a deliberately held goal of purpose; when the goal is possible, when the steps or means she takes to reach the goal are in fact appropriate for reaching it. Else, it is not. People are illogical most of the time: Pareto would say that residues shape their behavior. Today we would probably call it subconscious biases.
The threat of violence is the root of civilization.
A myth can transforms violence to heroism; it only takes a good story to make someone cherish an atrocity.
Find the review here
The Revolt of the Public Authority is under assault
networked public demolishes legitimacy
nihilists are lurking everywhere to destroy civilization and democracy
bureaucrats are trying to create stasis, which becomes corrupt over time. Every institution, given enough time, will suffer that fate.
new sources of authority via social media
Find the review here
The Lucifer Principle] group level selection
pecking order of the social superorganisms
selling illusion of control; via religion
promising the idea of control
Find the review here
The Status Game games shape the way we perceive reality. They dictate what we will recognize as moral behavior.
we play dominance, virtue and competence games.
what ever symbol a players of a game has settles on becomes sacred, taboos, saints and devils are created.
we become the game, we believe in whatever the game identifies as moral and start to hate the people that don’t play the same games.
When there isn’t an agreed upon highest game, memes and games will compete. And that can mean war. Mostly verbal war, but sometimes literal genocide
Find the review here
The Problems described by these books Society until now has always needed leadership, but our current leaders are losing the legitimacy. Fast. The loss of legitimacy opens the scene for what Nietzsche predicted: nihilism or ideologies. But we suffer both. People trying to bring it all down and people creating new, ever more extreme games of virtue and purity. There is a new divide emerging: people willing to destroy the engine of progress vs. people that keep it running. In the latter group are: workers, nurses, garbage collectors, drillers, engineers, farmers, builders, generally useful people. In the former group are probably bankers, bullshit managers, bureaucrats in academy and state, workers in non-competitive, sheltered, highly regulated jobs. Generally, they are called the laptop class, the highly credentialed useless folks, politicians, mindreaders of all sorts, people who want to ascribe outcome over process, people trying to sell certainty about an unknowable future. All of those want to stop progress. People are congregating around their “tribe”, in the virtual world, defending their game, their source of status, their being. In the extreme, they will be ready to use violence to fend off anyone threatening their position in the pecking order. The perks of being on top of a credentialed status pyramid are considerable.
Our “murder of god”, interpreted as the idea of mutually and broadly agreed upon highest good, has left society open to the quarrel of different games. And there is no chance of arbitration between the games, because they dictate how a person perceives reality and forms the basis of their morality. Defecting from a game is immoral - treason of the worst kind.
So is there any path a reasonably rational person could take without losing self-respect? Is there a “higher” game that is powerful enough to absorb and integrate a lot of the competing and warring games? Maybe. There have been some attempts, at least ostensibly rooted in “undeniable scientific facts”: communism and fascism. Today there might be different kind of a disastrous game. It’s the strain of anti-industrialism, anti-energy, anti-human environmentalism.
A New Highest Game: The Simulation Hypothesis There might be another route, which has emerged over the last decade or so: it’s the simulation hypothesis. Based on a fairly simple statistical argument, this hypothesis says that it is by far - billions to trillions of times - more likely that we are a simulation. Of course, this only holds true, if you accept certain unverifiable assumptions about the intentions and behavior of beings or at least one being outside our reality. The intentions that are ascribed to “the programmer”, a more technological sounding version of “god”, are mysterious and unknowable, but certain proponents have divined that it is likely that we are here to answer certain problems of morality, like what it takes to be “good”. Some even claim that we are an “ancestor” simulation, where we reenact the early history of the race of programmers. In this interpretation, we are becoming the creators and might be in the most interesting phase of this process. In Scott Adams’ book “God’s Debris”, he tells the story of us being the title’s debris of a god that tries to figure out how a world without its guidance might look like, while it’s in the process of reassembly. The “simulation” gives a new frame in which otherwise zero-sum questions, like “Who owns this holy place?” can get answered. These questions are softened by putting them into the frame of “if it is only a simulation, how holy can it really be? Why would you kill for some idea of a virtual past?” It also offers a frame for a new great tribe: “We are all denizens of the simulation! Our very existence proves that we are all equally important to the programmer, otherwise we would not have been implemented!”.
The simulation hypothesis is a piece of fiction; but the important question in light of status games and the irrationality driving our behaviors might not be: “Is it literally true”, but “Does it work?”. A lot more than you think could hinge on the latter question.
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