Managers and Warriors

 

Humans evolved as tribal hunters, fiercely loyal within the extended kin group - and sharply hostile to outsiders. This is the natural consequence of resource-scarcity once human populations reached local carrying capacity. The Neolithic Revolution – agriculture, herding – turned things around. With food surpluses, human groups expanded beyond Dunbar's number: cooperation with strangers became a social necessity.

Early civilizations remained kin-based, from Sumerian priest-kings to feudal lords and their dynasties. But liberal capitalism – uniquely impersonal, as Weber argued – made interactions between strangers a norm. Trade networks require transactions over blood ties. Contracts replaced clan loyalty. Work now demands a courteous face for every new job and every client meeting. We no longer kill for a stray look; instead, we smile. 

This shift encouraged elite-selection for agreeable traits. Short tempers find little space in the boardroom. The high ranks favour the polite, the transactional, the deferential. And so we see a peculiar elite emerge: Kamala Harris, Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves. These are not warriors. They are managers, rewarded for navigating, not disrupting.

In contrast, warriors - Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kemi Badenoch - are impulsive, aggressive, impatient with the status quo. These types disrupt systems, not preserve them. Capitalism needs both, but comfortable elites do not welcome challenges. Those who frighten our beta-elites elicit howls of outrage, get demonised.

The prosocial “mask” – the veneer of friendliness with strangers – is now sacred. Genuine feelings, as always, are reserved for kin, close friends, and lovers. Without this mask, social norms would collapse; yet the act necessarily breeds hypocrisy.

Humans are not wired to be nice to everyone; "niceness" is Darwinianly unstable. Wolves exhibiting “dark triad” traits - Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic - prey on the doves. Today’s society valorizes the mask, repressing those dark impulses which simmer beneath. But dark emotions drive popular discontent; warriors emerge to channel such repressed urges in times of structural decadence.

Hegelian dialectic still walks the Earth: a world of managers develops society in relative peace until the veto network of lobbies, pressure groups, activists and special interest groups stifles it; then comes the time for warriors to smash resistance, to usher in a new foundation for future growth and progress.

The Remote Future of Humanity

How many SF authors have written of a future in which the human genome has been re-engineered in countless ways: enhancing intelligence or physical prowess; adapting to life under alien skies; or simply on a whim?

This has a bearing on the sociology of utopia. Economists like to distinguish between the short-run and the long-run. In the long-run parameters which were constant in the short-run begin to vary under the impact of duration.

The classic purveyors of utopia, whether religious or socialist, were guilty of failures of imagination, of thinking of humanity within the psychological, biological and genetic constraints of the short-run.

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To define utopia ask a biologist. Utopia for a species is an embedding ecosystem in which all primary biological needs are satisfied, while thoroughly negative events (starvation, dismemberment by predator, for example) are absent. (In such cases one actually observes relaxed selection and disuse atrophy: be careful what you wish for!).

If you applied that to present-day humans then utopia is here already. Admittedly, in William Gibson's aphorism, unevenly distributed to those fortunate individuals who do not lack for financial and material resources and who join with their peers in pursuit of objectives both challenging and worthwhile.

I have in mind: researchers and technologists; religious leaders; social foundations; think-tanks; sports people ‘living the dream’; and so on.

Not every participant of course: those whose vocational lives seem to be fully in accord with their deepest desires.

Tanner Greer has a lengthy essay which, in its essentials, asks whether it's possible to build a successful society where its members do not feel like cogs in an impersonal machine. A contribution to the vast literature on alienation in complex societies.

Note: the point is not whether it is possible for an individual to live a happy and fulfilling life. In history there have been many such people. The issue is whether we can envision a society where this possibility is genuinely available to everyone.

Greer’s essay finishes on an uncertain note, but I, at least, am prepared to extrapolate. Given low-cost cognitive/robotic automation substituting for essentially all human instrumental work, humanity has an option to revert to the condition of the aristocracy of antiquity. The chores are all dealt with; now to create a society where humanity is an end in itself.

Marx used similar language, but his nineteenth century concepts were very abstract. Present possibilities were remote indeed for him and his co-thinkers.

For us, however, not so much.

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Getting to our highly-automated utopia will most likely be fraught. Due to Dunbar's Number, it seems unlikely that the future elite will either require or be prepared to tolerate the billions of helots whose toil currently underpins the global economy: there will be conflict before a future low-population stabilises on this planet.

An alternative future is one where our cognitively-competent, automated, self-replicating slaves develop objectives which don't align with the continuing existence of the privileged humanity they hitherto existed to serve. I'm not a doomsayer on this - any real problem is centuries away - but the issues are plainly real. Ask the Romans.

If we can avoid a violent extinction then consider this: our present human physiology is painfully limiting in terms of the life-experiences we aspire to; in the long-run, our descendants will simply merge into the unbounded possibilities of a self-replicating, ever-diversifying, galactic technopolis.

I think Greg Egan already wrote several SF novels on that very prospect (cf. “Diaspora”).

Arnold Kling: the significance of Dunbar's number

Arnold Kling writes:

"Referring of course to the Dunbar number that marks the boundary between small-scale society and large-scale society.

The public operated in the sub-Dunbar sphere. You were concerned with your own family, friends, and co-workers.

The elite managed in the super-Dunbar sphere, running government and large organisations, including mass media. The public knew that the elites were out there, but the public felt no direct connection to the elites. When elites contested with one another, the public were largely bystanders."

There's a lot more at the link.

Kling is a libertarian economist who thinks in terms of models applied to an amorphous social reality. This makes him an over-reductionist. The right way to think about society is:

1. Social formation - society as it concretely presents itself.
2. Mode of production - which generates the class structure and social dynamics.
3. Human nature - which defines the human elements from which behaviour originates.

Orthodox Marxism gets (1) and (2) right and ignores or misunderstands (3), hence its utopian perspectives.

The more enlightened bourgeois intellectuals like Kling think the world is constituted from (1) and (3) and forgo a class analysis - we see ahistoric, universalist categories such as 'public' and 'elites'.

Kling is better than most, though. The orthodox neoclassical economists simply present patently ideological models of (1), with (2) and (3) being replaced by the atomised egoists of homo economicus. Steve Keen is not a Marxist but his critique of this is not inaccurate.

The idea of the Dunbar limit is a powerful one. It allows the concept of nationalism to be approached without misleading ideas that it's either an empty illusion (a logical consequence of neoclassical economics) or that it's some reactionary antithesis to an ideal state of perfect global compassion and universal love. We can safely leave the latter to the overly religious, the social-liberals and SJWs.

In practice people care about their immediate circle, people they know individually and find they like. They care about the concept of their nation insofar as their co-nationals conform to an ideal of behaviour: one which they believe - with substance - buttresses the stability of the institutions and relationships which guarantee their security and their way of life: an ideal-supertribe of generally-amicable 'us'.

There is a lot to be said about a correct theory of nationalism, and how relevant, useful and indeed functional the phenomenon may be in the 21st century.

But without Dunbar's number the analysis doesn't get very far.

The misunderstandings of eusociality

"An early 21st century debate focused on whether humans are prosocial or eusocial. Edward O. Wilson called humans eusocial apes, arguing for similarities to ants, and observing that early hominins cooperated to rear their children while other members of the same group hunted and foraged. Wilson argued that through cooperation and teamwork, ants and humans form superorganisms. Wilson's claims were vigorously rejected because they were based on group selection and reproductive division of labour in humans."  -- [Wikipedia].

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My review

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My review

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People puzzle at how human societies of thousands to millions to billions can form, how they can be stable. Some people fantasise about some mysterious genetic glue which fosters ultra-scalable human bonding, at least among co-ethnics.

My review

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I am a believer in Robin Dunbar's number:

"By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships."

Pre-capitalist social formations (tribal federations, archaic empires, slave empires, feudal states) were invariably hierarchies based on the elite violence of family-clans. Horizontal kin-preference plus reciprocal-altruism was the glue which held society together, whether at court or in the village-hovels.

Game of Thrones.

When you do political violence to someone, you are not in a social relationship of asabiyyah with them. This is not eusociality.

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Capitalism removed the means of livelihood from the mass of the population (the 'proletariat') and thereby forced them into the transactional relationship of wage-labour. This is a scalable fact of capitalist economics but does not depend upon some upending of the individual's interpersonal capabilities.

If each human is a node in a graph, the number of personal links per node remains less than or equal to Dunbar's number.

The web of links, however, spans the world.

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Marxists like to talk about this as commodity fetishism, which socialism will supersede.

The 'workers councils' model is hierarchical and no-one believes in its long-term stability any more. Mass mobilisation is not sustainable, ignoring all the other difficulties such as informed choice and that irritating human lack of global altruism. Yet global coordination is necessary to mobilise the social forces of production, the future socialist global economy.

The need for a global coordination network combines with the human capacity for only a tiny number of reciprocal links. The solution is always hierarchy (at least until we subcontract everything to the AIs). And so the problems start. People are instinctively aware of them, hence the visceral urge for egalitarianism.

As the link-depth grows, relationships become remote, principal-agent problems emerge, the forces at the top of the hierarchy arrange things in their own immediate interests, the bubble re-emerges.

Capitalism addresses this inherent problem by a radical economic decentralisation: private ownership of the means of production at all scales. Coordination occurs via dynamic market-exchange.

The Marxist theory of crises

People occasionally comment on the subsequent problems: the proletariat disproportionality suffers during the inevitable crises.

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As János Kornai observed however, in centrally planned economies there is no countervailing, decentralising force. The links which constitute the economy are held in place, reproduced - and always for the benefit of the elite - by total surveillance backed by force.

My review

Welcome to the human condition. The maze without an apparent exit.