Katia N > Recent Status Updates

“The larger and more authoritarian an organisation (or state), the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds” Kenneth Boulding

Our Palaeolithic emotions are not a curse. The curse is the institutions and arrangements which bring out the worst in us.

This is very old, at least Rousseau’s time argument. I am not sure I’ve read 425 pages to come to this. It is as difficult to argue against as Hobbs’s one about all of all being evil.

I want you to imagine that the decision to detonate the bomb had rested not with betting scientists or the machinations of wartime politicians but with a jury of randomly selected US citizens fully briefed both on the impacts and risks of the bomb/the geopolitical /military situation. Now, ask yourself this: would that jury – with their friends and relatives waiting at home – have taken the same gamble?

Data is fast becoming the latest lootable resource that can be easily seen, captured, transported, and stored. AI is more extractive than artificial: it’s dependent on cheap workers, cheap materials, and stolen information. If we started paying workers fairly and requiring consent and compensation for the use of public data, the development of AI would both slow and become far more controllable.

The Creek (also known as the Muscogee Creek Confederacy), another key slave raider and colonist trader, were later compensated by being recognized as the first Native American group to be ‘civilized’ by the American government. For the Creek and other groups, slaving and aggression was handsomely rewarded.

One of the hardest things to permanently kill is not swords or crops but ideas. Once a legitimized hierarchy is deeply rooted in a culture, it becomes hard to remove. Entire systems for justifying inequality are carried forward for thousands of years. (Cont. in the comment)

Some percentage of a population appears always to harbour authoritarianism, &studies of twins suggest that it may be largely genetic. Surveys across 8 high-income countries found that around 10–25% ranked as highly authoritarian (with the US scoring the highest) These authoritarians tend to become more politically active&aggressive when they are activated by a social change, most commonly the emergence of a threat.

External threats change our brains in another way. They make us more open to being dominated. Authoritarianism – obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers – increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security.

Experiments with ‘deliberative democracy’ in which a randomly selected group of citizens gather together, are briefed by experts, deliberate, and make policy (either in a small jury of nine to twelve members, or assemblies in the hundreds or thousands) have been shown to reduce political polarization and even aid reconciliation in war-torn countries such as Bosnia. An assemblyeven helped Ireland legalize abortion

Administration trumped intimidation. Emerging kings across the world faced a similar problem in trying to prove they had the right to rule. Human sacrifice was a solution that many converged on and then later dropped. the ability to deal out random violence: It’s an act that puts the ruler above ordinary morality. Polities across the world have all settled on the importance of violence to make rulers legitimate.

Clearly, agriculture is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a state.3 Goliath fuel (caged land, lootable resources, and monopolizable weapons) can help explain why states arose in these areas yet not in Japan or New Guinea.

Many of the cases cut against the conventional wisdom that states allowed for the creation of large-scale farming&cities. The logic was that people needed rulers/bureaucracy to create stable food production to sustain a city’s large population. This wasn’t necessary: across the world cities& large-scale irrigation preceded centralized, hierarchical arrangements. They often fell apart once a domineering emerged.

Leaders still existed across North America in the centuries that followed the fall of the Goliaths. Yet these communities tended to be democratic hierarchies with strict checks and balances. Each Cherokee town had both a council of men and a council of women, while family-based clans spread their members across towns as a check against the councils and chiefs. (Cont. in the comment)

The Native Americans didn’t just drop their elites and cities; they organized themselves in such a way as to prevent them from re-emerging.

A small priestly class emerges and begins to boss others around. They display their power, sometimes through innocent means such as feasts and opulent burials, and sometimes through more unsettling methods, such as slavery and human sacrifice. Many archaeologists have pointed to these ‘secret societies’ as being one of the original blueprints for gaining power. (Cont. in the comment)

That wasteful consumption to gain and signal status easily becomes a preoccupation with growth. If you can improve your status through throwing a feast, then an even larger feast with a greater variety and abundance of foods will be even better. If you are competing with another chief, then there is an even stronger compulsion to grow a bigger crop to outdo them.

evolutionary backsliding: Our egalitarianism and counter-dominance shaped our bodies and minds and supercharged our cultural evolution. They made us unique and helped us navigate the Palaeolithic. The move towards Goliath – whether it be through class or patriarchy – made us look more like the harems of patriarchal gorillas and the chimpanzee hierarchies built on violence and politicking.

Lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land are all sources of Goliath fuel. These are different conditions that allow one group to control another; that allowed a group or individual to gather the greatest resource of all: status. It took thousands of years, but our social arrangements started to look more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees.(cont. in the comment)

What changed between the egalitarian ice age and the rise of inequality in the Holocene was the use of lootable resources. Once you had resources that others depended on, you could leverage them for other forms of power. The economic power of access to stores of fish or cereal could be converted to other forms of power by throwing feasts, making others work for them , or gifting them to create debts and obligations.

The four fundamental ways to gain power over others is to control valuable information (information power), to control by threat or force (violent power), to control the decision-making (political power), or to control the critical resources that others need (economic power).

Our mobility and willingness to regularly change groups may have even given us the unique human ability to gossip – to talk about others who aren’t currently present. Gossip was partly developed as one way to keep a mental grasp on people who had temporarily left. It now makes up around two-thirds of human conversation.

We are a species that survived the ice age by being intensely social, cooperative across groups, and equal, even during times of need and danger. There appears to have been peace across groups, but individuals were willing to kill, especially to avoid oppression. Those aggressively seeking status or wanting to dominate others were both figuratively and literally cut down. (Cont. in the comment)

someone who said he wasn’t going to buy your book before he’d read the reviews in the papers. No, that’s not how he put it, before WE have read the reviews in the papers. As if personality was the last shred of a worn rag: We, the united pedants, who have no personal opinion about your books, wait till the reviews have given you at least 6 out of 10.

Be yourself, but learn from this that ideals go to pot through your fault and mine, but most of all through the fault of those who invented idealism in order to make some money out of it.

As the philosopher Robert Fogelin observed, skeptics about the extent of human knowledge come in two types, facetiously categorized as East Coast skeptics and West Coast skeptics according to their relative degree of laid-backness. “East Coast skeptics recognize that their knowledge is limited,” Fogelin said, “and this troubles them deeply. West Coast skeptics recognize the same thing but find it liberating.

After Germans entrance in 1938, So many Austrians rushed to take out memberships in the Nazi Party—the “March violets,” they were sarcastically called—that the authorities stopped accepting new applications. Godel’s wife dutifully sent in hers, along with the 2 Reichsmark fee, but was never enrolled. her father, Josef Porkert, had actually been a member since 1932, boasting the number 1,451,013.

A year 1923, Vienna: The German Students’ Union began drawing up blacklists of “undesirable” professors and handing out leaflets warning fellow students not to attend their lectures. “Race and Science” issued by the Union named 200 Jewish&liberal professors to be boycotted, among them Freud, the legal scholar and author of the Austrian Republic’s constitution Hans Kelsen, Karl Menger, and Moritz Schlick.

The condition in Europe 1794 was disturbingly similar to 1938. There was a general feeling that law and civilization must be saved from brutality and violence. But the European governments, beneath all their protestations, had no real sense of running a danger in common. They would not rally their utmost forces, or even realize the vastness of the upheaval before them. (Continued in the comment)

‘Practical Frenchmen argued over their past with sectarian fervor incomprehensible in the United States’.

Well, I think nowadays the opposite would be closer to reality. It reads almost ironically.

Barreré, one of the rulers in 1794 of 🇫🇷 Terror: ‘Are we not yet weary of being tributaries to a foreign industry? So long as we buy English manufactures or use English shipping we live by the suffrance of the English government, we put our vital reserves in the keeping of a foreign people. We must produce everything ourselves that we can.’

More than 200 years since, but sounds painfully familiar:-(