Human History recaps Evolution

Game theory yields to white magic

Evolution is a 4 billion year saga about the struggle between cooperation and selfishness. The upshot? Selfishness never died, but cooperation has grown from the scale of molecules to cells to organisms to communities to species to ecosystems. Yes, ecosystems are organized to stabilize and preserve the whole. Selfish cells are eliminated by the immune system. Selfish individuals are brought in line by communal consensus. Selfish species are handily eliminated, though “handily” is on an evolutionary time scale, which may not be apparent in a single human lifetime.

Evolutionary theory really can’t account for the triumph of long-term planning over short-term advantage, or the ability of living things to cooperate on vast scales, when game theory would indicate that defectors would sabotage the works for their selfish advantage. I’ve proposed explanations that must sound to the classical neo-Darwinists like “magic”.

Predator species are not selfish. They are part of the balance. But unrestrained predation like the Rocky Mountain Locust, like the Bubonic Plague, are short-lived nightmares. Nature has ways of dealing with species that are too greedy. How this happens is not completely understood, but it is well-established that for a parasite to kill its host is not a winning strategy.

Is humanity the current unrestrained predator, headed for extinction? Never before (AFAIK) has a single species adapted to every climate zone, land and sea, and become an apex predator globally, taking down everything from climax forests to bowhead whales to beetles and mosquitos. Never before has a species imposed monoculture — the opposite of ecological balance — on large tracts of land. Never before has a species modified geology and engineered the weather for its own selfish benefit.

Animation by Steve Cutts

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Within humanity, there are selfish, ruthless people and there are the majority who embrace non-violence, who eschew coercion in all its forms, who want freedom to be themselves and have no problem allowing the freedom of others. What do you predict will be the dynamic between the minority and the majority?

In some places, the ethos of cooperation and toleration dominates the culture. In other places, the minority take control. In the former, they live sustainably in harmony with the larger ecosystem, and they cooperate with one another, assuring that all can live in comfort and safety. There is prosperity and many people have fulfilling lives. In the latter, there is regimentation and central control. The minority develop weapons with which to coerce the majority, and they convince the majority that the threat of force is necessary to protect everyone’s safety from selfish, violent individuals. Who are those selfish, violent individuals, the obvious answer is dismissed as a perversion, if it appears at all. The minority become an elite class, living from the labors of the obedient majority.

The elite take control of the education of the majority. They eagerly promote the virtues of nonviolence and non-coercion, virtues that they wish others to practice because it makes their domination easier. Cooperation is elided with obedience. The virtuous citizen is one who obeys for the sake of the community, and “community” becomes identified with the controlling regime.

Hodari Nundu

The elite’s educational program includes xenophobia. Outsiders are subhuman. They are a threat to our way of life. The elite teach that the virtue of non-violence applies only to insiders. It is necessary to be violent to The Other, because The Other is a threat to our community. The highest virtue is not just submission to the elite’s law; it includes the Manly Virtue of sacrifice for the good of the whole.

Thus is born the culture of war. The community-minded males (but never the elite) are sent to raid and plunder neighboring tribes. It’s self-defense. It’s for the good of the community.

When different tribes are at war, those who have developed the technologies of violence have an advantage. Those that culture obedience rather than grass-root cooperation have an advantage. Those that live in communities of trust, naïve to exploitation, will never know what hit them. Pizarro conquered the Inca civilization with 400 men bearing muskets and destroyed a rich culture that was centuries old. The Spanish and Portuguese conquered South America. The British overran China and India. The French and even the Dutch and Belgians were able to dominate huge areas of Africa.

Communities that culture blind obedience field better armies than those that culture independent thinking and voluntary cooperation. Large, centralized governments become victorious colonists. The more violent prevail over those who eschew violence. Peaceful, cooperative cultures die out; authoritarian, coercive cultures prevail.

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The story might end here, but for magic. The story so far has been told from the perspective of game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma, rooted in reductionism and a mechanistic world view. There is no God, no spirit, no unseen world, no wind of the Dao entraining the world in its current. This is the Procrustean world-view that the elite have cynically promulgated, and which the best-educated, most successful people world-wide have come to accept.

But the elite, themselves, know better. They practice black magic, making pacts with Beelzebub, crudely invoking spirit entities for their own selfish purposes. They are ruthless sociopaths. They dominate the naïve, successful people of the world, who in turn dominate the rest of us.

More powerful than black magic is white magic. The magic of extraordinary healing, the magic of knowing what is outside our view, the magic of manifesting goodness for oneself and others — these are suppressed by the elite, but they are unstoppable.

Black magic is an undercurrent in the river of the Dao, the river that sweeps history along its appointed path. The destiny of the world is to become ever more cooperative, ever more relational, ever richer in individual diversity. Nothing can stop the course of the Dao.

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Anarchist Musings

We’re maladapted to this age, it’s clear,
With concrete jungles, full of strangers who
Have thoughts and customs unlike me and you.
Our neighbors raise anxiety and fear.

They tell us, had we not the rule of law,
Our lives would be chaotic, violent.
We’re grateful that we have a government;
Alternative to “red in tooth and claw”.

But could we live without bureaucracies?
And who would we become with no police?
Without coercion, could we live in peace?
Would we be bonobos or chimpanzees?

I’d like the chance to live just as I please
In freely-organized communities.