American politics, in this age of Trump, is terrifying. The richest, most militarily powerful country in the world is running full speed towards Civil War II, the Empire Falls Apart. There are piles of commentary on the convention speeches, and policy positions, and whatever, about the political minutiae, but they seem to be overlooking the big stuff.
What’s the point? What is the purpose of national /regional /municipal /community /family leadership? Why have groups at all? It means pulling way out with your perspective of nations and groups and disagreement. So we pull way into orbit, and what is the point of having groups at all?
At the very most basic, it’s about safety. A group is better placed to cooperatively defend themselves from predators or other people, than they would be left on their own. Ok, so we have safety, or at least safety-ish as the primary responsibility of group leadership.
Humanity has, at least in large pockets, reached a level of advancement that safety-ish, and how to ensure it, is a known quality - even during a pandemic. Trump has shown that it is pretty easy to forget how to do safety-ish, but it is within the human knowledge base. So let’s give humanity the credit they, collectively, generally deserve. What purpose is attached to leadership once safety-ish has been achieved?
Economic production, and scientific knowledge, and cultural creations, and education at every level, and emergency response and a bunch of other things can be collected into the wrapper of ‘advancement’. We want the group /society/ nation /community /family to progress along one or more of those axes of advancement.
Ok, at this high orbit viewpoint, what do all of those axes of advancement have in common - what is the common thread? If you’ve read many of these things I write and send into the ether, you could guess what my answer is. Cooperation. As often screamed into the void by me and loads of others and ignored by lots of people of power, what sets the human race above other animals is that we are really good at cooperating.
There was a time that one person could hold a good portion of the collective knowledge of their tribe in their head, but that ended ten thousand years ago. One human brain wasn’t close to being capable of holding the collective knowledge of the species, even then. The hunting and foraging specifics of Southern China was very different from Northern Europe, from Central America, from the Nile delta, from wherever. This was the last time in human existence that someone could claim to be a self-made man, even if they hadn’t invented boot straps to pull themselves up by yet. They’d be overlooking what they learned from the rest of the tribe, but they wouldn’t be lying quite as dramatically as those that claim this now are.
/Aside
Fun etymology fact.
The first usage of ‘bootstraps’ in the sense of ‘lifted himself up by his bootstraps’ was mocking the impossibility of lifting one’s self up by pulling on straps connected to the boots one was wearing. It is obviously impossible - as it is impossible to rely solely on your own effort to succeed in any society. People who claim this act are, accidentally, alluding to a truth.
Source; the internet somewhere. Google is right there. Look it up :).
/End Aside
Writing and agriculture and beer were all developed, in their most basic form, over a fairly short period of time. The beer part mattered, because people hadn’t figured out how to maintain sanitation when they were all packed together in a city, and fermenting the water limited the parasites and pathogens in the drinking water. The agriculture mattered so you could feed all those people packed into that city. The writing was developed so the people protecting the city could tax the collective wealth of the city and redeploy resources in a way that minimized the damage done to that community from ‘bad things’.
Writing wasn’t a repository of knowledge yet. It was just a way to store tabulations of data. The first spreadsheets. The sharing of the wealth gained by packing people together and taxing them created an opportunity for true professions to form. Tax collectors, sure, but also scientists; and farmers; and philosophers; and sewage workers and layabout good for nothing wealthy children; and priests; and whatever.
The first examples of disparate wealth advanced ‘advancement’ - Corruption, waste, militancy, sickness, and misery were all advanced as well, but in terms of maintaining a population and breeding more, it worked better than the existing alternatives. Leisure time was key. The formation of an elite leisure class, that didn’t need to engage in the continual, if not particularly high energy, life of a nomadic living. Don’t get me wrong, parts of nomadic life are very high energy, but in times of relative plenty, in places that are relatively plentiful in resources needed by a particular tribal community, that community had time for singing, and praying and sharing and all sorts of good things. They just didn’t specialise to the level possible in a much bigger tribe collected in a city.
So why did city living out-compete nomadic living? Why did a lower quality of life for most citizens work better than nomadic life? The nomadic tribes traded amongst themselves, protected their own members and intermarried with nearby tribes for thousands of years. That first requirement of leadership was already in place. Nomads have safety-ish. The first agricultural communities were vastly sicker and less healthy than the tribal communities, but still the bigger groups associated with those nation states pushed nomadic living to the margins.
The ability of professions to gather specialised knowledge, and transfer that knowledge to younger specialists let the community as a whole cooperate in advancement more effectively than the small nomadic tribal communities could complete with. It also let the leadership of those cities raise large armies and conquer other cities and have huge battles and loot defeated cities, and pass on illness further and faster than ever before, and generally make those communities work much less well than the nomadic communities at the number one responsibility of good leadership, safety-ish. Yet on net, they worked better.
As some members of the elite leisureful class came up with new ideas and shared them within their specialties and down through generations, the cooperative groups moved from city states to true nations. During that developmental period, some bright spark took the idea of writing past the spreadsheet and into the word processor. Books allowed the specialised thinking of one city state to pass to specialists in other city states and through time, and collective knowledge, ‘advancement’, jumped ahead.
Over time, those leisureful elites figured out medicine and science and engineering and economics and all that elite stuff, and shared it worldwide. Bigger libraries, and universities, and specialists with leisure time learned so much that the biggest libraries couldn’t fit it all. Lots of the understanding of how knowledge interacts with reality was, and still is, passed from mentor to protege within a specialty, in one-on-one learning and doesn’t really translate well to books.
As of today, all that knowledge fits in the cloud. Billions of people have access to the biggest library ever, and some amount of leisure time to figure some of it out. We are living in a time where knowledge is at our fingertips all the time. Curators, who know what knowledge is useful, and what is some guy writing long dissertations into the ether, become much more important.
We really need better curators at the moment. Wikies are one axis of development with curation. Elite journals are becoming less effective, partly because of the speed knowledge moves now and partly by getting too caught up in ‘how things are done’ and not adjusting to the reality that is now present in the world.
The other component of ‘advancement’ that is in short supply just now is understanding. How do those bits of knowledge interact? You-Tube, and other video sharing services help with this with simpler concepts, but a lot of the remaining big questions are really hard. What are the complex kinetic interactions of matter and time and politics and economics and psychology that will lead to continued ‘advancement’?
That, my friends, is the number two job of our collective governing authorities. Advancement. Advancement pivots on reams of safe people interacting and sharing knowledge and understanding. The tools are in place to share knowledge and explain understanding to the entire huge population of the planet - but that knowledge will remain diffuse, because one brain can’t even almost, slightly, approach, getting even close to, storing a single percentage point of the whole.
The more efficient the cooperation between groups of people, the more leisure time that is available for people to share and comprehend knowledge and understanding. Governments that are best at fostering that cooperation just work better than governments that don’t. It has always been so. The big thing that modern politics misses, is that some policy positions work better than others do. It isn’t rooting for a favorite sports team, or betting on a race horse, or wanting things to work a certain way.
Peter Pan thinking doesn’t translate into reality. Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves until you get to really high effective marginal tax rates - seventy percent or more. The marginal utility of the billionth dollar is practically indistinguishable from zero. Higher economic disparity leads to greater unrest. Restive minorities that are subjugated by the state suck up resources both through unrest, and lower productivity. These are things we, collectively, know and understand.
It doesn’t matter if governments based on democracy and freedom are nicer to live in. It doesn’t matter if a privileged class wants to maintain their privileges. It doesn’t matter where the richest men on earth live. It doesn’t matter that some junior member countries in the hegemony looked at you funny. All that matters is that a society or cooperative group of societies work. It matters that a society works better than its competitors. Right now, the competitor that has a huge population (larger than the population in the free world hegemony) are prioritising education and cooperation within their society pretty effectively.
At this very second the technocratic Chinese authoritarian government is doing a better job of educating and encouraging vast numbers of specialists to cooperate towards building a political and economic reality that works. Human history says that authoritarian governments don’t remain technocratic, and lose focus on what works so collapse into in-fighting and popular unrest, and stop cooperating well. New technology and surveillance techniques make controlling popular unrest easier, and limit in-fighting - if wielded ruthlessly enough. What political system is obviously working better is no longer obvious. That China treats some minorities within its borders horribly doesn’t matter. America treats some minorities within its borders horribly as well.
It is not a predetermined reality that America remains the richest and most technologically advanced nation on the planet. It is very very likely that they will not be so in twenty years. It is disturbingly likely that the leading democratic, free country will collapse into in-fighting and unrest long before the leading technocratic, authoritarian one does. It is disturbingly likely that the large population that has been cooperating within the American hegemony will go through a period of decreasing cooperation, and work less well going forward than it does today.
For voters in America, the question is which party will result in a more cooperative environment for specialists to cooperatively converge, solving the biggest problems facing the collective existence of the world /nations /cities /communities /families? Which party will make America and the ‘free world’ work better.
The situation is actually more simple in this pandemic reality. Americans don’t need to take it to the second highest purpose of leadership - they can just stop at job number one. Which party’s leadership will use the knowledge of specialists and the collective understanding of people and behaviours to improve the safety and well being of your nation /state /city /community right now? For the sake of all of us in the hegemony, get with the program. You taught that program to the world, and are now forgetting it. Please don’’t forget. Please ‘advance‘. Please.