Better Living through Software

Tantek asks how we can kill bad ideas before we end up killing people.

While it’s useful to look at ideas through the lens of biology (”memes”), epidemiology, or systems theory; this is also the biggest error. 

Human “ideas” are unique in all of nature.  Humans (like apes or dogs) are capable of making a choice between equally powerful animal instincts at any moment.  But humans are also aware that other humans have this same power, and are aware that other humans are aware that they have that power — and so on.  Apes cannot think or communicate in four orders of intensionality, yet humans regularly go beyond four orders of intensionality in our calculations.  The ability to communicate in four orders is the bare minimum for science, religion, and “ideologies” to form.

What this means, is that any system of ideas that humans create, can eventually be gamed and exploited.  Some dictatorships lead to harmony, others lead to enslavement of the people.  Free markets can lead to equal opportunity, or to massive wealth disparity and indentured servitude.  When a critical mass of people learn how to exploit a system to gain advantage at the disadvantage of another group, things start to break down.

All of the mathematical and biological approaches ignore this simple fact.  They erase free will from the equation, and hide that fact behind several layers of abstraction.  Then someone can say, “Selfishness is human nature, and life is an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game, so it is human nature that I am rich”.  And he can say, “Game theory, statistics, and evolutionary theory predicted that Katrina victims did not plan far enough ahead, so it is their fault.  We just need MORE free markets and MORE wealth, and the problem will fix itself!”

That is, a system of ideaology which is intended to bring maximum harmony can (doesn’t have to) simply become an elaborate excuse for turning a blind eye to someone else’s problems.

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In addition, humans are relatively unique in that a human baby is not born fully developed.  A human child needs a lot of intensive training, especially in the first year, to ever hope to become a happy member of society.  Our first training in ideology is embedded from our relationships with our caregivers, then from our relationships with siblings, extended family, and classmates (”village”).  Children do not learn via logic; they learn by modeling close human relationships.  The wetware to process logic evolved relatively late, and is still completely impotent to handle typical human relationship issues.  Parables and stories work much better for training/persuading people of things that have to do with ideology.

Raising a child, teaching a homeless person how to support himself, teaching a gambler to quit — these are not technology problems.  These are not systems problems.  The more we look for systems solutions to these problems, the more of a mess we make.  Until we realize, “that’s my kid”, “that’s my cousin”, “that’s my neighbor”, systems are just an excuse.  The child needs a parent, not a system.

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The simplest parable of all is that of the two lovers (our spouses, or brothers) bound by mutual suspicion.  If the husband sees his job as being to correct the errors and flaws in his wife’s thinking and behavior, and the wife sees her job as being to do the same for her husband, we all know how the story ends.  At some point, one person in the relationship needs to forgive, and look for the flaws in her own behavior/thinking (’cause it’s never in his ) and move on.  Without this step taking place at least once, no harmony can ever exist.  No idea is perfect, and no person is perfect.

When two ideologies look for the slivers in one another’s eyes, it gives them an excuse to ignore the beams in their own.  And when the citizens of each bloc see the other bloc living in denial, it just makes both sides more entrenched.  Clearly, the main points of denial which hurt America’s credibility in the world today are the interest in oil money and the fact that our own internal systems have corroded in the last 100 years.

I wonder what would happen if America were to take the first step and acknowledge those things.  Suppose we were to say:

1. We still believe in democracy and capitalism, but we recognize that things here at home have become a bit skewed in the past 100 years.  We’re going to do some soul-searching and figure out why Katrina happened, why 2% of our population is in prison, why social mobility is decreasing rapidly, why washington is becoming more inbred every year.
2. We have huge amounts of money compared to the rest of the world; we don’t need foreign oil.  We’re going to reduce our consumption of foreign oil 10% per year.  The medium-term economic pain will be worth it, because it will spur new innovation in the long run.
3. Bombing other people into “love” is not a good strategy for security.  We will withdraw our military on the same schedule that our economic interests in the region reduce (10% per year).  We believe that peaceful democracy and liberty will flourish in the region if we set a good example by fixing our own problems first.  If it doesn’t, India and China will have far more incentive to deal with the problem than they do today.

Maybe I’m crazy; but I think it’s the only way the republicans can hope to hold power.  If they don’t, and the dems do, they will sweep the entire evangelical bloc.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 11:19 am and is filed under possibilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.