Dear Diary:
I have come to believe that the positions that people take on public policy issues has very little to do with public policy outcomes or ideology.
It seems to me that people are reacting as social animals, not critical or objective thinkers. There is nothing rational about this. Its all emotional and instinctive.
But because we’re emotionally anxious, and gearing down to instincts is quite natural and gradual, we don’t recognize our states of mind. Self-awareness and reflectiveness are lost in anxiety. We need to stay focused on the real and present danger — the others, the evil ones who want to control our lives. People are feeling progressively more vulnerable.
More people > more knowledge > More technology > civil complexity > information overload > diminished cognitive capacity > compounded anxieties > false sense of confidence > perceived inter-tribal threat > herding for group defenses > conformity > solidarity > escalating conflict >…
People are forming herds for joint and mutual protection. They follow their thought leaders. The though leaders are saying what they think their followers want to hear to maintain the flock. They repeat simple mantras to keep the flock focused on conformity and solidarity. Human instincts are the same, distributed in a statistical bell curve across the population.
Herding instinct is universal across our species population. So is the collectivist/individualist predisposition, rooted in our biology and distributed in statistical bell curve fashion. In other words, some people are naturally more individualistic while others are naturally collectivist, and some are rather balanced, depending on the situation. No social species like ours could survive if they were singularly either collectivist or individualist.
But now, the two camps are essentially the same in social function and structure and ideologies are not relevant. No one is actually articulating an ideology based on our scientific understanding of human nature. Its just an accelerating sabre-rattling prologue to war. Both sides are both instinctively collectivist in their herding behaviour as well as instinctively hierarchical in their power structures. The individual has a role to play on both sides.
The political polarization by ideology is a delusion. The proverbial alien from a different planet sees that this is all playing out according to the social instincts of our species in response to excess civil complexity and its consequent uncertainty and anxiety.
If we can reframe our public dialogue to recognize this phenomenon, then we may begin to have civil dialogue and deal with the root causes of our anxieties rather than the symptoms. The root cause is that civil complexity is becoming unmanageable for the human brain and our institutions of collective intelligence.
100 years ago Wm Ogburn articulated the principle of ‘cultural lag’. This idea is that material aspects of culture are adopted faster than new values and beliefs. Over time, the gap widens as technical changes accumulate. Gradually, we acclimatize to a state of being out of control until we are truly out of control.
Each person gets a diminishing portion of all knowledge available. That means that culture is now more complex and dynamic than the ecosystems into which humanity was born.
60 years ago, Alvin Toffler said that in his lifetime there were as many new things, new ideas, new knowledge, as existed in the previous 800 lifetimes put together.
We live in unprecedented times. We need to look deeper into our human condition in order to manage it. As reality is non-disciplinary, but holistic, We need a science that is non-disciplinary. That would be systems science.
Randal Adcock 