Ayn Rand critiqued socialism by saying self interest is always rational. [1] Marx says it is bad and creates wealth imbalance and waste. [2] Going past philosophy and into game theory, John Forbes Nash, Jr. says this kind of domination of self interest is always there. [3] Nash sees both domination and cooperation as the same, because cooperation is used in the self interest of both the player and the opponent. This is in contrast to both Rand and Marx, who views interest in the individual or interest in the society as a noble cause that are at odds. They assume that individualist capitalism and in Rand's terms "altruism" exist separately from each other in a sealed box that can never interact. Greed vs charity, in other words. If I were to use the Nash equilibrium model, you'll find this argument totally inadequate. Since Nash is the only one who has been able to actually prove anything with mathematics or win the Nobel prize for his contributions, we'll argue this point from the perspective that the differences between sexes are just as game influenced as a shopper and the sales department from a store. I will illustrate how this applies to world society at large, and also give many examples of unrelated scenarios that all apply to the same core science. I will bring feminism to a believable, but extremist and hypothetical scenario. You could compare it to the extermination of the Native Americans by pilgrims escaping persecution. Furthermore, I will end this argument with a utopian vision that can be realized to solve these issues using blockchain tech.
I will also use quite a bit of terminology related to cybernetics, which in my view is far better at understanding the world than from classical perspectives. It has also influenced quite a few fields including ecology, management, and the social sciences. I have included this documentation if you are not familiar with it. It includes Stafford Beer's work [4] that deals with social systems, a paper on complexity theory which is an expansion of Beer's trailblazing with better mathematics and explanation, [5] and Niklas Luhmann's book on social systems [6] - in particular chapter nine on contradiction and conflict would be what to look at. I'm going to argue from a completely gender neutral position and for the most part leave labels out. I'm not doing this for reasons of identity politics, but because I consider both genders are subject to the human condition. Anyway, I'll stick within these parameters to base my opinion from.
First, let's deal with the classic Marxism/objectivism argument that dominates popular opinion. I think this is a limited view, even though I lean more towards the objectivist side with sanity checks against turning the planet into a toxic dump. I also think Marx had a lot of really interesting things to say. His primitive concepts of studying capitalism was perhaps the first acknowledgement of positive feedback loops. He studied capital flow in relation to inputs and outputs and what might happen in a critical state. Clearly ahead of his time, and is the foundation for classical social sciences for a reason. However, it's a bit long in the tooth these days because nobody serious uses reductionist theory to explain complex systems such as societies or economics.
The reality is that what is perceived as the "patriarchy" or "hierarchy" is a system that's connected to other systems. To say that we all choose hierarchies is limited, because what we really do is organized communication and action towards some goal. This does not mean they do not exist, because they do. However, to say that we CHOOSE them without defining any parameters of what they really are is dishonest. Hierarchies can be either dominant or voluntary.
Good examples of dominant hierarchies are street gangs and nation-states. In these hierarchies, they use a form of extortion to force you to give up some of your rights for protection as long as you pay for it or agree to a set of terms. They usually give you some kind of benefits to sweeten the deal. If you defect from this agreement, they usually have some draconian way to punish you for this.
In contrast, a good example of a voluntary hierarchy is a class listening to their teacher. The class is generally voluntarily going to learn, because they want to get good grades for their parents. However, this does not mean individual students are not within a dominant hierarchy with their parents who may secretly abuse them if they get bad grades. If you assume that the teacher is totally unaware of this dynamic, that information will be totally unknown to them. This is important because it's a data set that could probably skew anything that is known about both education and parenting theory. Imagine if the child fails repeatedly because they like to play video games and don't want to do home work. Imagine then that they are in a tit for tat to see who will win their way, where the child avoids the parent and runs away from home to stay with friends, threatens to report the beating, etc. If the parent escalates, the child escalates. We have now entered a positive feedback loop. After a period of escalation, maybe they quit for a day. Maybe the next day the child finds a weapon to fight back.
If this occurs, you could say that we are now in a period of chaotic uncertainty. This is the most dangerous time, because this is when tragedy has the most possibility of occurring. At some point, it will have to return to equilibrium but each person is unaware of the other's decisions. We are extremely ill equipped to deal with these kinds of scenarios, because this is when our panic and flight response kicks in. It's very easy to choose to fight and hurt or kill one another, and it's not so easy to choose the correct answer which is to introduce "negative feedback" or deescalate. If the opponent on each side has any animosity towards you, the more this applies. They may see your deescalation as a weakness for attack. The only sure way to deescalate, is to have a third party observer with an equally powerful position break up the fight and bring the conflict back to equilibrium. This is the traditional way of looking at and solving these kinds of problems. It applies to basic market science, monetary theory, sociology, medicine, pressurized mechanical systems, etc. Teapots do this same type of negative feedback automatically when they boil to release pressure, and also to alert you to take it off the stove before water gets everywhere. It's a complete straight line from cause, to effect, to solution. These are simple systems to work with.
However, these methods only work on the micro level. The bad news is that we think we can apply them to the macro level of society. Even though we might think we can, all we tend to get are errors out of most of these voyages to order complex macro systems. Imagine a similar scenario with a million people that are in two groups that communicate within the individual groups, but don't communicate with each other. Imagine if the two groups had individual pacts that coordinated attack if one of the other groups attacked and there was no mediator.
The problem is that you know the initial condition, which is a steady state equilibrium for some indefinite time scale. If some sort of conflict occurs and it escalates to a critical point, then you will never get close to predicting the outcome. The reason for this is that you're now dealing with 500,000 people on either side that have individual decision making capabilities plus different properties like body strength, motor skill, etc.
You can observe these interactions even within 100% female groups in competition with each other. There's countless movies that exist detailing this effect. Gender domination is simply a subset and reductionist approach to what any social scientist, computer scientist, or economics expert will tell you. Bad behavior will always emerge unless there are sufficient sanity checks that are systemic, and females are NOT immune to the human condition. A proliferation of men that are dominant, and global warming are the same kind of problem. Systems theorists call this effect a positive feedback loop. Conservatism in the scientific sense is synonymous with order, which tends to fight against change in reaction to these feedback loops.
You can compare this to drug addiction and the related dynamics of the family, where the drug addict is harming themselves, and fights family intervention in almost every case. When they finally recognize their problem, usually what triggers this is one of two things. Either there is sufficient incentive to stop, or they went through a catastrophic experience associated with their addiction.
What has been hard for us to comprehend, is that these runaway effects are real. We KNOW that if we don't replace automobiles with better technology, climate change will kill us and everyone else. We don't have a good track record at handling these runaway effects. Not by a long shot. We see these effects in economics, the internet, crime, biological viruses, volcano eruptions, and so on. We are comparable to five year old children in terms of dealing with our society that is more similar to biological or ecological systems than simple systems like communication, which is a reductionist view. We also focus too much on gender and species behavior applied to groups. By generalizing male and female, you're already engaging in identity politics. Males and females are complex groups, full of variety. We are still in the process of learning how society even works, so I don't personally think how either person could generalize such notions like gender. For that matter, I don't think how they could generalize anything else to do with society by bringing up nineteenth century or older arguments, to answer twenty first century problems.
What has to be recognized is that men didn't all of a sudden decide to dominate over women. Male domination is an instinctual and evolutionary process dating back thousands of years that ran away like carbon dioxide did when we introduced gasoline cars to the environment. Don't blame men for this dominance, and don't say it doesn't exist. We don't blame CO2 for our greenhouse problems. We started that mess from our harnessing of non biological forms of energy production. We own it, we've known this has been going on since the 1970s, and we have done next to zero about it since. Before agriculture and basic tools like wheels and pulleys were invented, females needed protection from predators, strength to build things, hunt, and so on. The only reason we bother to talk about this subject now, is we have largely made this obsolete through tool building.
There is nothing you could have done differently to change these dynamics. This IS the human condition.
We need to learn to shed things a bit more often than we do. Who can even argue for countries and nation states dominating over others as being right in this obviously globalized civilization? While we did have cultures, races, and even religions attacking others in the past, tradition and hegemony is the answer today for the nation-state existence. In fact, most nation-states minus a few stragglers have realized such conflict is wrong. People are correct to bash identity politics because they tend to define any ruling hegemony, that has the potential for the increased power of ethnic or oppressed groups to revolt, as beneficial or progressive. They aren't. They are at best totally ineffective to solving the root issue, and at worst gives legitimacy to warlord mentality. Let me illustrate:
The extreme position of feminism is armed conflict, and in fact this is feminism's greatest potential victory. If you disagree, why is fighting and violence associated with men? With the right weapons and enhancing armor, you will both equal and exceed men in both strength and oppression. Even if it's just to prove you could do it equal or better. If females won a hypothetical female and male war and turned to genetics for offspring, it would even theoretically be beneficial according to the standard philosophical argument of not even third wave feminism but second wave. It would even be a social and scientific advancement of evolution in that tool building humans developed the first engineered society made up of a non binary gender source for offspring, and beyond this they survived a dinosaur level extinction event from climate change against all odds. It would be the first example of self directed evolutionary Darwinism that could compare to the first amphibians in biological importance. The greatest achievement of humankind.
Overpopulation, violent rape, etc would end, and they would have earned their battle stripes - finally victorious. Disregarding ethics, the outcome could bring female Eden where they get the best of the technology out of the thousands of years of oppression. This includes a personal robot that does their clothes, cleans, cooks, does labor, never complains, never sleeps, teaches their perfect and selected children everything they'd ever want to know, never drinks, never does drugs, never cheats, and doesn't want sex. Robots and genetics could be as liberating, feminist style, as the vibrator. With complete feminine freedom from their own and male chores. This is all possible while they live in luxury for the next 6000 years.
Will it work? Yes. Ethically, it's a disaster on the level of the holocaust.
Domination comes in many forms whether it's gender, social, religious, statist, racial, etc and has subjective and unequal shortcomings and benefits to both parties. If a dominant position benefits your interests, you will exploit this position as much as possible and you tend to be protective of such interests. Sometimes you will even resort to violent conflict with the opposition (ie, drug dealers) and the reverse is true as well. Sometimes the dominant factor might not be human but as natural as the weather. Tornadoes are feedback loops caused by weather. The US spends lots of money on weather modification research and detection, because tornadoes even existing isn't in the collective human interest of those living where they frequently occur. Those that are correctly critical of weather modification, say we have no idea what it may do to the climate somewhere else or in the future. If we then think of society as a social system of networks and the interactions involved in communicating over networks influence the society, this inadequacy of generalization is clear.
Breaking it down and trying to fix parts gives us a limited viewpoint akin to a single human trying to give order to an ant colony, where you move ants around in some way to create a result where the ants either treat it like an attack, or they might ignore it and go back to whatever they were doing. You, on the macro level have absolutely zero idea what they're doing on the micro level. You're not even an ant so you can't even communicate with them. We can only begin to understand the complexity of this interaction through management of the entire system. In other words, if we want the ants to build colonies a certain way, it may be easier to just study ants, see what they do, then begin to create an environment for them to flourish doing what you would like them to accomplish. However, there's even a larger system involved with the ants, and bigger systems that are involved with that system. We need to think about this process while we design systems originally, because it's hard to change them once they become standardized. This includes thinking about the consequences years and perhaps centuries out of all connected systems. This is hard, and worse required, because not doing so has very devastating effects.
For example, think of micro-beads. The beauty industry made money, with a likely male workforce, to make a product for women that they used and liked because of social norms relating to the appearance of flawless skin, that got into ecosystems, and was a detriment to them. Now, throw in a diesel pick up truck containing a couple, that goes to a store to buy the product with the micro-beads in it. Now, you have multiple interactive systems of compound environmental damage directly linked to male/female dynamics. It is our interactions with our environment, and the way we treat our environment as tools, that drives the social theories of Marx and Rand to begin with. We still have slavery, but from a human lens it's abolished. We don't recognize this normally. What really happened is that in the 18th and 19th centuries we recognized that all human slavery is bad and started intense discussion on the subject. Machines emerged when this was discussed. This development was also not limited to the United States.
So what is the best argument for civilization? Is it human slaves, a destroyed planet, populist tendencies with fascist results, or some other future unknown society? We might not be able to even answer this without a lot of computers.
We live in a world that has people with certain motives. They gather in groups to accumulate power through communication. Eventually they become the majority through revolution, and oppress other groups. Wash, rinse, repeat. Democrats, republicans, christians, ethnic groups, etc are all the same as mobsters and corporations. Self-seeking humans exploiting numerical strengths for gain, while using guns, laws, extortion, and manipulation of uneducated people to stay there as much as possible. They all create evil where it did not exist before.
One of the first uses of the Internet was for porn. One of the first uses of social networking was for entertainment, and to exploit it for surveillance and political warfare purposes. One of the first uses of 3-D printers was to exploit the technology to make guns. This was supposed to bring communication, education, and the means of production to individuals for prosperity. They communicated sex, learned buzzfeed clickbait, chose memes over knowledge, took photos of themselves for the NSA, elected Donald Trump, and made fully automatics available for anyone with a few grand to ten grand worth of milling machines and a cracked copy of auto-cad from pirate bay.
We didn't get social cooperation, and people took freedoms and ran with them. At least 70% of all media you read is right wing, and it's nothing more than AI generated articles. It takes 20 times or less for you to believe something about a subject. If they can drown out free speech discussion with Nazi media, they can make you believe it too. Geico is associated with geckos. Geckos are associated with Geico. I wonder if this is actually what fascinated Andy Warhol, the subtle things advertisements do to the mind and the art he's known for and what made him as well known as Leonardo da Vinci are very similar indeed.
What is extremely clear is that we are incapable at governing ourselves, but government is crucial. Social participation is even more crucial.
Social media has benefits such as the independent journalism that followed things like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and Occupy. They were number one in driving education to situations people aren't even aware of, and this holds true today. White cops shooting black unarmed children, humanitarian tragedies in the middle east, the poisoning of Native American lands, etc have been normal for a long time, but for white america especially this was largely unseen and so easy to ignore as it was not their problem. This does not exist anymore when video can be taken of it and distributed fairly quickly without much friction or traditionalism. We are seeing the largest transformation in history that holds information and communication as the ultimate rights we have, which was also noticed by our founding fathers developing our first amendment. Early computer users and hackers like Aaron Swartz and even myself were driven by this idealism and it is a core part of our culture.
What is obvious to us now is that we had no idea how far people would go with this and try to bend what was actually real. We now tend to believe that consensus driven technologies paired with information freedom provide the best possible way forward. If someone or a bunch of bots decide to rain on our parade and spread disinformation, we can then know who they are, all of their aliases, and kick them out of the virtual public square by simply muting their identity through a ton of down votes and reporting systems or individually. However, people that distribute this information are largely left to do so. It’s possible we could take this further. Under the best system of decentralized and social driven law, society will directly determine the punishment necessary to people that disobey the rules of such society - perhaps even a world society. People seeking to enrich themselves more than they are already or even well connected minorities that don't mind taking their money in a one step forward two steps backward fashion - is obviously not working.
Imagine if one group had atomic weapons in a cold and non threatening manner. The other group would likely not attack out of fear, bringing the two groups to equilibrium. Now, add more groups that may or may not have atomic weapons. Since the atomic weapons are now the dominant advantage, the group with the most atomic weapons will be dominant over all of the other groups, while the groups with some atomic weapons will be dominant over groups that don't have any. If you took the ability to communicate completely out of the equation, these groups couldn't exist because they can't communicate and form those hierarchies, which may be either dominant or voluntary. This is true on both the micro and macro level. Whatever conflict occurs, then happens outside of this scenario, whether it's with a smaller group, or individuals. Likewise, and this is the most important thing. Imagine all the groups interconnected into one big worldwide group through some kind of communications technology. That's not really hard to do considering how you are reading this. However, introduce into the systems we're already familiar with - a non-human government, that is in control of the atomic weapons all the groups have. Imagine a scenario where to release these atomic weapons, it would need to verify 8 billion 256-bit cryptographic keys. With current technology, this will take about one sexdillion years (longer than the age of the universe) to brute force each key, by using fifty of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
The only other way is to track billions of people down and steal the smart card containing their private key. The Terminator scenario just turned into the alien invasion or asteroid approaching earth scenario.
Imagine further that if your smart card had some sort of currency that you could use to trade, and third party verification of identification so everyone had proper identity. Imagine if you created a system of rules that had simple majority vote, where the computers could run sanity checks on us and we on them. This could create a separation of powers that operates within geographic locations from the smallest geographic location, to the whole entire planet. With software and our smart cards or NFC, we could report violations of these rules that could be verified to be accurate within minutes. Witnesses or victims can take timestamped video and have documented evidence where you could securely store all of the information a legal case would need immediately for review. It could provide even immediate peer review with very little wasted time.
How this hypothetically works, is it alerts others around the immediate area to help and/or verify the violation was taking place. If nobody could help or the incident was exceedingly violent or dangerous, those that verified the report would send for law enforcement to take care of the danger or investigate. If they were alone and in trouble, emergency people could be sent as well. For anybody who helps, a specified voted upon payment will be generated and given upon the confirmed arrest or through verification by the others and victim. Imagine if we could video secretly in the case of possible danger. Things like cameras embedded in clothing, and pre-assigned surveillance that is made up of trusted peers instead of potential bad actors like a fascist government, could be a huge societal benefit and also reduce fear, that is in my opinion extremely valid. We could vote on things like monetary policy, social benefits, etc with scholarly data that is aggregated within the platform. Then, anything humans do that is on the macro level and may have detrimental effects to ecosystems, can be checked for mathematics and policy in a one hundred percent open source format. Since identity is confirmed, we can start to design a system of credentials to match. We can also do experiments on how to do interconnected analysis from the micro level to the macro level. We can mix economic systems however we'd like, in whatever geographic area we want, that we can join and leave at will, with one single currency.
We can introduce systems of legal organization towards the invention of new technology, buildings, software, etc. We can propose media authenticity that requires authentic source material. We can design economic systems that could be well managed. Such systems could figure out how much to pay people that contribute to society through production or service oriented organizations, for instance. We can think about having a payment system for new novel ideas that are revolutionary with proper attribution to those rights holders. We can think about how to deal with people spreading nonsense like the earth being flat and other random conspiracy theories with no evidence, or at least a pile of evidence against such things. The only exception to this, is that action against any religion and cultural beliefs will be banned. If we go too far where we may collectively effect something negatively and the computer detects it, the computer will not deny us. It will simply warn us that whatever we're doing isn't sane, give a list of reasons why it doesn't think so, and require more votes.
The best way to describe such a system would be that it is a decentralized direct democratic republic that uses well defined consensus technology [7], with a true mixed economy based on individual need, that is eco-centric, and is a true bridge from the virtual world to the real world.
[1]
https://www.aynrand.org/ideas/philosophy[2]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm[3]
http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/NashEquilibrium.pdf[4]
http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/beer/book.pdf[5]http://www.complexityforum.com/members/Grobman%202005%20Complexity%20theory.pdf
[6]
https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Niklas_Luhmann_Social_Systems.pdf[7]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw3WkySh_Ho&t=578s
