The big advantage of the past is that we have a pretty good idea on how it treated us. The big disadvantage of the future is that we can’t know how it will treat us. Humanity doesn’t have any long-term goals. Does is matter if our species survives or evolves into new species? Do we care? I don’t. Many don’t.
When we do set ourselves goals they become part of culture. Culture is what creates the tension in the present between the past and the future. We want to do better than we have done in the past yet we don’t want to make changes that would give us a worse deal in the future than we expect. Culture is uniquely concerned with control.
Our ability to think about, reason about and even predict the future is what creates culture. Without understanding that A leads to B there can be no culture. Our ability to recollect the past, compare outcomes and engage in what-if thinking functions as an input for thinking about the future. Storytelling lets us learn about the outcomes of decisions without actually making those decisions ourselves. Law enforcement is uniquely concerned with storytelling.
The more culture gets fragmented in today’s long tail of worldwide interactions the more we loose control. By engaging in cultural practices in small groups instead of as masses massive control of people becomes harder and harder and eventually it will become impossible. As I told yesterday we need to be worried about how we will make money to be controllable by states. Yet more and more people are being paid to engage in free interactions with people they seek to influence. Once that influence is actually working and the communication channels are in place these individuals won’t have to worry about making money anymore because that influence can be monetized regardless of who pays.
Trust is a true currency in the sense that people who have earned it don’t have to worry about how to make money: they just make money by what they do and thus become much less controllable. This money isn’t being made through per-transaction revenue but through daily interactions regulated by trust. When the interactions violate the trust the earned privileges disappear and so do the monetization opportunities.
As the relationship between earned trust and making money become a phenomenon that regulates ever larger portions of the economy the groups in which trust is exchanged become more and more fragmented. The fragmented context in which wealth is created is such that exerting control – especially by a state – becomes next to impossible. Culture which is uniquely concerned with control changes drastically too. The part of culture that is used by the state to organize society shrinks to the advantage of the many fragmented interactions citizens engage in.
In other words citizens get much more chances to control than before and the state gets much less. This shift in control can be directly attributed to the long tail: the state is much better in influencing the very common interactions – like participating in traffic – than it is at influencing fringe interactions (those in the tail). When there didn’t used to be a long tail the state was all powerful. Now that there is long tail the state is practically forced to say away from the fringes.
Unfortunately much of the interactions in the financial industry used to be in the fringes where states didn’t exert control. Now that that fringe activity has blown up the economy and has put the financing of future society under grave threat the state has shot itself in the foot. By insisting for the past decades to keep their national currencies impersonal they’ve allowed people in the fringes who were explicitly not controlled to screw everybody. As it becomes clear that impersonal currencies are no longer viable states are and will continue to fight for the lives.
By counting on the answers from the past to regain control states will make the situation much worse. They can’t know this and even if they did know there’s nothing they can do about it. States are uniquely concerned with self-preservation. They have no choice but to mend national society until total collapse has arrived. Because total collapse is unavoidable under the regime of the answers from the past.
Since the answers from the past won’t do all we have left are the answers about the future. We’re not good at taking these serious yet our existing political and economical culture is completely obsolete. This is what Clay Shirky talks about when he says the old structures collapse faster than they can’t be replaced. We have a gigantic decision problem before us where the old processes of reaching decisions are useless.
We have seen this happening all around us since many decades. The legal system – laws and courts – is eroding. National policy is eroding. Democratic principles are eroding. The financial and economic systems are eroding. Health care is eroding. Agriculture is eroding. After erosion comes collapse. In all practical terms erosion is a slow-motion train wreck.
We have always believed that more control would solve our problems and we’re being proven wrong in a very dramatic way. The peace time carnage going on in the world today is larger than it has ever been before and the collapse of national societies is upon us.
The usefulness of any domain can be easily revealed by the clarity of the question that are being asked. When it comes to society, which are the questions that govern our decisions? That is not clear. There is no clarity what our society is for or about. As we reconstruct a brand new culture we’ll have to start asking the right questions. There is one question that was once asked during the 18th century by the first anthropologists like Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacque Rousseau that is making a comeback: How to construct a world society that is more democratic than ever before?
(i) inspired by Keith Hart, Kris Hoet
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I’ve thought for many years how ancient instruments of population control, such as money, can be made obsolete and always arrived at the same end point: Trust, or standing within a community, seems to be a far better way of bringing some balance to the world than things like institutions, money or religion.
I firmly believe that both trust and standing within the community must go hand in hand. It’s no good being very trustworthy if you contribute nothing back to the community and vice versa.
These two metrics would yield a self-balancing global civilisation, free from arcane concepts from the past. Don’t get me wrong - things like institutions, money and religion were vital to get us to where we are now, but they are victims of their own success and are now obsolete.
In a world balanced by trust and standing within the community, would crime and most other social problems be able to exist? People would still have to work in order to contribute something meaningful, but without the headache of money, in particular, they would be able to get far more done in a shorter space of time. Freeing up millions of minds from insurance, tax, accounts, etc., would enable the human race to focus far more on things that are actually useful and meaningful.
It’s late, I’m rambling, so I’ll stop. But money really has to reach “end of life” and be replaced by something more humanised and meaningful for the human race to move forward.