The Search for a Fair Society: Society as a Shared Dataset

September 12. Welcome. Grab a coffee and let’s figure out what we would call a fair society.

Society is often defined via its institutions and laws. That’s already problematic because it requires that some decisions about what information should be shared by all members of a group as hypotheses in their individual world generation process have already been made for them. In particular, we are speaking here about the nature of humans. Only when your idea of man is that of Hobbs, you will get to the conclusion that people need constant supervision and the threat of punishment or they’d be lazy and unable to get along.

Let’s be clear about it: there’s absolutely no scientific evidence that this is true. On the contrary, we have plenty of evidence that humans are programmed to be active at all times and to support each other when not indoctrinated so that they generate a model of the world which includes a different idea of man as a hypotheses. By nature, we mirror i.e. we unconsciously take data that we attach to other creatures and include it inside the part of the model of the world we draw a border around and call ‘self’. Thus, our goals are always shared goals. What makes sense because we are all part of the same universal wave function and there’s no defecting against oneself. So, including a mechanism into the mind that will automatically prevent defecting, is what we would expect to find given the mostly hypothetical basis of our mind’s insights into the world.

Mirroring is interrupted by a sense of power. The person then generates a model of the world in their mind that tells him that everyone else is less intelligent, dangerous left to their own devices, and lazy, needing their supervision. But that’s not the norm.

So, we shouldn’t start our discussion about what constitutes a fair society – a set of data all members can accept to use in their individual world generation process so that their models of the world align to a degree that large-scale cooperation becomes possible – from a point where a direction has already been set and therefore violence and/or the threat thereof needed to enforce a decision forced onto everyone else by a few has already been built into the result.

Instead, we should accept without prejudice the idea that there is no natural or neutral way to create and organize society. Not even ‘the state’ or ‘the economy’. Our political, legal, economic, and social structures are the products of human choices – choices made about what set of data people in the society share when they create their individual models of the world to align them to some degree.

Once we accept that they are human choices, we can’t but understand that it is within our power to change the dataset. And that the opinion of every member of the society about what the dataset should and should not include must have the equal weight in its creation from step one.

Tell me, can you accept the idea of society as a shared dataset? And that any fair version of it must be truly democratic from square one?

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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