The Search for a Fair Society: What Do the US Election Results Tell Us About the State of our Cooperation

November 25. I’m back. You’re back. So, grab a coffee and let’s talk about what we want society to be and what it takes to get there – from each one of us.

In the last two and a half weeks I took a break, not just from writing and posting but also from the news. After the shattering results of the US elections, I needed to regulate my emotions by breaking always faster circling thought patterns, thus giving me time and space to sort information by importance and give them relevance. Mostly, I worked my way through 20 seasons of Time Team. Archeological digs help because

a)   the searches are as random as they get today. You choose the most promising lump and bumps in your surroundings to interact with. And what you find isn’t immediately helpful, but it can be once you can come up with an interpretation that works for your situation.

b)  what you must do to get any meaningful result is to step out of your own model of the world and erect an alternative one that might have been used by others in the past while you need to keep in mind that this alternative model of the world is still limited by your horizon. It is an exercise that, when done right, will show you the limits of your mind as well as fetters put on your thoughts by simply existing in the world today.

What the approach helped me to see is that we got to the revival of autocratic ideas because the replacement datasets necessary to facilitate cooperation on the societal level are fraught with unnecessary details for the single motivation all cooperators share. It’s so bloated that it isn’t even certain anymore what the shared motivation to enter the cooperation is and what the shared goals are that can be extrapolated from the shared motivation. This overload that limits the extent to which the individual can truly self-generate their model of the world to their specifications allows those who endeavor to exploit the natural inclination of all humans to seek out cooperation even though it entails initially to veer away from the ultimate goal, to hide fetters on thoughts that render reaching the ultimate goal impossible but imprison even unwilling cooperators in the group to the point that they become their own prison guards. Here I’m thinking about the ways we define things like state, property, freedom, work etc. up to even the source of the reality that we live in without even being aware anymore that we use these definitions in the model of the world we generate in our own mind.

How does this happen? Through constant repetition often by ourselves at places we wouldn’t ever connect with politics. For example, I use Duolingo which I consider play time. In the French course they talk about La Fontain and his fables, especially the one about the ant and the cicada. In this fable the ant is praised because it works i.e. exploits existing knowledge while the cicada is portrait as lazy for exploring its natural skills and abilities. What motivates us to seek out cooperation by nature is the desire to explore via random searches as these searches promise the highest payoff. Random searches are impossible to engage in as an individual because their risk is insurmountable when we act self-sufficient and alone. But in this fable, and by using the fable to teach French in Duolingo, we are told that to want to explore is to want to be lazy and hence bad. Why? Because by defining work as exploitation of existing knowledge the profit of this exercise occurs at a predictable time and place where it can be siphoned off. The much higher profit of a random search realizes itself wherever the surplus information gathered that way can be made relevant inside the cooperation what is much harder to monopolize.

A definition of work isn’t necessary in a cooperation. I would go even further and claim that defining work in the replacement dataset is even detrimental for the success of a cooperation that depends on cooperators acting as they see fit in the context of their model of the world and thereby developing their natural skills and abilities whenever they become relevant to strive in the momentary surroundings. What needs to be defined is how the result of the exploration that became only possible because of cooperation must be shared to keep the cooperation going. And for that, our current replacement dataset includes mostly reasons why it is wrong to demand sharing especially from those who siphon off results of work.

To avoid the constant relapse into times of the rule of the few over the many we need a serious declutter of our replacement datasets and a rethink of our understanding of cooperation, why we enter them, what we want out of them, and where we share motivations and goals with what people.

Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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