The Search for a Fair Society: Why the Strong Leader Ideal is Antithetical to a Fair Society
October 25. Welcome. It’s time to grab a coffee and talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society as a fair society is our only chance to banish violence and wars from our lives.
After yesterday’s discussion of the Rule of Law I want to pick up another idea that comes up a lot right now and put it into the context of human cooperation: the strong leader ideal or even a strongman. To put the conclusion at the top, the strong leader ideal is antithetical to a fair society.
To understand why, we once more need to go back to what society is. Society is a dataset which contains all the definitions, rules, and structures governing the cooperation of a group of people. While humans are naturally driven to cooperate, cooperation doesn’t come naturally to us. We need to align our self-generated and therefore diverse models of the world to create enough common ground – shared reality – to be able to set common objectives. This happens when all members of the group implement said dataset into their world generation processes, replacing data they would have chosen otherwise themselves when generating the best possible model of the world for their individual purposes. Most prominent between these purposes is survival what can be achieved by any human alone via the conduct of searches that exploit existing knowledge. Replacing some of the best data with shared data means therefore creating a dependency on the group for something the individual could achieve without cooperation, thus putting oneself into a worse situation one could be in alone. Humans are, as I mentioned before, naturally driven to seek out cooperation anyway because only cooperation done correctly offsets the insurmountable risk highly profitable random searches pose for the individual. What means that a fair society is a society in which all participants create a shared reality by fully implementing a shared replacement dataset into their world generation processes which then results in every one of them having a sustained increased ability to execute random searches which are mostly driven by the parts of their model of the world that remain diverse.
This result is only achieved if all people constantly have the same say in the maintenance and adjustment of the dataset and there’s constant agreement between all members about what data the dataset contains. The reason is simple. Someone who doesn’t agree to the dataset or any change made to it, will not implement it. Realities drift apart and cooperation becomes impossible. No cooperation, no offset of the high risk of random searches, no satisfaction of the motivation that made all members create a dependency on the group that wouldn’t exist if they didn’t try to cooperate.
Hence, for a fair society to work people must have a right to disagree and a right to be convinced that putting some new data into the shared replacement dataset by e.g. adding a new rule or goal or taking some old data out will work toward the satisfaction of the shared parts of the motivation to cooperate, in particular that it will increase their personal ability to execute random searches. That also means that all members are always willing to be convinced, that they are not gullible and believe things without proof, but also not skeptical to the point where they reject things despite proof. Proof thereby isn’t what fits or fits not with the current personal reality. That’s exactly the point where we put us back into the Original Position and peel off all our preconceptions about what we believe about how cooperation should work.
A strong leader, per our definition today, is not a person who has the greatest skills convincing others. It is someone who might hear arguments but, in the end, decides unilaterally about changes in the dataset everyone else is then required to accept. Without convincing, this acceptance will be quickly withdrawn by the unconvinced – unless a strong-leader-based society implements mechanism that force acceptance. But that means such a society will never be truly free and equal.
Of course, not everyone can be convinced, nor should everyone give in. And then those of the willing must still be able to go on with their cooperation while the unconvinced must be able to go on with their life as well. How to handle this situation with the ideas of a fair society in mind is what I will talk about tomorrow.
Do you have any thoughts about what I said so far? 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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