Human Subservience to Emergence

Humans like to think of ourselves as the dominant species on the planet. While this is broadly true it is rather missing the point as species are not the only players in the game. If we actually look at where all the power and wealth is located we start to see a different picture forming. By far and away it is companies and governments which have the wealth and power. They are the entities which dictate how our lives are lived and the direction we are heading in as a species. This is not obvious at all however if you take the view that both companies and governments are controlled by people. It may focus the lens as to where power resides within humanity but it does at least keep it in house. If you start to consider companies and governments as emergent properties of society then you can take the view that humanity has already become a subservient species. A scary irony for all those who fear robotics and artificial intelligence will enslave us - it has already happened with with far simpler creations.

How is it then you ask that a company or a government acts independently from humanity despite being controlled by people? This is a bit of a semantics fudge as clearly neither are independent of the other. What I mean is to do with who's interests are being served by the actions of companies and governments and by those of people. It should be the case that companies and governments serve people and improve their lives however it increasingly seems to be the case that these institutions take more than they give and are primarily self serving.

This emergent property of seemingly inanimate institutions working in their own interests is the result of a few things coming together. Firstly it is to do with success in business or on politics as having little or nothing to do with the overall net good they afford to humanity. Obviously they need to bring some good to some people else they would cease to be viable but they only need to bring that good to some people. Just so long as some people, the "right" people, are better off it doesn't really matter who is worse off. Governments mostly only need to care about their citizens and only if they are liable to revolt or have the capacity to vote. Businesses only care about people with money and only in places in which they operate. Essentially business is just playing one game which is about market share and profitability and governments are playing a different game of simply trying to retain power. These are both linked to serving people in that gaining market share and profitability are generally the result of providing a desirable service or product better than anyone else in the world of business. Retaining power as an elected government requires that they too do enough for the people they govern to seem like the best option.

Ideally these institutions would exclusively work to serve humanity and make things better but there is no mechanism to power such wishful thinking. Competition between companies and political parties is needed to keep them streamlined and functional but it leads to their primary objectives only having partial links to the purpose they are intended for. This is essentially the inverse problem of communism. That ideology set out to make serving people the primary objective and failed because it had no impetus to make it work. Either you wind up with self serving capitalist institutions or stagnating incompetent communist ones. Capitalism and democracy clearly won the first debate in terms of economic and technological progress which in turn seems to afford be best quality of life and freedoms for individuals but there is more at stake. In round two we now have planetary issues like climate change to which capitalist and democratic countries are seemingly quite poorly equipped to handle. We also have serious social issues brought about by huge wealth gaps within societies and this is just scratching the surface as to the failings of the democratic capitalist systems. We in the west seem to think round one was all there was to it and that capitalism as it stands is the optimal or only options, neither of which are true. Pure communist setups do not do well and are clearly not a solution but it is increasingly apparent capitalism and democracy are also failing us on so many fronts.

The next important factor in the emergent properties of companies and businesses is that the individuals helping to run these institutions are well aware of these rules of the game and that people are self interested. People have ambitions, they have bills to be paid and all that sort of thing. When you work for a company or for a political party your actions are broadly going to be those that are most inline with the objectives of your employer. Lots of individuals, most of which will have decent morality and low levels of power come together to operate under one umbrella that collectively has vastly more power and easily facilitates the degradation of a moral code. Trying to do the right thing for humanity, be that sustainable practices, appropriate treatment of employees, people in other countries, people not buying your goods or voting for you, and all that sort of thing will often not be the best thing for your institution. Either you exploit some people somewhere and benefit from that or you don't do that and some other less scrupulous entity does so instead and puts your institution out of action or at least reduces the power it wields. So often the situation is either do the wrong thing to remain in a position to be able to do the right thing. This obviously just means whoever is on top should be doing the "wrong" things when it is in their best interests.

People have always been self interested and throughout history have exploited each other for their personal gain. This aspect of humanity has helped to mask the fact that we have now outsourced a lot of this exploitation to companies and governments. I don't know if that is good because it is inevitable and at least this way we bear less of the burden for our poor actions or bad because it is obviously bad! Sadly the former is only a relative good if it is inevitable and has no superior alternative which certainly isn't impossible.

In theory we only need to solve the issue as it stands for governments as if they were established in a way that they did act purely in the best interests of humanity they would legislate such that companies do so as well. The issue with that is that we would need somewhat of a consensus on the matter from governments around the world. If only a few governments are forcing companies to be socially and environmentally responsible then those that are able will simply base themselves elsewhere. Governments have to compete with each other for the affections of companies. The can do this in positive ways like providing good infrastructure, stable and safe social climates, well educated work forces and so forth but these are costly and slow. They can do so in more neutral ways with tax incentives and relief. Or they can turn a blind eye to dubious practices ranging from exploitative pay and working conditions to lack of regulation on waste and so forth. All these dubious things reduce company overheads and thus increase profitability which is a win for them. The government gets increased cash flow, tax revenue and employment opportunities which is a win for them too. It is the people who lose out both in and out of the hypothetical country in question. Those in the country may suffer low life expectancy and poverty due to low safety, polluted environment and low wages. Those outside lose employment opportunities and ultimately have to share the same planet we are collectively spoiling even if it is further from the source so to speak. If we do manage to find a solution to governments operating as they do, and sadly necessarily must, we need to do find away to implement it globally which just seems like wishful thinking.

The only real thing I can see towards making progress in the right direction is a reduction in nationalist ideals. Most countries try and generate national pride and very understandably. It is hard to ask people to go to war for you and pay taxes and things when people have no love for their country. It is shunned as unpatriotic in most places, even bordering on treasonous to not support ones own country blindly and in all ways. We chose which club football team we support and sure, a lot of the time it is the one most local to us, but not always. We do not tend to chose what country we support, it is chosen for us. It isn't even really a question that we could support other nations even in something as simple as a sports event, posing it as such sounds odd. There is nothing wrong with having pride in ones own country either. We are bound to like the things we grew up with, the traditions that we are used to. We will always identify more closely to those that have shared experiences which fall a lot in line with culture. There is however a big difference between a country and a government. A country is so much more, it is primarily the people but it is also the traditions, the laws, the history, the geography and so on. The government is just the institution presently steering the ship. At school we are taught about the great things our country does but very rarely the bad things. We are also given the impression that disloyalty to a government is the same thing as disloyalty to the nation. This is the kind of thing that should change. The world is made small by technology and we are much more like one big nation in so many ways. The problem is the rivalries between countries leads to huge waste, inefficiency and opportunities for companies and governments to make things worse for everyone not better. We need to start thinking of how to make things better for everyone and not just our customers or countrymen. And by all means, put more effort into those close to you, be it family, the local community, or the nation, just make sure it doesn't come at the expense of anyone else.

I don't really see a way to avoid companies and governments having differing agendas from individuals. There needs to be a driving force for them to work and that is all there is to it fundamentally. Nor do I really see a way in which those people working in those institutions will be able to get away with putting the greater good over that of the institution when that is an option. All is not without hope however as I can certainly see a world where public pressure and well thought out laws and social systems mitigate or minimize any adverse side effects from these differing agendas. Essentially I think we can get to a place where the option to not act in the greater good is less an less viable for the institutions. Public pressure is certainly the starting point. In terms of climate change we could leave it upto economics to solve it but that will be too late for those without sway in the markets. This includes most poor people as well as many non-people things. Luckily public opinion is changing and it is driving change in practices and legislation. That is why I think a step away from nationalism would play a big part in getting public opinion focused on goals that are for the overall net good. This is not really a solution to the problem, more just a way of moving in a potentially more positive direction. The emergent properties of companies and governments controlling things are not even really the problem, it is how we let them do so. We want them doing the job they do, we want them steering the ship, we just want them doing it on our behalf rather than theirs. You could even look at it in a completely different light, that humans are so impressive that we have come together to create entities even greater than ourselves. Life an emergent property of chemistry, evolution an emergent property of life, consciousness an emergent property of evolution, society an emergent property of consciousness, and now companies and governments an emergent property of society. Where next? Are we just a step in the progress towards something greater in the crazy world of emergent properties or have we just let our tools get a little out of control?