The Failings of Modern Western Systems

 

Capitalism and democracy have brought us a very long way and been instrumental in rapid advances in technology and human rights and thus quality of life for many generations. They have brought us so far and yet I intent to argue that they are no longer fit for purpose. Society has outgrown and outpaced what they can do for us and we need better solutions for bigger problems now faced by people and humanity as a whole. 

Conceptually I am still big advocates of both capitalism and democracy and would seek to include strong components of both in any utopian design exercise. They are just not the be all and end all that society seems to treat them as being. We are blinkered by their historic success. We try and spread democracy like we did with religion in the middle ages as if it were doing people a huge favour, saving them from eternal damnation etc. That we presume our form of government so successful and fit for purpose is a little frightening. Capitalism and democracy are held in such esteem that making a case against them feels like it would be viewed in an almost treasonous light. 

What is needed is something more appropriate to handle a world were technological progress is extreme, a world where we are sufficient in numbers and power to affect the whole planet, and one where we are increasingly connected through trade, communication and the actions of others. These three significant factors  (our nominal power, rate of power gain, and interconnectedness) are the things that are putting strain on democracy and capitalism and exposing the weaknesses. As systems they demonstrably have flaws but there were no better alternatives and the flaws were minor in relation to the perks afforded. The perks of these systems are certainly still bigger overall from where I am sat but the flaws seem to be increasing in issue at an alarming rate. 

The only flaws in capitalism are that wealth has an aggregating tendency and that there is not direct alignment of the interests of people and that of profit. Luckily these are both easy fixes. We have taxes which are the perfect tool for wealth redistribution to counteract the aggregating properties of wealth. These taxes work double as they are also incentives to mitigate negative externalities from the pursuit of profit such as air pollution or unhealthy consumables. Sensible taxes on undesirable actions prevent a lot of them and can fund remedies for the remainder. Taxes can be directly applied in sustainable and fair means with the end of promoting the best advantage for society and should be the responsibility of the government to enact. A discussion about where society should be headed and what is the "best" are certainly important details to be clear on so that a suitable job can be done of things. Rather too big of a topic to branch into here though. 

The problems with democracy are more numerous and harder to fix. From them stems the lack of appropriate fixes to the ills of capitalism. If we were to simplify modern society and try and represent it as a board game then government are effectively the designers who right the rules. The aim of the game is ultimately up to the individual however capitalist society very much has money as the points system it uses to determine the winner. It is pretty obvious that a game is rigged when the writer of the rules is playing the game as well and changing the rules as the game is in progress! Big game producing companies don't let their employees enter into competitive events for this reason rather obviously but society lets it's leaders be very involved in the wealth game. This is a source of bias at best and corruption at worst and needs addressing much more than it already is if we want a government that is doing a proper job. 

The next issue with democracy is that it is very short term. Parties and individuals do things that get them re-elected rather than what is in the ultimate good of people and society. Mostly these things are aligned but not always. A lot of good things take a long time to take affect and thus confer little advantage to those in power at the time. Equally there are some bad things with long lasting negative effects that give short terms boosts that are all too common in democracies. The solutions to this issue have the effect of making it look less and less like democracy. They involve things like removing term limits and having the only options to remove people from positions of power as firings, resignations, or the old classic of death. You can also do it with fixing single terms with no re-election potential but then you also somewhat need to do away with party affiliation which seems like it might be a tricky extraction.

The final issue of democracy is the scope. You absolutely don't want just one governing body in charge of everything globally even if this would solve a lot of issues. It is for much the same reason you don't want monopolies operating in the economy. They stop working optimally and can stifle emerging competition that might force them back into serving people rather than themselves, or at least just being inefficient and stagnant. This means you want to have numerous governing bodies as we do in the modern world. This however concedes a lot of power, away from people and towards wealth. Governments have to bid for the wealth of the powerful, both companies and individuals, with favourable tax rates and business laws. Essentially this undermines the power we would like our governments to have and lets it reside more in companies than people, more in the few than the many. A large global wealth gap means wealth can exploit poorer nations, often in ways that ultimately come back to affect everyone, again such as polluting industrial practices. 

These three failings of democracy ensure that the flaws of capitalism are not properly tended to which in turn has the effect of making people subservient to profit. Modern society is a support network for companies more than it is for people. In a world with an ever shrinking need for workers this is a fairly scary prospect. There is a lot of anti establishment propaganda that suggests there are cabals of the wealthy sinisterly plotting against us. In practice it is just mis-built systems, the improper alignment of rules and the systems by which we write those rules that naturally makes it look that way. There is no big conspiracy, it can just appear like it from some angles because people are acting in accordance with the incentives. They are not in cahoots, they are just playing the same game. The system has always been imperfect but there is no impetus to change anything so long as things are improving, which they generally have been. There is especially no motive to change when there are no obvious alternatives that are better, nor when things are as good as they can be for those with the power to make real change. The issue is that there is little discussion about these problems. No real end game for people or nations in mind. Humanity is just sort of bumbling along fixated in the now which has historically been fine, if a little slow and meandering. Now it is more of a problem. Now our actions have significant impacts on the future not just socially or economically but on the whole planet. 

There are arguably some current social factors hastening the issues with democracy. These are far from self evident and more speculation on my part than anything else. We have information overload making things more about frequency and volume than they are about accuracy. You could also say that social media has promoted a purer kind of democracy where our political leaders are more representative of us as an averaged whole than they are the best of us, as you would want at the helm. There also seems to be an element of increasing political identity and tribalism. As religion declines in most democracies it feels as if politics is taking it's place in many ways. It is quite dangerous when ones identity is so heavily tied to anything ideological like that as it makes any attempts at compromise like personal attacks. None of these things really help democracy function. Ultimately you just want a really well educated society with a really boring governing body at the helm making informed, impartial choices to benefit the people and not those making the choices. 

Education is huge for a democracy to function well but it is also one of those really slow effects that doesn't do all that much to help those in power at the time. It seems as if we could really do with improving the utility of our education for modern life, certainly the education I was given aged 10-18 involved learning a lot of fairly useless stuff in time that could have been spent better preparing me for adult life and being a benefit to society. This is rather a topic for a different essay but it is an important point to note. Any nation touting for democracy should be supporting that argument with a top tier and up to date education program. Why do we have teenagers learning about Shakespeare, oxbow lakes and trigonometry? These are fairly niche specialized things that only those with interest should be learning. There are plenty more worldly useful topics we could use that time for that would help people in the real adult world that schools barely touch on such as mental health, political systems, efficient actions, critical thinking etc. Good education should be interesting and beneficial. Useful education needs to be at least one of those two things and yet there is time being wasted on teaching things that to many people are neither. 

Back to the main topic, this essay is just asking the question, what should an ideal form of government look like? We are assuming we can apply the simple fixes to capitalism if we can solve the governance problem so we only need to worry about that. It should have elements that ensure long term thinking is used. These come from removing biases from those making the choices. No need to worry about retention of power either so as to as tackle the potential issues with bias and short termism. Discretionary life appointments or fixed duration single terms are the obvious ways to do this (as I am talking about things like running the NHS, the chief of police etc rather than pure politicians we are largely already doing this). No financial gains to be made from choices made is the other big one. This mostly just means people in government shouldn't sit on company boards, have other jobs, have significant investments in any areas, and likely applied to immediate family too. This all gets rather sticky rather quickly. You cannot eliminate nepotism and so putting too much effort into doing so is foolish. Means by which you can help tone down nepotism without adverse costs seem good but not something to get overly hung up on.

I used to think implementing some kind of large jury style parliament backed up by a well run civil service and a referendum style democratic vote of approval system on new legislature was the way to improve things. A kind of purer democracy which took politicians and parties out of the mix. There are certainly some benefits to this idea but sadly I think it is likely more flawed than existing democracies. Experiences of the fall out of referendum politics and how they are quite divisive in society has made me wary of them. More than that it is the total lack of suitability of people to make informed choices. Politicians struggle and mostly seem to fail so what hope do less qualified people have? The world is incredibly complicated. To make good choices you need to be so well informed generally and be an experienced expert in the field relevant to the issues at hand. You then really want a bunch of people exactly like this to debate and discuss the issue and pool their opinions, all without personal bias on the subject. A consensus agreed by such a group has a reasonable chance of making good choices but only if it is an isolated matter, in reality nothing is isolated so you need to bring in more groups of experts to expand the discussion, make sure some fix isn't causing a bigger issue elsewhere. This is not what the public nor the government is, although at least the latter get to listen to such debates before they ignore the advice. What people want is absolutely one of the most important things to take into account when trying to run a country however handing over the reigns of power to the people is less than likely to result in that. We need a system that involves the people and removes bias, but it needs to also involve the best means to make optimal choices. We are probably out of luck even with Plato's philosopher kings as there is just too much to know and understand. They would mostly just have to be masters of delegation these days! 

I used to think that the wisdom of the crowd theory was enough justification for democracy to be the best solution. In practice it clearly can't be. In a guess the weight of a cow at the fair event your data would be meaningless if you had to submit your answer in an entirely unknown unit of weight. Wisdom of the crowd only works if people are informed and aware of the parameters. We know what a kilo is and can see the cow and can have a rough stab at how those things relate! That is far too simplistic of a comparison for it to apply to democracy. Rather than the average cancelling out noise as it should when people are making informed judgements you just get chaos as you do with the unknown unit of weight measure. For democracy to function in accordance with wisdom of the crowd you need very specific questions with expositions on expected outcomes for each possible vote. That or some other clever means of involving the people and giving them voice and power but not in a way that lets them steer you into a ditch or just running round in circles. Voting on preferred experts as executives is a good way to do this but it becomes more of a popularity contest than a proficiency one and moves you in the direction of party politics. 

What I now see as the best direction to go in as far as governance goes is a little bit more dissolved and certainly not at all mapped out. I think you ideally want to take certain elements as globally as possible while making other aspects small scale. Ripping the responsibility of governments in twain and sending them in opposite directions. Local councils would gain more power as would NGO style bodies. If you could have more and more nations on the one hand joining up to trade pacts, freedom of movement pacts, standards pacts, etc, and on the other hand dissolving power internally towards local governments it would allow for a transition towards a sensibly run world. Ultimately if we can create a kind of tax body which is independent of nations and governments then there is no place for companies to hide and exploit people. They cannot play regions off against each other and so profit can start to serve people again. This would need to be an opt in system which feels like it would then need to come with some significant incentives. 

To have any sort of system where you have independent bodies responsible for important areas of society you are going to need a checks and balances system with means of oversight. There needs to be a power cycle from people to local government to global bodies to courts and regulators. There would also seem the need for a funded news, facts, and information service that was a lot like that arm of the BBC. Much like education, you can't hope to usefully involve the people if they are not informed. With misinformation so rife there needs to be a reliable means of finding out facts. We have seed libraries, places where weights and measures and kept. It seems like we need one of these for truth. Sounds like a scary prospect trying to get a publicly funded truth department. Very dystopian in feel if not intent. It too would of course need to be overseen with checks and balances. 

We are doing most things correctly or nearly so. We have systems already like those that seem most suitable. The changes required are much more like bug fixes and updates than they are akin to revolution. While we are seemingly on track to eventually get there in terms of a utopian society that really does serve the people it is neither assured nor getting there fast enough for the problems at hand. We need global action as soon as possible as far as the environment goes. This could help kickstart a powerful NGO with a means to collate funds and redistribute them as a means to tackle climate change that could then morph into one capable of managing a (partial) global tax and wealth redistribution system. It wouldn't need to be the only system of taxation by any means, it would just need global reach. Local governments would likely still source most funding from their jurisdiction. Much as this is a bit tangential a route from where we are to where we want to be is essential. You can make plenty of utopian systems to rule over society but without a means to get there they are either outright failing or at best causing severe disruption, setbacks and tumult. Or we could just let it go to ruin and rebuild with the benefit of hindsight and the convenience of significantly reduced numbers to rebuild for... That would be an easier thing to do but it is going to be an unpleasant journey to the starting point. Really the task is simply to smooth out and coordinate power while reducing conflict. These are all quite tricky as people never wish to relinquish power and people naturally have tribal biases. This is a fight not just against systems of power but also human nature embedded within our ambivalent selfish genes. When put in those terms it does feel as if we have done pretty well to come as far as we have. 

The Case of Shamima Begum

I am no legal expert and cannot comment on any aspect of the case of Shamima Begum on that front. What I can do is comment from a moral perspective, or that of what it says about the state of our society. Shamima is not easy to like and I cannot say that I do. I have only seen a few clips of her being interviewed but she comes across poorly, as I am sure would most teenage girls, especially ones in her position. The thought of an interview of a teenage me being how I was judged is a pretty chilling prospect. Shamima has also made some very poor life choices. Being dislikeable and having allied herself with public enemy number one she has made herself quite easy to villainize. That being said, our governments attempts to wash their hands of her is utterly disgraceful and wrong on multiple levels. I don't think she should be given a free pass, I don't know the specifics of her actions, and thus a fitting punishment if required, but I do know she deserves a fair trail and that is our responsibility. She is our mess and if you make a mess you clear it up, that is pretty basic stuff. 

Now, lets us consider that she was 15, a minor, when she left the UK. We failed to protect a minor being groomed by a terrorist organization. We failed to stop them stealing our children and putting them to use in their quite awful cause. Then we had the gall to blame her and make her the bad guy. We are trying to punish a child victim as an adult perpetrator. We are doing so despite that not being how the law works by not letting her have her trail or become repatriated. We have failed this girl every step of the way and neither admitting this failing nor trying to make amends. We are likely going to continue to fail her simply in an attempt to avoid having to admit that we ever did in the first place.

While this is bad on a personal level for her and her family it is more concerning on a societal level. Imagine her name was Emily Watts and she was pretty, eloquent, and white. Would she have her citizenship revoked? Much as those responsible for this debacle would argue that they would but you know they wouldn't have. This hypothetical Emily could have dual nationality with somewhere else like Australia or Canada or other "people like us" countries and that wouldn't change things either. Sure, we would try Emily when we brought her back and she would do some jail time if deemed that she had acted criminally but we would never discard her. What we are essentially promoting here as a nation is a pretty clear racial bias where by people who look like like Shamima are not regarded as British regardless of the fact that she is 100% British. She has never visited Bangladesh. She speaks with a London accent. I don't care what you look like or what your name is, your accent betrays "where you are from". Shamima is a Londoner. All you do by trying to claim she isn't somehow is to disenfranchise all those British people who also look like her and reinforce an "us and them" bias in white British people who are predisposed to such things. 

Revoking Shamima's citizenship is a huge betrayal of individual justice while also being a massive betrayal of the British people as a whole, particularly those that have dark skin. It is a terrible example to set and really diminishes our ability as a nation to try and take the high moral ground. Not that anyone which much of an interest in history would be fooled into thinking we had that in the first place... What I find most distasteful about this whole thing is that there is relatively little in the way of outrage. This is the kind of thing that has long term implications and fall out. It is like when you drop bombs with too much disregard for civilians and then wonder why a generation later there are loads of easily radicalised young adults. These choices are imposing a rift on society that is of no merit and to no ones advantage. Rifts that can last for generations. The public seem like they either don't care all that much or actively support this choice and this re-enforces this rift. Obviously ours, and most other governments do loads of shady and immoral stuff, plenty of which results in loss or life or other injustices. What stands out about this act is that it is a very symbolic one with little in the way of benefits. It looks like a political stunt. Like, selling arms to even shadier nations is bad but you have to pay the bills somehow. You can see why arm deals happen and appreciate there are some perks involved. This case however has nothing but drawbacks and would be so easy to just not do. I guess at least it does showcase that governments act a lot more like they have your interests at heart than the reality. Even the favoured people are still third in line behind self interest and those with power and money. 

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?

Humanity's Worst Invention

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday. It occurred to me that hate was a somewhat unique attribute to humans. Significant parts of the emotional pallet are palpable in intelligent mammals but hatred and anger do not feature in the same way in the non-humans as they do with the humans. It is hard enough explaining ones own emotions so trying to explain how a dog or cat feels differently will not be a seamless process!

The widest gap between humans and other mammals is of course languange. This allows us to create a much more real mental construct for past and future. Most mammals have a "two dimensional" emotional pallet where all the shades are rooted in the present. Humans manage to have warped their emotions over a three dimensional canvass where by things can be past, present or future. While you may get nervous dogs as much as you do nervous people you will not find a dog worrying in the absence of a thing to worry about. A dog will learn not to walk in front of a car as a result of its memory from previously getting run over and loosing a leg. It will not however spend its days regretting getting run over in the first place or indeed worrying about the next car that is going to hit it. Dogs are aware of past and present, cause and effect but they do not house their emotions. Emotions relating to experiences with cars are almost entirely confined to situations containing cars in this example. The dog does not carry those things with it in quite the same way people are inclined too.

Fight or flight is a practical survival mechanism when faced with danger. The issue is that past and future dangers still elicit bastardizations of fight or flight emotions in humans. You can't run from something that has happened, nor can you fight it. All their is to do is accept it and learn from it but that is not often how humans behave as a result of past fight or flight moments. I think that it is the structuring of time aspects within our emotional range that has resulted in hate and anger being such significant emotions in the human range.

Anger and hate are not practical or useful emotions. They are a damaging side product of an emotional construct that hasn't caught up with our intellectual capacities (or indeed our modern way of life). I have always felt like emotions where a blend of things, like mixing paint. You have your general positive paints and your negative ones. Then you have your personal paints that relate to feelings about yourself and ones that relate outwards to things, other people and so forth. Mix a positive paint with another persons paint and you have affection, mix the positive paint with your own and you have pride. There is another set of shades/tints or whatever you want to consider them as in your own analogous understanding of things. That is more the context of the thing or being. Each different mix results in a new colour of emotion. While humans many have the broadest range of possible emotional colours they can mix it seems as if many of them are redundant or even counterproductive. Their are shades and gaps on our large three dimensional canvass that have no productive value but none the less need filling in.

The purpose of emotions from an evolutionary perspective is simply a way of quickly aiding an animal in decision making. For simple creatures with simple lives it is a pretty good system. It allows creatures with fairly little understanding of their environment or the mechanisms by which things work to function very effectively within those systems. Humans have broken out of this blissful bubble of ignorance enjoyed by the rest of the living world. We shouldn't need emotion to guide us in our day to day as we understand how things function. We can plan, organize and arrange things. We can consider potential different outcomes and prevent bad ones occurring. While all this extra knowledge of our environment is fantastic for technology and science it poses problems for our poor sensibilities!

When we come across something we dislike in the world we generate the fight or flight emotional paint mixer. When that thing is far away in time or space there is no action to be taken. You are left with this nasty shade of hate that directs you to act but has no proper outlet. As such it lingers, like a heavy metal trapped in the body. There are lots of people out there who are building up unhealthy levels of hate for which there is no proper outlet or useful way to enact.

If you mistreat and beat a dog it will dislike you. Depending on the dog in question it will either cower in fear when it thinks it sees you or it will try and attack you. What the dog will not do is brood on that fear and grow it out of proportion. It will not machinate in the absence of your presence ways to hurt you back or eradicate your potential threat. Revenge is entirely a human trait. It is something we like to think of as an outlet for our buildup of hate. Animals don't do revenge because it is a completely stupid endeavor. It is a risk and a waste of time and resources. If animals bothered with revenge they would not fare so well in the big game of evolution!

I think there is this misconception that evolution is perfect and that emotions are a pure and righteous natural response to things. People don't perceive hate and anger as pernicious problems as they imagine we have them for a good reason. I propose the reason we have such things is the evolutionary equivalent of growing pains. When your bones grow too fast for your tendons and they hurt! Our intelligence has outpaced our emotions and as a species we are hurting. Anger and hate are the toxic appendix we could really do with finding a good way to remove. By all means, dislike something. Have preferences and opinions. Just don't let those things turn into anger and hate. Fantastic advice in theory but all too akin to me suggesting you simply stop some other natural bodily function like digestion.

Normally I like to propose solutions when I highlight problems. I am not exactly sure what a sensible solution is for this one. Evolution won't now fix it for us so we can't just wait and hope it will solve itself. I am not sure that a medical, genetic or technological solution is a good idea either. It sounds like it would touch on some serious moral issues and would likely have some scary unpredicted side effects at least in the development stage. Probably the best route to easing the tensions caused by hate and anger in society is cultural change. If people are made more aware of the issue and if the viewpoint shifted from emotions all being pure and natural then it would certainly be a big step in the right direction.

Evolutionary Selective Breeding

I have a theory regarding evolution. It makes some sense logically but as ever I only have anecdotal evidence and have no plan to obtain any scientific evidence on the matter. My first premise is that members within a species, or a not insignificant proportion of those members, have a predisposition to being attracted to similar features to those they have themselves. While I have seen this plenty enough with people it was actually the occurrence of it in dogs that was the real tip off. Cultural effects could very easily be the driving force in humans pairing off but that seems like it would be a much weaker force in dogs. When out and about with a pack of assorted dogs and we come across another dog it is always those closest in breeds to it that get most excited. The Labradors want to get frisky with the other Labs, the Terriers prefer the Terriers and so on and so forth. It is clearly just a trend as well, it is like a filter that applies to a more abstract notion of attractiveness. There are lots of big handsome dogs that all the bitches have the eye for regardless of their breed. The overall attractiveness of a dog is modified by the closeness in breed to the bitch evaluating him. A medium looking Lab looks better to another Lab on average than it does to a Schnauzer. They say there is no accounting for taste however I propose that there is some accounting for taste, certainly statistically when it comes to what we find attractive.

They say opposites attract, that is also true to a degree but I don't think it is the predominant factor. For one, differences stand out more than similarities in a pair. Couples are more alike than they are different although the areas in which they are different typically are very polar. These polar attributes in human couples are more to do with character and skills than they are with looks but there are some trends there too. Now, this is all conjecture but it would make good evolutionary sense in the way that good science involves controls. If you are predisposed to traits that are either similar or opposite in regards finding a mate and producing offspring then that will have the best and quickest results overall for your species. You still get good genetic variation by encouraging both opposite and like attributes however you focus your results so to speak. A bad trait will become more localized and have more chance of failing to reproduce in further generations, it will be removed from the gene pool more rapidly. Equally a good trait will be adopted more rapidly. If you purely mix genetic material at random evolution will be slow. If you are able to focus on a mix of more of the same genetic material with fewer yet more extreme differences then your species will evolve quicker and more suitably. It is like selective breeding but done with sensible logic and maths as nature loves to do rather than by design as we humans understand and practice it.

That is basically it, a theory on how we select mates based on how it would best advance the evolution of a species on the whole. I assume this occurs quite a long way down the tree of life among species that reproduce sexually. So this is good for evolution in the wilds of nature but what does it mean for humans?

The spread of human traits should be increasing and it seems like it is. Humans are the second (first? pretty sure dogs is first) most diverse species on the planet. With dogs it is down to the selective breeding we have imposed on them. With humans it is for a different reason. Our technology and society is the main thing aiding us in our capacity to survive. Being short or tall, fat or thin, stupid or smart, now has very little baring on your ability to reproduce compared to really any point in our history, it being increasingly important the further you go back in time. Most health issues now affect people later in life. Without nature ruthlessly plucking off any imperfect design humanity has become incredibly diverse. Technology has given the design space of humans a lot of wiggle room. Our predisposition towards mates with some significant number of similar physical attributes combined with this large wiggle room has lead to a very diverse species in what seems like a pretty short space of time on the evolutionary time scale. There are both pros and cons to an increasingly diverse population and discussion of that seems like like it would be best left for another time.

Philosopher Kings

I consider Plato's Republic to be a cornerstone of right wing thought. Despite considering myself a lefty I have never disagreed with his assertion that the Philosopher King is the optimal form of rule when you have it. I also entirely agree with him that it is not sustainable nor is it something you can aim for, it is just luck when you get one and that luck will assuredly run out. This is why I have always favoured democracy, a less optimal but more consistent and entirely sustainable method of governance.

To this end I have always been an advocated of John Stuart Mill's approach towards liberty and society. For democracy to work you need to trust in the good judgement of people. John Stuart Mill is a man who advocates liberty and education as a means towards ensuring people can make good judgement.  I had chosen to believe him as his ideas fit with mine regarding a social view and therefore a way of maximising the effectiveness of democracy.

What I have recently realized is that there is every chance that John Stuart Mill was just a Philosopher King himself, it was he who made his people great and not so much the environments he created. It is impossible to say which is which or even really separate those two things however it does serve as an ominous reminder that my political beliefs are potentially misguided.

If Plato is right and the only way to have the people of John Stuart Mill is by having an actual John Stuart Mill in the first place then right wing politics are probably more on the money than the left in a theoretical sense. This is sad, it means society works best when people are told what to do, when they are given less choice and less freedom when it comes to running things.

I have always been a strong supporter of referendum votes. Single issues are much clearer and purer than voting for people or parties and their complete set of opinions and stances on all matters. Recent events with the British EU referendum vote has completely shaken this view I once held. I felt entirely unqualified to hold an opinion on the matter and would much rather an executive had been in charge of the outcome.

Further to this I found the single issue to be incredibly divisive. The country seems incredibly split with far too much vitriol held for the other side. Given that I had no factual basis to cast my vote upon I used social premises to guide me. The status quo was fine as far as I could and voting to leave a union is never going to have the effect of increasing your foreign relations. As such I was part of the remain camp. I am not angry to have lost, I am sad about it but far from devastated. This is the only public comment I have made on the matter thus far.

Change and upheaval can be very good things for society, leaving the EU might have been the right thing to do in lots of ways. I didn't know before and I still don't now. We are where we are and so all there is to do is make the best of things going forward. Getting angry at those who got us here will only make things worse.

The significant aspect to me of all these recent events is how it has shaken up my belief system and not at all the potential economic ramifications. A little like losing ones faith. I thought I knew where I stood politically and now I have far less idea. I was a left wing democrat, now I am just confused. It is perhaps back to the drawing board for a Utopian form of governance. Referendums seem fair but is fairness worth all the conflict that comes with it?

The issue might not be with referendums and democracy as such and could be to do with the present difficulty in establishing truths and facts within current society. There is so much information, so many voices and such short attention spans that truth is often just the group shouting the loudest. I have a lot of rethinking to do and society has a lot of rebuilding to do but none of that has to be a bad thing. Questioning things, especially those you thought you knew, is a healthy way to go about things.

For now the main thing I can take from this is that I am far more likely to cast my votes towards potential Philosopher Kings and far less towards political ideals. I can also fairly comfortably state that none of the prospective replacements for David Cameron we have give even the slightest wiff of the complete Plato package. Can we just have a referendum to put David Attenborough or perhaps Steven Fry in charge for a bit?

Google Truth

There is no such thing is bad publicity is far too simple a statement to be accurate. There are reasonable sentiments behind it that apply in certain situations at least. It may well be good for promoting a circus act but BP and Volkswagen I am sure feel differently about negative press. I want to look at how the internet is affecting information, perception and publicity. Broadly my conclusions are that, although it is still far from a unanimous fact, bad publicity is seeming to have some more notable positive effects in certain areas. I also am beginning to wonder about the notion of truth and how that seems to be changing.

The internet is fantastic, it is the mos significant human advance since the printing press and is still in its infancy. It is an exciting time to be alive.While there is still much more positive change to come as a result of the internet there are issues with any new technology. We take a while to adapt, to learn what is acceptable and what is not. We need to adjust as a species and work out new etiquette surrounding our new technological capabilities.

I am reluctant to bring my tastes and opinions into evidence but I have no other recourse to explain myself on these observations. Without wishing to name and shame I will simply say that a larger number of the top artists, performers and "celebrities" of the day seem to be quite unpleasant people than in previous decades. Extreme to the point of being interesting but not at all good examples of people. There seems this morbid interest in what horrific thing some of these people will do next and so they generate quite a lot of extra media interest. I am shocked to find such people with some of the highest followings on Twitter and other such social media outlets. Dim as my view is of humanity I can still only conclude that at least half of the followers of such characters are simply doing it for the same reasons one cannot avoid looking at a road accident as they pass by.

We measured things like popularity on sales prior to the internet. For record companies I am sure this is still the driving force behind most of their choices however the rest of us seem to now measure popularity based on internet traffic. The more internet traffic you get the more you are being advertised for free and the more you have data to support your popularity. It is one of those works both ways thing. You can be good and so people will hear about you or you can have people just hear about you and assume you are good. Either way you will end up with some sales. Twenty years ago there was a lot more success based on merit and far less based on appearances and character.

Put another way, you might hate a lot of the music being produced at present. You might hate the people doing it and watch their moves so as to relish in their falls, If this describes you then you are part of the reason these characters exist. We now have two types of celebrities, those we love for who they are and what they do and that are examples of how to be a good person. Then we have the anti celebrities which serve as a reminder of how not to be and what the troubles are with society.

There is a new currency in town, we used to have just money and votes and between those two things most political power was found. Now we also have hits, little votes we make all the time telling the web what we want to see and do.

This concept of the political power of internet hits leads to the concept I call Google Truth. It doesn't really have anything much to do with Google but I couldn't find a better word to summarise the mechanism at work and so I stuck with it. The way Google Translate works was explained to me as something that looks at as many copies of the same text in the two languages in question as possible and simply takes the most common translation as the right one. It was a breakthrough in automatic translation software and was only possible with vast amounts of data. I am sure search engines work similarly and use records of other peoples searches and most common hits to provide results for new searches.

Twenty years ago if I wanted to know something I would look in a text book or an encyclopedia. Now I ask Google, often it points me towards Wikipedia. Although it took a lot longer to find information before the internet I only needed to find it once. Now I find I am much more wary of the information I get. I will find several sources and compare them or I will go to places I can place in a known context of trust. When I know a little about a subject I am looking at I am a lot more aware of who I can ask, which sites are reliable and so forth. Finding out that kind of information is easy and feels reliable. When I am treading new waters am have no idea where to look or who has credible opinions and knowledge I am clueless and find the internet far less helpful. Yes, there is lots and lots of information but without context or sufficient other relevant information I find it to be less use than before in a lot of ways.

There are areas in which the internet seems to be a shouting contest rather than a vast encyclopedia. If  you are looking for information supporting anti-vaccination it is out there regardless of the truth of what a terrible idea it is to not get vaccinated. The more anti-vax content there is on the internet and the more people looking at it the more it will increase its online credibility all regardless of the facts.

The internet feels like it has the capacity to spread misinformation. It can reinforce your biases and opinions with no need of evidence to support doing so. This is the basis for the concept of Google Truth, it says that the position with the most hits is the truth and that is not necessarily the actual truth. It is good in that it forces me to analyse the information I find rather than accepting it as fact as I did last century.

Leaders have been creating false truths to propagate in society for centuries, this is nothing new. The change is that the mechanisms driving the internet mean that it is a naturally evolving thing rather than a specific planned thing. You don't need money or votes to affect the truth now, we all just slightly affect the various truths found online in our day to day browsing. Some naturally evolving things are good, the economy, evolution! My hope is that the actual truth has a survival advantage over a false Google Truth as it were in an evolutionary analogy. As such over time the truth will out as they say. Given the similarities with evolving systems it implies that there are environmental niches where false Google Truths will flourish. While we can assume the truth will out it will be a slow undulating process.

If misinformation online is a problem going forwards then perhaps there will become some accrediting body that certifies sites for accuracy. Like the BRC or ISO9001 so that consumers of the sites information could revert to those encyclopedia years and assume some accuracy of fact in what they are reading. Not mandatory but sufficiently recognized that the majority of sites became accredited.

If we learn to think about what we read then Google Truth's will not be a problem. If we just accept what we read then we will have lots the blind leading the blind. A couple of decades is not nearly long enough to assess the outcome of the internet at all, especially given the many variable associated with something in its infancy. It does seem like cultural progress is speeding up which again implies good sense is winning out over false Google Truths. It also seems like there is a lot more noise coming from sections of society with quite shocking and antiquated views. Broadly I think this is an indication of the potency of the internet in being able to magnify everything opinion and information based and not an indication that antiquated views are on the increase as a result of Google Truths.