My Autism

I have autism and I am uncomfortable talking about it but it is for all the reasons you might not expect. A part of my reticence to divulge that I am autistic is because the term is very broad in meaning and not well understood biologically or socially. When I tell someone I am autistic they do not know what that means about me nor do they know what response I expect of them in return for my revelation.

The other part of my discomfort with the subject is that I feel like a fraud. While cultural perception is changing the view is still largely that autism is a disability. This is not an unfair view to have as for many that is exactly what autism is, however there are the lucky few to whom autism is a gift. I count myself among the lucky ones and feel as if I am being disrespectful to those who struggle with autism when I say that I have it also. It is confusing for others as well when they see people requiring life long care due to autism and then are confronted with someone like me using the same descriptive term to describe themselves and so I don't often bother.

Better terminology would be a great help in this matter. I have tried using phrases like “a little bit autistic”, “high functioning autistic”, or “on the spectrum” to better describe my condition but these feel just as ambiguous as well as attention seeking and pompous, and so I gave up trying. Mostly now my friends and family will break the news to any new person on my behalf which saves me the awkwardness. Usually however they are doing so in an attempt to calm down some social faux pas I have made! “Oh, don't mind Nick, he isn't being an arsehole, he is actually autistic.” Once you know me a little bit it is much easier to put the term “autistic” in an appropriate context and not have it either be meaningless or misleading as it is when you have no knowledge of my character.

I only discovered I had autism in my early twenties (about ten years ago) and have not since bothered to get diagnosed, both of which facts exacerbate my feelings of being a fraudulent autistic person. A diagnosis is only needed if you wish to get care, indeed the fact that I don't need any care means I wouldn't get a clinical diagnosis. This is all well and good, I don't need care and so not being able to get a diagnosis so as to obtain care implies that the system is working as intended. The problem is that while I don't require any care I do require understanding. By having the system not really recognize those who don't need any care they perpetuate the social perception that autism is exclusively a disability.

As the general aim seems to be getting autistic people out of care and into society it seems a little odd that most of the studies into autism overlook those who have managed to avoid needing care themselves. I have been very lucky in a number of ways, all of which have greatly helped me to get along in society. I can easily imagine that by changing the conditions of my life very little and nothing about my autism at all that I could have wound up being a far greater burden on society. I hope that by writing my experiences of growing up with autism and finding my place in the world I might help those without autism to understand it a little better and those with autism to perhaps find some idea as to how they might cope better.

I am overly confident, indeed arrogant in many ways. So much so that a teacher told my parents this at a parents evening when I was about eight. They didn't like her or care very much but did relay the message to me none the less. I was oblivious to my arrogance or its affect on others at that time. I really benefit from being told things, they are not obvious to me. I knew that arrogance was not socially acceptable but couldn't make the link to my behaviour. Once pointed out that I was arrogant I could observe that trend in myself and rein it in. I am no less arrogant now that I was then but I have learned how to filter it out or counter it with humility in the few things I don't still think I am amazing at. This is typically how I have learned to fit in with others, by someone eventually disliking me enough to honestly point out my flaws so that I can realise them and address them.

I spoke of filtering things out, this is something I think neuro-typical people do automatically. My filter is manually operated and requires a lot of effort to work, not to mention a lot of mental engineering over the years to craft it. I find that now meeting new people or formal social affairs very draining as those are the occasions I am operating my filter at full. When I am relaxed around people I know and am comfortable with my filter is off and I speak my mind. I am very good with animals and attribute a large part of that to having the default state of no mental filter. I find both animals and people trust me readily and again I attribute this to being able to operate while fully expressing what is one the inside.

The day that I learned I was arrogant was the day that I started to build my filter. I was only really aware I had been doing this when I learned that I was autistic and therefore probably not alike to other people in how I saw the world. I figured everyone consciously had to work at not saying something offensive or inappropriate. It is like having to check down a list of things in your memory every time you use a new word or phrase in a situation. I am fully aware that I can come across as very stupid if I am caught off guard by a question or comment. If I have no past experience of how to respond to something that I can draw from, or even if I'm not very mentally astute due to something like just having woken up and thus am unable to recall those experiences I have had that would help then I can flounder for words and appear to shut down.

My filter is greatly refined compared to how it was by the time I discovered I had autism. My better understanding of myself has aided me in being able to compensate and improve my filter however it is the help of others, mainly my partner, in informing me of the way they perceive things and me that has helped. Essentially the most helpful thing in my being able to get along in society was having someone by my side to tell me not only when I am being an arsehole, but also why and their “normal” perspective on my actions.

Socially I am still rather clumsy and the further you go back in time the worse I get at an increasing pace. Oddly my arrogance to the rescue again as it provided an unusual defence mechanism for my poor social skills. I was quite able to loudly take control of a social situation and become the centre of attention. This is a trait I very much acquired from my mother. The trick is that by controlling the whole situation you never have to interact with anyone. If you are disrupting the whole class by putting on a clown show or playing up you become an actor or entertainer to be watched. It gives the appearance of interaction but is devoid of any complex things that I didn't understand or required too much effort to master. As soon as dealing with other people become too much I was off doing something unorthodox or radical taking the attention away from me and onto my actions. I fall back into this habit quite readily when drunk but otherwise tend to take a more recluse approach to not having enough energy to deal with a social situation these days.

At school I was not popular, the unusual things I did, coupled with repugnant arrogance, awkward social skills and an alarming tendency to speak my mind even when I thought little of things all contributing to my popularity. To say I was bullied would be misleading, being fairly big and growing up in a fairly nice area meant there was basically nothing physical that came my way I can recall. There was plenty of verbal abuse and exclusion however this was something most kids get at some stage and something I thought I largely brought on myself, even at the time. I gave as good as I got and the difference was I sincerely believed what I was saying which tended to give it more weight. I vividly recall getting some grief from my peers and the teacher for replying to one of the less intelligent people who was calling me a boffin that I would rather that than be thick like him. I was surprised at the condemning response of everyone else, I thought I had replied in kind and was being as fair as one can be in an insult slinging contest. It was experiences like this where people actually informed me of when my actions are unacceptable that gave me a reference frame or check-list of how to go about acting in future.

The abuse I got made me fairly thick skinned but it rarely bothered me that much. The other kids didn't like me very much but then I didn't like them very much so that all felt good and reasonable. I have always been perfectly happy entertaining myself and in my own company with just my thoughts. I didn't really form any proper friendships until I was about 13 or 14 with anyone my own age. There were a few older kids who I found fascinating that I hung around with but at school in my own year I didn't have friends as I would define it. I found I naturally ended up with whoever the next least desirable person in the room was and sort of out of expectation I would find myself doing things one does at school with them. These relationships were volatile, there was little understanding between us and I am sure I was very mean to many of those people I spent time with in my earlier school years. I think I attracted other outcast types at school because I seemed to revel in the abuse, if I was with someone else then I would be getting the abuse and who ever I was with was getting respite. Another fantastic irony that my greatly dislikeable nature made me attractive to certain kinds of people. Even when I started to get what were more ordinary friendships I still got loads of abuse from other kids. I likely brought it on myself more as I felt more secure in having real friends. What I didn't realize so clearly was that people didn't always see things like me, I assumed my friends felt like me and I was generally surprised to find them unimpressed with me giving abuse to people they were friendly with. This mostly caused problems in group situations, which I still struggle with to this day. One on one I can interact fairly well with people but in a group, particularly one with unfamiliar people I am inexperienced and prone to doing awkward things.

As well as older children I found I got on well with girls when I was younger and had more kindly relationships with them. Girls mature faster and although I was very immature I was drawn to the mature. I also think that girls are less mean to boys than boys are to boys which meant that there was less often abuse to start escalating and reciprocating. I attribute a large part of being able to form friendships with my peers to having shared interests. Before I had any real interests of my own I was only drawn to people who I found interesting and this was typically the different, the mature and the experienced. It was not until I had my own interests in things that I had any common ground to interact with people and it was not until I was old enough to be afforded enough independence that I could really acquire my own interests.

Interests are hugely important to me even now as a mechanism to interact with people. I can talk to complete strangers about some topics indefinitely however I struggle with small talk and basic interactions with people I know well. I am a massive gamer, I always have been and probably always will be. Games have rules and are highly specific. I can easily describe, discuss, analogize, break down and explain things like games. This gives me a firm bedrock by which to interact with people who share an interest in one of these kinds of thing. Science is another example of an interest I have that I have little difficulty using as a tool for discourse.

My first proper equal friend was also a gamer and a scientist. I learned from him that your interests converge on a focus when you have someone to share and expand on them with. Broadly we both just liked games but because we were friends and played them together we wound up liking and playing a lot of the same games. This further helps interaction as you will be more likely to share more interests with more other people via this sharing and focusing process. Also as you age more and learn more about the world while gaining ever more independence you gain access to greater pools of people who share your more obscure interests.

The main game in my life has been the trading card game Magic the Gathering, or as large portions of my peers would call it “Tragic, the Saddening”, some jokingly, others more seriously. It was one of my older friends that first showed it to me and at first it was just a game much like any other. Unlike the others however I discovered a somewhat small and underground community of players. Basically none of my school peers played Magic and so I had these two separate worlds. Of these worlds the Magic one had some strong appeals and I would periodically plunge myself into it when the other was not so pleasing.

The Magic community is more like a weird family unit than a group of peers. It has a range of ages and people look out for each other and support each other. The local games shop people will all lend each other cards and organize a car pool to go to tournaments. The older people will look out for the younger ones, the experienced players will mentor the newer ones. It is not all happy families but it is far more noticeably a community than anything school or working life ever offered. The main thing about the Magic community is that they all speak Magic and are interested in Magic. This meant I could go to a huge social even full of loads of strangers yet have no anxiety about the required social interactions. I could go to new places and meet new people with guaranteed common interests and I could do so relaxed and as myself. I did not have to act up or become the centre of attention to avoid interaction. I did not need to go over in my head every possible iteration of events that could transpire over the day non-stop beforehand because I knew I would be able to wing it so to speak. Because of the older maturer elements of the community I would frequently be told how to act better rather than simply being ostracised by the group. It so many ways Magic has helped me find my feet in the world. I still tend to relate real life situations to potential in game Magic situations simply because I understand things so much more clearly in those pure logic terms.

Gradually through a process of trial and error as well as seriously taking on board any genuine criticisms of my person from others combined with a diversifying range of types of social interaction I became a more socially acceptable person. By about sixteen I was starting to get a little interest from the ladies and by about eighteen I had managed to stop rubbing people up the wrong way as a matter of course should we not have much in common. I was fairly reasonable in one on one situations from quite young but had been so bad in groups that I was politically very toxic to be attracted to or be friends with. I often felt let down or betrayed by people I liked when they wouldn't back me up in my disputes with others. This was my fault for failing to realize my own confidence in conflict and comfort in being disliked by others was a not something many people shared. I am not sure if it is a result of receiving much hatred and abuse over the years or part of the autism that has made me not care what people think of me if I don't like or respect them. If I actively dislike someone it seems logical to me that their dislike of you is a complement of sorts.

So at eighteen off I went to university because that is what all the people my age that I knew were doing. Armed with my new ability to not offend and given a clean sheet in regards what people thought about me after having gone to school with me for the past twelve years I was fairly adept at making new friends. What I soon discovered was that most of these friends were just so because of civility and circumstance. All we had in common was age and location and for a short while this is enough. I had fun, I learned about people and things and places and I made and lost a lot of friends. None of them were painful or sudden loses but gradual drifting out of each others lives. Shared interests are important in a friendship as they offer activities to pass the time together after all that is to be said at that time has been said. Shared interests are not enough alone, they allow you to be with someone for long periods of time but they don't (presumably obviously to most of you) necessarily make for good friends.

What I found more and more as I lost friends that those that I was keeping were those who shared more that just interests with. They shared the same sorts of values and perspectives as I did and they were those who I would call genuine or true to themselves. I spoke of filters and how I manufactured one to keep all the offensive thoughts from getting out. This may make it seem like I am not a very genuine person however I would contest that this is about as far from the truth as possible. I am very much the same on the outside as on the inside regardless of the level at which my filter is operating. While I filter many things out I am manufacturing nothing new, all of what comes through the filter is real pure unadulterated me. When I am at formal situations and my filter is working at full capacity it is not that I am not myself, I am just an overly restricted and confined me that I do not much enjoy being. I am less able to express myself while the filter is at full.

All people have filters that they use in varying degrees however some people have masks as well. A mask is like a filter except that it also manufactures output that is not true to what the conscious feels. These masks are used for a wide range of things from coping with and or hiding from insecurity to being more effective in certain job roles. Not all masks are bad however none of what I would call my good friends ever wear one when they are with me. I struggle enough with working out what people think, want and feel when they are being honest to me. When people are disguising these things by use of personality masks then I really struggle to know how to interact. I can now recognize many kinds of mask people wear and the reasons they are doing so and although that helps me understand their motives it does not help me interact with them in a way I can generate any affection with.

Although I have been able to curtail many of the annoying things I might say through experience I have been less able to do the same for all of my actions. I am hypersensitive to things, it seems like a ludicrous thing to say because I have absolutely no idea how anyone else feels about their sensory inputs. I am exactly as sensitive to things as the only experience I have of how sensitive one can be towards things! Tapping, dripping, poking, flashing, beeping, ticking, loud, bright all have strong negative connotations for me. It is not uncommon to find that I have buried a ticking clock in a huge pile of clothes to muffle it. I usually wear a hood up while I am out and about and mostly it is to shut out much of the light, noise and visual spread so that I have less to process. Simply going a place I have not been to before I a draining experience as I am hoovering up all these new senses and committing them to memory.

Although they seem like quite different kinds of filter I lack not only the one to stop things coming out of me but also the one to stop things coming in to me. I have an eidetic memory which is sort of like what most people think a photographic memory is. My brain doesn't seem to bother filtering out the irrelevant data from the senses and just saves it all to hard disk. I can fairly vividly picture in my mind, much like a film reel, any place or event I have been to. I can draw reasonably accurate floor plans of buildings I have been in (each room). I cannot glance at a page in a book and then read that page in my head with my eyes closed. What I can do is return to a place in a book for some quote or detail with great ease just based on the shape of the words on the page. I can picture exactly in my mind where the thing I read is located and find it again.

There are some perks to this kind of sensory set up as well as some drawbacks. I don't get lost but wind chimes make me want to do bad things! I am used to living as me and so both perks and drawbacks are just normal to me. The important thing to do is find suitable ways to exploit the perks and to circumvent the drawbacks. Again, finding out I was autistic made me realise that there were some more fundamental differences in my perception of things which allowed me to better use and/or compensate for them. Had I been diagnosed earlier then perhaps I would have been able to start adapting sooner. Perhaps I would not have been mature or self aware enough to use that information wisely any earlier than I got it.

The biggest drawback to taking on all this information is that you fell like you are an old computer with too many programs running. You can freeze up every now and again, you can become intolerably slow at certain tasks. I feel like I am a vast database with huge hard disk storage capacity but only accessible via a cruddy slow old processor. It is very nice to have a great memory, it makes learning all the more rewarding but it is also tedious becoming tired just visiting some place new or being rendered incompetent by something as simple as a beep. Again, I am used to these things and so the thing I struggle most with is explaining this about me to others. It even sounds ridiculous to me when I give the reasons I do or don't want to do something.

I often wonder if my not knowing I was autistic all throughout my childhood and education was actually a great aid in my coping with it. Obviously I do not suffer the more prohibitive aspects of autism strongly which is the main factor in my being able to get along in society autonomously. If I had not been measuring myself against normal people while growing up then I might not have bothered learning many of the interactive tricks that I did. I might have just used my condition as an excuse to act differently and be a more difficult person as a result. I think the exclusion based on being labelled as autistic would have been worse to endure in my school years than simply that of being disliked as an equal. I am sure people would have been nicer to me but it would have been less of a useful training ground for later life. Having both the period of not knowing I was autistic and the period where I now do in my life have had strongly positive effects on my character but it is not the sort of thing you can plan to do. It was a lucky and happy coincidence that it occurred as it did for me and that both experiences have helped me rather than hinder as they easily could.

While I coped fine with school I was almost certainly a hindrance on everyone else, teachers and pupils alike. Several of my teachers went on extended leave due to breakdowns. There is certainly the argument that it would have likely been better for everyone else at school had I been diagnosed younger even if it might then not have been so helpful for me. Sadly this is all far too full of ifs and maybes to be of any real insight or use. Likely the best thing to have done in a utilitarian sense was have some social service autism expert spend a little time with my teachers and myself informing us and preparing us. The problem with that is each case of autism seems to be entirely interwoven with the character of the person, their circumstances and the extent to which they are along the spectrum. As such, the said expert would have to know me at the time to some extent to be able to help anyone out at all.

Even with my greatly increased self understanding it was entering the working world that I found the hardest. Getting autistic people into work so that they can be productive and autonomous members of society is the main objectives of support given to autistic people. It is hard to describe why I have struggled in several lines of work concisely or in an on point way. Typically I do things very well or very badly, very fast or very slow, I don't do middle ground much. I find it hard to do things not my way and I find it even harder to explain why I want to do things my way. I found I was winding up employers much like I wound up teachers despite my slightly increased maturity. Any job I had that did not engage the brain I would find so boring that I would become miserable. Most jobs that did engage the brain required a complete package of skills of which I was missing a chunk. I have done a variety of rather different things and have settled into one of only a handful of things that I could see myself being happy doing. I have been a shelf stacker at a supermarket, a professional card player, a production manager (I am a truly terrible manager and suspect that would be a strong trend among autistic people), a lab worker and now I am a very content dog walker.

There are a lot of things I could do very well in a lot of different avenues of employment. The thing is that in most of those roles I would usually be required to perform tasks I would be shocking at, basic things like not appearing to be a moron on the telephone. In order to utilize my potential in any given industry I would need a great deal of extra support from the employer. I don't know if that would be an economically sound investment in my skills but I should like to think so! There are certainly an increasing number of employers specifically seeking autistic employees so as to take advantage of their unique perspectives and creative problem solving. Socially speaking again I would suggest that the best return on investment would be to encourage employers to take on that extra cost and work with autistic people directly. Certain industries are much more suited to autistic peoples talents such as architecture, computer programming or scientific research. Any social worker helping out during childhood with education and teachers should go on to help out with careers advisor meetings, job applications and interviews in more extreme cases.

While I think we could do specific things like my afore mentioned vague social policies to help society get the most from its autistic people, and they to get the most out of life, I think the most generally helpful thing is information and understanding. It is my close friends understanding my quirks that allows them not to hate me. It was the lack of understanding of employers that made many of my previous jobs so all round unrewarding and it is my own understanding of my differences that has helped me to find a way of living that works for me. I hope this whistle stop tour of the autistic attractions of my life has helped spread some understanding on the subject.

The Fallacy of Democracy

While many nations call themselves democracies none so far as I can tell hit the mark. Democracy gets some bad press for being an imperfect system but that is only speculative to my mind as we have never put it to the test due to never having a real democracy exist in society. Certainly the manner of voting, governing and so forth used by most so called democracies have their shortcomings however the problem goes deeper than that.

Capitalism undermines democracy in that it is more powerful, more natural and more effective at doing what democracy attempts. Capitalism has a kind of inherent momentum, it drives itself and has the ability to correct its direction while democracy needs to be actively maintained. Capitalism is the result of peoples actions and directly serves their desire while democracy requires people to take extra actions and then only indirectly serves those people.

I could go on extensively about how capitalism is a more perfect system than even the most ironed out utopian democracy, let alone any of the shambles we have today. I will spare the reader the monologue as it is so obvious, not just in theory but also if you consider your day to day life. How little the government actually impact anything while the effects of capitalism are all around us, always changing and improving and yet deeply ingrained within our lives.

The problem is not with capitalism, nor with democracy, both are useful systems for society. The issue is with how capitalism makes democracy fairly impotent while somewhat super-seeding one of the integral moral components of democracy. With capitalism, your vote is your money and where you chose to spend it, in democracy your vote counts the same as everyone else. These two ideas are at odds and with capitalism being the far more powerful system we end up living in a weird meritocracy where your opinion is worth one vote plus your spending power. A true democracy could only really exist under an economic system that ensured each person has the same amount of money, which we know from experience takes most of the wind out of capitalism's sails.

The problem is not even anything to do with having meritocratic properties. As the name might suggest, a meritocracy is in principle a good thing. The issue, as ever is the imbalance of power between the systems and between individuals. The quality of a meritocracy is dependant on how well the merit of a person is assessed and therefore the proportion of how much impact their actions and opinions should count for. In countries like the UK and USA the poorer people make up the majority of voters yet no government comes close to enacting their view of appropriate wealth redistribution due to a rational fear of the economic fallout. Much of this fallout would be retaliatory things from the wealthy minority, both individuals and companies more inclined to emigrate, evade tax or commit some other antisocial act.

In other essays I have discussed how the one flaw in capitalism is how it has a positive feedback that tends towards wealth aggregating. The main drawback from this is the widening of the wealth gap which in turn has many undesirable social ramifications. In this context however it simply ensures that the richest people have more monetary voting power than a perfect meritocracy would afford them. I do not have a problem with higher earners having slightly more political sway than other people. I do take issue with those that think it should be in proportion to the unchecked results of present day wealth distribution.

The USA saw the importance of trying to separate religion and state right from the outset and despite this aim have failed spectacularly to achieve it. For a true democracy to work in a capitalist nation there would need to be the separation of economy and state, a task that would be far harder than the separation of religion. This impossible task combined with the strength and utility of capitalism imply we should be aiming for a modified form of government. Most in terms of how we understand our government and what we should expect from them. Democracy tells us we are equals while capitalism plainly refutes that claim. Each somewhat represents the main virtues of a state, democracy representing equality and capitalism representing freedom. The hope being that the power struggle between the two mechanisms results in the maximum possible freedom and equality within the society.

Although there is much that can be said to be working well as a result of the capitalist democratic power balance there are the issues mentioned earlier in the aggregating properties of capital and the raw efficiency and dedication to purpose of capitalism. Combine this with rapidly improving technology and capacity for work within society and you find that over time you would expect the power of spending and capital to increase relative to that of a democratic vote as well as finding that more and more voting power was localized within a smaller demographic of society. This trend is already observable over our recent past however little is being done to turn the tide and little thought is being given to the end result of this problem.

With the internet and cost of shipping globally the mechanisms of trade are changing. Amazon and ebay are in their infancy yet already play a huge part in trade worldwide. The power of this kind of company will increasingly lead to them dictating the conditions for trade to governments and not the other way around. I suspect this in itself will lead to a higher degree of free trade and a global economy which are good things however these are not the only ramifications. When companies dictate the terms of global trade rather than democratic governments we are no longer in a meritocratic blend but an oligarchy whose motivations are not implicitly aligned with society.

Various recent studies have come out supporting these trends, observations and logical conclusions. An American PhD student looked at voting patterns and legislation over the last few decades in the USA and concluded that it was already an oligarchy. Thomas Pikkety went much further back with his recent book “Capital” and looked at the aggregation of wealth over a couple of centuries, showing that it was always greater than the rate of the total accumulation of wealth. Put in Pikkety's simple terms, the most elegant solution is to make the rate of aggregation of wealth roughly equal the rate of the growth of wealth. Ideally it would have minor fluctuations either side so as to allow gradual movement of wealth where most appropriate rather than a forced flow in one direction only. Assuming you started from some a point close to the ideal equilibrium between democratic power and economic power or left the situation long enough to reach that equilibrium then you would have a pretty reasonable meritocratic society.

The problem with stating the solution in terms of a logical premise is that is misses all of the subtleties and context of the problem. First and foremost the fact that the only means society has to restrain the aggregation of wealth is democratically. Capitalism necessarily encourages it and mechanically loses much of its virtue if you try and set up a variation of it that would not have that property. Realising democracy is the only way to alter the rate of wealth aggregation you see that the solution to obtaining an effective democracies relies on you already having an effective democracy. The appropriate analogy is like trying to give yourself a leg up.

We can theorize that in a society with minimal or “natural” variance of wealth any democratic system would be near its maximum effectiveness. This is all well and good but helps us in no way to get us to the society with the lower wealth gap. The state of western democracies is not so hopeless or impotent that change cannot come from them however it will be slow, heavily resisted and a back and forth process. In my more cynical musings I wonder if the present UK focus on immigration is not just a good way to deflect the political attentions of the poorer people in society. Parties such as UKIP would not have been acknowledged or allowed to join the debate by the major parties if it were not for the social focus on the economic side of things resulting from the recent financial crisis and the involvement on the financial sector in that crash. More public pressure is on financial reforms which puts the political parties under more pressure from the industry lobbyists. The fact that democracies are underpowered compared to what they should be in theory means that it is easier to deflect social pressures than it is to address them.

To conquer the more powerful foe one must exploit it's weaknesses. The most effective manner in which the poorer people have to reduce the wealth gap is not voting for the most socialist party on offer but changing their spending habits. Each time we shop at Walmart or Tesco, each time we eat McDonalds or stop at Starbuck's for coffee we are casting a more powerful vote in contradiction to our political stance. Certainly this is less convenient and/or more expensive. It is not an option in certain areas to buy products not produced by giant companies and it is not an option at all for the poorest in society. The wonderful thing about capitalism is that it is adaptive, as spending patterns start to shift it will respond accordingly. If people want to buy more local products produced by smaller local companies that keep the flow of wealth more contained and less syphoned by the capitalists then those services and goods will become more available and cheaper.

The weakness of capitalism is not that it responds to our demands, that is its strength. It's weakness is that it only understands and responds to cost and profit. It relies for the most part on our greed to get the thing we want cheapest so that we can obtain more of other things we want. In terms of cost and profit there is no room to understand happiness, empowerment and other human factors. If we, as a society learn to think in terms of the democratic vote affixed to the price of each thing we buy then we would change the world for the better quicker than any purely democratic method could manage.

A large problem is that we now have a capitalist culture where by we equate success to money in too many areas. We now educate ourselves not to make us better people or live in a better society but as a means of investing in our own economic potential. We do well at school to get a better job so as to have more money in later life. The more society becomes conscious of the fact that money cannot buy fulfilment nor happiness the more we will be able to use it so as to force through desirable social change. It is empowering to chose to pay a little more for the service you support, be it the local baker over the supermarket, the bookshop with its friendly staff over Amazon.

The capitalists so to speak may have the coordination and the money but the people still hold all the real power we just lack the knowledge of how to use it, the direction in which to use it, nor the organization to do so effectively. We do most of the work, we do most of the real spending and consuming of all the most important things. We create most of the demand for the things that are then brought to market.

We are an inconceivably long way off being able to get our oil from the local refinery or our medication from the little family run pharmaceutical company, nor is it a pragmatic end game for those kinds of industry. The hope is that a gradual improvement in the wealth gap would subsequently empower democratic government to more effectively control those industries that need to be vast to work without falling subservient to them or crippling them by trying to make them publicly operated. Knowing that when buying a product you are doing a lot more than just getting something for some money, certainly more than you do when you head out to vote on election day, is a big part of the battle. It is the kind of thing that education should be comprised of. Choosing not to go into debt or buy the cheapest product when you can get the same without contradicting your beliefs elsewhere. Choosing to support those who are not well off with your custom rather than your charity. Realising it is the fact you condone paying minimum wage to people by supporting those companies with your custom is the reason there are lots of people paid minimum wage. All these things we have the power over and should we start to spend more with our humanity and political sway than with our capitalist cultural way of thinking. In doing so we would further empower ourselves by making our forms of democracies start to function more as intended.

*Disclaimer

I have nothing against any of the large companies mentioned in this essay. I am ignorant of any wrong doing they may or may not have done and am not picking on them in any way specifically. My intent was just to paint a picture of the kinds of large company we endorse each and every day. My objection to large companies in this essay is purely in regards to how they naturally assist in the aggregating of wealth and how they are able to influence politics due to their economic power and importance. The more profit the company has the more it is aggregating wealth and so by capitalist definitions it is at its best when being most damaging to society. The bigger it gets overall is a another key measure of success for a company and is the main factor in political influence. As such the better a company is by traditional capitalist aims the more damaging it is towards democratic ends.

Innocence and Experience

The pair of concepts William Blake illustrates in his Songs of Innocence and Experience have become an embedded part of western culture. While they retain their poetic mystical quality there appears to be more than just literary appeal to the notion. There is some palpable truth to the poetic innocence and experience and a clear distinction between the poetic notion and the common use of the words. I use these two words in this essay not as the dictionary would define them but in the way that Blake paints them. Innocence and experience are states of being rather than a descriptive term based on a specific context.

Due to our lack of scientific understanding as to the difference of these poetic definitions of innocence and experience we make lazy linguistic assumptions as to their properties based much more on the dictionary definitions of innocence and experience than any potential physical cause. There is also a strong trend between the obtaining of real life experience and losing ones innocence, and vice-versa, those without much experience of life tend to be those we would describe as innocents in the general poetic sense. Most human adults have lost their innocence, most young children still have it.

The more I probe these concepts however the more I find that the simple gaining of life experience is insufficient alone to cause the effect of becoming experienced in the poetic sense. Certainly the gaining of life experience is a help to the transition from innocence to experience in humans but it is not the route cause of the change. The two main observations I would use to demonstrate the separation of poetic experience and of dictionary experience are the characteristics of animals and the characters of people with conditions that affect the brain in a certain way such as autism or Down's syndrome. The complex workings of the brain and my somewhat limited data sample mean I cannot make any assured sweeping claims however I have found that these two groups of beings are resistant to the loss of innocence. The gaining of life experience has little to no effect on their qualities which make them innocents.

The reason that I find these concepts so fascinating is that they are so ambiguous yet so palpable. I can fairly easily categorize a being as an innocent or as experienced after basically just meeting them. Another thing that strikes me very hard is that I am fairly inept at relating to the emotional states of most other people. This is a common facet of autism and nothing striking or unusual. What is noticeable and unusual is that I am excellent at relating to animals and far better than usual with mentally atypical people who I seem to more intuitively understand. Obviously being somewhat atypical myself, the ease of relating to similar people is fairly understandable however the fact that it extends to cover animals as well makes it more interesting. All the groups that are made up of innocents are the groups I am above average at empathizing with yet those I classify as experienced I am intuitively poor at relating to.

There is a certain simplicity and honesty to the actions of innocents that in many contexts the experienced person doesn't accept because they are no longer able to operate under those conditions. The difference between an innocent and an experienced being seems to be most manifest in how they relate to other beings and to their environment. The innocents have no barrier between their thoughts and feelings and the expression of their body, while the experienced do. It is not quite as simple as that however, as innocents are capable of lying and deceit as well as the experienced. The difference goes more to the motive behind the deceit rather than the act itself as to what would distinguish an innocent from an experienced being.

Beyond the link between the words experienced and experienced another cultural misconception we seem to have about these poetic states of being is that they are linked to sex. Again, it is the fact that animals remain innocents despite growing old and having sex that rebuke this notion. You might argue that animals don't count as they cannot really become experienced in the way most humans do and as such should not be used as a way to show how the change might occur in people through what they do and don't do. My counter argument to this is that animals posses all the same identifiable and relatable properties of innocence that innocent humans do. It would be arrogant to assume that just because they don't become experienced that they are removed from the possibility of being innocents or being part of the same system. Humans are the odd ones out, we are the species breaking the mould and the most likely situation is that innocence is the norm and experience is a by-product of our advanced reflective and imaginative capabilities combined with our acute self awareness.

Thinkers and philosophers like Koestler and Schopenhauer put forward very persuasive arguments that the human condition is highly flawed. We are destined to live a life of internal conflict, paradox and contradiction. Fundamentally the problem is that we have two ways to deal with a situation, we have the emotional intuitive subconscious response which evolved first and then we have the conscious brain which is far slower but much more capable of logical deductions and reasoning. Most higher animals have both these modes as well however the latter is undeveloped compared to humans and works in harmony with the other system. For humans however our conscious reasoning is so highly developed that it stops working in harmony with the more emotional part of the brain. Certainly it is this advanced reasoning conciseness that has allowed us to conquer the planet and live in luxury however I believe it is what is costing us our innocence, in in more understandably terms, much of our potential happiness.

Humans are aware of there own mortality, we can see ourselves from the perspective of other people, we can plan and imagine and then fall victim to our own expectation. All of these difficult little problems and many many more come up in our conscious mind which does something (contort?) to our subconscious. The solutions to these imagined situations and conceptual problems are essentially in an incomprehensible language to the emotional part of the mind and as such any solutions it may have are not useful.

I mentioned before a barrier between what is inside of an experienced person and what they let come out of them which is not present in the same way for an innocent being. I believe this barrier is the result of becoming aware of mental contradictions that ultimately force people to act in discordance with how they feel.

I have used the innocence of animals to refute sex and life experience as causes of the loss of innocence and shall do so again with violence which is clearly one of the greatest accelerators of the change from innocence to experience in humans. The reason why violence between animals in the wild has no effect on their innocence yet does appear to have an affect on the rate of change in humans comes back to the motive behind the actions as I mentioned when talking about deceit. The motives for violence between animals in the wild is survival, competing for a mate, defending against attack or for feeding purposes. These are pure, honest motives behind the more extreme acts. Outside of these situations animals are very peaceful creatures which default to the nice setting much like a bubble defaults to a spherical shape – it is the the easiest thing to do.

Violence in humanity is far less often for these pure honest reasons. Even when one side of the conflict is fighting for pure reasons such as survival, the other side is invariably not. The older humanity has become the more our acts of violence have deviated from pure natural motives. Most violence is now born out of hatred or greed which are both impure motives and somewhat the result of conflict between our reasoning and emotion. Animals don't really have greed or hate in the way humans do, they will fear something they feel they have some reason too but they won't hate it in a consuming manner. It is the hate behind the violence rather than the violence that contributes to the loss of innocence.

You may say that animals can be greedy but again it is different. With humans we imagine having something and generate a want based on that imagined situation. With animals they know they want food already and so given the opportunity can be prone to what we perceive as greedy eating. It is almost the complete opposite effect going on, the animal being greedy has failed to imagine what might be enough food as it is not a situation they are overly familiar with or instinctively programmed for. They are failing to use foresight and thus gorge themselves, a greedy human has imagined a want and then sets about obtaining it, often well beyond actual need.

Although a fascinating subject I am not sure quite what purpose it serves. While I find innocents easier to spend time with I would not suggest either experience or innocence as the better state. I do think there is a high chance that the loss of innocence makes many things harder for humans to cope with and as such is a strong contributing factor in things like depression. Even if this were the case though I am not sure it has a solution. Experience seems bound to what it is that makes us human and is not something easily altered. I am not even sure which I would class myself as despite claiming an ability to quickly judge others. The concepts of innocence and experience should at least help us understand a little more about the workings of the brain.

I suspect I shall be returning to this subject as this is just an introduction. It is a relatively new idea to me and my thoughts are still somewhat immature and chaotic. I have been somewhat limited in the scope of innocence and experience thus far in this essay yet have been finding glimpses of it all over the place. It was finding it in music about a year ago that first sparked the notion that there might be more to innocence and experience than simple poetic elegance.

Mozart and Beethoven are widely regarded as the two giants of classical/romantic music. I had been a lover Beethoven for a while but found Mozart to be far less engaging. My experience with this kind of thing is that it takes a little while to appreciate something and as such you have to put in some effort to be able to enjoy the greatest works of art. It is hard to put my finger on why it is the case but it was pretty clear to me when comparing the works of the two composers more directly to each other (with the aim of understanding why Mozart was so similarly revered as Beethoven yet failed to rewards me similarly) that they were the musical equivalent of Songs of Innocence and Experience with Mozart being the innocent and Beethoven being the experienced.

Mozart has a kind of immediate overbearing euphoric joy to almost all of his works, they resonate with the same kind of purity and simplicity that can be found in the languages of the innocent. Beethoven on the other hand has more sinister works that are contain more trickery and illusion. A different way to phrase it might be that the music of Mozart is correct with respect to nature and harmony as if Mozart simply saw the most pristine and perfect musics that already existed, like the laws of logic, and then copied them down. Beethoven also saw this perfect music but instead of copying it he contorted it to his own desires, breaking the rules where he could see a way. After having put the effort into getting Mozart I do fully appreciate his genius and can see why he is regarded alongside Beethoven but my preference for the latter remains unchanged. They both totally got music yet they did completely different things with that understanding.

From what I know of Mozart there is a high chance he was autistic and therefore according to my theory was likely to be an innocent himself. This muddies the waters rather than pointing towards anything insightful, as does the fact that I relate better to innocents yet prefer the taint of experience in my music. There is speculation Beethoven was also autistic, as I am sure there is for most historic figures, and I very much doubt it is as simple as innocents create innocent art etc. even assuming he wasn't autistic. I have discussed the presence of innocence and experience imprinted on music just as a tangible example of the kinds of place they can be found and not to make any deductions. While it may make the subject more interesting it also makes it that much more complicated and mysterious.

All I can really say on the matter at the moment is that there does seem to be something real and tangible that can differentiate between two general states of being. These states of being can be seen in the actions, expressions and communications of all kinds of higher animal. Such is the nature of the distinction between the two types of being that we can assign these states to abstracts and inanimates. Perhaps this ability to assign states of being to things like music is a fallacy and part of the human urge to find patterns. Perhaps it is little more than languages like French assigning a gender to each word. Even if this link is spurious it does at least give weight to the notion that the concepts of innocence and experience are recognizable, a little like how we are inclined to see faces in clouds and other random formations.

I think it is possible to alternate between occupying an innocent state and an experienced one but I think for the most part you are in one state or the other with fleeting moments outside of the norm. I think this is the case because the difference between innocence and experience is distinct yet has some characteristics of a spectrum. This again may be a linguistic bias with the links to the dictionary definitions of innocence and experience where you are easily able to be more or less of one than another being.

I have little evidence for the key distinction between innocence and experience being based on internal contradictions unique to the advanced human brain and self awareness. I spent much of my time musing the subject with no theory on this matter at all, simply driven by the feeling they were real properties. My belief in this theory simply comes from how well it fits with what little I do know of the brain and my various observations while investigating the matter. I have a need to explain what I encounter and observe and I find my explanation thus far on the matter of innocence and experience to be satisfactory, if not complete nor even necessarily correct.

The End Game

The end game is a concept that is crucial in making correct choices. Knowing to what end your actions are working towards my seem obvious however it is surprising how many choices are made without any reference or even idea of what the ultimate objective is. Being a gamer I relate most things that I can to games as the methods of reasoning in them are widely applicable in real life yet they are very simple by comparison thus making it easier to apply them. In any strategy game knowing how you plan to win and the likely situations that will arise as your plan comes to fruition is essential, it is something to always have in the back of your mind while playing. If I were writing an essay with the aim of getting better at games this would be one of the first lessons. With games it is obvious what the ultimate aim is, usually it is simply to win. Knowing what the aim is in games it comes down to a simple case of when and how. Even so, in many of the games I play I see people repeatedly doing the same things, perhaps the powering up stages of the early game, whatever that might be, and failing to ever focus in on an end point. Games might have resources you obtain and then convert into points or ways to optimise efficiency and so being efficient and getting lots of resources will be generically good things to be doing. If you lose sight of how and when the end will come about and simply focus on those core elements of the game you will get pipped to the post by someone who saw the end in sight and stopped gathering more resources so as to focus on converting those they have into points.

I notice many people act much in this way in their lives, they repeat the same cycles as if they were going to live forever. This is more understandable, unlike games our lives don't have the end detailed in the rule book with known conditions or timings, nor do we have an aim laid down for us to finish with the most points, complete specific objectives or eliminate all our opponents. This essay is not concerned with discussing aims for individuals which I have covered to some extent in other essays, most notably “The Meaning of Life”. All that should be taken from this essay in regards to ones own life is that you should have at least one aim and you should be mindful of your own mortality. Failure to do both will lead to you making choices that are incorrect from a game perspective, which typically translates to being inefficient or treading water.

Often thinking with an end game in mind is coined “thinking of the big picture”. I prefer to call it end game thinking as it draws attention to the key element involved. Big picture implies you need to know lots about everything between now and the end game however you can, and have to, make do with only knowing about things now and where you are trying to get to with little knowledge of what may lie in-between. Both big picture and end game thinking at least conjure up the idea of making investments and doing things that might not always be the best for right now to make it better for later. More sayings spring to mind such as “a stitch in time saves nine”, while I am not sure about the ratios and feel I would need a more exact time scale to work with the sentiment holds very true. Understanding the situation you are in and being mindful of where you want to end up generally allows you to make good calls despite having no knowledge of how you are going to get from where you are to where you wish to be.

One thing that has always surprised me is that the human race seems very focused on the here and now and devotes very little time to thinking about the end game for our species. It is much harder for an individual to work out an endgame for themselves when they also have to work one out for society as well so as to frame theirs within it. Regardless of this is it is also much harder for state to create policy or infrastructure without an endgame for humanity in mind. We end up just patching over the problems we presently face, working out road-hog isolated solutions. What we should be doing is tweaking and making changes cohesively towards an end goal instead of taking each problem in isolation and covering up its mess in some thoughtless manner. Rather than the cyclic boom-bust nature of modern society we would have a steadily improving state of affairs if changes were made with an ultimate and holistic aim in mind.

Humanity is a fairly composite term and should be broken down into a few more specific categories within which we can more usefully discuss the end game concept. There is life and evolution of which humanity is and intertwined part. We then have the physical universe in which we live and how that is expected to change. We have society with its culture, laws, systems, infrastructure, morality and so forth. We also have knowledge, a concept for which the end game is pretty obvious – know all that can be known. This leaves scientists with an easier time that most groups of people in society as they are aware of the ultimate aims of their roles. There are also religious end games, some of which are described, others not however these are moving outside the scope of this essay. For humanity to sensibly consider what its endgame might look like it must consider the forces of life and evolution and the changing universe and reconcile them with any utopian social ideas.

The physical universe may not be fully understood by us but this should not prevent us from preparing for what we know or expect to happen based on our present understanding. Overall the physical universe is the slowest effect on humanity of the ones I have named, which given that evolution is also included, should demonstrate just how long term we are talking. Although slow the physical universe is something we have least control over and must work with or around in whatever plans we may hatch. The main date in the diary set by the physical world in regards the endgame for humanity is the expiry date of the Sun. We have at least four billion years to prepare for this event but should we wish to survive as a species we have to have populated other worlds or found ways of surviving a nomadic life in space. It is not something we should necessarily be working on now but it would be remiss to simply assume life can go on as it is indefinitely on our surprisingly transient (when discussed in the universal context rather than that of our own lifespan) hunk of rock we call home.

There is also speculation about the universe re-collapsing or expanding into an entropy death which is much much further down the line than the Sun's expiry date however poses a more awkward question for humanity. Perhaps there is no getting around the end of the universe and humanity needs to have achieved all its goals by this stage. Perhaps a species needs to know its own mortality in order to properly motivate them towards their goals much like it does with individuals. This feels counter intuitive at first as things might seem a bit pointless if it is all going to come to nothing and so the mortality of a species would be a de-motivator. It could just be that we are so much in the infancy of our species life cycle that we are all but oblivious to the appropriate ultimate aims of our species. Like a newborn baby that only really appreciates its immediate needs humanity often works towards fairly superficial ends. If you apply the de-motivation argument to the situation of the baby who is only aware of its immediate needs and suddenly make it also aware of its mortality it might seem logical to give up trying to satisfy them now and accept the inevitable. This is because we are not accounting for all the other reasons for being that the baby will come to appreciate above and beyond basic needs as it grasps a fuller understanding of its situation and environment. It will come to understand it is destined to die but will continue to strive in life towards ends other than just basic survival. Certainly as individuals we have ascended beyond pure survival however the species as a whole only makes advancements to serve the comfort and convenience of individuals. We presently do very little to further the species beyond our increase to the pool of knowledge however we don't even put that to great use, often ways to kill each other or novel new ways to consume more resources. We have the capacity to makes the choices faced by gods yet we still act much like the other animal species on the planet, just finding places we can exploit and then filling them up with our numbers. As the wise agent Smith noted to Neo, we have almost regressed below our fellow higher animals to the level of a virus based on our present inability to conserve our environment.

As an aside, the argument that a super intelligent alien species has not made any contact with us therefore acting as proof against their existence, or at least any with the capacity to travel about space with some ease, seems flawed based on our own preconceptions of what an evolved or mature species looks like. I am not suggesting this is a proof of alien life, only that this line of reasoning certainly does not prove their non existence. Our mating rituals, our houses, basically everything we do can also be found elsewhere in the world performed by other lifeforms. Are our houses sufficiently more complex than a birds nest when judged on the same scale as a super alien intelligence? Is our language that much more advanced than the sounds made by a pack of wolves that an alien observer would notice the difference? Certainly human achievement is monumental when compared to the achievements of any other species native to Earth, but given that totals at nil it is hard to guage a nominal level of achievement. I would argue that evolution as a mechanism has achieved much but that its various non-human offspring when defined as species or individuals have failed to break their mould and have no achievements that could be called their own. Humanity needs to have some humility in regards to our progress when we are conceiving of an end game plan. Simply outclassing the other apes is unlikely to be noteworthy on a galactic scale.

Much of what motivates the living other than satisfying immediate wants and needs are things that can be left behind after death. There is a clear difference between the end of a species as a result of the events of the universe and the death of an individual. If the universe ends there will be nothing left to benefit from anything. Rather than ruin the analogy however I think this highlights our lack of understanding and our inability to conceive of what our ultimate aims could be and how they might be relevant. Simply put it is impossible to imagine something you have no notion of at all. The hurdles imposed on our species by the universe set both technological and philosophical challenges but they are so very far away that they seem all but irrelevant in our lives. Presently then it is just good food for thought and something to be dimly aware of. We are pointed in the right direction at least, with our scientists and philosophers compasses being dead on (in terms of their ends games, not always in terms of ideas or pursuits) giving us valuable knowledge and insight, however we are somewhat constrained by our short term individual goals and lack of direction as a species.

The evolutionary end game is a much more pressing question than how we are to survive the death of the Sun or be relevant in light of the end of the universe. It is rapid by comparison but not so much that it would be too significant except for two things. One is that we are bypassing understood evolutionary mechanisms with our technology such as medicine preventing natural selection from working as it used to and secondly we are becoming very adept at tinkering with genetics thus opening a whole new world of possibilities. In a classic sense we think of evolution slowing honing and dividing species into more specialized, adept and diverse organisms able to best exploit an environment. This view breaks down when we apply it to modern man. We have become so good at exploiting our environments we no longer need the help of the tediously slow biological evolution process. The problem is we are taking control of something without any idea of the direction we should go in. Eugenics is a fairly ugly grey area and a debate that needs having and resolving soon. It is not just our own genetics we are altering but that of all species we farm and even, although to a much lesser extent, all those species whose environments we affect. Selective breeding and GM foods are altering things outside the classic scope of survival of the fittest. It is not that taking control of the direction of evolution is a bad thing, indeed it can and does offer us a wealth of useful opportunities, the concern is that we are not aware of the ramifications of our actions as much as we might like.

It is most likely people would chose to use our increasing control over genetics to select for desirable traits as our society sees it such as intelligence, tall and good looking with athletic prowess while cutting out defects such as poor eye sight or perhaps even allergies. A pragmatic suggestion might be to make people much much smaller so we consume less food and energy and can live in less space. This would be great for easing expanding population levels and would be more in line with species evolving to suit their environment better. The idea is however farcical both logistically and in terms of things like human rights. Who would agree or want to have their offspring genetically shrunk a bit even if it were for the good of humanity? Certainly this is one of the biggest questions that humanity will face thus far in its path. Atomic weapons are to date the greatest hurdle we have come to and although we have part cleared it I suspect we are not fully out of the danger zone. Either way, the bomb gave us terrifying control over each other and on local environments however the progress we have made in biological and genetic fields give us control over evolution itself. It is like those sci-fi horror b-movies where the robots become self aware and start making more of themselves using the designs of their creators, except we are the rebellious robots in this simile, not the benevolent creator, which is of course simply evolution. We need to decide not only the moral issues and the practical issues but also, and perhaps most importantly what direction we wish to go in regards to our end game. I suspect if it is left to the free markets and capitalism to develop then its uses will be solely egotistic and superficial. By that I do not mean just physical beauty but also things like athletic prowess or even intellect. Ultimately it would become a fairly cyclical and pointless affair where we would genetically select for things that would be “in trend” culturally speaking, people would conform to certain standards of beauty that had as much basis as what colour is in season. Generally such things would be selected for based on the prestige it would bring individuals and not for how they can benefit society or even humanity. If this were the case genetics would be a squandered power, we would remain animals and not become gods. I am perhaps being overly harsh as it would be difficult not to wind up with medical and intellectual perks as a result of tinkering with evolution inside a free market society which themselves would contribute significantly to the further development of the species. As yet I have no real answers to the direction and use for genetics, I would most like to see it used to discover more pure and direct forms of communication and/or higher or combined forms of consciousness however I realise this makes me sounds rather like a hippie. I have no notion of how this would be done nor what it would achieve, it simply feels like it is more worthy that making my offspring have less body hair or ensuring they are the higher end of the height spectrum.

While genetics may pose some very challenging and immediate questions and the notion of galactic significance is rather abstract and difficult to conceive the social end game is somewhat straight forward. As society is something that has essentially been constructed and defined by us the rules governing its optimisation and end game options are far more obvious and logical. It is a composite of laws, tradition, morality, culture, economics, infrastructure and governmental systems. Society is also a tool by which we can more efficiently work and live together for mutual advantage. As I mentioned earlier in the essay, we use ad-hoc solutions to the problems caused by any one small part of society and often disregard the effects it has on the overall system. Things work well enough in the short term and so a long term or cohesive solution is not found. The utopia is the endgame for society however there is not just one single utopian solution but many. Each person may have an idea of what their own utopia may look like based on their own political sway and other preferences in life and many of those may be valid utopian visions. The true test of a utopia, and whether it is an appropriate social end game is not how much the various ideals please you but how well the various elements blend together. To have a valid utopia the morality has to align with the economic policies, which in turn both have to work within the law and so forth. Presently we have a situation where our society is misaligned, there is overlap within the general moral compass, laws and the economy etc but not at all points and unsurprisingly it is these points at which you find the problems in society arise. An example is that our capitalist economy appropriately satisfies many of our ideas of freedom however its polarising effect on wealth does not fit as well with many peoples idea of justice or equality. Our economy is set very well to fuel the pace of innovation however it does little to help conserve our resources or environment. We are guided by our morality, culture and tradition but we do not control them directly and as such any utopia will be heavily defined by those of the times. In defining our utopias however we have complete control over the economy, the law and the systems by which things are done. If all the things that would be utopians have control over can be made to seamlessly work together as if one great machine and not independent parts, while also appropriately reflecting the less controllable aspects then you would have a worthy candidate to aim for as the end game for society.  

The Adverse Effects of the Division of Labour

It is generally assumed that the division of labour is an all round good thing that will improve efficiency in a given task. The division of labour must necessarily go hand in hand with things like mass production and the growth of huge companies. A key factor to remember about the division of labour is that you need each role a person is doing to occupy all of their time. If on average a company needs five hours of legal work done per week it would be very unwise to employ a full time lawyer to either sit around for seven eighths of the time or to fulfil both legal non legal tasks. Both options will mean you are paying vastly over the odds for the required legal work, or at least vastly more than you should for the non legal work done in the latter case. Companies in this situation will outsource their work which is the most efficient option for them. However if the company in question with a need of five hours of legal work should grow significantly, for the sake of argument lets say ten times bigger, then it would have sufficient demand of legal work to effectively employ their own in-house lawyer which will be cheaper and more effective than outsourcing. This lengthy example is simply to show that the benefits of the division of labour can only really be taken advantage of alongside a scaling up of the business.

One of the noticeable side effects of this requirement to grow to become more efficient through the division of labour is a polarization in the types of company that exist in the present day. There are the various giants in their respective fields that are either nation wide or multinationals and then there are those local sole proprietors and family run businesses. It is often overlooked that to organise and divide labour requires a fair amount of effort, at the large company end of the spectrum these efforts are somewhat negligible even if they are nominally greater than those for the smaller companies. At the sole proprietor / family businesses end of the spectrum however the effort to train and manage additional employees is substantial as a fraction of the total required work. Also it is always much more of a jump up in terms of relative size to take on extra staff at the small end of the spectrum compared to the big end of the spectrum and so you cannot incrementally take advantage of economies of scale. As the returns from the division of labour are less efficient for small companies, and as they require proportionally more input to incur, there is a disincentive to grow. The small businesses often provide more returns on the input the smaller they are, up to a point, and growing past that point is a lot of hard work with relatively low odds of success (As a side note specific the the UK, the VAT threshold is also a cripplingly restrictive on small businesses breaking through into being nationwide). The amalgamation of labour has its own associated efficiencies in terms of operating and running a business. When you can amalgamate all your labour into one worker you are the most efficient a company can be in terms of delegation and management along with any personnel duties. Much like many laws in chemistry and physics, at different magnitudes or under different conditions certain laws will start to dominate where once they were negligible. While the division of labour is the dominant force for efficiency in large companies, the very small ones are predominated by the efficiencies of the amalgamation of labour.

There is nothing wrong with the small business however, they provide valuable services, employment and are often important within the smaller communities. What they do not tend to offer is progression, it takes a company with much capital behind it to invest into doing something new or devising improvements to current practices and then to usefully put that into effect. Small companies keep things ticking over within society but large companies help to move us forwards. Certainly we want both within society, the problem is that there is very little migration from the small to the large. Social mobility is talked about much but the mobility of business is not something so commonly regarded as an issue. My concern for the lack of commercial mobility (specifically in more established sectors, for example something like electronics in its emergence is less susceptible to these effects) is that innovation is more likely in the newer budding companies and industries. When vast companies have infrastructure to do things a certain way it can be expensive to make improvements to the infrastructure. Even practices within various industries are die hard, many record labels for example being very slow and unwilling to embrace the internet and take advantage of their capital and market share to get ahead in the new environment, instead choosing to fight the internet and keep things as they were before, which is like fighting the tide and only serves to slow progress. In many cases due to the efficiency differences just from the size difference between companies the large old company with its outdated practices and infrastructure will still be able to be more competitive than the new innovative company with its better methods. It is not until the old methods are so outdated that the forces of capitalism will give the innovative companies a competitive edge and allow them to grow. As such progress within society is retarded. The large companies have the capacity to invest and implement innovation however they are under no real pressure to do so as a result of the impotence of smaller companies that are both more likely and more able to take new approaches. Smaller companies therefore stagnate progress within society not just because they do not grow themselves very often but also, and perhaps more importantly, because they fail to pressurise those companies more able to innovate, improve and implement into doing so.

The second problem with the division of labour is that by offering an efficiency incentive to the larger companies it naturally encourages the forming of monopolies and companies with dangerous levels of market share. The bigger the company gets the more efficient it can potentially be and therefore has a higher chance of surpassing competition. I have discussed the problems of monopolies in reasonable detail in other essays and so I shall just offer a quick outline here. Essentially monopolies are devoid of competition which is the driving force of capitalism. Competition between companies is what forces improvements and keeps prices low. A monopoly can stagnate in terms of making any improvements while still making a killing on profits. The consumer is at the mercy of the monopoly while a company with good and varied competition is at the mercy of the consumer and can only win by serving them best. A competitive industry may still stagnate in terms of progress and developments however it will still tend toward offering the consumer the best possible costs and services. When a monopoly starts to take advantage of its consumers it will serve to widen the wealth gap within society which in turn has a wide range of detrimental effects on society from increased crime to decreased individual happiness. These are statistical trends rather than proven facts however the logic that is used to support these trends makes good and clear sense and is akin to evolution in its plausibility as an unproven theory. Monopolies are not limited to their industry in regards to their detrimental effect on society. A monopoly on the supply of diamonds doesn't just mean you will be paying more for diamonds.

It is also not just pure monopolies that are guilty of failing to best serve consumers but rather it is a scale that starts to take more effect as companies grow in market share. A good example of this are the various super market chains in the UK which may appear to offer sufficient competition and a wide range of choice to consumers but in reality are a little more pernicious. Certainly they are not monopolies however they do not directly compete with each other as one might imagine. Firstly they each tend to cater for a specific demographic and secondly they are fairly well spread so as to have somewhat of a local monopoly. If you were able to isolate the various demographics and assign them as separate markets then each of the major supermarket chains would suddenly look a lot more like a monopoly, which is only compounded in effect with the location spreading of outlets. It is not really the other supermarkets that each of the major chains must compete with but it is the local markets, butchers, bakers and greengrocers that infringe on their location and demographic pseudo monopolies. This however has proven to be an easy fight for the super markets to dominate with their economies of scale and the effect is fairly pronounced and observable in the decline of the independent food retailers over the last fifty or so years. In essence then the supermarkets needs only serve the consumer sufficiently well to surpass the local markets, greengrocers, bakers and butchers and do not overly have to worry about serving the consumer better than the other supermarkets. The range in pricing across stores in the UK is not a reflection of cost incurred to the supermarket to supply the food in that area so much as it is a reflection of what a supermarket can get away with charging to people in those areas. Overall the effect is a cyclical positive feedback one where companies tend towards polar extremes, the monopoly like companies or the sole proprietor. This secures the position of the monopoly like company who find themselves in a position where they are competing with small companies that are easy to keep down, like a war where one side has tanks and the other bows and spears.

The final drawback of the division of labour is the dissociation of context. Each additional person in the chain of a process incurs either an information loss or a large efficiency cost. For most companies it is impossible for every person to know all the relevant information. The solution is usually rigid protocol and systems that ensure sufficient information is transferred efficiently at each step. This commercial need to know approach to working will provide a sufficient level of service and won't tend to do much wrong however it misses most of the opportunities it might have to excel in some manner or attain extra unexpected efficiencies as they arise. I have worked for large organized companies where things felt devoid of human emotion or input. Consumers got what they expected and nothing more and staff tended to be disenfranchised and unmotivated. I have worked for a rapidly growing disorganized company where information was frequently lost or unused and the result was an awful service provided with many losses of efficiency within the company. Now I am effectively self employed, I know each of my clients personally and am able to offer a service that is more efficient upon my work load while simultaneously being a better service for them. It is also more rewarding when you do a good job as you get to witness the appreciation for your efforts (I am a dog walker rather than the prostitute this could also depict, although for the record I have nothing against prostitution and feel it should be legalized so as to allow for more personal security and freedom for both kinds of party involved). I also prefer to use small businesses where possible as I know where and to whom my money is going. When you spend money with a big firm you have no idea where that money ends up, how much is useless advertising or investments far away from your local area or morally grey profiteering schemes. I shop at my local games store instead of online despite the cost difference because the local games shop also provides a valuable service to the area. We are all a little overly occupied by profits and returns when thinking about economics and forget some of the more important things in life. Small businesses help bind a community together and increase the quality of life for all within. They can offer certain services you simply cannot receive from large companies due to the amount of specific personal information required to perform them and they can be a blessing for those that cannot stomach the familiar feel of working for any large company.

In society we need big businesses and we need small businesses so as to exploit both the economies of scale and also those of amalgamation. We want personalized human interaction but we also want cheap products. The polar extremes of business size generally serve very different roles within society yet unfortunately exist on the same playing field which is far from level. Not all small businesses need to grow in order that large companies feel the pressure to be innovative however it would be beneficial if they were not so hindered in growth by the larger companies. Much of this is a cultural attitude towards money and not just a result of economics but then it is all part of the same complex mosaic where everything is intertwined. A good example of the dissociation of context is that of investments which are usually provided by large companies where fairly minimal human and personal information is known. For starters, unless you have some some material backing or appropriate reputation you will likely not be entertained as a wise investment opportunity. If those able to offer loans and capital investments were more personally involved with people and not statistics there is more chance to spot genuine people with an innovative idea even without renown or capital. This is all very idealistic but shows the potential kind of social efficiency

that can be gained from having a more amalgamated, personal or local working relationship while simultaneously showing a way in which more pressure could be placed on larger companies to be more innovative without tinkering with free trade.

Giving a subsidy or incentive towards small businesses so as to offset the advantages of the larger companies and allowing them to grow more easily is dangerous and almost certainly not the solution. More likely the only solution is a much narrower wealth gap in which the returns from small businesses are sufficiently liveable that growth is far easier complete with better protection against monopoly like companies so that large businesses are too busy competing with each other to quash the little ones. These are long term solutions that can only happen slowly and must be approached from many different fronts. It is not just small business that needs protection from monopolies and pseudo monopolies but all of society. This is a tricky beast to tame as you want minimum disruption to the economies of scale afforded by the larger company. My gut solution is to impose an arbitrary cap on market share which if exceed by a company would then require that company to nationalise a portion, effectively issuing shares which would be state owned, at a rate linked to the market share it exceeds the cap by. There are however many further problems with this as it fails to account for proximal or demographic monopolies very effectively, not to mention the dangers of gross inefficiency so frequently seen in nationalised institutions. The idea is more to encourage companies to invest in improvements towards increasing profit margins rather than market share as the latter is often significantly more worthwhile in the present climate and leads towards monopoly rather than progress. The solution to taming the monopoly is going to be a complex one and not just a silver bullet alteration as each industry is entirely different and needs to be handled accordingly.

It seems as if the solution to every social problem is either a changing of the wealth gap (narrowing in the case of capitalism based societies), eduction or a change to economic policies. The problems caused by economies of scale require two of these solutions and certainly would benefit from all three making it one of the more awkward ones. Fortunately all of its solutions are ones you would wish to implement regardless of the existence of economies of scale as other areas of society and social forces would greatly benefit from the changes. All change has good and bad implications, I measure the value of change in society not on the level of exploitation of the good bits but by the handling of the bad bits. Much as our production of good and gadgets is mighty impressive but overall it leaves a bad taste as it brings to mind how we have squandered so many resources, engendered an attitude of consumption and material wealth and widened the wealth gap further all at the same time. The division of labour is a powerful tool that has given us much. I do not advocate the limitation of its application, only the appreciation for what is being lost as well as what is gained and having a mind towards finding solutions.