The Illuminati met in Davos this week. According to Reuters, there were three main topics of conversations. They were in no particular order, what an a**hole that Putin is; what an a**hole that Trump is and the scary ramifications if he becomes president of the USA again; and finally Artificial Intelligence, as one of three options — a doomsday machine, a boon to mankind, or a tool that cuts into and bleeds the human condition but can also be a huge benefit to everyone. PS. I don’t believe in the Illuminati, a secretive group that controls the world. The idea was all started in 1776 by the Bavarian Illuminati aimed to promote Enlightenment ideals such as reason, secularism, and the separation of church and state. The group was suppressed and disbanded by the Bavarian government in the late 1780s. However, using the word is useful to the thesis of this post.
There was also lip service paid to other topics. For example, participants hypocritically talked about climate change while participating in the private jet rental wankfest at the Altenrhein St. Gallen Airport near Davos.
Most steered clear of the Israel/Gaza/Hamas situation. Then there are the Houthi attacks, aided by the perfidy of Iran, which are disrupting supply chains around the world. There is tension between China and Taiwan. North Korea wants to nuke the USA and South Korea.
The immigrant situation is dire in places around the globe from Texas to Europe. Countries are being overrun with immigrants fleeing impoverished and war-torn areas, with little assets to give in nation-building skills, while creating a budgetary strain on humanitarian aid, housing needs, employment and social welfare. Many African nations are rife with political corruption and economic stagnation resulting in human bloodshed.
Female reproductive rights are being eroded in various states in the nation that touts itself as the most progressive, advanced nation in the world. These laws rival the antediluvian laws of regressive Islamic theocracies in faraway places. And let’s not even talk about the minefield of children and transgenderfication.
Authoritarianism is on the rise. Right wing politics at the event horizon of extremism dominate elections. There is a clear and present danger to democracy around the world. And to top it all of, the economic situation in many countries is in the toilet.
Technology is a threat. Not only is AI eating into the job market. But it also invades our privacy and spies on us. The worst part is that technology can destroy lives like Fujitsu did in collaboration with the British Government. There flawed Post Office software erroneously reported that village postmasters were stealing money. Many people went to jail, committed suicide or went bankrupt because of software that was written by rank amateurs without any rigor behind it. And then there is the intrusion software. I just read about an AI program that scrapes AirBnB settings and determines the actual physical addresses of the rental units, and reports them as tax cheats.
The overall prognosis of our societal health is apparently that good. The risk of conflict will increase due to diverging interests among major powers, an expanding terror threat, continued instability in weak states, and the spread of lethal, disruptive technologies. I can see the first battle coming shortly between robotic soldiers, robotic drones, and autonomous weapons waged on helpless human populations. It’s a fairly chilling scenario when armed automated robots march through your hometown.
So I wanted to understand how we got into this situation, where it is going, and possibly how to survive it, providing primitive human being doesn’t push an Armageddon button.
Our perceptions of how a modern society operates came out of post-World War II. Between World War I and World War II, the industrial revolution had changed society. North America went from the family farm to urbanization. Industrial activity was ramped up by the war and it continued afterwards. In the late 1940’s and 1950’s there was stability, good economic times, the rise of the consumer society, the invention of the suburbs, unlimited growth, cheap money and periods of relative peace. Anyone who had any job, could afford a car, a house in the suburbs and a TV. Televisions were much more expensive in the 1950’s (the equivalent of over $3,000 in today’s money), but by and large they were affordable by the average household, certainly by the time that the 1960’s rolled around. This created a large, majority middle class that defined America and other countries in what is now considered the G7.
But by 1985, the cracks were starting to show in America’s middle class. Take a look at the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s song “My Home Town”.
Now Main Street's whitewashed windows, And vacant stores, Seems like there ain't nobody, Wants to come down here no more. They're closing down the textile mill Across the railroad tracks, Foreman says, "These jobs are going, boys, And they ain't coming back, To your hometown".
Hypercapitalism reared its ugly head during this period. We had the Wall Street raiders, the junk bond kings and profit maximization and shareholder value driving corporate greed. It was cheaper to manufacture goods first in Mexico where you could underpay the workers. Then Far East countries had a workforce that was even cheaper. Everything moved off to countries like China, who eagerly exploited their people to become the factory of the world. That started out the hollowing of America’s middle class. It started with companies like General Motors and General Electric and created a tsunami of a manufacturing exodus from everywhere in the USA until there were no small to medium manufacturing facilities in small town America that was the engine of the local economy and prosperity. What it did, was transfer the wealth, or more accurately equalize the wealth created by manufacturing to form a middle class in the poorer, far away countries.
But we North Americans and Europeans were in the cycle of consumerism, capitalism and unending economic growth. It was unsustainable. It took some time, but it had to break. We are, unfortunately just at the start of the broken cycle. And then came the internet which forever changed the way that information was spread. The world didn’t get a chance to normalize and equalize the powers of technology before Artificial Intelligence came to be. We are in a total mixmaster of societal conditions.
Everything is in flux. Our economic expectations of owning a house in the suburbs, a car, a stable job and a beneficial economy are gone, especially for millennials. Even the globalization trend that drove us to this point is breaking down. Globalization brought us an epidemic from China that changed societal norms. Hypercapitalism and technology is creating greater income disparity. The middle class is hollowed out. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs available, and they barely pay the rent. You need two of them to live in a large city. Certain professions have higher and higher incomes, like engineers in Silicon Valley making $300,000 a year, while people without tertiary educations are just scraping by. It appears that society is in deep chaos.
There was always chaos in society, but it is now magnified by the power of technology. Dispirited and marginalized people now have a voice that can echo around in the world with social media. Information travels at the speed of light and bad news and disinformation travels faster than the speed of light and into more and darker corners. No matter who you are now, with the power of the internet, you have a voice. This is a double-edged sword. The immediate effect of this, is the extreme mutilation of the literal truth and the poisoning of facts with human biases, prejudices and the most base of emotions. The question is “Why does any one want to kill the truth and spread lies and disinformation?”.
I was sitting in a coffee house, and it wasn’t in the United States. An observer at the table remarked that half of the American people are effing stupid, even retarded, because they support the proven liar, and ethically-challenged Trump. The observer continued that those who vote for the Republican party, which has gutted every bit of humanity, altruism and its soul in the support of Trump, are so mentally subverted by their partisan biases, that they themselves are intellectually and morally challenged. While it is easy to call them names, and to class Trump supporters and Republicans in general as deplorables, like Hillary Clinton did, that is not the case. It goes back to the basic human condition and the chaos of our society itself.
We humans are social beasts. Right from when we first emerged from Africa as humanoids, we have been tribal. We have a belonging that gives us a sense of identity. We belong to a tribe that looks out for one another, at least in a perfunctory way. We like stability. We crave stability. We crave social connections. We crave validation. Our egos dictate that our tribe recognizes us as valid, useful members of the group. What happens when all of that is ripped away? What happens when our jobs are lost, and in this society much of our identity is tied to our jobs? What happens when we can’t achieve the economic success that our parents achieved, especially when that has been the paradigm for the last 200 years? What happens when the world doesn’t operate in the same way that it has for most of our lives. We lose our identity. We lose our sense of self. We have lost belonging in our tribe.
Look at photos of Trump rallies. How many people of color do you see? How many minorities are there? How many people are in suits, compared to those in baseball caps and jeans? Do you see the sea of gray or bald heads? Those people are those who have lost the most. Their identity is stretched. The old neighborhoods are not the same any more. You can’t make a good living any more. They are marginalized and the American Dream is dust in the wind. The enemy is the status quo.
Those people have watched what appeared to be a powerful man, Trump, on TV, firing people left and right on The Apprentice. He is part of television culture. His TV persona is artificially created as the big boss who knows best. Surely he can fix the country. Surely he can put things back the way they were, so we know who we are, where we are going and what the rules of the game are?
The short answer is no. We know in our heart of hearts that you can’t put the worms back in the can, but hope springs eternal, and that seems as the only viable option in this chaotic world — even if it destroys good things in its wake, like government institutions, trust and even democracy. We live in dangerous times.
So what about the future? Where are we going and what will be the outcomes? Is there a fairy godmother that can fix things? Again, the short answer is yes and it is Time. It’s not a very palatable solution though. Unfortunately many of us will have to go through a literal and figurative meat grinder before we reach a time of stability again. It is how Chaos runs things. And Chaos rules. And out of Chaos comes order …. and unfortunately it cycles back to Chaos again. That is a feature of our universe.
What does science tell us about chaos? In some chaotic systems, the transition between stability and chaos may exhibit hysteresis, meaning that the path taken during the transition may depend on the direction in which the parameters are varied. Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. Hysteresis often is a loop between chaos and stability, between order and disorder, between going up and coming down.
Chaos theory tells us that a disordered system begins to display more and more coherence and stability until it attains such a state of complexity, that the state begins to deteriorate. That is what we are seeing now. If we subscribe to the complete theory of chaos, society is all going to hell and there is nothing that we can do about it. The United States will cease to be the foremost economic power in the world.
Authoritarianism will take hold. Most of the “common folks” will be grubbing for a living. Consumerism will be an ephemeral dream from the past. The focus will be on survival and getting our daily bread. Governing will become more difficult as nations impotently try to provide security and prosperity for their citizens. The world is getting messier and more dangerous than ever. Disagreements, political polarization, fighting and human suffering abound. That’s the overall long term picture in The Complete Theory of Chaos.
The sad part is that some provocateurs embrace the chaos. Conspiracies circulate as fast as viruses. They foment distrust in all institutions, including the media and government. They want to ratchet up the hostility and instability and push society to the tipping point. Why? Again, because it gives them an identity in the echo chambers of the marginalized. They want to break everything up and start over. They want to smash societal pillars. The most dangerous ones are the religious zealots who do not fear death and destruction but welcome it because they believe in an invisible utopia that they will enter after their bodies turn to worm excrement. But most importantly, they want the egotistical recognition and life purpose to be known as smashing the rotting society. Otherwise they are nobodies in a frenzied world that doesn’t even know that they exist.
The logical conclusion to the events that we are seeing, is that there will be a very small middle class, and a large predominant lower class which are thralls to the technologically empowered upper classes. We have seen this before during the pre-Victorian era in England. You had the serf and lower classes and the elites. It was technology of the Industrial Revolution that empowered the lower classes and elevated them to middle class. Ironically, it is technology again that is reversing this trend today.
There is a big “BUT” to all of this. Our tribal society has undergone another massive change. It has undergone what is known in chaos theory as bifurcation. That’s when a path splits and then splits again and so on and so forth, until the thing looks like hundreds of bacteria colonies each jostling for a piece of agar agar real estate on the petri dish. Professor Alvin Toffler predicted this “niche-ification” in his book “Future Shock”. Not only has society broken into hundreds of niche shards, but so have consumer products. Think of how many brands of something so mundane as chewing gum that you had as a kid, compared to what is on the shelves now.
This bifurcation part of chaos also results in Loss of Chaos in some of the bifurcated niches or bubbles. Observable effects may include the disappearance of chaotic attractors and the emergence of periodic or quasi-periodic behavior in societal systems. The system may settle into a stable state or periodic orbit. And how does it do it? By changing parameters in the hysteresis loop. All the while, the overall system is going to hell in a handcart.
And that is the secret to surviving in these chaotic times. There are niches that are orderly. They are bubbles. You either have to build them or migrate to them. The characteristics of these bubbles, is that they are populated by tribes that give their identities back to them. Their sense of belonging and identity gives them strength of character to choose enlightenment, critical thinking, science over dogma and most importantly, truth over lies. It means embracing progress and applying it construction rather than destruction. It engenders a sense of caring over all of humanity, even for the flawed a**holes who want to bring it down. The niches that use technology to empower people will the be successful niches, but not the dominant ones. It’s because of the heart of darkness in the hearts of mankind. There is ultimately no kind in most of mankind. If there was, insulin would be free in America.
The secret to survival is building tribes again - enlightened tribes. It is getting down to grassroots to give the marginalized something to hold on to. They must have jobs in their communities. They must have the necessities of life. They must have dignity and they must be given the opportunity to contribute to the tribe. It’s not going to happen everywhere, and it’s not going to happen overnight. But maybe it will exist in the little niche that you call home. It will be a collection of those kinds of local tribes, in your neighbourhood that will preserve and advance humanity. It will be the bulwark against the dark forces buffeting society. It’s a paradigm for survival.
Thanks for reading.
100%
Really enjoyed this one Ken. Love the systems thinking. I tell people all the time, peace and tranquility in a person's life is a precious and fleeting thing.