“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”
Theodor Reik
When I think about what is going on in the world, I have to wonder whether the nonsense that we see all around us can go on forever. Now it goes without saying that human folly is a tapestry that envelops all of us in a pattern that generates pain, fear, violence and death at a prodigious rate. And that there has never been a full century in history when the majority of human beings lived in peace and happiness.
And this isn’t anything surprising. This is just what human beings do. We’ve always lived in a state of wary hostility even when we were nothing but small family groups living around a campfire to keep the cave bears and sabretooth tigers at bay. We’re not peaceful creatures. We may live now in enormous groupings measured in the millions and even billions of individuals but at all times and in all places, we seem to end up at each other’s throats. But, does this have to be? Could it be possible for humans to organize themselves into groups that interact in ways that lead to long term and abiding cohesion and satisfying cooperation?
The track record for utopian communities is definitely poor. Some of the religious groups have thrived and shown some ability to cooperate in many community endeavors but this is a small minority of the human race. And even they can’t completely eliminate anti-social behavior. Currently, communities that live in affluent areas and support a robust police presence and a conservative judicial philosophy seem to do the best at creating a workable human environment. But as we’ve seen since 2020 the forces of chaos can unleash barbarism even in the most affluent areas of the country.
But what if technology can provide a system to guarantee both social cohesion and material security? We’re seeing the dystopic version of this in the Chinese system of social control called the “Social Credit System.” Here those who don’t follow the rules are blacklisted and denied access to various important social advantages like good schools and better neighborhoods. But think of the opposite. Imagine a multitude of organizations that figure out ways to find compatible people and build social systems that bind them together and allow them to thrive. I imagine these as completely voluntary associations. And if someone doesn’t work out, they get the equity that they put into the system and are assisted to find another association where they would fit better. But such an ejection would be considered a failure by the organization, which would use the most advanced research to analyze personalities before candidates are accepted into the association.
In the next installment I’ll discuss what facets of life would and wouldn’t be included in these organizations. And I’ll talk about what I think are the human realities that make something like this extremely difficult to pull off outside of a science fiction story.