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currents420420 · 6 years

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People have proposed various methods for understanding society and how people interact with each other from a scientific standpoint, from dialectical materialism, to memetics, to analysis of incentive structures, even to viewing social groups as a kind of superorganism, with each individual as a cell in a body.

And I thought- what if you were to take those models and jam them together into some kind of big social theory Frankenstein?

We might use the work of B.F. Skinner as a jumping off point- known for his eponymous “Skinner Box,” a simple box that administered rewards or punishment in response to certain actions- pushing a lever, or moving to a particular part of the box. Organisms inevitably shifted their behavior in response to these incentives- even fruit flies, in a simple Skinner Box that heated up when they moved to one side of the box, soon changed their behavior, avoiding that side of the box.

Social interactions can be a bit like a Skinner Box- our actions are either rewarded or penalized by those around us, through everything from subtle expressions of approval or disapproval to more overt forms, and soon our actions shift in response to this.

How our actions are incentivized or disincentivized depends on the memes the people around us carry- memes not in the lolcat or SpongeBob sense, but in the older sense of the term, an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another. How the people around us will respond to our actions is shaped by the moral beliefs, political beliefs, religious beliefs, etc. of people around us- these collections of memes, or memeplexes, often contain a list of dos and don’ts, and people carrying these memes will incentivize or disincentivize our actions according to these scripts.

Sometimes people create their own value systems, but usually people just pick up the value systems they’re immersed in by their community through osmosis, or join communities because they find their value system appealing- but all value system memeplexes were created by someone at some point, to serve someone’s material interest- perhaps the interest of the community as a whole, or perhaps the interests of a specific group or individual.

A group of people sharing a value system act in tandem as a massive incentive system, affecting the behavior of everyone they contact- to understand what that looks like, let’s draw a rough diagram loosely inspired by a real life example, let’s say the culture war between the right and left surrounding the new age scene in 1970’s San Francisco.

Let’s represent these with color dots, and say the blue dots are right-wingers and the pink dots are left-wingers, and the orange/yellow ones new-agers.

And then from there, lets draw arrows to indicate the influence that people have over each other- with the size of the arrow indicating the degree of influence one person has on the other, with the color of the arrow representing which value system is guiding how they incentivize or disincentivize behavior- whether they’re following the values of right-wing politics, left-wing politics, or the new-age scene in how they reward or penalize the actions of the actions of that person. (It might seem strange to think that there would be overlap between right-wingers and new-agers, but those familiar with the new age scene in 1970’s San Francisco wouldn’t be surprised.) The social incentives which an individual receives, and the social reality that they experience, is determined by their relations to the people around them, consequently the set of social incentives one person receives will be radically different from that of another. Within right-wing social clusters, they would be rewarded for praising then-governor Ronald Reagan, in left-wing social clusters they would be rewarded for opposing the Vietnam war, in new-agey social clusters they would be socially penalized for expressing disbelief in crystal healing, and so on.

This is very simplified rendition, of course- a perfectly accurate one would be excessively cluttered- but this works as a lose rendition of how communities interact. People with shared beliefs cluster together, and influence each other, and the people they’re socially adjacent to, according to those shared values.

From this angle, social groups which coalesce around memplexes like this appear as almost a kind of collective organism, with each person being a cell in the body of some kind of massive behemoth- the memeplex serving as it’s genetic- or memetic- code, and the incentives serving as it’s nervous system.

Now, a lot of analysis which has used this sort of metaphor has framed it as strictly negative, but I don’t think that’s useful- these sorts of social organisms form any time you have multiple people together who have even vaguely shared beliefs about right and wrong, and I don’t think it’s meaningfully possible or desirable to prevent people from congregating around shared moral beliefs. We’re all cells in the bodies of vast superorganisms, we’re all conduits for forces far larger than ourselves, and that’s okay!

For lack of a better term, lets call these collective organisms “currents,” building off of the sense of the term meaning “particular ideas, opinions or feelings being present in a group of people.”

But also referencing it’s more common usage as referring to a current of water - something a person can get caught in the flow of. Or an electrical current, coursing through conduits.

Most social phenomenon can be described in these terms- groups of people acting in tandem to incentivize and disincentivize behavior according to a memetic script- from political movements, to religions, to cults, to ethical philosophies, to governments, even to corporations and artistic movements- all of these can essentially be thought of as different varieties of currents.

And there can also be currents within currents- for example all corporations are sub-currents of the super-current of capitalism, which is the prevailing hegemonic economic current.

The incentives used by currents include everything from material incentives/money, to expressions of approval or disapproval from peers, to legal punitive measures like imprisonment- even our internal feelings of guilt and pride are ultimately based on the value systems we’ve picked up through social interaction, and thus are just another form of incentive that currents use.

Morality, rather than being some unchanging concrete law encoded into the universe, is a function of this social phenomenon- people generate memetic scripts about which actions to incentivize and which to dis-incentivize, and the effect of this incentive structure will be to varying degrees beneficial, or detrimental, or beneficial to one group at the expense of another. Morality isn’t like the laws of physics as much as it’s like a form of technology, which must always be continually updated and improved to be more beneficial to more people.

We could also roughly sort currents according to the categories of Economic and Ideological- or in Marxist terms, Base and Superstructure.

These both overlap and have a reciprocal relationship, of course, but there is a definite divide between currents which incentivize mostly through material economic means, like corporations- let’s call these Base currents- and currents which incentivize behavior through more subtle ideological and social means, such as political ideologies and religions- let’s call these Superstructure Currents

Often there will be superstructure currents which emerge out of base currents, or base currents which emerge out of superstructure currents- consider the mission statement of the ethos of a company as a superstructure current emerging out of a base current, or a boycott organized by political group as a base current emerging out of a superstructure current- or the food program run by the black panthers, a base current emerging from a superstructure current which could have, had there been a successful revolution, evolved into a more larger and more complex base current- a socialist economy.

Our choices are so heavily shaped by the incentive structures of the social currents we interact with that insofar as we have any kind of autonomy as individuals, this is expressed more by what currents we choose to interact with or act as a conduit for than it is by what we choose to do within a given current.

While usually currents operate simply through people following the incentive structure while acting in their own self-interest, once an individual has fully absorbed the value system of a current, they will act according to that value system even beyond the point of self interest- whether this is a good or bad thing depends on the merit of the value system of that current- on how beneficial it is as a piece of moral social technology.

To give a few examples to illustrate this:

A: Two people in the desert come across water. Instead of splitting it evenly, the stronger of the two- who happens to lack a sense of guilt and conscience- simply kills the other, and takes all the water for themselves. In the absence of external incentive systems created by society, or internal incentives like guilt, self-interest plays out in horrific ways.

B: Someone donates money, but the primary reason they did so was because they knew they would receive social approval for doing so, and benefit in the form of social approval outweighed the cost to themselves.

C: Someone knowingly gives their life to save the lives of several other people. In this case there isn’t even the hypothetical chance that they did it purely for selfish approval-seeking reasons, since the cost was their own life, and whatever social approval they may gain, they will never experience it. This is, nonetheless, still a function of currents- it’s just that they have internalized the value system to the point where they adhere to it not just as a means to the end of gaining social approval (or avoiding social disapproval and punishment), but as an ends unto itself, and will adhere to it even at extreme personal cost.

D: Some incel creep, stewing in forums which treat Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian as heroes, goes on his own similar spree killing, ending the spree by taking his own life. This person also will never receive any social reward from their cohorts for their actions, due to being dead, but had internalized the value system of the incel ideology to the point where they will act on it even at extreme personal cost. The distinction is that the value system they’re acting selflessly in the service of is abhorrent.

So you can see that while example C and example D are both acting selflessly, example C is morally commendable, while example D morally repugnant- and while both example A and example B are acting selfishly, and example A is just as repugnant as example D, example B is only somewhat less commendable than example C- point is, acting selflessly does not inherently make you better than someone acting selfishly if the moral framework of the current you are selflessly adhering to is itself a malignant framework. (And this isn’t a static thing either, since a current that was once benign can become malignant).

So selfishness is, overall, Not Great, but the picture is a little more nuanced than “selfishness=bad, selflessness=good”

In practice, currents tend to have a certain anatomy- already in this image here we can see the different currents portrayed have a clusters within them, as well as a noticeable edge- let’s outline those to bring them into clearer focus.

When we do this, we can see an amoeba-like shape taking form- inner nuclei, and an outer membrane. Similar to how genetic code instructs cells on how to organize into an organism, this is how memetic codes instruct individuals on how to organize into collective superorganisms. And when the two memeplexes are more compatible, the superorganisms will overlap as they absorb each other, and when they memeplexes are less compatible, they’ll form more distinct boundaries, and attempt to siphon people away from each other, acting more directly in competition. Here we can see both the left-wing current and the right-wing current overlapping with the current of the new-age scene, making it a flashpoint for culture war sparring- this kind of scenario, where one current will become the arena in which two other currents battle each other, is far from uncommon. For example the culture war between the left and the right within the new age scene in the 70’s is mirrored today by culture war skirmishes between the left and the right within the Norse neopagan scene.

Currents have a tendency to try to place parts of the memeplex which are more appealing to outsiders on the outside membrane, and to place parts which are more alienating to outsiders near the nuclei- Scientologists don’t tell people about all the Xenu stuff right off the bat, you feel me? This especially applies when attempting to siphon people away from a competing current.

The Mormons actually have a term to describe this strategy- “Milk Before Meat”- the idea being that you must first expose potential converts to the Spiritual Milk- the more appealing parts of the memeplex- before exposing them to the Spiritual Meat- the more alienating parts of the memeplex.

In addition, incentive structures are usually more severe, and the rules more strict, the deeper you go- this similarly helps to ease the process by which someone is absorbed into a current.

In some of those nuclei clusters we can see noticeable power hierarchies, particularly the ones on the top and bottom right, which are clearly centered around specific individuals or groups who the rest of the cluster is subordinate to. To tie this more firmly into the real world, if the pink and blue represent the political left and the right in this model, then the nuclei-like clusters would be both informal and formal groups of political activists or discussion groups, with some of the more formally organized political groups having overt hierarchies and chains of command.

These kinds of power imbalances within a current can have a detrimental effect upon it, resulting in a kind of social decay.

To give an example, consider the reverend of a right-wing church gradually making his church more cult-like, consolidating his own power at the expense of his followers.

(A more thorough diagram might show how this church interacts with the larger current of Christianity, how the different denominations act as distinct yet connected currents, how they’ll act in opposition or in tandem depending on circumstance, and how they overlap with both the right and the left- but it would take years to create a diagram which accurately captured that, and even then it would be so complex as to be almost unreadable.)

A person who already has disproportionate power within the current- in this case the aforementioned reverend- shifts their value system in their own favor, re-writing the rules to their own benefit- (one popular path for the preacher gone full-blown cult leader is to re-write the rules to allow themselves to take multiple young wives, like David Koresh did)- here I’m representing that shift with the shift from blue to teal-ish in the upper right corner, representing a shift from the background - and this has a ripple effect on the cluster surrounding them,

shifting it so that the rest better serves the interests of themselves, or other people within the inner circle of leadership, often at the expense of everyone else within the cluster. The subtle shift from preacher to cult leader, and the attendant shift in the social mores of the church, doesn’t in any way benefit his followers, only himself. But given his disproportionate ability to reward or punish his followers, they fall in line out of fear of punishment, adopting the new value system, enforcing it on each other horizontally in addition to the pressure the cult leader is exerting from above, increasing the leaders power even further.

So while the popular narrative holds that we need hierarchy to maintain social harmony, in actuality hierarchy is in many ways harmful to social harmony- the powerful have every motivation to shift the rules in their favor, change the incentive structure of the current such that it acts to their benefit and exploits the people lower in the hierarchy, not to mention when there is a clear divide between the people who make or enforce social rules, and everyone else, the people who make or enforce social rules have little reason to follow them- cops, and Ted Kennedy, can get away with murder.

Of course, a lot of the times the social rules were already in their favor to begin with- hence why they had more influence in the first place. In either case, whether built into it from the beginning, or caused by societal rot as the powerful entrench their power, the end result is the same: the prevailing ideas and values are the ideas and values of the ruling class, and the interests of the ruling class disguised as the universal interest of everyone.

Luckily, hegemonic power attempting to entrench itself isn’t the only way a currents value system can shift, and there are other forces which act to counteract the entrenchment of the ruling class- put a pin in that, because we’re going to come back to that in a minute.

There’s also another kind of cluster within the currents in this chart, and that’s clusters of people who have become dissatisfied with the status quo of the social norms of the current they’re within - lets highlight those in grey.

These pockets of dissatisfaction generally emerge in response to legitimate grievances with real problems in the value system of the status quo (though they can also occasionally be founded on illegitimate grievances, like a formerly privileged class losing their privilege). Often these problems in the value system are tied into the kind of exploitative hierarchies I mentioned earlier - however, problems can exist within the value system of a current without them necessarily being to any exploitative classes benefit. But while often the source of the problem is that the rules have been written (or re-written) to benefit one group at the expense of the rest, occasionally there are problems in the value system of a current which are caused by simple human error, and aren’t to anyone’s benefit.

Lets say that the pocket of dissatisfaction within the left-wing current is people who feel the social norms around sex within the left are dysfunctional, while the pocket of dissatisfaction within the right wing current is people dissatisfied with the excesses of the ascendant evangelical right, perhaps specifically unhappy with the excesses of that preacher turned cult leader i mentioned earlier, who they’re socially adjacent to.

On one hand, these pockets of dissatisfaction can act as a point from which a competing current can attempt to siphon away individuals, in the form of people from the competing current reaching out to the people in the pocket and making the case that they would be happier if they were to leave their current for the competitor, in this case reaching out to people alienated by the church-gone-cult, and making a case to them that the social values within the left prevent this kind of reactionary religious excess- in this framework it can almost be represented as one current extending a pseudopod into the other current to draw in people:

This is a relatively simple example- one person reaching out to another- but a current can generate more complex social mechanisms to draw people from other currents into itself. For example consider a group like Redneck Revolt, which reaches out to people in right-wing leaning rural areas and recruits them into the left, or conversely, for an example from time frame of our diagram, the 70’s, the Jesus movement, a right-wing movement which recruited hippies into reactionary evangelical Christianity- unlike Redneck Revolt, which is pretty overt in what it’s goals are, the Jesus Movement was more deceptive, framing itself as a left-leaning progressive brand of Christianity when in actuality it’s most prominent figures were staunchly reactionary- just look at the Jesus Movement associated cult the Children of God, which marketed itself to hippies and presented itself as progressive to outsiders, when secretly it’s was preaching racist, homophobic, and antisemitic screeds to the people living on the cult commune.

An especially deceptive version of the milk before meat strategy comes into play here, in this case being used as a strategy to siphon people away from the left while concealing that intention, presenting a progressive face to suck in hippies and then indoctrinating them with far-right ideology once they’ve been ensnared. So while the strategy of one current extending a pseudopod into another to siphon away members may be pretty universal, it can either be done in ways which are more honest about the intentions, like Redneck Revolt, or it can be more underhanded and dishonest like the Jesus Movement was.

While these pockets of dissatisfaction can act as a weakness for another current to leech off of, they can also act to generate a corrective force, as people who have been harmed by the existing social norms within that current create an updated version of that value system, or an entirely new value system, in response to their material needs- so for example, this pocket in the diagram on the left represents women who had been harmed by the dysfunctional social mores around sex in the 60’s radical scene. This motivates them to create critiques of the “free love” norms of the 60’s radical scene, these critiques eventually developing into the ideological concepts which would later be described as “sex-negative feminism.”

In this diagram this is represented by the grey pocket of dissatisfaction becoming a new internal current, which acts in opposition to the current surrounding it on the point of contradiction- the red current within the pink current representing sex negative feminism within the larger context of the “free love” ideology which prevailed in much of the left.

This internal current spreads within the current, absorbing people who resonate with their critiques of the social status quo, eventually dispersing and incorporating itself into the larger surrounding current.

In the classic dialectical materialist model, the first current is the thesis, then the new current growing out of the pocket of dissatisfaction is the antithesis, then they synthesize into a new social status quo, which inevitably will have it’s own pockets of dissatisfaction, and the process repeats.

For example, as portrayed in this diagram, the problems inherent in the 1960’s radical scene’s social norms around sex was the flashpoint for the development of feminist critiques of sex and porn, then the flaws inherent within the sex negative framework, such as it’s sometimes excessively puritanical values and it’s ugly transphobia, spurred sex positive feminist critiques, then the flaws within the sex positive framework spurred a new wave of sex critical feminism, and so forth, this back-and forth dialectic working to shape the social norms around sex within social spaces on the left.

Now, I’m sure some would argue that in the back and forth between sex negativity and sex positivity, one of the two was reactionary, and emerged to retain the privilege of an oppressive class and undo progress. However I disagree, I think both sex positivity and sex negativity- and the back and forth dialectic between them- played a progressive role in improving the social norms around sex within the left.

The pattern of “people disenfranchised by the current value system create a new value system, and this theory spurs praxis which shifts social norms to better accommodate peoples needs” is visible everywhere- revolutionary action by the oppressed against the status quo is not only a force in driving social and moral advancement- it’s the primary force, the grinding dialectical engine at the heart of history and morality.

We can see this pattern playing out in the history of LGBT rights, where homophobic and transphobic laws and social mores- which are a harmful incentive system which unnecessarily punishes benign behavior- spurred the emergence of the lgbt rights movement, as the people harmed by homophobic and transphobic social mores and laws to joined together in radical action to change them.

Or for an example on a larger scale, consider the way feudalism was supplanted by liberalism and capitalism, particularly around such flashpoints as the French revolution- so we can see that this dialectical pattern can take different forms, and while sex critical feminism and sex positive feminism both acted internally within the left, the contradiction which spurred the decline of feudalism was more severe, with the liberal enlightenment current more fully separating itself from the feudal current before overtaking it.

Similarly, at this point it’s necessary for capitalism to be supplanted by an entirely new economic current- the contradictions at play here are too severe to be resolved through a more subtle internal dialectical process.

As noted earlier, the ruling class losing it’s power and privilege due to social progress creates it’s own pocket of dissatisfaction, which creates a harmful reactionary current.

Reactionary currents caused by an oppressive class losing their power can have a significant memetic ripple effect, outlasting the actual people who lost their power- consider the reactionary current which emanated from the aristocracy and monarchy losing their power after feudalism declined, which carried as it’s central narrative the notion that progressivism and democracy were bad, and that Jewish people, freemasons, and the Illuminati were behind them (especially in relation to the French revolution)- this narrative which continues to play a central role in reactionary movements to this day, from fascism to neoreaction- though some original flavor moldbuggian neoreactionaries attempted to swap out the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theorism for a sinister Calvinist conspiracy.

The Illuminati was a small short-lived enlightenment-era discussion group, but then some deranged pro-monarchist priest named Augustin Barruel accuses them of having caused the French revolution, and from there the telephone game effect exaggerated the Illuminati into the ultimate shadowy boogeyman in the reactionary narrative. More than anything else, the fact that the whole right-wing conspiracy theory about the Illuminati is directly traceable back to the reactionary response to the French revolution shows just how severe the memetic ripple from that reactionary current was, and how firmly caught up in it’s wake a lot of modern reactionaries are. Both fascism and neoreaction can be understood as essentially mutations of the reactionary current that emerged in response to the French revolution.

However, while reactionary currents can undo progress, nonetheless the general overall trend of history is toward improvement- the long moral arc of the universe bending toward justice.

Now, if power imbalances are harmful, and if these sorts of dialectical processes correct power imbalances through social upheaval, the question must be asked- why do power imbalances exist in the first place?

To answer this question with a question- how do you create an incentive system without that incentive system creating a power imbalance between those it rewards and those it punishes?

It’s a difficult question, with no easy answer!

Of course, this may drive many to deem currents and incentive structures inherently evil- “We must cast off all binds that might shape our behavior, destroy all the authoritarian social mores, reject all coercive social systems, and embrace individualism fully!” they might say. They might also tell you you’re “spooked” and tell you to read Stirner.

But the thing is, any time you have people in a group where some of them have shared beliefs about which actions are good or bad, these kind of social incentive systems are going to emerge- you could try to prevent people from doing anything which might in some way incentivize or dis-incentivize the actions of others, but how would you do this without in some way rewarding or penalizing their behavior yourself?

And more importantly, would we really be better off if there were no social incentive systems or consequences for action? Would we really be better off if abusers faced no social repercussions? And recall here that we’re talking not only about formal legal penalties but also decentralized social penalties like “people not liking you”- which, mind you, can be a pretty powerful social tool for shaping behavior!

So as you can see, there isn’t any way to escape this here, and the dream of a world without incentive structures is in actuality neither desirable nor possible. The goal shouldn’t be to abolish all social incentive structures, but rather to correct what is broken, to replace flawed incentive structures with better ones, and to improve upon the social technology of morality.

So, what is the takeaway from all of this?

Essentially, that both Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are right in some ways, and the way forward is to synthesize the two modes of thought- to merge the concepts of horizontal non-hierarchical social organization from Anarchists, with a sense of duty, unity, and discipline more akin to the ideas floated by Marxists in Engel’s On Authority, or Mao’s Combat Liberalism. Through a more complete understanding of currents and how they function, we can more effectively create a revolutionary current which can supplant the hegemonic capitalist current, driving the great dialectical engine of history and morality forward toward greater human flourishing and prosperity.

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currents420420 · 6 years

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And I thought- what if you were to take those models and jam them together into some kind of big social theory frankenstien?

We might use the work of B.F. Skinner as a jumping off point- known for his eponymous “Skinner Box,” a simple box which administered rewards or punishment in response to certain actions- pushing a lever, or moving to a particular part of the box. Even fruit flies, in a simple Skinner Box which heated up when they moved to one side of the box, soon changed their behavior in response to incentives, avoiding that side of the box.

How our actions are incentivized or disincentivized depends on the memes the people around us carry- memes not in the lolcat or spongebob sense, but in the older sense of the term, an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another. How the people around us will respond to our actions is shaped by the moral beliefs, political beliefs, religious beliefs, etc. of people around us- these collections of memes, or memeplexes, often contain a list of dos and don’ts, and people carrying these memes will incentivize or disincentivize our actions according to these scripts.

Sometimes people create their own value systems, but usually people just pick up the value systems they’re immersed in by their community through osmosis, or join communities because they find their value system appealing- but all value system memeplexes were created by someone at some point, to serve someone’s interest- perhaps the interest of the community as a whole, or perhaps a specific group or individual.

A group of people sharing a value system act in tandem as a massive incentive system, affecting the behavior of everyone they contact, in ways from subtle to overt- to graph out what that looks like, let’s draw a rough diagram loosely inspired by a real life example, let’s say the culture war between the right and left surrounding the new age scene in 1970’s San Franscisco.

Let’s represent these with color dots, and say the blue dots are right-wingers and the pink dots are left-wingers, and the orange/yellow ones new-agers.

And then from there, draw arrows to indicate the influence that people have over each other- with the size of the arrow indicating the degree of influence one person has on the other, with the color of the arrow representing which value system is guiding how they incentivize or disincentivize behavior- in this case, whether they’re following the values of right-wing politics, left-wing politics, or the new-age scene in how they reward or penalize the actions of the actions of that person. (It might seem strange to think that there would be overlap between right-wingers and new-agers, but those familiar with the new age scene in 1970’s San Fransisco wouldn’t be surprised.) The social incentives which an individual receives, the social reality that they experience, is determined my their relations to the people around them, and the set of social incentives one person receives will be radically different from that of another. Within right-wing social clusters, they would be rewarded for praising then-governor Ronald Reagan, in left-wing social clusters they would be rewarded for opposing the Vietnam war, in new-agey social clusters they would be socially penalized for expressing disbelief in crystal healing, and so on.

For lack of a better term, lets call these collective organism “currents,” building off of the sense of the term meaning “particular ideas, opinions or feelings being present in a group of people.”

But also referencing it’s more common usage as referring to a current of water - something a person can get caught in the flow of. Or an electrical current, coursing through anything which can become a conduit for it.

And there can also be currents within currents- for example all corporations are sub-currents of the super-current of capitalism, which is the prevailing hegemonic economic current.

We could also roughly sort currents according to the categories of Economic and Ideological- or in Marxist terms, Base and Superstructure.

Often there will be superstructure currents which emerge out of base currents, or base currents which emerge out of superstructure currents- consider the mission statement of the ethos of a company as a superstructure current emerging out of a base current, or a boycott organized by political group as a base current emerging out of a superstructure current- or the food program run by the black panthers as a base current emanating from a superstructure current, which could have, had there been a successful revolution, evolved into a more larger and more complex base current- a socialist economy.

To give a few examples to illustrate this:

A: Two people in the desert come across water. Instead of splitting it evenly, the stronger of the two simply kills the other, and takes all the water for themselves. (Also in this hypothetical they feel no guilt and won’t ever be intervened on by society, which is a bit of a stretch, sure, but I need an example to illustrate how selfishness plays out in the absence of any kind of incentive system.)

So selfishness is, overall, Not Great, but the picture is a little more nuanced than “selfishness=bad, selflessness=good”

When we do this, we can see an amoeba-like shape taking form- inner nuclei, and an outer membrane. Similar to how genetic code instructs cells on how to organize into an organism, this is how memetic codes instruct individuals on how to organize into collective superorganisms. And when the two memeplexes are more compatible, the superorganisms will overlap as they absorb each other, and when they memeplexes are less compatible, they’ll form more distinct boundaries, and attempt to siphon people away from each other, acting more directly in competition. Here we can see both the left-wing current and the right-wing current overlapping with the current of the new-age scene, making it a flashpoint for culture war sparring- this kind of scenario, where one current will become the arena in which two other currents battle each other, is far from uncommon. For example the culture war between the right and the left within the new age scene is mirrored today by culture war skirmishes between the right and left within the norse neopagan scene.

In addition, incentive structures are usually more severe, and the rules more strict, the deeper you go- this similarly helps to ease the process by which someone is absorbed into a current.

These kinds of power imbalances within a current can have a detrimental effect upon it, resulting in a kind of social decay.

To give an example, consider the example reverend of a right-wing church gradually making his church more cult-like, consolidating his own power at the expense of his followers.

(A more thorough diagram might show how this church interacts with the larger current of Christianity, how the different denoninations act as distinct yet connected currents, how they’ll act in opposition or in tandem depending on circumstance, and how they overlap with both the right and the left- but it would take years to create a diagram which accurately captured that, and even then it would be so complex as to be almost unreadable.)

A person who already has disproportionate power within the current- in this case the aforementioned reverend- shifts their value system in their own favor, re-writing the rules to their own benefit- (one popular path for the preacher gone full-blown cult leader is to re-write the rules to allow themselves to take multiple young wives, like David Koresh did)- here I’m representing that shift in value-system with the shift from blue to teal-ish in the upper right corner- and this has a ripple effect on the cluster surrounding them,

But given his disproportionate ability to reward or punish his followers, they fall in line, adopting the new value system, enforcing it on each other horizonally in addition to the pressure the cult leader is exerting from above.

So while the popular narrative holds that we need hierarchy to maintain social harmony, in actuality hierarchy is in many ways harmful to social harmony- the powerful have every motivation to shift the rules in their favor, change the currents incentive structures such that it acts to their benefit and exploits the people lower in the hierarchy, not to mention when there is a clear divide between the people who make or enforce social rules, and everyone else, the people who make or enforce social rules have little reason to follow them- cops, and Ted Kennedy, can get away with murder.

Of course, a lot of the times the social rules were already in their favor to begin with- hence why they had more influence in the first place. In either case, whether baked in from the beginning or a function of societal rot as the powerful entrench their power, the end result is the same: the prevailing ideas and values are the values of the ruling class, and the interests of the ruling class disguised as the universal interest of all.

These pockets of dissatisfaction generally emerge in response to legitimate grievances with real problems in the value system of the status quo (though they can also occasionally be founded on illegitimate grievances, like a formerly privileged class losing their privilege). Often these problems in the value system are tied into the kind of exploitative hierarchies I mentioned earlier - however, problems can exist within the value system of a current without them necessarily being to any exploitative classes benefit- sometimes the source of the problem is that the rules have been written- or re-written- to benefit one group at the expense of the rest, but occasionally there are problems in the value system of a current which are caused by simple human error, and aren’t to anyone’s benefit.

Lets say that the pocket of dissatisfaction within the left-wing current is people who feel the social norms around sex within the left are dysfunctional, while the pocket of dissatisfaction within the right wing current is people dissatisfied with the excesses of the ascendant evangelical right, perhaps specifically unhappy with the excesses of the preacher turned cult leader they’re adjacent to.

For a modern example consider a group like redneck revolt, which reaches out to people in right-wing leaning rural areas and recruits them into the left, or conversely, for another example from time frame of our diagram, the 70’s, the Jesus movement, a right-wing movement which recruited hippies into reactionary evangelical Christianity- unlike a redneck revolt, which is pretty overt in what it’s goals are, the jesus movement was more deceptive, framing itself as a left-leaning progressive brand of Christianity when in actuality it’s most prominent figures were staunchly reactionary- just look at the Jesus movement associated cult the Children of God, which marketed itself to hippies and presented itself as progressive to outsiders, when secretly it’s was preaching racist, homophobic, and antiemetic screeds to the people living on the cult commune. An especially deceptive version of the milk before meat strategy comes into play here, in this case being used as a strategy to siphon people away from the left while concealing that intention, presenting a progressive face to suck in hippies and then indoctrinating them with far-right ideology once they’ve been ensnared. So while the strategy of one current extending a pseudopod into another to siphon away members may be pretty universal, it can either be done in ways which are more honest about the intentions, like Redneck Revolt, or it can be more underhanded and dishonest like the Jesus movement was.

But on the other hand, these pockets of dissatisfaction act as a corrective force, as people who have been harmed by the existing social norms within that current create an updated version of that value system, or an entirely new value system, in response to their material needs- so for example, the pocket in the diagram represents women who had been harmed by the dysfunctional social mores around sex in the 60’s radical scene, which spurred them to create ideological concepts based off of critiques of the “free love” norms of the 60’s radical scene, ideological concepts which would later be described as “sex-negative feminism”

In the classic dialectical materialist model, the first current is the thesis, then the new current growing out of the pocket of dissatisfaction is the antithesis, they synthesize into a new status quo, which inevitably will have it’s own pockets of dissatisfaction, and the process repeats.

For example, as portrayed in this diagram, the problems inherent in the 1960’s radical scene’s social norms around sex (which was one of the points of weakness the Jesus movement exploited) was the flashpoint for the development of feminist critiques of sex and porn, then the flaws inherent within the sex negative framework spurred sex positive feminist critiques, then the flaws within the sex positive framework spurred a new wave of sex critical feminism, and so forth, this back-and forth dialectic working to shape the social norms around sex within social spaces on the left.

Now, I’m sure some would argue that in the back and forth between sex negativity and sex positivity, one of the two was reactionary, and emerged to retain the privilege of an oppressive class and undo progress. However I disagree- I think both sex positivity and sex negativity- and the back and forth dialectic between them- played a progressive role in improving the social norms around sex within the left.

The pattern of “people disenfranchised by the current value system create new value system, which spurs praxis which shifts social norms to better accommodate peoples needs” is visible everywhere- revolutionary action by the oppressed against the status quo is not only a force in driving social and moral advancement- it’s the primary force, the grinding dialectical engine at the heart of history and morality.

We can see this pattern playing out in the field of LGBT rights, where homophobic and transphobic laws and social mores- which are a harmful incentive system which unnecessarily punishes benign behavior- spurred the emergence of the lgbt rights movement, as the people harmed by homophobic and transphobic social mores and laws to joined together in radical action to change them.

As noted earlier, the ruling class losing it’s power and privilege due to social progress creates it’s own pocket of dissatisfaction, which creates a harmful reactionary current.

The Illuminati was a small short-lived enlightenment-era discussion group, but then some deranged pro-monarchist priest named Augustin Barruel accuses them of having caused the French revolution, and from there the telephone game of the memetic ripple effect exaggerated the Illuminati into the ultimate shadowy boogeyman in the reactionary narrative. More than anything else, the fact that the whole right-wing conspiracy theory about the Illuminati is directly traceable back to the reactionary response to the French revolution shows just how severe the memetic ripple from that reactionary current was, and how firmly caught up in it’s wake a lot of modern reactionaries are. Both fascism and neoreaction can be understood as essentially mutations of the reactionary current which emerged in response to the French revolution.

However, while reactionary currents can undo progress, nonetheless the general overall trend of history is toward improvement- the long moral arc of the universe bending toward justice.

To answer this question with a question- how do you create an incentive system without that incentive system creating a power imbalance between those it rewards and those it punishes?

It’s a difficult question, with no easy answer!

Any time you have people in a group where some of them have shared beliefs about which actions are good or bad, these kind of social incentive systems are going to emerge- you could try to prevent people from doing anything which might in some way incentivize or dis-incentivize the actions of others, but how would you convince people not to reward or penalize the behavior of others, without in some way rewarding or penalizing their behavior yourself?

So as you can see, there isn’t an “out” here, and the dream of a world without incentive structures is in actuality neither desirable nor possible. The goal shouldn’t be to abolish all social incentive structures, but rather to correct what is broken, to replace flawed incentive structures with better ones, and to improve upon the social technology of morality.

So, what is the takeaway from all of this? Essentially that both Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are right in some ways, and the way forward is to synthesize the two modes of thought- to merge the concepts of horizontal non-hierarchical social organization from Anarchists, with a sense of duty, unity, and discipline more akin to the ideas floated by Marxists in On Authority or Combat Liberalism. Through a more complete understanding of currents and how they function, we can more effectively create a revolutionary current which can supplant the hegemonic capitalist current, driving the great dialectical engine of history and morality forward toward greater human flourishing and prosperity.

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currents420420 · 6 years

Text

And I thought- what if you were to take those models and jam them together into some kind of big social theory frankenstien?

Sometimes people create their own value systems, but usually people just pick up the value systems they’re immersed in by their community through osmosis, or join communities because they find their value system appealing- but all value system memeplexes were created by someone at some point, to serve someone’s interest- perhaps the interest of the community as a whole, or perhaps a specific group or individual.

A group of people sharing a value system act in tandem as a massive incentive system, affecting the behavior of everyone they contact, in ways from subtle to overt- to graph out what that looks like, let’s draw a rough diagram inspired by a real life example, like say the turf wars between the far left and the far right in surrounding the neopagan scene- this is a good illustrative example to show how three different memeplexes, some compatible and some incompatible, might interact.

Let’s represent these with color dots, and say the blue dots are right-wingers and the pink dots are left-wingers, and the orange/yellow ones neopagans.

This is very simplified rendition, of course- a perfectly accurate one would be excessively cluttered- but this works as a lose rendition of how communities interact. People with shared beliefs cluster together, and influence each other and the people they’re socially adjacent to according to those shared beliefs.

And there can also be currents within currents- for example all corporations are sub-currents of the super-current of capitalism, which is the prevailing hegemonic economic current.

We could also roughly sort currents according to the categories of Economic and Ideological- or in Marxist terms, Base and Superstructure.

Often there will be superstructure currents which emerge out of base currents, or base currents which emerge out of superstructure currents- consider the mission statement of the ethos of a company as a superstructure current emerging out of a base current, or a boycott organized by political group as a base current emerging out of a superstructure current- or the food program run by the black panthers as a base current emanating from a superstructure current, which could have, had there been a successful revolution, evolved into a more larger and more complex base current- a socialist economy.

To give a few examples to illustrate this:

So selfishness is, overall, Not Great, but the picture is a little more nuanced than “selfishness=bad, selflessness=good”

In addition, incentive structures are usually more severe, and the rules more strict, the deeper you go- this similarly helps to ease the process by which someone is absorbed into a current.

These kinds of power imbalances within a current can have a detrimental effect upon it, resulting in a kind of social decay.

People with power shifts their value system in such a way that it better serves their own needs- here I’m representing that shift with the shift from blue to teal-ish in the upper right corner- and this has a ripple effect on the cluster surrounding them,

shifting it so that it better serves the interests of themselves and their cohorts, often at the expense of everyone else.

So while the popular narrative holds that we need hierarchy to maintain social order, in actuality hierarchy is in many ways harmful to the social order- the powerful have every motivation to shift the rules in their favor, change the currents incentive structures such that it acts to their benefit and exploits the people lower in the hierarchy, not to mention when there is a clear divide between the people who make or enforce social rules, and everyone else, the people who make or enforce social rules have little reason to follow them- cops, and Ted Kennedy, can get away with murder.

These pockets of dissatisfaction generally emerge in response to legitimate grievances with real problems in the value system of the status quo (though they can also occasionally be founded on illegitimate grievances, like a formerly privileged class losing their privilege). Often these problems in the value system are tied into the kind of exploitative hierarchies I mentioned earlier - however, problems can exist within the value system of a current without them necessarily being to any exploitative classes benefit- sometimes the source of the problem is that the rules have been written- or re-written- to benefit one group at the expense of the rest, but occasionally there are problems in the value system of a current which are caused by simple human error, and aren’t to anyone’s benefit.

On one hand, these pockets of dissatisfaction can act as a point from which a competing current can attempt to siphon away individuals, in the form of people from the competing current reaching out to the people in the pocket and making the case that they would be happier if they were to leave their current for the competitor- in this framework it can almost be represented as one current extending a pseudopod into the other current to draw in people from it:

For example consider a group like redneck revolt, which reaches out to people in right-wing leaning rural areas and recruits them into the left, or conversely the Jesus movement, a right-wing movement which recruited hippies into reactionary evangelical Christianity- unlike a redneck revolt, which is pretty overt in what it’s goals are, the jesus movement was more deceptive, framing itself as a left-leaning progressive brand of Christianity when in actuality it’s most prominent figures were staunchly reactionary- just look at the Jesus movement associated cult the Children of God, which marketed itself to hippies and presented itself as progressive to outsiders, when secretly it’s was preaching racist, homophobic, and antiemetic screeds to the people living on the cult commune. An especially deceptive version of the milk before meat strategy comes into play here, in this case being used as a strategy to siphon people away from the left while concealing that intention, presenting a progressive face to suck in hippies and then indoctrinating them with far-right ideology once they’ve been ensnared. So while the strategy of one current extending a pseudopod into another to siphon away members may be pretty universal, it can either be done in ways which are more honest about the intentions, like Redneck Revolt, or it can be more underhanded and dishonest like the Jesus movement was.

This creates a current within that current, which acts in opposition to it on the point of contradiction.

For example, the problems inherent in the 1960’s radical scene’s social norms around sex (which was one of the points of weakness the Jesus movement exploited) was the flashpoint for the development of feminist critiques of sex and porn, then the flaws inherent within that framework spurred sex positive feminist critiques, then the flaws within the sex positive framework spurred a new wave of sex critical feminism, and so forth, this back-and forth dialectic working to shape the social norms of the left around sex.

As noted earlier, the ruling class losing it’s power and privilege due to social progress creates it’s own pocket of dissatisfaction, which creates a harmful reactionary current.

Now, I’m sure some would argue that in the back and forth between sex negativity and sex positivity, one of the two was reactionary, and emerged to retain the privilege of an oppressive class and undo progress. However I disagree- I think both sex positivity and sex negativity- and the back and forth dialectic between them- played a progressive role in improving the social norms around sex within the left.

The Illuminati was a small short-lived enlightenment-era discussion group, but then some deranged pro-monarchist priest named Augustin Barruel accuses them of having caused the French revolution, and from there the telephone game of the memetic ripple effect exaggerated the Illuminati into the ultimate shadowy boogeyman in the reactionary narrative. More than anything else, the fact that the whole right-wing conspiracy theory about the Illuminati is directly traceable back to the reactionary response to the French revolution shows just how severe the memetic ripple from that reactionary current was, and how firmly caught up in it’s wake a lot of modern reactionaries are. Both fascism and neoreaction can be understood as essentially mutations of the reactionary current which emerged in response to the French revolution.

However, while reactionary currents can undo progress, nonetheless the general overall trend of history is toward improvement- the long moral arc of the universe bending toward justice.

To answer this question with a question- how do you create an incentive system without that incentive system creating a power imbalance between those it rewards and those it punishes?

It’s a difficult question, with no easy answer!

0 notes