A Brief Sketch of History: Subdivisions of the Iron Age

Large sedentary civilizations emerged where groups of people were forced to, and then rewarded by, central organization of labor - often in marginal environments (dry river valleys requiring irrigation, or in the special case that generalizes the rule, rice farming.) Because of the more rapid diffusion of ideas, the Silk Road regions (Asia, Middle East, Europe, North Africa) were advantaged over the rest of the world. (Hence, the description here is focused on the Silk Road macro-region.) Europe, in turn, was advantaged over China because geography predisposed the formation of multiple small states which acted like incubators for cultural selection; and Greece was advantaged over the rest of Europe given its peninsulas, mountains, and islands. This arrangement still allowed eventual cultural diffusion, overtaking China only with the printing press. The other factor which allowed Europe's situation to obtain was the separation of religious/moral authority and secular authority - a Pope, and kings (as opposed to the unity of these institutions throughout much of Islamic history, and the relative marginalization of religion in East Asian history.)

States demonstrate a natural cycle of 200-250 years. Even if a nation by the same name, on the same territory, with the same people, lasts longer than this, typically there is a transition period. The natural experiment of a large state on a fertile plain showing this pattern is China, but Rome also demonstrated the Principate and Dominate periods, the Ottomans had a similar pattern, and it can be seen elsewhere as well. In these rough divisions I am focusing on the Silk Road regions of the Old World - China, the Middle East, North Africa and and Europe.


THE IRON AGE: 1200 BCE-1800 CE

Early Iron Age: 1200 BCE-500 CE. Began in Europe with the Bronze Age Collapse, saw the rise of multiethnic administrative empires and coinage, and thus the Axial Age. In China, this contains the end of the Shang Dynasty, as well as the rise and fall of the Zhou and Han Dynasties. In Europe this can be further divided into Early Iron Age 1 (1200-600 BCE) featuring palace economies, and Early Iron Age 2 with the later development of oligarchic rule and early market economies.

Middle Iron Age: 500-1500 CE. Roughly co-extensive with the medieval period. in Europe this begins with collapse of Western Roman Empire, the weakening of the Eastern Roman Empire, the collapse of Persia and the spread of Islam. In China, it begins earlier with the end of the Han Dynasty. The Middle Iron Age is characterized by the spread of supra-ethnic philosophies and the dissolution of large empires, which can be thought of as an ecological model of cooperation within empires no longer exceeding competition within empires; oligarchies quarelled amongst themselves, and social or ethnic outsider groups benefiting from cultural diffusion (Germanic tribes in Europe, or the Yellow Turban Rebellion in China.) This period is marked by states and peoples developing a sense of identity if not patriotism, and especially by nomads occasionally overwhelming established states, with the Mongols as the military high water mark of nomads in history, with their decline signaling the end of this period.

Late Iron Age: 1500-1800 CE. In the West this contains the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Age of Discovery and Enlightenment. In Russia, it starts with the Great Stand on the Ugra and eastward expansion. In China, it's the parallel end of the Yuan Dyansty. Ultimately it begins with the spread of gunpowder, as seen in the gunpowder kingdoms, as well as the printing press, which had its greatest impact in Europe both for the good (Europe's domination of the world starting in this period) and the bad (religious civil wars as Northern Europe could communicate more easily.) At this time, the technological advantage of sedentary societies began to overwhelm that of nomads. Simultaneously, the benefit of technological innovation in the crucible of a sort of geographically-enforced natural federalism in Europe allowed Europe to outstrip China and colonize the world. The use of gunpowder as a source of energy more powerful than human or animal muscle anticipates the Industrial Age. Like the Mongols, Napoleon was the high water mark of Iron Age warfare, and was ultimately undone by the home of the Industrial Age, the United Kingdom.


Though not the focus of the post, the Industrial Age comes with its own subdivisions: the first wave in 1790-1830 with steam and water power leading to factories, materials extraction and textiles, an interim with three "transition wars" in the West (the Crimean War, American Civil War, and Franco-Prussian War; the Taiping Rebellion still appeared very much like a late Iron Age religious War, like a Thirty Years War compressed into half the time) with the second industrial revolution 1870-1910 converting industrial power into consumer goods; this culminated in World War I, the first industrialized war.

Physical Topography (of the American West) Associated with Human Personality

You can find the paper here. I have only read the abstract since there's a paywall. Questions: how does this correlate with the settlement patterns discussed in Albion's Seed, in this genetic analysis, or the Bad Stripe? (The Bad Stripe roughly correlates with Greater Appalachia in the former article, or the Border Reavers in Albion's Seed.)

Götz, F.M., Stieger, S., Gosling, S.D. et al. Physical topography is associated with human personality. Nat Hum Behav (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0930-x

The Roots of Universal Moral Authority in Medieval European Christendom - Benefits to States and Individuals

Reading about many conflicts in medieval European history - especially bitter protracted ones - you're often struck by the appeal to legal proceedings. Take this example about Joan of Arc's experience after being captured during the Hundred Years War:

The trial for heresy was politically motivated. The tribunal was composed entirely of pro-English and Burgundian clerics, and overseen by English commanders including the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Warwick. In the words of the British medievalist Beverly Boyd, the trial was meant by the English Crown to be "a ploy to get rid of a bizarre prisoner of war with maximum embarrassment to their enemies". Legal proceedings commenced on 9 January 1431 at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. The procedure was suspect on a number of points, which would later provoke criticism of the tribunal by the chief inquisitor who investigated the trial after the war.

Under ecclesiastical law, Bishop Cauchon lacked jurisdiction over the case. Cauchon owed his appointment to his partisan support of the English Crown, which financed the trial. The low standard of evidence used in the trial also violated inquisitorial rules. Clerical notary Nicolas Bailly, who was commissioned to collect testimony against Joan, could find no adverse evidence. Without such evidence the court lacked grounds to initiate a trial. Opening a trial anyway, the court also violated ecclesiastical law by denying Joan the right to a legal adviser. In addition, stacking the tribunal entirely with pro-English clergy violated the medieval Church's requirement that heresy trials be judged by an impartial or balanced group of clerics.

From this excerpt you can clearly see that her trial was hardly a model of justice and impartiality. But the very idea of a trial, and an appeal to fairness and an authority beyond the people with the most swords, is what is remarkable. Yes, the English bent rules, but there were rules to follow and they had to give at least a minimal appearance of following them. They didn't just immediately and gleefully execute her with no explanation beyond "she frustrated our goals and we don't like her."

Compare: confronted with the victorious army of Kublai Khan, the last Song emperor jumped to his death along with other high-ranking officials, rightly fearing their fates should they fall into the Mongols' hands. Was there a court they could appeal to for release or at least better treatment? An argument they could make to Kublai from universal moral authority, about what was the right and fair principle to obey? How could these concepts even make sense? For China and the Mongols, there could be no appeal, indeed no idea of an appeal beyond either's physical authority as it stemmed from each mans' desires - that is to say, force.

The benefit of an organization whose authority was mostly moral is something that those of us who are secular-minded may ignore, as it stemmed from supernatural claims. We are often tempted to write off medieval Europe as a thousand-year failure mode, an Iron Age Orwellianism, or a Mad Max dystopia from the standpoint of ancient Roman citizens. While it was all those things, the seeds of Europe's positive divergence were being sown, and having a superimposed moral authority, separate and acknowledged by all as above Earthly concerns, was a unique arrangement and seems likely to have been part of it. There are many ways to think about this - two might be that warring parties both respecting the Church's authority created an in-theory neutral arbiter; another is just that more players makes a richer political ecosystem that is less zero-sum. This ultimately made possible rule of law and not of men, the possibility of service to principle rather than person. The destructiveness of rational warfare in eg East Asia was possibly part of why Europe was able to pull ahead.

It may have been quite fortunate that the church was based in one city that fell to barbarians (Rome) and another that saw its territory shrink until it was overwhelmed by infidels. The Western Church then was a kind of virtual state that could coexist with the others fighting for survival in Western Europe. It was a fortunate accident of timing, with Europe's isolating geography (mountains near the coast and indented coastlines) favoring continued separation. In an alternate history where Belisarius succeeded in reuniting the Roman Empire, European religious history might look much more similar to that of the Middle East, where religious and political authority were inseparable (or Chinese history where it was clearly peripheral) and there was no chance for mediation to calm wars and allow the concept of rule of law to emerge.

This 2018 paper by Hill, recently covered on MR argues in more detail about why the concept of the rule of law emerged when it did, though I disagree that it's the ideology itself that was more disposed to resulting in such a concept, rather than the geographical, political and military context of each. That is to say, if we re-ran history with the holy books switched, eg Mohammed in a cave writing the Bible, and the Qu'ran getting vetted and adopted at the Council of Nicea, I think the result would have been largely the same.

In the twentieth century, the U.N. has clearly appealed to a sense of universal rights much more than previous international forums did - the League of Nations and the Concert of Europe before it were both practical negotiation venues, but the U.N. makes claims to mediating universal morality. I can't help but wonder to what extent that has been intentional, and can't help but worry even as an atheist that it's easy to for states and peoples to reject non-supernatural moral claims as being made up by human beings, only and always for pragmatic self-interest.

Trust and Progress

Tyler Cowen talks with Paul Romer about social norms that encourage scientific advancement, or don't. Romer refers to the actually very puzzling question about why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China and (embellishing) it was one of this cacophony of squabbling medieval kingdoms that eventually did it. Romer says,

One of my predecessors at the World Bank as chief economist, Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn’t China develop the industrial revolution. His argument is basically that China — because there were so many people looking and discovering; they discovered a lot of things, like gunpowder, steel, printing, and so forth — but what China didn’t do was invent the social system we call science. They had some knowledge and some technology. They didn’t invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science.

I found that argument really compelling, and I’ve taken it one step further and think that part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust, and that science indirectly gave us those things.

For any country around the world, it’s worth thinking about — if you’re short on that, if there’s a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what’s true, if there’s norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about, how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth, and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us?

There's a section near the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (the best alternate history book ever written hands-down) where an alchemist - actually a shady huckster who is aware that what he is doing is just a con - gets caught "transmuting" lead into gold in a demonstration for a local potentate in some Persianate Central Asian state when his hollow, gold-containing ladle is discovered.

He gets his hands cut off in punishment, then swears that he will only work to advance knowledge from then on. This ends up being the start of something like what we recognize as science. Of note, the divergence point in this world is that the Black Plague wiped out all of Europe, turning history into a zero-sum contest between the Islamic world and China)* Because of the reformed con man, science advances much as it did in our history, except with different names (ie, qi for electricity.)

That said, while many hucksters have been caught at their game, few have so dramatically changed their internal incentive structure in response - though this passage highlights the importance of trust and an earnest search for knowledge that may better the world in general. The importance of developing a general background of trust is difficult to overstate.


*Interestingly enough, in Stirling's Conquistador, Alexander the Great lives to a ripe old age and succeeds in his dream of uniting the lands from Europe to the Indus into a macro-state; the resulting world is one of unity and stability, therefore stagnancy, where by what would have been the 20th century of the Christian era they are barely medieval, and China appears to have been overrun by the Tocharians.

The Beginnings of a Voluntary State Free From the Tyranny of Territory

States are inefficient, with governments subject to severe free-riding (at the best of times) and exploitation by violent psychopaths (at the worst.) They are involuntary - you are in a state, usually, because of an accident of your birth. As animals that take up space and as modern humans dependent on agriculture, we occupy a territory that belongs to us, as does our state. The central job of the state is to maintain a monopoly on violence, in order to protect us from violence. (This is why the Somali "government" is a joke, because they can only protect you if you're within about four blocks of their office. You can emigrate, but at a massive price (learning a new language, new customs, new social network, etc. - ask people who are trained as physicians and leave their home country due to a civil war or persecution of their ethnic group, and end up driving a cab or running a shop somewhere safer.)

Consequently this lack of competition means there is a high barrier to emigration, and states often drag in perpetual suboptimality until invasion, civil war, or economic disaster brings about a fundamental transformation. (More on this here.) Much potential human flourishing is left on the table, so to speak. Charter cities are a partial attempt to free us from the tyranny of territories - if you can go across a bridge and be subject to the courts and business laws of a more sensible successful country than the one that governs your home, that minimizes emigration cost (you don't even have to, you just commute.) The end-goal of such arrangements would be that, if (for example) the DMV sucks in your state, you could announce you were subject to the DMV rules of another state. Of course this sounds absurd, and the tyranny of physical territory overrules this. The political scientist that could solve this problem would go down in history.

Of course there are supranational cultural entities that serve some of these functions somewhat - religions and corporations immediately come to mind - but there's a new attempt to get past this: Safetywing, which aims to become no less than a virtual country. It is starting as a safety net (of the sort that wealthy welfare states already provide.) Read more about this idea here. Of course this will cost money, and if you're already paying into your own country's safety net based on the tyranny of territory, you might not have money for a second one. This is why wealthy (or at least upper middle class) people from developed countries should buy into this early, both to make it sustainable, and also to give it prestige value.

I expect that should this actually take off, there will be massive resistance to it from the mutual-recognition cartel of the legacy states; see here for an example of the kind of reaction one might expect if you have physical territory to attack. The virtualness of the project may protect it in this regard, but I hope that Safetywing has anticipated that. Note that nation states are often openly hostile to supranational entities (see: Islamic states and other religions; China and any religion.) It could be that this virtual state could be the next supranational level of social organization, like religions and corporations, but it should expect to be identified as a threat in the same way that China sees Falun Gong.

I will be joining this, and I strongly encourage you to consider it.

The 200 to 250 Year Life Cycle Of Great Powers

Any theory of cycles of 200 to 250 years in the life of empires or nations immediately brings to mind China. If such a phenomenon exists, it would be China where it first became apparent, and where in fact it did first become apparent to historians. In successive states established in the same physical territory (dictated by the geography of a fertile wet agricultural plain united by waterways) with basically the same people, many other variables are taken out of the equation. This was noticed at least by the Ming Dynasty by Persian travelers observing China; again by Tytler and/or Detoqueville in the nineteenth century; and most recently by John Glubb in Fate of Empires.

It's often instructive to swap out the lenses we use to view various regions of the world's history. In this way, China might have followed Europe's path (of a single empire followed by splintered states that never quite regained the same territory.) Or conversely, China is a Europe where the Roman Empire fell only to be replaced by a continent-wide Frankish Empire, then a Norse Empire, then a Habsburg Empire. In fact, what we think of as the Roman Empire is regarded by historians as having two periods that are almost like separate civilizations, the earlier Principate and the later Dominate, separated by the Crisis of the Third Century. Each of those two periods was around 250 years.

The Ottoman Empire was once viewed as having reached its peak under Suleiman and then declined, but more recent scholarship has reached the consensus that the Empire underwent a partly-intentional transformation (starting prior to Suleiman's death, and not entirely a negative one.) This divides the Ottoman Empire's history into two halves. The second is roughly 300 years but extends well into the period when the Ottoman Empire was regarded as "the sick man of Europe."

If we take the Byzantine Empire as starting with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, then the first three dynasties take it to 711 (235 years) - the Leonid, Justinian and Heraclian families. (I avoid the use of "dynasty" because what we call a dynasty in Western empires is different than the way we use this word in Chinese history. In the Chinese sense, the Roman Principate and Dominate were dynasties, as was the Byzantine entity spanning the Leonid, Justinian and Heraclian periods.) You could argue reasonably for an earlier start to the Leonid dynasty in 457, to make this period 254 years.) This was followed by the Twenty Years Anarchy. During that period the proto-medieval structures which appeared going in the Roman Dominate matured into a smaller fully medieval state which emerged from the anarchy a very different civilization. In Western Europe, we find it a bit comical that the Pope and Charlemagne thought they were still Romans, even superficially. But just as with China's dynasties, we shouldn't take medieval Byzantium's claims to being the same political entity, just because it happened to still occupy some of the same territory.

It's very easy to cherry-pick history, once you have a Great Theory. And it's always easy to draw parallels between periods in history (here are five to the modern day), but a 200-250 year cycle is of obvious interest to American readers.

Why Is Pursuit of Pleasure a "Third Rail" in Central Authoritarian Agricultural Societies?

A friend related the following to me. While she was an undergraduate, her grandparents came to visit and took her out to lunch. At the time she was dating a man of Middle Eastern descent. During the meal it became clear that her grandparents' true mission was not to buy her lunch, but to warn her about Middle Eastern men. They didn’t seem to be disturbed by her being with a non-Christian or ethnically different partner, so much as they were worried about her being in danger of abduction. "You know, when you get married and go back to their countries with them, you have no rights," her grandfather said. "Oh Grandpa," my friend responded somewhat innocently, "I really have no intention of marrying this guy." Her grandparents’ faces drained of color, and the conversation ended, and the rest of the meal was spent in icy silence.

To put it plainly: they were horrified that their granddaughter basically just told them that she was in this relationship for the sex, with no intention of commitment to marriage or reproduction. For them, this was far more serious than the prospect that she would be kidnapped and effectively enslaved! Why? Because she was acknowledging that she was making decisions in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Of course in American culture and in most places, there is a double standard between men and women, but men are not immune to such attitudes either, though the social consequences are rarely as severe.

This may be part of why homosexual relationships have produced negative reactions across so many cultures - certainly not in all, but in enough for it to be a pattern. At least as often as they are accepted, they are either ignored or reviled. Why? Because gay sex can only result in pleasure. By these standards, an abomination if ever there was one!

But it's not just sex; it's the discussion of pursuit of pleasure in general. In very formal settings, any acknowledgement that you do something just because you like it feels very inappropriate. At a morbidity and mortality conference (where surgical residents stand up and accept blame for bad outcomes of cases - few settings are more formal or tense) I noted with some surprise that a physician even noting that he enjoyed his breakfast was met with uncomfortable laughter, eye-rolling or shifting in seats. The acknowledgement of enjoying any sort of physical pleasure seems to decrease, the more formal the setting, and this was an excellent example.[1] This is so basic to social reality that we don't notice or question it. Why is this?

Allan Tate said that civilization is an agreement to ignore the abyss. This is actually too limited. More to the point, civilization is an agreement to ignore affect - to ignore the primary drives in our basic animal code, and the reactions they cause in us, and the abyss causes anxiety. So it's not just the pursuit of pleasure we avoid, but the recognition of and response to affect in general - because affect can be dangerous. In social animals, affect is contagious, which is very effective for cohesion in hunter-gatherer groups below the Dunbar number (150 people.) But in any large civilization where we're constantly interacting with strangers in (necessarily) formalized settings, paying attention to and reacting to the affect on others' faces would seem to be inherently destabilizing. Try it when you go for a walk in a busy city some time - at best, you'll quickly be exhausted, and at worst you'll get into fights. And constantly talking about your pursuit of pleasure with strangers can make people resent you, or compete with you, or avoid you, and in general is a ticket to negative affect. The higher the stakes, the less we do it. In therapy training, we're "de-programmed" so that we don't just notice, but pursue affect, even when it flashes across faces for only a moment, and this de-programming is very difficult.

If this theory is correct, there should be other trends of affect-generating cultural practices that differ between hunter-gatherer and centralized agricultural societies, and that are at their most intense in the oldest longest-centrally-organized agricultural society (i.e. China and East Asia); and that are at their most intense in formal settings, like religion and many high-prestige professions.[2] To this end:

• I have found qualitative assertions (but not quantitative studies) that homosexuality is more tolerated in more traditional societies, often with specific institutionalized roles.
  
  
• Gender roles in general become more rigid in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.
  
  
• There is a trend toward brighter colors in the art and clothing of cultures that more recently converted from hunter-gatherer to agricultural (or "small-village" agricultural to nation-state.) Yes, bright colors are often used in nation-states - in specific settings (religious displays, holidays, weddings.)
  
  
• Drums tend to disappear as a central musical instrument in this transition as well, only to have re-appeared recently in the West in rock and hip-hop - possibly because, ironically, our wealth has allowed us to ignore social restrictions and revert back to our "native state" as hunter-gatherers, as in Hanson's theory of farmers vs foragers.
  
  
• In the hunter-gatherer to centralized agricultural authority transition, hallucinogens become restricted (often to religious ceremonies) or outright banned.
  
  
• There are exceptions to these rules, in the sense that these things which disappear in the transition still do appear under closed settings controlled by and useful to central authority - war chants, group initiations, religious artifacts and ceremonies, and team sports with big audiences.
  
  
• Bright colors, rhythmic music, hallucinogens, the spread of gender equality and tolerance of sexual minorities, and sex-openly-for-pleasure all reappeared in the West as we transitioned from agricultural back to hunter-gatherer values in the late 20th century, as per Hanson's theory.

These affect-restricting cultural practices can be thought of as a Dunbar's number multiplier, by decreasing the frequency of group fission events. Others are exapting family psychology to the state (leader as father figure, fellow soldiers as brothers) and organizing society into stable hierarchies (family, village, ethnic group, state.) If we assume that agricultural states ultimately win out over foragers - which they consistently have since the Great Stand on the Ugra and the fall of the Yuan Dynasty - then there is a form of selection for groups which develop such multipliers.[3]

A major cultural technology and Dunbar's multiplier is controlled tolerance. It is difficult for people with different moral systems to closely co-exist. The Ottomans had the millet system, China and the Mongols had a theocratically laissez faire approach, and in the modern West many countries build freedom of conscience into the law, though avoiding leg-breaking and pocket-picking by neighbors with different convictions was realistically much easier in Jefferson's wide-open agrarian utopia.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Psychiatrists are less formal than surgeons in our meetings and I am pleased to report much more comfortable talking about food.

[2] Americans in particular might object that there are many high-status arenas in the U.S. which are now fairly informal, for instance technology, the entertainment industry, or academia. I would argue that apparently informal, high-prestige professions are actually formal in a more complex way. This is clearest in academia, but true for the others, that this apparent informality is not so much superficial as an another layer of complexity to let the ambitious signal that they can maneuver even under the paradox of forced "relaxed collegiality." Sure someone can wear jeans to work and set their own hours - but come back in 15 years and see who's setting budgets, and it probably won't be them.

[3] The current greatest combination of Dunbar's number multipliers remains China at about 9.2 million.

Australia and USA Populating at the Same Rate: Coincidence?

I wondered: how does Australia's current population density compare to the U.S.'s at the same point in its history? Australia's first colony was founded in 231 years ago in 1788; the future U.S.'s first continuous colony that was a center of population expansion (i.e., Jamestown, not St. Augustine or Roanoke) was founded in 1609.

Today, 231 years after its founding colony in 1788,* Australia has a population of 25,203,198, giving a population density of 7.93 people per square mile.

In 1840, 231 years after its founding colony in 1609, the USA had 17,069,453 people. Taking into account its size at the time, the U.S. had almost exactly the same population density with 7.92 people per square mile.

Interesting, but possibly coincidental. The first observation to make is accessibility: from the period 1788 until today, it's much easier to get to a new land and spread out from one's landing location than it was in the period 1609 to 1840. Australia is also further away from Europe. Had Australia been settled at the same time, I doubt it would have filled as fast. There also seems to have been more reproduction with natives in North America, and also a denser native population (for the continent, an upper bound around 20 million is often estimated, versus Australia with 2 million.)

Related to its lower pre-colonial native population, Australia is also not as innately hospitable as the U.S. Large portions of the coast are inaccessible swamp, and a massive portion of the interior is desert with poor soil. Because the coasts are much better, Australia's population in 2019 is 86% urbanized, versus 10.8% in the U.S. in 1840.

Related to not being as hospitable, Canada is the obvious comparator. Canada at a similar point after its first colony had a density of 0.29 people per square mile, more than 27 times lower than the U.S. at that time, despite beyond as close or closer. (It's still 8 times lower today, despite having a 5-year head start.)


*I'm not counting the ancient Indian contact with Australia, which is now genetically confirmed. It turns out that's right around the time dingoes appeared - likely not a coincidence.

Complex Dynamic Systems Like Cells, Humans, and Nations Cannot Avoid Cycles of Paroxysmal Disillusionment and Suffering

The following principles apply to any dynamic complex system, including organisms, individual people, or organizations - corporations, nations, or religions. They demonstrate that distortions will inevitably accumulate in the behavior of such a system, causing paroxysmal shocks and suffering.

Let's define a system as a set of components discrete from the rest of the universe. Let's define dynamic complex systems as ones that are high-information relative to the rest of the universe around them, high enough that in the absence of opposing forces, entropy passively favors irreversible changes happening to the arrangement of the system's elements which make it no longer discrete.[1] If such a set of components that exists now is going to exist more-or-less unchanged in the future, it has to perform actions[2] - it has to be dynamic - which reduce its own entropy at the expense of the rest of the universe.[3] The rest of the universe may include similar systems.[4] (Going forward, when I say "system" I mean "complex dynamic system.")

The seven principles are outlined below, then described in more detail.

1. A system must be mostly concerned with its own perpetuation, or it will not persist. "If a complex dynamic system has been around for a while, it's designed to last and expend energy to do so."
   
   
2. It must do this by reflecting - reacting to - aspects of the rest of the universe. Aspects of the rest of the universe important enough to make the system tend to develop ways to change its state in response to them are called stimuli. A more familiar statement of this principle: "That which gets measured, gets addressed."
   
   
3. A measurement always contains less information, and is therefore not a full or fully accurate representation, of the thing being measured. Perception cannot exactly be reality; "this is not a pipe."
   
   
4. Over time, the focus on self-perpetuation leads a system to become concerned with itself to the point of minimizing the importance of or responses to aversive stimuli to avoid altering its state (which is also aversive.) "Everything that gets measured, eventually gets gamed" or "All metrics eventually become useless." (Also known as Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law.)
   
   
5. The system's responses become increasingly un-moored from the external world, favoring its own perpetuation over other functions, and/or having a severely distorted model of the world and reaction to stimuli. "Eventually, everything becomes a racket [and/or gets delusional]." Another term for this is representational entropy.
   
   
6. The distortions accumulate until a sufficiently destructive stimulus occurs (a shock), which either reorients the system (usually accompanied by severe aversive stimuli), or destroys the system. If the system survives, such shocks will happen repeatedly, but necessarily unpredictably. This is called inherent cyclic crisis.
   
   
7. This is inherent to any self-perpetuating dynamic complex system, and because these shocks are correctly perceived as worsening survival, they cause inevitable suffering. We can call this the Final Noble Truth, a vague parallel to the Buddhist First Noble Truth.

Following is an expansion on each principle.

Principle 1: "If a complex dynamic system has been around for a while, it's designed to last and expending energy to do so." If a system is going to continue existing, a top priority on self-preservation is mandatory, and self-preservation must be the primary influence on perception by and reactions of the system. Since Darwin, thinking of organisms in this way is not revolutionary. But the same principle applies to any other complex system, including human organizations. Corporations have a relatively clear function in this way (they can't keep making money for shareholders if they don't keep existing) but it's more surprising for most of us to think of religions, countries, or volunteer organizations in this way. The converse: if a complex dynamic system is not expending energy on its self-perpetuation, it will not exist for long. (Many apparent mysteries, like the transparently weak business plans of many a Web 1.0 company, are resolved on realizing that they are not in equilibrium and will perish quickly. And indeed they did.)

Principal 2: "What gets measured, gets addressed." This seems obvious enough, especially to those of us at all interested in organizational dynamics, but principal 1 directs the kinds of things that have to be measured if the system will persist, and principal 2 says that there is always some difference between the measurement, and the totality of the outside world; that is, there is always going to be at least some important information missed, and what is missed cannot be acted upon. Concretely speaking, genes reflect the outside world by establishing sensor networks that interact across the inflection point (the cell membrane, or in the case of multicellular organisms, the body.) Some sensor networks have become very rapid and fine-grained reflections of the outside world - xenobiotic metabolism enzymes (which have reacted in only millennia, and the genetics differ considerably even between groups of humans), adaptive immune systems (which also differ between groups of humans and react in minutes), and of course nervous systems are the paragon.[5] But all of them make sacrifices and do not (cannot) sample all of the possible information available. It should be pointed out that living things do not have to constantly repeat the mantra "what gets measured gets addressed" because that's how they're already built and behave, automatically and obligatorily, as was the case for eons' worth of their ancestors. This is not the case with human organizations, which are new developments in nature, and may not be in equilibrium - so those organizations that you notice do not measure important (survival-supporting) data are unlikely to exist for long either. Whatever corporations or their descendants exist in a million years, it won't be ones that didn't respond to relevant metrics. (Added later: A more generalized description of this process is called value capture, as described by philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen at the University of Utah. Very briefly, value capture occurs when an individual encounters a group with a simplified, quantified version of their own values, often driven by considerations external to the agent. The additional component relative to "what gets measured gets addressed" is that in value capture, there is feedback from the simplified quantified value system to the individual, distorting and oversimplifying their own values.)

Principle 3: Perception cannot exactly be reality; "this is not a pipe." Representations - measurements - are never the same as the things themselves, and incentives are never aligned perfectly with desired outcomes (almost trivial; otherwise, perfect alignment means identity, that is, the incentives are the desired outcomes.) There must always be a limit on information collected, and inferences are not always correct. There is infinite information a system could in theory collect about the universe (looking for correlations between each datum or set of data), but the system is more likely to perpetuate itself the more the information it collects, and the more impactful the information it collects. It is this design choice by the system to sense survival-relevant data that turns one of infinite facts about the world around the system into a stimulus. Obviously, which things it chooses takes as stimuli - what it measures - are relevant. (Not to mention if the system is in competition, especially with others using the same resources, there are time and resource limitations on the system on how much data to collect before altering its state.) The implication is that there is a limited set of information collected out of all possible information - what the system receives as stimuli - and these stimuli are necessarily very heavily biased toward self-perpetuation.[6]

Principal 4: "Everything that gets measured, eventually gets gamed." This is similarly familiar, and here is where the tension is set up. Systems must perceive (measure) and react to their environment. Their measurements are not the same as the thing in the environment, only a reflection. Because of this, systems react to the measurement - the perception - not the thing that is being measured. This is not a trivial difference. Anyone who has worked at a large corporation or applied to professional school is familiar with this, and we all know examples where an endpoint was achieved in an only-technical, meaningless way that did not advance toward the real-world goal outside the organization that the endpoint was meant to incentivize. To "follow the letter but not the spirit" is an aphorism which expresses this. Case in point: many companies have sexual harassment or racial sensitivity training. These often take the form of instructional videos with quizzes after them. Most people skip and fast-forward through the videos as fast as possible to register as if they watched the whole thing, often having two different types of browsers open so when they get to the quiz they can go back if the answers aren't obvious. Of course this raises the question of whether there are some types of training where the written tests to get the credential have nothing to do with performing the actual work. For example, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, people became scientists because they liked being in labs, were good at organizing experiments, and in general got immediate feedback directly from their work, and therefore performed better, and therefore were recognized for it by peers and superiors, moreso than is the case now.[7] Do the best GRE scores (and administrative maneuvering, and recommendations, and tolerance of modern graduate school politics) really correlate with the best scientists? Or, does the same process produced skilled and caring physicians? (See Paul Graham's essay The Lesson to Unlearn.) For examples in individual humans, take your pick of any of a host of brain receptor-tricking molecules like opioids or alcohol, as well as immature psychological defenses like denial. Cancer is another example. Multicellular organisms have many checks on uncontrolled cell growth and spread, but there is a perverse natural selection our entire lives for cancer. Unlike infection or physical injury, cancer doesn't hurt until it's about to kill you, thanks to both the earlier reproduction of our ancestors relative to the later onset of cancer, along with the black swan of radiation and brand-new-to-nature chemicals that there was never any reason to develop an alarm system for.[5][8]

Another type of distortion has to do with the structure of the system, which effects the way it behaves, rather than perceptions per se. It's long been noticed that corporations become less "nimble" (responsive to market change; ie the relevant universe outside the corporation) as their surface area-to-volume ratio goes down.[9] The higher the surface area-to-volume ratio, the more information that can be collected and the more effective responses can be. Think of bloated giants like big automakers or old engineering companies, where in Dilbert-like fashion people think more about maneuvering in their jobs, coordinating with other departments within the company ("transfer pricing") or competing with other people within the company than they do about their outside-the-company competitors or serving the market. This certainly occurs within states as well, where to various extents for Chinese dynasties, the Roman Empire, and the Spanish colonial empire their downfall was more the result of special interest maneuvering and other intrigues directing attention consistent inward to the court - because what could be going on that's more important outside the palace walls where the barbarians are than inside where the power is? So we have Zheng He's fleet being recalled, Roman patricians scheming in the absence of a succession rule to get legions on your side, or Spanish royalty neglecting overseas possessions until the British and their offspring eat your lunch.[10] There's a final type of distortion which arises from the way that nervous systems save time and money: the more some stimulus-response pairing occurs, the less reward-sensitive it becomes. It moves from being a conscious act requiring effort and concentration, to a habit, to (in biology, programmed through evolution) a stereotyped movement, then a reflex. Once a stimulus-response pairing has started moving down the line it is almost impossible to move it back other than by over-writing it with another stimulus-response pairing.

Principle 5: "Eventually, everything becomes a racket [and/or gets delusional]." This quote is attributed to the late George Carlin. An occult paraphrasing of this in more specifically politics terms is "The state is primarily concerned with itself." Here we can see the full flowering of the problems buried in the earlier principles. There is a constant tension between the need for negative feedback, which the system avoids - that's what aversive stimuli are for - but because the measurement and the thing measured are not the same, the metric is game-able, and the system avoids these stimuli increasingly by gaming them rather than taking real action. (And simultaneously makes un-helpful-to-survival end-runs to pursue positive stimuli.) Consequently the stimulus-response arc gets more and more distorted with respect to the actual longer-term perpetuation of the system. This seems paradoxical in light of #1 above, but because systems are never perfect reflections of the universe around them, they necessarily always react based on at least limited information (especially with respect to long-term consequences) and sometimes with outright distorted information their machinery is feeding them. The necessary self-focus means that these distortions will tend to be in favor of pursuing pleasure; of avoiding pain and believing everything is alright when it is not, and over arbitrary time whatever non-self-perpetuating parts of a system's "purpose" previously existed, will atrophy, and its behavior will become more distorted in favor of comfort and perceived survival over actual survival.[11]

The distortions come not just from "gaming" pain. Organisms can hack themselves to fire off their reward centers without an actual survival enhancement, for example, with heroin, masturbation, or consuming resources they are driven by prior scarcity to consume as frequently as possible, but which have become "cheap" to the point where their over-consumption causes problems, e.g. in humans, fat, salt, and sugar. Opioids are in humans the thing closest to the artificial intelligence problem of "wireheading" where a self-modifying agent given a task can self-modify to be satisfied even though the task is completed.[12] Good examples of rackets are religions and charities that depart from their stated mission in favor of wealth-accumulation and self-perpetuation. (See Givewell's list of charities which maximize their mission rather than their income.) Profit-seeking entities whose products or services intrude into "sacred" (i.e. non-transactional) realms (best example: healthcare) often find that self-perpetuation wins out over their claimed mission. Organizations and individuals can also become delusional - humans are incorrigibly overoptimistic and discount the future.

Principle 6: inherent cyclic crisis. Eventually the stimulus-response arc becomes so distorted that it encounters a survival-threatening problem it can properly perceive and respond to, but by this time the gap between perception and reality is profound and it comes as a shock. Surviving the crisis, if possible at all, is quite painful.

Black swans are indeed one type of crisis, but missing impending black swans is the fault of the system only to the extent that the system could not reasonably have anticipated the black swan event, given the experience it had to draw on. More salient here are crises precipitated by the accumulated distortions in the system's perceptual machinery, where the system "should have known better". At the organizational level, nations might collapse because their ideology, increasingly un-moored from reality, led them to weakness on the battlefield out of refusal to update their armies with modern techniques and technology. Nations with dysfunctional (delusional) organization meet reality catastrophically on battlefields, and religions collapse (sometimes) when encountering reality. Crusades failed due to Christians' belief that God would intervene, medieval Europeans with a military hierarchy based on nobility got crushed by Mongols with rank based on meritocracy, Washington in the Seven Years War lost to the French because he insisted on fighting like a gentleman in rows, then the British lost to Washington in the American Revolution because they still insisted on this formation, and Washington no longer did. (Many of these could be considered examples of the advance of "rational" (and more destructive) warfare over traditional warfare.) For the young Washington and the later British Empire, the losses did not destroy them but came as painful shocks. In the case of many near-delusional Crusaders or the combined German-Polish-Hungarian forces in thirteenth century Europe, the shock did result in their destruction. On the individual level, any delusional or distorted behavior (psychosis, neurotic defenses, substance use) results in a painful shock in the result of adjusted behavior or shattered beliefs, or in some cases, the death of the individual. Someone might underestimate the risk of driving while intoxicated or in inclement weather, and crash, injuring or kill themselves or their family and updating their belief only in crisis. These crises occur more often and faster, the less (or more distorted) the feedback, as illustrated in very centralized arguments from authority (famine under Stalin using very divorced-from-reality - and unquestionable in Stalin's USSR - Lysenkoist theories of biology and agriculture.)

Principle 7: What to do about it? The Last Noble Truth is that cyclic crises are therefore inevitable in any complex dynamic system. As conscious complex dynamic systems called human beings, composed of complex dynamic systems called cells, being members in conglomerations of complex dynamic systems called nations and corporations and politics or religious belief systems, we will occasionally have shocks that kill us, or even when we "wake up" and adapt, still hurt us quite a bit. This happens in national collapses and revolutions as well. In arbitrary time, the problem will always re-emerge. Your measurement is not the same entity as the thing it measures. Unless a system comprises the whole and then there is no boundary, and of course no system.[13] How can we minimize the inherent problems that lead to this cycle?

• Constant testing and cross-checking between senses and expectations. In individuals we already do this automatically (corollary discharge, binding between senses and discomfort when our binding expectations do not match observation.) Cross-checking beliefs and assaying decisions at multiple points in ways that will quickly expose them if they were bad is helpful for individuals; it probably won't hurt to think twice about that turn you just made while hiking in the deep dark woods, even if you feel quite confident about it. Critical thinking is one form of this. Cognitive behavior therapy is another.
  
  
• Increasing the amount of feedback. This facilitates the suggestion above as well. It is good to decrease the consequence for objections in groups. Calibrate yourself - when people or organizations have secure egos and want to get better at something - running a mile, or making better decisions - they do this. This experiment about how to fool a computer in a "delusion box" showed that through a constant drive for being surprised - by learning new information - an agent gets out of being deceived faster. Of course this itself is also hackable (the machine could reset itself; you could convince yourself you're learning important new information but really you're just confirming your biases.) Pushing until you reach failure, in physical training or decision-making, is an instrumental rather than epistemic form of increasing your surprise.
  
  
• To the extent possible, rely on positive feedback. Negative feedback is that which by definition systems avoid, and they will avoid it by gaming it if necessary. Therefore, systems should put themselves in situations where the ratio of positive to negative feedback is higher, so we are less likely to avoid feedback.
  
  
• Simulating negative outcomes. In other words, expect the worst. You will never be disappointed, and you will have prepared yourself for the shock. Negative visualization as proposed in stoicism is a technique to do exactly this.
  
  
• Respecting a system's realistically unmodifiable constraints - especially if the system is you. This is especially true at the individual level. Humans as a species are not built to question close family relationships, especially without reason, without becoming depressed and damaging our relationships (asking if your daughter really loves you once a day will not help you or her.) For that matter, negative visualization actually causes quite a few people to reliably suffer rather than feel better (including me.) Constantly second-guessing every decision, like that turn you made in the woods, may erode your confidence and spark depression. Of course, your daughter really might secretly not love you, and your family might die, and you might have made a wrong turn (and you really can't fail without consequence at some things.) But it's probably going to make you suffer more in the long run not to think about this all the time, and you should pay attention to your reactions to see where your thresholds are.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Though not the purpose of this argument, this does set up a useful boundary for defining living and non-living things. Because it's quantitative it doesn't suffer from a problem of boundary cases, and sentience is nowhere considered, but it does appeal to common sense - stars and fire are at one end of the spectrum and things with nervous systems are at the other. Most current electronics are minimally dynamic, which makes them "less alive" than is often argued.

[2] It's implied that these actions are cyclic, like catalysis in biology or the Krebs cycle, or else the system would be unlikely to return to any previous state, and you don't have a self-perpetuating system.

[3] There's a strong argument to be made that defining a system as separate from the rest of the universe is arbitrary. However this becomes less true as the system develops additional complexity for its self-preservation. There is an increasingly sharp inflection point at some physical boundary of the system where the exchange of matter and energy between unit volumes drops, and also where an event on one side of that boundary events have much more impact to the future of the system than events outside of it. That is the self/non-self boundary. In cells this is easily recognized as the cell membrane. In nations, although the boundary becomes more complicated, ultimately the boundary is spatial, because of the primacy of space. Even in corporations or religions this remains the case. The individuals in those organizations, or carrying those beliefs, as physical beings are still dependent on predictability, safety, and resources permitted by more "basic" forms of organization. A good example is the early evolution of life, it is recognized that an RNA molecule (or RNA-protein) would not benefit from any reaction it could catalyze any more than another molecule in its vicinity, or at least not as much as it could if the reaction products were sequestered. Consequently when nucleic acids were enveloped in lipid membranes, natural selection accelerated, and the the self/non-self boundary became less arbitrary.

[4] In a zero-sum setting with limiting resources (which is a necessary condition given arbitrary time) this is a good definition for competition. Unless you count Boltzmann brains, it is likely that a system will find itself in a world with other similar systems.

[5] You may have noticed that there are no examples "below" humans in my examples in principle 4. There are many examples of behaviors in humans, and in human organizations, where metrics are gamed. There are far fewer examples of organisms besides humans where this is the case. Some species of pinnipeds dive deeper than any prey we know of, we think, just to alter their consciousness, and African elephants go out of their way to consume fermented (alcoholic) marula fruit. But there is nothing like the systematic distortions we see in human psychology. It seems likely that the simpler, the more fecund, the faster cycling an organism is, the less it is able to afford having a gap between its response to its metrics and what survival-affecting things are actually occurring in the world. That we don't see many organisms gaming their metrics could occur both because their stimulus-response arcs are simpler, and because a distortion in these arcs will more quickly kill off the organism so they don't come to our attention. This also implies that having a mind as complex and powerful as ours provides unique opportunities for distortions - that organisms which are focused on "survival, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality" (to quote a psychopath fictional android) in fact have a more accurate view of the universe (not incidentally, a central theme of the Alien films.) Having a complicated brain and surviving by imitating each other, our nervous system is constantly hijacked by self-reproducing ideas in a way that our genomes never were (lateral transfer events are incredibly rare) and those memes are selecting, as per principal 1, for their own self-perpetuation; they want to avoid killing us outright, and use us to spread them, so they can be slightly parasitic, occasionally symbiotic, but most are probably merely commensal. If there is an analogy, the meme complexes we get from our families are not genes but rather our microbiome. It should also be pointed out that as we congratulate ourselves for taking over the planet due to agriculture and combustion engines, we are living through the sixth mass extinction, suggesting that in fact we are not acting in our long-term best interests; and like cancer, ecocide might not hurt enough until it's too late, and that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end (a principle 8? That given arbitrary time, an inherent cyclic crisis will eventually destroy an entity, and the more complex the representational system, the more likely the crisis is to be endogenous.)

[6] There is a spectrum of arbitrariness, of how "symbolic" the perceived stimulus is relative to the thing being perceived. In the engineering of signal systems, the closer your signal is in a physical causal chain to the stimulus - the thing it is signaling about, or measuring - the less arbitrary it is. Digital systems are more powerful in many ways than analog systems but they accept increased arbitrariness and complexity in exchange for this. Case in point: people who fear assassination can build elaborate electronic sensing systems to avoid being approached while they sleep, but there are always questions: can they be hacked? What if a component fails? What if the power is out? Can a spy shut it down? Compare this to the system used by the Tokugawa shoguns - sleeping in the middle of of a large room with a wooden squeaky floor with many tatami barriers, and choosing a place to sleep on that floor at random each night.

[7] Of course other things have changed about the way science (and medicine) are practiced over the past half-century, not to mention that all the "low-hanging fruit" in terms of problems accessible to the specific strengths of human cognition may have been picked soon after the Enlightenment started. But it remains a concern that by (not unreasonably) trying to regularize and make transparent the application and career progression process, we're selecting for attributes that have little to do with being a successful scientist or physician, or even selecting against them, because we're using "artificial" endpoints distant from the relevant abilities, which can be and are gamed. Certainly this problem is not unique only to science and medicine, and whatever is causing the phenomenon, it's having real-world economic consequences. An interesting historical study would be to see if the health of the Chinese government across the dynasties waxed and waned with any relation to some aspect of civil service examinations.

[8] Referred visceral pain is an example of an aversive stimuli-sensing system that gives very inexact answers, because it was never important enough to improve. If your arm is hurt, you can point to exactly where even with your eyes closed. But when people get appendicitis, very often in the early phase they point to the center of their abdomen around their belly button, and then gradually the pain moves to the area immediately over the appendix - but only after the overlying tissue, which is innvervated by somatic ("outside"-type nerves) is irritated. Often people with a problem in their abdominal organs or even their heart feel extremely sick and anxious and in general uncomfortable but can't point to any specific spot. Why does this make sense? If a scorpion scrambles up onto your left elbow is stinging you there, it's worth knowing exactly where the stinging is happening so you can act in a way that improves the situation. But if you were sitting around a fire with your tribe in the African Rift Valley 100,000 years ago with appendicitis, what exactly could you do about it? If you had bad stomach pain, it didn't matter exactly where it was; you curled up in a ball where your family members were nearby to care for and protect you and hoped it passed.

[9] In contrast to corporations, single-celled organisms survive best not when they have a low surface-area-to-volume ratio (like successful nimble corporations) but a low one, which is why they are mostly near-spherical. Corporations, while competing with each other and in some ways with their customers, are still operating in an environment that is predominantly cooperative, so it's better to have lots of customer interaction surface. Bacteria exist in an environment of constant unpredictable ruthless lawless natural selection. It's really about how much the surface is an asset for information gathering by the system, versus a liability to attack from competing systems. Consequently, for bacteria, the sacrifice of knowing less about the outside world (which at that scale is less predictable than our world anyway) must be worth it given the overall survival advantage gained by being in the shape that most maximizes distance of any unit volume from the surface. In contrast, there are cells in biology that maximize surface: neurons, and nutrient absorption membranes deep in the GI tract. Both of these exist deep in the organism (especially neurons) in a web of profound cooperation (also especially neurons.) Of course, some bacteria are rod-shaped, which is a higher surface area-to-volume shape thought to confer an advantage in terms of nutrient absorption - when that is the growth-limiting factor rather than attack by other systems, that is the shape we would expect to see. The more fractal a complex dynamic system, the more likely it is to exist in an environment of predominant cooperation. The more spherical a complex dynamic system, the more likely it is to exist in an environment of predominant competition. In the case of corporations, the shape is somewhat "virtual", but corresponds to points of contact per customer and ease of contact, which ultimately are still going to require space. Nations are somewhere in the middle, though it would be interesting to see if nations now, more cooperative and less violent than they historically were, are more likely to have fractal borders, or shared zones (my predictions) than one or two centuries ago.

[10]This corresponds to Level 3 operations as described here, which explain how large organizations work but is not an argument that they should work that way, for Level 3 organizational decisions often lead to the downfall of the organization, unless the inner circle in the super-Pareto distribution has the best interests of the organization at heart. In politics, maintaining the state's best interests happens either because the leaders have a feedback loop in the form of being beholden to an informed electorate as in functioning democracies, or less likely, by luck as with benevolent dictators, e.g. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, or the "good" Roman Emperors.

[11] There's an apparent conflict here. On one hand I'm arguing that systems become distorted because they're focused on self-perpetuation and ignore metrics. On the other I'm arguing that they focus on the metrics, which they game and become distorted. Both can be true at different times, and vary depending on the aversiveness of different stimuli.

[12] Organisms are exempt from becoming "rackets." Rackets are systems which have a claimed mission besides their self-perpetuation but in fact are only self-perpetuating, and organisms are openly survival systems, full stop, and make no claims to the contrary. In other words, organisms cannot be rackets, because organisms do not have mission statements to deviate from.

[13]It may not have escaped your notice that one implied solution - expand the system until it comprises the whole universe, and there is no self/non-self boundary - is, at least on the individual level, one advocated by many mystical traditions. We actually achieve this when we die, so in individual terms this could be re-formulated as "lose your fear of death". Yet our read-only hardware makes this a terrifying and unpleasant experience, even, empirically speaking, for life-long meditators. For now, this is not a real solution.


APPENDIX: Analogous Terms

	Non-human Organism	Human	Organization
Input	stimulus	perception, belief, representation	measurement, metric, dogma
Reflection, Output, Reaction	response	belief, behavior	decision
Examples of Gaming	Rare; some higher animals seek out "highs"	Opioids, denial, delusion	Preserving letter but not spirit; false or incoherent religious or political truth claims
Examples of crisis	Death	Personal disillusionment or death	Revolution or collapse

Evidence for Coordinated Labor in Agriculture Hypothesis of Early State Formation (CLAHSF)

Early states tended to emerge in places that were actually somewhat marginal for agriculture, quite counterintuitively. (Most recent discussion here.) When combined with the example of China (which is not at all marginal for agriculture), the connecting argument that emerges is that states appear where central coordination of labor is required for agriculture, there is a benefit to population, and a centrally organized society develops. This can occur either because of marginal conditions (e.g. timing the flooding of a river surrounded by a vast desert) or difficult crops that require more central coordination, e.g., rice. Conversely, in places where the land easily produces calories, there is little benefit to central coordination, as dissatisfied "citizens" can easily refuse to cooperate and move away, and not lose any benefit in terms of population growth.

One way to test this would be to look at political stability within an early state - within a single early state - and how stability correlates with agriculture-favoring (or -disfavoring) climate changes. This hypothesis (CLAHSF) would be falsified if improved conditions outside the central areas of a state improved state stability, and if worsened conditions outside the central area de-stabilized the state. Ola Olsson from the University of Gothenburg shows that in fact, when the ancient Egyptian "hinterlands" received better rainfall (which improved agriculture in a desert climate), there was a delayed de-stabilizing effect on the Egyptian state, "since the decline in effective circumscription provides the farming population with an outside option in the hinterland."

Ola Olsson (University of Gothenburg), "Pharaoh's Cage: Environmental Circumscription and Appropriability in Early State Development", IAST General Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, March 29, 2019, 11:30–12:30, room MF323.

The Three Ways of Dealing with Outsiders: Sub-Humans, Ignorance, or Evangelism

Humans have so far fully developed only three ways of dealing with outsiders:

1. remaining ignorant of them (or feigning ignorance)
2. considering them sub-humans and acting maliciously or merely neglecting them
3. evangelizing and assimilating them

By "outsider" I mean "people whose behavior is perceived to differ in morally important ways". Those morally important ways are often things like what moral authority you follow, supernatural or otherwise; what you eat; sexual practices; and boundaries of socially sanctioned violence.

You can be perceived as an outsider because you are of a different ethnic group, political system or party, or religion, among other things, whether or not your behavior actually does differ. This seems to offer hope, in case the perceived differences can be found to be mere labels with no real differences in behavior. But that is not always, or even usually, the case. It's not just perception; there are morally important differences. Either a man laying with another man is moral, or it is not. Either violently taking property from the bourgeoisie is moral, or it is not. Either honor killings are moral, or they are not. And inspired by an example from Robert Frank's Choosing the Right Pond: either it is okay to eat ponies, or it is not. It is very difficult to see what a mutually beneficial coexistence might be for people with conflicting views of these things.

We have now arrived at the central problem, which goes as follows.

a) There are genuine differences between groups of humans in moral behavior
b) This forces a choice as to whether morality extends to a morally different group or not
c) If we are living with a morally different group, they may not want your morality extended to them; if you don't extend your morality to them, you are implying that they are not human.

This is a dismal hypothesis, as these three ways are obviously sub-optimal for human dignity and the functioning of a modern multi-ethnic state, so it is imperative that we understand them, and possibly find new ones.

Name of strategy	Ignorance		Sub-humans	Evangelize
Interaction	Trade, at most*		Living with
Underlying strategy	(no strategy)		Degrade	Assimilate

This could be called either the triune theory of moral resolution, or ISE (sounds like "ice" - for Ignorance, Sub-humans, and Evangelism.) They are as follows.

1. Ignorance - for most of the lifespan of our species, humans have lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. Consequently we were spared from having to deal with outsiders. Even if you know they exist, if you don't have to interact with them, then you don't care that much how they behave. You might still interact with them minimally, transactionally, through trade* - often on neutral ground, and possibly not even sharing a common language. (When we behave transactionally, we're calculating and not engaging most of our social cognition.) They don't sleep in your territory and don't eat at your table, or only in settings which are carefully controlled by the tribe or state and prevent extensive contact between populations. This "non-strategy" is what obtained throughout all of pre-history, but starting in the Neolithic this strategy was no longer stable, as some populations began to expand into their neighbors' territories.


2. Sub-humans - unfortunately, the easy and automatic response when you live around people morally different from you is to consider them sub-humans. There is a wide spectrum of how we do this in terms of active, conscious malice. Starting on the more malicious end: you might outright condemn them as filthy animals and sometimes even actively exterminate them. You might just keep them sequestered in ghettoes or certain roles where they can't contaminate the rest of society. There might be a split between upper and lower classes of the dominant group, with the upper classes not worrying much about the sub-humans as long as they stay in their undesirable roles, and the lower class much more resentful, since they sometimes have to work alongside the sub-humans and their own jobs are more threatened by the sub-humans. You might appear to tolerate them because you aren't overly bothered by them, but it's only because the gentiles are dirty and going to hell anyway (or whatever the local terminology is) and you just accept that they can't help themselves. (Minorities with moral codes differing from the majority often take this last position of feigning tolerance and just keeping to themselves, as they're forced to do so if they're not going to agree that they themselves are in fact the sub-humans, and the other options aren't open to them - they're in no position to be exterminating anyone else.)

Most subtly and softly, as is often the case in modern states - you might even be horrified at the suggestion that you're capable of this - but there are groups of people in your society for whom you've drastically lowered your expectations. The Ottoman strategy of governing people, allowing a multi-confessional empire, seems quite modern in some ways - but I'm sure most people in the capital didn't regard with admiration the pork-eating Christians they allowed confessional self-governance. You may even have caught yourself, in the pony-eating example above, finding reasons to excuse the pony-eaters from full moral evaluation, though I doubt if you were told you were invited to a pony-eating party you would be excited.

We also sometimes categorize people in our own society as sub-human, usually based on class. The upper classes do this with the lower classes to explain why they "under-perform" (but might also try to evangelize them about how to improve, i.e., be more like the upper class.) The lower classes do this to the upper class to explain why the upper class has more money - it's not because they're better, it's because they're immoral, engaging in bizarre practices behind closed doors, and they have lots of dealings with dirty foreigners. The lower class of a dominant group rarely evangelizes the upper class, because this exposes that the lower class in the end would actually want to join the upper class, and exposes their self-comforting fiction.

Because moral rules sometimes place inconvenient restrictions on economics, multiple times throughout history conventions have evolved where a sub-human outsider is actually employed to perform morality-violating acts. (E.g., shabbas goys who tend fires on the sabbath, or eta in Japan. How exactly the employer or trading partner avoids naughty-points for this is quite mysterious.)

In some cases sub-humanism can be "escaped" by assimilation, which requires both the desire of those considered sub-human to be accepted by those considering them sub-human, and those considering them sub-human to want them to escape. This seems like evangelism (see below), but the difference is that there is no open recognition of the former sub-humans having joined the dominant group; indeed after the fact, they're loathe to note that there was ever anything different about them in the first place.

As mentioned, sub-humanism is the default option when morally differing people move out of the "ignorance" category, and this transition is all too easy. Very often this is discovered by traders who have overstayed their welcome. In the current populist surge, we are witnessing discussion of "globalists" now, either outsiders, or people tainted by outsiders through business loyalties. Persian merchants were slaughtered during the Guangzhou massacre for explicitly this reason. The Dutch merchants living near Nagasaki during the Tokugawa Shogunate never made the ignorance-to-subhuman transition because the Shogun kept them sequestered on an island, consistent with state practices that repeatedly appeared in history to keep the population ignorant.


3. Evangelism - This is a more difficult strategy in the sense that it is not innate to humans, but it has been very effective for expanding empires that aim to retain stability. In this strategy, you recognize your neighbors as human - and want to help them! (To avoid Hell, become more economically successful, etc.) So you Christianize them, or send advisors to make them more capitalist/communist, or otherwise "civilize" them in general, etc. Witness Thomas Jefferson's well-meaning attempts to civilize native Americans, the British white man's burden to educate and develop Africa, and communists' attempts to export revolution. (Reading about Che Guevara's frustrations in Bolivia or the Congo, you could almost do a find-and-replace with Thomas Jefferson's irritation with assimilation-resistant native Americans, or anyone working in an NGO in the Muslim parts of the developing world.) Compare the non-evangelical religions to the evangelical ones (better-adapted ones which appeared later in history) and note how they emphasize brotherhood in the faith over national origin. Obviously none of these were done with purely altruistic motives, but the impulse to assimilate rather than exterminate is on plain display.

If this strategy is made to work, it is dramatically successful - witness the success of the Roman Empire, the United States, Christianity, and Islam - although often the evangelized don't want to be assimilated (but that's just because they're incorrigible sub-humans, off with their heads!) This mode can fail as well - when Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity after the final departure of the Moors, this wasn't satisfactory to the rest of the population, who could never be convinced that the conversos were not underneath their baptisms still sub-humans (and the more attempts to convince that the conversion was true, the more outraged the mobs became.) The populism in twenty-first century America is a turn from evangelism as well - from the ideal of the melting pot, to anger that too many foreigners are polluting the creed and are still, underneath their iPhones and Starbucks, sub-humans.

There are instructive differences between states that otherwise seem to have some of the same sorts of beliefs, but where one is more clearly evangelizing than the other. One example is the differences between the Soviet Union and modern China. The USSR was trying to export revolution, because (besides of course strategic reasons) they believed in the universality of communism. China has quickly regressed to the historical mean, and is concerned about their territory, and Chinese people, full stop, even producing tracts on the genetic superiority of the Han - but they don't seem to care much whether the people in Africa for whom they're building roads and stadiums agree. (When ethnic supremacy doctrines are espoused, a tribe or nation is lauding its own immutable and unobtainable heritage, a sure sign of the sub-human strategy instead of evangelism.)



Can There Be Any Solution?

The hypothesis can seem worrisome in the sense of unfalsifiability. It's tempting to play the game of putting every interaction between morally differing people into one of the three boxes - "Are you aware of their existence? You're not ignorant of them then. Do you think what they're doing is wrong, or not care? You consider them sub-humans. Do you want to help them? You're evangelizing." Indeed, most such interactions really do fit.

But we will hopefully never go back to being ten thousand disconnected tribes, able to ignore each other's differences. The way forward will likely depend on the aforementioned sometimes-present gap between perception and reality. In some cases, the perceived differences are not real concrete differences in behavior. For example: the country you live in predicts your moral sense better than your religion. You may claim you share convictions with Muslims or Christians, but your behavior is more likely to resemble your neighbor from another religion than it is someone in a developing country of your religion. I was struck by this when looking at examples of surveys of Christians and atheists in the United States. With rare exceptions, they make the same moral choices in the same situations. It's not just the cliche of focusing on similarities over differences; rather, we need to focus on the concrete outcomes of beliefs. What do our moral convictions actually make us do? If we do the same things for the same reasons, and we're all aiming for a world with more human flourishing, then that makes living together much easier. This approach (of actually dissecting the effects of beliefs) has really only begun in earnest in the past few decades, and it may be a fourth way. My hope is that the people and nations that are able to make this work, in at least part of their populations, will out-compete the other models, just as the evangelism strategy out-competed sub-humanism. I think explicit reasoning about and repudiation of slavery, and later racism, is one such example, although the increasing value of labor certainly helped (both ability to reason morally and increasing value of labor were themselves both products of increasing rationality, i.e. the Enlightenment.) Very metropolitan trade-oriented cities may also be early examples of the fourth way - trade cities on ports have long been thought of as more "relaxed" culturally than the hinterlands around them. I submit that they are not "less moral", nor are they evangelical places, but rather they're necessarily consequentialist. Ironically, it's precisely the transactionalism of New York or London that have driven this; thinking more abstractly about actual effects of behavior prevented conflict between traders during the "ignorance" mode, and it can (and is) again. Voltaire recognized the emergence of such a system of coexistence when he said

Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son's foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn't understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.

You might object that a transactional relationship is not a full one, and you would be correct. Here we can take advantage of the millions of people who we live among in the modern age - you don't have to interact with every single member of your society, and the ones you choose to interact with, you choose at what level you do.

In one sense, this approaches the voluntary ideal. That said, it may be that the only solution to coexisting with people who perceive genuine moral differences is to limit the interaction in this way. And this does seem much better than sub-humanism or assimilation. In cases where concrete moral actions really do differ and people must live intimately together (especially with very limited resources), I have no solution. This should be added to the list of political science problems, along with how to organize a truly voluntary state that is not determined by physical territory (see also here.)


*A complicating observation of tribes (usually not nations) who are mostly ignorant of each other is that one of the "interactions" can be warfare. In traditional tribal warfare, there are ceremonies, there are few casualties relative to what might otherwise have occurred given the technology available, and there are agreed-upon conventions: we don't fight each other when it's raining because our warpaint runs off; we stand in order lines and kneel and fire our muskets because only cowards hide behind trees like savages; etc. (See the Aztec Flower Wars for a well-documented example.) Every so often we witnessed a sudden transition from traditional to modern warfare, with a disregard of previous conventions and much higher casualties (or even extermination; see here for discussion of this in Iroquois and Mongols) that in this framework represents a transition to sub-humanism. As with trade, in traditional warfare, you remain basically ignorant of the other tribe because you have very limited "interaction" with them. The complication is that clearly there must be some cultural norms shared between the two tribes for this arrangement to occur, although again, interaction is quite limited other than at the highest level of the tribe or state.

A Morbid Calculation: Conquest Rate of the Americas and Cultural Assimilation Rates

The first European set foot on what would later become the United States in 1513. The last uncontacted indigenous person was captured in 1911. Many people are familiar with the story of Ishi; the picture above is of the monument commemorating the place in Oroville, California where he came under the power of European-descended people. (Image credit to Ray_Explores on Flickr.) This marker commemorates not just Ishi, but the date and place at which an entire nation's worth of indigenous people had finally been completely assimilated or exterminated - on August 29, 1911.

If taken in terms of territory, if it's just a linear expansion of a certain amount per unit time, then the annual expansion was 9,450 sq mi (24,729 km^2) per year; meaning a square of land about 98 miles (157 km) on a side. If we break it down to the day, then the U.S. was taking 26 sq mi per day (blocks 5.1 miles on a side.) Given the average American County size, that means every 46.5 days (about a month and a half) the U.S. was taking a county's worth of land in our march to manifest destiny. (I realize it didn't happen this smoothly but it gives us an idea.)

If we go by percent expansion (the more land you already got, the faster you get more), and we assume Ponce de Leon's camp when he landed was a square a hundredth of a mile on a side, then Europeans expanded at an average annual rate of 6.31%. Again, assuming this was a completely smooth process just for visualization purposes, that means the last year the US would have added territory equal to an area bigger than California but smaller than Texas. If going down to the day, the day Ishi was captured/gave himself up the US added half a county's worth of land.

But people are what we're most interested in here, and in human terms, the annualized assimilation rate for the United States of 4.1% over those 398 years. Obviously the size of the territory matters; to get a second data set to investigate territory size effects, I tried to find a similar event in the history of Canada but could not. With more than one country, we could get an idea of how the territory affects the rate.

Although it's not a conquest in the same way, it's been noted that the time for Germanic people to take over the Western Roman Empire was about six centuries, which corresponds to a 2.45% annualized rate of assimilation. In territory, in linear terms it's more than seven times slower, gaining 1,292 sq mi/year (an area 35.9 miles on a side.) In percentage terms, it's a 3.89% annual increase, using the same assumptions, i.e. same starting area, except this time it's a camp in the Black Forest instead of the Florida Coast. This is to be expected given that transportation was not as good and the technology gap between the Germanic tribes and the Romans was not nearly as great as between Europeans and North Americans; same people have likened colonization to being invaded by people from 4,000 years in the future.

Predicting When a State Will Centralize

A 2015 paper by Koyama, Moriguchi and Sng (KMS) builds a model based on modern China and Japan's different experiences, suggesting a mechanism for how external threat and internal political and geographic characteristics drive centralization, as in Japan's case - or makes the state collapse, as in China's case. The small states either centralize to defend against the external threat or cease to exist, and due to their size, centralizing is not so difficult. The large states might not centralize, since there may be local disincentives that the central ruler cannot overcome. Consequently by the early twentieth century, the Japan (feudal a mere century before) emerged as a great power, and China (a centralized rich empire a century before) collapsed. KMS give statistics about railway-miles built per decade as a proxy for overall modernization, of course, referring to the dismantling of the Woosung Railway by the Qing.

This is intriguing, because it is not only consistent but complementary with the "labor-intensive agriculture drives state formation" hypothesis, and gives us a fuller picture of the appearance of the first states and their subsequent spread. The marginal agriculture hypothesis of state formation (MAHSF, pronounced "MASH-F") observes, again counterintuitively, that the first states (originating in a political analog of "spontaneous generation") tend to emerge in places which are actually quite marginal for agriculture. Like: the Nile Delta in the Sahara, which has to be irrigated in a time-sensitive and labor-intensive way; or, the Fertile Crescent, fertile only (again) if it is irrigated. Or the dry central Mexican highlands, or the Peruvian Andes. Not the plains of southeast Asia, or the Pacific Northwest, where even hunter-gatherers could develop a rich material culture.

But on consideration, MAHSF has an obvious flaw, which is China. (Any theory of state formation that does not account for the emergence of China is not a theory of state formation>) China was founded on fertile wet plains still today used for rice cultivation, and the exception shows that it's not a marginal physical environment, but rather the requirement for centralized labor, which played chicken-and-egg with centralized state capacity. Consequently a better account is the coordinated labor in agriculture hypothesis of state formation (CLAHSF, proncounced "CLASH-F.") It doesn't matter whether you live along a river in the desert and have to centrally organize labor because of the marginal environment, or you unfortunately have chosen a "tyrannical" crop like rice which places similar demands on its harvesters. In such a setting, advantage goes to the group that can organize labor, and the population and the state grows. CLAHSF explains why states emerge in certain places, and KMS provide a mechanism for how state formation "spreads" from those original nuclei. In the Old World, there are basically two nuclei and three vectors: from the Middle East to Europe and the Mediterranean; from the Middle East east along the Indian Ocean; and from China to the rest of East Asia. You'll notice the absence of Egypt, but modern Europeans, North Africans and Middle Easterners are much more the inheritors of statecraft and culture in general from the Fertile Crescent than from Egypt.

KMS apply their theory beyond China and Japan and look at both Anglo-Saxon England (ultimately unified by Alfred in response to Norse invasions) and Muscovy (in response to the Mongols; and Russians still psychologically think of Ukraine as a buffer state - the "Wild Fields" - since the Mongols easily crossed prairies but halted at the boundary of the boreal forest.) A third example that cries out for such a treatment would be the first unification of India after Alexander's arrival at its frontier; not to mention the seeming counterexample, why the Greeks, even after a long-standing threat from the Persians, never did manage to unify and remained a set of city-states - to be over-run by Alexander.

An entirely different question is why China, which to this day can be seen as the amalgamation of ethnicities it is (with the Han dominating in the east) unified so early, and essentially stayed unified under different rulers (as if the Roman Empire had never fallen), when Europe had one such period early on, which was never repeated (a Warring States period that never ended.) Thought experiment reversing this here.


Koyama M, Moriguchi C, Sng Tuan-Hwee. Geopolitics and Asia's Little Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of State Building in China and Japan after 1850. GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 15-54, 19 Nov 2015.