Chapter 24.1 – With 20/20 hindsight, 2020 will be crystal clear
Sometimes it’s only possible to understand what is going on with the benefit of hindsight. Think of your own traumatic childhood – after all, we were all scarred horribly by our childhoods (at least, all the interesting people I know were). Yet at the moment when the worst events were happening, how aware were you of the full context? I remember the moment my family fell apart – I was eleven and my biggest concern was not the loss of my parental relationships, the long and ugly court battles that lay ahead, the loss of a nurturing home environment or the economic hardship that would follow the disorderly dissolution of family wealth. No, it was the loss of my pet turtle. Now, 38 years later, I can’t even recall that turtle’s name.
And what is true of family histories is as true of our greater political history: We turn on the news and are bombarded with images of … ehem … bombardments. The news item changes, and we are being told by some talking head or other that this US Presidential election is the one that really really matters – not the last one we were told really really mattered. But are these the ‘world-changing’ events really that big a deal? How will future historians see the things that raise eyebrows, like Russia invading Ukraine or Israel attacking UN peacekeepers in Lebanon? Will Julian Assange make the Table of Contents?
Chapter 24.2 – Citing foresight, for four poor sites?
Given what we know about the folly of making predictions when you’re caught in the storm of current events, only a fool would attempt to answers these questions. I always remember that wisest of sages, my father, telling me as a boy in the 1980s that I’d better hurry up and go visit the Amish, before they all disappeared. Decades later, while on a trip to Upstate New York, I asked a local if there were any Amish left and was nearly laughed back to New England. “The question is are there any non-Amish left. They have like ten kids each!”
Or else consider a sage even wiser than my father: Francis Fukuyama, with his ‘End of History’. He predicted that the 1990s had already seen the end of global conflict – that economic liberalism and democracy had won and solved the question of how to rule, and that everything that would follow would be a series of internationally organised peacekeeping missions to slowly spread the joys of Westernism to the far corners of the earth.
Chapter 24.3 – A fool and his predictions are soon parted
Of course, I am every bit the fool my father and Fukuyama are, so I will attempt to do the impossible: draw a political map of 2024, as it might appear in the textbook of a future historian of, say, 2034. This is what I believe it would look like:
The first thing to notice about this map is that the United States of America doesn’t appear on it. That is because, in my view, the constitutional republic of the US will be considered by future historians to have ceased to exist some time in the mid to late 20th Century, (when Deep State operatives assassinated President Kennedy). Instead, there exists the great empire of the time, drawn in blue – the American Empire, whose capital is not Washington DC but New York City. It occupies the territory of North America, but includes two blocks of vassal states: one in Europe and one in the Asia-Oceania Region. There are a number of aligned states, most notably the region of the middle east, which I believe historians would simply view as being ‘occupied by the American Empire’.
The other great power bloc is comprised of the Asian Powers (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea), supported by their network of sympathetic Asian states (Kazakhstan, India, Vietnam…). Most of the developing world is in grey, reflecting their weak ideological alignment and susceptibility to economic or even military suasion from either of the two blocs.
Chapter 24.4 – The four forlorn corners of Asian conflict
The future historians will conclude by identifying Four geopolitical flashpoints – areas where the American Empire’s political and economic boundaries and interests brush up against those of the Asian Powers: Ukraine, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan. Simply put, the Asian Powers cannot afford to allow these regions to remain under the sway of the Empire, and the conflicts that will bring the blocs into outright war hinge on these four geographic corners of Asia. As the Empire declines, the future of the world hinges on the fate of these four flashpoints: if Ukraine falls to Asia, the ripple effect on the European Vassal States will be so profound it will unwind a goodly portion of the Empire’s Atlantic power. If Israel falls, the Empire will lose its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. If South Korea falls, the Empires North Pacific flank will collapse, and if Taiwan falls, the South Pacific will soon follow.
So much for Chapter 24. A part of me is burning with curiosity to turn the page and read Chapter 25. But another part of me wants to turn back to Chapter 0 and watch an episode of Friends.
As the debate heats up, I find myself getting more and more interested in the politics of climate science. What is interesting is how lost the concept of ‘science’ has become in today’s society. To see how, we need a little look at the history of science. As far as I can tell, ‘science’ has gone through three distinct stages.
There was a method in their madness
To begin with, ‘science’ was a method. It was a way of thinking about how to solve problems, by formulating ideas and testing those ideas empirically to see if they stood up to scrutiny. The method was quite simple: you start by looking at the world, observing things and making associations. You smell, taste, see and feel your way around this universe. As you do so, you notice associations and patterns. Some could be meaningful, some could be coincidence. It doesn’t matter, you are ignorant but curious. Most of all, you are humble.
Observation => Hypothesis => Critical scrutiny (testing) => Theory
Next, you look at the associations that seem to make the most sense. You then formulate a hypothesis based on what you observe. This is a guess about the relationship between things you observe in the universe – does one thing cause another? Is there a pattern here? Is it likely to happen again? It’s important that the hypothesis is falsifiable – i.e. that you can think of ways in which, if the hypothesis is untrue, you can show that it is untrue.
Next, you test your hypothesis. The goal of testing is to prove the hypothesis wrong. You think of as many ways as possible that the hypothesis might be shown to be wrong and you test all of these ways. Remember, you are humble. Your goal is to prove yourself wrong, to rule out a false association, not to have your name put up in lights.
If, however, the hypothesis survives lots and lots of rigorous testing, we get to call it a ‘theory’. The longer a theory survives consistent critical scrutiny, the stronger the theory becomes, scientifically speaking. We don’t call it ‘truth’, but we imagine that by continuously and selflessly applying this method, over and over again, we can begin to approach the truth.
In these early stages, scientific journals were a useful way for scientists to share their findings. The peer review process formalized the shared interest in scrutiny. As real scientists, we welcome this scrutiny, because remember – as humble scientists our goal is to rule out bad hypotheses. The more scrutiny, the more we rule out falsehood. It’s like a piece of iron, getting hammered on a hot anvil, again and again, until it turns slowly into hardened steel.
From the ‘fields’ to the ‘silos’
This method was applied with varying degrees of rigor to many fields of inquiry. And with success, came a new Steel Age of Enlightenment. Slowly, over time, some of those fields became synonymous with the method itself. The set of disciplines is amorphous, but is usually thought to include the ‘hard’ sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, as well as some applied sciences, like engineering and medicine, and then bleeds into the ‘social sciences’ like economics, politics, psychology and… ehem ….sociology.
As the number of disciplines claiming some connection to ‘science’ grew, the rigor with which the scientific method was applied grew more lax, giving rise to the dysphemism ‘pseudo-science’ to describe disciplines that wanted to enhance their legitimacy by claiming an association with the scientific method, without actually having to apply that method to their work. This is in part the cynicism of academia, but it is also a reflection of a key limitation of the scientific method: the requirement that hypotheses be falsifiable. Particularly in disciplines where laboratory experimentation is not possible, disproving a hypothesis is hard. In social sciences, all you really have is population level data. You can try to be rigorous using statistical sampling techniques, but as Frederick Hayek points out in the excellent rap battle against Keynes, “econometricians are ever so pious. Are they doing real science, or proving their bias?”
And as the scope of academia balloons out with the expanding university educated middle classes, the corpus of ‘scientific’ literature must grow, even beyond the confines of useful experimentation and hypothesizing. More and more, dodgy population-level datasets are being drawn upon to produce ‘scientific’ findings. The scientific journals, once a convenient place for scientists to expose their work, are now little more than tools for would-be professors to build their resumés. Now we are already at the point where real scientists should start getting worried.
Follow The Science, for His name is Fauci and He is your shepherd
But it gets worse. Because not only are bloated universities and dodgy pseudo-sciences creeping in on our humble method, but somewhere along the line, we enter the third and final stage of ‘Science’, in which all humility is about to get polluted by something much worse than a middle class 28 year old who dreads the idea of having to look for a real job: the sinister influence of Big Money.
That’s right, the real attack to science comes not so much from the patched-sleeved tweed jackets of the sociology departments, but from the lab-coated back door of the applied sciences, and in particular from medicine. As academia expands, the game becomes about funding – research grants, partnerships, what have you. At the same time, as Big Pharma grows to become one of the biggest industries in the West, a set of government institutions and research agencies grows entwined with the business interests of these for-profit companies. Soon, the academics are indistinguishable from the editors of peer-reviewed journals, and from the revolving door between the industry-funded regulators, the government-funded Institutions that dole out research funding, and the industry itself.
This set of institutions has now developed a stranglehold on the peer review process. They fund the research, thereby setting the agenda. They have even created standards for creating evidence – including things like double-blinded randomized control trials – which only they can afford to carry out. And when even those safeguards fail, they resort to the basest of tactics to suppress dissenting views. Remember, dissenting views are the very essence of what science used to be. Now we are treated to popular slogans like “I believe in Science”, pronounced by zealots who are too simpleminded or ignorant to appreciate the irony in that statement.
The climate around science needs to change
This is all regrettable, but not momentous in a world where this ‘science’ remains contained in the lecture halls and laboratories. But of course, it does not and cannot content itself with that.
It leaks out of the lab and into the very real world we are all forced to inhabit, bringing us things like lab-engineered viruses, and the whole host of harmful and ineffective responses to the problems this ‘science’ has created in the first place: social distancing, masks, lockdowns and novel, vaccine-like mRNA treatments.
But perhaps nowhere is the application of Institutional Science so dangerous as in the field of Climate Alarmism. The planet is in peril, don’t you know, and if we don’t Follow the Science, we’ll all burn.
But will we though? The first thing to note about Climate ‘Science’ is that it does not welcome any dissent or attempts to prove it wrong. Rather than being a steel theory, made harder by the pounding of many critics’ hammers, it is a fragile house of cards, built high and tall upon a tower of assumptions and modelled results. Any criticism is met with violent defence, like the overprotective mother of a sickly little child.
Those criticisms are many and obvious, so I’ll be brief in my enumeration: (1) lack of falsifiability i.e. what would it take to prove the climate theories wrong? Any temperature anomalies or changes are just retrofitted into the models and a new, even more dire, IPCC report comes out the next year. (2) model misspecification can anyone explain the relationship between the basic physics constants and the climate sensitivity parameters in the models? What about missing explainers like cloud albedo, photosynthesis, solar irradiance flux? (3) measurement error – what is the temperature anomaly, really? How well are we controlling for heat island effects? How well are we measuring solar irradiance, for that matter? (4) Model invalidity – what about all the things the models didn’t explain before, like ocean temperature anomalies? If we don’t understand them, how predictive are these models really?
What we need to do is stop, take a deep breath and go back to the scientific method. Let me attempt to do that now.
I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘s’
The first point here is that it is not arrogant or unscientific for a ‘lay’ person like me to attempt to look at the issue scientifically. If you go back to the original definition of science, in fact it is the very essence of inquiry: simple observation.
So that’s where I start. The first thing I notice is that indeed, it has been getting hotter. I have lived in many place in the Northern Hemisphere and talked to many residents of those places and one can indeed observe pretty big increases in temperatures across the hemisphere.
When I look in the sky, the thing that I observe to be making it warm is the massive ball of energy in the sky, so my first hypothesis would be: is the sun getting ‘hotter’, i.e. emitting more energy than before? I don’t know, but let’s call that hypothesis number 1.
Next, I think about the rock I am standing on. It feels like cold earth at my feet, but I know from going into mines that actually, that cold earth gets pretty darn hot pretty quickly when you start to dig down. In fact, it seems that the earth’s average temperature is not 17 degrees the way we think, but rather it’s something closer to 4,000 degrees Celsius. This matters, of course, because all that heat is constantly radiating up through the mantle and onto the surface, then into the atmosphere and into space.
Much of that effect comes through the oceans, which are closer to the hot core. So my next question would be, is that process very, very constant? What if changes in the diffusion of heat through the mantle were warming/cooling the oceans at a different rate? I don’t know, but let’s call that hypothesis number 2.
Next, I look into the night sky above my Belgian home and see something remarkable in the northern sky. Dazzling colourful lights. Beautiful. But also kind of scary. What’s going on? I’m told it’s changes in the magnetosphere, and that the magnetic poles are in a ten-thousand-year process of ‘flipping’. Could such disruptions in the magnetosphere impact the penetration of certain rays from the sun? I don’t know, but let’s call that hypothesis number 3.
Then there’s the burning of carbon fuels by humans. Millions of gallons of oil every day, and in ever increasing quantities. All the fuel creates heat of course, but that first-order effect might be small. However, perhaps this creates some emissions that change the composition of the atmosphere. Also seems to be a small effect, but let’s see. After all, I don’t know. So let’s call that hypothesis number 4.
Others might have more and better ideas. That’s fine too.
Now let’s work through our hypotheses one by one, trying hard to disprove them. And let’s see which ones survive the best.
My hypothesis on that? Given what I know about the monster ‘science’ has become, the best survivor is unlikely to be the scientific method.
I hope the summer is going well – despite the very mixed weather we’ve been having!
We’re making the best of it. The garden at home is struggling – I managed to harvest only about half the potatoes I thought I would, but it’s still a good result, given how much rain we had. The tomatoes (Jo is looking after them) are in a worse state, but that’s also because we went away for a week in May.
Right now I am in Ireland with your sister Daphne, who is with her friend Isidore doing a pony camp. We are in a place called Leitrim, a wild, beautiful part of Ireland where however it rains quite a lot! Isidore’s dad is cycling around Ireland as we speak (he’s a former champion cyclist) and his mom is working from the cottage next to me here.
I’m sad to hear that you don’t want to see me, and also that you are not interested in meeting Daphne, who talks about you all the time and is – frankly – determined to get to know you sooner or later. You will have a hard time not meeting her, I’m afraid, as she has a strong character and works busily at getting what she wants. (Sometimes that is a challenge, I can tell you!)
But most of all, I wish you well and send you my continued love. Please know that whatever happens, I will always be here for you, the day you decide to take the leap and get to know me.
I sometimes listen to Brett Weinstein on the Darkhorse Podcast, whence I hear an uncanny number of my own, older ideas echoing back at me – which is a little creepy, somewhat flattering but mostly not that edifying an experience. In general, I find Brett in that category of thinkers who – though quite smart and original – is slightly less smart and original than he thinks he is. If his brain were a little bigger, or his ego a little smaller, he would stand a better chance of making a meaningful contribution to the world of ideas. All in all, I think I listen more for the comforting and good-natured repartee he has with his sidekick wife Heather, than because I expect to learn something.
Occasionally, though, Brett hits upon something that really provokes thought. In a recent episode, he makes the point that there is a fundamental difference between academic and vocational education: for the former, test results are given by the teacher. It’s possible for the teacher to exercise discretion, induce grade inflation or act on biases. For the latter, the outcome of the education is too closely tied with a material, objective result. If you write a bullshit essay about the sociology of queer bubble tea drinkers, it’s possible a sufficiently biased teacher would give such an essay a high grade that does not reflect its true merit. If, on the other hand, you build a book case so badly that it falls apart upon contact with any reading material, there is nowhere to hide the fact that you have not been a good student. The physical world has a way of highlighting failures which, in the artificial world of academics, can be disguised behind a veil of ‘subjective validation’.
This idea of ‘subjective validation’ is actually an important point for making sense of the Western World in 2024. I have argued before that wokeness as a form of postmodernism is a real and meaningful concept for understanding current affairs – so many of society’s ills involve the replacement of the objective with the subjective. I have also argued that there is a pandemic of overeducation which leads to the ‘dumb but educated’ having less – not more – capacity to reason.
Weinstein’s point about education fits right in to this architecture. From kindergarten through to her second master’s degree, the entire life path of a middle class, professional American is defined by validation – not from the hard edges of bumping into physical failure – but from the soft, socially malleable constraints created by authority figures, peers or other social forces. Even in the physical sciences, the majority of ‘research’ involves models and theories that are two steps away from any practical application. This dulls us to the rigors of objective reality, in favour of subjectivism which may in itself be a defining factor in the success of postmodernist ideas like critical race theory or transgenderism.
All the A+’s in the world won’t make this woodshed less leaky
None of us is immune from this, of course. I recently attempted to erect a woodshed in my garden. To accomplish the task, I took with me a few tools, but a much larger stock of hubris from my relative success as an ‘attender of meetings’ and ‘sender of emails’. After all, I have many degrees and accolades, etc, etc. None of this mattered much to the final result of the woodshed, which currently stands as a risible and leaky testament to the fact that the physical world doesn’t give a damn how smart other people think I am.
In fact, you can generalise Weinstein’s point to encompass many phenomena in today’s society; a society in which an increasingly large number of people have learned what they know through subjective, rather than objective, validation. Take the entire culture of safety-ism. If your conception of the dangers of falling and hurting yourself come from warnings issued by your overprotective mother, rather than the crunch of your seven-year-old bones as you plunge from the climbing frame, then your understanding of risk is one degree separated from the consequence itself. How well equipped will you be when, later in life, the government mandates you to Stay Safe from a virus that poses virtually no risk to your 24 year old body?
And what impact does subjective validation have on the media? If the very idea of what is ‘true and correct’ comes, not from a careful observation of nature, but from some authority figure telling you ‘you are right’, what hope can we hold out for the journalists whose job it is to sort through this very social noise in search of the important objective facts? Today on Substack, the excellent Eugyppius writes about how shockingly the media has reported on the thorny issue of President Joe Biden’s mental health. But when the quality of reporting is validated not by any objective truth, but rather by the subjective validation of the collective authority (in this case of the elites themselves), this kind of mistake will be par for the course.
Of course, the world of subjective validation is itself ultimately subject to constraints of the objective kind. When entire generations have been told they are smart and clever by indulgent university systems, the fruits of this false validation will eventually result in economic stagnation, in military unpreparedness, and in a lack of meaningful innovation.
In other words, the woodsheds we’re building are getting very leaky.
The right to consume clickbaity outrage news on the internet, with peace and dignity
Some current affairs topics refuse to go away. They start as a minor irritation you scroll past in the online media. Then they develop into a more serious outbreak, covering the news in debilitating fashion. Every poorly informed article or overwrought tweet causes you throbbing, continuous pain, sucking the joy out of your daily doomscroll, until the only humane solution is to seek the sweet, peaceful relief of writing your own blog post on the topic. So it is with the debate on Assisted Dying (AD).
So here goes.
At the core of the question of whether or not there should be some legal framework for Assisted Dying is one of agency. Specifically, it prompts the question: What right does an individual have to exterminate his own live?
We hold these truths to be self-evident…
It has been commonly held in Western society that a rational individual should enjoy all and any freedoms which do not directly impinge on the freedoms of others – or as a pugilistically inclined fellow student at Trinity once put it, “the limit of one man’s fist is another’s face”. It follows from this that a rational individual who wishes to commit suicide should not be held back from jumping, provided it is done in a way that minimises collateral blood splatter.
But it is in the very word ‘rational’ that the rub lies. For implicit in our understanding of what is rational is an acceptance of the root desire a human – in common with all living things – must have to continue to live. It is taken as axiomatic that life, above all, craves its own continuance. We see it in every ant, every garden weed, every government agency. So the wisdom holds that he who would go against this most basic instinct has lost his mind, and therefore can no longer be presumed to enjoy the freedoms we allow to ‘rational’ individuals – it’s padded cells and happy pills for you, dear chap.
Don’t jump!…
This paternalism for the suicidal is not beyond criticism – at very least it should be clear that the policy is predicated on the assumption that a determined self-destroyer will always retain sufficient sovereignty to carry out the act, irrespective of the rules. We don’t so much prohibit suicide, as deny freedom to those who have engaged in clumsy attempts at self-harm. Still, the policy enjoys wide public support and a long tradition in almost all Western countries.
In this context, I can’t help but marvel at the incongruity between a system that would at once lock away one set of people for the sin of wanting to end their own lives, while at the same time creating the legal space, in some cases even taxpayer-funded, to provide the practical means for a different set of people to end theirs. A physically healthy 18 year old who tells her therapist she wants to kill herself can be committed to prevent self-harm; but if she waits forty years and can prove she has some chronic pain, the same doctors will stick the death serum in her arm.
…no wait, your life really sucks. Jump!
To square this circle, society must make some judgement of when and under which conditions the desire for suicide can be considered ‘rational’. If you have a healthy young body, you’d have to be crazy to want to destroy it. If you’re body is covered in wrinkles and riddled with cancer, you might just have a point. In other words, we must make an evaluation of what is the value of residual life.
Who precisely makes this evaluation and under which criteria? This is not a trivial question, neither in law nor in moral reasoning. Health economics has some tools to value life, notably the concept of a Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), which are used to determine objective thresholds for the approval and administration of expensive treatments. But these are blunt tools. Using them to set solid benchmarks for AD is anything but straightforward. Even if it were possible to decide how much remaining life is enough to force someone to live it, the thornier question of how much suffering a person should be expected to endure during that period cannot be answered with statistical tools alone.
Nine out of ten doctors agree … with whatever pays their golf club membership dues
And so most AD regimes rely on the opinion of two medical experts, and some round concepts to do with ‘chronic pain’ or ‘terminal illness’ (being born is a terminal illness, but okay…) Here we are far from out of the woods – opponents of AD point to the risk of slippage, the arbitrary nature of medical opinion, and the influence greedy heirs or a cash-strapped healthcare system might put on an fragile, elderly patient who doesn’t “want to be a burden”. If we are killing impoverished, unemployed 45 year olds, depressed because they can’t pay their rent, how far have we come from the ‘peace and dignity’ the Death Serum Dispensers promised our beloved parents would be free to choose?
You can’t place a value on something unless you know what it is for
But the thing I find most interesting in the AD debate is not where or how this line is drawn, but rather what the line itself tells us about our society. The very act of valuing the quality of residual human life reveals something fundamental about what we see as the purpose of life itself.
In those distant times before social media, a majority of Westerners still did not consider that they had come to earth in order to seek happiness. Looking further back into the pre-history of the 20th Century and before, much of our Judaeo-Christian theology exhorts us to treat such indulgences as sinful. We are here, so the stoic reasoning goes, in order to suffer, to cleanse our spirits and prepare for a higher state of being in the next life. A painful exit from this world was a cleansing one; the peace ultimately achieved all the more divine.
But increasingly, it is hedonism that underpins our culture now. We live for no higher purpose than the pleasure of our own flesh. It follows that pain is abhorrent and must be avoided at all costs. As that flesh fails, and the possibility of pleasuring it recedes, there can be no reason for a hedonist to keep living. Of course, this is itself a pernicious death spiral, because hedonism is too shallow a philosophy to provide any meaningful fulfillment, especially for those who suffer the kinds of trauma that make superficial happiness appear elusive. This is why more and more young people are turning to depression, medication and ultimately, to the Assisted Dying solutions that, a decade ago, would have landed them in a mental hospital. No one is even inviting them to think about changing their world view from self-absorbed hedonism, to living a life in service of others.
I just want the Almighty to have the right to die with dignity
However, I remain an optimist. Contrary to Nietzsche’s assertions, rumours of God’s death are greatly exaggerated. He might be chronically pained to see the sorry state of our culture. It might even seem like He is terminally ill. But I’m not ready to sign off on His dose of death serum quite yet. So I’ll put my back behind stopping this Assisted Dying madness.
And I will remain a believer in life – the fun & quirky; the hard & ugly; the warts, the cancer cells and all.
When I think back over my life, I have few if any regrets for the things that I did. Even the very stupid decisions I have taken – like marrying a woman who raised more red flags than a Mao Zedong rally – have ultimately only led me to good or better life outcomes. I wouldn’t change them if I could.
But regrets I have. I regret every time I fell down, and didn’t get back up. I regret every time I allowed failure to dictate my course of action. Conversely, when I think of my accomplishments, the ones that matter most, the ones that give me satisfaction, are the things I persevered in doing, despite how hard it was; how stacked the odds seemed against me.
In that sense, failure isn’t just an unavoidable part of life. It is the very thing that makes life worth living.
I’ve had in my head for some time a general theory of society, that I’ve been meaning to put down in writing. Here goes:
Society – any society – consists of three essential elements: a State, a Market and a Community. Let’s take each in turn.
The State is, in its essence, the monopoly on physical force. The weaker the State is in a given society, the more physical force is dispersed between different actors. The stronger the State, the more physical force is concentrated in the State itself. A hallmark of a strong State is, therefore, laws which prohibit any form of violence, up to and even including self-defense.
It follows from this definition of the State that everything it does in some way relates to its monopoly on violence. For example, the State spends money on infrastructure. But in order to do so, that money must come from taxes. These in turn are collected from taxpayers who, if they refuse to pay, will have the money taken from them. If they resist, the State will not hesitate to use physical force to compel them out of their possessions and into prison.
Next comes the Market. The Market is the free exchange of value between actors. It reposes on the assumption that exchange is mutually beneficial. In its purest form, the Market knows neither altruism nor compulsion. Each actor enters the Market to further his own self-interest, and finds that agreement with other actors is the best way of doing this.
The final pillar of society is Community. Community is all voluntary interactions of social actors that are neither transactional nor subject to compulsion under threat of physical force, So anything that is non-State or non-Market is by definition Community. Examples of Community are families, friendships, bowling clubs, religions and board game meetups.
A key feature of Community is that it has the power of banishment or exclusion, but no other power. Another key feature is that interactions within a Community tend to be highly altruistic. Community members ‘care’ about one another, and in fact are often willing to suspend their own self-interest in pursuit of Community-defined goals and in adherence to Community-defined values.
Now comes my core hypothesis about the ideal organisation of a society:
A society can be said to be well-organised when the Community, the Market and the State all have equal weight. This is because each of these three mechanisms represents an important check on the other two. The State provides order and peace, the Community provides values and morals, and the Market provides economic rationality and innovation.
A society that has a strong State, but a weak Market and a weak Community, will tend towards Communism. The lack of (Community) moral compass will allow the State’s leadership to abuse its monopoly on power, while the lack of (Market) pressure will lead to bad economic-decision making and undermining of democracy, because consumers and businesses exert a democratising influence.
A society with a strong Market, but a weak State and a weak Community, will tend towards Corporatism, a consolidation of economic power in the hands of wealthy oligarchy, who will lack morals and fly to space with Captain Kirk in a giant dick, while their workers have to pee in bottles. Likewise, enforcement of contracts will be impossible, because that requires either the compulsion of the State or the moral impetus of the Community. Ultimately, even basic transactions will be burdened with additional costs of self-enforcement, and entire markets will collapse under that cost.
It’s rather hard to find examples of a society characterised by strong Community, but weak State and a weak Market. However, tribal societies exactly fitted this description. And while they may be marked by a degree of stability, I would argue that this comes at a high price: investment is next to impossible, nothing is there to drive human progress and innovation.
In modern political discourse it is conventional to consider society along a ‘left-right’ axis, in which two of the three essential societal elements are considered as opposing poles of a spectrum. My hypothesis suggests that in fact there is no place along this spectrum that can deliver a healthy, well-functioning society, because the third element – Community – is not represented.
That is why it is best to illustrate politics not with a left-right spectrum, but with a Social Triangle
And in fact, much of the imbalance in modern society is related to a steady erosion of the influence of Community on our daily lives. Church attendance has plummeted, people have fewer meaningful friendships and participate in fewer activities. Families are smaller and more fragmented than ever before. Indeed, we have drifted down the Social Triangle, and landed somewhere along the axis between State and Market.
That is why when the Left and the Right complain about the other side, they are both right and both wrong. A good example is around Hate Speech. New laws are being rushed upon us by well-meaning, but wrong-headed Leftists to outlaw saying ‘mean things’. These laws are incredibly stupid – at best they won’t work, and at worst they will. But the question is, why is this happening? Simply put, the power of the Community to check the behaviour of society’s members is increasingly absent. We now find ourselves trying to criminalise the sort of behaviour that used to cost you friendships, club memberships and a place at your cousin’s dinner table.
Markets are also malfunctioning in ways that Right-wingers find hard to explain away. It turns out that excessive greed and amorality are themselves a form of market failure, because any asymmetry between market participants creates an opportunity for sharp practice – information is imperfect, bargaining power is lopsided. Absent Community, the only way to check those immoral excesses is ever-more costly regulation. That in turn creates opportunities for regulatory capture and barriers to entry for new market participants. We find ourselves in a social market economy that is neither very social nor very market.
What is the solution? Clearly, it is to restore some sense of Community – common values, a common purpose, a clear set of religious dogma and a shared moral code. Adam Smith understood the importance of this intuitively, (even if Karl Marx was less perspicacious in this regard).
Now, this is all well and good, but do I have any more practical suggestions or is this just another ‘everything is awful’ blogpost? Here’s my three step plan:
Awareness. Stop pretending like our Community doesn’t matter. Restart a conversation about what our values are, what we can agree on, and how we can come together to pray and play – knowing that is every bit as important as who our State leaders are or how our economy is working.
Subsidiarity. An interesting result that comes out of the social triangle is the question of scale. It turns out the Market works ever better at scale, and the State too seems pretty able to work at scale. But Communities don’t seem to work very well at scale at all. Insofar as altruism is a key ingredient, it’s really not possible to have empathy with a million other people, much less 8 billion. In other words, today’s society is too big for real Community to exist. Not only is globalism a terrible idea, in fact, we need to break nations down into pieces that are well proportioned for Community to prosper. This suggests devolving more of the Market and the State to smaller scales – local government and buy local goods.
Stop uncontrolled immigration. Yes, there I said it. Immigration is very bad for Community, for the obvious reason that immigrants are least likely to share the common values that bind people together in voluntary ways. Immigration erodes Community and splinters society.
God. That’s right. The big guy. Flowing white beard. Turns out, not only is He almighty, but He’s also quite good for creating the conditions under which Communities can flourish. He sort of works as a rallying point and an anchor for common values and beliefs.
Get the hell offline. I don’t believe the internet is the cause of failing Community. After all, the excellent book Bowling Alone came out when the internet was still in diapers. But I also don’t think the internet can be part of the solution. If you want real Community, you should get off this damn computer, go outside and meet people. Join a choir. Or a rugby team. Or take a pottery class.
As with birth rates, we use data for 4 categories of countries from 1990 to 2015 (100 observations total). We have two explanatory variables, AGE and Y, where AGE is defined as the percentage of the population aged over 65 and Y is per capita GDP.
After eyeballing the scattergrams, we test the following functional form:
d = (minY^a)/Y^a * (1/AGE^g)
Where minY is the constant equal to the smallest value of Y in the series.
Logarithmic transformation gives:
ln(d) = ln(minY^a) – a*ln(Y) – g*ln(AGE)
which we test on the data using OLS. Here are the results:
Adjusted R square: 75.191
Intercept coefficient: 7.37384
t-Stat: 20.4011
Y coefficient: -1.01444
t-Stat: -13.1059
AGE coefficient: 2.0097
t-Stat: 11.5208
The estimated intercept is a good, but not perfect, approximation of ln(minY^a)
Here are the fitted against actual values of the scattergram for death rate against per capita GDP:
While the results are not as good as with the birth rates calculations, it is nevertheless a good enough fit and the explanatory variables have a strong enough confidence factor to be usable in our estimations.
We begin by examining the scatter of data for 100 observations of per capita GDP and per capita emissions for 4 categories of countries, over 25 years (1990 – 2015).
The scatter suggests a cubic functional form, so we test:
GHG = a + b*Y + c*Y^2 + d*Y^3
where GHG are per capita emissions of GHG, and Y is per capita GDP.
