Category: Essay

Who Are They



This is a tricky one. My Monkey Logic column started out as a kind of joke. Look! Ha Ha! We are Monkeys! We think we are soo smart! Typical human hubris! But as I wrote the pieces, it turned out the hubris was mine. I’d believed the insight that ‘we are animals’, was quirky enough to riff a few amusing essays off of. Perhaps I might make a few people think, I thought. Maybe nudge a few into changing their environments to make life a bit more comprehensible to a poor perplexed Monkey cowering in each of their heads.

Writing the essays, I got pulled into thinking about primate hard wiring; how each generation of our species learnt how to survive sharing a patch of forest/savanna/classroom with angry, chest-beating Alphas. I mused at how, over millions of years, lippy apes, who pissed off the Alphas, got beaten to death with branches before bringing children into the world; evolution informing us, in its typical blunt fashion, that it’s best to not mess with the Alpha; not to question power.
We are herd animals, or troop animals, which is basically the same thing. We no longer live in the jungle or on the open savanna, but we still have that old Monkey Logic running in our ape minds. Logic built to make the Alpha happy. Our behaviour is wired to anticipate what the Alpha wants: don’t sleep with his mate, don’t rock the boat, go along with the latest fashion, aspire to buy a Rolex, align with consensus opinions, do what you are told! OBEY!

I stopped finding it funny. My writing may have suffered. Sorry about that. Things were serious. It looked like human behaviour really was dominated by subconscious forces; animal emotions; evolutionary heuristics; MonkeyLogic if you will.

I am not burying the lead. I promised to reveal who THEY are, and I will, I wanted to set the evolutionary stage first. So, here goes, who are THEY?

At one level they are our own creations. Psychological pathologies personified. Mental demons projected into the world. If you are familiar with the film, they are the monsters from Forbidden Planet.

We are simps [not chimps, look it up], sycophants. 80% of us will never comment on the emperor’s lack of clothes, however much his nudity puts us off our soup. There has to be a THEY because our primate programming needs something to put on the pedestal waiting in our minds. We want to read about their affairs and what appliances they have in their kitchens. 80% of us need this pointless nonsense in our lives. It doesn’t matter that they are dumb Apes like us. We don’t care. If the troop decides they are the Alphas, we are programmed to care who they sleep with and whether they bake good cakes.

We imagine our masters into existence. We make rods for our own backs - then we hand them to anybody with a blue tick, a black AmEx, or golden Rolex.

But most of THEM, the people we look up to, are just as confused as we are. They have more stuff, but they are shaved-apes way out of their depths, just like us, except they are often less happy and more stressed. They don’t really understand how they got into the first-class line in the first place. They suspect it might have something to do with all the handbags and expensive shoes they own, but they can’t be sure. They never had to clean the toilet and they don’t know why. This scares them. They worry that if they say or do the wrong thing, somebody might make them put on a pair of marigold yellow gloves and start! The last thing these imposter-alphas want is to draw attention to themselves. They suspect there might be real monsters out there ready to tear them apart if they slip up. They are right.

Most people don’t have the capacity to lead. Of those who do, most are unwilling to make the impossible moral choices necessary to perform the job. Anybody who does step up in this world of terrible compromises must therefore be both capable AND ruthless. This doesn’t necessarily make them bad. There are a few good leaders who are both of these things. They understand that talking softly and carrying a big stick means that sometimes you might have to hit somebody over the head with it. But how does this hypothetical ethical leader react when the people who need hitting are innocents? What if not hitting them only hurts more innocents? What if the trolley will always crush someone and you need to choose who… NOW! CHOOSE! WHO DIES?! CHOOSE! What if there are no good answers? What do you do then? Even if you started out as one of that vanishingly small fraction of people who can, want to, and want to for the right reasons? What then? Confronted with the impossibility of the task? I think you give up in the face of this abyss. You retreat into delusion. You convince yourself you are in charge while abdicating real responsibility to others. You take the payoff that is waiting; million dollar speaking engagements; chauffeur driven transport for the rest of your life; fancy trips to Caribbean islands on private jets with pretty young stewardesses. You never admit these are payoffs. You allow the tricky decisions to pass to the bankers, the generals, and the regulators. You displace any residual horror by speaking at the UN, choosing a new CEO, shopping for a new housekeeper, or attending TED or WEF. You plug your ears to the screams.

This is true for those leaders who didn’t start out as psychopaths in the first place. The less said about the latter the better.
As I warned, it is tricky. There is no cabal of Illuminati huddling in Bavarian castles, discussing the bloodline of the Son of Man [well there might be, but it would be a side show]. There is instead a lot of ignorance, a lot of bureaucracy, and a little evil.

So, to summarize, THEY are:

Imposters; most are simply the 20% the universe decides will always have the lion’s share, regardless of any underlying meritocratic justification [check out Zipf’s law, or the 80–20 rule ]. The wiring of our monkey brains ignores any obvious deficits and insist their ideas and wellbeing must be lofted above our own petty wants and needs. Out of their depth, these individuals are often scared and confused. They are always looking for a real Alpha to agree with:

Leaders; the few good men and women who start out clean only to shatter on contact with the fractal fuckedness of the modern world. Minds reeling from the horror they delegate to:

Bureaucracies; endless committees, algorithms, think-tanks, and corporations. All the non-human entities that have intent without compassion or comprehensions, and which are, in turn, run by:

Psychopaths; those who understand it all and just kind of like the sticky feel of our blood on their hands.

THEY is a gestalt beast, easier to picture as a ravenous, sadistic evil from another dimension, than a collection of policies and peons (think British Telekom or AT&T).

THEY is a mob of emergent, crowd-sourced evil made up mostly of dumb b-list celebrities and mundane-middle-managers.

THEY is the MAN. It doesn’t matter if they are in denial, deliberately ignorant of the horror their compliance is supporting, uncomprehending algorithms maximising numbers that have no meaning, or cold technocrats playing with lives as a child plays with Lego.

THEY is a fortification of compliance; an adobe insect castle built from our own archaic behaviour to protect the bloated corrupted grubs of power skulking in dark tunnels below.

THEY is POWER.

Whenever I suspect I might be one of THEM, I use whatever puny levers of power are available to me, to make sure I remain one of US instead.

—

In the next and final essay in this series, I am going to tell you what THEY want.

Pre-collapse Economics — The Poison



This edition of ‘Monkey Logic’ is Part One of a two-part series on how to fix all the problems of the world…

As an experiment, I am also reading these essays on YouTube, let me know what you think:





Or, read on…

Pre-collapse Economics — The Poison

What’s on the other side?
The other side of what?
The other side of the slide.
The other side of the burning curtain which separates expired, tired, trashy today from pre-singularity tomorrow.
I see past the smoke and teargas.
Let me tell you what I see…

But first, a recap…
We find ourselves at a significant point of inflection. We cannot fail to see a general decay in trust across the board. Belief in truth, confidence in institutions, and faith in our fellow citizens are evaporating like spilt champagne on a summer terrace. Even money, the foundation of our consumer society is looking increasingly shaky. Paraphrasing Warren Buffet: “We’ve moved from a system where debt is repaid, to a system where debt is reimbursed.” Mr Buffet goes on to point out that we don’t know if this new system of laissez-faire money printing will work better than the old system, but he’s buying goldmines and selling banks. You can draw your own conclusions; I will give you mine for free:
Money is toast. Don’t bother looking for its value, it’s gone. Evaporated.
The only reason we still use it is that up until very recently, there was nothing better …more on this later. Countries that suggest they might like to be paid in something more tangible than bits of paper, or digital bits of bytes, get a dose of sense forcibly regime-changed into them. Just ask Gaddafi about his plan for an African gold dinar. Money, a once functional tool, has been so abused and twisted by bad faith actors that it is now a ridiculous clown of its former self. We broke it. Just like we break anything to get to the value inside.
I’m not one of those people who claim our entire economic system is a lizard run conspiracy, but I suggest that even the most propaganda riddled, blue-pill, sheep-person will concede that not all motives are pure. Not all humans are upright and honourable. They scam if they can. This is a fact. In pursuit of personal gain, people will leverage loopholes they discover in systems ostensibly built to ensure the common good. This type of person naturally gravitates towards positions of power where they can enlarge their favourite loopholes and further bend the rules. Buoyed up by a lack of push back, they begin to fragrantly break the rules and soon, the abused, bent and mangled system of law and order will cease to have any power. After this, the system will collapse, chaos will ensue, and we will be forced, at least for a while, to play by the rules printed on the box that the universe came in:

Sticks and stones. Tooth and nail.

Our current economics, for the sake of argument, let’s call it neoliberal free-market capitalism, has had a good run, but it’s approaching this collapse.
This is how things go. Human systems of governance have a half-life; they decay as they are systematically pierced by loophole spelunkers and eroded by bad-faith regulators
Laws can not long survive the relentless abrasive wind of human corruption; although some artefacts of ordinance prove more resistant to this decay than others. A wealthy Roman merchant’s fortune, buried in panic and then dug up two thousand years later, will have retained its value. This is because gold is not a made-up thing. It is real in a way IOUs and paper money are not.

Gold is shiny, which makes people want it.
Gold is rare, which means not everybody can have it.

Gold’s value comes from desirability and scarcity and its scarcity is not something artificial under the control of corrupt rulers, rather it comes from the rules of the universe. Gold is heavy. When Earth was molten most of it settled into the core beyond our greedy digging.
So if we want to find a system upon which to build longterm prosperity for our species, we need to bind our laws to something resistant to fiddling.
Could we base our new economics on gold? Probably not:

  1. Gold’s scarcity might not survive the next couple of decades of technological advancement. Gold is rare in the universe - one atom for every hundred trillion atoms of hydrogen - but there is just so much miscellaneous stuff floating around in the vastness of space, that somebody is going to bring back a big boulder of precious metals at some point in the next couple of decades; and when I say big, I mean big like Paris. One day, SpaceX, or SpaceY or SpaceZ, will drag a Trillion tons of gold, platinum, and nickel into orbit and announce that they are ready to start parachuting pre-smelted ingots directly down to your factory’s parking lot anywhere on the planet.
  2. Gold is money, but money is only one ingredient of an economic system. We don’t only need a substance to store and exchange value, we need an inviolate substrate upon which to build an entire system of economics beyond meddling.

When I say a substrate, I am talking about the rules and the board where the game of commerce is played. When I say inviolate, I mean it is impossible to make illegal moves.
‘Base-reality’ has the property that some ‘moves’ are impossible:
It is impossible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
It is impossible to turn water into wine - at least without a shit ton of high-tech equipment.
This is why these things are considered miracles. The substrate, the game-board that is the universe, has rules which can not be broken. Some things will always be impossible for mortals, only somebody with administrative privileges on the universe can do magic: the creator, his son, or one of his handful of upper-management gods. Compare this to the edifice of money and delegated force where we play today’s games of power. Once only the king was allowed to perform bureaucratic miracles, these were called decrees, today, with a de facto global constitution assembled from hundreds of thousands of treaties, laws, and backroom deals, there are as many kings as there are billionaires. As soon as an individual has sufficient funds, they join the crowded pantheon of gods and are able to force miracles onto the system. Minor economic deities do small miracles: bending planning laws to make sure no new houses are built in front of their villas; while really powerful oligods change demographies and confiscate wealth and health.
As an aside, this is what the right to bear arms was all about. If everybody had a gun-so the American founding fathers thought-everybody would be a little god and all the little gods together would keep the Titans in check. It turned out that there were many flaws in this plan, for a start it was enacted before aircraft carriers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and computational propaganda, but at least it was an attempt to build some ‘base-reality’ real-world resilience into the system of governance.
In summary, the laws of the universe are inviolate, but they are also crude and often come down to hitting people with lumps of reality in order to take other bits of reality off them. Human laws, even when they start off well-intentioned, always become corrupted and broken as they are hollowed out by bad faith actors pissing on the commons and looting our bureaucratic edifices for personal gain.
We need something robust and tamper-proof to stand against the relentless abrasion of a billion tricky monkeys, while, at the same time, being subtle and nuanced enough to encapsulate our instinct for fairness.
We need a new playing board immune to meddling by the players; a neutral, inviolate ‘substrate’ to provide the same governance functions as our current system, i.e. it’s laws, treaties, obligations, contracts, agreements, threats, promises…
On this ‘board’, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, capitalists, industrialists, artists, teachers, scientists, mothers, and soon, synthetic intelligences too, will, by plying their trades and taking their chosen paths through life, help our species on its journey from the caves to the stars; hopefully without the inane predictability of kleptocrat predators running off with all the goodies every few centuries and needing to have their manners guillotined back into them.

Lucky for us, I have developed a truly marvellous demonstration of such a system which unfortunately this ‘margin’ is too narrow to contain…
Details on the solution to all the world’s problems in the next issue of Monkey Logic 😉