Friday, August 10, 2018

Excellent Book! "Mike Martin" - "Why We Fight"

https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/why-we-fight/

I found this book by Mike Martin to be a compelling warning against underestimating the importance and impact of top-down causation; here derived from the in-group versus out-group dynamics driven by our evolutionary propensity to seek status and belonging in our in-group, and for leaders to seek to dominate other leaders (apparently leading to a relatively fixed rate-of-conflict over recorded history).

As the in-group gets larger the relative number of deaths in conflicts seems to go down; while elite vs. elite, leader vs. leader conflict derived from our evolved drive to dominate other leaders drives us into further conflict at a relatively constant rate.

That this is all driven by inequality that decimates the in-group sense of belonging and relative status, as elites and leaders claw resources away from the in-group members in their desperate desire to dominate other leaders. The in-groups violently fracture and leaders violently clash with each other in highly personalised attempts to dominate each other in ways derived from our stone-age ancestors evolutionary adaptations.

For me, this really resonated with the idea of hierarchical causality in financial economics; where bottom-up agent-based models have a poverty of not yet being able to effectively account for top-down causation and its affect on individual agent strategies and dynamics - that we may need to generalise the idea of agents (with complex adaptive and purposeful behaviours) to classes of computational components along the lines of some sort of actor type model to better model purposeful system components that have both top-down and bottom-up causation linkages. For me hierarchical causality is a phenomenological fact that needs to be accounted for in real-world models.

It may also be that the only way forward is to augment leadership decisions in the corporate and political sphere with artificial intelligence in order to ameliorate and moderate our stone-age derived biases. We remain relatively effective at making fair decisions (though fairness does not equate with the economic notion of rationality) at the level of small groups, our immediate communities; but seem to fail miserably when our in-group scaled to the size of nation states with the advent of printing, and now is failing as the in-group can globalise, with the advent of the internet, online ordering and globalisation in general.

We appear not to be "fit-for purpose" as leaders in the age of globalisation. Our evolutionary adaptations have not caught up with rapid technological changes around us. We could probably use some technological assistance. We may need to find a way of re-organising ourselves into an in-group that may not have an out-group. We need leaders whom do not seek to dominate other leaders - I think this is currently an impossibility.

Our own natural propensity to fawn over royalty, super-hero's and power continually leads us to collectively select leaders whom continue to seek to dominate and re-enforce the very power and status that generates inequality that in turns leads to violent conflict. The irony of the positive feed-back is the tragedy of our times. How do we cut this Gordian Knot?

Of course elites naturally fear (through their evolutionary derived need to dominate other leaders) anything that may require less control, or a weakened ability to accrue wealth and power relative to other comparable leaders - however; the key point (for me) from Mike Martins book - the most effective current strategy to level inequality has historically been violent conflict. This is the tragedy. Elites typically lose their wealth and power and new elites emerge through violent conflicts.

This is the for me the key warning of the book; that we do need a new way of thinking about finance, economics and democracy as informed by better knowledge of our-selves as humans in collective. Human elites and human leaders seem evolved to favour centralisation, hierarchy and relative wealth accrual at all-cost, to fear loss of status and power above everything else - while history seems to favour decentralisation, diversity, fairness in trade, open societies with rule of law, transparency, accountability, open and equal education, health-care and a respect for difference, as ways to reduce violent conflict and help individuals have a sense of belonging and status. This is a remarkably simple insight that the book seems to provide. This is not about ideology it is about human nature.

If we could simply moderate our leaders petty evolved need to dominate other leaders and provide more people with a sense of status and belonging we would probably avoid much of the violence that plague our current world - so making the world safer, richer and better resourced and fairer for ourselves and others. It really suggests that there is a way of breaking the cycle of inequality and violence that we remain locked into due to the positive feed-backs from our own evolved nature.

Tim Gebbie 2018