Social Success, Part 3A: Collectivism and Autocracy
Communistic tendencies, dogma and salvation, and the struggle for life
This series began with a statement that emphasized that understanding today’s world requires an understanding of the past. The two previous posts in this series looked at human development in a tribal context and in a civilizational context, contexts in which individual humans (and their genetics) and groups of humans (and their cultures) had substantial periods to develop adaptations that supported survival and reproduction.
In the final act of this series, we set our sights on modernity. We will attempt to apply evolutionary insights to try to get a better understanding some of the complex social phenomena of recent times. The modern social landscape is wonderfully complex, and any person, or organization of persons, that claims to have The Answer™ to a complex topic should be met with skepticism. Nevertheless, I'm going to attempt to take a crack at some of those topics. I'll therefore approach the upcoming topics gently and with humility, and leave it to you, the reader, to judge for yourself the merit of the content.
We're going to try to understand why modern social systems tend towards collectivist or individualist approaches of economic governance. To ease digestion, I'm separating this discussion into two parts. This part will focus on conditions conducive to, and the consequences of, collectivist approaches; the following post will focus on conditions conducive to, and the consequences of, individualist approaches.
Recap
Before delving into specifics, let's briefly recap on what we have learned so far throughout the series.
Humans occupy a peculiar place in nature. On the one hand, humans are selfish. We were produced by biological forces, and thus adhere to the rules of biology: genetic self-preservation (survival) and reproduction. We fight to survive. We protect what we love. The catch is that for most of biological evolutionary history, an organism's love was generally reserved for genetically related kin. Tigers, for example, are a solitary species and thus take selfishness to the extreme. When a male tiger conquers a new territory, he mauls the cubs of rival males so that females aren't investing resources in progeny that aren't his1.
On the other hand, humans are social. We form large colonies, like ants or bees do. However, within colonies of ants or bees, mass cooperation is greatly enabled by the fact that those within the colony generally share a common progenitor: the queen. The systems of cells that compose us can be thought of in a similar way, whereby the near-identical genetic relatedness between cells produces a harmonious biological symphony. When compared to systems of cells or colonies of ants, the degrees of genetic similarity within human colonies fall short of what would be expected to facilitate large scale cooperation and cohesiveness.
This interesting blend of selfishness and sociality, coupled with enormous group sizes, is one of our distinctive features as a species. Though due to the rapid flourishing of our species (thanks to a series of technological innovations), our genetics just couldn't quite keep up. Put differently, evolution didn't have time to reorganize our reproductive systems and generate queen humans that could spit out large batches of sterile female workers and smaller batches of male sex slaves. All genetic evolution really had time to was fit us with brains that better allowed us to navigate the complex web of relationships that accompanied group living.
Most of our social adaptations arose due to group selection. As Charles Darwin put it, the fiercest struggles for life tend to occur not between species, but within species, because they occupy similar areas, eat similar foods, and vie for the same reproductive resources. Humans encountered no shortage of intergroup conflict. And that ongoing conflict drove groups to not only develop better technologies, but also develop better social strategies. These distinct social strategies between groups are what we call culture.
Groups had to find ways to get self-interested individuals to sacrifice personal gain for the best-interest of the collective, else the whole group could perish. By the time civilizations arose, these strategies tended to be packaged within religious doctrines and institutions. Religion filled our gaps in understanding with plausible answers, and used shared fictional belief to distinguish between the within and the without. Religions were also valuable in discouraging harmful selfish behavior, and encouraging pro-social attitudes towards fellow group members and anti-social attitudes towards competing groups.
This last point emphasizes a balance that human groups tend towards: the formula of ingroup harmony. Groups attempt to minimize selfishness, that is, the prioritization of the self at the expense of the rest of the group; and maximize groupishness, that is, the prioritization of ingroup at the expense of other groups. Meanwhile, individuals grapple to maintain personal sovereignty. Demand too much sacrifice from individuals and they may try to leave for a group that provides more opportunity to flourish.
While a selfish individual generally bests an altruistic individual, a group of altruists generally bests a group of selfish individuals. In times of looming tribal conflict, groups will crank up the notch on sacrificial demands. Groups provide security to the individuals within them; therefore, a struggle for survival urges groups to ensure collective harmony, leading to enormous pressures for social conformity. When push comes to shove, individuals have little choice other than to play their respective roles and rally around whatever shared fiction (i.e., social glue) promises to get them out of the mess.
Communism
Using the insights above, we're going to try to understand why modern social systems might tend towards collectivist approaches of economic governance.
A communist society is characterized by a publicly controlled economy, which requires an authoritative system of governance to maintain that public control of the economy. Historically, small hunter-gatherer tribe sizes made communal living a necessity. There existed an emphasis towards egalitarianism, since exploitative tribe members risked weakening the group and threatened the survival and reproductive success of everybody else. Whether it be a petty thief or a chief intoxicated by power, the intimate nature of smaller groups allowed the exploited to band together and discipline exploiters accordingly.
Most of us no longer live in small and intimate groups; we live in nations with populations exceeding the millions. The community is represented by a national government, which thus grapples with some significant challenges when attempting to enforce communist social systems for significantly large populations.
A challenge that communist groups face is that they must restrict the self-organization of self-interested individuals, that is, the division of labor and wealth distribution are heavily dictated by the government. This "forgoing personal gain for the good of the group" strategy works
for the system of cells in our bodies that all have near-identical genetics,
for a colony of bees within a hive that all share a common mother,
for small and intimate hunter-gatherer tribes that have members who tend to be closely related.
And in these examples, group members are happy to comply because it aligns with their biological interests. Strict communism, however, doesn't work as well in large societies when you ask individuals to forgo personal gains for group members they will likely never meet or aren't genetically related to. This can eventually leave a large amount of individuals unsatisfied, eventually provoking either government upheaval or the migration of members in search for a better life.
Put differently, communism can be socially empowering, but it is individually regressive. At some point, increasing collectivist pressures sufficiently weakens individuals to a point where they fold and the entire society crumbles. As Confucius succinctly put it, rotten wood cannot be carved.
Another challenge is that a communist approach requires a totalitarian system of governance. Authoritative control is necessary to organize the distribution of wealth and division of labor, and vigilant surveillance is required to identify and discipline those who threaten the totalitarian doctrine. Authoritative control is nothing new to biological systems, for instance
in multi-cellular organisms, nervous systems have authoritative control on cellular processes;
in a bee hive, young bees are automatically assigned specialized roles via differential gene expression;
small hunter-gatherer were small enough such that a) those in higher positions of status were genetically related to most tribe members and b) resistances could be mounted to prevent harmful authoritative figures. Nevertheless, when things get messy groups become more likely to submit to authority.
In these examples, authoritative control works because it is in the best genetic interest of the authority figure to ensure group success. However, if we shift our view back to nations, we have to keep in mind that those who occupy positions of power are self-interested individuals! The underlying biological objectives of those in power don't necessarily align with the best-interest of the group. The upper-echelons of totalitarian regimes are thus ripe for corruption, attracting (ironically) capitalistic individuals whose self-interest eventually leads to systemic rot and collapse.
The last point I'd like to make about communism, is that it nears the optimal approach for the survival of a complex biological system if all of the biological interests of the constituents align. If civilians or politicians could somehow be reprogrammed to be completely group-interested rather than self-interested, that is, to not think twice about foregoing personal gains for the good of the group, the communist approach could be a great strategy, as evidenced by its prevalence in biological social systems. But alas, we can't yet be reprogrammed…not that I think we'd be much happier if we could.
Conflict
The more elaborate and expensive a nest is in energy and time, the greater the fierceness of the ants that protect it. — E.O. Wilson
As a biological systems is threatened, be it by another biological system or a natural disaster, its communal instincts kick in as it mounts defenses to the threat. In systems of humans, self-interest increasingly aligns with group-interest as group members focus on defeating whatever threatens their survival and proliferation. Our communal responses can be inspiring and shed light on the altruistic and loving side of human nature. Take, for example, natural disaster responses. Whether it be a response to a hurricane or wildfire, stress-inducing natural events often produce heartwarming stories of community collaboration, heroic rescue efforts, and waves of charitable support.
When the threat is another group of natural humans, however, things can become more or less heartwarming depending on whether you're patriotic or pacifistic. A natural consequence of international conflict is mass conscription of the general population and a general redirection of resources (labor and capital) away from private entities and towards war efforts. This predictably occurs because a group of brave altruists generally bests a group of selfish cowards. From the perspective of the national nervous system, war generates feelings of tremendous national pride and love towards those brave enough to participate in the war efforts; however, war also tends to provoke feelings of mass prejudice and hatred towards those who bear any similarity to the opposition.
dog·ma
noun
a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.
When faced with a threat, human groups become vulnerable to ideological dogma. Dogmas harmonize the objectives of the constituents and provide the group with a simple path towards vanquishing the threat. In times of uncertainty, people crave certainty and value it above truth. As a consequence, nuance becomes unacceptable because it threatens certainty, and certainty promises followers the salvation that they so dearly crave. This phenomena is deeply human, so manifestations of it exist wherever you look. Some examples that come to mind are:
Early Israel was subject to constant threat from surrounding imperial power struggle. This lead to hostility towards the surrounding empires and the subsequent development of a monotheistic religious dogma.
After its defeat in the first world war, the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to pay an equivalent of over $400B (inflation adjusted) in reparations to the Allied Powers. This crushing economic disadvantage laid fertile ground for resentment and desperation, giving rise to the xenophobic Nazi regime.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus put public health at risk. Despite early evidence that suggested the virus posed a heterogeneous threat (i.e., being most harmful to the elderly and the physiologically disadvantaged), many countries adopted prolonged homogeneous responses (i.e., universal and mandatory lockdowns, masks, and vaccinations).
What the examples above have in common is that opinions that stray from the generally held ideology are socially condemned. The ideological dogmas promised to get these groups out their messes, and nuance stood in the way of salvation.
sal·va·tion
noun
preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss.
a source or means of being saved from harm, ruin, or loss.
We can imagine that an Israelite who expressed doubt in his belief of Yahweh to his devout peers wouldn't fair too well during an imperial conflict. Nor would someone in Nazi Germany who openly opposed the extermination of the Jewish population. The same goes for those who expressed discontent towards indiscriminate pandemic responses towards a discriminating virus; lockdowns and vaccines promised to bring things back to normal, thus anyone who threatened that return to normalcy became subject to social shame. This last example is less severe than the previous two, but I wanted to highlight it to show that we are still vulnerable to the same mechanisms of ideological capture that have led to historical atrocities.
Cause and effect
As we’ve seen, groups have a natural tendency to gravitate towards collectivist strategies under stress. Furthermore, if a group is disadvantaged in relation to other groups the threat of being exploited looms large and becomes a source of constant stress.
I wanted to emphasize this point, because I see many people who mistaken communism as some collective choice that is consciously made by a country, or some "evil" ideological pathogen that must be exterminated, rather than a natural consequence of the environmental and biological conditions that groups of humans happen to find themselves in.
For example, after the Neolithic revolution, China's geographical position placed them far from the technology generating flurry of competition in the Fertile Crescent, and could therefore only weakly participate through long-distance trade. This caused China to lag technologically and made the country more vulnerable to more technologically advanced foreign threats, forcing them to compensate by adopting more socially-oriented policies that stymied socially regressive private enterprise.
The same can be said of Russia, positioned just far enough away from the competitive European economy to cause technological lag, but close enough for European countries to be of threat. Couple that with being exposed to a harsher northern climate, and you're left with a country that experiences a greater struggle for survival relative to surrounding countries. And again, the greater the struggle for survival, the more a group has to lean into collectivism to prevail in intergroup conflict.
Despite being characteristically communist, both these countries, however, are capitalistic in relation to other nations, i.e., in the global marketplace. China is currently gobbling up precious metal mines in Africa in anticipation of the renewable energy transition, and Russia is still undergoing a greedy and gluttonous attempt to invade the country of Ukraine. Within-group competition is heavily regulated in collectivist societies, so they have to rely more on between-group competition to drive technological adaptation. Communist societies can’t leverage internal competition (and some of its adaptive benefits) to the same degree that capitalist societies can.
But in fact, all nations are capitalistic entities to some degree, it just depends on how far you’re willing to zoom out. Each tribe, chiefdom, and civilization got to where it is today because it exploited the exploitable, whether it be the inorganic (water, stone, metals) or the organic (weaker species such as plants and animals, or weaker groups of humans). This is an uncomfortable truth we have to live with; unfortunately pacifists don’t typically rise to power. I'll expand on this a little more in my next post.
Fortune
So, as we've seen, due to geographical positioning and historical happenstance, groups often adopted what we call communist approaches of governance because it sufficiently equipped them in struggles for life. And across the historical record, most civilizations were under authoritarian control (divine rule, monarchy, etc.), because historically life was much more difficult. Countries were in constant conflict, either with the natural world (disease, famine, natural disaster) or with other countries. I want to stress that just because those collective strategies helped groups survive, doesn't necessarily mean the collective was necessarily happier. Our genes designed us to survive and reproduce, not to be happy.
It has only been until relatively recently that conditions arose such that some countries became secure enough so that they could afford to further lean into capitalist economic systems and democratic governance. Democracy is a luxury awarded to groups who happen to have abundant material and energetic resources and are well-positioned socioeconomically relative to other groups. In other words, when a country has enough to go around and isn't too preoccupied with foreign competition, it has the luxury to compete amongst itself.
Which brings us to the subject of the final post of this series (I promise), where we will be delving into capitalism. We'll elaborate on the paragraph above, laying out why some conditions are more conducive to capitalist economic systems, which will help us explain why democracy may have taken hold in some places rather than others. I’ll show how unfettered capitalism empowers the individual at the expense of the collective. We'll talk about the benefits of capitalism and its contribution to technological adaptation, but also its costs, both to humans and the overall environment. Stay tuned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_cycle_of_the_tiger