Unconscious mechanisms: why things are mainly only getting worse
People are moral, but systems and institutions aren’t.
That is the critical mistake that people make when thinking about society, as they transpose their feelings about individuals onto the collective whole.
There are well-meaning individuals, but unless the incentives of the system they operate in are properly aligned, they will do deeply immoral things as “they were just following orders” or doing the only things they were able to do within the system.
Our society is guided by systems that often prioritize profit and efficiency over well-being. This article will explore these systems, how they work in financial markets, history, and how these factors can come together to cause social collapse over time. Finally, we will be shedding light on what this could mean for our society’s future.
The path of least resistance
Social dynamics work under rules of cause and effect, almost as if ideas and actions were objects in Newtonian physics. Whether consciously or unconsciously, every system has a predefined behavior that it incentivizes.
For example, in a completely free market, profits are the goal. Every factor which does not directly benefit the bottom line is a luxury. This set of luxuries includes morality. If a company can maximize its profits by being inhumane but chooses not to, it will eventually be outcompeted by one with no qualms.
Of course, morality can be used as a marketing tactic and differentiator, which is why you get situations where companies like Coca-Cola signal about ethics and inclusivity in the first world while hiring death squads and hitmen in the third world; or chocolate manufacturers promoting peace and love while incorporating child slave labor in their production process.
As an institution, companies understand that morality is a cost, but the appearance of morality can be profitable. Hence, they need to arrange matters in such a way that they appear to be moral while not incurring the costs, or they’ll get outcompeted by someone who plays the game better. This motivation is why, for instance, supporting Pride is such a popular tactic in the West — it costs institutions little, but it serves as effective marketing.
Like other large-scale systems, capitalism is amoral, primarily concerned with its end goal. If it happens to improve or worsen the lives of people, it doesn’t care as long as this improves the bottom line in some measurable way.
Much like a ball will always roll down a hill, circumstances tend to follow the path of least resistance unless compelled by an even greater force. And even then, only so long as the strength remains to fight against the inherent decay and devolution of the system.
In capitalism’s instance, the “even greater force” is the power of the state and the legal apparatus behind it. Effective regulation keeps the worst vices of free markets from materializing, but only where the implied threats are applied uniformly.
However, the state itself is comprised of different and competing groups. The civil service, for example, is comprised of unelected bureaucrats, and they have interests of their own. Just like any organism, they’re looking to expand, improve their well-being, and perpetuate themselves into the future. This is the true “deep state” that might throw a wrench in the works of any policy that they don’t find beneficial.
As a consequence, the apparatus of the state is making decisions contrary to what the public would want, who’d like smaller, less bureaucratic governance and easily understandable rules. Instead, what they get is a ballooning civil service that gets given a reasonable budget but overspends out of fears that they might get less money next funding round if they don’t use it up and are also generally looking to expand their influence through arcane Byzantine legalism.
Similarly, politicians don’t care about the long-term state of the system. If a crisis is all but guaranteed ten years down the line for a politically popular policy right now, their job security is directly correlated with not doing the prudent thing and being shortsighted.
These different systems then interact with each other, and their bad incentives aggregate. Both civil servants and politicians get hired/funded by corporations in order to get favorable rulings and advice for navigating the maze. The main party who suffers in this scenario is the public, who is supposed to get a fair rule of law and competitive products but is getting neither due to collusion.
As the end result of any of the systems is only loosely correlated with the well-being of the citizenry, it’s an afterthought. For things to improve, you need some leader or a powerful enough temporary incentive that completely warps the fabric of all underlying system incentives, like a blackhole affecting the trajectory of a planet.
Systems naturally tend towards a state of balance where opposing forces are equal, akin to a state of equilibrium in physics. However, this tendency can lead to a decline if not balanced by other forces. For instance, similar to how a planet’s roundshape is the result of gravitational forces pulling equally from all sides, a system can keep devolving towards its ‘lowest energy state’ — a state of collapse — unless other forces intervene.
The Middle Path
Legend says that whilst the Buddha was in the process of becoming enlightened, he was having trouble coming to a true understanding of the universe. His partying and general naivete years prior had left him none the wiser, while his recent asceticism and deprivation of food and comforts were leading him nowhere.
One day, while sitting under a tree on the riverbank, he overheard a boatman explain to his child:
“No, if you tie the rope for the sail too tight, it will snap, while if you tie it too loosely, it will not work at all. You have to tie it strong enough to still work but not so much that it can’t bear the strain.”
This was the key that the young prince needed to achieve cosmic knowledge and help him to properly understand life. The realization was the path of the Middle Way, the path of moderation, where extremism was understood to lead to one’s ruin and ignorance. At this point, Siddartha finally became the Buddha, the enlightened one.
While perhaps less dramatic, as we are far from achieving enlightenment (check your browser history if you want a reason why), we can still use this dichotomy to understand society. In an ideal world, where all policies work as intended, there are only two forces in politics: creation and destruction.
Depending on the time and place, either one might be called right or left wing. As we understand them, the policies of the modern political wings are arbitrary and subject to change on a whim. Remember back in COVID in the USA when supporting masks and even vaccines were initially considered a right-wing position, but then it flipped without anyone seeming to notice or even remember?
So instead, let’s ignore the modern conception of “wings” at all and instead think of a level above.
Creation is the imposition of rules and structures onto a system. Destruction is the erosion of the rules and structures that were once established.
Neither of these is wholly good or bad, but either extreme is terrible.
If you tighten the rope too hard, you impose order on an unruly world, yet every component of the system is under a lot of strain and might snap at any moment into lesser, disconnected, and less strained pieces. This is the ebb and flow of an authoritarian state.
If, on the other hand, you loosen all pre-established rules, eventually, the civilization itself cannot cope and collapses when buffeted by the elements. When anarchy reigns, the necessary structures to maintain creature comforts disappear.
There are moments when it is necessary to loosen or tighten the rope, as the original environment that required a certain state no longer exists. Sometimes, there’s more wind, sometimes less. Expecting one strategy to always be applicable is nonsense.
This is also partially why in the modern era, there seems to be a trend toward “destruction.” All social structures prior to the industrial revolution seem antiquated and nonsensical, as technology has created so much abundance that we can be careless with our legacy and still be fine…for the time being.
It is not that all social institutions, including the state, religion, family structures, etc. were unnecessary for all 12,000 years of human civilization, and we just happened to discover it in the last few decades. No, it’s just that our present capabilities make it seem as if those institutions are wholly obsolete. After all, we’ve been working fine for the last hundred or so odd years, right?
The key thing we fail to mention is that we’ve been on an upward, exponential ascent because of technological abundance. It’s like someone with a credit card who just so happens to get a promotion while they’re spending a lot of money. Yes, their newfound powers afford them more freedom, but it is not an invitation to spend liberally either.
We keep eroding taboos and institutions, thinking they’re wholly useless, but sooner or later, we might realize that we’ve unthinkingly cut into living tissue, and it’s going to hurt.
Throughout most of history, the two forces of creation and destruction were rather balanced, as civilizations, through quasi-Darwinian trial and error, ended up developing societies that were well adapted to their environments and capacities. Whether people wanted them or not, these institutions were in some form necessary.
However, the excessive returns of technology allow us to play fast and loose with these institutions before something breaks. To a certain extent, this is good. After all, few people genuinely want to live in a country where jingoism leads them to pointless wars, a theocracy takes over every aspect of their lives, or families control all their behaviors and expectations well into adulthood.
Yet, we’ve created an ever-increasing vacuum by hollowing out society with technology. This hole might eventually get large enough to consume us all if we are not careful.
The industrial revolution and its consequence
By making some tasks easier, technology almost definitionally reduces the amount of effort needed to achieve a similar or even superior state. For example, a warrior needed to train for years to master the sword, but nowadays, someone who can barely walk due to being unathletic and fat could take a one-hour course on shooting technique and would then stand a reasonable chance of defeating the swordsman with a gun if they were to be magically pitted against each other.
However, it wasn’t just the skill of murder that is lost when the warrior disappears, but a whole philosophy, ethos, and respect for violence. You don’t train for a lifetime and take the application of violence as a given. But you can definitely train for an hour, be proficient in shooting, and use that newfound ability quite liberally.
This is reminiscent of President Harry S. Truman’s comments: “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision.’ It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness” Had he personally had to burn all 226,000 people alive instead of pressing a metaphorical button, I dare say he’d have had quite a different opinion.
By making things easier to do, the industrial revolution eroded psychological and societal guardrails that stopped certain destructive behaviors from being the norm and acceptable. Yet our technological abundance made this an acceptable tradeoff.
If our social advancement stops or even slows down, the same impetus to keep chipping away at the fabric of society will actively destroy it.
Then, there will be the option of letting the decline happen, letting anarchy reign, or imposing some new structures that work in conjunction with the novel environment.
I don’t know what shape society will have to take in the future; what I do know with full certainty is that things can’t remain as they have.
Conclusion
We live in an era of change, and regardless of your political stripe, it is becoming clear that the present status quo is not working out. Our institutions are often obsolete, but there are also ills they were protecting us from.
We need to develop alternatives to what we’ve come to accept as normal, but we can’t build blindly. We have to see what has come before and understand why institutions were shaped that way and what they were trying to address.
Systems are amoral; they only optimize for the core purpose they are built for, which if sloppily executed, might end up being different than what the original designers had in mind. So, we need to consciously build with a positive yet cynical mind. Systems that incentivize productive behavior should be built, regardless of whether the agents within the system are angels or devils.
We cannot take progress for granted and keep living under the expectation that the next paycheck will pay our debts. We have to start building social behaviors that are durable but flexible enough to adapt to the evolving world.
Let’s not merely aspire to build a society geared towards social well-being, but actively lay its foundations. We need to rethink how social systems are aligned and empower individuals to pursue healthy expressions of their desires. Freedom without form, without a direction to aspire and work towards, should not be the goal.
Instead, we should aspire to build a system that encourages people to build new things without fearing being ostracized or being left homeless while also creating a system that encourages a sense of community, a common ethos that people can share and work towards.
That is the goal. How we get there is an Odyssey by itself and one we will have to work on over the next few decades.
