On the Origin of Speciousness
“The singularity has already happened, but we’re just too dumb to see it.”
Individual people are conscious entities. They’re flawed and emotional and seldom behave logically or consistently.
En-masse, however, like ants within a colony, the behaviour of people can be rational. This is particularly noticeable when they’re parts of an institution that follows strict rules, and which has an internal system of checks and balances. Institutions such as corporations, governments and churches.
Individually, we behave in accordance to our own personal beliefs. Whether that be a belief that a vengeful god exists, or that acquiring large amounts of money is the ultimate goal in life, or that watching television and browsing websites is just the best thing ever.
Collectively, we abandon our personal beliefs and adhere to the rules imposed on us by the institutions to which we belong. And, as the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, we seem hard-wired to do this.
This is interesting to me because I don’t believe that the behaviour of an institution as a whole necessarily comes down to the behaviour of a few powerful individuals within that institution. I think that often an institution can behave in ways that are more than the sum of its parts — zooming in to investigate a particularly reprehensible behaviour may reveal nothing more than a long chain of reasonable behaviours.
The problem is that the institution exists in an environment within which it must act to satisfy its goals, possibly by altering the environment itself. This can be seen in the symbiotic relationship between big business (who seek wealth, but must act within the law) and governments (who seek power). Like a self-reinforcing arms race, businesses lobby governments (using their wealth) in order to change their legal environment in a way that makes satisfying their goal (of generating more wealth) easier, which bestows more power on the government (by ensuring their future support).
In a sense, we have created these institutional behaviours by building their environment and setting their goals. Businesses should maximise wealth without breaking the law, so they’ll behave in a way that achieves that, even though that behaviour may not align with the moral beliefs of all of the individuals that make up that institution.
My problem with all of this is that it’s very hard for individuals to change the behaviour of institutions, even when it’s clear to the majority that the behaviour should be changed. The noble ant cannot easily stop its colony from attacking and killing the peaceful grasshopper. The immune system of the institution is strong and has evolved over so many generations that it has become very good at preventing all forms of attack.
So governments will change laws when individuals band together in protest if doing so protects their desire for power, but only if there are no other alternatives (such as discouraging such protests), for changing the environment in a way that may not benefit them is a measure of last resort.
Similarly, big business will spend money to protect the environment, or to make their products safer, or to assist those its behaviour disadvantages, only when doing so allows them to satisfy their goal (of generating wealth) within their environment (of being lawful).
Which is horrible. These huge beasts of our own creation are only in it for themselves. How can we change them? Altering their environment can only be done through revolution. So how can a powerless individual introduce morality as a fundamental part of their DNA?
One way would be to engineer a virus that circumvents their immune system and attacks them directly, modifying their internal structure to change their desires, either by tempering them (pursue wealth, but not at the expense of others) or by modifying them entirely (forget about wealth, maximise the happiness of your customers instead).
Technology companies already seem to be doing something like this. Google’s “don’t be evil” is a mind-virus, a meme, that tempers the behaviour of the individuals that it consists of, ensuring that the overarching goal of maximising wealth doesn’t betray that moral code. Likewise, the focus of early-stage startups on users instead of money mean that these institutions more easily behave in a moral fashion, although this is often just a pupal stage of their growth cycle, and they frequently either die or transform into a more familiar institution of profit over everything else.
But these are mutations, not viruses from the outside environment. Could such a thing exist? Could a band of Anonymous-like mind-hackers construct a new moral belief that would infect existing institutions and alter their behaviour? It’s an interesting thing to imagine.
