The Problem with Systems

This isn't a blackpill - it's an autopsy.

Let’s distinguish up front between objective facts, and system facts.

Objective facts are reality. Gravity is a perfect example. No human ever has to have gravity explained to them, they realize it exists when they trip and faceplant into the ground. A completely feral human, raised in the wild, would still know about gravity even if they had no words to express the idea.

System facts (or social facts) we’ll label as those facts a human has to be taught. (Whether there is a universal moral law or Lawgiver we’re setting aside for the time being.) A feral human, raised in a harsh environment, would probably have no compunction about killing another person. True if our feral example was in a civilized land they might still be punished for their act of murder, but they would not understand that it’s the system of civilization punishing them for their action the way they would grasp how gravity punishes them for jumping from a large height.

So with that in mind, let’s play a little mental exercise, dear reader. I want you to imagine the perfect societal and governing system that you can. Your ideal, just picture it in your mind. I’ll also grant you as many or few people as you want, the only rule is that it has to be more than 1 occupant otherwise it’s not a society or system, it’s just a hermit.

Now it is also the case that for any system of humans to work, there must be some large buy in/agreement by the population. If the system is going to agree that stealing is wrong, then when a deviant attempts to take something, it will be up to all other people around them to put a stop to their efforts. Catch the thief, restrain him, execute him on the spot - regardless of the solution applied, the system only works when deviance is punished or deviance does not exist at all. So let’s be even more generous and assume that your population of humans in your new society system is 100% on board with its design such there is no deviance from it at all. We are assuming complete buy-in.

What happens with the churn?

So we have our system. We have our population running the system. Our next challenge is that man is mortal. Said population is eventually going to die. If nothing else is done, the system will reach a hard end around 100 years at maximum. Thus we’ll require the occupants to make a new population to replace them.

The problem is, people are born ignorant, so the old population will have to instruct the new population in how to run the system. Our problem is that transmission is imperfect. Let’s be real generous and say that there’s about a 10% corruption rate in this transmission. Some kids end up orphans. Some parents are just poor teachers. Some of the kids just don’t listen. Whatever the various and diverse reasons, when the new generation takes over the system, the transmission failures will mean that 10% don’t buy into it. So our first churn of generations and now your population is only 90% on board with it. (This is where deviance will start arising.)

But then it happens again. The generations pass, the churn happens, and we get a 10% data corruption in the transmission again. So now we’re into generation 3 of your system and we’re at only 80% buy-in.

Hopefully by now you see where this is going. How many times can the generations churn before your system suffers collapse? Can it survive if only 50% of the populations believes in it? Does it require more? Less?

This is foundationally the two great secrets of society that every ancient knew and warned everyone about.

First, democracy isn’t the best system of governance - it’s the only system. Nothing is going to work without some level of buy-in by the populace. In our example, we made it easy by assuming the participants were binary in their agreement - either all on board or none. In real life, there is a whole spectrum with each participating individual. So someone might agree personally 90% with how things are going while their neighbor is only 52% happy with things.

This post was partially inspired by listening to someone go on about how power flows from the government without them ever bothering to mention where power comes from in the first place.

If we have a collection of people, you don’t have a stranger walking up and declaring, “I’m king now! Go work on crops!” If nobody is willing to heed his words, nothing will make him king. If he tries to force himself upon the collection, it will go poorly as 1 man vs 30 is going to be a short fight. Our would-be king must have some kind of force-multiplier to overcome the odds.

You might ask, “Well what if he has soldiers to do his bidding?” But that just shuffles around the core point:

Power is derived from crowd participation.

If Alex has 5 men willing to follow his commands and orders them to fight Bob who has 50 men willing to follow his commands, Bob will overpower Alex.

Again, the key point is willingness. The man who-would-be-king may even have a nuclear bomb at his disposal, but if the people he would command all refuse to work, no amount of bombing will cause his fields to yield a harvest.

(Here is an example of this happening in real time as many Chinese people are “laying flat.”)

Thus again, when you boil it down to the lowest fundamental level, ALL governments are democracies. Even the most tyrannical imaginable can only function because some number of people decide they would rather work as slaves than be dead.

So whatever system you want to aim for, the first question asked is how are you going to convince people to buy into the system so it works in the first place?

The second question asked then is how do you sustain it? The normal generational churn will wear at it normally. I know some common refrains are, “But look to the past. See how some systems lasted for thousands of years?”

Yes, and in almost every example I have looked at in the past, they were pretty isolationist. Why? Because communication means that outside systems can put into the mind of your system’s participants alternatives to the system. Meaning that your system has to work against not just the erosion of generational churn, but competing systems.

This was very doable in an era where ideas could only travel on foot, horseback, or sea, carried by the hands or minds of traveling merchants. But now we live in an era of instant communication across the world. And not just of words - but of video. The ancient peasant who heard of golden cities on the other side of the world could dismiss the merchant as embellishing or lying about those other system, but now the peasant can look and see with their own eyes the golden cities on the other side of the world in those other systems¹.

So add all this up together, and you start to see not only why everything is screwed up now, but any effort to “fix” it is doomed to fail as well. Whatever system you think worked in the past, has to deal with challenges which did not exist back when it was “optimal.” Monarchy, Democracy, Dictatorships, Anarchy… whatever you want to try, it’s all going to have to grapple with these core facets of reality and humanity.

Does this mean there’s no hope? That we should do nothing?

Not at all. Just that when you go to repair a fence, it helps to understand why it was erected in the first place. If you know something can’t last forever, then you’ll do a better job setting it up to last as long as possible, and to be repaired when it needs it.

1. Yes of course there are deceptions and lies here as well. Information has its own corruption issues which are for another discussion and another post. The point here is are the challenges your system will face from other systems.