The Biology of Politics

by Roger Erickson, Mike Norman Economics

Tom Hickey dug up a forgotten book. C.Wright Mills — The Higher Immorality (1956) that triggers questions about the biology of politics.  This book continues the tradition of pragmatic self-analysis that’s been strangely lacking in ambition in the USA these past 50 years.

There’s nothing in this book, of course, that wasn’t previously written thousands of years ago, by Dravidian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, & Sanskrit writers – and artfully plagiarized by demented but curiously useful people in various religious texts. So what could we do differently? What part of common sense is failing to propagate through our electorate, via the process we call politics?

First, note that methods drive results. Math is a useful example. Advanced math was used by a notable few like Imhotep, 4000 years before the efficient decimal notation made accurate calculation accessible to the mass of humans. Point is that our operational methods count, far more than most assume, and are rate limiting for group-wide leverage of seemingly available group options. (Ditto for MMT – modern monetary theory – and economics, but let’s not go there right now.)

There’s a patterned cycle to politics, which we can call the biology of politics.

Every wave of innovation places newly efficient people & practices in positions of influence. Grasp of those innovations also defines an intrinsic buffer shielding the newly powerful people from the early stages of even further innovation lurking in the wings. The trick to continued adaptation is to make that buffer stage powerful enough to achieve change, yet transient enough to QUICKLY avoid denying further change. An “innovate/deny” cycle ensues, where innovation and denying others rapid access to the same innovations follow one another just like a predator/prey relationship curve (think bobcats/rabbits). I/D or P/P cycles continue, like a moth circling a light, until one of two things happen:

a) the predator depletes the prey, and must wait for an outside perturbation to replenish the prey despite the predators best efforts; (restarting the cycle);

[This is where both species trip over a deeper truth, look around, and then go about their business as though nothing had happened. If they don’t perish, how long can they go on mindlessly repeating this cycle? Tens of thousands, even millions, of years! Have supposedly brilliant humans shortened that cycle to only hundreds of years? Are we supposed to be impressed with ourselves?]

b) some statistical chance allows the predator & prey time to recognize co-dependence on an identified, outside resource, at which time they can transition to a domesticated, symbiotic relationship akin to shepherd/herd.

For Libertarians, the kinetics (tempo) of our existing I/D-P/P process is individually acceptable, and even attractive. However, for families, tribes, nations and species (and those Libertarians with brains) … anything slowing the relentless increase in national and species adaptive rate is absolutely not acceptable, and constitutes group suicide.

Why haven’t we invented coordination methods that do for crude politics, what decimal notation did for hieroglyphic-based mathematics? What teaching operation would make it dirt easy for all youth to fully perceive the higher returns available from scaling coordination? That would make them unimpressed with politics as is, and immune to propaganda. How do we permanently capture Mills’ message, and free ourselves from continually forgetting & rediscovering it? It’s not lack of an accurate chronometer that’s holding us back now, it’s lack of an accurate “coordination-ometer.” Better yet, call it an accurate Coordinometer. We don’t need students to know more, we need them to know how to zero in on how little of the right things each needs to know in order to solve any situation through coordination. And we need them to know why – and how – to do that better/faster/cheaper every single year! Instead of just the facade of school sports teams, we should have Coordination Leagues for kids, to replace the no longer great game of politics.