Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The hallmark of Western Industrial Civilization has been its unprecedented embrace of individual liberty and free market capitalism. As a direct result, it has experienced a far greater degree of technological progress, and has provided a higher quality of life to its participants than any preceding civilization. However, our unique grand experiment in individualism is not immune to the same failure patterns that have accompanied the declines and ultimate collapses of previous attempts at civilization.

The history of the rise and fall of human civilizations is interrelated with the rise and fall of degrees of authoritarianism. The demographic patterns that drive the life-cycle curve of civilizations also drive to a large degree the cycle of authoritarianism. I submit that these cycles are closely related in cause and effect, but are in opposite phases. The part of both cycles of greatest interest to us today is the point where authoritarianism tends to increase as a civilization approaches the crest of its life-cycle curve, and continues to increase as the civilization declines.

It's a natural human drive to compete with each other individually and in groups. As the genes of the most successful socioeconomic sectors are self-eliminated from the gene pool through a below replacement level reproductive rate, the functional capabilities of the general population decline. This demographic shift also diminishes the relative political power of the productive and creative sectors that previously defined and drove the civilization, allowing less successful sectors to displace them as the controlling force. Unable to create power and prestige through their own contributions and accomplishments, these less successful sectors seek ways to change the rules of the game to artificially diminish the long resented successes of more capable sectors.

Authoritarianism provides a means for those who lack the ability to compete individually, to manipulate the playing field in ways that allow them to "win" in socioeconomic terms over those who can do what they can't. Ultimately, the motivation and ability to advance the technological state of civilization becomes subject to the increasing interference of an artificial authority structure. That structure in turn tends to become ever more hostile to any change that doesn't serve its ulterior purposes.

A rigidly structured socioeconomic system is attractive to those incapable of understanding the evolving world around them, because it forces everyone into the same predictable limited set of alternatives regardless of their potential abilities. Arbitrarily imposed legislation and restrictive regulation enforce a uniformity that diminishes the advantages of innovation and invention, and protects the less capable from the consequences of their failures. Often justified as needed to protect the uninformed consumer, these "protections" also restrict the alternatives available to those who are capable of discerning real value and understanding what they are doing. They also progressively strangle further innovation. The value of intelligence and creativity as factors in success are eliminated when their application is indirectly prohibited.

The same tragic pattern has been repeated down through history. Artificial authority structures tend to attract and eventually be controlled by those more interested in them as a source of personal power, than in achieving the structure's intended purpose. Those whose power and privilege are gained through position have a strong self-interest in ensuring that the authority structure that provides their position never achieves its purpose, since they would then lose their artificial advantages.

Those who are incapable of competing successfully on their own abilities tend to be drawn to artificial positions that will provide them with power that they are incapable of acquiring on their own. They then tend to abuse whatever power they've acquired in order to prove to their own egos, and to those around them, that they are personally powerful. The more unworthy of the power the individual has acquired through his position within an artificial authority structure, the greater the subconscious motivation to abuse that power to prove to himself and those around him that he is a powerful person - a significant individual deserving of respect.

The most important aspect of this tendency, from the perspective of the decline of civilization, is that the creation of artificial authority structures allow those with inferior capabilities to gain unearned and undeserved coercive control over the abilities of more capable individuals. This allows incompetent individuals to increasingly divert the remaining creative abilities of more capable individuals into wasteful directions that serve the purposes of the authority structure, but not the needs of civilization. Activities such as piling rocks in the desert, burying treasure in tombs, building grand monuments to failures redefined as triumphs, and other wasteful activities, are traditional favorites of incompetent authority structures.

The increase in authoritarian control and exploitation tends to discourage those still capable of enlightened thought, from contributing to the continued advancement of civilization, out of fear of exposing themselves, and becoming the slaves of their increasingly more numerous inferiors. The one eyed man doesn't become the ruler of the kingdom of the blind, he becomes the slave of the masses who want to exploit his exceptional abilities - or kill him as a threat to their own positions in the hierarchy if he's unwilling to be useful to them.

Regardless of the underlying mix of intentions driving the expansion of authoritarianism, the nature and dynamics of authoritarian control progressively increases the effects of several additional mutually antagonistic distortions of society. As I explored in my essay "Calculus of Control", the socioeconomics of control won't support the kind of continuous close supervision often associated in popular culture with totalitarianism. Even in a society practicing classical slavery, the overseers can't give their undivided full time attention to any one individual slave. The percentage of overseers can only be a small fraction of the number of slaves they supervise, and they must each control and motivate multiple slaves.

While a given overseer may periodically focus his attention on any given slave, the total amount of direct supervision devoted to that slave can only represent a small percentage of that slave's lifetime. During most of minutes of his life, the slave must in essence cooperate in his enslavement, and perform as ordered by his overseer even when that overseer isn't available to directly force him to perform.

The essence of authoritarianism then becomes the use of some means of convincing the slave to cooperatively comply with the will of his overseer even when not being directly forced to comply. As such, while periodic direct coercion may involve physical violence, what affects the slave's behavior over the greatest percentage of time, and which is therefore the most effective aspect, is always psychological - if only the psychological fear of further physical violence. The variations in different types of authoritarianism largely reflect the different means used to achieve this cooperative compliance.

The durability of an authoritarian society is largely a measure of the cost effectiveness of its means of control. It's in the obvious interest of any form of authoritarianism to develop a means of securing the greatest amount of cooperative compliance with the least expenditure of coercive resources. This calculus is inevitably further complicated by conflict with the perverse relationship between power and human nature. The powerful must abuse their power to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are powerful. This abuse inevitably causes increased resistance among those subjected to that abuse, and works against efforts to maximize the efficiency of coercive control.

Authoritarian societies typically break down when their operating overhead grows to unsustainable levels relative to the productivity of the subject population. This is typically caused by a combination of increasing resistance due to abuses of power requiring ever increasing supervisory overhead, coupled decreasing productivity due to decreasing effectiveness of coercive efforts to leverage cooperative compliance in the subject population.

One of the major downsides of digital technology is that it can be all too easily subverted into providing high degrees of intrusive authoritarian supervision and control, at very low operating overhead per supervised slave. The citizens of western industrial civilization will likely suffer unprecedented levels of authoritarian control before the operating overhead and counterproductive interference of authoritarianism drives our civilization into decline and ultimate collapse.

Just as the demographic shift driving the changes in society occurs over multiple generations, the resulting decline in civilization occurs as an incremental process that is too gradual to be noticed by most participants, or is all too easily dismissed by those expecting short term benefits. Those sectors experiencing the greatest growth as a percentage of the population and populist political power, are also the ones with the greatest desire to surrender the individual rights and freedoms they fear, in return for promises that artificial authority structures will assume ever greater responsibility for their lives and wellbeing.

By the time the looming collapse of civilization becomes sufficiently obvious to penetrate the wishful thinking and willful denial of the progressively dominant products of the demographic shift, the internal momentum of the process will be more than enough to overrun any feeble last minute attempts to stop it.