Professor Rees, I have been thinking a lot about the issues you discuss here. The problem is that “psychopathy”, whatever it is, is ill-defined, leaving all clinicians and/or mental health professionals practically powerless against it: while psychiatry has managed to get itself a bad name as it has been (and still is) weaponized and used against political dissidents and as a form of stripping personhood, credibility and rights, “psychopathy” is a loose “label”, which is, as far as I know, not a formal clinical diagnosis (i.e. entailing treatment, and in extreme cases containment, as other disorders do). But even if it had all the prerequisites to become an official diagnosis, how realistic is it to “cure” this type of "evil", since medicine is about curing? And who could the one to introduce such a proposition?
There is a major issue, rarely discussed: Most people exhibit “top-down” thinking, while a minority exhibits “bottom up” thinking. While top-down thinking is geared towards speed, efficiency and the so-called “big picture”, bottom up thinking is geared towards accuracy, precision, detail and towards pinpointing inconsistencies, at the expense of speed. It is like an “evolutionary trade-off.” Well, the supposed “big picture” may actually be a misnomer, as rarely people do see the big picture (as systemic thinkers do) since the majority, paradoxically assuming themselves as seeing the big picture, are in fact confirming their biases and/or narratives. Top down thinking relies heavily on assumptions (general to specific) and -because of that- bias, while bottom up on detail and structured data (specific to general). In this respect, it is expected that most people, as “top-down thinkers”, being born and educated within this, say, psychopathic organization of society (a sick environment), lack the cognitive substratum required (either inherent, inherited or acquired) to question the logos and raison d’ etre of the “system” at all its levels, as their biological “default” cognitive platform is to likely assume that this is the “normal” and has always been like that: top down thinking is geared towards “social cohesion” at the expense of accuracy. Consequently, speech becomes incoherent, confused, contradictory and eventually corrupt.
It is also expected that even scientists will be tempted to “fit the world in their models” and not vice versa, and I believe that the species suffers from lack of bottom up thinkers. What seemed to be “selected for” then (speed, efficiency), seems now to be “selected against” in an unpredictable world, where what would otherwise be called “noise” and would be “filtered out” for the aim of making quick decisions and ensure social cohesion, now could be called “missing out critical data” in a world that increasingly moves in non-linear patterns.
I would like to add that from the perspective of social ontology “international law” is a convention which the strong use at their discretion and the weak appeal to in times of distress. There is no such thing as “international law”. As you too have remarked, every known human society/culture exhibits in-group/outgroup behaviour, so, in this respect, international law (“universal”) is a contradiction in terms. Just another story that humans have invented, and it appears to be against biology too.
George, as usual you raise several important points.
Psychopathy may be somewhat ill-defined but that may be because it is not a discrete medical/mental health issue like a broken arm but a fuzzy spectrum of related personality disorders, particularly the lack of empathy, smarmy charm (and other manipulative tendencies), narcissism and egocentricity, expressed in varying degrees in different individuals. Also, the structural brain anomalies associated with psychopathy suggest a genetic root, i.e., that a complex of genes is at cause. If so, then we would expect this particular personality disorder to vary among the afflicted depending on the relative influences of differing gene loci. This all speculative, of course, but if anything like this is involved, then formal, definitive diagnosis is not possible. The “loose label” will continue to apply and formal treatment and “curing” (as splinting a break or vaccination against a virus) is simply not (yet) in the cards. (Gene therapy, anyone?)
As for top-down and bottom-up thinking, from your description these correspond to what I refer to, in earlier articles, as ‘normal’ (simplistic, mechanistic, reductionist) thinking and complexity-oriented ‘systems’ thinking. I argued that H. sapiens evolved in relatively simple social and biophysical environments and that our “top-down” manner of thinking reflects brain development in this context. (‘Top-down’ immediacy was adequate for survival in Paleolithic times). I also suggest that cultural evolution (e.g., technology) has left cognitive evolution far behind so that our relatively primitive brains are now functionally obsolete, unable to cope with the unfolding drama—even the best systems thinkers are only skipping like a stone over the deep waters of complex reality. This means that most humans are deeply maladapted for life in the overly-complex increasingly-chaotic modern (“big picture”) environment we ourselves have created. We—i.e., most people—may, as you suggest, assume this is the ‘normal’ way of being; after all, it is all they and many earlier generations have ever know—but I have argued (and you seem to be agreeing) that it means H. sapiens is in increasing danger of being selected out. Darwin wins again.
As for international law, I agree that it is mere convention, a social construct. But I cannot fault it for that. Laws and regulations, socially constructed, are necessary for what we like to call ‘civilized’ existence. And you are right again—they go against crass biology. When they work, they do so to inhibit anti-civilizational but natural behaviours that would otherwise emerge (beat or kill your enemies, take whatever attracts you, mate with whomever you choose) to make ‘civilized’ life impossible.
Professor Rees, I enjoy very much the conversation with you, and I would like to thank you for engaging in this dialogue. Let me add a little more “spice” in our discourse.
The answer would probably lie within Socrates and his views of the human and human affairs. As a systems thinker, Socrates knew that he knows nothing (Εν οίδα ότι ουδέν οίδα), because a thinker like him possesses the self-awareness that his intellect is always in dialectic with the Cosmos (the environment -remaining vigilant on “emergent phenomena”) and abstains from making definitive judgements; he just proceeds with caution and temperance. Philosophically, it entails the acknowledgement of the limits (finitude) of his existence.
On the contrary, the West (and the world today) is preoccupied with “Ends” and “Utopias”/ final solutions, as it has translated/secularized theological texts into Law and Form, and eventually as a way of being. The West moves with manuals and handbooks, and life and community is considered and managed as if it were a product/project. But a bottom up thinker is supposed to be aware that there cannot be such a “manual”, everything is a continuous dialogue (dialectics). Paradoxically, a systems thinker (bottom up) is occupied in sensing and reading the environment, and this way is opposite from what the Western paradigm expects him to do as a systems thinker: find a final solution.
So, I tend to believe that the “success” of a systems thinker paradoxically lies in him “failing” the Western expectations in finding definitive “solutions” for this predicament. Let it run its course and adjust accordingly.
I quote an excerpt by Elliott Greg which caught my attention:
“But once societies scale, and decision-making is mediated through abstractions — contracts, offices, reputational proxies, the advantage shifts toward individuals who can navigate those abstractions more effectively than others. Empirically, this advantage aligns with a specific cognitive profile...” (Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis 3rd Chapter: Institutions as Mirrors of the Psychopathic Mind - page 11)
It seems that the problem lies with questionable “abstractions”, i.e. top-down thinking, ruthlessly created for the advantage of the said individuals. The psychopath has effectively “hijacked” all of society’s psychological apparatus and twisted it, using the same “software” (top-down thinking - mental schemata - models - Theory of Mind) that the majority utilizes, without remorse. For it is one thing to describe (detached view), and totally another to do something about it (counteraction-engagement). Description means that the result (hijacking-transformation) has already taken place, and the researcher studies the phenomenon retroactively.
I also stand at this sentence: “The crucial shift occurs when simulation becomes structure.” (page 13) This is astonishingly similar to “The map becomes the terrain itself”. So, we have top-down thinkers, who use this profile as leverage to manipulate whole societies, and society has turned into a virtual one, effectively severed from natural-sensory experience. We live “inside” the minds of psychopaths, within a “psychopathic society”.
Maybe anthropology should study this new phenomenon: Agency gone-only Simulation exists-mutation completed, and make bold claims. Or else how can it be explained that Simulation-map (projection) prevails over Essence-territory (irreducibility)? Looks like the whole world has turned into a statistical model, enter AI here too (!), and we now live in a 21st century Plato’s Cave. Otherwise researchers risk being classified exactly as the ones they describe, using meticulous descriptions as a pain-killer or “speaking the language that aligns with others’ moral expectations”: A lot of literature about psychopathy and narcissism, little action towards defense. In this respect, Kafka was a prophet, a very astute futurist. In other words, he was not a “writer”, but an anthropologist coming from the future using metaphors.
Unless science frames this situation under a new light: That our era might signify the onset of some kind of “speciation”, where supposed “universal” human features do not apply to all. If we rule out that possibility (which cannot be ruled out completely), then claims about the “universality” of “human nature” are far from substantiated.
It sounds like sci-fi, but how impossible is that there might be an emergent phenomenon, the onset of “speciation” within the species itself, as an effect of the extremely overwhelmed environment humans have nourished and amplified the past 100 years (exploitation, overpopulation, overshoot, pollution, transgression of planetary boundaries, complexity, scarce resources, extensive use of technology leading to a rewiring of brain, AI etc.)? If we interpret “social exclusion” against certain groups that exhibit distinct cognitive profiles, such as neurodiverse population for example, as “behavioral isolation”(ironically autistic people are said to have the opposite profile from the psychopath: intact affective empathy, low cognitive empathy), how possible is it that this could signify an early-early step of “speciation”? Of course always bearing in mind that “evil destroys even itself” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). And as Greg Elliott says in his essay: “This is not a moral failure but a mathematical one”... So, evil seems to be a perverse simulation, which aspires to reduce into parts the irreducible, also mistaking itself with the very territory it seeks to manipulate. How biblical!
George, yours is an intriguing stream of thought which has helped me in my own wrestling with Greg Elliotts Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis. You quote Elliott: “But once societies scale, and decision-making is mediated through abstractions — … the advantage shifts toward individuals who can navigate those abstractions more effectively than others. Empirically, this advantage aligns with a specific cognitive profile...”
You then remark: “It seems that the problem lies with questionable ‘abstractions’, i.e. top-down thinking, ruthlessly created for the advantage of the said individuals. The psychopath has effectively “hijacked” all of society’s psychological apparatus and twisted it…”
Let me play with this a bit. First, I agree that the problem lies with questionable abstractions. Also, Elliott does indeed imply – actually, he’s quite explicit – that the psychopath hijacks society as the large-scale organizations they populate come to reflect and institutionalize what Elliott calls the ‘asymmetric personality profile’.
Given the empirical evidence that socio- and psychopaths are overrepresented at the top of large-scale organizations, I think this is a truly important observation. The nature of the organization ‘selects for’ the deviant personality disorder and the particular operational ‘abstractions’ if produces.
But is this a totally unique phenomenon or a particularly interesting expression of a more general and long-recognized pattern of human cognitive functioning? The established fact is that human beings generally do not operate in objective reality but rather ‘live out of’ socially constructed myths and narratives. These shared models or ‘abstractions’ constitute social reality. In other words, decision-making in human societies at any scale is mostly mediated through what you call “questionable abstractions” of one kind or another—think tribal myths, religious doctrines, political ideologies, academic paradigms and even scientific theories. These social constructs are the dynamically shifting shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. They are the cognitive maps that become the effective terrain for everything from personal conduct (ordinary people can be induced to hunt and kill witches) to government action and rationale (Renee Nicole Good was killed as a left-radical subversive threat to US national security).
Significantly, neuroscientists tell us that oft-repeated experiences and thought processes help shape the synaptic circuits of the brain – i.e., a mythic narrative can acquire a physical presence in the human ‘illusion organ’ (actual book title). Once so encoded, this cognitive preset acts as a filter for subsequent sensory inputs; people seek out—or at least accept—-complementary data and reject or ignore contrary information.
To put this in concrete contemporary terms, modern techno-industrial society operates from the fabricated notion of human exceptionalism (H. sapiens is not part of nature not subjected to natural laws). This “questionable abstraction” is reflected in the prevailing global economic development paradigm of perpetual economic growth propelled by ever advancing technology. Contrary evidence from objective reality such as plunging biodiversity, ecosystems collapses, global heating, ocean acidification, micro-plastic contamination, and the general entropic disordering of the ecosphere has no effect on the decision making. Climate change denial is official US government policy. To paraphrase your words, the simulation map subdues the de facto territory. And, since the map completely misrepresents the territory, it miserably fails Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. It follows that the territory (biophysical environment) will ultimately destroy the map (MTI civilization). (Evil destroys even itself.)
This is not to dispute Greg’s hypothesis. Rather it is to make the case that human societies have always operated from ‘top-down’, inadequate, conceptual models of reality. What Greg Elliott describes is a particularly pernicious and currently relevant case in which, particularly in contemporary large scale organizations, certifiable psychopaths get to dictate and implement the cognitive imaginaries on the wall of the cave in which we all live.
The notable psychopath Donald Trump and his like-minded minions are (again, to play on some of your language) manipulating a whole society, trying to turn it into virtual one, attempting to sever US citizens from their own natural-sensory experience of reality.
To move on, I don’t think there is anything here that undermines the universality of human nature if by that we mean the behavioural characteristics of society at large. You ask, “how impossible is that there might be an emergent phenomenon, the onset of “speciation” within the species itself…?” Speciation is a controversial topic but there is agreement that it generally requires the geographic separation of populations of a species so that the different geographies operate differentially on the genetic profiles of the two populations. At first, the genomes and phenomes of the two populations will be virtually identical but if the two environments are substantially different natural selection will gradually operate to favour qualities ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ in one isolated population and ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’ in the other. Eventually the two populations will diverge genetically (genome) and in appearance or function (phenome) as they become better adapted to their particular circumstances. If the physical divergence is sufficient such that inter-breeding is impossible or fertile offspring not produced, then we have speciation.
Keep in mind, too, that H. sapiens is a very long-lived species with a relatively low reproductive rate—it would take hundreds of generations and many thousands of years for even isolated populations to speciate. (Aboriginal Australians have been isolated for 50,000 years but are still interfertile with Scandinavian Europeans, for example). Bottom line: I don’t think within-species speciation without millennia of separation of discrete populations of H. sapiens is in the cards.
Attempts to connect fields seemingly unrelated are exciting, but I hope I am not tiring you with my extensive comments.
Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is spot on, only variety can destroy variety, and it is evident that the human society cannot destroy base reality (nature), only itself. A paradox about the “illusion organ” of the brain, if it universally “afflicts” with the same gravity, is that no one can verify its existence, as the premise accepts that humans lack the necessary grounding in reality to “call it out”, and live in a closed loop of illusion. Calling it out entails a distancing (separation), even an epiphany and potent antidotes such as intellectual honesty (the MTI civilization exhibits a lack of it). As an antidote I appeal to a quote by Panagiotis Kondylis, scholar of human affairs, who has presented a huge and profound work on social ontology: “Everyone has the same right to illusion, since not all possess the same ability or the same courage for knowledge.” But this goes against “universality-inclusion”.
Yes, evolution happens very slowly, but what about the case where an abrupt/unfavorable change in the environment happens and potentially triggers the population to adapt rapidly, through epigenetics, to the environment the very population itself has altered? If the niche is threatened (we have succeeded in turning the whole world into a dangerous place), then human populations are subjected to extreme environmental stressors, they themselves cannot fully perceive, as the “illusion organ” works against them. The linear, “coherent narrative” now becomes irrelevant as the mind must stay vigilant for potential threats. Result: Disadvantage. This is an extremely overwhelming situation.
I have observed that today’s people, apart from the fact that are -as you say- desensitized to institutional cruelty, also move as automata while being depressed at the same time, and they act as if they have lost their primordial survival instincts. I believe that our ancestors were more sensory based, as animals are sensory based (bottom up). Perhaps the linear script-map has claimed a disproportionate part of cognition, at the expense of non-linear thinking, direct experience and unfiltered data, at some point in history. After the onset of MTI anomaly, statistics were invented, as well as the “average-normal” human. This is a profound skewing of human experience and understanding, for the purpose of governing the masses. Statistics is the epitome of dehumanizing the human, and turning him into a data point on a bell curve.
The environment today is particularly stressful, because of this anomaly. MTI civilization is unprecedented and cannot be compared to any other known event in human history: Explosive population growth and extraction/exploitation, ecosystems degradation, abstractions all the way down, widespread anomie, diminishing returns, totally living on planetary-ecological debt; add AI on top of that. We are about to bankrupt the whole bank, and there is no bailout. In this respect, monetary debt may be understood as 100% real, as it may represent (albeit metaphorically and ironically) what we collectively owe to nature: the measure of unsustainability of the current civilization-anomaly projected onto our ultimate abstractions, i.e. translated into trillions of dollars, where “externalities” are finally, albeit indirectly introduced to the budget. This is why there is no visible option for “Σεισάχθεια” (debt cancelling) or Jubilee. Nothing is now as underpriced as it seems, as the Tax Freedom Day has moved from January (1900’s) to May or June (now). Looks like that even neoliberal economics cannot escape thermodynamics and diminishing returns, even if the “illusion organ” works overtime (propaganda, wishful thinking, willful blindness). The reality is telling: what we now feel as “oppression” (whether economic, social, political) appears as a direct reflection of nature closing upon us. And psychopaths are the “penalty” for our acquiescence to abstractions (read: assumptions) that have crossed the line, and instead of working in tandem with reality were seeking to annihilate/erase it.
This is a totally novel situation. Top-down thinkers are susceptible to lag (path dependence, assuming from prior experience). The problem is that we have systematized a whole field of collective “prior experience”; it is called “History”. And based upon that, we make assumptions for the future... What if History has not remotely suspected what is about to come?
When Elliott Greg says that psychopaths are “selected for” positions in institutions (“a cognitive profile that becomes selectively advantageous” - page 1), I can’t help but think that “something happened” in the process, and the specific type or phenotype is now over-represented at the top of social stratification, a presumably novel manifestation. That “something” may be evolutionary (or temporary). The fact that Elliott Greg uses the phrase “selectively advantageous” “obliges” me to think in evolutionary terms. Consequently, I can assume that maybe “something happened” again, and neurodiverse population is facing persistent social ostracism, despite its documented high accuracy, high systematizing - against the “illusion organ”- ability. Besides, in evolutionary terms, apart from allopatry (geographically distinct populations) there exists sympatry and sympatric speciation (populations within the same region). When Elliott Greg proposes how psychopaths are “selected for”, he describes the very substratum upon which this “selection” occurs i.e. abstractions all the way down, where simulation becomes Structure, a new environment manifesting physically. The Structure is not a purely conceptual one; those Corporate and Government Offices, the Mega Cities are the physical habitat-niche of bureaucrats and citizens too, being the territorial networks of the altered environment (the internet too). Can a psychopath-bureaucrat live in a remote village or is this village outside his “niche”? AI is also a physical manifestation of this altered environment, albeit trapped in silicon and tethered to servers. Maybe a serious challenge lies ahead us: will we succumb to AI which represents the “cutting edge” of the abstractions mentioned above (Plato’s Cave augmented reality, literally) and get trapped into the virtual-silicon world? If this happens, then the “mutation” will be complete.
George I replied to your original comment on my substack, but replying here as well:
The core hypothesis I’m developing is that scaled societies create something analogous to a new selection regime, not Darwinian natural selection, but simulation-based selection inside abstract gameboards (markets, law, bureaucracy, metrics, reputation systems). These environments do not primarily select “ideas” or “policies.” They select cognitive profiles: minds that are hyper-adapted to symbolic competition, strategic manipulation, and cost externalization.
Under those conditions, the locally optimal strategy is not reciprocity but defection-with-plausible-deniability: extraction without accountability, dominance without visibility, harm displaced downstream. The clinical and neurobiological literature on psychopathy/Dark Triad traits aligns with this strategy: reward pursuit and strategic control remain intact, while the affective inhibitory systems that normally constrain exploitation (fear conditioning, empathic distress, guilt) are attenuated. In other words, what the simulation rewards is a parasitic strategy profile, functionally analogous to biological parasitism, but operating inside a social/semantic host inside the simulation (ie capitalism, neoliberalism, financial markets etc).
This matters because once such profiles rise within a simulation, they don’t remain “individual pathologies.” Their strategies become copied into institutional logic (incentives, enforcement design, conditional access) and then copied into cultural norms (“professionalism,” “realism,” “merit,” “personal responsibility”), until the society begins to mirror the cognition that is winning within it.
At that point, collapse is no longer mysterious. Parasitism scales badly. In biology, extraction eventually outruns host regeneration. In social simulations, extraction becomes decoupled from replenishment: institutions optimize for short-horizon gain, externalize long-horizon cost, and maintain compliance through loss, dependency, and automatic punishment. Game-theoretically, the system drifts toward equilibria where players comply primarily to avoid penalty, not to pursue shared benefit, stable, durable, but systematically anti-regenerative (due to atomization).
So my claim is not “institutions are evil,” nor “most people are psychopathic.” It is that scaled simulations select for parasitic cognitive profiles, and those profiles then propagate upward into rules and downward into norms, producing a civilization that becomes structurally incapable of care, repair, or regeneration at the necessary time horizons. Neoliberalism is the clearest modern instantiation of this dynamic, but the mechanism generalizes across any sufficiently scaled simulation.
Greg, it may be because I’m not steeped in game theory, but wonder whether you are not making things more complex and obscure/abstract than needs be to validate your argument.
A couple of things don’t quite resonate for me. First, I’m not sure that it necessary to refer to ‘simulation-based selection inside abstract gameboards’ where the simulation is ‘capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism, and other constructed ideologies, and ‘gameboards’ basically seem to be the rules and institutional frameworks of society where the so-called ‘simulations’ play out. Both, are of course, emergent phenomena of large-scale societies which remains a crucial point.
First, ‘simulation’: I’ve always understood simulation to mean simplified imitation of something real, a model of a specific entity or process. I use to work as part of a group of ecosystem simulation modelers – ecosystems were the real-world, our models were the simulations. So my first question is, “if capitalism and neoliberalism are simulations, what do they purport to simulate?” It could be argued that they are culturally constructed entities unto themselves; as Freud might say, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
If, on the other hand, you are implying that capitalism is a simulation of society or neoliberalism a simulation of human economic behaviour, (or whatever) it would help me, at least, if you stated this explicitly. (BTW, these examples would be dismal simulations.)
Similarly, while ‘market’, legal frameworks, ‘bureaucracies’ are human creations intended to speed up and otherwise facilitate transactions and relationships, it muddies the water for me at least to call them ‘abstract gameboards’. Are they not simply what they are? Why abstract them to ‘gameboard’ and perhaps alienate some readers? (By the way, you have ‘markets’ listed as both simulation and gameboard—can’t be both, or can they?)
On the question of selection: you have fascinatingly analogous process in play here but I’d first like to comment on your interpretation and then extend the story in a different direction. For natural selection to work there must be a largish population and significant variability among physical or behavioural traits that have adaptive significance in that particular environment. Favoured variants will be ‘selected for’, their relative success measured by greater longevity and reproductive success. Modern-techno industrial (MTI) society necessarily spawns and comprises large-scale organizations and institutions which function as (un)natural social environments. And, like biophysical environments that select for the ‘best adapted’ traits/individuals (which then populate subsequent generations), the structure and function of large-scale organizations may favour the survival (in the institution) and rise to dominance of particularly advantageous behavioural variants (which subsequently come to dominate the organization). So, from among the many personality types expressed by their human inhabitants, it is in the nature of large-scale organizations to select for ‘malignant’ cognitive variants, “minds that are hyper-adapted to symbolic competition, strategic manipulation, and cost externalization” etc. Wonderful analogy (even without reference to simulations or gameboards)!
Now, some massaging. First, isn’t there a bit of the chicken/egg conundrum at play in your hypothesis? As I have previously noted, large scale organizations are by nature, in themselves, alienating, unfeeling, intimidating etc. So, while psychopathic or, more broadly, dark triad personalities tend to thrive (are selected for) within them, these organizations already possess an institutional analogue of anti-social personality disorder. Such institutional psychopathy may be reinforced by the rise to prominence of the human variant, but the organizational personality did not need to be shaped by the latter. ASPD need not be “copied into institutional logic”: much of the deviant institutional logic was pre-existent.
Let me take this further. I would argue that it is civilization itself that is pathological, ”structurally incapable of care, repair, or regeneration” and that this quality is reflected in civilization’s foundational institutions and organizations. The latter subsequently select for (and are then reinforced by) dark triad personalities.
Keep in mind that large-scale organizations including fixed settlements, towns, cities, corporations, governments, etc., have been with us for only a few millennia, perhaps only 2% of anatomically modern H. sapiens’ evolutionary history. This is too short a period for significant cross-species evolutionary change in human brain structure which means, in turn, that the structural environments created by ‘scale’ are essentially abnormal (alienating and hostile) for humans from the get-go. I even argue that no denizen of any ‘civilization’—particularly MTI culture—has actually ever lived in a ‘normal’ (i.e., natural) human environment. We don’t recognize and acknowledge this because ‘civilization’ at scale is all anyone alive has ever experienced.
It follows that humans, in general, are maladapted to large-scale, intimidating institutions, dense populations, cities, etc. (just ask psychiatrists treating the worst manifestations of modern cultural angst from social alienation through chronic depression to substance addiction.) The socio-behavioral dynamics of scale may even be a foundational reason for the cyclical collapse of every major human civilization to date. Large-scale is selecting for the aberrant personalities as you describe—they are ‘fittest’ to survive in the artificial structural environments characterizing large-scale societies—and as they come to dominate perhaps they accelerate societal collapse. As you say, “Parasitism scales badly.”
There is another wrinkle that ties your ‘simulation-based’ selection to Darwinian natural selection. To the extent that deviate personalities succeed financially and competitively, including, in the competition for mates—I pointed out in my blog that they have enhanced opportunities for sexual exploitation—they ensure their own enhanced survival and the propagation of heritable personality traits. This is archetypal Darwinian natural selection, albeit playing out in an ‘unnatural’ environment’. Taking this to the extreme, we could say that large-scale societies are breeding grounds for psychopathy, at least to the point where society comes crashing down under the weight of the malignant spin-offs (corruption, self-aggrandizement, betrayal, alienation, loss of public confidence, etc.) which tend to accumulate at the top. Which brings me back to my earlier question: which comes first, the psychologically alienating societal/institutional chicken or the deviant cognitive profile egg?
As always, appreciate the tough questions and discourse.
Let me try to state it plainly, without unnecessary abstraction.
When I use the word simulation, I’m not referring to a scientific model. I mean that modern institutions increasingly operate through abstract rule systems (law, money, metrics, credentials) that mediate access to resources, status, and security. Success is measured symbolically, while many of the material and moral consequences of that success appear elsewhere, later, or are borne by other actors. Once payoffs are decoupled from real-world consequences, optimization inside the abstract system becomes evolutionarily real, even when it damages the underlying society or ecosystem.
By gameboard, I mean this in a straightforward game-theoretic sense: institutions define who the players are, what moves are allowed, what is rewarded (payoffs), what is punished, what is visible, and who can change the rules. Markets, bureaucracies, legal systems, and corporations are repeated games with delayed feedback, uneven visibility, and the ability for winners to influence the rules themselves.
Under these conditions, a familiar class of strategies becomes reliably profitable. In everyday language we call this “cheating,” but in game theory these are forms of defection or strategies that increase private payoff by avoiding the full costs of cooperation.
The reason defection wins is structural, not moral. If benefits are immediate and private, while harms are delayed, diffused, or displaced onto people without retaliatory power, and if enforcement is weak, slow, or inconsistent, then the expected cost of defection collapses. Cooperation requires actors to bear real costs themselves; defection allows them to shift those costs elsewhere. Under those rules, defection becomes the dominant strategy, even if everyone would be better off in the long run if cooperation prevailed. The result is a stable equilibrium that looks successful locally while degrading the systems it depends on.
The strategies that dominate in these environments are not speculative or rhetorical. They correspond to well-documented defection strategies studied across classical game theory, evolutionary game theory, and institutional economics, particularly in repeated games with delayed payoffs, imperfect monitoring, and weak or endogenous enforcement.
Such strategies include:
1) Cost Externalization: capturing benefits now while pushing harms onto future generations, ecosystems, or the public. This is a canonical defection strategy in games with delayed or discounted payoffs. A firm pollutes to save money; health and environmental costs appear years later and are paid by others. Because the actor does not pay the bill, defection beats cooperation.
2) Symbolic Compliance: This behavior is well studied in games where monitoring relies on observable proxies rather than outcomes. Institutions often rely on visible signals, reports, certifications, policies, rather than direct effects. This allows actors to follow the letter of the rules while defeating their purpose. On paper they cooperate; in reality they defect.
3) Information Asymmetry Exploitation: This is standard defection in games with asymmetric information. Some actors know more, sooner, or better than others. They act before problems become visible to regulators, customers, or the public. By the time harm is recognized, the gains are already taken and protected.
4) Rule Capture: This corresponds to endogenous rule modification in institutional and political-economy game models. Successful actors gain influence over laws, enforcement, metrics, and liability. Once harmful behavior is legal or normalized, it no longer even looks like defection, it becomes standard practice.
5) Reputational Shielding: This is a strategy that lowers expected sanction in games with noisy or reputational enforcement. Philanthropy, ethical branding, and moral language create buffers that delay scrutiny and blunt accountability, allowing extraction to continue behind a veneer of virtue.
Individually, these behaviors are familiar. Together, they reinforce one another. Shifting harm away makes defection profitable. Paper compliance hides it. Information advantage delays discovery. Rule shaping prevents punishment. Reputation absorbs criticism. The combined effect is that honest cooperation becomes a losing move inside the system.
Where psychology enters is not as a moral explanation, but as a practical one tied to strategy execution. These defection strategies impose internal psychological costs on many actors even when external penalties are absent. Empathy, guilt, anticipatory regret, and concern for reciprocity function as internal brakes: they introduce hesitation and self-limitation even when defection would be materially rewarded.
Actors with psychopathic or broader Dark Triad traits experience those internal costs far less strongly. Low affective empathy reduces aversion to harm; shallow guilt weakens anticipatory restraint; grandiosity and entitlement normalize extraction; and power-seeking aligns naturally with rule capture and dominance within hierarchies. Charm and social confidence further function as tactical assets: they accelerate trust, disarm skepticism, facilitate manipulation, and support reputational shielding. Emotional detachment allows harm to be treated as an abstract variable rather than a felt constraint.
These traits do not cause defection, but they make defection easier to execute repeatedly, strategically, and under sustained pressure. Over time, institutions do not select for these traits because they are socially admirable, but because they are competitively effective under defection-dominant payoff structures. Actors who hesitate, self-limit, or internalize harm lose ground to those who do not. Selection therefore operates not on intent or morality, but on outcomes: those best able to execute defection strategies rise, are rewarded, and disproportionately shape institutional norms and rules.
On the chicken-and-egg question: I agree that large-scale institutions are alienating and brittle regardless of who inhabits them. My claim is not that psychopathic individuals must invent institutions for pathology to arise. Rather, symbolic scale creates environments where defection strategies dominate; actors best able to execute those strategies rise; and once they do, endogenous rule modification further entrenches the payoff structure. Cognition and institution co-evolve inside that loop.
I suspect we’re aligned on diagnosis. Where I’m trying to contribute is by making explicit why these systems so reliably converge on defection-dominant equilibria, why reform that doesn’t change incentives fails, and why collapse emerges is the resulting outcome...
Greg, thank you for the dialogue, which I feel that it provides some “missing pieces” in my personal interpretation of the situation, for the time being.
I read your hypothesis “backwards”. I believe that people weren’t always like that. I dare say that it is a wrong assumption that “our” “paleolithic brain” has stayed the same. My innate tendency is to recognize patterns. So, what I see is that the brain “mutated” in the course of history, towards language and hierarchical organization and abstractions (representations), at the expense of sensory experience and working memory. The following experiment is revealing:
Can anyone explain what happened and the “evolutionary neighbor” of ours is vastly superior to humans in eidetic memory? This implies a trade-off. People gave up working and eidetic memory for “abstractions”, language and its hierarchical organization. With time, specific language-symbolism came to dictate, colonize thought. So, the hierarchical organization, like a “his master’s voice”, suppressed and almost severed raw data input, the majority of sensory input is now filtered out (at least in people of neuro-typical cognitive profile). Kind of a “mutation”. And now people are lost in abstractions (and hierarchical organization and translation). The trade off happened as people chose “efficiency” over “resilience”, effectively rewiring their brains. “Efficiency” may be another word for short-termism (even lack of self-restraint). On the contrary, plants know why they are “inefficient” in their photosynthesis; they chose resilience/adaptation.
As I said, “ordinary, everyday people” are not totally exempt from this “mental virus”. This is coherent with Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration and the argument of Elizabeth Minnich regarding “the Evil of Banality”. Dabroswki claims that the “average person” is closer to the psychopath than he thinks, fairly integrated into society, experiencing only minimal internal conflict. Minimal conflict means internalization of today’s society’s organizing principles (assumptions). To this extent, there has been a choice, passive acceptance/agreement, conformity and complacency, facilitated by scaled simulation: "Everybody does it", a cliché. In the face of the imminent-catastrophic downfall, a conscious effort for the decolonization of thought is required. Or else we should generalize that all people are automata, explainable, reducible, soulless and mere mirroring machines of the supposed “winning strategy” of the psychopath, just like bots, and every thought, every flutter on “human virtue” is an illusion just for the sake of a “social cohesion” that serves parasitic systems, which (social cohesion) is not working anymore since we are about to get an Eviction Notice from Gaia. Then why be empathetic towards people, if they are bots without agency, if this is all an illusion, moreover with the “script” not working anymore? Why making science, where “expert-savants” claim omniscience over tiny fragments of knowledge, while fighting each other over which field is more “valid”? For our narcissism and vanity? How sure are we that today’s “scientific method” and “dogmas” do not suffer from faulty generalizations? And we know that today’s science suffers from immense replication crisis, amounting to theory crisis. So, it is a matter of perspective. My interpretation:
Emergent phenomena: Scaled simulation and intention. The chicken or the egg? Both, as self reinforcing loop.
Typical people are said to have a “Theory of Mind”. Theory of Mind is a simulation on “reading other people’s minds”. If their model (map) is sound, then they should be able to explain, predict and detect the manipulation of the psychopath, not just society “mirroring” the psychopathic cognitive profile. But they are unable to do so it seems, and fall victims of exploitation or whatever. They are unable to even understand the autistic-neurodivergent mind, which is even said to lack this "mirror". Yet, they assume that all people are like them and agree with them. So, the “onus of proof” lies on them, or on whoever devised this strange theory.
Till yesterday, the inquiry into socio-political thinking evolved around the question of what would be the next historical revolution, or what would be the trigger of the next “revolution”. Since the entrance of AI in human lives and institutional organization and operation, the question is annulled. Having so, people are faced with a more complex psychopathic institutional edifice, where psychopathic actors exploit science and technology (usually combined), to exercise power and manipulate societal behaviors. What was yesterday deemed as “complacency” or “acquiescence”, is now enforced, it is imposition as inevitable “causality”. The question is not anymore how to cope with psychopaths within society, but whether we want to live in such a totalitarian virtual (simulation) environment where the existential fabric is rendered necrotic.
Needless to say that my views are personal and incomplete.
Thank you again for the seriousness and depth of your response. I appreciate the way you’re engaging with this at the level of cognition, evolution, and selection trade-offs. I think we are largely describing the same phenomenon from different vantage points, and the main difference is where we locate causality.
On the chimpanzee working-memory example....I agree that it demonstrates a real trade-off. Humans clearly sacrificed certain forms of eidetic and short-term sensory memory in exchange for symbolic compression, language, and hierarchical abstraction. But I would be careful not to interpret this as cognitive degeneration or a loss of resilience. It is better understood as reallocation, not decline. High-bandwidth sensory memory and symbolic abstraction solve different evolutionary problems. Chimps outperform humans on specific memory tasks, but they cannot sustain cumulative culture, large-scale coordination, or transgenerational knowledge transfer (which is why we live in mega cities and no other creature ever has). Those capacities were selectively advantageous in human environments, particularly at the tribal scale.
Critically, however, abstraction itself is not the problem... nor does it entail psychopathy. For most of human history, abstraction coexisted with empathy, reciprocity, and constraint because it remained embedded in small, reputation-dense groups. Empathy does not require defense because it is core human wiring. As an ultra-altricial species, long childhoods, cooperative breeding, pair-bonding, and cultural transmission made empathic coupling computationally necessary and genetically stable. In that sense, empathy is not a cultural overlay or illusion.... it is foundational.
Psychopathy, by contrast, is not new. It has likely always existed at low frequency as a stable evolutionary strategy. What changed is not cognition, but ecology. Abstraction, anonymization, symbolic power, and scalable institutions removed the constraints that historically kept psychopathy local. Once those constraints dissolved, psychopathic strategies (optimized for defection, short-term payoff, and instrumentalization) were able to scale and then rewrite institutional rules in their image (because psychopaths win simulation based gameboards).
This is why empathy now appears maladaptive inside contemporary systems. Not because it vanished or degraded, but because the gameboard flipped. The system increasingly demands cognitive convergence: simulate psychopathic logic or be selected out. Most people remain empathic, but are forced to mask or suppress that wiring in order to survive institutionally. The resulting burnout, moral injury, and depersonalization are signals of systemic pathology, not evidence that empathy was ever illusory.
On agency, I don’t see people as automata. Agency persists, but it is constrained by payoff structures. Empathy remains evolutionarily necessary at the species level even as it is locally punished by institutions optimized for short-term dominance. That tension is precisely what drives collapse.
I agree with you that AI and technoscientific systems harden this dynamic by collapsing ambiguity and converting what once looked like acquiescence into enforcement. Where I would differ slightly is that I see AI not as the origin of the problem, but as psychopathic logic made executable at scale, an accelerant rather than a cause (and it also presents the emergence of a new selection gameboard, I call the synthetic gameboard in my book).
So while I agree that abstraction involved trade-offs (as the chimp example illustrates), I don’t think we need to invoke a mutation or degeneration of the human brain to explain our current predicament. Selection pressure alone is sufficient. Empathy was not lost; the conditions that once protected it were or are currently being dissolved.
I appreciate the exchange, this is exactly the level of dialogue the work needs.
Thank you Greg. I would like to make some remarks referring to your comment here and your paper, in combination.
In your paper you hypothesize:
“These traits correspond to what clinical psychology describes as psychopathic or Dark Triad profiles, but the theory does not require diagnostic claims. The selection operates on behavioral outcomes, not on internal states.”
In your comment you say: “Most people remain empathic, but are forced to mask or suppress that wiring in order to survive institutionally”.
If the selection operates on behavioral outcomes, the selection does not care if one “masks” or suppresses his empathy. What the selection “sees” is his behavioral outcome (in order to survive institutionally), not his assumed internal state, the assumed empathy. In this respect, “normal people” who “mask” their empathy in order to “survive institutionally” act as a substrate of selection, according to the hypothesis, that is what I understand. Burnout is definitively observable, when it leads to resignation, modification of the subject’s behavioral outcome. Such a burnout means that the “system” has lost a “resource”, for this “selection” to perpetuate.
In my point of view, there are no “systems”, only subjects. In fact I believe that “ordinary people” are capable of extreme cruelty, given the right conditions, and this has been historically proven.
Of course I agree that AI is not the origin. But it could be the end.
A great summary of negative human traits and their impact on modernity. The strangest part of the human predicament is that middle class and poorer people are fascinated by the super-rich and other elites (just look at mainstream media). The power is with the billions of people with limited ‘wealth’ if they acted collectively. Instead, many people aspire to have fast cars, gold chains and mansions. High levels of comfort and status are goals for people emerging from poverty. So, who is going to seriously criticize the elite, when they are jealous of their lifestyles? Even on an individual level, who will give up 24-hour ice cream to save the planet? Not many.
Which is why it's so important to continue to not talk about the importance of not breeding. Even you, William, skit around this entire subject. God, we really are so Fucked.
Yes. We don't even talk openly about population growth, not even in environmental or academic circles. In fact, the issue only comes up when people worry the birth rate is declining. Are humans intelligent?
Give it up to save themselves. How to make everyone aware? If it’s life or death to pay attention, that could end wars and get us to be cooperative…hopefully.
Fair enough -- one doesn't have to look very far to see both incipient socio-political implosion (more advanced in some places than others) and rampant global ecological decay.
Your last question seems to imply that you think that a social organisation which can be thought of as a "civilisation" is possible and, presumably, sustainable (i.e. can be sustained indefinitely). Sorry, if this isn't your opinion. All previous civilisations have collapsed. But so have almost all organised societies (those that remain untouched are rare and may not have collapsed only because of the lack of sufficient time). But, surely, the only arrangement which may be sustainable is the hunter-gatherer lifestyle? There won't be many takers for that.
And in-between civilizations, there have been longish periods of "un-civilization" that appears to have been sustainable.
The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not the only form of un-civilization.
Central to civilization seems to be the ability to hoard and withhold trophic resource — food. Evidence points to grain-based agriculture as the culprit.
An interesting counter-example existed about 7,000 years ago, about the time grain agriculture was building pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica.
This un-civilization lasted for perhaps a millennium or more, in coastal British Columbia, centred on present-day Hazelton. There are found almost all the different hazelnut varieties that exist throughout British Columbia, Washington, and even northern Oregon. This "hazelnut culture" left no great monuments like the grain-growers did. Hazelnuts go rancid without refrigeration, and can't effectively be hoarded and withheld.
Another example seems to be periods of pastoralism that existed in-between hunting-gathering and agriculture. I would gladly live the life of a goat herd, if it meant freedom from wetiko!
The coastal first-nations societies you describe for BC and elsewhere on the Pacific Coast of North America represent a particularly interesting case. The Pacific Northwest ecosystems, both land and water, are among the most productive in the world, This is one of the very few natural habitats capable of supporting small but permanent human settlements in the absence of continuous agriculture. All hail to salmon, herring, shellfish and hazelnuts (for example)!
Interesting. So you think a grain based civilisation could be sustained indefinitely? Would it be a civilisation that generations of people would be happy to live in? We do know that such civilisations didn't last but maybe they could have done, if its citizens were happy.
There seems to be evidence that the development of grain-based agriculture was what enabled hoarding, withholding, stratification, hierarchy, and capitalism.
Before the ability to store food for more than one turn of the seasons, people were forced to cooperate for daily sustenance, groups of more than ~150 individuals could not be supported, and we were arguably much more egalitarian.
My point (which apparently was not well-made, sorry!) is that it is possible to have non-grain-based agriculture that doesn't foster all the negatives we associate with modern civilization.
Humans have been ruining their environment from the beginning of agriculture. The only difference is that they always had a new area to move to or else their population shrank to accommodate the new conditions. At one time the Middle East was called the land of milk and honey and was heavily forested. Look at it now. So no, we weren’t living in harmony with our environment even then but it just took a while to reach this point.
Perhaps the global catalysts are now rapidly converging and a new (uncertain) dawn awaits, Gaia willing. One of these is undoubtedly in Antarctica where critically important testing in underway at and around the Thwaites (“Doomsday”) Glacier - the results should be known very soon. It’s of immense global consequence. Follow Miles O'Brien at:
I'm in the "blame fossil fuels" camp. I agree that structural and psychological defects generally lead to the collapse of larger hierarchical societies, but the vast majority of the Holocene transpired without the global environmental devastation we have today. Pre-modern empires rose and collapsed regularly all over the world for thousands of years, but the damage they did to the ecosystem was localized and temporary.
We would be thrilled to have the global environmental status of 1,000 years ago, yet that status included at least 8,000 years of human impact from numerous civilizations, most of them underpinned by agriculture. To me, this is evidence against any claim that only small foraging societies are truly sustainable within a global environmental context.
It has only been the last few hundred years of exponential growth in energy usage and population that the damage has become so great that the Anthropocene took over from the Holocene. That growth in energy use and population would never have been possible without fossil fuels.
It was only when we became able to use the energy from fossil fuels to create the machines that enabled us to extract more fossil fuels that things got out of control (on a global basis). We can blame our defects for being unable to avoid social collapses, but we should blame fossil fuels for getting us into our global overshoot predicament.
Finally, since most species, including humans, have been selected by evolution to be subject to the Maximum Power Principle, I doubt that any species that became able to extract and utilize fossil fuels would have been resistent to using them to support their efforts to thrive and reproduce. Humans are mostly like other species except for our ability to utilize exogenous energy sources (particularly those involving combustion), but as long as those sources were limited, so was humanity's impact. Fossil fuels are finite, but the quantity available has been so large that they seemed unlimited. We used them as if they were.
I'm not sure we differ on anything, Joe. We agree that large, hierarchical societies tend to collapse--things 'get out of control' locally/regionally with alarming regularity. We also agree on the role of the maximum power principle in propelling modern human society to global scale behemothic proportions in just a couple of hundred years (I wrote about these things in a couple of earlier pieces). So, it seems to me that modern techno-industrial (MTI) culture is on track to collapse as have many previous societies but with the major difference that this time things are out of control on a global scale. Despite ideological, religious, linguistic differences, among nation societies, fossil fuels have enabled virtually the entire 'developed' world to integrate and bloat, thus to face collapse simultaneously. It's global this time.
Any species with unlimited food is just going to keep growing its population until something happens to make it stop. Humans are no different, it's just that our "food" is fossil fuels.
As always, you are providing urgently-needed, incisive insight.
This is, without a doubt, the most thorough and distilled synopsis of the metacrisis I've come across. Thank you, Prof Rees, for taking the time and care to craft it. While the predicament of the metacrisis can't be "solved," the spirit of Kettering's "A problem well-stated is a problem half solved" is still valuable; we need these insights to navigate what is coming as well as can be managed.
This series has been a delight to read, and I've no disagreement with any of it. But THE question remains, which your "Now, take it from there". alludes to: how? and how will that "collapse" play out/be experienced?
Evolution had to put something in the genes or DNA that would eventually destroy not only themselves, but a lot of other ecological and biological things as well. This way it'll all start over again, for the most part. Change is what keeps life going, be it on earth or universally. Otherwise, it would all become stagnant.
One can only add to this with things like the banality of evil and other ordinary psychological mechanisms that explain why the rest of very large societies plays along, the godlike, manipulating tech hyper-enabling it all on hithereto unseen levels, the utterly irresistible temptation of free energy slaves etc.
Here are some revealing findings coming from Thomas Seeley, Horace White Professor in Biology Emeritus, Cornell University. Professor Seeley has studied the phenomenon of Swarm Intelligence (SI) in honey bees. According to him, “SI is a means whereby a group can overcome some of the cognitive limits of its members”.
This is very relevant, as far as a crucial point of our discussion regards the issue of “human cognitive obsolescence”, bio-mimicry, and a “perversely inverted form of bio-mimicry”.
“My analyses of collective decision-making by honey bee colonies indicate that a group will possess a high level of collective (swarm) intelligence if within the group there is:
1) diversity of knowledge about the available options,
2) open and honest sharing of information about the options,
3) independence in the members’ evaluations of the options,
4) unbiased aggregation of the members’ opinions on the options, and
5) leadership that fosters but does not dominate the discussion.”
Panagiotis Kondylis’ profound study on social ontology, on the contrary, reveals a bleak reality in human affairs:
"Ultimate reality consists of beings, individuals or groups that struggle for their own preservation and together, necessarily, for the expansion of their power. That is why they meet as friends or as enemies and change friends and enemies according to the needs of the struggle for their own preservation and the expansion of their power."
This excerpt is found in his Magnum Opus “Power and Decision” (Macht und Entscheidung), which I strongly suggest for reading.
As for the “illusion” you describe. It is this “optical illusion” that creates the necessary “veil” for the majority of humans to believe that current “humanity” is a truly social species, as the ultimate reality is too depressing to handle psychologically. Maybe the “illusion” is a type of psychological defense against reality, but it seems that not all people possess it equally, as Kondylis would not be in position to describe what is actually happening. Unlike the SI (swarm intelligence) of honey bees, Kondylis dispassionately describes a situation where in human societies there are ruthless struggles for power, as an expression of “self-preservation” as “self-intensification”. In this respect, the ultimate illusion that the current version of humanity is “one” is depicted in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” which is a normativistic text-content (a tool by which societies appear to discipline themselves), and not natural-lived experience, because if it was lived experience it would be self-evident, so this law would be useless to enforce. It is now observable, undisputed reality that this law is used at the discretion of the strong, or trashed accordingly. But would one enforce in normativistic text that humans possess a liver or a heart for example (natural law)? Would one enforce a law that the Sun exists (natural law)? Never before a collective illusion has reached such heights (i.e. “international community” is an illusion), especially now manipulated for the control of the masses, through a bizarre phenomenon identified by Wilhelm Wund (a pioneer psychologist), called “Heterogony of Ends”. Heterogony of Ends is another term for “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.
Contrary to Kondylis (human affairs), Seeley (honey bee affairs) describes a situation where “leadership fosters but does not dominate the discussion”. Perhaps Kondylis was observing a phenomenon of Psychopathy in action, as he made explicit disclaimers that his theory is Historically determined, this understood in the context of Greg Elliott hypothesis. As being intellectually honest, he also gave the tools for advancing research and refuting his own theory: He identified that irrespective of “Thought Content” (= narrative = map = simulation, whether Theocracy, Humanism, Human Rights or whatever) there is a persistent “Thought Structure” in humans (in the Western Civilization particularly), which dictates who is “friend” and who is “foe”. The thought structure is not logical, but relies on a primary arbitrary Decision, as Separation. The Separation-Decision reorganizes the undifferentiated world into a coherent narrative providing orientation, albeit excluding parts of it (i.e. other worldviews and the irreducible world-objective reality itself) from the predicate of existence, and choosing others as “real”. This is the formation of the “world image”. Kondylis states that his theory is occupied with the Morphology of Thought (not the Content of it) and its Polemical use with regards to “self-preservation”. This morphology of thought he describes is essential for the formation of “normativistic thought” for the cause of “social disciplining”, but as he stated, if there is a way of showing that there are different thought structures, his theory would be refuted.
The question remains: Do all humans possess the same “thought structure”/morphology of thought? Kondylis paradigm itself negates it, as he himself would not be able to describe what is actually happening in the human world. But if humans do not possess the same thought structures, then the current version of “humanity” is not “one”, however Not regarding the First Level (Content of Thought, i.e. fighting over narratives/ideologies) but on the Meta-Level (Structure of Thought-Morphology). And if ontology precedes epistemology, how possible is that within the human population there exist “different ontologies”?
In our complex, technocratic, constructed reality, the subject of the data does not function autonomously and with agency in selecting, codifying, evaluating and providing data to a honest and democratic center regarding his existence and his lived experience within the environment. On the contrary, the subject is being manipulated and directed by self-serving power structures (institutions, corporations, governments) to the production of certain data and for certain purposes (the Kondylian “ultimate reality”). And in the end, the subject of data is called and coerced into “discipline” that is supposed to be its own “will” arbitrarily translated into politics by others. This is the satanic trap of data of our electrified and digitized (one) world, which eliminates and nullifies the human subject, as agency. At least, bees have the privilege of playing a crucial role on who will be their queen, while their queen is real and serves them. Humans, instead, spend their lives to “vitalize” and nurse a dark, alien, digital algorithm that governs their lives, pretending to be a “superorganism” whereas they have formed a Caricature, a “perversely inverted form of bio-mimicry”.
Taking into account the argument of Elizabeth Minnich, the “Evil of Banality”, where Banality (clichés, thoughtlessness) is considered a source of evil which creates the invisible “extensive evil”, there you have it. Thus, this “optical illusion” is perhaps the source where this evil can gain a foothold. But if we want to be consistent and not moralistic, we cannot and it is futile to try to change humans for what they are or appear to be, and remains to be seen whether the human aspiration in achieving a quasi honey bee-SI structure will be soon streamed to a more honest and really democratic way. I am afraid it will not, it cannot for the MTI “culture” and its proponents.
Hi Professor Rees, what do you foresee for humanity a few centuries down the road? From how i read your writings, you believe that humans are hardwired for complexity, and then overcomplexity, and then an inevitable fall, leading to the cycle of empires. Do you foresee that continuing after this collapse bottoms out(assuming no extinction)? Of course, less overshoot this time due to no fossil fuels(good thing, I think!)
Ian, I avoid making predictions--the world is far too complex and what we know is a thin skin on the apple of the unknown. We can only reflect on current conditions and trends. Will humans even be around in 'a few centuries'? Possibly not if, for example, the global community exercises its death wish in a full-on nuclear conflagration. Anyone who thought we had side-railed that possibility via international arms agreements is probably rethinking options in light of the erratic behaviours of some of the psychopathic totalitarians currently running the world. (Do you need a list?) Assuming our species survives, a high probability attaches to something like small-scale agro-communities and a global population of a few hundred million; an even smaller population might live more like hunter-gatherers if people can relearn very basic survival skills and enough of wild nature survives the great unravelling and recovers to the point it could sustain a controlled harvest. A good- if not best-case scenario would have the global community acknowledge its predicament in the coming decade or so, recognize that MTI civilization is over and begin the transition (including vigorous population planning) to small, more or less self-reliant bioregional (ecoregional) communities, living to the extent possible on the output of carefully husbanded regional ecosystems (there could be limited trade). I outline one possible configuration of this alternative toward the end of this paper: https://www.docdroid.net/ZPtk0qA/why-large-cities-wont-survive-the-twenty-first-century-pdf . Again, this option might support only a few hundred million people (depends on what technologies are still functioning, average material consumption levels, community structure, etc.) and would require a much higher level of cooperation, mutual aid, community cohesion than the contemporary world is currently able to muster. That said, how it all unfolds is up for grabs -- except, IMHO, for the great simplification, the unraveling of MTI society.
I agree that your scenario is the best case scenario. However, from how I read your writings, you believe thay humans are hardwired to build complexity. You say that “Assuming our species survives, a high probability attaches to something like small-scale agro-communities and a global population of a few hundred million”, so I can easily see the possibility of that leading into regional empires (and cities) worldwide!
Not the current cities though, sruff like Rome, or maybe a medieval town, with much less overshoot. What do you think?
Again, hard to say what, exactly, will transpire. However, I doubt the kind of small-scale communities I was thinking about will scale up to world-wide empires. MTI culture will have used up all the necessary, easily-accessed energy and material resources. Small medieval towns, maybe, but even these could go into temporary overshoot and deplete their already diminished resource base (in which case, collapse again -- the cycle continues on a smaller scale).
My hypothesis/theory, is that as we collapse, nature recovers, like a fallow period for the whole world, and after we bottom out in centuries as you say(i think), nature has recovered enough to act as a new frontier for our remnants. I fully agree that we won’t have the energy and material resources for a GLOBAL empire, but what about regional ones aka Rome or the Chinese dynasties? A common objection i see to this are metals since we’ve dug everything up already, but that’s the point exactly; we’ve dug it up, the metal isnt going anywhere! Even with long corrosion periods it corrodes to a hematite rich layer underneath the soil, just like a shallow mine. As for energy- Rome didn’t need fossil fuels, biomass served just fine.
Im not trying to say this will happen, I just want your opinion on whether this is plausible or likely.
For evidence or an attempt at substantiation, a response I posted from somewhere else:
Firstly, collaose itself takes centuries. In that time, biodiversity could recover to such an extent that it can resemble a frontier again, a “fallow period for the world”. The population decline to, as you say, 2-3% of current levels would help immensely. For examples, I point to Chernobyl, whicb received degradation in excess to most of what we put out today, reforestation after the Maya collapse or natures rebound after the Black Death. So in my view, there will been room to grow again, start over and do it all once more, and that rhey can migrate and start afresh (quoting you).
Next, your point about “The easy-to-get resources will be gone”. What resources, exactly? Metals? In that case i can point out that the metal hasn’t actually gone anywhere, it’s right there on the surface waiting for scavengers (as you said). One calculation i did was I grabbed the steel forecast for 2050 (70GT) and divided it by Rome era metal usage (1.5kg/person/year), scales up to 300 millions. It went to the scale of 70k years without recycling. Corrosion is also a (mostly) non issue here, since metal over long timescales corrodes into hematite, whicb is what iron ore is anyway. Cities literally become mines.
Recent analyses have reported catastrophic global declines in vertebrate populationsnature.com/articles/s41…,nature.com/articles/s41…. However, the distillation of many trends into a global mean index obscures the variation that can inform conservation measures and can be sensitive to analytical decisions. For example, previous analyses have estimated a mean vertebrate decline of more than 50% since 1970 (Living Planet Indexnature.com/articles/s41…). Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase
Climate swings will be extreme.
not really. Funny enough, warmer periods in earths history are stabler than cold ones, which is why we didn’t have agricukutre in the Pleistocene. Also to note, civilisations have risen and fallen in places like India, where even before climate change has frequent heatwaves reaching 40c which were adapted to by human planning.
Professor Rees, I have been thinking a lot about the issues you discuss here. The problem is that “psychopathy”, whatever it is, is ill-defined, leaving all clinicians and/or mental health professionals practically powerless against it: while psychiatry has managed to get itself a bad name as it has been (and still is) weaponized and used against political dissidents and as a form of stripping personhood, credibility and rights, “psychopathy” is a loose “label”, which is, as far as I know, not a formal clinical diagnosis (i.e. entailing treatment, and in extreme cases containment, as other disorders do). But even if it had all the prerequisites to become an official diagnosis, how realistic is it to “cure” this type of "evil", since medicine is about curing? And who could the one to introduce such a proposition?
There is a major issue, rarely discussed: Most people exhibit “top-down” thinking, while a minority exhibits “bottom up” thinking. While top-down thinking is geared towards speed, efficiency and the so-called “big picture”, bottom up thinking is geared towards accuracy, precision, detail and towards pinpointing inconsistencies, at the expense of speed. It is like an “evolutionary trade-off.” Well, the supposed “big picture” may actually be a misnomer, as rarely people do see the big picture (as systemic thinkers do) since the majority, paradoxically assuming themselves as seeing the big picture, are in fact confirming their biases and/or narratives. Top down thinking relies heavily on assumptions (general to specific) and -because of that- bias, while bottom up on detail and structured data (specific to general). In this respect, it is expected that most people, as “top-down thinkers”, being born and educated within this, say, psychopathic organization of society (a sick environment), lack the cognitive substratum required (either inherent, inherited or acquired) to question the logos and raison d’ etre of the “system” at all its levels, as their biological “default” cognitive platform is to likely assume that this is the “normal” and has always been like that: top down thinking is geared towards “social cohesion” at the expense of accuracy. Consequently, speech becomes incoherent, confused, contradictory and eventually corrupt.
It is also expected that even scientists will be tempted to “fit the world in their models” and not vice versa, and I believe that the species suffers from lack of bottom up thinkers. What seemed to be “selected for” then (speed, efficiency), seems now to be “selected against” in an unpredictable world, where what would otherwise be called “noise” and would be “filtered out” for the aim of making quick decisions and ensure social cohesion, now could be called “missing out critical data” in a world that increasingly moves in non-linear patterns.
I would like to add that from the perspective of social ontology “international law” is a convention which the strong use at their discretion and the weak appeal to in times of distress. There is no such thing as “international law”. As you too have remarked, every known human society/culture exhibits in-group/outgroup behaviour, so, in this respect, international law (“universal”) is a contradiction in terms. Just another story that humans have invented, and it appears to be against biology too.
George, as usual you raise several important points.
Psychopathy may be somewhat ill-defined but that may be because it is not a discrete medical/mental health issue like a broken arm but a fuzzy spectrum of related personality disorders, particularly the lack of empathy, smarmy charm (and other manipulative tendencies), narcissism and egocentricity, expressed in varying degrees in different individuals. Also, the structural brain anomalies associated with psychopathy suggest a genetic root, i.e., that a complex of genes is at cause. If so, then we would expect this particular personality disorder to vary among the afflicted depending on the relative influences of differing gene loci. This all speculative, of course, but if anything like this is involved, then formal, definitive diagnosis is not possible. The “loose label” will continue to apply and formal treatment and “curing” (as splinting a break or vaccination against a virus) is simply not (yet) in the cards. (Gene therapy, anyone?)
As for top-down and bottom-up thinking, from your description these correspond to what I refer to, in earlier articles, as ‘normal’ (simplistic, mechanistic, reductionist) thinking and complexity-oriented ‘systems’ thinking. I argued that H. sapiens evolved in relatively simple social and biophysical environments and that our “top-down” manner of thinking reflects brain development in this context. (‘Top-down’ immediacy was adequate for survival in Paleolithic times). I also suggest that cultural evolution (e.g., technology) has left cognitive evolution far behind so that our relatively primitive brains are now functionally obsolete, unable to cope with the unfolding drama—even the best systems thinkers are only skipping like a stone over the deep waters of complex reality. This means that most humans are deeply maladapted for life in the overly-complex increasingly-chaotic modern (“big picture”) environment we ourselves have created. We—i.e., most people—may, as you suggest, assume this is the ‘normal’ way of being; after all, it is all they and many earlier generations have ever know—but I have argued (and you seem to be agreeing) that it means H. sapiens is in increasing danger of being selected out. Darwin wins again.
As for international law, I agree that it is mere convention, a social construct. But I cannot fault it for that. Laws and regulations, socially constructed, are necessary for what we like to call ‘civilized’ existence. And you are right again—they go against crass biology. When they work, they do so to inhibit anti-civilizational but natural behaviours that would otherwise emerge (beat or kill your enemies, take whatever attracts you, mate with whomever you choose) to make ‘civilized’ life impossible.
Professor Rees, I enjoy very much the conversation with you, and I would like to thank you for engaging in this dialogue. Let me add a little more “spice” in our discourse.
The answer would probably lie within Socrates and his views of the human and human affairs. As a systems thinker, Socrates knew that he knows nothing (Εν οίδα ότι ουδέν οίδα), because a thinker like him possesses the self-awareness that his intellect is always in dialectic with the Cosmos (the environment -remaining vigilant on “emergent phenomena”) and abstains from making definitive judgements; he just proceeds with caution and temperance. Philosophically, it entails the acknowledgement of the limits (finitude) of his existence.
On the contrary, the West (and the world today) is preoccupied with “Ends” and “Utopias”/ final solutions, as it has translated/secularized theological texts into Law and Form, and eventually as a way of being. The West moves with manuals and handbooks, and life and community is considered and managed as if it were a product/project. But a bottom up thinker is supposed to be aware that there cannot be such a “manual”, everything is a continuous dialogue (dialectics). Paradoxically, a systems thinker (bottom up) is occupied in sensing and reading the environment, and this way is opposite from what the Western paradigm expects him to do as a systems thinker: find a final solution.
So, I tend to believe that the “success” of a systems thinker paradoxically lies in him “failing” the Western expectations in finding definitive “solutions” for this predicament. Let it run its course and adjust accordingly.
I quote an excerpt by Elliott Greg which caught my attention:
“But once societies scale, and decision-making is mediated through abstractions — contracts, offices, reputational proxies, the advantage shifts toward individuals who can navigate those abstractions more effectively than others. Empirically, this advantage aligns with a specific cognitive profile...” (Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis 3rd Chapter: Institutions as Mirrors of the Psychopathic Mind - page 11)
It seems that the problem lies with questionable “abstractions”, i.e. top-down thinking, ruthlessly created for the advantage of the said individuals. The psychopath has effectively “hijacked” all of society’s psychological apparatus and twisted it, using the same “software” (top-down thinking - mental schemata - models - Theory of Mind) that the majority utilizes, without remorse. For it is one thing to describe (detached view), and totally another to do something about it (counteraction-engagement). Description means that the result (hijacking-transformation) has already taken place, and the researcher studies the phenomenon retroactively.
I also stand at this sentence: “The crucial shift occurs when simulation becomes structure.” (page 13) This is astonishingly similar to “The map becomes the terrain itself”. So, we have top-down thinkers, who use this profile as leverage to manipulate whole societies, and society has turned into a virtual one, effectively severed from natural-sensory experience. We live “inside” the minds of psychopaths, within a “psychopathic society”.
Maybe anthropology should study this new phenomenon: Agency gone-only Simulation exists-mutation completed, and make bold claims. Or else how can it be explained that Simulation-map (projection) prevails over Essence-territory (irreducibility)? Looks like the whole world has turned into a statistical model, enter AI here too (!), and we now live in a 21st century Plato’s Cave. Otherwise researchers risk being classified exactly as the ones they describe, using meticulous descriptions as a pain-killer or “speaking the language that aligns with others’ moral expectations”: A lot of literature about psychopathy and narcissism, little action towards defense. In this respect, Kafka was a prophet, a very astute futurist. In other words, he was not a “writer”, but an anthropologist coming from the future using metaphors.
Unless science frames this situation under a new light: That our era might signify the onset of some kind of “speciation”, where supposed “universal” human features do not apply to all. If we rule out that possibility (which cannot be ruled out completely), then claims about the “universality” of “human nature” are far from substantiated.
It sounds like sci-fi, but how impossible is that there might be an emergent phenomenon, the onset of “speciation” within the species itself, as an effect of the extremely overwhelmed environment humans have nourished and amplified the past 100 years (exploitation, overpopulation, overshoot, pollution, transgression of planetary boundaries, complexity, scarce resources, extensive use of technology leading to a rewiring of brain, AI etc.)? If we interpret “social exclusion” against certain groups that exhibit distinct cognitive profiles, such as neurodiverse population for example, as “behavioral isolation”(ironically autistic people are said to have the opposite profile from the psychopath: intact affective empathy, low cognitive empathy), how possible is it that this could signify an early-early step of “speciation”? Of course always bearing in mind that “evil destroys even itself” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). And as Greg Elliott says in his essay: “This is not a moral failure but a mathematical one”... So, evil seems to be a perverse simulation, which aspires to reduce into parts the irreducible, also mistaking itself with the very territory it seeks to manipulate. How biblical!
George, yours is an intriguing stream of thought which has helped me in my own wrestling with Greg Elliotts Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis. You quote Elliott: “But once societies scale, and decision-making is mediated through abstractions — … the advantage shifts toward individuals who can navigate those abstractions more effectively than others. Empirically, this advantage aligns with a specific cognitive profile...”
You then remark: “It seems that the problem lies with questionable ‘abstractions’, i.e. top-down thinking, ruthlessly created for the advantage of the said individuals. The psychopath has effectively “hijacked” all of society’s psychological apparatus and twisted it…”
Let me play with this a bit. First, I agree that the problem lies with questionable abstractions. Also, Elliott does indeed imply – actually, he’s quite explicit – that the psychopath hijacks society as the large-scale organizations they populate come to reflect and institutionalize what Elliott calls the ‘asymmetric personality profile’.
Given the empirical evidence that socio- and psychopaths are overrepresented at the top of large-scale organizations, I think this is a truly important observation. The nature of the organization ‘selects for’ the deviant personality disorder and the particular operational ‘abstractions’ if produces.
But is this a totally unique phenomenon or a particularly interesting expression of a more general and long-recognized pattern of human cognitive functioning? The established fact is that human beings generally do not operate in objective reality but rather ‘live out of’ socially constructed myths and narratives. These shared models or ‘abstractions’ constitute social reality. In other words, decision-making in human societies at any scale is mostly mediated through what you call “questionable abstractions” of one kind or another—think tribal myths, religious doctrines, political ideologies, academic paradigms and even scientific theories. These social constructs are the dynamically shifting shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. They are the cognitive maps that become the effective terrain for everything from personal conduct (ordinary people can be induced to hunt and kill witches) to government action and rationale (Renee Nicole Good was killed as a left-radical subversive threat to US national security).
Significantly, neuroscientists tell us that oft-repeated experiences and thought processes help shape the synaptic circuits of the brain – i.e., a mythic narrative can acquire a physical presence in the human ‘illusion organ’ (actual book title). Once so encoded, this cognitive preset acts as a filter for subsequent sensory inputs; people seek out—or at least accept—-complementary data and reject or ignore contrary information.
To put this in concrete contemporary terms, modern techno-industrial society operates from the fabricated notion of human exceptionalism (H. sapiens is not part of nature not subjected to natural laws). This “questionable abstraction” is reflected in the prevailing global economic development paradigm of perpetual economic growth propelled by ever advancing technology. Contrary evidence from objective reality such as plunging biodiversity, ecosystems collapses, global heating, ocean acidification, micro-plastic contamination, and the general entropic disordering of the ecosphere has no effect on the decision making. Climate change denial is official US government policy. To paraphrase your words, the simulation map subdues the de facto territory. And, since the map completely misrepresents the territory, it miserably fails Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. It follows that the territory (biophysical environment) will ultimately destroy the map (MTI civilization). (Evil destroys even itself.)
This is not to dispute Greg’s hypothesis. Rather it is to make the case that human societies have always operated from ‘top-down’, inadequate, conceptual models of reality. What Greg Elliott describes is a particularly pernicious and currently relevant case in which, particularly in contemporary large scale organizations, certifiable psychopaths get to dictate and implement the cognitive imaginaries on the wall of the cave in which we all live.
The notable psychopath Donald Trump and his like-minded minions are (again, to play on some of your language) manipulating a whole society, trying to turn it into virtual one, attempting to sever US citizens from their own natural-sensory experience of reality.
To move on, I don’t think there is anything here that undermines the universality of human nature if by that we mean the behavioural characteristics of society at large. You ask, “how impossible is that there might be an emergent phenomenon, the onset of “speciation” within the species itself…?” Speciation is a controversial topic but there is agreement that it generally requires the geographic separation of populations of a species so that the different geographies operate differentially on the genetic profiles of the two populations. At first, the genomes and phenomes of the two populations will be virtually identical but if the two environments are substantially different natural selection will gradually operate to favour qualities ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ in one isolated population and ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’ in the other. Eventually the two populations will diverge genetically (genome) and in appearance or function (phenome) as they become better adapted to their particular circumstances. If the physical divergence is sufficient such that inter-breeding is impossible or fertile offspring not produced, then we have speciation.
Keep in mind, too, that H. sapiens is a very long-lived species with a relatively low reproductive rate—it would take hundreds of generations and many thousands of years for even isolated populations to speciate. (Aboriginal Australians have been isolated for 50,000 years but are still interfertile with Scandinavian Europeans, for example). Bottom line: I don’t think within-species speciation without millennia of separation of discrete populations of H. sapiens is in the cards.
Attempts to connect fields seemingly unrelated are exciting, but I hope I am not tiring you with my extensive comments.
Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is spot on, only variety can destroy variety, and it is evident that the human society cannot destroy base reality (nature), only itself. A paradox about the “illusion organ” of the brain, if it universally “afflicts” with the same gravity, is that no one can verify its existence, as the premise accepts that humans lack the necessary grounding in reality to “call it out”, and live in a closed loop of illusion. Calling it out entails a distancing (separation), even an epiphany and potent antidotes such as intellectual honesty (the MTI civilization exhibits a lack of it). As an antidote I appeal to a quote by Panagiotis Kondylis, scholar of human affairs, who has presented a huge and profound work on social ontology: “Everyone has the same right to illusion, since not all possess the same ability or the same courage for knowledge.” But this goes against “universality-inclusion”.
Yes, evolution happens very slowly, but what about the case where an abrupt/unfavorable change in the environment happens and potentially triggers the population to adapt rapidly, through epigenetics, to the environment the very population itself has altered? If the niche is threatened (we have succeeded in turning the whole world into a dangerous place), then human populations are subjected to extreme environmental stressors, they themselves cannot fully perceive, as the “illusion organ” works against them. The linear, “coherent narrative” now becomes irrelevant as the mind must stay vigilant for potential threats. Result: Disadvantage. This is an extremely overwhelming situation.
I have observed that today’s people, apart from the fact that are -as you say- desensitized to institutional cruelty, also move as automata while being depressed at the same time, and they act as if they have lost their primordial survival instincts. I believe that our ancestors were more sensory based, as animals are sensory based (bottom up). Perhaps the linear script-map has claimed a disproportionate part of cognition, at the expense of non-linear thinking, direct experience and unfiltered data, at some point in history. After the onset of MTI anomaly, statistics were invented, as well as the “average-normal” human. This is a profound skewing of human experience and understanding, for the purpose of governing the masses. Statistics is the epitome of dehumanizing the human, and turning him into a data point on a bell curve.
The environment today is particularly stressful, because of this anomaly. MTI civilization is unprecedented and cannot be compared to any other known event in human history: Explosive population growth and extraction/exploitation, ecosystems degradation, abstractions all the way down, widespread anomie, diminishing returns, totally living on planetary-ecological debt; add AI on top of that. We are about to bankrupt the whole bank, and there is no bailout. In this respect, monetary debt may be understood as 100% real, as it may represent (albeit metaphorically and ironically) what we collectively owe to nature: the measure of unsustainability of the current civilization-anomaly projected onto our ultimate abstractions, i.e. translated into trillions of dollars, where “externalities” are finally, albeit indirectly introduced to the budget. This is why there is no visible option for “Σεισάχθεια” (debt cancelling) or Jubilee. Nothing is now as underpriced as it seems, as the Tax Freedom Day has moved from January (1900’s) to May or June (now). Looks like that even neoliberal economics cannot escape thermodynamics and diminishing returns, even if the “illusion organ” works overtime (propaganda, wishful thinking, willful blindness). The reality is telling: what we now feel as “oppression” (whether economic, social, political) appears as a direct reflection of nature closing upon us. And psychopaths are the “penalty” for our acquiescence to abstractions (read: assumptions) that have crossed the line, and instead of working in tandem with reality were seeking to annihilate/erase it.
This is a totally novel situation. Top-down thinkers are susceptible to lag (path dependence, assuming from prior experience). The problem is that we have systematized a whole field of collective “prior experience”; it is called “History”. And based upon that, we make assumptions for the future... What if History has not remotely suspected what is about to come?
When Elliott Greg says that psychopaths are “selected for” positions in institutions (“a cognitive profile that becomes selectively advantageous” - page 1), I can’t help but think that “something happened” in the process, and the specific type or phenotype is now over-represented at the top of social stratification, a presumably novel manifestation. That “something” may be evolutionary (or temporary). The fact that Elliott Greg uses the phrase “selectively advantageous” “obliges” me to think in evolutionary terms. Consequently, I can assume that maybe “something happened” again, and neurodiverse population is facing persistent social ostracism, despite its documented high accuracy, high systematizing - against the “illusion organ”- ability. Besides, in evolutionary terms, apart from allopatry (geographically distinct populations) there exists sympatry and sympatric speciation (populations within the same region). When Elliott Greg proposes how psychopaths are “selected for”, he describes the very substratum upon which this “selection” occurs i.e. abstractions all the way down, where simulation becomes Structure, a new environment manifesting physically. The Structure is not a purely conceptual one; those Corporate and Government Offices, the Mega Cities are the physical habitat-niche of bureaucrats and citizens too, being the territorial networks of the altered environment (the internet too). Can a psychopath-bureaucrat live in a remote village or is this village outside his “niche”? AI is also a physical manifestation of this altered environment, albeit trapped in silicon and tethered to servers. Maybe a serious challenge lies ahead us: will we succumb to AI which represents the “cutting edge” of the abstractions mentioned above (Plato’s Cave augmented reality, literally) and get trapped into the virtual-silicon world? If this happens, then the “mutation” will be complete.
George I replied to your original comment on my substack, but replying here as well:
The core hypothesis I’m developing is that scaled societies create something analogous to a new selection regime, not Darwinian natural selection, but simulation-based selection inside abstract gameboards (markets, law, bureaucracy, metrics, reputation systems). These environments do not primarily select “ideas” or “policies.” They select cognitive profiles: minds that are hyper-adapted to symbolic competition, strategic manipulation, and cost externalization.
Under those conditions, the locally optimal strategy is not reciprocity but defection-with-plausible-deniability: extraction without accountability, dominance without visibility, harm displaced downstream. The clinical and neurobiological literature on psychopathy/Dark Triad traits aligns with this strategy: reward pursuit and strategic control remain intact, while the affective inhibitory systems that normally constrain exploitation (fear conditioning, empathic distress, guilt) are attenuated. In other words, what the simulation rewards is a parasitic strategy profile, functionally analogous to biological parasitism, but operating inside a social/semantic host inside the simulation (ie capitalism, neoliberalism, financial markets etc).
This matters because once such profiles rise within a simulation, they don’t remain “individual pathologies.” Their strategies become copied into institutional logic (incentives, enforcement design, conditional access) and then copied into cultural norms (“professionalism,” “realism,” “merit,” “personal responsibility”), until the society begins to mirror the cognition that is winning within it.
At that point, collapse is no longer mysterious. Parasitism scales badly. In biology, extraction eventually outruns host regeneration. In social simulations, extraction becomes decoupled from replenishment: institutions optimize for short-horizon gain, externalize long-horizon cost, and maintain compliance through loss, dependency, and automatic punishment. Game-theoretically, the system drifts toward equilibria where players comply primarily to avoid penalty, not to pursue shared benefit, stable, durable, but systematically anti-regenerative (due to atomization).
So my claim is not “institutions are evil,” nor “most people are psychopathic.” It is that scaled simulations select for parasitic cognitive profiles, and those profiles then propagate upward into rules and downward into norms, producing a civilization that becomes structurally incapable of care, repair, or regeneration at the necessary time horizons. Neoliberalism is the clearest modern instantiation of this dynamic, but the mechanism generalizes across any sufficiently scaled simulation.
I’ve written this argument more fully here https://gregelliott2000.substack.com/p/chapter-4-section-2-the-architecture, using neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and game-theoretic constructs to support the selection claim. I appreciate the dialogue!
Greg, it may be because I’m not steeped in game theory, but wonder whether you are not making things more complex and obscure/abstract than needs be to validate your argument.
A couple of things don’t quite resonate for me. First, I’m not sure that it necessary to refer to ‘simulation-based selection inside abstract gameboards’ where the simulation is ‘capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism, and other constructed ideologies, and ‘gameboards’ basically seem to be the rules and institutional frameworks of society where the so-called ‘simulations’ play out. Both, are of course, emergent phenomena of large-scale societies which remains a crucial point.
First, ‘simulation’: I’ve always understood simulation to mean simplified imitation of something real, a model of a specific entity or process. I use to work as part of a group of ecosystem simulation modelers – ecosystems were the real-world, our models were the simulations. So my first question is, “if capitalism and neoliberalism are simulations, what do they purport to simulate?” It could be argued that they are culturally constructed entities unto themselves; as Freud might say, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
If, on the other hand, you are implying that capitalism is a simulation of society or neoliberalism a simulation of human economic behaviour, (or whatever) it would help me, at least, if you stated this explicitly. (BTW, these examples would be dismal simulations.)
Similarly, while ‘market’, legal frameworks, ‘bureaucracies’ are human creations intended to speed up and otherwise facilitate transactions and relationships, it muddies the water for me at least to call them ‘abstract gameboards’. Are they not simply what they are? Why abstract them to ‘gameboard’ and perhaps alienate some readers? (By the way, you have ‘markets’ listed as both simulation and gameboard—can’t be both, or can they?)
On the question of selection: you have fascinatingly analogous process in play here but I’d first like to comment on your interpretation and then extend the story in a different direction. For natural selection to work there must be a largish population and significant variability among physical or behavioural traits that have adaptive significance in that particular environment. Favoured variants will be ‘selected for’, their relative success measured by greater longevity and reproductive success. Modern-techno industrial (MTI) society necessarily spawns and comprises large-scale organizations and institutions which function as (un)natural social environments. And, like biophysical environments that select for the ‘best adapted’ traits/individuals (which then populate subsequent generations), the structure and function of large-scale organizations may favour the survival (in the institution) and rise to dominance of particularly advantageous behavioural variants (which subsequently come to dominate the organization). So, from among the many personality types expressed by their human inhabitants, it is in the nature of large-scale organizations to select for ‘malignant’ cognitive variants, “minds that are hyper-adapted to symbolic competition, strategic manipulation, and cost externalization” etc. Wonderful analogy (even without reference to simulations or gameboards)!
Now, some massaging. First, isn’t there a bit of the chicken/egg conundrum at play in your hypothesis? As I have previously noted, large scale organizations are by nature, in themselves, alienating, unfeeling, intimidating etc. So, while psychopathic or, more broadly, dark triad personalities tend to thrive (are selected for) within them, these organizations already possess an institutional analogue of anti-social personality disorder. Such institutional psychopathy may be reinforced by the rise to prominence of the human variant, but the organizational personality did not need to be shaped by the latter. ASPD need not be “copied into institutional logic”: much of the deviant institutional logic was pre-existent.
Let me take this further. I would argue that it is civilization itself that is pathological, ”structurally incapable of care, repair, or regeneration” and that this quality is reflected in civilization’s foundational institutions and organizations. The latter subsequently select for (and are then reinforced by) dark triad personalities.
Keep in mind that large-scale organizations including fixed settlements, towns, cities, corporations, governments, etc., have been with us for only a few millennia, perhaps only 2% of anatomically modern H. sapiens’ evolutionary history. This is too short a period for significant cross-species evolutionary change in human brain structure which means, in turn, that the structural environments created by ‘scale’ are essentially abnormal (alienating and hostile) for humans from the get-go. I even argue that no denizen of any ‘civilization’—particularly MTI culture—has actually ever lived in a ‘normal’ (i.e., natural) human environment. We don’t recognize and acknowledge this because ‘civilization’ at scale is all anyone alive has ever experienced.
It follows that humans, in general, are maladapted to large-scale, intimidating institutions, dense populations, cities, etc. (just ask psychiatrists treating the worst manifestations of modern cultural angst from social alienation through chronic depression to substance addiction.) The socio-behavioral dynamics of scale may even be a foundational reason for the cyclical collapse of every major human civilization to date. Large-scale is selecting for the aberrant personalities as you describe—they are ‘fittest’ to survive in the artificial structural environments characterizing large-scale societies—and as they come to dominate perhaps they accelerate societal collapse. As you say, “Parasitism scales badly.”
There is another wrinkle that ties your ‘simulation-based’ selection to Darwinian natural selection. To the extent that deviate personalities succeed financially and competitively, including, in the competition for mates—I pointed out in my blog that they have enhanced opportunities for sexual exploitation—they ensure their own enhanced survival and the propagation of heritable personality traits. This is archetypal Darwinian natural selection, albeit playing out in an ‘unnatural’ environment’. Taking this to the extreme, we could say that large-scale societies are breeding grounds for psychopathy, at least to the point where society comes crashing down under the weight of the malignant spin-offs (corruption, self-aggrandizement, betrayal, alienation, loss of public confidence, etc.) which tend to accumulate at the top. Which brings me back to my earlier question: which comes first, the psychologically alienating societal/institutional chicken or the deviant cognitive profile egg?
Bill,
As always, appreciate the tough questions and discourse.
Let me try to state it plainly, without unnecessary abstraction.
When I use the word simulation, I’m not referring to a scientific model. I mean that modern institutions increasingly operate through abstract rule systems (law, money, metrics, credentials) that mediate access to resources, status, and security. Success is measured symbolically, while many of the material and moral consequences of that success appear elsewhere, later, or are borne by other actors. Once payoffs are decoupled from real-world consequences, optimization inside the abstract system becomes evolutionarily real, even when it damages the underlying society or ecosystem.
By gameboard, I mean this in a straightforward game-theoretic sense: institutions define who the players are, what moves are allowed, what is rewarded (payoffs), what is punished, what is visible, and who can change the rules. Markets, bureaucracies, legal systems, and corporations are repeated games with delayed feedback, uneven visibility, and the ability for winners to influence the rules themselves.
Under these conditions, a familiar class of strategies becomes reliably profitable. In everyday language we call this “cheating,” but in game theory these are forms of defection or strategies that increase private payoff by avoiding the full costs of cooperation.
The reason defection wins is structural, not moral. If benefits are immediate and private, while harms are delayed, diffused, or displaced onto people without retaliatory power, and if enforcement is weak, slow, or inconsistent, then the expected cost of defection collapses. Cooperation requires actors to bear real costs themselves; defection allows them to shift those costs elsewhere. Under those rules, defection becomes the dominant strategy, even if everyone would be better off in the long run if cooperation prevailed. The result is a stable equilibrium that looks successful locally while degrading the systems it depends on.
The strategies that dominate in these environments are not speculative or rhetorical. They correspond to well-documented defection strategies studied across classical game theory, evolutionary game theory, and institutional economics, particularly in repeated games with delayed payoffs, imperfect monitoring, and weak or endogenous enforcement.
Such strategies include:
1) Cost Externalization: capturing benefits now while pushing harms onto future generations, ecosystems, or the public. This is a canonical defection strategy in games with delayed or discounted payoffs. A firm pollutes to save money; health and environmental costs appear years later and are paid by others. Because the actor does not pay the bill, defection beats cooperation.
2) Symbolic Compliance: This behavior is well studied in games where monitoring relies on observable proxies rather than outcomes. Institutions often rely on visible signals, reports, certifications, policies, rather than direct effects. This allows actors to follow the letter of the rules while defeating their purpose. On paper they cooperate; in reality they defect.
3) Information Asymmetry Exploitation: This is standard defection in games with asymmetric information. Some actors know more, sooner, or better than others. They act before problems become visible to regulators, customers, or the public. By the time harm is recognized, the gains are already taken and protected.
4) Rule Capture: This corresponds to endogenous rule modification in institutional and political-economy game models. Successful actors gain influence over laws, enforcement, metrics, and liability. Once harmful behavior is legal or normalized, it no longer even looks like defection, it becomes standard practice.
5) Reputational Shielding: This is a strategy that lowers expected sanction in games with noisy or reputational enforcement. Philanthropy, ethical branding, and moral language create buffers that delay scrutiny and blunt accountability, allowing extraction to continue behind a veneer of virtue.
Individually, these behaviors are familiar. Together, they reinforce one another. Shifting harm away makes defection profitable. Paper compliance hides it. Information advantage delays discovery. Rule shaping prevents punishment. Reputation absorbs criticism. The combined effect is that honest cooperation becomes a losing move inside the system.
Where psychology enters is not as a moral explanation, but as a practical one tied to strategy execution. These defection strategies impose internal psychological costs on many actors even when external penalties are absent. Empathy, guilt, anticipatory regret, and concern for reciprocity function as internal brakes: they introduce hesitation and self-limitation even when defection would be materially rewarded.
Actors with psychopathic or broader Dark Triad traits experience those internal costs far less strongly. Low affective empathy reduces aversion to harm; shallow guilt weakens anticipatory restraint; grandiosity and entitlement normalize extraction; and power-seeking aligns naturally with rule capture and dominance within hierarchies. Charm and social confidence further function as tactical assets: they accelerate trust, disarm skepticism, facilitate manipulation, and support reputational shielding. Emotional detachment allows harm to be treated as an abstract variable rather than a felt constraint.
These traits do not cause defection, but they make defection easier to execute repeatedly, strategically, and under sustained pressure. Over time, institutions do not select for these traits because they are socially admirable, but because they are competitively effective under defection-dominant payoff structures. Actors who hesitate, self-limit, or internalize harm lose ground to those who do not. Selection therefore operates not on intent or morality, but on outcomes: those best able to execute defection strategies rise, are rewarded, and disproportionately shape institutional norms and rules.
On the chicken-and-egg question: I agree that large-scale institutions are alienating and brittle regardless of who inhabits them. My claim is not that psychopathic individuals must invent institutions for pathology to arise. Rather, symbolic scale creates environments where defection strategies dominate; actors best able to execute those strategies rise; and once they do, endogenous rule modification further entrenches the payoff structure. Cognition and institution co-evolve inside that loop.
I suspect we’re aligned on diagnosis. Where I’m trying to contribute is by making explicit why these systems so reliably converge on defection-dominant equilibria, why reform that doesn’t change incentives fails, and why collapse emerges is the resulting outcome...
Chat soon :)
Greg
Greg, thank you for the dialogue, which I feel that it provides some “missing pieces” in my personal interpretation of the situation, for the time being.
I read your hypothesis “backwards”. I believe that people weren’t always like that. I dare say that it is a wrong assumption that “our” “paleolithic brain” has stayed the same. My innate tendency is to recognize patterns. So, what I see is that the brain “mutated” in the course of history, towards language and hierarchical organization and abstractions (representations), at the expense of sensory experience and working memory. The following experiment is revealing:
“Chimps outperform humans at memory task”:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12993-chimps-outperform-humans-at-memory-task/
Can anyone explain what happened and the “evolutionary neighbor” of ours is vastly superior to humans in eidetic memory? This implies a trade-off. People gave up working and eidetic memory for “abstractions”, language and its hierarchical organization. With time, specific language-symbolism came to dictate, colonize thought. So, the hierarchical organization, like a “his master’s voice”, suppressed and almost severed raw data input, the majority of sensory input is now filtered out (at least in people of neuro-typical cognitive profile). Kind of a “mutation”. And now people are lost in abstractions (and hierarchical organization and translation). The trade off happened as people chose “efficiency” over “resilience”, effectively rewiring their brains. “Efficiency” may be another word for short-termism (even lack of self-restraint). On the contrary, plants know why they are “inefficient” in their photosynthesis; they chose resilience/adaptation.
As I said, “ordinary, everyday people” are not totally exempt from this “mental virus”. This is coherent with Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration and the argument of Elizabeth Minnich regarding “the Evil of Banality”. Dabroswki claims that the “average person” is closer to the psychopath than he thinks, fairly integrated into society, experiencing only minimal internal conflict. Minimal conflict means internalization of today’s society’s organizing principles (assumptions). To this extent, there has been a choice, passive acceptance/agreement, conformity and complacency, facilitated by scaled simulation: "Everybody does it", a cliché. In the face of the imminent-catastrophic downfall, a conscious effort for the decolonization of thought is required. Or else we should generalize that all people are automata, explainable, reducible, soulless and mere mirroring machines of the supposed “winning strategy” of the psychopath, just like bots, and every thought, every flutter on “human virtue” is an illusion just for the sake of a “social cohesion” that serves parasitic systems, which (social cohesion) is not working anymore since we are about to get an Eviction Notice from Gaia. Then why be empathetic towards people, if they are bots without agency, if this is all an illusion, moreover with the “script” not working anymore? Why making science, where “expert-savants” claim omniscience over tiny fragments of knowledge, while fighting each other over which field is more “valid”? For our narcissism and vanity? How sure are we that today’s “scientific method” and “dogmas” do not suffer from faulty generalizations? And we know that today’s science suffers from immense replication crisis, amounting to theory crisis. So, it is a matter of perspective. My interpretation:
Emergent phenomena: Scaled simulation and intention. The chicken or the egg? Both, as self reinforcing loop.
Typical people are said to have a “Theory of Mind”. Theory of Mind is a simulation on “reading other people’s minds”. If their model (map) is sound, then they should be able to explain, predict and detect the manipulation of the psychopath, not just society “mirroring” the psychopathic cognitive profile. But they are unable to do so it seems, and fall victims of exploitation or whatever. They are unable to even understand the autistic-neurodivergent mind, which is even said to lack this "mirror". Yet, they assume that all people are like them and agree with them. So, the “onus of proof” lies on them, or on whoever devised this strange theory.
Till yesterday, the inquiry into socio-political thinking evolved around the question of what would be the next historical revolution, or what would be the trigger of the next “revolution”. Since the entrance of AI in human lives and institutional organization and operation, the question is annulled. Having so, people are faced with a more complex psychopathic institutional edifice, where psychopathic actors exploit science and technology (usually combined), to exercise power and manipulate societal behaviors. What was yesterday deemed as “complacency” or “acquiescence”, is now enforced, it is imposition as inevitable “causality”. The question is not anymore how to cope with psychopaths within society, but whether we want to live in such a totalitarian virtual (simulation) environment where the existential fabric is rendered necrotic.
Needless to say that my views are personal and incomplete.
George,
Thank you again for the seriousness and depth of your response. I appreciate the way you’re engaging with this at the level of cognition, evolution, and selection trade-offs. I think we are largely describing the same phenomenon from different vantage points, and the main difference is where we locate causality.
On the chimpanzee working-memory example....I agree that it demonstrates a real trade-off. Humans clearly sacrificed certain forms of eidetic and short-term sensory memory in exchange for symbolic compression, language, and hierarchical abstraction. But I would be careful not to interpret this as cognitive degeneration or a loss of resilience. It is better understood as reallocation, not decline. High-bandwidth sensory memory and symbolic abstraction solve different evolutionary problems. Chimps outperform humans on specific memory tasks, but they cannot sustain cumulative culture, large-scale coordination, or transgenerational knowledge transfer (which is why we live in mega cities and no other creature ever has). Those capacities were selectively advantageous in human environments, particularly at the tribal scale.
Critically, however, abstraction itself is not the problem... nor does it entail psychopathy. For most of human history, abstraction coexisted with empathy, reciprocity, and constraint because it remained embedded in small, reputation-dense groups. Empathy does not require defense because it is core human wiring. As an ultra-altricial species, long childhoods, cooperative breeding, pair-bonding, and cultural transmission made empathic coupling computationally necessary and genetically stable. In that sense, empathy is not a cultural overlay or illusion.... it is foundational.
Psychopathy, by contrast, is not new. It has likely always existed at low frequency as a stable evolutionary strategy. What changed is not cognition, but ecology. Abstraction, anonymization, symbolic power, and scalable institutions removed the constraints that historically kept psychopathy local. Once those constraints dissolved, psychopathic strategies (optimized for defection, short-term payoff, and instrumentalization) were able to scale and then rewrite institutional rules in their image (because psychopaths win simulation based gameboards).
This is why empathy now appears maladaptive inside contemporary systems. Not because it vanished or degraded, but because the gameboard flipped. The system increasingly demands cognitive convergence: simulate psychopathic logic or be selected out. Most people remain empathic, but are forced to mask or suppress that wiring in order to survive institutionally. The resulting burnout, moral injury, and depersonalization are signals of systemic pathology, not evidence that empathy was ever illusory.
On agency, I don’t see people as automata. Agency persists, but it is constrained by payoff structures. Empathy remains evolutionarily necessary at the species level even as it is locally punished by institutions optimized for short-term dominance. That tension is precisely what drives collapse.
I agree with you that AI and technoscientific systems harden this dynamic by collapsing ambiguity and converting what once looked like acquiescence into enforcement. Where I would differ slightly is that I see AI not as the origin of the problem, but as psychopathic logic made executable at scale, an accelerant rather than a cause (and it also presents the emergence of a new selection gameboard, I call the synthetic gameboard in my book).
So while I agree that abstraction involved trade-offs (as the chimp example illustrates), I don’t think we need to invoke a mutation or degeneration of the human brain to explain our current predicament. Selection pressure alone is sufficient. Empathy was not lost; the conditions that once protected it were or are currently being dissolved.
I appreciate the exchange, this is exactly the level of dialogue the work needs.
Greg
Thank you Greg. I would like to make some remarks referring to your comment here and your paper, in combination.
In your paper you hypothesize:
“These traits correspond to what clinical psychology describes as psychopathic or Dark Triad profiles, but the theory does not require diagnostic claims. The selection operates on behavioral outcomes, not on internal states.”
In your comment you say: “Most people remain empathic, but are forced to mask or suppress that wiring in order to survive institutionally”.
If the selection operates on behavioral outcomes, the selection does not care if one “masks” or suppresses his empathy. What the selection “sees” is his behavioral outcome (in order to survive institutionally), not his assumed internal state, the assumed empathy. In this respect, “normal people” who “mask” their empathy in order to “survive institutionally” act as a substrate of selection, according to the hypothesis, that is what I understand. Burnout is definitively observable, when it leads to resignation, modification of the subject’s behavioral outcome. Such a burnout means that the “system” has lost a “resource”, for this “selection” to perpetuate.
In my point of view, there are no “systems”, only subjects. In fact I believe that “ordinary people” are capable of extreme cruelty, given the right conditions, and this has been historically proven.
Of course I agree that AI is not the origin. But it could be the end.
A great summary of negative human traits and their impact on modernity. The strangest part of the human predicament is that middle class and poorer people are fascinated by the super-rich and other elites (just look at mainstream media). The power is with the billions of people with limited ‘wealth’ if they acted collectively. Instead, many people aspire to have fast cars, gold chains and mansions. High levels of comfort and status are goals for people emerging from poverty. So, who is going to seriously criticize the elite, when they are jealous of their lifestyles? Even on an individual level, who will give up 24-hour ice cream to save the planet? Not many.
And so, things will play out to the inevitable dismal end.
Which is why it's so important to continue to not talk about the importance of not breeding. Even you, William, skit around this entire subject. God, we really are so Fucked.
Humans have always been a poor quality of meat.
Yes. Post collapse could have some promise
cheers
The strangest part of the human predicament is that we keep breeding.
Yes. We don't even talk openly about population growth, not even in environmental or academic circles. In fact, the issue only comes up when people worry the birth rate is declining. Are humans intelligent?
Not in the slightest. Right, I'm off to shit out another human to bring my life a little meaning.
Give it up to save themselves. How to make everyone aware? If it’s life or death to pay attention, that could end wars and get us to be cooperative…hopefully.
Maybe stop talking about it as a thing of the future?
It’s here.
Fair enough -- one doesn't have to look very far to see both incipient socio-political implosion (more advanced in some places than others) and rampant global ecological decay.
I’m sad that we agree on this.
Your last question seems to imply that you think that a social organisation which can be thought of as a "civilisation" is possible and, presumably, sustainable (i.e. can be sustained indefinitely). Sorry, if this isn't your opinion. All previous civilisations have collapsed. But so have almost all organised societies (those that remain untouched are rare and may not have collapsed only because of the lack of sufficient time). But, surely, the only arrangement which may be sustainable is the hunter-gatherer lifestyle? There won't be many takers for that.
"All previous civilisations have collapsed."
And in-between civilizations, there have been longish periods of "un-civilization" that appears to have been sustainable.
The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not the only form of un-civilization.
Central to civilization seems to be the ability to hoard and withhold trophic resource — food. Evidence points to grain-based agriculture as the culprit.
An interesting counter-example existed about 7,000 years ago, about the time grain agriculture was building pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica.
This un-civilization lasted for perhaps a millennium or more, in coastal British Columbia, centred on present-day Hazelton. There are found almost all the different hazelnut varieties that exist throughout British Columbia, Washington, and even northern Oregon. This "hazelnut culture" left no great monuments like the grain-growers did. Hazelnuts go rancid without refrigeration, and can't effectively be hoarded and withheld.
Another example seems to be periods of pastoralism that existed in-between hunting-gathering and agriculture. I would gladly live the life of a goat herd, if it meant freedom from wetiko!
The coastal first-nations societies you describe for BC and elsewhere on the Pacific Coast of North America represent a particularly interesting case. The Pacific Northwest ecosystems, both land and water, are among the most productive in the world, This is one of the very few natural habitats capable of supporting small but permanent human settlements in the absence of continuous agriculture. All hail to salmon, herring, shellfish and hazelnuts (for example)!
Interesting. So you think a grain based civilisation could be sustained indefinitely? Would it be a civilisation that generations of people would be happy to live in? We do know that such civilisations didn't last but maybe they could have done, if its citizens were happy.
No; quite the opposite.
There seems to be evidence that the development of grain-based agriculture was what enabled hoarding, withholding, stratification, hierarchy, and capitalism.
Before the ability to store food for more than one turn of the seasons, people were forced to cooperate for daily sustenance, groups of more than ~150 individuals could not be supported, and we were arguably much more egalitarian.
My point (which apparently was not well-made, sorry!) is that it is possible to have non-grain-based agriculture that doesn't foster all the negatives we associate with modern civilization.
My fault. I read your note too quickly.
I agree with your point.
Humans have been ruining their environment from the beginning of agriculture. The only difference is that they always had a new area to move to or else their population shrank to accommodate the new conditions. At one time the Middle East was called the land of milk and honey and was heavily forested. Look at it now. So no, we weren’t living in harmony with our environment even then but it just took a while to reach this point.
Perhaps the global catalysts are now rapidly converging and a new (uncertain) dawn awaits, Gaia willing. One of these is undoubtedly in Antarctica where critically important testing in underway at and around the Thwaites (“Doomsday”) Glacier - the results should be known very soon. It’s of immense global consequence. Follow Miles O'Brien at:
https://open.substack.com/pub/milesobrien/p/face-to-face-with-thwaites
Please distribute in your networks.
I'm in the "blame fossil fuels" camp. I agree that structural and psychological defects generally lead to the collapse of larger hierarchical societies, but the vast majority of the Holocene transpired without the global environmental devastation we have today. Pre-modern empires rose and collapsed regularly all over the world for thousands of years, but the damage they did to the ecosystem was localized and temporary.
We would be thrilled to have the global environmental status of 1,000 years ago, yet that status included at least 8,000 years of human impact from numerous civilizations, most of them underpinned by agriculture. To me, this is evidence against any claim that only small foraging societies are truly sustainable within a global environmental context.
It has only been the last few hundred years of exponential growth in energy usage and population that the damage has become so great that the Anthropocene took over from the Holocene. That growth in energy use and population would never have been possible without fossil fuels.
It was only when we became able to use the energy from fossil fuels to create the machines that enabled us to extract more fossil fuels that things got out of control (on a global basis). We can blame our defects for being unable to avoid social collapses, but we should blame fossil fuels for getting us into our global overshoot predicament.
Finally, since most species, including humans, have been selected by evolution to be subject to the Maximum Power Principle, I doubt that any species that became able to extract and utilize fossil fuels would have been resistent to using them to support their efforts to thrive and reproduce. Humans are mostly like other species except for our ability to utilize exogenous energy sources (particularly those involving combustion), but as long as those sources were limited, so was humanity's impact. Fossil fuels are finite, but the quantity available has been so large that they seemed unlimited. We used them as if they were.
And here we are.
I'm not sure we differ on anything, Joe. We agree that large, hierarchical societies tend to collapse--things 'get out of control' locally/regionally with alarming regularity. We also agree on the role of the maximum power principle in propelling modern human society to global scale behemothic proportions in just a couple of hundred years (I wrote about these things in a couple of earlier pieces). So, it seems to me that modern techno-industrial (MTI) culture is on track to collapse as have many previous societies but with the major difference that this time things are out of control on a global scale. Despite ideological, religious, linguistic differences, among nation societies, fossil fuels have enabled virtually the entire 'developed' world to integrate and bloat, thus to face collapse simultaneously. It's global this time.
Yes, I think it's just a difference in emphasis.
Any species with unlimited food is just going to keep growing its population until something happens to make it stop. Humans are no different, it's just that our "food" is fossil fuels.
I'm in the ‘blame humans' camp, particularly the ones that breed.
As always, you are providing urgently-needed, incisive insight.
This is, without a doubt, the most thorough and distilled synopsis of the metacrisis I've come across. Thank you, Prof Rees, for taking the time and care to craft it. While the predicament of the metacrisis can't be "solved," the spirit of Kettering's "A problem well-stated is a problem half solved" is still valuable; we need these insights to navigate what is coming as well as can be managed.
All the best, sir!
This series has been a delight to read, and I've no disagreement with any of it. But THE question remains, which your "Now, take it from there". alludes to: how? and how will that "collapse" play out/be experienced?
TLDR; accountability doesn't work at scale in current systems.
That does not imply it cannot under actually rational systems, and especially under degrowth.
But the important takeaway is that social systems can be accurately diagnosed with the DSM.
Evolution had to put something in the genes or DNA that would eventually destroy not only themselves, but a lot of other ecological and biological things as well. This way it'll all start over again, for the most part. Change is what keeps life going, be it on earth or universally. Otherwise, it would all become stagnant.
Once a species like us had emerged with no effective competitor.
But themselves
Brilliant, hard truths, incredible insights. Thank you.
Couldn’t agree more. Awesome series.
One can only add to this with things like the banality of evil and other ordinary psychological mechanisms that explain why the rest of very large societies plays along, the godlike, manipulating tech hyper-enabling it all on hithereto unseen levels, the utterly irresistible temptation of free energy slaves etc.
Here are some revealing findings coming from Thomas Seeley, Horace White Professor in Biology Emeritus, Cornell University. Professor Seeley has studied the phenomenon of Swarm Intelligence (SI) in honey bees. According to him, “SI is a means whereby a group can overcome some of the cognitive limits of its members”.
This is very relevant, as far as a crucial point of our discussion regards the issue of “human cognitive obsolescence”, bio-mimicry, and a “perversely inverted form of bio-mimicry”.
https://nbb.cornell.edu/thomas-seeley
I quote Thomas Seeley’s words:
“My analyses of collective decision-making by honey bee colonies indicate that a group will possess a high level of collective (swarm) intelligence if within the group there is:
1) diversity of knowledge about the available options,
2) open and honest sharing of information about the options,
3) independence in the members’ evaluations of the options,
4) unbiased aggregation of the members’ opinions on the options, and
5) leadership that fosters but does not dominate the discussion.”
Panagiotis Kondylis’ profound study on social ontology, on the contrary, reveals a bleak reality in human affairs:
"Ultimate reality consists of beings, individuals or groups that struggle for their own preservation and together, necessarily, for the expansion of their power. That is why they meet as friends or as enemies and change friends and enemies according to the needs of the struggle for their own preservation and the expansion of their power."
This excerpt is found in his Magnum Opus “Power and Decision” (Macht und Entscheidung), which I strongly suggest for reading.
As for the “illusion” you describe. It is this “optical illusion” that creates the necessary “veil” for the majority of humans to believe that current “humanity” is a truly social species, as the ultimate reality is too depressing to handle psychologically. Maybe the “illusion” is a type of psychological defense against reality, but it seems that not all people possess it equally, as Kondylis would not be in position to describe what is actually happening. Unlike the SI (swarm intelligence) of honey bees, Kondylis dispassionately describes a situation where in human societies there are ruthless struggles for power, as an expression of “self-preservation” as “self-intensification”. In this respect, the ultimate illusion that the current version of humanity is “one” is depicted in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” which is a normativistic text-content (a tool by which societies appear to discipline themselves), and not natural-lived experience, because if it was lived experience it would be self-evident, so this law would be useless to enforce. It is now observable, undisputed reality that this law is used at the discretion of the strong, or trashed accordingly. But would one enforce in normativistic text that humans possess a liver or a heart for example (natural law)? Would one enforce a law that the Sun exists (natural law)? Never before a collective illusion has reached such heights (i.e. “international community” is an illusion), especially now manipulated for the control of the masses, through a bizarre phenomenon identified by Wilhelm Wund (a pioneer psychologist), called “Heterogony of Ends”. Heterogony of Ends is another term for “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogony_of_ends
Contrary to Kondylis (human affairs), Seeley (honey bee affairs) describes a situation where “leadership fosters but does not dominate the discussion”. Perhaps Kondylis was observing a phenomenon of Psychopathy in action, as he made explicit disclaimers that his theory is Historically determined, this understood in the context of Greg Elliott hypothesis. As being intellectually honest, he also gave the tools for advancing research and refuting his own theory: He identified that irrespective of “Thought Content” (= narrative = map = simulation, whether Theocracy, Humanism, Human Rights or whatever) there is a persistent “Thought Structure” in humans (in the Western Civilization particularly), which dictates who is “friend” and who is “foe”. The thought structure is not logical, but relies on a primary arbitrary Decision, as Separation. The Separation-Decision reorganizes the undifferentiated world into a coherent narrative providing orientation, albeit excluding parts of it (i.e. other worldviews and the irreducible world-objective reality itself) from the predicate of existence, and choosing others as “real”. This is the formation of the “world image”. Kondylis states that his theory is occupied with the Morphology of Thought (not the Content of it) and its Polemical use with regards to “self-preservation”. This morphology of thought he describes is essential for the formation of “normativistic thought” for the cause of “social disciplining”, but as he stated, if there is a way of showing that there are different thought structures, his theory would be refuted.
The question remains: Do all humans possess the same “thought structure”/morphology of thought? Kondylis paradigm itself negates it, as he himself would not be able to describe what is actually happening in the human world. But if humans do not possess the same thought structures, then the current version of “humanity” is not “one”, however Not regarding the First Level (Content of Thought, i.e. fighting over narratives/ideologies) but on the Meta-Level (Structure of Thought-Morphology). And if ontology precedes epistemology, how possible is that within the human population there exist “different ontologies”?
In our complex, technocratic, constructed reality, the subject of the data does not function autonomously and with agency in selecting, codifying, evaluating and providing data to a honest and democratic center regarding his existence and his lived experience within the environment. On the contrary, the subject is being manipulated and directed by self-serving power structures (institutions, corporations, governments) to the production of certain data and for certain purposes (the Kondylian “ultimate reality”). And in the end, the subject of data is called and coerced into “discipline” that is supposed to be its own “will” arbitrarily translated into politics by others. This is the satanic trap of data of our electrified and digitized (one) world, which eliminates and nullifies the human subject, as agency. At least, bees have the privilege of playing a crucial role on who will be their queen, while their queen is real and serves them. Humans, instead, spend their lives to “vitalize” and nurse a dark, alien, digital algorithm that governs their lives, pretending to be a “superorganism” whereas they have formed a Caricature, a “perversely inverted form of bio-mimicry”.
Taking into account the argument of Elizabeth Minnich, the “Evil of Banality”, where Banality (clichés, thoughtlessness) is considered a source of evil which creates the invisible “extensive evil”, there you have it. Thus, this “optical illusion” is perhaps the source where this evil can gain a foothold. But if we want to be consistent and not moralistic, we cannot and it is futile to try to change humans for what they are or appear to be, and remains to be seen whether the human aspiration in achieving a quasi honey bee-SI structure will be soon streamed to a more honest and really democratic way. I am afraid it will not, it cannot for the MTI “culture” and its proponents.
Hi Professor Rees, what do you foresee for humanity a few centuries down the road? From how i read your writings, you believe that humans are hardwired for complexity, and then overcomplexity, and then an inevitable fall, leading to the cycle of empires. Do you foresee that continuing after this collapse bottoms out(assuming no extinction)? Of course, less overshoot this time due to no fossil fuels(good thing, I think!)
Ian, I avoid making predictions--the world is far too complex and what we know is a thin skin on the apple of the unknown. We can only reflect on current conditions and trends. Will humans even be around in 'a few centuries'? Possibly not if, for example, the global community exercises its death wish in a full-on nuclear conflagration. Anyone who thought we had side-railed that possibility via international arms agreements is probably rethinking options in light of the erratic behaviours of some of the psychopathic totalitarians currently running the world. (Do you need a list?) Assuming our species survives, a high probability attaches to something like small-scale agro-communities and a global population of a few hundred million; an even smaller population might live more like hunter-gatherers if people can relearn very basic survival skills and enough of wild nature survives the great unravelling and recovers to the point it could sustain a controlled harvest. A good- if not best-case scenario would have the global community acknowledge its predicament in the coming decade or so, recognize that MTI civilization is over and begin the transition (including vigorous population planning) to small, more or less self-reliant bioregional (ecoregional) communities, living to the extent possible on the output of carefully husbanded regional ecosystems (there could be limited trade). I outline one possible configuration of this alternative toward the end of this paper: https://www.docdroid.net/ZPtk0qA/why-large-cities-wont-survive-the-twenty-first-century-pdf . Again, this option might support only a few hundred million people (depends on what technologies are still functioning, average material consumption levels, community structure, etc.) and would require a much higher level of cooperation, mutual aid, community cohesion than the contemporary world is currently able to muster. That said, how it all unfolds is up for grabs -- except, IMHO, for the great simplification, the unraveling of MTI society.
Thanks for the reply, professor!
I agree that your scenario is the best case scenario. However, from how I read your writings, you believe thay humans are hardwired to build complexity. You say that “Assuming our species survives, a high probability attaches to something like small-scale agro-communities and a global population of a few hundred million”, so I can easily see the possibility of that leading into regional empires (and cities) worldwide!
Not the current cities though, sruff like Rome, or maybe a medieval town, with much less overshoot. What do you think?
Again, hard to say what, exactly, will transpire. However, I doubt the kind of small-scale communities I was thinking about will scale up to world-wide empires. MTI culture will have used up all the necessary, easily-accessed energy and material resources. Small medieval towns, maybe, but even these could go into temporary overshoot and deplete their already diminished resource base (in which case, collapse again -- the cycle continues on a smaller scale).
The cycle is exactly what I was thinking of!
My hypothesis/theory, is that as we collapse, nature recovers, like a fallow period for the whole world, and after we bottom out in centuries as you say(i think), nature has recovered enough to act as a new frontier for our remnants. I fully agree that we won’t have the energy and material resources for a GLOBAL empire, but what about regional ones aka Rome or the Chinese dynasties? A common objection i see to this are metals since we’ve dug everything up already, but that’s the point exactly; we’ve dug it up, the metal isnt going anywhere! Even with long corrosion periods it corrodes to a hematite rich layer underneath the soil, just like a shallow mine. As for energy- Rome didn’t need fossil fuels, biomass served just fine.
Im not trying to say this will happen, I just want your opinion on whether this is plausible or likely.
For evidence or an attempt at substantiation, a response I posted from somewhere else:
Firstly, collaose itself takes centuries. In that time, biodiversity could recover to such an extent that it can resemble a frontier again, a “fallow period for the world”. The population decline to, as you say, 2-3% of current levels would help immensely. For examples, I point to Chernobyl, whicb received degradation in excess to most of what we put out today, reforestation after the Maya collapse or natures rebound after the Black Death. So in my view, there will been room to grow again, start over and do it all once more, and that rhey can migrate and start afresh (quoting you).
Next, your point about “The easy-to-get resources will be gone”. What resources, exactly? Metals? In that case i can point out that the metal hasn’t actually gone anywhere, it’s right there on the surface waiting for scavengers (as you said). One calculation i did was I grabbed the steel forecast for 2050 (70GT) and divided it by Rome era metal usage (1.5kg/person/year), scales up to 300 millions. It went to the scale of 70k years without recycling. Corrosion is also a (mostly) non issue here, since metal over long timescales corrodes into hematite, whicb is what iron ore is anyway. Cities literally become mines.
sources: aist.org/getmedia/edc9d…
The biosphere will be degraded
fair enough, this is happening, but just a few stats/papers to add nuance:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2920-6
Recent analyses have reported catastrophic global declines in vertebrate populationsnature.com/articles/s41…,nature.com/articles/s41…. However, the distillation of many trends into a global mean index obscures the variation that can inform conservation measures and can be sensitive to analytical decisions. For example, previous analyses have estimated a mean vertebrate decline of more than 50% since 1970 (Living Planet Indexnature.com/articles/s41…). Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase
Climate swings will be extreme.
not really. Funny enough, warmer periods in earths history are stabler than cold ones, which is why we didn’t have agricukutre in the Pleistocene. Also to note, civilisations have risen and fallen in places like India, where even before climate change has frequent heatwaves reaching 40c which were adapted to by human planning.
for example, according to this paper,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871
A large portion of land is stable enough for agriculture even at 6c.
Wonderful description ☺️