Enough - Simplicity

I wonder if you think thing are simple, binary, good and bad, right, or wrong?

It seems to me, the older I get and I’m more than half-way through now, that things are far from simple when it comes to humans. Then again, it seems to me that things are extremely simple.

In terms of the considerations, thinking, social requirements, use of tools, emotional and psychological entanglements, creativity, abstract thinking etc. things are extremely complicated all the time. In terms of the fact of our biological lives, they could hardly be simpler. Ensure a supply of food and survive long enough to procreate. I’m nailing one these.

So, on the base level, the simple binary being alive thing, we are organisms with genes that require passing on. We need to survive for a certain amount of time to do that. ‘Same as all life. However, we developed these big brains and we developed societal co-dependence. We are not static and at the whim of wherever the seed that we originate fall, or the tides or the wind take us. We are not strong or quick enough to flourish as lone hunters. We’re in the group whereby we must organize into co-operative groups. We’re in the most developed species of all the cooperative species in terms of our ability to manipulate and change our surroundings. It is for this reason alone that humans are so successful.

So, I ask you to think once more about the simplicity of binary solution sets and ask yourself, what denotes ‘right’?

What is the best thing to do, the way to behave, the way to think, the way to be? Isn’t it complicated? Doesn’t it involve nuance and context? Let’s be honest, it isn’t being honest, kind, and helpful at all times is it! The right thing is that which benefits our tribe, right? It’s a rhetorical question. On a personal level then, there must be limits on how much take a person can expect to exact on one’s own tribe surely? Isn’t that a bit tricky in a splintered, personal responsibility, everyone for themselves, winner takes all, winning at all costs, getting the most and best and being the richest no matter what… so-called society?

What happens when getting the best of whatever is available gets out of balance with the needs of the tribe? What happens to the tribe if it splinters into individuals doing whatever they want to further their own accumulation of resources? What happens?

The tribe fails is what happens.

What happens to the tribe if the accumulation of resources for singular personal ownership is a zero-sum game, and the end of the natural consumable things available on the planet is reached?

At this point, humanity itself is one tribe, humans will fail.

We are already at this point, we are currently choosing to fail because we haven’t realised that personal gain or even National tribal gain is not longer possible when the end of the resources upon which we can reasonably function is now, at our current rate, inevitably going to run out.

The dumbed down understandings of right and wrong meet the misunderstanding of Occam’s razor in a world where humans have an accelerating exposure to new information and ideas. We have a big problem. Most people are not equipped to deal with and accept multi-dimensional, muti-faceted, nuanced, complex, inter-dependent systems. Most people just want to be right about being right, and that ‘right’ needs to be explainable is very short form. Preferably in a phrase of with an accompanying image; a meme.

In this increasingly complex world of human exposure and experience we confronted by a childish, infantile situation whereby adults display the simple way they want things to be by screaming, kicking, spitting, and threatening each other. Chose which side to be one and know that one way you’re in my tribe, the other you’re the enemy… is playground stuff. Are we still at the stage of there must be good guys and bad guys and the differences can reasonably to settled by combat? Holy feckin’ hell is this really as far as we’ve got? It seems so!

Individual rights. You can have them so long as you agree with the most aggressive, paranoid, one-eyed bunch with the most firepower. I don’t mean just metal weaponry when I say firepower either, I also mean cancelling, PC, passive aggressive firepower too. I mean forceful, threatening coercion to comply with a tribal stance. There are loads of them out there, some are bigger than others and more dangerous in terms not only of social and professional life, but actual life.

There have always been those who would find ways to coerce the masses into particular obedience by any number of means. There have been millennia of misinformation produced to coerce large populations to do the bidding of rich families. It has come in many guises from economic dependence to religion and often both. However, now we have the spectre of groups of people who are firmly of the view that their individual research has led them independently to a particular point of view. It might shock you to know that most OECD adults still think that Google is a search engine… Jeeaysus! We are not any longer in a position of having enough world to go and conquer and it will be OK. The next big punch-up will be the last.

People, it’s COMPLICATED, BUT there is a solution, and it’s this – take away the means and mechanisms by which people can harm or even kill each other and force them to speak with each other in very small groups. No bigger than 4. Give them a bit of information, an idea, a theme, and let them talk to each other as humans, the way we have been programmed to do. Actual conversation, interaction. This can be done in small groups on zoom if not in person and in fact, it’s probably better that it is because the physical threat and dominance is diminished.

In a human, conversationally dialectic situation, away from a ‘gang’ and without the keyboard warrior hate bomb option, people will have the best chance of allowing understanding and cooperation to happen naturally. It’s not guaranteed but talk to special forces professionals about the need to humanize their interrogators. It’s not guaranteed but it’s the best chance we humans has got.

We are now, due to COVID and Russia, in no doubt, or should not be at any rate, that we are one people, connected globally. For all the ranting and raving of the big ‘powers’, if the global system breaks, it all breaks. The global system we have is bloody complex and it requires us to work cooperatively to make it work as well as it can for as many of us as it can.

We were getting closer. We had high profile joint scientific cooperation between recently sworn enemies. We had Europe. We had imperfect, fledgling egalitarianism which formed Republics. We had figured out that people trading what they could contribute was going to make things better for all of us. What happened?

Simplicity happened. Tribal, basic, nonsense which has been manipulated by a few people who don’t care what the eventual outcome is going to be. They might, if they could be made to talk on an individual level, to a lot of small groups of more-or-less random people. If they were striped of their ability to use force in whatever guise they wield it. Humans without the group power platform of Gay rights activists talking to other humans that are Christian pro-life, but without the placards and threats. Gang members might be able to talk to conservatives about their lives, and vice versa, what they would like to conserve. GOP Americans without the overbearing need to signal to their fellows talking to a Chinese factory worker and about their families and the hopes they have for them. Etc.

It is not possible that humans will continue to occupy a planet whereby we all fight to be the ‘best’, the ‘right’, whether that’s politically left, right or otherwise.

Unless we enlist the help of the fundamental secret sauce, we humans have, our ability to communicate and cooperate for a shared improvement, we are a slow-moving drug and drink fueled rock ‘n’ roll hotel room tour party. While we flail around exercising our individual rights to do whatever we damn well like, we’re wrecking the place! We’re also causing inter-personal damage that isn’t going to go back in the box in our present day interdependent nuclear, chemical, biological, drone-war state. The band is going to come to blows and break up like never before, if we allow a punch-up between Keith Moon and Genghis Kahn to decide our futures.

It's complicated. There are systems interacting like never before. We are not allowed geographical distance from each other so we can get on with things separately. We are all kinds of shapes, colours, histories, historicity, economies, customs, sexualities, needs, wants, etc. all pressed together in a world connected by global trade interdependence, jets, and the internet.

We cannot escape each other and ‘live and let live’… but not in my neighbourhood, in the way we have. We need to be able to get past our binary thinking and ways of being. Our histories are our histories. They are not our current and future globally connected realities. One way of doing and being is not going to prevail folks, it’s just all going to blow up and the planet will carry on in some way irrespective of the brief flash of colour that was us.

Capitalism is not entirely the way. Socialism is not entirely the way. Fascism and totalitarianism are most certainly not, but they are also part of our human expression. Tribalism is actually the way, but only as one global tribe, which has differences historically, but acts in the future in a way which protects and preserves the ability for humanity to exist. That must include the ability to live on the earth with everything else the earth needs for us to exist on it… It is certainly not going to be a simple solution.

I guess at least the most pointless, uncooperative, selfish, mal-intentioned, and probably psychotically damaging of humanity might be living in a glass bubble on Mars by then, so there is that.