Leviathan, Cooperation, and Social Trust

I promised I'd revisit this, though I wonder sometimes if I write about it too often? Feels like I do, in some shape or form... but the last time I covered this may have been years ago.

Imagine, if you will, a world where humans need 23 hours of sleep in a day. One tribe decides to stagger their sleep cycle, so that one person is always awake. The other... doesn't.

If something were to happen. An attack, or natural disaster, or somesuch, I think it's fairly obvious which tribe would be better off.

Cooperation makes us stronger. (Which is well known, of course, which is also why certain types of people find dissent so threatening. It's hard to accomplish much of anything if the group is unable to make a decision on what, or how. But that's a separate topic.)

A pack of wolves is more dangerous than the sum of each individual wolf's abilities. They can work together to attack blind spots, tire out their target, and so on and so forth.

But there are challenges to cooperating, especially for us. That's part of my fascination with social dilemmas and the like. How do we get people to agree to cooperate when there are so many incentives to be selfish? (This is also where trust comes into play... because maybe you do want the benefits of cooperating, but you don't trust everyone else to do their part. And if nobody is going to work together, then you might as well see about getting yours while you can.)

One of the best classes I ever took was called Analyzing Social Trust and Cooperation, and it covered quite a bit of this - social dilemmas, Bowling Alone, microlending, and more. It also discussed Elinor Ostrom's work on governing the commons, well before she won her Nobel prize.

And we discussed the Hobbesian notion of the Leviathan, and the problems and challenges with such a system.

Hobbes argued for a strong centralized government. As I mentioned earlier, he wrote during the English Civil War, and saw the horrors of disunity. I suppose you could also watch Game of Thrones to see a fictionalized account of that sort of thing. Can you think of a single character that didn't lose something they cared deeply about?

And, again, is it such a shock that some Iraqis now look fondly on Saddam Hussein, and prefer a 'strongman' to the chaos we unleashed?

But there are problems with Leviathan, and more than just the harm caused by being at the mercy of a tyrant. (I used to think the evil villains in fantasy were caricatures... a real world ruler would never be that awful, would they? I heard some stories about Saddam and his sons that made me rethink that.)

The thing is, centralized (and, more importantly, outside) forces generally make one of two mistakes - they either punish the innocent or fail to capture the guilty. It's sort of like the challenges the computer science industry has with intrusion detection systems, or biometric authentication... you get some false positives (thinking someone is hacking your system when they aren't, or in biometrics thinking someone isn't who they claim to be when they are) and some false negatives (thinking you're good when someone really is trying to hack your system, or with facial recognition recognizing someone when they really aren't the person they're supposed to be.)

Leviathan may try to, say, make marijuana illegal... but the cops may not catch everyone using it, and may falsely arrest someone who wasn't.

The thing is, these are the mistakes an outsider would make. I don't mean that they're a foreigner, per se, so much as that they just don't really know the local situation. You might know if your neighbor is doing something illegal, but the cops don't.

So one solution is to empower the people who actually know the situation, up close and personal. Elinor Ostrom's work looked at various ways local communities solved social dilemmas. Like water usage... if cities are drawing their water from underground lakes, and the lakes start filling up with salt water if the water level gets too low... destroying the resource for everyone... then the people who want to use that water benefit by working together.

Same thing with the fishing industry, and the problems with overfishing.

She wrote a whole book discussing this, and iirc it was rather dense and academic, though interesting. There's stuff like whether the boundaries of the resource are clearly defined (i.e. consider the difference between water rights to a lake, vs. the right to breathable air), whether there's an effective way of monitoring usage, and more. A lot of good stuff if you're into that sort of thing, but probably a bit much for a layperson.

The part I wanted to focus on, though, was her notion of allowing local communities to resolve it their own way (i.e. no attempt at a one-size-fits-all solution. One fishing community may agree to rotate access to prime fishing locations, and another fishing community may come up with an entirely different solution. That's okay.), and the notion that organizations should form multiple layers of nested enterprises (to go back to water usage... figuring out a solution depends, in part, on knowing exactly how much water it's safe to use before you destroy the resource entirely. That sort of research requires resources to collect the data and analyze it. You may also need the resources to create and enforce an agreement... perhaps through the judgment of a state or federal court, and the use of state or federal power.)

In other words, we have yet again discovered the joys of trying to keep decision-making at the lowest level possible, and empowering those lower levels to make decisions.

Nesting those governments in a larger organization gives you some of the benefits of that, without making the whole system cumbersome, slow, and prone to error.

Really, it doesn't seem all that different from the republic system of government we stumbled on... nor the ideal military structure. What's that term the military started using lately? Mission command?

Empower those closest to the issue to come up with their own solutions, and use any larger resources to help smooth away the problems in doing so.

As with all systems, there are strengths and weaknesses here, and things that have to be done in order to make it work. I also think there's a certain tension in... I dunno... humanity? I think of it like centrifugal and centripetal force - social pressure to consolidate and make everything (or everyone) the same, and a countervailing pressure to be individuals each doing their own thing.

Like, there's advantages to having everyone all speak the same language. Makes it a heckuva lot easier to order food, or go shopping. But there's also advantages to having different languages, where we're only just beginning to understand how language can shape the way we think, and different languages give us different ways of thinking... some of which may be useful at times. (It's like... how we frame issues can affect how we solve them, so having different frames of reference can be like having different tools in our toolbag. We can pull out the one that's most appropriate to the situation. Different cultures, different languages, different stories... they all can give us different ways of being human, and being aware of them give us more choices about that. Umm, not in a 'cultural appropriation' kind of way... It's more like, I dunno. I heard about high-context and low-context cultures, and realized the impact that has... and in some ways, I've reduced how explicitly I write in my blogs because of it. Err, not directly. I'm not trying to change up my cultural context or anything. It's just... if someone's interested enough in reading my babble they can probably, they can probably figure out some of this stuff without my explaining it in detail, and maybe it's even better if they do. Maybe I can let the reader figure it out for themselves, and even if it's not exactly what I was thinking, it probably sticks better that way, anyway.)

Anyways. There's advantages to having consistency... consistent rules, consistent standards. Like having screws, nuts, and bolts all standardized, so you don't have to custom make replacements.

And maybe it's better to use the USB-C, so you don't have to have twenty different cables for as many devices.

But there are downsides to that, too... from a business perspective, of course the makers of said devices prefer being able to sell you their own unique cable, even if we all benefit by being able to use just a few. But aside from that, one company might come up with something new or different (like allowing the cable to work regardless of which way you plug it in) that eventually becomes standard.

Though in that case I think it was specified by the IEC, so you don't exactly have to have private businesses competing in order to get improvements.

Anyways, this post has gone on long enough. I hope, dear reader, that my babble hasn't been too boring, or too much of a data dump.

Power and Strength

A long time ago, when I was still in the Army, I got to talking with some of my fellow officers, and we soon wound up discussing terrorism. Someone claimed that the Russians were extremely tough on terrorists, that (for example) if you commit a terrorist act they will go after you and your entire family.

I have absolutely no idea if this is true or not, but I brought it up because it captures certain... how should I put it?

Beliefs?

Misconceptions?

Glamorizations?

There's numerous subtext going on here, and some of the subtext has been going on for a looooong time.

There's the belief that brute force is a sign of strength, that we're too 'soft', 'effeminate', etc... and so there's a bit of admiration there, for those hard-a$$es willing to brutally harm entire families in pursuit of their goals. (I said this has been going on for a long time, 'cause I remember reading something on Roman history, and this perception that they were growing 'soft' and 'weak', and it was strange to realization the whole notion of that civilization weakens men has been around for a very long time. Ummm, that's not how it's really put, but I can't remember the exact wording right now and I don't want to stop writing in order to figure it out.)

Sort of like a common 'myth' I heard growing up, where 'tough on crime' people seemed to admire Middle Eastern governments where thieves could have a hand cut off.

The Russian one bothered me, though, because I do what I normally do. I think about what I'd think/feel/etc if I was in that position.

Let's say I was a relative of someone who joined a group intending to commit a terrorist act, and the Russians found out and punished the entire family. If that were my sister or brother, well, if they truly took it out on the family I'd probably be dead. So let's say it was a cousin, and the Russians arrested and/or killed my aunt, uncle, and two or three of my cousins.

I would probably be furious (and scared), because I'd know that four or five of those people were absolutely no threat, completely innocent. And given what I know of human behavior, 9/10 would probably be cowed enough to just keep their heads down and say nothing (even though they'd probably hate the perpetrators, the harsh response would keep them from taking too many risks)... but that tenth person?

That tenth person is going to be passionately motivated, they're going to hate, and they're going to be even more of a threat then whoever or whatever got caught up in revolutionary fervor in the first place.

(As usual, take this with a grain of salt. I have no hard and fast statistics on whether it's truly 1/10. It's just a rule of thumb used to make a point... )

In other words, that harsh show of power may temporarily solve a problem, but it sows the seeds for further problems somewhere down the line. It also sort of sucks you in, in that once you start responding like that the solution to further problems often appears to be even more brutality, which also breeds even more anger and resentment, and determined opposition, and so there's a constant undercurrent of unrest that just takes the right (or wrong) circumstances to break through.

Same thing with people's admiration for those lone rulers... kings, presidents, dictators, what-have-you. There's an appealing simplicity to being able to just say "make it so", and have everyone obey. Not that, historically, it ever really worked like that... kings always had to deal with factions (whether it's powerful nobles willing to take over at the slightest sign of weakness, or guilds, or whatever), but the myth and the glamour and the appeal is to be the person who has enough power that they can just speak a command and everyone will jump to make it happen.

I know from my own experiences leading people that it can get very exhausting trying to get people on board with whatever it is you're trying to do. It's hard to be patient when they have questions (and more questions, and more questions)... and, of course, some of them are just asking questions to drag things out so they don't have to go to work any sooner. But dealing with that is just part of the job, and if you don't like it... if you're tempted to just bulldoze over all of it, and take it as opposition (when many of them really do have legitimate questions, and will work harder/better if you answer them) then you probably shouldn't be in a leadership position, tbqh.

I understand how, especially in times of turmoil, people think a strong leader can somehow help provide some sort of stability. It's part of why it's no coincidence that Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan during the English Civil War (and the challenges/problems with that are something I covered a long time ago, so maybe I'll post a refresher some time in the future). It's also part of why Saddam Hussein's brutal rule starting looking better and better as the situation in Iraq degenerated further.

It goes hand in hand with the way people seem to have an entirely different standard by which they judge the movers and shakers of an era. I don't know how much of that is the whole "he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard" sort of sentiment, vs how much is tied to the belief that 'good guys never win', wherein we think anyone trying to do the 'right' thing is going to lose to the bastards out there willing to play dirty.

I've been thinking a bit about that, actually. Thinking about Cardinal Richelieu, the famous French statesman. (Okay, and a clergyman... but this was back where it was common to encourage the sons who couldn't inherit to join the church, and often they gained political power... and from an outsider's perspective many seemed a bit more worldly than one would expect in today's day and age.)

He's the one who realized that a unified Germany could threaten French superiority on the continent, and played the political game 'well' in order to ensure his country dominated.

I say 'well', because after two bloody world wars France and Germany are now allies, and iirc Germany followed the French lead... though those sorts of things can always change at a moment's notice, and I'm not sure if that's currently true any more. Still, I have to wonder... could they have achieved that state sooner if Cardinal Richelieu hadn't been afraid, and had instead tried to encourage and develop Germany sooner? (And could we have avoided those two bloody world wars in the process?)

It's like... 'divide and conquer' is famous for a reason, and it's not an uncommon strategy when someone's afraid of the strength of another.

But... when I think of my own experiences, when I think of the things that give me warm feelings, a sense of loyalty, and the desire to work for someone...

Such strategies don't make sense at all. There's a genuine joy in helping someone achieve their full potential, and most of the people who receive such support feel the same way. There's a sense of connection, and it tends to build trust, and loyalty, and other things.

And there's the flipside, the anger and resentment when that doesn't happen. When people seem afraid of your potential to outshine them, and so sabotage your attempts to succeed. Or the way people start thinking selfishly when they see you're doing so, the way so many people now are willing to hop jobs... as corporations have proven over and over again that they don't really care about you.

Some time ago, I read a book that discussed the Soviet Union's spying efforts... it might have been The Sword and the Shield? It's interesting, because it gave me the impression that the United States had been losing the spying war... over and over again the Soviets appeared to do a better job of finding our spies than we did theirs. And yet...

And yet, the Soviet Union is the one that fell apart.

In some ways, I think too much focus on brute strength makes a nation (or organization) somewhat brittle. After all, there's all sorts of different ways to show power. (I know, I know... people talk about 'soft' power all the time, and maybe they even have a definition for what they mean by it.)

A baby has power - whether it's humans, or kittens, or puppies, or any other young animal. Their helplessness, the larger head/eyes of childhood, all of these tend to make people want to help. And people will go above and beyond to help babies.

That person you admire, who's opinion you seek out? They have power... and if it's in a specific area, like advice on fixing your car or repairing a wall, they have expert power, though that power probably doesn't just come from expertise... you may know someone who's just as much of an expert who's an a-hole, and you'd only go to them as a last resort.

There's a lot more to building a strong nation than brute force... and part of what struck me about the Soviet attempts at spying was that they had a culture where people were afraid to stand out. If you stood out too much, you got into trouble... so better to pretend to be a little dumber, a little less capable. Be just like everyone else.

It's hard to measure what sort of impact that can have, of course, but I think any organization that has such toxic disincentives is going to be at a disadvantage against the organizations that nurture and celebrate talent.

I feel like this post switched gears rather rapidly, but I'm about done typing for the day, so I'll just summarize the main point -

Don't think that harsh brutality and/or a willingness to ignore social norms about what's 'good' necessarily means someone is strong, or even powerful.