The Fool Who Follows: A Lesson for the CPC

 

But the list raises uncomfortable questions for the Harper government about overall expense oversight in the military at a time when $2.1 billion has been slashed from the defence budget, and Conservatives are just getting back on their feet from the political drubbing of the Senate expense scandal.

 

I wouldn't quite say the CPC is back on its feet post Senate Scandal - it's not quite over yet, is it?

 

But that's besides the point.  The Tories have done their best to reshape Canadian politics into a game they think they can perpetually win - one that is aggressive, antagonistic, cynical and above all, costly.  They can raise more money, aren't afraid to hit below the belt, etc.; they win because they're winners, and everyone else is a loser.

 

It's not working out quite the way the boys in PMO had planned, is it?  The more successful the Party becomes, the more liberties they are taking with political tradition and conventional wisdom - moving away from their own values in pursuit of the win. 

 

The more they win, the more confident they become in their own superiority; it's not that they're intentionally taking greater liberties with ethical pursuits so much as they have started to believe that they are smart, everyone else is dumb.

 

Put it another way - losers commit sociology, winners build empires.

 

How far can you push the envelope before you feel the need to rewrite the rules in your favour?  How long can you maintain the fiction of holding the same values as even your base before the only way to stay in power is through more coercive means?  How far can you push those boundaries before someone knocks you down a peg?

 

Here's where the CPC can learn a lesson, although it means committing sociology.  In the complex, interwoven society we live in where information is becoming the modern-day sucrose, it's folly to think you can cynically bash an individual with the woes of the system and not expect to face some of your own blowback.

 

The solution is easy - instead of looking for ways to smear any and every opponent, stand for something.  Support all efforts that work in that direction, wherever they come from. 

 

And be forgiving of your neighbour - you may even want to really consider how you'd want them to treat you and respond in kind.

 

Altruism is selfishness that plans ahead.  Selfishness that doesn't think through content, context and consequences, on the other hand, looks a lot more like foolishness.

 

 

Rob Ford on the Road to Damascus

"This is an absolutely staggering figure that puts pressure on our city," he said.  "At this point we need the province and the federal government to step up and assist us with these clean-up costs."

It's really easy to tell people to live within their means and blame them for poor planning when they falter.  Rob Ford has done so more than once.  

But life doesn't always respect one's means; an unexpected accident, a sudden illness or accumulated injuries both physical and mental can get in the way.  When the demands of life exceed your means of sustainability, what then?

That's where Toronto is at with the clean-up.  

Toronto has powers of taxation.  It's got a lot of really wealthy people and strong businesses that, being as committed to planning ahead as they are, should be investing in their community to promote the kind of sustainability that will improve their business opportunities in the future.

Yet here we are, two majors storms in and more expected in the near future, looking for assistance from other levels of government.  This is in spite of Ford's so-called gravy-cutting, too.

This doesn't make Toronto weak; it makes us human.  $60 million is too much for the city; scale down, and it can be a few thousand, or even the cost of groceries that's out reach for individuals.  It's the exact same thing - only the scale differs.

There's a lesson in this.

Remember when Trudeau Said He Knew What He Was Doing?

The Liberal leader has been tilling the soil in preparation for this moment for months.  Even before this week, he had made himself the champion of Quebec Anglophones, Allphones and federalists by defending the Clarity Act, and speaking out against the PQ's identity politics.  When the fault lines finally cracked, he had a position ready to go, which was published Thursday in English in the Globe and Mail.  It is a straightforward restatement of his long-held view.  The prime minister, by contrast, has yet to say anything of substance on this matter.  He will need to before long, lest he entrench the perception that he is playing catch-up.

Chortle about committing sociology all you want - I maintain that altruism is selfishness that plans ahead.  It looks like I'm not the only one to recognize this.

Selfishness That Plans Ahead

 

I'd say I feel bad for Ayn Rand, but were she still around that probably wouldn't be received as intended.

 

People are selfish creatures, just like our cousins - after all, altruism is simply selfishness that plans ahead.

 

Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

 

Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution? Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have failed to consider a critical fact: that humans could not have survived in nature without the charity and social reciprocity of a group.

Last week on Slate, evolutionary anthropologist Eric Michael Johnson explored the question against the backdrop of two cultural events in 1957 — the consequences of the rogue, selfish activities of a pygmy hunter in a Congo forest, who used the group’s collective hunting efforts to benefit only himself, and in New York City, the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, whose protagonist champions the author’s notion that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that each man “exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”

Atlas Shrugged counts many politicians as admirers, perhaps most notably Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, who cites the book as one of his main inspirations for entering politics and is known to give Rand’s books frequently to his interns.

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So, does Rand’s theory comport with current evolutionary theory? The data is not exactly kind to her position. For example, Johnson describes an anthropologist’s account of the pygmy tribesman, Cephu, in the Congo who lived by the Randian ideal that selfishness is the highest morality. Cephu was part of the Mbuti tribe for whom “hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else,” Johnson writes, detailing how the tribe “employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap.”

It was a group effort, for most:

But one man, a rugged individualist named Cephu, had other ideas. When no one was looking, Cephu slipped away to set up his own net in front of the others.

Soon caught in this blatant attempt to steal meat, Cephu was brought in front of the whole tribe:

At an impromptu trial, Cephu defended himself with arguments for individual initiative and personal responsibility. “He felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets,” [the anthropologist Colin] Turnbull wrote. “After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band?” But if that were the case, replied a respected member of the camp, Cephu should leave and never return. The Mbuti have no chiefs, they are a society of equals in which redistribution governs everyone’s livelihood. The rest of the camp sat in silent agreement.

Faced with banishment, a punishment nearly equivalent to a death sentence, Cephu relented.

He apologized, handed over his meat to the tribe and then, essentially, was sent to bed without dinner. As Johnson explains, selfishness is considered far from a virtue in such tribal groups, which still live in ways similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, every such group ever studied has been found to idealize altruism and punish selfishness, in everything from their mythologies to their mating practices.

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Although Rand accepted that early human life was a collective effort, she failed to realize how this shaped our brains. In most societies, for example, a man like Cephu would be seen as the opposite of a good catch for a woman wanting a partner. A good mate — and one whose genes were likely selected for and passed on in our earliest evolutionary history — would have been a cooperative hunter, one who didn’t put his own goals ahead of those of the tribe. He would have been altruistic in battle too, particularly when warring with other groups. A selfish soldier, after all, is known as a coward, not a hero.

The evidence for altruism as a critical part of human nature isn’t limited to anthropology. Studies of 18-month-old toddlers show that they will almost always try to help an adult who is visibly struggling with a task, without being asked to do so: if the adult is reaching for something, the toddler will try to hand it to them, or if they see an adult drop something accidentally, they will pick it up.

However, if the same adult forcefully throws something to the ground, toddlers won’t try to retrieve it: they understand that the action was deliberate and that the object is unwanted. These very young children will even assist (or refrain from helping) with a book-stacking task depending on what they perceive to be the adult’s intention. If the adult clumsily knocks the last book off the top of the stack, the toddler will try to put it back; if the adult deliberately takes the last book off, however, toddlers won’t intervene. Even before kids are taught to chip in — perhaps especially before they are told it’s an obligation — children are less selfish than often presumed.

Another study found that 3- to 5-year-olds tend to give a greater share of a reward (stickers, in this case) to a partner who has done more work on a task — again, without being asked — even if it means they get to keep less for themselves. And those cries of “That’s not fair!” that plague sibling relationships: they’re not only selfish; they reflect children’s apparently innate desire for equity.

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Fundamental tendencies toward altruism aren’t only seen in children, either. Worldwide, the aftermath of natural disasters are typically characterized by heroism and a sharing of resources — within the affected community and in others farther way — not selfish panics. During the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, there were no accounts of people being trampled rushing out of the World Trade Center towers; rather, those who needed assistance descending were cared for, and calm mainly prevailed. The same occurred after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011. The cases in which people stampede or look out only for themselves tend to be rare and involve very specific circumstances that mitigate against helpfulness.

Moreover, our stress systems themselves seem to be designed to connect us to others. They calm down when we are feeling close to people we care about — whether related to us or not — and spike during isolation and loneliness. Even short periods of solitary confinement can derange the mind and damage the body because of the stress they create. And having no social support can be as destructive to health as cigarette smoking.

Of course, none of this is to say that humans are never selfish or that we don’t have a grasping, greedy part of our nature. But to claim, as Rand does, that “altruistic morality” is a “disease” is to misrepresent reality.

(Share the love and read the rest of Johnson’s fascinating feature here.)

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Oakville vs. Boston: Where Ozymandias Went Wrong

Two tales of humanity today:

At some point, this so-called power plant scandal will run out of steam (“so-called” because it’s more of a boondoggle), while the bills keep piling up. Never mind the seemingly scandalous amounts of money that have gone down the drain to bury a gas plant. The real electricity scandal was our own wooly thinking — a highly charged blend of NIMBY myopia and privatization mania.

A Political Party looking to squeeze out another win.  A wealthy community with the highest energy consumption rate in the province wanting to eat their cake but not have the bakery next door.  Companies seeking to be the most competitive to get the gig successfully misrepresenting their capacity and taking the taxpayer for something of a ride - only feasible because it was the lowest price, not the best service, that was prioritized.  Opposition Parties looking to beat down the Governing Party so that they can take the reigns themselves.  Everyone circles the wagons, claims the high ground and looks for ways to undercut others.

It's free-market competition at its best; people compete, out of the competition comes failures, someone gets punished and then the cycle repeats, looking for the next massive failure to pin on others for strategic personal gain.  Oakville threatening attack ad fire and electoral brimstone on anyone that doesn't enable their ridiculously-high energy use but keeps energy generation troubles away from their shores is like North Korea threatening the West for humanitarian aid instead of better managing their own resources.

What we're looking at is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons - people looking to protect their own interests in a social setting cause the system of which they are a part to fail.  Political Parties do it when they put the win above accomplishment.  Voters do it when they put their narrow wants ahead of broader social planning.  Institutions both private and public do the same when they target support for their niche areas in isolation.  When media inflates or creates problems for headlines, they are simply adding fuel to the fire.

Theoretically, we could do what Amazon does successfully; instead of chipping away at the failings of others and denying any failings ourselves, we could aim higher. 

We have it in ourselves to get past the failings of dog-eat-dog politics and collaborate on generating and maintaining systems that work well, when we have the right motivation.

Gestures as small as offering a drink of orange juice and use of a home bathroom were recounted on Twitter in an ongoing online recollection of the fellowship that emerged in the wake of Monday's devastation.

Then, there's the Boston Marathon bombing.  The event itself was horrific; I have been close enough to bloody chaos to know the powerful cocktail of emotions that rise up in true crises (which differ from the PR kind, believe me).  There's the pervasive fear of not knowing what's going on, where safety is, who is in charge.  You also get bravery, self-sacrifice, people spontaneously working together and finding meaning through common purpose - helping your fellow human beings in a collaborative, dare I say social way.

EMS forces using an efficient, universally-recognized Emergency Management System quickly swung into coordinated action.  Hotlines were set up for people to find news of their relatives.  An effective runner-tracking system made the process of identification and reconnection that much easier.

Then, God bless em', there were the people - offering their homes, offering food, offering whatever they had help those in need.  Twitter became an information management system, with instructions being conveyed and re-tweeted, supportive resources being connected with real-time need, second-tier concerns like "do the blood banks have enough plasma" were raised and circulated.  By working together, these individuals have been able to accomplish what none could alone.

Here are some tweets, taken from this site:

N.E. Alerts@NEincidents

BOSTON POLICE IS REQUESTING THAT ALL SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES TO TELL PEOPLE TO GET OUT OF THE AREA OF THE MARATHON ROUTE. DO NOT STICK AROUND

Boston Police Dept. ✔@Boston_Police

BPD asking for tips #tweetfromthebeat via @CherylFiandaca

Amanda Soehnlen@asoehnlen

Just called MGH - they have enough blood on hand for the tragedy today, but will need blood later this week to replenish. #boston

The Boston bombing is an example of what's worst about humanity - our capacity to inflict suffering on others for our own personal gain.  It was also an example of what makes us strong - our ability to rise above challenges and create coordinated, effective solutions.

Here's where Ozymandias went wrong - it doesn't take a crisis for people to work together.  The reason crises work best is because they trigger a powerful, emotional response: what led to people the world over contributing their prayers, dollars, resources and tweets wasn't a compulsion to react to a problem but the desire to be part of the solution.  It doesn't take a crisis to trigger proactiveness; the latent urge is always there.  It simply takes leadership to get the ball rolling.

 

As the globe becomes increasingly crowded, the opportunities for social friction are only going to increase.  Think what we may, we cannot silo ourselves off from the problems of the world - there are no Elysiums to be found.  When we attempt to think selfishly, we're simply creating new problems for ourselves down the road.  Fortunately, our increased exposure to diversity also provides us with opportunities for collaboration; as we have seen time and again, we can make the system work when we all find a way to contribute. 

 

None of us are tourists in this world.  We're in this together.  If we're to make a better world, it has to be one designed for all of us to live in.

 

The Story of Labour: The Demise of Capitalism, the Rise of the Knowledge Economy and the Evolution of Society

Income disparity.  Accountability crises leading to economic crises.  Leaders of business and government uncertain about the long-term sustainability of the model that brought them success and general populations demanding more equality and opportunity.  With the modern system of capitalism under duress, the question people are naturally turning to is “what do we do next?”  For some odd reason, less asked but equally relevant: “what does the demise of capitalism have to do with genetics and social evolution?”

History provides the answer. 

While it is natural for the deterioration of an economic model (and the disruption that decline entails) to be frightening, we must never forget that when one door closes, another opens.  If we linger too long on the door that has shut, we miss the opportunity revealed by the new one opening.  Capitalism, like feudalism before it, will slide from dominance.  Just as there are still feudal societies in some corners of the world today, some people will continue to cling to capitalism as the majority reaps the benefits of the new model, whatever that might be.  The question we must ask ourselves now is, which side of the divide we want to fall on.

The general decline of feudalism was instigated by the growth of cities and the specialization of labour (which is likely why modern-day feudalism is connected to rough terrain, less innovation and lower lifespans).  The shift from title to wealth as a means of determining social status was accompanied by the shift in priority from owning land towards owning the means of production.   This shift of power from kings to the bourgeoisie – the transition from feudalism to capitalism – brought with it mechanization, the industrial revolution, public transport, public health care, etc.  To function properly, capitalism required a more democratic society which, hopefully, we can all agree is a good thing. 

Today, we are living within the latest iteration of urbanity; we still have the city, the state, the nation, but we’re also part of this thing we call the global village.  Just as the city drew people together and allowed for increased opportunities for collaboration, specialization and innovation, the internet is bridging the gaps between people everywhere on the planet.  Where feudalism focused on land ownership (to grow crops and house labour) as a requirement of title and capitalism made ownership of the means of production (the means by which labour creates products) the ticket to fortune, what gets people ahead today is access and the capacity to harness cognitive ability – including knowledge, creativity and critical thinking.

Just as single-celled organisms slowly evolved into more complex creatures that are still made up of single cells, the evolution of society simply builds on what came before.  We still need land to live on, grow food and for housing the means of production; we rely more than ever on tools, ranging from irons to microwaves to cars to blackberries.  Society engages in a kind of social cell division; the result is that where we live is no longer the same place our food comes from, nor where our tools are built or used.  Now, with video-conferencing, online databases and useful tools like Google or Wikipedia, we are separating work from the places where we live.

Feudalism, capitalism, whatever’s next – the one thing that has remained constant is the need for labour.  Nothing gets done without someone doing it; people work because they gain benefit from doing so.  This is as true of the human animal as any other.  In all social animals, collaboration allows for the highest possible gain with the lowest possible risk.  For it to work, collaboration requires equal measures of trust in others and altruism, the desire to help them in turn.  Those who collaborate have higher rates of success, i.e. resource access and accompanying good health.  The corollary to this personal health and resource access is stronger offspring that are more likely to reproduce and have healthy offspring of their own.  This is why stable democracies have greater quality-of-life outcomes (including longer life expectancies and lower crime rates).

Collaboration, working together to achieve a goal, is at the deep root of all interaction.  It’s connected to mutation; it’s why species like ours reproduce through sexual rather than asexual selection.  I bring this up not as a tangent, but rather to bring home a point – while genetics is all about survival of the individual gene, nature has evolved collaboration as the best mechanism to ensure a gene, or an individual, or a society not only survives, but thrives.

While collaboration is not uncommon in the animal kingdom, tool-use is less so.  Tool-use requires the ability to envision an outcome that does not yet exist, the capacity to design and create that outcome and the patience and will to follow-through.  It’s a complex ability requiring a complex, specialized brain to realize.  Humans might do this best, but we aren’t the only tool-making animal on the planet.

It’s the combination of these abilities – collaboration and tool-design/use – that really make humans stand out, though again, we’re not unique in innovating and sharing our learned skills.   While chimps might be able to crack open nuts with rocks and teach other chimps to do the same thing, what we don’t see in a group of chimps (or at least, we haven’t recognized yet) is the ability to specialize.  Planet of the Apes being prescience instead of fiction.  If there’s anything that makes people special, then, it would be just that – the capacity to specialize. 

Our unique mixture of capacities – to innovate, to envision and realize, to work collectively in a specialized manner and to pass on this knowledge, allowing the cycle to repeat – is the history of human labour.  In search of individual benefit, we have gathered into collectives (family units, tribes, cities, states) and developed increasingly specialized roles to do the various things we need – grow/harvest food, build shelter, provide security, provide coordination, etc.  These abilities manifest themselves physically, but they originate cognitively.  To fully manage these processes, our grey matter has been evolving the capacity to take conscious control of them.  As Joseph LeDoux has pointed out, “an absence of awareness is the rule of mental life, rather than the exception, throughout the animal kingdom.”  As Descartes declared, “Cogito ergo sum.”

Marx and Engels had it wrong – "the history of all hitherto existing society” isn’t “the history of class struggles".  Class struggles, racism, sexism, all forms of dominance facilitated by stigma are by-products of evolutionary, selection-of-the-fittest drive; it’s what we’ve been evolving from.  The history of society is the gradual integration of disparate elements into a cohesive whole with specialized functions.  The evolution of a human, social organism – networked intelligence – probably mirrors the process by which complex gene networks, or biological organisms, evolved.  The specialization of labour, facilitated through communication, is the  social equivalent to RNA.  Cognition and, therefore, conscience have been a by-product of this process.  As Steven Pinker has pointed out, humanity is becoming less egregiously selfish the more social we become, which only makes sense. 

The capitalist model has done its job; it has fostered socialization better than any model that came before it.  Capitalism shifted our focus from property to financial wealth, with land becoming a subsidiary benefit.  Means of production have allowed people to work together, expanding diversity and fostering innovation.  Our capacity to network our intelligence has now shifted focus from wealth to knowledge – the capitalist model simply isn’t adequate to support this reality.  What we need now is a system that better harnesses the cognitive potentials of our species by fostering an increased social consciousness and a greater leaning towards ethical behaviour on the part of all society’s members – from top to bottom. 

Such a system will be more altruistic, supportive and involving; as such, it will be more innovative, able to plan even further ahead yet respond more flexibly and rapidly to the challenges of the moment.  This system will organically build on the groundwork that capitalism laid down before it.  It will also employ the “teach a man to fish” approach to empowering the individual rather than taking from them, foisting upon them or selling to them.  This system isn’t going to be a social outcry against capitalism, or socialism, or any isms; it’s simply going to be a matter of efficiency and expedience. 

We have moved from feudal kingdoms, where individuals led, through capitalism, where the bourgeoisie  control access and are now on the cusp of a kingdom of conscience where the people shall lead more directly than in any social model that has come before.  Social media and all the communicative technologies and networks we’ve busily created over the centuries will serve as the synapses of this networked intelligence.  What this means for leaders is that power rests firmly in the hands of the people, so existing institutions need to serve them better if they're to gain maximum benefit from available people power. 

Fortunately, the general populace will provide the labour by which these connections happen with online, open-sourced information networks for education, training upgrades and peer support; wikis; corporate collaboration and altruism; etc.  They're going to want to work with the system and pieces of the systems that will help them realize the quality of lives they want.  Government will streamline its focus towards the role of executive function.   Again, this isn’t naïve hopefulness, but rather, rational optimism.  It’s all the rage these days – you should try it.  In fact, I’m pretty sure you will.