Population Crisis among the Elite

That the overproduction of elites over the last century is at the core of the present crisis is spectacularly illustrated by the following news.

“Saudi Arabia detains princes, ministers in anti-corruption probe”

In his book Peter Turchin explains cyclic crises by overpopulation, in particular an uncontrolled grows of the elites. They don’t produce wealth but exclusively consume it. In order to satisfy their ever growing demand, two occurrences follow naturally.

1. The elite increases its oppression the working people have to suffer. That is they increases taxes, rents, or interest rates.
2. The elites eliminate each other.

The first has only limited success. It is simply impossible to squeeze out more profit without damaging the whole economy and provoking civil unrest. This stage is what we witnessed in Europe and America over the last century or so. Saudi Arabia is tightly connected to these economies.

The second stage is what we currently approach, so we witness a competition growing more fierce among the elites. Of course the elites try to use their power to eliminate each other. Those who wield less power are the first to be eliminated. Those poor chaps arrested in Saudi Arabia for instance.

The crisis ends when enough people belonging to the elite are eliminated, be it physically murdered or “downgraded” into the working class. Then actually a period of social progress ensues.

From fauceir perspective this can be better explained by parasitism, social parasitism. Parasitism always evolves in nature as soon as there are enough resources to feed from. Parasitism is a common subject of biological studies, but mostly neglected in societies. That comes as no surprise as government and propaganda is exclusively controlled by these parasites, and unfortunately this is true for most of scientists in the humanities too.

But as a rule of evolution, in response the growing parasitism defense mechanisms evolve to fend off or at least reduce parasites. What we witness in Saudi Arabia now may be understood as the first half-hearted attempts of such defense mechanisms to become activated. More rigorous steps are necessary of course. Lets hope that the process will get momentum soon and act with minor collateral damage.

Update more examples of that competition among the elites going on:

Azerbaijan Moves to Drastically Cut Number of Lawyers

Sorry for the the Azerbaijannian lawyers, but they were obviously not at the top of the social parasite’s food chain.

Paradise Papers

The Paradise Papers also serve an other purpose. Like the Panama Papers before, it will increase the Gini coefficient by reducing the income of the rich and leaving the super-rich unscathed, so all these papers will by increasing the Gini coefficient accelerate the crisis.

The Ronfeld-(TIMN)-Chain

In order to avoid confusion in my previous post, I’m going to provide some explanation for the term of Ronfeld Chain. The name is derived from a comment made by some David Ronfeldt (maybe it’s him working for the RAND institute on a Social Evolution Forum webpage.

He summarizes his TIMN-theory as follows:

EXPLANATION: In brief, TIMN theory finds that, over the ages, people have come up with four cardinal forms of organization for constructing their societies: tribes (or the T form), hierarchical institutions (the I form), markets (M), and information-age networks (N). Each form of organization has different purposes and uses, along with different philosophical and strategic implications. Each form also has both bright and dark sides, and can be used for good or ill; societies can get them wrong as well as right, in ways that affect their usage of the other forms.

Concerning evolution he further explains:

In notational terms, this means that societies have evolved across the centuries in a preferred historical progression: from monoform (T-only), to biform (T+I), to triform (T+I+M), and now potentially to quadriform (T+I+M+N) types of societies.

This theory is consistent with the fauceir theory and quite handy to explain a lot of social phenomena, so I will translate it in more detail in faucier terms.

T: The tribal form is the most ancient way to organize human social groups based on biological needs such as provision of food and propagation and it involves some elementary types of division of labor in child care, hunting, and protection.

I: I’d better call it the imperatorial or ideological form. It is the way to control larger social groups which includes institutional hierarchies and ideologies and was made possible with increased agricultural production.

M: The market form. It is the way to control different social groups across countries (imperial states). This form became dominant with the industrial revolution.

N: The network. Though the network is not the hallmark of this form, markets form networks too for instance, the cardinal sign of this networks is rationality. All human brains contribute to this network one way or the other, and though it already can be felt everywhere, soon the contribution of artificial intelligence (AI) will increase substantially.

As we are talking about fauceir evolution all the forms are control units which control other fauceirs and may come under control themselves in evolutionary history. Eventually, a hierarchy is build. A hierarchy is not a divine order. On the contrary, it is the product of fierce competition, and as the element fauceirs keep evolving themselves it is like an arms race between host and parasite to keep the subdued fauceir under firm control.

The control that had been established by human social evolution is the chain of control, the Ronfeld Chain.

T < I < M < N

In summarizing human social evolutionary history, we have to recognize that most of the hunter gatherer societies up to about 30.000 years ago were dominated by tribal fauceirs. With the advent of agriculture, tribes were overruled by imperatorial fauceirs. The most ingenious innovation to keep tribal fauceirs in check was creating the family that is private tribes. But not only in families. Tribal fauceirs survived in some rare cultures and fringe groups that most often are called asocial or even criminal indicating that these fauceirs are under heavy control now.

The prime time of imperatorial fauceirs was about 10.000 years ago and since about 2.000 years we observe a steady decline of its influence. The imperatorial style of governance already existed in hunter gatherer societies which does not come as a surprise because the system of alpha males we inherited from our primate ancestors. But is was not before ideology was invented that tribal behavior could be effectively controlled across tribes. The only thing that was necessary was that a tribe accepted an ideology. We known from history how bloody business it was to spread ideology throughout several tribes.

Next step on the ladder was control by market fauceirs. Though archeological evidence proves that people traded some 60.000 years ago ( see here and and here and the references listed there) and the many activities of merchants is known from history, it was not before recently and after the industrial revolution in particular that economic fauceirs gained significant control on both imperatorial and tribal fauceirs. An insightful anecdotal evidence how this takeover took place over the centuries of industrial revolution on British Island is the history of freemasonry. Aside of secret societies, today numerous ways exist by which market fauceirs control the imperatorial ones: lobbying, the monitary system, and by corporates sponsored think tanks and NGOs to influence policy makers. Market fauceirs also force tribal ones under control. The most prominent example is the disbandment of families by economic means of coercion. Women had to work to also provide for the family and childcare was handed over to the government. According to a report by Aaron Russo it was thoroughly planned by Rockefeller. Maybe that’s true in the US, but it happened everywhere even in countries like the Soviet Union where Rockefeller had rather negligible influence, I guess. It is just what economy demands.

Next and so far final step is the takeover by the rational network fauceirs. Rational fauceirs also exist for long, but there influence on economy and ideology was rather limited. It was only with the advent of the internet and the spread of new ways of communication that the influcence of the rational network became obvious. Brexit and the Trump election are symptoms of the control shift from market to network fauceirs.

For us ordinary humans two things remain difficult to understand:

1. We are just witnessing a competition between market and network fauceirs. The market by far is not under full control yet and it will never be. The fight between these two fauceir units is fierce and will become fiercer the next years. The two fighting fauceir parties take what they can get control of as weapons, including us, the people. We people contribute in several ways to this combat. We participate as members of the imperatorial or tribal fauceirs.

2. But, we also contribute to the network simply by developing rational arguments. Any rational endeavor and exchange of opinions contributes to the network in a way that is not foreseeable. A single human individual contributing to the network has no control of the network. The network controls itself and the people contributing.

Let’s give an example. Now many people write articles like this one. In this article the authors try to explain what happened when Trump was elected, and although the authors did not find a point that I can agree with, they made a valuable contribution on how tribal fauceir control is exerted by both imperatorial and market fauceirs that can be used by the network to tap the control mechanism in the future. Therefore keep in mind that a single person’s contribution to the network might not be visible and conscious instead it might be accidental and work in a not intended direction.

Conclusively, while ready this article you were making your contribution to human social too. Thank You.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

On the inability of pundits to explain Trumpism

This is actually a response to an article “Darwin Applied to Trump: Can Evolutionary Theory Help Us Understand the Appeal of Donald Trump?” and the ensuing discussion published on Social Evolution Forum.

Though I agree with Bryan Malone’s point that evolution is random at times, this is not true all the time. To propose the term development for a directed process is not a perfect solution either as we observe different degrees and mechanisms among those directed processes. Instead of such a black and white picture of evolution and development, Fauceir Theory’s relatedness allows for a gradual scale between an individual’s development and the evolution at large.

David Ronfeldt has an excellent point too. His TIMN classification exactly reflects the Fauceir approach of different levels of social evolution.

EXPLANATION: In brief, TIMN theory finds that, over the ages, people have come up with four cardinal forms of organization for constructing their societies: tribes (or the T form), hierarchical institutions (the I form), markets (M), and information-age networks (N). Each form of organization has different purposes and uses, along with different philosophical and strategic implications. Each form also has both bright and dark sides, and can be used for good or ill; societies can get them wrong as well as right, in ways that affect their usage of the other forms.

And it is that these levels determine the direction of success in evolutionary adaptation. What Lesley Newson and Peter J. Richerson described in their main article is just a snapshot of that top-down control of evolution M->I->T. Economic changes (M), the concentration of production in particular, led to political changes (I), which are hailed as democracy and social security measures, eventually resulted in destruction of traditional family values (T).

Though I agree with David’s theoretical view, I fervently disagree with his opinion about Russia being just TI. This is outrageously ignorant and merely mirrors the propaganda he consumed.

Such propaganda and personal involvement, my dear colleagues, constitute the main hindrance of your comprehending the whole picture of social evolution. Given the Ronfeld Chain most of you are working for institutions that are placed either between M and I (that is your institutions receives money from economic “sponsors” and you “convince” policy makers) or you are placed between I and T (receiving governmental “grants” to “educate” the public), or both. Both of these positions render you actors in the ongoing evolutionary process, and both of these positions make you blind to understand social evolution in its complexity.

Aside of some close observations of the transformation of families praised above already, the article retreats into ideology and propaganda as soon as mechanisms at the M and I level are concerned. At this point ontological fallacies are committed repeatedly when using such vague terms such as Western/non-Western populations, democracy, modernism and so on. What the article misses out entirely is the N level. Which comes a little bit as a surprise. Scientists in all fields increasingly rely on networks to develop their ideas, on the other hand they are nearly unable to apply these practical experiences to society as a whole. And herein consists my major critique on this article as it completely blinds out the network of rational thinkers behind Trump’s success.

This is BTW is in accordance with the fauceir rule of blindness which states that fauceirs cannot perceive what is outside their scope of control. For that reason all institutions heavily involved in the Ronfeld Chain between M and T (including academics, mainstream media outlets, and intelligent agencies) miscalculated Trump’s trumps victory. And it is also typical of these institutions that they invent explanations that are limited to the scope of their own activity, so intelligence agencies blame Russians interference as they interfere in almost all elections worldwide, the mainstream media blame fake news as they produce lies perpetually, and academics blame tribal behavior as this is what they are allowed to study and to control. By contrast among those who anticipated Trump’s victory was Peter Thiel who as data analyst was closer to N than all the others.

The evolution of the brain from fish to modern humans is characterized by growth of the cortex (Telencephalon) while the other parts remained almost the same size.

The others simply cannot see the body of N controlling M-T much the same way as brainstem neurons cannot see that they are controlled by the cerebral cortex neurons. As with the evolution of vertebrates in societies, the body of N will grow, and this is how evolution makes me optimistic about the future.

PS.: Don’t take me wrong. I never said that Trump is the incarnation of N. Far from that. N is a fauceir, and this in Fauceir Theory means a rational control network, a system, that has no physical representation. While reading this article your brain, for instance, also belonged to it. Thank you for this valuable contribution.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Empathobesity—The Dynamics of Social Symbiosis and Parasitism

Social parasitism is a recurrent topic on this website. I tackled the question how such parasitism is unaware to those who contribute. Also the phenomenon of the evolution of a social parasite’s defense system was illustrated. In a recent article Heartiste, raised an other aspect of social parasitism. The systems theory’s well known fact that a symbiotic relationship can become parasitic (and vice versa).

This dynamics of a relationship’s mutuality, of course, is true for all relationships social included. Empathobesity is a role model. The concept describes the rise-and-fall process of Western societies by the impact of empathy.

As well as the process can be divided into rise and fall, the two phases are characterized by (1) a distribution of wealth, education, and power which translated into higher productivity and considerable ingenuity, and (2) growing inequality, declining education, and concentration of power which translates into stagnation and genuine ingenuity became replaced by just fancy but useless innovation such as ringtones. The two phases of the process even have a biological, population genetics, implication. While in the first phase the more prosperous people had more children, it is now the other way around, so even the genetic basis of ingenuity is in decline not to mention the schooling system and psychological and sociological research that supports a propaganda of educating the imbecile to become geniuses.

No doubt, this process was propelled by empathy mostly arising from Christian religious believes, and we owe those Christian ethics a great deal of our wealth and prosperity. The major question is why did the growth of prosperity came to a halt. The answer lays in the dynamics of relationships. Institutions that sprout from the grounds of Christian ethics like political parties and organizations and charities entered their parasitic stage of behavior. All these organizations have in common that they spread their political agendas by the help of creating empathy like the Christian Church did.

Thus empathobesity well characterizes this process. It is empathy that became obesity. Like obesity empathobesity results from doing in excess what is essential. If you don’t eat you starve, if you eat too much you become obese. Obesity like malnutrition is a disease, and both can kill you. The same is with empathy. It is essential to keep a society flourishing, but to much of it causes dangerous metabolic consequences.

The parasitic abuse of empathy has a long history and it has it re-birth again and again.

The young man on the streets of Prague creates empathy, but does he deserve it. Please take a closer look. His sneakers are as new as the ones of the bystanders and his backpack and his clothes aren’t ragged. He covers his face to not show that he is well shaved. My conclusion was he just wanted to create a feeling of empathy in visitors crossing the Carl’s bridge to pay for his vacation.

In a family, for instance, one member can force tho other into obedience by playing the sufferer. This is the trick played by men and women likewise, but only women showing such a behavior are supported by society. You can easily spot those women on facebook, for instance, by re-posting charity requests. The women don’t care the least about the poor chap who asks for help, but it is a test for her male followers who will qualify to become enslaved by her empathy trap.

But empathy parasitism is not restricted to personal relationships and personal contact like beggars. Whole institutions support on it. Charity organizations, Environmental protection groups, churches, and political parties all use to employ the human social instinct of empathy for their egoistic purposes.

A Hare Krishna parade in Prague. They would offer me a rose but in return they would have demanded my whole pocket full of money. An other type of social parasitism.

But empathy is not the only social behavior pattern (fauceir) that is abused by social parasites. Here follow some other examples of social parasitism:

• A security agency that creates security risks to enforce their power and influence.
• A news agency that creates new just for a good selling headline.
• A health organization that creates a disease to have more patients to cure.
• A company that creates a monopoly to increase revenue.
• A scientific community predicting a disaster, such as an epidemic, to obtain more funds.

The faces of social parasitism is manifold, and what once has been a respectable institution can become a social parasite. This is made clear by the term Empathobesity when empathy in political realms becomes an obstacle of social advancement at best but in its worst case scenario become morbid leading to death of a culture. So many culture died already. They all died because they succumbed to their specific social parasites. BTW biological organisms die the same way.

Well from a fauceir historical perspective there is nothing wrong with that. Fauceir Theory has a non-partisan view. Nobody can avert the death of an organism. That’s true for biological organisms and social organisms likewise. Death and the subsequent degradation is the prerequisite of a life circle going on. If the Roman Empire hadn’t been degraded some thousand years ago we would not have the level of culture that we enjoy in Europe today.

Thus what can be done practically, is to prevent the dying social organisms to take to much human vitims, to destroy intellectual achievements and other natural resources.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Essence of Fauceir Evolution

Here go some quotes:

Evolution is not just about species [1] but includes all types of fauceirs [that form resources PN].

Evolution is not just about natural selection [2] but a set of optimization rules [including decotectulization and adaptation, for instance PN].

—– Mato Nagel
[addendum by the author]

[1] Darwin, Charles, 2008, On the Origin of Species. Rev. ed. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press. (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin.html)

[2] Wallace, Alfred Russel,1870,Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection. A Series of Essays. London, New York: Macmillan and co. (http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/59/2/125)

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Is There a Purging War – Part 1 Definition

This is a comment on this Aeon article, which ones again promotes the idea of a creative war. Last time it was clearly fallacious, this time the argument is rather intriguing though imprecise and implying fallacious thought.

The best way to analyze the phenomenon of war is again to adapt the fauceir position. War is conflict between social groups, collection of people that are united by some social contract. Usually war is conflict between states and/or organizations that strive for state like power. Sometimes this term is extended to include conflict between political factions and smaller groups within organizations or companies, especially if casualties are involved.

All these concepts have in common that they are only flat or descriptive. Fauceir Theory instead provides a functional definition based on fauceir hierarchies. According that two types of war may be distinguished.

1. War between social groups at the same level of the fauceir hierarchy. This type of war clearly has the character of competition as we know it in free market economy.
2. War waged from a higher ranking social group to suppress its elements. This type of war has many characteristics of enslavement. Sometimes also called war against its own people.

The amazing thing about these two definitions is that they are often confused to produce logically wrong conclusions. This is, I have to say, intentionally planned by ideologists.

For instance, the war against its own people is always justified by competition with other state like organizations. The most recent example is the war on terror that lead to substantial cutbacks in private rights and freedom worldwide, and to give the most horrible example remember the holocaust.

On the other hand, the own people often are intimidated by threads of war. As an example may serve the Social Democrats in Germany after WW1. They successfully prevented a revolution by coining the slogan “We don’t need an other war.”

Conclusively, if we were talking about the cleansing effect of war we have to state that only the first type, the competition between organizations bears progress. The other type is reactionaryism.

Admittedly, in any major conflict involves both types, so it is a well known fact that in times of external war internal repressions are common. People even the critical ones rally behind a leader if there is an external thread.

That said I think celebrating war’s creative power nowadays is equal to committing a fallacy as we don’t live in Rabindranath Tagore’s time any more. Our knowledge about history is broader and more detailed now. We ought to formulate more precisely to make our claims distinctive. After all celebrating Shiva as God of War was characteristic of a period of Indian economic and social stagnation.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Institutions are Fauceirs

This actually is a comment on a Peter Turchin post on institutions.

First of all I want to mention the new look of his social evolution forum. Looks great though I miss a little bit the sobriety of a scientific publication. Looks rather like a glossy newspaper.

Anyway, remarkable is his scientific thoughts slowly approach Fauceir Theory. Institutions are mere fauceirs, and comparing them with software, another typical fauceir, is just abstracting those analogies that make a fauceir a fauceir. Fauceirs are essential to describe evolution scientifically.

While in the realm of biological evolution it is still possible to get the big picture of evolution without fauceir because
(1) there are only a few fauceirs and you can name them personally,
(2) clades, biotopes and environments are relative stable and comparable in their influences on evolution.
This, however, is no longer true in the realm of social evolution. The main actors, such as laws, education, institutions, economic enterprises, change rapidly and so does their impact on evolution. They do so as pieces of software—the analogy is striking—which grow into one or several new projects. That dynamic process requires these fauceirs to be frequently re-evaluated.

In the majority of scientific literature, those evaluations of actors are made from the perspective of the government. Peter Turchin’s blog is no exception, and this comes as no surprise because most scientists are paid by the government. They work in governmentally supported institutions after all, but that makes those scientists dependable and ideologically imprinted and their work tainted.

In my recent post I demonstrated that a government is but an other actor in social evolution, so evaluating and defining social fauceirs from a state’s perspective only can lead to inconsistencies and even dangerous ideological flaws as we’ve seen with the propagation of war, for instance.

Hope this post helps a little bit further to open eyes.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Democracy – What is that anyway?

I know, many people would be up in arms when reading this headline. For them democracy is so precious, even bears a state holiness, that they feel provoked, even personally offended, by simply question its usefulness. But those are people deeply imbued by governmental ideology. Any ideology hampers scientific analysis. (The most prominent example is the denial of the helocentric system by the catholic ideology for centuries.) Scientific endeavor has to free itself from any ideology—as far as possible—including its fervent proponents, so I don’t care.

For starters, a good collection of arguments why democracy fails can be obtained from this video:

It finally convincingly illustrates why a democratically elected government is constitutionally bound to increase the income gap. Despite all rhetoric to the contrary and despite of all the gullible people with good intentions who want to improve government to close the gap.

There is another misconception about democracy. Ideology states that democracy constitutes a collective decision and is therefore always the best one. (Condorcet developed a theorem that supports). Mato Nagel recently showed that this is not the case. On the contrary, given the Dunning-Kruger effect, the results of such a collective decision is rather mediocre at best. Now, he is confronted with a lot of hatred for his paper.

From an evolutionary point of view democracy is just camouflaged parasitism. Parasites use to evolve camouflage to evade a host’s defense system. That’s the same with a people (host) and the pack of thieves (parasites) who use government (camouflage/evading system) to protect themselves from the people’s defense.

Figure 1. The upper panel shows a flu virus that can invade an individual that has no antibodies neither against the blue nor the red antigen, shown in the lower part of this panel. The panel in the middle illustrated a body that effectively developed blue antibodies. That body can be infected by viruses coated with red antigens only. The lower panel shows the opposite case. In all cases the virus adapts to the immune system to improve its chances to cause an epidemic infection.

Even the mechanisms to break a host’s defense are similar to the flu virus. Every year a flu virus generates new strains and by invading the people the one that experiences the least counter attacks by the human bodies becomes epidemic. Every year an other strain. And after a couple of years, when the immune system’s memory has declined enough, an old strain can become epidemic again.

Figure 2. The adaptation of social parasites works similarly. Instead of coating antigens, they hide themselves by the shield of government from their hosts defense system. The upper panel shows a population that is not yet immune against any kind of social theft, so their defense systems symbolized by fists in the lower panel are not activated yet. The middle and the lower panel illustate how the shield changes according the accumulation of hatred in the population. Same as with flu viruses, the shield that shows the least counter attack is employed to cause the epidemic.

That sound quite similar to democratic elections, and the US American elections in particular. In primaries the most sympathetic candidate is forged and finally chosen to become epidemic for 4-8 years. After that period the people become resistant to that strain (party) and usually elect the other strain (party).

Against flu, vaccination is effective. There does not exist vaccination against government. Most people aren’t even aware of its role. It can be depressing to realize that we all live in a state of chronic social disease, and many people don’t even have an idea how it feels to be free and uncompromised.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Misconceptions in Social Evolution Theory

This is actually a reply to a post on the Social Evolution Forum website which regrettably is closed.

The author reports an incident at Newark airport’s terminal that he terribly felt an insufficiency and that he asks for social evolution to improve and wonders why it never happens.

It is a typical mistake made by many when studying evolution. I did it myself when I was a boy. I tried a mouse to evolve gills by adapting it to underwater living. After I drowned a bunch of them, I finally realized that it is impossible. Actually I was more successful with insects. They survived significantly longer, but also died eventually.

At that time, I found myself in good, even academic, company. Only a few decades before a Russian academic claimed to evolve temperature resistant corn by simply exposing it to the cold. He also failed eventually.

Well, what I learned from that is embodied in Fauceir Theory. The rule simply states that a fauceir doesn’t evolve by itself but in a context of a master fauceir, a container that embraces it. Applying that rule one can easily conclude that Newark Airport will never evolve by itself. It is just an individual of the species airport.

Thus improvement can be expected by (1) natural selection in the population of airports and (2) horizontal gene (information) transfer.

Interestingly enough in the comments both these ways are illustrated.

1. (ad 1) The monopoly prevents natural selection at the moment. That’s unfortunately how states often act on social evolution.
2. (ad 2) Still improvement is possible by an other technology. An app, in particular, is mentioned that circumvents failure in the airport’s departure display.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Warmonger’s Fallacies Exposed

A book “War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots” by Ian Morris.
caused many cons like here and here. I analyze a pro. Actually, what I discovered was not a single argument in favor of war, but a fertile source of logical fallacies.

Peter

„ … just returned from California, … “
„ … I started at Stanford, then went to Davis.“
„ … I gave talks at Irvine and Riverside.“
„ … I also met with Ian Morris, the author of the widely acclaimed … he gave an invited lecture at Yale … “
„ … workshop I organized at Stanford on … The main proponents … at the workshop were Peter Richerson, David Sloan Wilson, and I. “

Fallacy: Appeal to authority.
Obvious to everyone I guess 🙂

„ … Morris argues that ‘the main function of war in cultural evolution across the past 15,000 years—and particularly across the past 500 years—has been to integrate societies, increasing material wellbeing.’ … the argument here is ‘over the long run.’ It goes without saying that wars created, and continue to create an enormous amount of human misery. … Thus, wars have not only a destructive side, but also a creative one.“

Fallacy: Straw man.
Though Peter successfully knocked down the straw man that over the short run war causes misery, it doesn’t prove anything about beneficial effects of war over the long run.

„ … I was soundly berated by one irate member of the audience … “

Fallacy: poisoning the well.
Declaring an counter argument irrational doesn’t say anything about the argument itself.

“ … several reviews from reputable commentators that I’ve seen were cautiously positive.”

Fallacy: celebrating the well (the opposite of poisoning the well).
Who says that those commentators are reputable. Where does their reputation derive from.

“Most people who react negatively to Ian’s book have not read it. … he hadn’t read the book. He explained that he disliked the title, … “

Fallacy: Hasty Generalization.
He met just one.

Also

Fallacy: poisoning the well.
As this little anecdote is mentioned to discredit all critic.

Besides, the next paragraph contradicts:
“ … indicating lots of sales. … ”
People wouldn’t buy without reading, would they?

Richard

“You can be vegetarian, but it’s really hard to argue that humans would have evolved in to what they are if they had been herbivores.”

Fallacy: False analogy.
I think it is obvious to everyone.

“ … Would you not be interested in studying why slavery happens, why it still exists today, what could cause it to be more prevalent in the future, … ”

Fallacy: Red Herring.
What studying slavery has to do with justifying wars as engines of progress?

“But how can you disagree with a conclusion before studying something first?

You seem to have a closed mind where you find some conclusions objectionable before ever considering any evidence.”

Fallacy: Poisoning the well.
An accusation of the opponent being closely minded does not prove the initial argument

Besides this accusation was what the Red Herring was abused for.

“It seems that you are not very good with the liberal arts skills of critical reasoning and close reading.”

Fallacy: Personal Attack.
At this point eventually, the opponent realized that he was tricked and quitted the thread.

The Rest

What follows is several other rephrased Red Herrings, the main question being unanswered by anyone. Why war purportedly is more effective in promoting cooperation?

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.