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.

Why Academics Love to Publish Their Ideas in Books

Because by all their narrative they try to prepare the ground for an irrational case. But, rationality, on the contrary, strips all superfluous words.

Narrated stories promote subconscious judgments. Sometimes such stories hardly bear reference to the case in question, so they hardly support the case in a rational way. They do so irrationally, though. The mechanism is like hypnosis. In hypnosis, critical thinking is turned off, which allows to fill the memory with “facts” that never were seriously scrutinized. These so infused facts on a subconscious level influence judgment, promote irrationally.

Narrated stories stray from the main case. Stories in the way the authors put them seem to support the case. However, all these little stories can be rationalized in different ways that support the opposite case. In fact, one is tempted to counter the narratives, to put the facts straight, and to make the explanation more succinct. As those stories raise additional points of contention, they work like red herrings. They provide topics a discussion can be easily locked in while keeping the main argument safe and untouched.

Examples.

Ian Morris [1] narrates stories about war. His point is always that war is terrible but the time after it is more peaceful and progressive. The question that he didn’t touch is do exist other reasons for peace and prosperity after a war? Unfortunately, after a couple of pages of lulling details only few people raise that question.

Andy McNab and Kevin Dutton [2] start their case with a story about a goatherd, an innocent young boy, who has to be killed because he accidentally watched a secret operation in order to not jeopardize the entire mission. The questions that remain unanswered in this book are was it really necessary or existed other ways to save the mission, and was the mission really worth it.

Though I admit that not all scientific novelty can be put on twitter, and some elaborate scientific theories need books to be understood, this is not true for books that support a single argument, in particular if coupled with extensive story telling.

[1] Morris, Ian. 2014. War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[2] McNab, Andy, and Kevin Dutton. 2014. The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success. Bantam Press.

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

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Source: Wikipedia

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.

Applied to this article [https://evolution-institute.org/article/evolving-organizations/]: The lack of conceptual clarity creates a thicket of wordiness to disguise that deficiency. No offense intended, I just want to mention that fauceir theory that is around for years and does provide that clear concept.

For instance: social evolution as every evolution entails the co-evolution of parasites and defense mechanism. One of these parasites and the most hideous is war. But there are many of them. An other not so harmful but still quite annoying is resources wasted for meaningless research.

Being involved in a social parasite distorts the view on parasitism, so no proper ideas of fighting social parasites can be expected from parasitic research which rather puts asleep reason.

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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.

More Warmonger’s Fallacies Exposed

This post continues the previous post and the quotes are taken from this discussion.

stephenduplantier

„Peace is slow war, because conflict can occur in peacetime; and war is fast peace, because cooperation can occur during wartime.“

Fallacy: Abstract meaning fallacy
I ask myself if the author of this assertion is aware of his/her great predecessor. „War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength“ phrased Orwell already. This fallacy, maybe, is not so obvious to everyone. It has to do with redefining the meaning of words. Usually this is accomplished by making it more abstract, and the author of the above quote is just caught in the act. The author tries to convince us that there are similarities between peace and war and by that tries to blur in our minds the borderlines between them. This is just an intermediate step to what G. Orwell wrote sarcastically.

Ross David H

“The main thing that war provides, is the same thing that bankruptcy provides in a market economy, which is that if an organization (nation or company) drops … , then it is removed.”

Fallacy: False analogy (at least partially) which again leads to redefinition of war.
To put it simple, there are great differences (obvious to everyone) between war and bankruptcy, which is the reason why we use different words. One of the great advantages of bankruptcy is that it involves less collateral damage. So I suppose, we all may agree, if war were transformed into bankruptcy, humanity would enormously benefit. Thus, let us study the following questions: What blocks states from competing like companies, or what allows them to cause so much destruction in the wake of their competition? Why bankrupted states manage to merely change facade instead of being removed completely?

Richard

“You put a fallacy here yourself (appeal to common sense). In fact, it is not obvious to everyone why that is a false analogy.”
“Another fallacy (straw man; putting words in someone else’s mouth). Nowhere did I try to justify wars as engines of progress (you seem to lack the liberal arts skills of critical reasoning and close reading as well).”
“But how can you disagree with a conclusion before studying something first?”
Fallacy: Red Herring.
He is probably good at selling Red Herrings. The post is neither about fallacies nor about studying slavery. The post is about beneficial effects of war ‘in the long run’ (whatever that means). BTW “beneficial effects” in connection with war sounds equally wrong to me as “progress” connected with war, so there is no straw man in rephrasing a false claim. Sorry I won’t discuss the other allegations. Peace is more important though.

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

Eugenics of intelligence

Eugenics became a verbal battleground recently. It has been a battleground since humans became aware of the possibility. Even the involvement of genetics to control hereditary diseases is reality in most countries. The recent flare is about intelligence coming into the reach of eugenics. The prospect to control an offspring’s intelligence re-ignited the human-history-long battle, and we will analyze the battleground as it allows to fauceirize the combatants.

The graphic shows that by the German Nazis about 30-times more Jewish than disabled people were killed.

First, we start characterizing the participants in respect to their goals.

1. The lowest level fauceir are the human individuals as biological beings. I imagine—and there is plenty evidence for that—that parents and mothers in particular cling to their offspring no matter how intelligent. The biological reflexes drive a mother to breast feed her child even if malformed. Among other mechanisms, oxytocin excretion s stimulated by the baby sucking on her nipples, and that alone provides satisfaction.
2. The next level is a social one. It is the lowest social level at all. The family. A family has to make decisions on other grounds. They have to feed more children and the resources have to be distributed among them wisely. From a family’s perspective, it would be stupid to waist resources on children that have only a poor chance to survive. Here a first fauceir conflict arises between family interest and a mother’s emotional interest. Some mothers tend to cling to her helpless and disabled children even more than to her healthy ones, which puts the family under stress and not seldom such families break apart.
3. At the next level up the social hierarchy the controversies become fiercer. That is where the real battleground unfolds, and nothing is so as it seems to be. The interest of the state—or to put it more general, the local security provider—is again in favor of helpless, disabled, unintelligent children. Some reader might argue this is bold assertion against all evidence, as euthanasia was introduced by governments—the Nazi German fascist government being a prominent example. But is that really true. I will give two arguments in support of my claim one is logical reasoning the other is empirical data.
   1. First the logical argument. All government act as local security provider, and all security providers tend to monopolize their ‘service’. Still it is a service. People have to pay for it. People receive security service in exchange for a salary that is generally called taxes. As the government holds the monopoly of violence it would suppress other potential security providers and they would even use their power to enforce salary payments and they would increase their honorarium arbitrarily. This monopolized security business goes the better the more unassuming and stupid the customers. Intelligent slaves are a perpetual source of trouble. Either they want to become security providers themselves or they press to negotiate better conditions. Conclusively each government in history has been interested to reduce people’s intelligence.
   2. There is enough empirical evidence in support. Throughout history intelligent people were eliminated on a regular basis. The first documented historical evidence I’m aware of is Jesus who was killed not because he was stupid but because he was superior. Thousands of people followed him killed throughout Europe by inquisition. Many of them we would call natural scientists today, so the inquisition was after the bright ones.While intelligent people were openly attacked before, in the 20^th century, governments became hypocritical. The German Nazis declared to eradicate unworthy human life, and in fact, some people with severe mental disabilities were killed by the fascist euthanasia program, as the graphic shows that number was rather negligible compared to the huge number of Jews killed thru the holocaust. And Jewish people on average were more intelligent, than average Germans. For that reason the IQ test in Nazi Germany was forbidden and discredited as a Jew test. Besides it is worth mentioning that not only Jews but also intelligent German people died in concentration camps, as they were most likely to oppose the regime. The extent of that Nazi policy to eradicate human intelligence becomes even more obvious if considering that intelligent Jews and Germans were killed in their prime reproductive age (see second picture) while the people killed by the euthanasia program were not likely to propagate, at all.Governmental hypocrisy was elevated to a next level by post-war governments in the Western and in socialist countries alike. They declared not to follow the Nazi policy of euthanasia but to press in the opposite direction. They vowed to support all human life forms as disabled they may be. By that, however, they followed the Nazi policy of eradicating the most intelligent people even on a greater, a population based, scale. Not only did the governments drained a lot of resources to support mentally disabled people, a developed society can cope with that, but much more damaging from the point of population genetics was the fact that resources were drained from intelligent people to such an extend that it became more and more unattractive for them to raise children. Statistics throughout developed countries show that the more qualifies the less children per mother. That problem is growing for decades and known to everybody, but politicians meet it with neglect pointing out that disabled and socially lower classes need their attention most. The intelligent can help themselves though they obviously cannot as the data demonstrate.
4. The forth level of fauceir hierarchy is international competition. Here again as at the family level higher intelligence is more desirable as it puts a nation at a more advantageous position.

This picture from Wikipedia shows Jews in a line waiting for their extermination. At that time Jews were more intelligent than average German folks. Their killing was an reduction of the g factor of the overall German population.

Second, from these considerations, what can be predicted in behalf of future eugenics.

1. The country that first employs eugenics of intelligence will have an advantage in international competition (follows from point 4).
2. As we have seen with the Arab spring the augmentation of a peoples intelligence would destabilize a countries ruling structure (follows from point 3).
3. Families will be the first that secretly in some places will press forward eugenics of intelligence (follows from point 2).
4. Local security providers will abuse the fate of desperate mothers who love their disabled children to push forward ideologies that oppose eugenetics of intelligence (follows from points 1 and 3).
5. Local security providers will press for scientific research that allows to augment a population’s intelligence and submissiveness at the same rate.
6. If not a global security provider develops, eugenics of intelligence will become feasible and popular.

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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.

War, Cooperation, Atruism, and Slavery

As I like the book Secular Cycles, (at least the first chapter that is freely available) coauthored by Peter Turchin, I occasionally browse his blog. In contrast to that book, his recent argument was not only flawed but got me outrageous.

First. There is an obvious contradiction in his argument:

Although one may follow that cooperation is enforced, at least temporarily, in a threatened society, what about the aggressor? If it were so cooperative, why wouldn’t it simply go ahead and ask others to cooperate. Trading, for instance, as merchants and business people do during peacetime. On the contrary, it requires a great deal of selfishness to attack others and steal from them.

Now if you need both selfishness to attack and cooperation to defend, what will evolve eventually?

Second, and even more importantly. His argument is sheer hypocrisy.

Given a society divided into selfish rulers and altruistic slaves. The more such a society grows in population the more people are employed to enforce enslavement. This can be accomplished either by brutal force or,

From http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/slavery.htm

even more successfully, by preaching altruism.

From http://thecripplegate.com/the-lost-art-of-street-preaching-must-it-be-resurrected/

Well, Peter Turchin calls it cooperation but it means giving up personal interests for the sake of social ruler’s interest. This is nothing but mere propaganda, and it is for an obvious reason. As a state employee, he earns his money for upbringing devoted slaves, and he does a good job, doesn’t he. Disguising enslavement as cooperation, and condemning self-confidence as selfishness, he is preaching water while drinking wine. His selfishness is at the expense of followers who become proper slaves. I detest such hypocrisy.

I very, very, very much more like Ayn Rand’s position on selfishness, who allowed all people to behave selfishly as long as not abusing others.

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