Hi. This Leo Volont.
This is Part Five
of my Seven Part Series
Democracy a
Bad Thing This is chapter “Social
Group Dynamics”
(24)Remember
that earlier we were speaking about how current science and trends today in
academia have effectively blown up the hope and optimism we carried away
from the Age of Enlightenment. From there we had had a vision of an
inherently Good and Noble Humanity, but given a trial to prove itself over the last few Centuries, well, it didn't
pan out, did it? That now effectively
drops us back into the dark and foreboding Hobbsian Pure State of Nature, which
would bring us full circle in our discussion, wouldn't it?
So, let's
quickly brush up again on Hobbes.
Remember how all his individual men would be locked in a kind of battle
with all others, well, looking back from the vantage point of what we know now,
Hobbes' description was sort of a kind of philosophical political poetry. The truth we know today is more likely that people contend as members
of distinct groups and more as factions than as individuals. It turns out that
for the last several hundred thousand years Human Beings largely evolved in
social groups of from 50 to a 150 individuals.
Yes, there were certainly men with ‘personal power’ but those with the
most power would have friends, allies and partners. Also, since Human Beings
evolved with Groups being the unitary objects of evolutionary forces, well, we
could then infer that there is no evolutionary optimum ‘individual’ but that
our Species evolved so that in every random group of from about 50 to 100
people there would be the optimum spectrum of necessary personality and
capacity types required for what could be called a high functioning group. It was natural selection aiming for the
fittest Group.
Perhaps we
need to delve a bit deeper into this theory that the biological predisposition
of Human Beings would cause Social and Political Dynamics to be driven not by
reason or even by individual self interests but by instinctive group driven
social instincts which could then be cynically manipulated. So let's look at some of the details here just as we would have expected others to have looked at these same issues
before.
(25)What
kind of Types are necessary to the Optimum Group we might ask. It is a lot more complicated than just Leaders
and Followers. The Leadership Cadre would be split up into Front Men and
Functional Executives. We know there are
Narcissistic Types, right? Why do we
even need them? Well, their High Opinion
of themselves is very contagious and while Experts can smell the Bullcrap,
normal people fall under it’s spell. But
that is what the Functional Executives are for, to supply the vigorous real
world expertise that would actually fulfill the promises of leadership. Then to flesh out the entire group, well,
science has only scratched the surface in establishing the various niche
specialized talents and abilities people have, but apparently broadly
functioning groups that are the best constituted for survival need all sorts.
(26)But now
let’s think of the social and political repercussions involved in Humanity’s
propensity towards forming in 100 person groups. One thing that studies show us is that
apparently people only have enough built in mental slots to cover for just over
about 100 names and faces. The studies
involved getting subjects to match names with faces using flash cards. Go much above 100 and the people in the cards
start looking alike. Also, in psychology
we hear a lot about people “projecting”.
This happens when people assign to some new person the characteristics
of another person they’ve dealt with extensively before.
(27)It is
crucially important in our discussion of Democracy to remember that in
primitive evolutionary times that people lived their entire lifetimes out
within one group and that mutual knowledge of each other must have ran very
deep. After such long acquaintance and
over thousands of interactions these Group Members must have known organically
what they could expect of each other.
That is probably one of the reasons why we are so dysfunctional today,
because instead of feeling like we are a well integrated part of some
collective Oneness, no, we are institutionally forced to live in small
claustrophobic nuclear families, where a man’s nerves can only be frazzled from
being penned with a female of the species and her brat kids, not exactly the
broadest and most exciting of lives, is it?
Yes, I’m thinking that we must be longing for life back in the Primeval
Group where we would seamlessly fit in and unquestionably belong. Now, even when we are in groups, well, they are always new ad hoc collections of
strangers where it is rare that anybody ever seems to answer to our
expectations and where we ourselves always seem to be misunderstood. The only person we can trust is ourself, and
just think how sick that is compared to our Evolutionary Norm where we were
practically ‘one flesh one mind’ with a hundred other people. Each one of us today is living in a Paradise
Lost which we're anxiously trying to regain.
(28) So we
could expect that our primitive instinctive longings would interpret the
Democratic Ideal, as the propagandists present it, as some kind of return to the original Garden
of our Primordial Group. And then our
understandable disappointments with our present Social Conditions and
Institutions would feed into attracting us more towards that Democratic Primordialism. The cry would always be "MORE Democracy can fix the
problems that THIS Democracy has in fact dumped upon us".
The honest
truth is that we can never re-achieve that bliss of oneness of being with the
same small comprehensible group for a lifetime.
Well, no, not unless some future
comprehensibly authoritarian and very well organized regime organized people
into such groups. Is it possible?
Yes? I’m sure it could be very likely.
(29)But up
till now we've only discussed what was good about the primitive primal groups
from which we evolved. It gets even
more interesting discussing their darker side.
We need to ask ourselves what happens
when the Group by natural increase exceeds the optimum size? Remember,
People don’t have the capacity to be inclusive beyond a certain point
and I would suppose that from that point we would get the onset of
Factionalism, and the Us vs Them dynamic.
There’s two ways things can go at that point. In the first case there can be a crisis and
the one Group subdivides, not evenly, but between Larger and Smaller, and the
Small Group immediately goes for a hike and creates some distance between
them. The second way things can go is
that there could be a life and death struggle between factions whereby the
excess numbers are killed or banished.
This uglier and more brutal resolution might be caused by restrictions
of territory where the group may already be boxed in between hostile groups who
would attack if old promises were broken in regards to creeping
expansionism.
What we can
note from archeological and anthropological data is that population levels at
this stage of Human Development were never that high. Also Primitive Peoples more often than not
develop a Warrior Ethos which means that life and death fights must be expected
as the norm.
(30)Now
think of our present Society. All of us
are tossed together with many times the top limit of 150 names and faces vying
for our attention. That would constantly
be pushing us into Us Vs Them factionalism and Side Choosing, dividing up our
acquiesces into Friends and Enemies. Now
think about what some Democratic Operatives could do with that. That is great for Voter turn out and
enthusiasm even while we can recognize how socially destructive these
irrational and purely instinctive impulses can be.
Then, again
because we are so overwhelmed with names and faces, we must constantly be projecting
personalities onto people who may only have a few salient physical
characteristics to remind us of those real people whom we either love or
hate. That means we can expect ourselves
to behave at least partially irrationally with many people we encounter, and
probably that the vast majority of our acquaintance aren't nearly what we think
they are. But this tendency towards
constantly projecting can have a political application. If studies show that people will predictably
'project' according to objectively discernable types, then it would be easy
enough to simply talent scout for candidates with the optimum physical
characteristics and after they are deterministically elected they can serve out
their offices as shills for those who engineered their rise to power.
Okay, In Our
Next Video we discuss in more detail how the Promised Ideals of the Age of Enlightenment
failed the Reality Test and what choices we have once Cynicism is staring us in
the face.
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