Humans are specialist non-specialists. We are, by far, the apex self-modifying, all-purpose intelligence on this planet. All the other forms of life advanced by constant tweaking of their DNA hardware by the processes of Darwinian selection.
As a result, we have a universe of fantastic forms most wondrous to behold, each more-or-less exquisitely adapted to its particular ecological niche.
Humans are different, however. They are not niche specific. They are generalists. By virtue of various physical, especially neurological adaptations, they are equipped to learn, think and talk and to transmit knowledge both horizontally to others and vertically to succeeding generations. They learnt this within small groups and are thus a social species.
Since we were not specialists we wouldn’t have survived unless we had been unusually adaptable and cooperative – developing technologies to protect ourselves against external threats, including the vagaries of the environment, and the ability to hunt larger and more dangerous animals.
Once this trajectory got off the ground, those early humans best at learning, transmitting, accumulating, innovating and cooperating survived and a new evolutionary pathway appeared: the cultural.
Humans did not have to wait for the slow processes of genetic evolution to get cleverer and adapt to their surroundings. They could move to new surroundings or modify their environment to suit them better and create new tools for storing and transmitting information, to find food and new sources of energy, and defeat enemies.
This slowly became a self-reinforcing run-away process that now threatens us with extinction. (See ‘Unbound’ by Richard L Currier, Arcade Publishing, 2015 for a readable overview).
Tribes and Tribal Psychology
Throughout this prolonged seven-million-year process, our predecessors lived in small, cooperative bands in constant conflict with neighbouring bands. Over much of human evolution the global population was less than most modern large cities (reaching 4 mil. approx 10 000 years ago), so that our psychology was exquisitely adapted, both genetically and culturally, to small-scale tribal life.
All this changed in a relative hurry following the agricultural revolution in which new, more reliable, sources of food allowed for an increase in regional population densities. Suddenly, in place of isolated quarrelling tribes in a state of quasi-equilibrium, we had large agglomerations of people.
Given one technological advance, the domestication of plants and animals, other political changes followed. To understand what this entailed we need to look at the political organisation of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer (HG) bands. They were regulated by what can be called coercive egalitarianism.
In brief, this meant that ‘all supervised all‘ – watching carefully for over-dominant behaviour, free-riding, deception and the like. Such individuals would be targeted for pointed banter, then all the way to ostracism, expulsion and murder.
We have largely inherited a Pleistocene psychology in which mutual cooperation and altruism reigned within the tribe, but outsiders could be treated with the utmost brutality. Mutilation, torture and outright cannibalism were common in inter-tribal conflict. We need to look more closely at basic Homo Sapiens psychology if we’re to understand politics. You can find a neat and brief summary on Rob Henderson’s Substack.
Political Psychology
Over the last few decades or so there has been a revolution in the extent and depth of our understanding of human evolutionary-social psychology. Since this is a work in progress and there is no consensus, I’m going to skip the conventional academic silos and adapt current concepts to a general audience interested in the political dimension. For the sake of flow, some of the detail will be relegated to the endnote.
The bottom line is that our moral and political psychology is a hodge-podge of highly context-sensitive emotions and cognitive shortcuts (heuristics), finely attuned to what the rest of the tribe is thinking – especially those with status and power. The precise weighting of these characteristics varies between individuals, cultures, ideologies and socio-economic groups and so forth.
The power-dominance impulse, conformity-tribal-identity complex and empathy-altruism-fairness cluster are all notable features of the human political psyche. Various combinations of these social-moral instincts, together with intelligence and personality factors plus cultural and other non-genetic contributions, create an infinitely rich palette of potential individual human responses to politically charged inputs. In reality, group dynamics and the constraints of reality ensure that responses fall mainly into one of a few modes, such as: for, against, uncertain or simply uncommitted.
Since politics primarily represents the constraint and control of the power-dominance impulse in human society, it’s worth examining this drive in slightly greater detail which I do below.
The Special Case of the Dark Triad and Political Power
This is an opportune time to reflect on the special place of the dark triad (DT) cluster of psychological traits in politics. Generally, the DT is defined as (1) a callous indifference, namely, lack of empathy and guilt for the suffering of others, (2) narcissism and (3) machiavellianism – ie. devious and manipulative behaviour.
These traits can be expressed in different degrees and in various combinations. The term, ‘Dark Tetrad’ (DTT) has been coined to describe the combination of the DT with outright sadism added over and above simple callousness. Other variants include the ‘the dark empath’ which shows higher empathic responses than the typical DT personality or even normal people. Generally, DT types are perceived as disagreeable and bullies, while dark empaths can come across as empathic and pleasant.
Doubtless this is a rich field for psychologists to explore, but for our purposes we can identify a broad class of people who are variably callous-sadistic, narcissistic and manipulative. Depending on upbringing and personality traits, including intelligence, different combinations can result in a life of petty or violent crime or, at the other extreme, such people can become captains of industry or powerful, influential or disruptive politicians.
To summarise: since all social-political arrangements are subject both to internal churn and destabilising external assaults of various kinds, this stress-testing sorts out the stable from the unstable political configurations. There is evidence (see here and here) that prominent in this mix are DT-DTT or related personalities which are over-represented in more extreme and authoritarian politics.
These fundamental realities bring us to the fundamental issue of our age: what kind of societies are going to survive this trial by fire, and what will that mean for the future of humanity?
Societies and Basins of Attraction (BoA)
Human cognition easily slips into binary thinking. Doubtless, the challenges of survival in our evolutionary past favoured ‘either-or’ decision making, but such heuristics do not take into account complexity and informational deficit.
Complex systems (such as human societies) are characterised by non-linear dynamics, interactive networks and critical tipping points. Simple binary reasoning may not be adequate for meeting the challenges posed by the ubiquitous complex systems encountered in politics and the natural world.
Unless they descend into chaotic states, complex societies assume relatively stable configurations which reflect the characteristics of the humans of which they’re composed, as well as the dynamic structure of the whole. Such systems are also responsive to external inputs. Preferred stable configurations are called basins of attraction (BoA) in the jargon of the discipline.
How do we characterise such BoA: according to size? complexity? form of governance? wealth? or culture and social organisation? This can rapidly become complicated and confusing. (See here for a conventional but informative approach to the taxonomy of human societies)
Rather than attempt an academic, formal classification, I’ll stick to everyday speech and suggest the following 3 clusters (or basins) based primarily on the flow and distribution of power within the society, but also including an element of size and complexity:
1. Authoritarian Societies in which the flow of power is primarily top-down.
2. Democratic Societies in which power flows in both directions
3. Mafioso Societies in which power is distributed between rival mafias, bands and sometimes weak central government.
While each society reflects the particularities of its history, ecology, demography, traditions and, possibly, the pre-dispositions of its citizens, the boundaries are not sharp between the different clusters or basins.
The bottom of a basin represents the ‘idealised’ (archetypal) form of that particular cluster, but variants, perhaps functionally superior variants, climb the sides of the basin thus approaching closer to other clusters in neighbouring basins. In this way hybrids appear which may be difficult to allocate to a particular basin.
My working assumption in this approach is that flow of power within a society, and the cultural norms and formal institutions which govern that flow, will play an important role in the individual happiness and social stability within that society.
Authority versus Freedom
‘The only constant is change’ they say, and of course this is true of politics and societies. Following on the domestication of plants and animals about 10 000 years ago, and the regional increases in population density referred to earlier, the small-scale, intimate egalitarianism of the HG band was replaced by increasing need for top-down coordination of large numbers of people with no basis for mutual trust.
Enter Authoritarianism in which individual families or oligarchies could capture power and coerce and persuade others to obey them. Coercion was always present and relatively straightforward, but persuasion required more finesse. It could include the fruits of conquest, bribery and demonstrations of power, glory and moral superiority.
Religions or even secular ideologies serve to provide the moral justification for the existence of rulers, hierarchy and the exercise of power. They also provided the general population with moral codes of behaviour towards each other and towards authority, while simultaneously sanctioning brutality against enemies. Sometimes these were encoded in cultural traditions, but as societies became larger and more complex, specialised castes appeared as did legal systems for resolving disputes.
Other cultural technologies included public monuments to the power and divinity of rulers, public displays including marches and shared rituals which encouraged the identification of the masses with the leviathan which ruled them.
While the thrust of individual ambition amongst the elites and the sharp pangs of deprivation amongst the lower classes could never be entirely eliminated, these could be countered by the cautious extension of privilege and rewards, combined with some sharing of power. Nevertheless, all such social engineering came with risks to internal stability exploitable by external enemies. Together with the unexpected depredations of disease and other external calamities, all great empires were destined to end.
Despite the attrition of time, such authoritarian traditional structures did demonstrate a remarkable adaptability and resilience over many millennia in different regions. Over the last few centuries, it was only in the West and its colonies that the power gradient within societies shifted sufficiently to the general populace to be called Democratic.
The causes for this are complex and disputed but with democracy, whether cause or effect, came technological innovation, free markets, massive population and territorial expansion, prosperity, longevity and unparalleled military power. The impact on the traditional authoritarian world as well as on the undeveloped regions of the globe was both destabilising, traumatic and potentially liberating.
This history is close to us in time, and the outcomes are very much in flux. While democracy brought unparalleled expansion of human freedoms, power over nature and personal comfort, it has also come with serious problems.
The liberation of the individual came with a variety of formal institutional guardrails, as well as informal norms and values designed to produce social order and cooperation. But these too could be harnessed to the will of powerful individuals and coalitions. The exercise of power did not disappear with the advent of democracy but has become more subtle and less susceptible to detection and resistance.
In addition, the expansion of individual freedom and rights has been bought at some inescapable cost in social connection and solidarity, and vulnerability to external penetration. The massive penetration of digital communication technology into our lives has also brought new stresses to the social fabric through increased exposure to emotional triggers and informational complexity.
Narratives of virtuous victimhood can be used by unscrupulous actors to undermine susceptible individuals in open democratic countries. Such vulnerabilities can be amplified by sophisticated campaigns aligning with prevalent political fashions and elite power struggles, backed by the power of digital communications plus the credible threat of social violence.
It may turn out that the complex mix of rationality, stable institutional guardrails, internalised pro-social values and mutual trust required by successful democrac is beyond the capacity of most societies. Undue internal diversity, scale, historical grievances, rate of technological change together with deliberate destabilisation by external enemies may overwhelm the ability of democracies to prevail against the simpler and millennia-old authoritarian political technologies.
The Mafioso Basin: The terms mafia, mafioso etc come from the predatory crime families of Sicily, but this is nothing new in human history. It is as much a political phenomenon as a ‘criminal’ issue. In the mafioso basin, I include all political entities whose main function is predation or parasitism. These are, by definition, essentially authoritarian and usually small-scale, where power is wielded by a warrior class lacking the capacity or inclination to create large-scale, complex and ‘civilising’ polities.
Nomadic mafias were likely a common phenomenon in the early millennia following agriculture, especially in those areas in which agriculture was more difficult to establish or in which regional density was sufficiently high. In regions perhaps less conducive to agriculture , nomadic and potentially predatory pastoralists persisted and occasionally burst out to wreak havoc on more peaceful communities.
A deep historical lens reveals the evolution of some mafiosos into ‘civilised’ societies (see Italian city states for example) and, conversely, the fragmentation of previously coherent states into warring bands under the impact of internal and external challenges. Even in stable and functional democracies, mafioso politics persists in the form of criminal gangs of differing sizes and sophistication. Large parts of Africa, the Middle East, South America and even Europe exhibit the persistence of mafioso politics in various forms into the 21st century.
In Summary
This has been a broad-brush attempt to visualise politics as the regulation of the power impulse in society. Power interacts with other elements of the human psyche and with technological innovation to produce various political configurations which I have simplified into four main clusters (basins of attraction): HG bands, mafias, authoritarian and democratic societies.
None of these developments are set in stone. The stress-testing process of internal political churn and external competition continues relentlessly, changing the form and distribution of the political landscape. Technology which has always been a key determinant in human affairs has become even more prominent and disruptive over time.
It is hoped that this approach is useful in orienting us to the forces operating beneath the noise of everyday political strife and the stakes involved. By treating commonly used political terms in a new way, we can perhaps escape the pull of binary thought and moral labelling and see the issues more clearly. The current political scene provides no grounds for complacency
Endnote:
A rough guide to the human political psyche
- The fear-aggression-lust-envy cluster: common to all adaptive life forms serving basic survival needs
- The coalitional-tribal-identity cluster: humans are primarily social beings and their personal identity is bound up with group membership. This permeates the political psychology of humans and can account for a great deal of collective human behaviour to this day.
- The shame-honour-conformity-punitive cluster: this arises out of intelligent small-band, high-threat life in which co-specifics are closely observed for evidence of group commitment. Personal reputation for honesty, humility, conformity to group norms meant survival and significant deviation could mean exclusion and death.
- The empathy-loyalty-personal sacrifice cluster: also a small group cluster which enhances personal reputation and promotes group survival.
- The power-dominance-submission-authority cluster: mainly a relic of our earlier primate ancestors which did not disappear under the pressures of egalitarian small group life.
- Self-regulation-strategic deception-planning cluster: important in small-group life in competition with intelligent and potentially dangerous con-specifics competing for status and resources.
- The status-conformist bias: learning from and associating with high status individuals confers survival benefits.
- The rational-logical-truth seeking drive: survival also depended on the detection of causal relationships and making accurate predictions and appropriate decisions.
- The cognitive heuristics cluster: this represents a series of intellectual shortcuts which could simplify decision-making under the constraints of time and insufficient information. Such shortcuts include the availability bias, the conformist and status biases, the confirmation bias etc.
- And at the apex of this mental machinery precariously sits the plastic, self-aware, culture- and context-sensitive, symbolic and metaphoric, imaginative, attentive, communicative and enquiring human brain.
This may seem a bit much to digest in political discussion, but everything in politics (so far) is ultimately filtered through human consciousness. All political systems and societies reflect in part the interaction of the whole with the human brains which produced it. This dialectic determines the fate of individual societies, so it’s important for us to have some grasp of the fundamental human units which comprise societies, whether criminal gangs, sports teams, states or empires.
Different political technologies, from HG bands to theocracies and other authoritarian tyrannies to secular, liberal democracies to criminal cartels, have to align at least to some extent with the human dispositions which compose them.
Such social collectives in turn modify the brains which comprise them so that the fit between the two evolves and improves, at least in theory. Politics is what happens in practice.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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