Are Our Best Practices Evolved or Centrally Planned?

A conflict of aphorisms

Two heads are better than one.

But too many cooks spoil the broth.

Let’s follow the logic of those dueling aphorisms to reckon with the advantages and the disadvantages of a free society.

Brainstorming in free societies

Adam Smith pioneered the defense of a decentralized society, with his invisible hand argument. He said that if you allow individuals to make independent rational decisions, without interference from an overbearing authority, you could have at least as much collective welfare as you’d have in a monarchy in which the king controls everything.

Paradoxically, the decentralized society features many rival heads working in opposition to each other. Yet that competition sparks innovation, minimizes the damage any individual can do (as well as privatizing the gains), and enables the distributed intelligence to solve local problems. Instead of a central planner making decisions that affect everyone in society while deprived of sufficient information, the free society fixes local problems at the local level, and the result is an unintended increase in collective welfare.

“Two heads are better than one” makes sense especially if the purpose is to brainstorm. When there’s no known solution or purpose, and indeed the task is only to generate ideas in a vacuum, you maximize your chance of striking upon a winning option by increasing the number of thinkers, asking for their independent input, and assessing the results at the end.

Brainstorming can be hampered if there’s only one responsible individual since anyone can fall victim to one of the many natural cognitive biases. For example, the longer you spend thinking about the same problem, the harder it might be for you to obtain a fresh perspective. If you have multiple people working on the same problem, the group is less likely to be mired in the same cognitive trap. There are fallacies that beset groups, of course, such as groupthink, tribalism, or mass hysteria. But the best way to overcome one person’s limitation is often to bring in someone who has a different set of limitations.

For that reason, professional writers rely on editors or hand their manuscript to other readers, to benefit from the fresh perspectives. Moreover, free countries with democratic governments and capitalistic economies are known to excel in innovation. The distributed intelligence brainstorms new ideas and the free world leads in modern inventions. Obviously, closed, patriarchal societies that censor thinking stifle creativity and waste women’s cognitive potential.

Efficiency in oligarchies

But what of the second aphorism? Whereas liberal society excels in creative endeavours when there’s no established guidance and we need to find a solution, maximizing individual freedoms can also lower society’s standards.

This is evidently why chains of command develop in social hierarchies, centralizing authority. Imagine a body trying to perform a single task if the body has multiple heads and brains, each pulling the whole in a different direction. The human brain is largely decentralized in that neurons fire on their own accord, and balance emerges from that competition in the network. But the human body has a single brain (with some competition from the gut).

The brain’s layers are infamous for already dividing our attention, as when our reason tells us one thing, but our emotions another. Yet these divisions would be far worse if there were no veto power at all in the brain or if there were multiple brains within each person.

Likewise, when the plan of action is established, as in a restaurant or a military, or on a movie set, hierarchies naturally develop to centralize command. “Too many cooks spoil the broth” means that when the goal is known, together with the best means of achieving it, efficiency is more important than creativity, and having redundant leaders makes the team less efficient.

There’s one head chef per kitchen, one senior commander in a military, and one film director per movie. When multiple leaders arise, the results are often notorious, as when the decision-makers squabble and dither and blame each other rather than taking responsible actions, or when the filmmakers compromise and lack a coherent artistic vision.

This is known informally as the Iron Law of Oligarchy. To maximize efficiency in achieving a goal, a group needs to delegate tasks that are overseen by a central commander. Infamously, the Occupy Wall Street movement disgraced itself by failing to abide by this principle. Instead, political correctness interfered with the movement’s purpose, so the movement achieved very little.

Likewise, although Wikipedia demonstrates the power of decentralized intelligence, as represented by the first aphorism, the online encyclopedia defers to the second aphorism, too, in that a team of elite editors nonetheless arose in the organization: “as the encyclopedia grew, and the number of collaborators grew with it, a cadre of die-hard editors emerged that have accounted for the bulk of Wikipedia’s growth ever since.” The result is that “77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors.”

A hidden agenda in free societies?

We see, then, that the two aphorisms or schools of thought don’t negate each other since they address different situations. Decentralized intelligence works in open-ended scenarios in which there’s no pre-established objective. Creativity by way of brainstorming or trial-and-error is the strength of this liberal system.

Just as clear is the strength of a central command structure, but only in scenarios that have a predetermined purpose. If everyone in the group knows the goal isn’t just to cook food, but to follow the official recipes, because the group is employed at a restaurant, it makes no sense to let all the cooks do whatever they want in the kitchen. That would be the least efficient way of producing the expected meals. Instead, you divide the workforce into ranks, the lower members being subordinate to the higher ones, and different cooks would perform different tasks, as managed by the head chef.

One question that liberal nations should be asking, therefore, is whether all societies have a pre-determined project after all, and thus one that would be most efficiently pursued in united fashion in obedience to some central authority.

Indeed, instead of leaving the matter up to our imagination, we might check whether free societies tend to revert to oligarchies despite their liberal principles. If so, we could reverse-engineer the hidden agendas being served by those shadow command structures.

Of course, most societies have mixed political and economic arrangements. Even feudal societies in the medieval period had somewhat competitive markets: “Sellers of particular goods, who paid an estate owner, the town, or borough council a fee for the privilege to have a stall, were typically set next to each other in areas so that competition was kept high.”

And a free society like the United States has robust competition in its economy but isn’t a pure democracy. Instead, the US is a democratic republic with a constitution implemented by elected representatives, and with a central bank. The US breaks up its government into three branches to help prevent an outbreak of tyranny. Thus, the US seems to recognize the wisdom in both aphorisms: trial and error in the economy, and elite assessments of the market’s output both within the management of each corporation and in the government bureaucracy.

But despite America’s relatively open market, we know that perfect competition is hard and perhaps impossible to obtain, which makes the relevance of the early modern economists’ models of capitalism unclear. What happens in real capitalist systems is that monopolies or oligopolies form as some firms achieve the upper hand in the competition for market share, and the winners find ways to consolidate their privileged standing, which stifles the competition. Indeed, the leading firms can even capture the governmental regulators and thwart the democratic system.

I won’t go into details here, but this is arguably what’s happened in the United States over the last century. Despite the social progress from the Progressive Era, FDR’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, this progress seems always to be an uphill battle because there’s another dynamic taking place, namely the one touched on by the second aphorism. Individual freedom ends up being reduced to make for more efficient social hierarchies or central command systems.

Again, as the national or even existential objective becomes clear, there’s less need for brainstorming. What matters then is a race to achieve the shared objective with the greatest efficiency.

Suppose, for example, the unstated national goal is to maximize everyone’s chance of enriching themselves. In that case, you’d have to ensure that everyone has the same advantages as the upper class, to eliminate the arbitrary differences between large groups. And the government would create a strong welfare state to enable the citizens to fail without destroying their later chances of success.

However, as we know from the collapse of the communist societies, this “nanny state” has the unintended consequences of emasculating the population and of weeding out the kind of sociopathy needed to sustain the insane ambition to become, say, a billionaire tycoon.

Yet if you went in the other direction and tried to breed a population of antisocial, would-be dominators, you’d have the opposite problem: feeding that savage competition would prevent an outbreak of civility, let alone of modern progress. The whole society would collapse in a reversion to the brutal state of nature.

Preserving the plutocratic rank ordering

What early modern liberal philosophers recognized is that there’s no cosmic or objective purpose of human life. There’s the pursuit of happiness, but the nature of that happiness is left undefined. It’s up to individuals in a free society to decide for themselves what’s best for them. Certainly, American culture protects those individual liberties.

But in addition to those protections there’s a hidden purpose which is to preserve the rank orderings that nevertheless form from the ground-level competitions. As each generation enters the workforce, and a minority of unscrupulous, ruthless, talented, or lucky competitors comes out ahead, or as the wealth of one generation is passed tax-free to the next, a social ranking system or class structure is established. The lower classes want to increase their stature, but the prevailing sense may be that they’ve had their chance. And the upper class wants to preserve its privileges, which means preventing the lower-class masses from taking its wealth or its place.

As the upper class gains control of the mass media and of the military-industrial-entertainment complex, and subverts the voters’ ability to enforce their will, by shifting the Overton Window, holding up legislation in the Senate, and vetoing popular agendas — such as gun control or increasing the minimum wage — with lobbying, campaign contributions, and revolving-door expectations, a covert consensus evidently forms: maintain the status quo that benefits the winners at the expense of the losers!

Fittingly, that consensus is consistent with the conservative impulse since that impulse is just the faith that the humanist’s attempt to progress beyond the primitive state of nature — in all but the most superficial ways — is vain. Conservatism is just social Darwinism propped up by pompous theological or twisted liberal rationalizations.

With that hidden agenda in view, to preserve the class structure that accrues from what’s supposed to be fair competition in the market, the second aphorism comes to the fore: efficiency in achieving the accepted purpose is paramount. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel or to put our heads together and to imagine alternative solutions or purposes. The wealthy decide on the nation’s function for the rest of us because they excel at consolidating their power. The effective plutocracy must be kept in place, and all social sectors must defer to that hidden purpose.

That purpose is hidden because it’s antithetical to America’s traditional, official values. The US is supposed to have fought for its independence against a stagnant, top-down empire, to protect the liberties of individual Americans. We know, however, that that philosophical justification was largely rhetorical since the Founders proceeded to exterminate or to sideline the indigenous populations and to generate their private wealth with an enslaved workforce.

Still, the rosy philosophies of liberalism and of secular humanism preserve the integrity of American society despite the cynical plan of the breakaway upper class. The talk of the American dream of equal opportunities and of the right to pursue happiness is like the fictional illusion that sustains the filmic Matrix. We’re kept docile because we want to believe we can make it too, even though no society can support more than a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy (and thus subcriminally sociopathic) individuals. We addict ourselves to the petty pleasures that lead us to think we have a lot to lose, so we rarely revolt with full power.

The gross inequalities perpetuate themselves because there are hidden systems in place that preserve them by gumming up and defunding the regulators, suppressing certain votes, and distracting the masses with vacuous culture wars and ludicrous religions.

The liberal’s existential purpose: the maximization of “progress”

We might return to the liberal’s assurance that because there’s no objective purpose which everyone should pursue, societies should be open-ended in leaving the question of life’s meaning to the individual to decide. Even if the universe doesn’t dictate how we ought to live, and the naturalistic fallacy blocks a simplistic appeal to certain natural norms such as the tendency to pursue pleasure or power, there might be an existential analysis of a universal human purpose.

Precisely because nature is amoral and indifferent to our value judgments, and we’re pattern-detecting and meaning-creating creatures par excellence, we inevitably conflict with the nonhuman world. Our path seems clear, which is that we seek to replace the meaningless world with a meaningful one. We imagine the inhumanity of the glorious, sublime, but also appalling wilderness that nature’s mindless forces, elements, and dimensions produce.

If that existential conflict is universal at least for civilizations, if not for nomadic and archaic-revivalist lifestyles, we can imagine a society that dedicates itself to achieving that objective with the greatest efficiency, and we can compare that society to the open-ended, liberal one.

In short, it’s possible that liberalism isn’t as neutral as it seems. Leaving the individual to discover his or her meaning in life seems at first like the fairest option. The idea is to tolerate all possible lifestyles, assuming they’re not oppressive. But the medium might be the message here: the respect for all freedom-loving pursuits presupposes a more universal answer to the question of life’s meaning.

By denying there’s a cosmic plan for everyone, the liberal implies that the meaning of life is to create as much human meaning as possible. This isn’t the maximizing of happiness or utility, contrary to neoliberalism; instead, it’s the maximizing of meaning, which is to say the maximizing of humanity at the expense of the wilderness (of the pristine, prehumanized state of nature).

It’s no coincidence, then, that the freest, most open-ended liberal societies are also the most “progressive” in that they accelerate the destruction of the biosphere to grow our artificial refuges.