Socialist Fantasies and the Escape from Nature’s Prison

Memeplexes and the rebranding of philosophy and religion

There’s a trendy critique of post-industrial culture wars in western society that’s based on the thinking of civilization designers, entrepreneurs, and peak-state experts. These experts include Daniel Schmachtenberger, Peter Limberg, and Jamie Wheal, all of whom have appeared on the YouTube channel Rebel Wisdom.

Here’s an overview of their critique, drawn from some articles (here and here) and a video series. The theorists distinguish between strictly evolutionary human behaviour, which is rivalrous and self-destructive, and the more cooperative, inclusive, consensus-based behaviour we’ll need to survive and to keep up with technological progress.

The first type is known as “Game A,” since that’s our default mode that’s driven us for hundreds of thousands of years. Game A is egoistic, exclusive, and zero sum. It’s about winning in a competition for private gain where the other players have to lose. Game A is game-theoretic in that it’s about strategies for advancing under the evolutionary assumptions that resources are limited, others are out to get you, and there’s no divine referee.

In short, Game A is realistic in the Machiavellian sense; that is, Game A is conservative rather than liberal in that the players assume the worst-case scenario for social interaction, since these players are guided by Occam’s razor in declining to posit a deus ex machina. The result is an undercurrent of total war that bubbles to the surface even in superficially-civilized settings.

The alternative is Game B, an infinite, sustainable kind of society in which the members aren’t so overtly animalistic and clueless about the long-term consequences of their actions. Game B devotees would be wise and profoundly cooperative in maximizing their creativity and fulfilling their potential. In short, Game B would be the mindset of the far-future civilizations we read about in optimistic science fiction. Gene Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek, for example, seems to assume a Game B.

The trick is to get from here to there. These theorists, therefore, criticize the aspects of culture that are flagrantly Game A in their assumptions and effects. For example, Peter Limberg contends that modern culture war is waged by short-sighted “mimetic tribes” that flail about in response to various unresolved crises such as secularization and the meaning crisis, postmodern fragmentation of narratives which creates a reality crisis (the lack of a shared world of accepted facts), and globalization and the challenge of cosmopolitanism (the threat to personal identity based on the proximity of so many foreign cultures).

Limberg argues that tribes such as Social Justice Activists, #MeToo, Antifa, New Atheists, the Christian Right, Alt Right, Trumpists, and Incels are all attempting to impose their “memeplex” onto everyone else.

The problem, as Andrew Sweeny says, is that this kind of battle royal is “a war of propaganda, emotional manipulation, blatant or unconscious lies. It is nothing new, but is reaching a new intensity as our technology evolves. The result is that it has become harder and harder to make sense of the world, with potentially fatal consequences. If we can’t make sense of the world, neither can we make good decisions or meet the many challenges we face as a species.”

For example, so much of our online discussions amount to “bullshit” in the technical sense captured by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Mimetic tribes aren’t likely to care about the truth, so they blur the line between facts and opinions.

A wiser alternative, proposed by Game B theorists is to follow what they call “Rule Omega,” which is a principle of charity dictating that we should ignore the noise in our messages (Game A propaganda and bullshit) and focus on learning from each other’s signals. Following Rule Omega would require a truthful character and a commitment to speaking and acting in good faith as opposed to the mindless spewing of memes.

Another key concept, for Schmachtenberger, is “sensemaking” which is our need to explain the unknown or the anomalous in real-world situations, by arriving at plausible interpretations that preserve the uplifting meanings we attribute to life. As they’re practiced, our culture wars are often about exploiting that human tendency with “weaponized” fallacies that pollute the “information ecology,” requiring that we develop an “information immune system” or set of critical-thinking tools to distinguish between constructive and regressive discourses.

Rebranding Philosophical Radicalism

The reason I call the above critique “trendy” is that much of it amounts to flashy neologisms that rebrand very old concepts and indeed ubiquitous social issues. Virtually all of that critique could be framed in terms deriving from ancient Greek or existentialist philosophies.

The so-called “Rule Omega” is reducible to the Western concept of philosophy itself, to the Socratic love of knowledge as opposed to opinion. Philosophical dialogue is the cooperative enterprise that Plato distinguished from sophistry, from the deceptive rhetorical games played by lawyerly sophists who were more interested in earning money for their lessons than in working together to discover the truth.

The concept of sensemaking is part of a social-scientific analysis of the illogical or pragmatic aspect of our beliefs and behaviour that’s familiar to philosophers and to practitioners of religion. In daily life, we prefer myths and urban legends to exhaustive scientific explanations because the latter are amoral whereas the former reinforce what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called our “manifest image,” the intuitive, folk-psychological self-image that’s roughly the same as what Freud called the “Ego.”

As to Games A and B, that distinction amounts to the commonplace one between conventional normality and radicalism. The Game B theorist’s emphasis is on discovering a wise, sustainable, utopian mentality, but every radical speaks in glowing terms about her revelations and social recommendations. The point is that Game B is necessarily radical, which means this theorist is offering meta-criticisms of how culture is normally generated, not just refutations of this or that cultural product.

To reject Game A is to reject human social norms and traditions, and to search for a novel, even transhuman alternative. Recall that Socrates was the paradigmatic gadfly who became infamous for humiliating Athenian dogmatists. Similarly, the early Christians thought of their syncretic creed as revolutionary. In First Corinthians, Paul employs the Gnostic distinction between the natural and the spiritual man, the “psychikoi” and the “pneumatikoi.” The former are trapped by their obsession with material things, while the latter are able to transcend such primitive, animal preoccupations and to solve spiritual problems.

The only significant difference between Gnostic or theistic radicalism and so-called Game B is that the latter is science-friendly and therefore premised on secular humanism. For Paul of Tarsus, a transcendent “Spirit” saves us from the barbarism that would destroy us, by allowing us to discern what’s most important, namely the Bible and its promise of an opportunity to live forever in bliss.

Faith-Based Secular Optimism

The Game B theorists skirt this question of how they’d justify their optimism. Jamie Wheal, for example, points out that even enlightened individuals tend to regress into egoistic, atomized showboaters, because we prefer to work with those we trust. In short, birds of a feather flock together, and in a very large, heterogeneous group we find we have more in common with some subgroup. With the internet’s facility for microtargeted searches, we lose sight of underlying commonalities between everyone, because we’re able to occupy personalized niches online.

Wheal’s solution is that we should trust in a code such as Rule Omega, to put us all on the same page. But this raises the problem of the multiplicity of religions: Which myth should we trust? And would that trust be anything more than an arbitrary, Kierkegaardian leap of faith?

Sweeny says, “The war on sensemaking is actually a war against the human being, because the human being is in essence a sense-making creature, which is our curse and blessing. The same powers which make us so adaptive and intelligent are the ones that make us vulnerable to self-deception.”

To say that we’re essentially “sense-makers” is to say, with the philosopher David Hume for example, that our daily decisions aren’t strictly rational. We operate on intuition, impulse, and what cognitive scientists call “heuristic” rather than “algorithmic” reasoning. We often follow cognitive shortcuts that don’t guarantee success but are handy in real-word, time-sensitive situations. Assuming there’s no divine power such as the Gnostic or Pauline Spirit to guide us, it’s all-too easy to explain events in self-serving rather than community-oriented ways.

Indeed, it would be a mistake to identify Game A mentality with selfishness, since as Arthur Schopenhauer points out, much of our conventional behaviour, including monogamy, is geared to benefiting the species as a whole, not us as individuals. We’re disposable as far as evolution is concerned, which is why our metabolism slows down once we’re too old to reproduce and it’s why we’re willing to sacrifice ourselves to protect loved ones.

The main problem here is that if we’re talking about “sensemaking” or the nonrational, largely faith-based or intuitive judgments about what we find meaningful, these judgments aren’t objectively right or wrong. To ask for universal consensus about what we ought to find meaningful would be like asking for everyone to agree on the tastiest food or the most entertaining movie. Any such agreement would be superficial and arbitrary at best or else maintained by draconian measures.

Of course, there are cultural middle-grounds that accrue as the behavioural averages a society is willing to tolerate. These conventions or norms aren’t reached so much by voluntary consensus as by forced compromise between opposing powers. Evolution pulls us in one direction and our egos and cultural aspirations pull us in others. Radicals tend to find such a social norm distasteful because they’re purists who view compromise as a trap that prevents us from living up to an ideal.

From Anarchy to Oligarchy

One such social compromise goes by the informal name of the “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which says anarchical or free societies tend to fall back on organizing themselves around a hierarchical power structure, because power needs to be concentrated in the hands of a minority of leaders to manage a large group with any efficiency or intelligence.

Evolution reached this compromise in most social species, with the advent of the pecking order. The strong rule the weak and reap the bulk of the rewards, because if there were no such hierarchy, the group wouldn’t exist in the first place, since its rudderless ancestors wouldn’t have survived long enough to reproduce members of their kind.

We saw this elitist tendency play out in the Occupy Wall St movement, in which protestors condemned economic inequality and the plutocratic aspirations of the richest one percent, and thousands physically occupied Zuccotti Park for a month beginning on Sept 11, 2011.

The protestors’ socialist, progressive, or anarchic principles forbade them from distributing power unequally in their group, so they tried to make their decisions by reaching a consensus in their general assemblies, with hand signals. And as a direct consequence of that “progress,” the movement lost broader support because no clear list of policy demands was forthcoming from their cooperative group dynamics. Any simplification or compromise of the protestors’ varied interests and opinions would have been construed as oppressive.

That’s an example of how the natural resort to top-down power structures plays out in a negative fashion: Occupy was the exception that proved the rule, since the protestors didn’t follow the Iron Law and lost their movement.

A positive example of the same dynamic is apparent from the development of Wikipedia, the open-source, democratic encyclopedia. Wikipedia was founded on the idea of bottom-up self-organization; anyone could be a volunteer editor or moderator of its content. This encyclopedia was therefore meant to be an alternative to traditional encyclopedias that are produced by experts.

In practice, however, Wikipedia developed a bureaucracy in which trusted administrators are granted access to special tools to edit pages. With their effective vetoes, these high-level administrators can delete or protect pages and block or unblock contributors. Arguably, then, Wikipedia’s success is due in part to its evolving out of a free-for-all and into a top-down structure.

Toxic Femininity and Masculinity

Elitism or dominance hierarchy is the natural, default way of organizing groups of social species, including ours. True, for more than ninety percent of our time as a species, we lived as egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, but that’s because we were nomadic (we followed the herds of our prey) and our status-conferring possessions were limited to those we could carry on our person. Plus, the invention of spears around 400,000 years ago was an equalizer, since aggressive males could no longer rely on their size or strength to dominate others in the group.

Our chief evolutionary strengths are our opposable thumbs and our brain power, both of which were equally-enough distributed in each member of the tribe, compared to members of animal species whose social divisions were determined by fractional differences in variable bodily traits such as the size of their tail feathers, their skill at performing a mating dance, or their strength and aggression as displayed in physical combat.

Social inequality returned with the enormous sedentary societies made possible by farming, and as a result of our “civilized” implementation of the Iron Law, we tend to sort ourselves into social classes that reflect differences in our character, which is to say we adapt to the power-based niches depending on whether we’re fit to lead or to follow. We can be selfish, ambitious, and domineering or timid, deferential, and introverted.

What the flashy theorists call “Game A” is the predominant way of life for most social creatures that have been constrained, roughly speaking, by the compromise of the Iron Law. As is often pointed out, capitalism achieves its success by harnessing the flaws of our nature, namely our tendency to divide ourselves into dominance hierarchies in which, for short-term, private gain in this case, the masses follow ambitious innovators who degenerate into cabals of corrupted monopolists.

These theorists are surely correct that Game A, as such, is hardly sustainable on an ideal basis. Capitalism destroys itself by polluting the natural environment and by producing monopolies and frauds that periodically blow up the economy, requiring bailouts from the welfare state. See, for example, the Great Depression and the 2008 market crash.

As they outline it, Game B seems socialistic in that a spiritually-elevated culture wouldn’t tolerate dominant leaders. A Game B society would consist solely of deferential followers who would be more than willing to cooperate and compromise. As we saw with the Soviet Union, a communist society can devolve into an oligarchy that collapses under the regime’s internal contradictions, as the many citizens who prefer not to knuckle-under are swept into the gulags.

Another sobering foreshadow of what Game B would be like is the current woke state of much of America’s entertainment industry. Instead of being rewarded for creative risk-taking, movie producers, for example, are cowed by toxic slave morality. The forced compromise here is that everyone, besides the loathed white male oppressor, must be given his or her time in the spotlight even if the resulting feel-good propaganda saps the artistic value from the woke products.

One question for Game B theorists, then, is whether there’s a point of being a follower if there’s no room for leaders. What’s the purpose of running a race if no one’s allowed to win, because of forced equality? If you do allow for winners, as in Game A, you have the threat of toxic masculinity, of brutish machismo, psychopathy, and unjust inequality in which the cons of crony-capitalism produce pseudo-winners.

But in socialist Game B, you have the opposite threat of toxic femininity, of paralyzing slave morality (pulling winners down to the losers’ level), the dearth of ingenuity or creative vision, and the celebration of passive-aggressiveness, virtue-signaling, and “safe spaces.”

We likely need a Game C.

The Prospects of Global Wisdom

As far as it goes, the Game B theorists’ condemnation of the social mechanisms responsible for intractable sideshows and cultural spectacles is reasonable. These theorists are self-help gurus, motivational speakers, and entrepreneurs with science backgrounds, so they know how to popularize and to make money from the problems they identify.

Still, their optimistic plans for a Game B remind me of The Simpsons episode in which a conman sells Springfield a faulty monorail. For over two thousand years, philosophers and mystics have recognized the promise and peril of our potential to transcend nature’s inhumanity. Granted, philosophers only sat around and debated the issues and the mystics hid in their caves or joined the frauds of organized religions. Any social progress made by those old forms of cognition has been negligible or piecemeal at best.

We have the recent explosion of technological progress, which was initially hailed as having socialist ends, but instead, Big Tech succumbed to the Iron Law and gave us surveillance capitalism with its totalitarian overtones. The democratic hopes for the once-vaunted, Facebook-led “Arab Spring” were mostly dashed by authoritarian responses throughout the Middle East.

Theoretically, we have the means to spread messages of enlightenment around the world, but as the Game B theorists recognize, such messages have to compete with the seas of noise that are likewise free to compete in the information ecology. Just as social groups tend to settle into dominance hierarchies, we as individuals often submit to our baser impulses.

There’s every reason to think social progress is technically possible, since if the brain can be rewired for the worse — as in mental disorders, for example — it could be rewired for the better as in a godlike capacity for wisdom. That beneficent rewiring could be accomplished by some inauspicious dictatorial fiat or by a miraculous groundswell of support for profound insights. Flashy rhetoric may help to catalyze either intervention, but I suspect we’re still missing large pieces of the puzzle.