Wave theory of Society

The limiting factor of language.

When talking about societies and civilization, it's hard not to be constrained by language. Inevitably, we have to talk in terms of conceptual units, like kings, merchants and slaves, or in generalized classes, such as the bourgeois, the elites, the working class, etc...

But words are not realities, and trying to describe societies using the words generated by those societies seems like a losing proposition. 

Kings and Emperors.

What is a King and what does it mean for a country to have one?

America has always made a big deal about not having a King, or a formal aristocracy. But it still has an elite, and it still has an executive form of government. How much difference is there between a King and a President? Or a hereditary aristocracy and a corporate elite?

If the President orders everyone to kill their firstborn son, would they do it? Of course not. But neither could a King really order such a thing, except in stories.

Even in medieval societies, The King didn't really issue orders. He embodied the will of the elites. He was a rubber stamp on policies that would have emerged with or without him. And that will is limited by the power of the elites over the lower levels of society. The institution of elites, King and Commoners is just a psychological convenience to describe a complex system of power.

The actions of the King seem to take on an executive aspect, because he is ordering society to do the kinds of things it wants to do anyway.

In the same way that we imagine our brains as a little anthropomorphized pilot in a meat vehicle, the view of individualized agency is only an illusion. If we're hungry, we can avoid eating for a little while, but eventually our bodies will force us to obey our biological imperatives. It is possible to overcome the limits of agency offered by our animal existence, but it requires integration into something bigger than ourselves; a meta organism in the form of our societies and the social norms that help us to live as more than beasts.

If we give up thinking of humans as discrete, self contained organisms with absolute agency and personal responsibility, we need other ways of thinking about humanity.

Points on a line.

Instead of thinking in discrete concrete elements, how about thinking of vectors?

Imagine society laid out as points on a line. There's really no division between one point and the next. We're not thinking in terms of integers here. The number of divisions between 0.0 and 1.0 is infinite.

The King is not separate from his nobles, and they are not separate from the commoners. Each aspect of the whole could not exist without the others. Like a brain in a jar, its functions would not work when removed from the organism. A King locked in prison, wearing an iron mask, is no longer King. A slave, stranded on a desert Island is no longer a slave to anyone but themselves.

Of course the line doesn't always look like x=y. Some societies have steeper or shallower curves. Some have complex curves.

Either sharp curves that eliminate the middle, or those that extend it.

From curve to wave.

Once you see this idea, it's natural to extend the idea to think of societies in terms of wave forms.

You can imagine different kinds of societies, with different amplitudes (representing levels of inequality, from top to bottom) or different frequencies (representing individual units; cities, countries, neighborhoods, empires...)

The Y axis represents material and social benefits of high status (or lack there of). The X axis represents distribution across different social meta-groups. One peak/dip combination might be one community. Again, these societies aren't distinct. There's no border or end between one and the next. They are part of a larger wave form.

There could be high energy societies and low energy societies.

The higher the highs, the lower the lows; You can't have rich people without poor people. You can't have a god emperor without slaves

You can't have billionaires without inherited wealth and inherited debt servitude.

And there can be more complex curves described by a wave.

 We could also look at absolute position of the Wave. Moving it up 2 units on the y axis would mean even the slaves suffer no negative impact from their relative inequality... But I suspect that only the relative advantage of amplitude really allows that relative advantage.

Mass production allows economies of scale. But it also allows monopolies and extreme wealth disparity. It might be hard to measure absolute wealth and relative wealth.

Implications.

We can make a broad division between high energy societies and low energy ones.

A society of tribes of hunter gatherers is a low energy wave, with little amplitude of difference and high frequency of meta-entities.

Today's global economy is a high energy society, with massive inequality and large sub-units.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and what kind of society evolves is subject to the same kind of pressures that affect biological evolutionary selection.

If we look at history, we can see times when higher energy societies started to emerge. They had benefits for the members; more efficient production, larger possible settlements, more free time for the elites, more social control that eliminated low level conflicts... 

...but they had down sides too.

High levels of guard labor and social control are required to sustain a high energy wave. Inequality creates exploitation and lack of trust. A feeling of anger at the system and scapegoats, folk devils, that represent it. The low level conflicts that are suppressed can feed high level conflicts, resulting in wars and revolutions.

Often in the historical record, you can see times when the wave collapsed and people just walked away from these societies. For the individual members, the down sides exceeded the benefits. it wasn't possible to preserve the wave through guard labor alone, and the empire fell apart.

But wave collapse isn't painless. A high energy society can sustain much higher levels of consumption and populations than a lower energy society. If our global economy collapsed overnight, and we were plunged back to pre-industrial levels of organization, a lot of people would die.

Entering into a higher level society requires a devil's bargain. Each time we moved to a higher level, we made it possible to live with higher population densities and higher levels of consumption. But we also made it nearly impossible to go back to the "earlier" model without suffering a painful transition.

And?

If we look at society this way, what ideas does that offer us in terms of making things better? Obviously we don't really want to live with the down-sides of massive inequality and a constant shifting to higher and higher levels of consumption... it's just not a stable or sustainable pattern. Collapse is inevitable.

So could we reduce amplitude (inequality) while changing frequency? Smaller social units? Or larger ones? Could a slow return to pre-industrial civilization be managed without violent collapse?

Could we really engineer asymmetrical distribution? Could we have rich people without having poor people?

Previous large scale attempts at this kind of society make it seem unlikely. Removing poverty tends to also remove the mechanism that allows massive wealth. Trying to cheat the numbers through manipulation of the symbolic aspects of the system leads to long term problems, as the system always has to return to equilibrium over time. We can't make everyone rich by printing more money and giving it to everyone. If everyone is rich, no-one is. Behind the numbers represented by currency, there's still the real numbers of resources and labor allocation.

If that's not possible, then there are those that advocate a return to a pre-industrial low energy society. But bearing in mind the requirement to massively reduce consumption and population, that has its own problems. Can we really reduce consumption without reducing population? Can we create a low energy society where we don't spend 16 hours a day farming just to survive? And wouldn't there still be some relative poverty to compound the problem of absolute poverty?

What about Robots? There is the idea that we've already reached the point where not every section of the line needs to be populated by humans;

This model relies on the idea that all the robots are communally owned. Otherwise the benefits of robot labor go to the elites and we end up with a situation where the robots live better than most humans in terms of rights and resource consumption.

Maybe we don't have much of a "choice". Few organisms get to decide what form they evolve into. It's likely that our evolution to the next state change will be forced upon us. It will be interesting to see what it looks like; If we survive the violence of the wave collapse. 

End.

In any case, I've found that abandoning the idea of humans as unique, precious individuals, either sinful or virtuous, at least has the benefit of helping to avoid simplistic silver-bullet, utopian theories of politics. The world isn't like it is because somewhere a bad guy is doing bad things. It's not going to be improved by finding that guy and defeating him.
Look at America; the King is dethroned, but the problems that he embodied remain.

There are possible different ways of living. But they come with pros and cons compared to the society that we currently live in. And there's always the problem that any wave is self sustaining. Everyone along the continuous line of the wave is working to preserve the status quo. Either voluntarily or involuntarily. It's not just a case of a faceless elite forcing everyone to follow orders. The King can't order people to do anything that they, collectively, aren't already prepared to do anyway. The benefits of power percolate upwards, so that anyone who isn't at the bottom of the graph feels some positive results from their place on the line.

Once that stops being true, the wave collapses to a lower energy state. It becomes chaotic before finding a new equilibrium.

Most of us live above zero on the lines above. We'd probably be worse off individually under a lower energy system. But there would almost certainly be collective benefits, especially in terms of the environment that we can't avoid in the long term.