Four Core Problems to Focus On
Looking around, you might notice that nothing is working properly. Our global society is riddled with problems and crises that continue to get worse with every passing day. We have serious problems such as extreme inequality, high cost of living, low wages, inflation, poverty, pandemics, pollution, increasing climate instability, endemic market crashes, and war.
The way society works today has nothing to do with the way humans or the world truly are. There is a complete mismatch between society, people, and the natural world. This is why we have so many problems. If the way society works was based on how humans and the world actually work, then we wouldn’t be having so many problems. All of these crises we are facing are a sign that 21st-century human society is poorly designed. We focus on designing everything around us, except society.
This means that to solve all our problems, we need to completely rethink the way we understand society and redesign it based on that new knowledge. This new way of thinking about society leads us to the root causes of our problems, which allows us to create a paradigm shift that can solve all the problems simultaneously by addressing the fundamental causes of our problems. Building this new paradigm and explaining the intricacies of the solutions it uncovers is the subject of the book I’m writing. Here are some of the core problems that this new paradigm uncovers and some of the solutions.
Simplistic and Dualistic Thinking
We live in a very complex world, but our brains were not designed to deal with such complexity. We tend to simplify the world to increase our understanding of it. To a certain extent, this simplification was necessary thanks to our limited capacity to accurately process information. However, we have gone too far and oversimplified the world. We have oversimplified the world both from a social perspective and a scientific perspective.
Our brains are limited but, more importantly, our experiences are also limited. We don’t each experience the whole world, so our understanding of the world tends to get skewed towards our experiences of it. This leads to the development of certain biases, which are usually caused by the social groups within which we are born. This tendency to subscribe to a certain perspective of the world based on the social groups we are born into has since been reinforced by a virtual environment that is designed to create echo chambers where we are only exposed to ideas that conform to our worldviews. These echo chambers further isolate people from different perspectives, which reinforces the bias, leading to a very dualistic kind of thinking and extremist points of view.
When science was in its infancy, we didn’t have much information available to work with. We had to start somewhere, and we had to be careful to make sure that the information was accurate. Our reductionist scientific paradigm was helpful for some time. It worked by breaking the whole universe into parts and understanding the parts in isolation. This was helpful because we didn’t have a lot of confirmed information yet, so we had to first make sure that the information we had was correct before we could build on it. However, over time, that has led us to oversimplify the world because the world is, in reality, deeply interconnected, so the various parts affect one another, changing each other and the world as a whole. Understanding the world in isolation is not sufficient. We also need to understand how everything fits together and interact. Science has become more interdisciplinary over the past few decades, but from a practical perspective, at university, we are still largely operating under the old paradigm. We need to update science to make it more interdisciplinary.
Hyperindividualism
We live in a very individualistic society. This is particularly true in the West, though the whole world has been influenced by Western individualistic culture. In an individualistic society, the individual is valued and prioritized over the group. To a certain extent, individualism makes sense. We exist as individuals and we have a lot of value as unique individuals. We also have a lot of rights as individuals, regardless of the groups we belong to. We are free to be who we are and to act as individuals. However, we live in a world that overemphasizes the individual to the point that it is harmful not only to society as a whole but also to individuals.
We should have the freedom to make our own decisions, but not if our decisions harm others. If our decision affects others in any way, they should have a say in those decisions, otherwise, we are making the decisions for them and their freedom to make their own decisions is being denied to them. We live in a society where a few people make very significant decisions that affect the whole society and where most people have little to no say in the decisions that affect them. This is, then, not a free society.
We don’t live in a society that truly protects the rights and freedoms of individuals. It claims to do so, but it fails to do so because the extreme cultural emphasis on individualism has created a hyperindividualistic society that is ultimately harmful to individuals. Freedom must be counterbalanced with responsibility and accountability. If people have the freedom to do whatever they want regardless of how they affect other individuals, they end up harming other individuals. Individuals must have a sense of responsibility towards others. They must respect the rights and freedoms of other individuals. They must also be held accountable for their decisions when they harm others. Without responsibility and accountability, there can be no freedom.
This hyperindividualism also influences all systems of society, making society deeply uncoordinated and fragmented. Different systems fail to communicate with each other and even compete against each other when they should be collaborating toward their common goal. Hyperindividualism is the foundation of the free market. In the free market, we exist and interact only as individuals. The free market is supposed to regulate itself, but it fails to do so for many reasons. One of the reasons is that individuals in the free market are so autonomous and competitive that they become disconnected from each other, impeding the flow of information that is necessary for the free market to function. This ultimately leads to a lack of coordination in society that destabilizes its systems.
Hypercompetition
Like individualism, competition may have a benign purpose, but taken to the extreme it can be very harmful. A hyperindividualistic culture naturally leads to a hypercompetitive society where isolated individuals compete for resources and power without taking into consideration other individuals. In other words, an excessive emphasis on competition leads to a deeply divisive and fragmented society. The greater the emphasis on individualism and competition, the greater the divisiveness and fragmentation a society experiences. This is why places such as the USA, which has the culture that most emphasizes individualism and competition, suffer from a much greater degree of divisiveness and fragmentation than, say, Japan, which has a culture that emphasizes the community and encourages respect between individuals and care for the community.
In nature, competition helps regulate the population of species. This is done through a fine balance between the number of predators and prey, which balance out each other. Too few predators can lead to an overpopulation of prey while too many predators can lead to the extinction of prey. In the human society we have today, competition is supposed to help regulate the size of businesses so that no business becomes too big and powerful. There are many reasons why this doesn’t work in practice, but the important point for now is that even if competition worked within this economic setting, it would still lead to a fragmented society that lacked coordination. Furthermore, economic competition spills over into the psychological and political realms, which leads to friction between people and divisiveness.
Competition doesn’t work very well, but it is an imperfect solution within an environment where there is limited information exchange and accumulation. Competition enables order to spontaneously emerge within systems where information exchange and accumulation are limited. But because that information exchange and accumulation is limited, it is inherently unstable, leading to chaotic cycles. Now that we have the capacity to exchange and accumulate vast amounts of information, we can create far more stable self-regulating systems intermediated through cooperation instead of competition. The problem is that many, if not most, people have so much faith in this competitive system that they can’t see that it has become obsolete thanks to the new information technologies of the 21st century.
Centralization, Decentralization, and Intermediation
A lot of problems in society come from a concentration of power in the hands of a few people. This concentration of power is often blamed on the centralization of systems. This is most obvious when it comes to governments. Governments are systems that centralize power in the hands of a few. At the most extreme, you can have a government where a single person has significant power over all of society, but even so-called “democracies” are plagued with centralization of power and bureaucracy. Many people, as a result, would rather make governments as small as possible or get rid of them entirely.
But the problem is not just governments. Corporations present us with the same problem. Corporations are, effectively, private governments. They have exactly the same organizational structure that governments do – a centralizing hierarchy where information, power, and resources flow up the chain while orders flow down. This leads to a sluggish unresponsive form of organization that accumulates too much information, power, and resources in the hands of a few while being unable to adapt to changes in the environment quickly enough.
Some would argue that the solution, then, is decentralization. Decentralization does help to a certain extent, but there are also problems with decentralization. Too much decentralization can lead to a largely disconnected and uncoordinated system, where different parts of the system don’t have enough information to make accurate decisions. This is particularly problematic if the different parts of the system compete, which means that they have an incentive to withhold information or even misinform in order to win the competition. Furthermore, decentralized systems have centralizing tendencies, as centralization leads to economies of scale and greater efficiencies which give them great advantages in competition.
The biggest problem that nobody talks about is not centralization or decentralization, but intermediation. Intermediation is the process of connection between two actors. Those actors can be people, organizations, or other different kinds of systems. One of the core problems with our society is that artificial positions of power have been created where people are dependent on some form of intermediation in order to gain access to their needs. For instance, you might have a landlord who you depend on in order to have housing. This puts you in a position where you have no choice but to obey your landlord. The landlord, in turn, is in a position where they have power over you. This is an artificial asymmetric relationship because the two people possess different degrees of power in the relationship, and it is artificial because it is socially constructed. Society could have been designed in another way where such a relationship didn’t exist. Nearly all power in society is derived from such artificial social positions. The solution is not to decentralize or centralize power but, rather, to distribute power by eliminating all artificial asymmetric relationships in society.
This is my first attempt at starting a book. Does this feel like a book you might read? If so, what else would you want included?
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