Identify a 'minority' and blame them

But in all of this mess we are still seeing the continued rise of prosociality.

I wrote this article a while ago now, in light of what is happening in the UK I thought I would rewrite it and present it again.

Today, again, politicians are focused on symptoms and ‘us versus them’ rather than getting to root causes and addressing them. Shouting about hooligans and saying things like “Prison places ready for 'thuggish' rioters” and “will face “a reckoning” is just media fodder and adds fuel to the flames.

These same politicians seem detached from reality “So we should be clear, there will be people who were thinking they were going on their summer holidays this week, and instead they will face a knock on the door from the police.” says the new UK Home secretary. People who struggle to pay their bills, work three jobs, have to decide whether to ‘eat or heat’, whose children eat at school or go without aren’t likely to be able to afford a ‘summer holiday’.

It would be better if those politicians were to get down from their media soundbite platforms and start discussions with the disaffected who are out on the streets. Oh wait! Parliament is in recess as it’s the holiday season.

Much of what has happened in the past and in today’s world can be better understood when we incorporate a ‘social status’ (the relative level of social value a person is considered to possess.) parameter into our analyses and understanding of the past and present. Social status, or perceived social status is a driving force behind many different types of behaviour. Today we have wars, conflicts, corruption, depravity as certain individuals seek to augment their preceived social status or react to perceived insults to their social status.

Today we have increasingly fragmented societies made up of groups of people who live in social media echo chambers. These chambers encourage confirmation bias, attitude polarisation, false correlations and the preservation of beliefs. Someone who is in a difficult financial and social position, living in a country next to people who are extremely well off, can easily be convinced that their problems are all because of some perceived ‘minority’.

This falls on fertile ground because we have been educated and brought up this way. Simple binary causes and effects. Jobs are scarce and it’s because people are ‘flooding’ in from other countries and taking them. Binary, simple to understand and of course completely simplisitic and wrong. These echo chambers also offer a platform to those seeking to get known and thereby raise their preceived social status. One can wonder if these people really believe what they shout but then again the same can be asked to many mainstream politicians.

Can one say that the destruction of property, attacking vulnerable people, torching cars etc is justified? No, as it tends only to hurt people in the same or worse position than those doing the damage, it’s crap for the environment too.

Attacking vulnerable people, for example in a building, is just obscene bullying of the worst kind.

Elite over-population

We Humans have a tendancy to ‘punch down’, we aren’t the only ones. After having been aggrieved by a more dominant individual, chimpanzees, humans and others will head off to reaffirm their social status by taking it out on another individual with a perceived lower status and so on.

Researchers like Peter Turchin have pointed out that there are recurrent periods of polycrises in our societies. These periods see the rise of factions amongst the ‘elite’ who seek to recruit groups from the general population to help them shake up or even destroy the existing status quo. These individuals from the ‘elite’ seek to improve their perceived social status and acquire more power and wealth. The simplest way to do this is to encourage ‘punching down’ amongst their supporters, find a ‘minority’ or a perceived threat posed by a selected group from the general population. Women, so-called immigrants, people with ‘different’ skin colour or people with a ‘different’ sexuality etc. Propoganda, conspiracy theories, exageration and straight out lies are used to mark a given sub-group out as a menace to ‘our way of life’.

The ex-elite leaders promote extremist and populist views and this also helps draw to their cause those disaffected by the status quo which they see as the cause of all their personal problems. They come to believe that ridding their country of whichever sub-group will make their own lives better.

As noted, these periods are recurrent and a look at history, as Turchin and others have done, shows vividly that polycrisis periods are often caused by ‘elite’ infighting or they are transformed into revolutions, revolts and war by dissaffected members of the ‘elite’. The question then arise as to what we can do to stop these cycles of polycrises or at least manage them in a different way. To all intents and purposes the way we have been doing it for the last 10,000 years hasn’t worked before, it would seem foolish to assume that it would work today.

What factors provoke periods of polycrises? Several parameters have been identified:

• Degradation of the environment (reducing food production capacity)

• Climatic change (stressing food production, droughts, wildfires)

• External shocks (such as an invasion, volcanic eruption, earthquakes)

• Social complexity (people’s lives become more and more complicated as a society evolves, more and more administration to deal with)

• Elite over-population (too many elite offspring fighting over too few high status roles/jobs). In this example the elite is not just those who are wealthy but also those who are highly educated)

• Erosion of workers rights and power to negotiate wages.

These factors, often combined together or rapidly succeeding each other have brought about the collapse of numerous civilisations. We are in a major period of polycrises at the moment and a glance at the list shows that we’ve got all the different causes in place today. Not good.

Around the world we are seeing central governments behave in just the same way as past leaders. Increasing suppression of workers rights, more social manipulation and control, increasing numbers of Police who have more and more power, the use of propaganda to highlight perceived threats and putting the blame for all of a societies woes on this perceived threat. Rare are the governments, today and in the past, who have acted differently.

Turchin and others write that giving workers more rights to negotiate can help end or shorten periods of polycrises. This could well be true but such an approach can only be part of the solutions for today. Workers may be able to negotiate better pay but vast numbers still work in ecologically and socially destructive industries which create crises of their own. Climate change is not happening on it’s own, it is a negative symptom caused by our current and past economic activities. We will still have societies which are far too complicated with too much paperwork to do just to live. We will still have an oversized elite with too few roles and jobs on offer for them, Turchin and others note this point and promote the idea of either government intervention through taxation or a voluntary, by the elite, redistribution of wealth and resources.

In all of this mess we are seeing the rise of prosociality.

This movement has nothing to do with Socialism, it is a paradigm shift away from societies based of aggressivity, competivity and high social status being accorded to who accuulate, who destroy lives and damage the biosphere. It is a movement building communities where cooperation, mutual aide and sharing define the social status that an individual is accorded. This movement is working with human nature (at least that of the general population), a large number of studies have shwon the in general people will lend a hand to someone in need, even when said someone is a stranger. For us cooperation means survival.

The prosocial movement is highly heterogenous as the individuals involved understand that the ‘one size fits all, nationalist’ approach of too many governments doesn’t work. Policies aimed at squeezing a divers population living in often very different types of environments cannot take into consideration these local variations and are thus anti-social. For example the European Union, through a number of policies have taken unto themselves the right to determine which seeds can be sold or exchanged. Farmers and growers lost the right to produce local varieties best adapted to their local conditions. The same seeds to be planted in the wetter northern states and in the much drier southern ones, a myopic and ridiculous politic in keeping with so many others enacted by centralised governments.

What are the dreams of the prosocialists? What are they putting into place?

Relocaliation of production and distribution coupled with prioritising the development of local economies. This involves a move away from agro-industrial and supermarket dependancy and towards local resilience. It also involves a move away from the low grade industrially built homes towards local construction of high quality housing and the refitting of the rest of the local housing stock.

Reprioritising the work/life balance towards more leisure and less work. This means giving higher value to social interactions and social activities.

Reorganising governance and decision making. The generally held vision is that the most important decisions to be made involve the local community. The next important decisions concern groups of local communities working togther and finally a reorganisation of how decisions at a national level should be taken. This latter means moving away from electing national factions to government and replacing the current systems with ones where the these decisons are decided at a multi-local level.

The vast majority of people involved in the movement adopt prosocial values within their local communties, respecting those people who help out the most and sanctioning those others who continue to non-cooperate and who thus endanger the community.

This is not a minority movement. Imagine the queue at a swimming pool, people lined up to jump in, most people are in this queue. A recent study in France revealed that over 70% of the population want to completely change their lives and move towards the type of thing that the prosocial pioneers have been building.

The same planet but a different world.