Superorganism
Democracy & The Grand Trajectory of Human History
This essay concludes a series that compares the twilights of (1) Rome's slave-based economic system and (2) the Middle Ages' feudal system to (3) today's capitalist economic system. In addition to the life cycles of these economic systems, we'll note similarities between infectious diseases and changes in communication technologies common to all three eras. Finally, we'll see how belief systems rise and fall in tandem with these economic systems. When these systems seize up and stop functioning, people begin questioning authority. And that, in turn, leads to collapses of bedrock conceptions of reality itself.
Introduction
Two undeniable trends have shaped human history: the steady advancement of technology and the gradual expansion of democracy. These parallel trajectories reflect humanity’s drive toward greater interconnectedness and illustrate the nature of change within human society. Our history has seen a slow replacement of top-down, autocratic decision-making with bottom-up, collective decision-making. Though the denizens of every political and economic era regard their own time as the culmination of history, the truth is that the human story remains ongoing…
Technology & Democracy
Two of the most obvious features of human history are that (1) technology proliferates over time and (2) political systems gradually become more democratic.
Even the most cursory examination of the historical record reveals an obvious progression in technological complexity. A theoretical graph of technological sophistication over time would have many setbacks and falls, like a stock market chart. But, like stock charts, it generally trends up and to the right over the long haul.
Democracy follows a similar trend to technology, generally increasing over the centuries. The notion of democracy is much older than America. Democracy as a formal system of government was unheard of before around 500 BC when it burst on the scene to become the official governmental philosophy of the city-state of Athens. That first democracy was limited only to free male citizens and excluded women, slaves, and non-citizens. In modern America, we espouse the ideal of democracy. Even though, like the Athenians, we still don’t live up to it in practice.
In between the slave economy of Rome—also nominally a democracy—European civilization went through a transitional feudal system in which most people worked as peasants. This was a considerable improvement over Roman society. It was certainly better to be a peasant and surrender half your produce to your local feudal lord than to be his slave.
In 1215, King John of England was forced to sign the Magna Carta, which distributed some of his divine right to rule to the rest of the nobility. Old Greek ideals were revived during the Italian Renaissance and became fashionable again. Democracy became the popular rallying cry as European society transitioned from the Medieval economy of lords and peasants into the modern world of employers and employees. The crowned heads of Christendom were relegated to figureheads, while democratic bodies such as parliaments and congresses assumed political power.
In the open ocean, icebergs are commonly observed “rolling over.” That phenomenon results from cold seawater below the water line and warm sunshine above the water line melting icebergs at very different rates, changing their centers of mass and causing them to rotate 180°. We’re undergoing an analogous flip. Over the long sweep of history, the top-down autocracies that once typified early human society are gradually replaced by bottom-up democracies.
Democracy at Work
The great trap of history is to think of ourselves as the product or result of history. But in truth, every age is a transitional period. Great economic systems like feudalism and capitalism are like cars; they have a useful lifespan. They cry out for replacement once they’ve reached the end of their useful life. That is the stage of the economic lifecycle we find ourselves in today.
Karl Marx burst onto the stage of history by advancing the idea that our current system of employers and employees is coming to the end of its useful life. He predicted that the same technological innovation unleashed by capitalist economic forces would eventually be its undoing after technology replaced a critical mass of employees. If too few workers are demanded, the remaining employees would be unable to negotiate for high enough wages to buy all the goods and services offered by employers. This way of thinking became much more difficult to challenge after the recent advent of ChatGPT.
The trend of increased democracy throughout human history gives us a clue as to what the next economic system could look like. Democratic control over the means of production might be a logical next step. It’s peculiar that we affirm democracy as an ideal in all other facets of public life while accepting top-down autocracies at work.
Perhaps our next great economic system will resemble former UK labor leader Jeremy Corbyn’s 2018 plan to create democratic workplaces. His idea was to require businesses to offer to sell themselves to their employees first before any other party has the right to purchase it. That way, the dynamism of small business ownership is preserved. However, during the process of scaling up from small businesses to international conglomerates, most corporations would graduate into democracies under his plan.
Offshoring
Offshoring is one of the major problems created by autocratic decision-making. Many economies have suffered deindustrialization because of war or disease, but America became the first economy in history to deindustrialize voluntarily. During the 20th century, international corporations realized that they could fire domestic workforces and hire cheap foreign labor to replace them.
Whatever magnitude one assigns to that historic blunder, one must assign even greater significance to the fact that America not only voluntarily deindustrialized itself; it reassembled that manufacturing capacity within the borders of its chief economic rival: China.
Offshoring is an issue because we accept the control of a tiny minority over our vast systems of production. The people who own America’s largest businesses often send proxies to board meetings; they’re concerned only with the profits of the companies in their portfolios. One can scarcely imagine the employees of such a company democratically voting to fire themselves and offshore their own jobs. For the problem of offshoring, democracy is virtually a silver bullet.
Mythology
For the purposes of this essay, we’ll define mythology simply as popular beliefs that aren’t really true. Authorities disseminate these beliefs, and as such, they frequently benefit authority. “The ideas of the ruling class,” wrote Karl Marx, “are in every epoch the ruling ideas”.
Under the European feudal system, for example, peasants often worked three days for their own family and three days on behalf of their local feudal lord. Then they spent Sunday sitting in hard church pews and hearing that this arrangement was precisely how God wanted the spoils of their labor divided.
The level of brainwashing in modern society is more similar to that than we’d like to believe. During the Industrial Revolution, the ideal of democracy was very convenient for bankers and employers when they seized political power from the Church and monarchies. This has led us to celebrate the idea of democracy while accepting a notable lack thereof in the workplaces where most of us spend our adult lives.
We mistakenly regard capitalism as the culmination of human history—as if no improvement upon it is conceivable—instead of a transitional period. But of course, the great lesson of history is that all periods are transitional periods. Our iceberg is still in the process of rolling over, and more democracy is the obvious way to trim our sails to match the winds of history.
Superorganism
Ant colonies were once regarded as being comprised of individual ants. But in recent decades, scientists began considering entire colonies to be “superorganisms” themselves. That’s because, from an evolutionary perspective, ants don’t compete with each other. Rather, it is the colonies that collectively vie for the scarce resources. Depending on the outcome of that competition, the genetics of an entire colony are then passed on to the next generation or not passed on.
Similarly, our bodies function because billions of bacteria work in concert with each other. Our white blood cells and the teeming populations of our gut biomes are examples of bacteria facilitating human life.
On an evolutionary timescale, bacteria are much simpler and older life forms than humans. At some point during the evolutionary process, we awoke as conscious minds piloting vast collectives of smaller organisms.
Perhaps the trend of increasing democracy over time is really the human race awakening as a superorganism. The trend of increasing technology also fits into such a view of humanity. Maps of network nodes notoriously resemble neural connections within the human brain. Maybe the internet is nothing less than the wiring together of all human brains into a new superorganism. After all, the whole point of democracy is to cancel out individual egos in the decision-making process by distributing decision-making across as many egos as possible.
Our physical bodies are made of the same basic building blocks as the physical space between our bodies. Our conception of ourselves as individuals is really just a conceptual overlay we project onto a swirling cloud of protons, neutrons, and electrons. In other words, our disconnectedness is nothing more than an optical illusion. One that democracy allows us to see past.
Conclusion
Definitionally, the contents of people’s minds are the biggest barriers to sweeping change. Broad recognition of the need for change is not enough. Ruling classes have powerful incentives to preserve systems in which they hold privilege, no matter how dysfunctional and past their expiration date those systems might become. In today’s America, for example, reading Karl Marx is treated with a similar social aversion as praying to the devil, even as we struggle with the deep problems caused by undemocratic practices like offshoring. Open-mindedness is the best weapon we have to counter the ever-present reluctance of ruling classes and advance the grand project of human history.
Further Materials
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845
If you enjoyed this essay, please check out where much of the inspiration was derived.
The classical Greeks had a myth called the Golden Age. In the Golden Age men and women were equal, there was no slavery, there was no agriculture, and people lived a long time. It was followed by the Silver Age, then the Bronze Age, then the Iron Age, each successive age being worse than the previous age.
Of course classical Greece was in what we call the Iron Age; men and women were not equal, there was slavery and agriculture, and it was a work or die kind of existence. It was preceded by the Bronze Age, and human brains were larger, on average, in the Bronze Age. Now we know that humans were building cities before the Bronze Age and before agriculture (Gobekli Tepe, etc.). So it is reasonable to talk about a Silver Age.
And before the Silver Age we have a human culture that lasted 25,000 years. So the Golden Age might be the Ice Age.
The Ice Age ended suddenly when the glaciers slid into the oceans and raised sea levels a total of 400 feet. For the survivors populations were isolated, and life became nasty, brutish and short. It was at this time that Asian people in the Americas diverged to become Native Americans.
This catastrophe set off the long decline that ended with the Iron Age, which is the modern era. A new catastrophe may destroy our current civilization. In order to measure how serious this threat is, count the number of satellites watching the sun. Every couple of centuries, the sun hits the Earth with a solar storm that takes out all electrical devices on the Earth. The last such event is 1859.
The big dinosaurs were wiped out when an asteroid strike ushered in 10 years of winter. What would 10 years of no electricity do to us?
Less than 300 years ago there was no electrical technology. What technology we had had persisted for centuries. Why didn't we develop electrical tech before now? Perhaps we did, only to discover that it all broke down at once. And the last time, we ignored the message.
Actions speak louder than words, and fossils speak louder than texts, especially when the texts are syllabaries and we don't know the language (like Linear A). What we can read is less like history and more like propaganda. So we look for clues like rectangular buildings (urbanization), pottery kilns, forges, dyed lint, oatmeal residue. We realize that hunter/gatherers have to know everything about everything, and thus are the greatest interdisciplinary scientists. They also know how to get the greatest return for the least investment.
In contrast, the pyramids built in the Egyptian Old Kingdom now appear to have been temples used daily, perhaps to support the retainers who were taking care of the entombed pharaoh until they themselves died and were buried alongside. Such extravagance depended upon the surpluses provided by the Nile. Ancient Egypt was an agricultural civilization, and it was preceded by hunting/gathering civilizations. Climate change drove the transition; wheat and barley were domesticated as the climate warmed.