Beware System Decay
Imagine passengers on a plane, who somehow don’t know they are on an automated plane. There are no pilots or other officials; passengers have to manage themselves. They fight over who gets to sit where, who gets bathroom priority, and who gets what snacks.
If the jet engines turn off midair, they don’t realize that they are in trouble. The plane still feels fine, and it is now less noisy. To see a problem, they’d have to see themselves as part of a flying system sustained by particular supports, and see how those supports might fail. Someone who tried to tell them about their problem would need to have sufficient status or a clear and compelling enough argument to distract them from their seat, bathroom, and food fights.
That’s how I feel re cultural drift. We are all part of a great many systems, some of which we understand better than others, and many of which we are already engrossed in fights over. To get people to consider problems with how we create and change our key norms, I need to distract them from their other fights. To see what I’m up against, I polled my Twitter/X followers re how worried they are re 32 different kinds of systems decaying or breaking. Here are the implied priorities (relative to max 100) from 3256 responses:
While energy/electricity is at #3, the other 6 of the top 7 are about governments. Three norm options rate highly at #1,10,11, showing that we do worry about norms related to other systems we worry about. But cultural variety is #24, and status norms is #28, and activism is #30, even though these three are core to the cultural evolution process. So we don’t have much generic fear of cultural systems going awry.
In fact, status norms are plausibly the main cause of bad fertility norms, and the high status of govt is why we worry so much more about govt, when it isn’t actually a much bigger problem. So we do have a big problem with people not seeing cultural drift in the abstract as a problem.
It's notable how little consensus there is on the "what are our biggest problems?" question, even among highly informed people. The future is fundamentally unknowable and any strong opinions are bound to reflect assumptions and biases as much as any rational argument. But it's probably good that people aren't fully rational, since only with some degree of unjustified certainty is one is motivated to take action. I purely rational actor might just shrug and do nothing about any problem that wasn't imminent and obvious.
Nobody pays attention to "how it all works".
Why? Because they're not taught or conditioned to even think of that, whenever they go to "do something". This is why so many government/organizational programs fail; the people running the damn things don't have clue one about how they really work.
Most of our "elite" functions in a cognitive haze; they think that what they think creates reality. You solve problems by writing memos/legislation/regulations. You're never, ever taught to go out and examine the "why" of those problems existing in the first place. Because of that, improper analysis is performed, and no feedback is ever sought. Something doesn't fix the problem? Why, the solution must be to double-down on the paperwork...
You can step back from the issues and begin to gain wisdom, once you consider each and every interaction with the environment as a momentary Skinner Box; conditioning behavior of the subject. Does the subject get what it wants from the interaction? Why, then that behavior becomes ingrained, permanent. If the subject doesn't get what it wants, then it tries something else. Behavior is the result of a conversation between the subject and the environment; if you want to modify behavior, you have to first consider what the signals are actually telling the subject. You may think your memo modifies those signals, but the sad fact is, they usually don't.
The "elites" of today do not understand the world they run, and they do not know how to make things happen. They're chimps, pulling away at levers and pushing buttons that they don't understand. If a reward pops out, then they're happy and continue on flailing away at things. No reward? Then they'll grow increasingly disturbed and start breaking things. That's the point we're at, right now.