Future Fears

People tend to act to help themselves. Sometimes that is good, and sometimes it is bad. We economists distinguish situations where such acts on net 1) help others, 2) hurt others less than they help oneself, and 3) hurt others more they help oneself. We see only type #3 acts as bad, and the others as good.

However, I’m coming to realize that most people actually use a different criteria; they care more about loyalty than efficiency. That is, they ask: are the acts subject to “our” prestige control? How well can “we”, by applying or changing our common notion of prestige, shame people to make them stop, or praise people to make them start?

We fear powerful people who feel free to defy us. When they can make big changes to the world, and put only minor weight on our prestige influence. We are afraid of this even when their actions have so far been of type #1, benefiting us. We fear that their inclination to be helpful could change after they accumulate enough power.

This is the standard attitude of foragers, as described by Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest, where the main fear was individuals strong enough to defy the consensus of their local band. It is also echoed in the classic “illicit dominator” fictional villain. (A “dominator” needs only a source of power that can defy prestige.) In schoolyards, kids have long sought to ridicule nerds who submit to teachers, instead of joining other kids in resisting teacher dominance.

In the classic tv show Survivor, participants tended to vote off the island opponents strong enough to earn immunity from group votes, no matter what those people’s other virtues. Similarly, in office politics workers who feel productive enough to not need to make arbitrary displays of submission are often seen as “difficult”; putting them in their place becomes a priority.

In larger politics today, the main villains are powers who feel free to defy national or world culture’s regarding proper behavior. Criminals (and “terrorists”) and foreign powers, especially in war, obviously, but also one’s own government unless it uses democracy or something to show its submission to local prestige. In the past, when religion was stronger, churches demanded so much submission that they were vulnerable to being labelled illicit dominators. Politics has often been about gaining support for one power via seeing it as protecting us from other powers.

Today, our other main candidate for illicit dominators are for-profit firms. Bigness triggers forager suspicions all by itself, ordering employees about adds a vivid image of dominance, and a for-profit status declares the limited influence of prestige. So we are very suspicious of big organization choices, especially for-profits, and especially regarding employees. We want to regulate their prices and quality, and especially how they hire, fire, and promote. We mostly don’t trust competition between firms to induce them to benefit us; yeah that might work sometimes, but more direct control feels more reliable. (Even if it actually isn’t.)

All of this makes it pretty easy to predict our fears regarding the future. Foreign powers create the classic apocalyptic conflict, and criminals going wild is the classic post-apocalyptic fear. A foreign power winning over us is the classic alien war allegory. Governments being non-democratic, and acquiring new powers, describes most of the new young adult dystopias. Sometimes there’s a new church with too much power, defying reader prestige rankings.

But if you imagine religions, governments, and criminals not getting too far out of control, and a basically capitalist world, then your main future fears are probably going to be about for-profit firms, especially regarding how they treat workers. You’ll fear firms enslaving workers, or drugging them into submission, or just tricking them with ideology. In this way firms might make workers into hyper submissive “inhuman robots”, with no creativity, initiative, or leisure, possibly even no socializing, sex, music, or laughter, and maybe just maybe no consciousness at all.

And if you are one of the rare people who don’t even fear firms, because you see competition as disciplining them, well you can just fear technology itself being out of control. No one has been driving the technology train; tech mostly just appears and gets used when some find that in their interest, regardless of the opinions of larger communities of prestige. One can fear that this sort of competition and tech driven change will be the force that makes human workers into “inhuman robots.” Making you eager for a world government (or a super-intelligence) to take control of tech change.

This framework seems to successfully predict the main future fears raised early in the industrial revolution. And also the main concerns about the scenario of my book. Of course the fact that we may be primed to have such concerns, regardless of their actual relevance, doesn’t make them wrong. But it does mean we should look at them carefully.