Our Modern Mistake

People hate to be given direct orders, especially if they will have to visibly follow such orders, and especially if they feel rivalrous with those who give the orders. And most of our ancestors managed to avoid this despised scenario most of the time.

Sure, at times kids, servants, and soldiers had to take specific orders, and wives also sometimes. But most of what most people had to do was quite routine and scripted, requiring no new explicit orders. And many of the explicit orders given were by overlords whom the ordered didn’t feel very rivalrous with, like masters ordering servants, or generals ordering troops.

Modern workers, in contrast, are frequently given novel orders, and by people much more similar to them. For example, people of a similar age and class, who were once at the same level as them, and who compete with them for mates and associates. Orders where it is far from clear to the person ordered that such orders are actually better choices for the enterprise or society as a whole.

In fact, a key function of modern schools seems to be to habituate us to such orders. Schools grade students more frequently than adults get graded, and far more than is optimal for student learning. Historically, times and places with smart unschooled adults have found it hard to get such folks to function well in modern workplaces.

Most of our ancestors would be ashamed of us if they saw how servile we are at work; their pride would not have accepted such clear and frequent ranking and domination. But what we gained from this submission is great wealth, including health and security, and they would envy us for those.

Early in the Industrial Revolution, many noted the great productivity that resulted from very regimented and organized workplaces like shipyards and factories. They then expected and feared that such regimentation would spread to all the rest of their lives, including their food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, and parenting. Novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We warned of this coming totalitarianism.

But what happened instead is that we have spent most of our increased wealth on not regimenting our non-work lives. Instead of such things being arranged and regimented efficiently by big orgs, as in our work lives, we instead each make pretty autonomous and artisanal choices. For example, instead of wearing standard uniforms, living in dorms with shared bathrooms, and eating at cafeterias, we each vary and duplicate all this at great expense. But we can afford to do so, at least for now.

Compared to our ancestors, who had similar levels of domination, routine, and poverty in their work and non-work lives, we have become schizophrenic. At work, we are far more dominated and constrained by our bosses and orgs, though they often avoid giving very direct orders. However, outside work we are far more autonomous, rich, and vibe-driven. Which we like.

Now instead of seeing all this as a fundamental modern tradeoff, some are foolish enough to think that we could be similarly autonomous, rich, and vibey at work, if only we would rebel against capitalism. But even the least capitalist modern societies have also had big orgs, and roughly this same split between regimented productive work and relatively free and inefficient non-work.

This work vs non-work split also correlates roughly to where we have healthy vs unhealthy cultural evolution today. Even though many maladaptive norms limit how firms can innovate to make work more productive, capitalist competition has been driving firms to be more productive overall. But our vibe-driven and norm-intensive artisanal non-work practices re food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, parenting, etc. have been drifting into maladaption.

But such maladaptive culture just can’t last, however much we enjoy it. Sorry, just defying selection pressures was never going to be stable in the long run. And this seems to me to be our most fundamental modern mistake, which our descendants must eventually solve. But how?

My default scenario is that our main world civ falls, to be replaced by insular fertile groups like the Amish and Haredim. Groups whose non-work lives are strongly set by their conservative religious cultures, which do not give individuals much room for rich autonomous artisanal non-work lives. Yes, they may find it harder to organize work as efficiently, and as they grow they may well fall into the modern pattern again, likely resulting in at least one repeat of our civ’s rise and fall.

Another scenario is that we allow capitalist orgs to own and run more people, things, and areas of life. Yes, humans seem quite opposed to this at present, but humans may well start out AIs (or ems) in this sort of situation, and allow that to continue as they grown in power and ability. Perhaps realizing some versions of what many have long feared as totalitarian dystopias.

I’ve outlined other scenarios for making culture more adaptive, but I’ve described those at higher levels of abstraction, as ways to search for more concrete answers. So these may well also result in something like such scenarios.

If you don’t like such options, I sincerely invite you, implore you actually, to help us find more better alternatives.