Let’s Make Homo Sapiens The Best They Can Be

The qualities of society I have stated—that the society be enabled to accomplish great achievements and concurrently that each individual’s experience within the society be a positive one—I have taken to be self-evident. Let me take a step back and describe the thoughts that form the basis for selecting this founding philosophy for social design as well as discussing why I think formation of society ought to be approached from a design perspective. The driving principles for all this is empirical—driven by personal observations.

The idea that societal design target positive experience for every individual within said society is not a new one. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, founding the Unites States of America as an independent nation, includes, as self-evident truths, that the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right of every individual, and that government (an intrinsic component of social structure) is instituted by the people governed “to effect their safety and happiness”. While positive experience, or happiness, of individuals within society is considered important in many countries around the world, it has often been considered to have so much variation between individuals as to make it intractable to form a basis for social policies. Current research efforts are underway to measure “subjective happiness” and “life satisfaction” (via surveys and polling) that could make social policy formation based on individual happiness tractable in the near future.

The article linked above posits goals of not only increasing individual happiness, but also reducing inequality of the level of happiness between individuals, both within one country as well as between countries. Such measurement methodologies, when fully developed, would provide the tools by which such goals could be tackled and by which progress may be measured. Will those tools be employed to achieve such goals? While only time will tell, human history, especially regarding the interactions between the leaders of a society and its members, does not inspire a great degree of optimism that leaders of societies would employ those tools to advance such goals.

As to society achieving great accomplishments, I think every individual in every society would agree with that goal for their society—this is, so long as it does not come at the cost of individual happiness. Any society that strives to concurrently achieve great accomplishments as well as provide a positive experience for each of the individual members of that society will encounter situations in which these two objectives are at odds with each other and must find a way to strike a balance.

Any societal design aiming at producing the type of society described above must, therefore, provide at its core the mechanisms and methodologies to establish and maintain such balance. Implicitly included in this are measurement techniques to detect a condition of imbalance and to providing sufficient data to guide employment of the given mechanisms to reestablish balance. The fact that both “positive experience” and “great accomplishment” are defined at the level of the individual person, with much variation between individuals, indicates the daunting level of complexity with which any such societal design attempt must grapple.

This then is the project we set before ourselves—to investigate and bring greater clarity to the design of society from this perspective. Is it even possible to produce a design handling this degree of complexity? If so, what are most promising directions of investigation we might pursue? We will delve into this endeavor in the ensuing writing, in which some investigation into past attempts our species has made in social organization in the context of these societal goals will provide a good starting point.

The particular goal of the social design to be investigated in these pages is to better enable a large ensemble of people to accomplish astounding creative achievements during which the experience of each individual is positive. This is a rather lofty goal, and I have indeed been accused of trying to create a Utopian society. Looking at my first sentence it is hard for me to reject that accusation on the basis of my goal. However, I do reject that statement based on the effect that statement has, which is almost passive-aggressive in impact—making one subconsciously conclude that the goal I have stated is not achievable. To counter that directly, I will modify the phrasing of the goal with no meaningful change to it, in the following restatement:

Enable a large ensemble of people to accomplish creative achievements as astounding as possible during which each individual’s experience is as positive as possible.

In revising the statement in this way, it clearly refers only to what is possible, hence achievable.

More importantly, the intent at present is not to produce such a design for society, but to investigate, as fully as I am able, all the aspects that must be taken into serious consideration in attempting to produce such a design. The scope of what is to be considered in this investigation remains ambiguous at the present, hence some analysis is needed to determine that scope itself—how do we know when sufficient investigation has been done to determine all important aspects? This question is one of methodology and exposes a larger set of methodological questions that may be encompassed in the following: What methodology shall be employed in performing the investigation upon which we wish to embark?

Over the larger course of our investigation, we shall keep in mind this overarching question of methodology, and take note of techniques used in any given instance that may provide the basis for an investigative approach to be added to our methodological toolkit. One such instance appears above in the generation of those two questions—that of generalizing a given question into a class of question. Perhaps this will be a useful method to apply in the future, and possibly the more general questions thus proposed may also be ones to keep in mind as the investigation proceeds.

Returning to the initial question of how to determine when the investigation is complete, first we note that completion involves “all” of something, making it appear that completion of the investigation will involve having investigated everything. While this is intractable, we will attempt to do the best we can. At any given point in the investigation, not only will there be some things not investigated, there will be some things overlooked—that have not occurred to us as needing investigation. This itself indicates that we cannot clearly define what it means to have completed the investigation up front. We will need a methodology to evaluate whether to consider the investigation as sufficiently complete at any given point along the way.

Whatever that methodology ends up being, the information it can use for evaluation are:

1. The items already investigated along with the results of their investigation,
2. The items identified as not needing deeper investigation,
3. The existence of unknown items.

The forgoing list arises from categorization of items that may be subject to investigation, first into the categories of those known vs. those unknown, and subsequent division of those known (as nothing further may be considered concerning those unknown) into those that cannot have a significant impact on the goals of the social design, hence do not need further investigation, vs. those requiring investigation. Note that this implies the methodology deciding whether the investigation is sufficiently complete need only be applied at a given point in the process of investigation if, at that point in the process, all items known to need investigation have been investigated.

The immensity of the task before us is now clearly exposed—no only are we unable to scope the size of the task, we are even not able to fully define the criteria for completion. We note that throughout history societies have arisen much more often via various sorts of evolutionary processes rather than by design—large numbers of people inhabit a geographic region and some individual or group gains sufficient support to define the daily operation of the society. The stability of a society derives from conscious and unconscious evaluation done by the individuals of the populace comparing the conditions of the society at that time with the hypothetical conditions if there is no centralized “ruling class” in society or against the hypothetical conditions presented by one who has an interest in changing the society in a given way. Such a “one” typically imagines themselves as being part of a newly defined “ruling class” in the social order they propose.

Returning to the type of social design that these investigations are intended to help enable, I note it does not appear to follow the format of any historical society of which I am aware. In considering some great accomplishments of past societies (consider, for example, the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and other such achievement of ancient civilizations) certain figures of the “ruling class” or other elite class have organized large masses of skilled people to work together in achieving such amazing feats. If there were individuals with the desire and skills to achieve similar results, but not holding the proper position, the historical record would not only be lacking the artifact they would have produced, but also the fact that they even existed and held such a desire.

The present effort is to enable more of a “grass roots” social design—to investigate what would be needed from each individual within such an idyllic society in order for it to be able to be idyllic. If such a Utopian society is possible, it would not be possible under the models of how societies have been structured to date. Moreover, even if a Utopian society is actually not possible, it is likely that an honest attempt to do the best we can in determining the minimal prerequisites can provide useful information and lessons that may empower each of us to make improvements in today’s societies.

Having established some basis of a methodological framework, we need to define the starting point from which to launch this investigation—that is, to define which items to consider from the start. Two of the items of the starting point derive directly from the target societal type we have described above:

1. of society, to accomplish amazing creative achievements
2. of the individual, to have a positive experience

For each of these items, we need to more clearly define and delineate its meaning, and to determine what the necessary factors are to enable it. The process by which we perform the second portion of these tasks requires a basis on empirical evidence. It is in those stages that lessons from history and learning from science need be incorporated.

In my coming posts, we shall proceed into the investigations themselves…

From my earliest memories I have been interested in how things work, leading to my lifelong interest in science and mathematics. A question that had arisen to me at various times in my teens, that of “why am I here, what is my purpose?”, took on a new form during my freshman year in university—it became the question of “How am I here?” That is, how is the subjective, experiential, me attached to the objective, physical, universe?

This has been a question that I have returned to repeatedly since then. It is a question that has seen little or no progress since as far back the golden age of the Greeks, or the days of the earliest Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, or even before that. To investigate this question I have employed elements of quantum physics and cosmology, neuroscience, existential and epistemological philosophy, and basic empirical observation.

My investigations have lead me to additional questions concerning the current condition of our species in its various cultures and societies. Questions concerning not only how did we arrive at the present condition, but how might we improve on that condition. Our history presents us with various societal structures along with efforts to change them, some of which aimed at improving the condition of each individual within that society. Many such attempts failed to achieve those intentions, while those that did proved to be temporary, experiencing either a sudden end or a slow degradation and perversion of the goals they had achieved.

Some of my investigations into creating equity in social organization, through either both political and economic structure, working with hypothetical alternate structures while considering the lessons of the past, has indicated that the individual is an integral component of the system. As a component of an equitable system, the individual is not only the beneficiary of the equitable environment the system provides, and her or his role goes far beyond that of having a vote in the selection of leaders.

The actions of every individual in a society has impact on other individuals around her or him. This is the core of the pervasive role each individual plays within a society—while an individual must suffer (or benefit) from the consequences of his or her own actions, the society itself suffers (or benefits) from the consequences of the actions of each of the individuals therein. Therefore, it behooves each individual member of the society, each of us, to attempt to predict not only the consequences our actions may bring to bear on ourselves, but also the consequences our actions bring to bear on the society in which we live as well as the global society of all people.

While it would be a tall order to expect all individuals to analyze the possible societal consequences of their every act, the proposal is not of such an all-or-nothing variety. If sufficiently many people can sufficiently often take sufficient care to have the impacts of their own actions on society be sufficiently beneficial, the impact of society on us each individually will improve by leaps and bounds. That is my thesis. I hope these writings assist in more of a shift in that direction.