Human instincts have their roots in the basic simian psychology created by natural selection. These instincts allowed our simian ancestors to muddle through the Pliocene and Pleistocene using the simian gang as the largest unit of social organization. Our human ancestors of the Paleolithic and Neolithic continued this instinctive form of behavior and organization in the form of small hunter-gatherer groups of a few dozen individuals.
Over the last 10,000 years there have been some very dramatic changes in human circumstances. The largest unit of social organization has become the empire and our instincts have proved to be conspicuously unsuited for coping with social organizations of thousands of individuals much less hundreds of millions of individuals. It is fair to say that our instincts are creating problems we have never had to face before, and they are doing so on a massive scale.
In particular the instincts of Fosterity and Hierarchity are fostering the creation of authoritarian, if not totalitarian, states. 50 KYA, people living in small hunter-gatherer groups knew the alpha male. They had lived with him all their lives and knew what to expect from him. When a new alpha male came to power they had a pretty good idea what they were in for and knew whether to stay or to run. That is no longer the case.
The case of the German people and Adolf Hitler makes an interesting data point. If Hitler had announced to the German people that he was going to get them into a world war that would result in them being slaughtered by the millions, and if he had announced that he intended to commit genocide on a massive scale that would leave them with feelings of enormous guilt, is it plausible that very many people would have supported him? Obviously not. Hitler had a great deal of public support, and this is what enabled him to come to power. This support had to have been given with the expectation that he would solve some problems and that in general good things would result. Simply put, the German people were deceived on a massive scale. The logical question is, "What made this deception possible?"
The answer is that the German people did not have the kind of detailed personal information about Hitler that normally only comes about from living continuously with someone for months or years. People know what to expect from their fathers, brothers and uncles because they have lived in close contact with them. All the German people knew about Hitler came from the news media, some speeches they may have heard and hearsay. This information proved to be inadequate.
The American people have obviously fared much better under Bill Clinton than did the Germans under Hitler, but I seriously question whether the American people actually knew any more about Bill Clinton in 1992 than the German people did about Hitler in 1932. I have worked on research projects to gather information on candidates for public office. In terms of what a candidate's position is on a political issue, there is very, very little available in the regular news media. I have done computer searches for published articles on various political figures and have found little more than name, education, family statistics and business connections. For the most part, the American people are basing their votes on general impressions and not on hard facts. I think this is true worldwide. It was certainly true of the German people and their encounter with Hitler.
For those that think this is exaggeration, let's look at just one more appalling fact. In the course of elections, signs are commonly posted that have no information on them other than the last name of the candidate and maybe the office. In the case of well-known candidates it can perhaps be argued that this is an attempt to demonstrate wide-spread public support and "momentum." But it is done by candidates that are complete unknowns. Candidates would not do this if there was not some pay back in it for them. The point is that large numbers of votes can be had simply by achieving name recognition. We've all seen the signs. We all know this is true.
This lack of information combined with the human penchant for behavior driven primarily by Fosterity and Hierarchity, leads to the creation of totalitarian states. Suffice it to say that we are all human beings with very, very similar genetic heritages. The problems the German people experienced with Hitler are human problems. They are our problems.
It seems very clear that world-wide, the advocates of welfare statism (i.e. socialism) are gaining the upper hand and that the advocates of individual rights and human liberty are losing out. Oh, I know that most of the individualists who read this will immediately cite counter examples like the demise of the Soviet Union, the Reagan era and the Thatcher era. But I submit that the demise of the Soviet Union is not the same thing as the demise of socialism. I submit that all Reagan and Thatcher accomplished was to temporarily undo some of the more odious aspects of socialism. Certainly, in the U.S. all of the primary social welfare programs in effect at the time Reagan took office were still in effect when he left office. Indeed the level of funding for these programs went up. Sure, Reagan did win some tax cuts, but the net effect there was to bring the tax rates down below the level of diminishing return. Government actually gained more revenue as a result of the Reagan tax cuts than it would have had if there had been no tax cuts. The result was that the socialists were more secure than ever in that they had more revenue with which to buy votes. In Sweden the socialists have been somewhat chastised, but the edifice they built remains intact. In Poland and Russia, many of the old communist apparatchiks have been voted back into power. If we stand back and look at the aggregate global circumstance, all that has happened is that most socialists have given up the notion that government should directly operate the means of production. Knowing that capitalism will produce goods and services, the socialists have largely switched to allowing limited capitalism (i.e. fascism). This affords them a real economic base to exploit and makes them more secure since they really can deliver something (i.e. stolen goods).
If Autonomity is the driving force behind individualism, and Fosterity, Hierarchity and Gregarity are the principal driving forces behind socialism, the manifest success (i.e. continuing broad-based acceptance) of socialism is a clear demonstration of the relative strength of Fosterity, Hierarchity and Gregarity vis-a-vis Autonomity. Clearly within the U.S., Libertarians have failed to achieve significant political success, and Objectivists with their intellectual excellence, have not taken academia by storm. I submit that this is not an accident but is rather a manifestation of the real strength of one group of instincts vis-a-vis another.
Perhaps a small metric will help to document this point. The first part of Das Kapital was published in 1867. It took 50 years for Marxism to go from a theory, to an intellectual movement, to full political implementation in 1917. That gives us a gauge of what is possible in human affairs. Atlas Shrugged was published some 43 years ago. The individualist movement that was aided by Atlas Shrugged is nowhere near achieving the kind of success the Marxists achieved. I find it impossible to dismiss such a broad-based phenomenon as serendipitous or insignificant.
Vietnam is another data point that contributes to understanding the relative strength of Autonomity vis-a-vis Fosterity, Hierarchity and Gregarity. Although neither side can be characterized as purely collectivist or purely individualist, it is clear that Autonomity played a greater role in the motivation of the South Vietnamese and that Fosterity, Hierarchity and Gregarity played a greater role in motivating the North Vietnamese. Although the coincidence of the fall of South Vietnam and the diminishing of U.S. support cannot be dismissed as serendipity, it is clear that the ability of North Vietnam and its international allies to sustain their motivational state was greater than the ability of South Vietnam and its international allies to sustain their motivational state.
I don't believe there is any massive international conspiracy to establish a world police state. The idea that there is a "new world order" at work trying to make slaves of us all strikes me as paranoia. However, if it is paranoia, it is paranoia with some basis in reality. It seems clear that large scale social institutions combined with the instincts created by natural selection, when pursued with intelligence rather than managed with intelligence, are all too likely to result in totalitarianism. I estimate that the chances that the human race will escape the institution of a single world-wide police state sometime within the next three hundred years at less than one in a thousand.
My position here is being driven not simply by an understanding of the basic psychological nature of man, but by an understanding of the circumstances that are developing:
We are now in the process of creating a world culture. With the advent of the Internet, world news reporting, frequent international travel and a global economic system, human beings from many diverse cultures find themselves communicating with and dealing with each other on a daily basis. Every time two people have contact with each other, they tend to become a little more alike in the sense that, for convenience sake, they tend to adopt a common set of protocols to govern their interactions. Over a period of time, these minute shifts result in a set of widely accepted procedures for managing human interaction. For example, English is well on the way to becoming the international language. A set of globally accepted procedures for managing human interaction is a de facto global culture.
Europe, despite thousands of years of conflict, now has a common currency, a common economy (i.e. the Common Market) and is clearly headed toward some kind of political union. In North America the NAFTA treaty portends a future union between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. The United Nations represents a faltering step towards global military cooperation. Cultural uniformity, economic ties and military cooperation are the precursors of political unity. This unity is not going to be achieved overnight, but it is very clear which direction we are traveling in.
Population growth is resulting in a vastly increased frequency of human-human contact. Even if no instincts ever come into play in these circumstances, the circumstances alone are enough to guarantee that the opportunities for autonomous action are necessarily decreasing. However, instincts are most definitely coming into play (e.g. Hierarchity). The advent of a global culture will inevitably mean the creation of a global political hierarchy. People are going to struggle to get to the top of this hierarchy, and inevitably some are going to succeed. Individuals with severe cases of PCD (i.e. power compulsion disorder) are going to find this hierarchy to be extremely attractive. Sooner or later, a severe case will make it to the top.
A global political hierarchy is necessarily going to mean global social tensions. The potential will exist for the would-be beneficiaries of socialism to be dissatisfied with their benefits. The potential will exist for the victims of socialism to be dissatisfied with being exploited. A potential for this dissatisfaction to be turned into overt violence (a.k.a. terrorism) will exist. Inevitably some people are going to slip over the edge and resort to violence in retaliation for perceived or real injustice. This will result in repressive measures being taken. This is to say that global police and global military institutions will become essential for the management of global social tensions.
Technology provides a way of controlling autonomous action that goes far beyond anything that can be achieved with mere manpower. I'm referring to electronics and computers. A cashless society wherein all economic activity is conducted through a system of networked computers is feasible and would make it possible to collect vast quantities of raw economic data. What computers collect they can also be used to summarize and control. Clearly it is possible to devise an economic system wherein the actions of every individual can be monitored in precise detail. This means that compliance with law will be much easier to verify and enforce via electronically administered economic sanctions. It should even be possible to know the geographic location of specific individuals on at least a periodically sampled basis. This in turn means that law enforcement by physical means becomes much easier. Already in the U.K. many urban streets are continuously monitored via remote controlled TV cameras that can see in the dark. The license plates on cars going into central London are being scanned and recorded by electronic means. Right now, the government of the U.K. actually has more real power than did the government of Nazi Germany. To be sure, they are not using the power to do everything the Nazis did, at least not yet. But the same productivity that electronics and computers have fostered in industry, can be fostered in government. The nightmare world described by George Orwell in his book 1984 falls far short of what is achievable just with the technology that exists today.
In the simplest possible terms, Stalin, Mao, Hitler and the like were put into positions of power by apes (i.e. by human beings acting on their simian instincts rather than acting according to reason). Right now every nation on this planet is packed wall-to-wall with apes. These apes have an emotional faculty that is a product of natural selection operating in the context of small simian social groups living in the Miocene rain forests and Pliocene savannas of east central Africa. Now, in the Quaternary, they find themselves confronting very large social groups, high technology and a splendid IQ with which to pursue the simian emotional agenda. The predominant indications are that the mistakes of the past are going to be repeated in the future for exactly the same reasons albeit on a global scale.
It is clear that the threat of the cold war is diminished and, that the immediate likelihood of nuclear war is diminished. It is certainly too early to celebrate, especially considering recent threats by the mainland Chinese to resort to nuclear war over Taiwan, but the possibility exists that the human race may have reached a Churchill Limit where nuclear war is concerned.
The technology of printing and electronic information storage means that the instinct of Curiosity is being stimulated on a scale and to a degree never before seen. The accumulation and integration of information means that a whole lot of fundamental ground work has been done and need not be repeated by the next generation. Science and technology are going to move forward and spectacular new achievements are likely.
Advancing computer technology means that intellectual processes that previously could only be done in the human mind over a period of years, can now be performed with software in seconds. The human capacity for reason has been extended and amplified by mechanical means. Intellectual achievements that could scarcely be imagined one hundred years ago are now being done on a routine basis. It is certain that much more of what is permitted by the laws of the universe is going to become doable by human beings.
Victory in the political struggle involving abortion/choice has, for the most part, gone to the side motivated by Autonomity. This is a most extraordinary development for it has been my experience that in contests between Fosterity and Autonomity, the latter usually loses out. Here, Autonomity is not only winning out but is being embraced by women, no less. Women tend to be more inclined to accept restrictions originating in social organizations (i.e. Subservity). Women also tend to be more heavily influenced by Fosterity than men. The spectacle of women shrugging off some of the heaviest instincts that normally impact them, is proof that the standard preferences of the EmoFac are being successfully overridden by the LogFac and CiFac.
I consider the existence of human homosexuality to be a cause for hope. For obvious reasons homosexuals tend not to have children. Under the regimen of natural selection, this means that any genetic cause of homosexuality would tend to self destruct (i.e. it would be a genetic heritage that would strongly tend not to be inherited). Obviously the pleasure humans take in sex is a gambit originating in natural selection to motivate beings with free will to engage in life sustaining behavior (i.e. procreation). One would therefore predict that the emotional card deck has been stacked by natural selection in favor of heterosexuality, and indeed, that does seem to be the case. That human homosexuality exists is proof that a predictable preference of the EmoFac has been overridden. It is proof that the EmoFac is not an absolute dictator with unlimited power. The LogFac and CiFac have a fighting chance.
We now have general acceptance that gratuitous killing is inappropriate, immoral and to be avoided. We don't often do terribly well in implementing this injunction, especially when it comes to violating the injunction by proxy, but the notion that the injunction is fundamentally valid is deep rooted. Objective morality has a critical toehold on the human consciousness and the possibility exists that it can be expanded.