#55. Gender is Pecking Order [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Gender is pecking order

Gender, social status, and testosterone are clearly interrelated, but exactly how requires clarification when the very nature of gender is in question, as now. One possibility is that the male pecking order sits directly atop the female pecking order, and there is no barrier between. Thus, a male who falls low enough in the male pecking order will undergo a reversal in gender identification from male to female (and maybe keep on going down) and a female who rises high enough in the female pecking order will likewise undergo a reversal in gender identification from female to male (and maybe keep on going up). The entire structure could be called "the" pecking order, with the statistical median of the status ranks, and possibly the ranked testosterone levels, always dividing females from males, at least in terms of gendered social signaling. This could be an example of what is called an exact theory replacing its approximate counterpart. In this case, the corresponding approximate theory would be the gender binary. ("You are either a man or a woman.") 

A limitation of this “median theory” is that no causative mechanism is provided.

Recent history of trans

Since the early Sixties, we have seen a trend of increasing media exposure of trans and non-binary individuals, and this was also a period of ever-increasing human population numbers. I conjecture that the latter trend caused the former. The population trend may have produced an upward trend in the average population density at which people are living, suburban expansion notwithstanding. This may have caused an increasing incidence of aggressive one-on-one interactions among humans due to the Calhoun effect, which is much discussed in these pages. See post #36. Aggressive, one-on-one interactions are well known to change the social status of the combatants, the winner enjoying increased status (i.e., a higher ranking in the pecking order) and the loser suffering reduced status. Overall, population density increases can thus be expected to increase the amount of traffic on the social ladder, both upward and downward, leading to increasing numbers of individuals crossing the median and becoming trans or nonbinary. The increasing numbers of trans and nonbinary individuals in society was then faithfully reflected in the content of the news stories of the day. QED.

Trans not genetically determined

Consistent with this, PLOS blogger R. Lewis, who has a PhD in genetics, found remarkably little evidence of a direct genetic causation in transgenderism. Moreover, out of 58 studies on "transgender" listed on clinicaltrials.gov, nothing worth mentioning was found about genetics. This could be an instance of the filing-drawer effect (negative results not published but left to languish in the filing cabinet).

How pecking-order dynamics may lead to dispersal and a mechanism 

I am indebted to Jordan Peterson for turning me on to the pecking-order idea. It can explain aspects of dispersalism, as follows: If people have no emotional memory of their social wins and losses, we would expect their distribution on the social ladder to be Gaussian (aka, a bell curve). However, if a win or loss leaves you with an emotional residue of optimism or pessimism (and, of course, it does), a positive feedback can set in if conflicts are coming faster than the emotional fallout from each can dissipate, so that the more you lose, the greater your pessimism, and the more likely you are to lose in the future. Moreover, the more you win, the greater your optimism, and the more likely you are to win in the future. (Following Peterson, this emotional fallout effect may be due to prolonged up- and down-regulations of serotonin concentrations in the brain.) This dynamic then splits the population into a bi-modal social distribution, resulting in dispersal when most of the underdogs become refugees. Those who remain conceal their potential to reproduce (and thus compete) in gay-trans relationships. The frequency of conflicts could be measuring population density, and the conflicts would not necessarily be over resources, but over proxies for these such as land or jobs. With the addition of these ideas, the splitting and separation of overcrowded rodent populations in the behavioral-sink phase of a Calhoun experiment is explained. To connect these ideas with my earlier idea of the sadness cycle, I conjecture that sadness and its attendant social signaling expresses anger colored by pessimism about winning, whereas contempt and its social signaling expresses anger colored by optimism about winning.

 

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

#53. Where are All the Space Aliens? [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EP    EV

Red, theory; black, fact

Canada's remote Algonquin Radio Observatory,

which took over SETI duty between 1988-91.

Astronomical observations and the Fermi paradox

Contemporary exoplanet research keeps turning up extra-solar-system planets that seem to be promising abodes of life of the Earthly variety (never mind the completely weird biochemistries that may exist on other planets). In the habitable exoplanets catalogue (HEC), kept by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo, the list of planets found orbiting in the conservative habitable zone now has 17 entries, and a 2013 paper by Petigura et al. ("Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars") placed the percentage of stars in our galaxy with potentially habitable planets at 22 ± 8. Accumulating evidence suggests that life is common in our galaxy, yet SETI research—the search for extraterrestrial civilizations that send out radio signals that bear some stamp of intelligence—has drawn a complete blank, as far as I know. And if it did find something, it would make such a sensation in the media that no-one could help knowing. So I ask you: where are all the space aliens? This question is generally attributed to 20th-century physicist Enrico Fermi and has since become known as the Fermi Paradox.

My hypothesis is this:

Life is one thing; intelligent life is quite another. This is a form of the Rare Earth hypothesis, which is one of the avenues that has been explored through the years in the search for a resolution of the Fermi Paradox.

Biospheres may not be permanent 

No doubt there are many, many planets in our part of the galaxy that have some form of primitive life, and many, many more "graveyard planets" that once had life but are now sterile. Mars may well be an example of this kind of planet in our own solar system.

Biochallenge!

I conjecture that if we seem to be alone in this part of the galaxy, based on the negative SETI evidence, it is because we are, and this is because we have evolved to the level of intelligence first in this galactic neighborhood, because evolution on the Earth is egregiously rapid. It has taken us four billion years to get this far, which doesn't sound so fast, but everything is relative. This rapid evolution is plausibly a response to challenges: all the various natural disasters we are subject to here on Earth, examples being bolide (meteor) crashes, continental glaciations, drifting continents, droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, long climatic warm spells, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanism, wild weather, wildfires, and winter.

Sept 23, 2018: Tornadoes knock out primary transformer station in my town.

Case in point: a large bolide strike is believed to have triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs, making way for the rise of the mammals, and we ourselves are the descendants of those mammals. The bolide may have killed the dinosaurs indirectly, by touching off a climate shift in our dangerously unstable world. This would explain the temporary presence of dinosaur fossils above the Cretaceous/Tertiary iridium anomaly, which has been a problem for the bolide hypothesis.

Case in point: the rise of modern humans seems to have coincided with the end of the last continental glaciation. The rigorous, cold-climate conditions prevailing then might have selected our ancestors for high ability in building shelters and sewing protective clothing. These skills might have required the rapid evolution of a high ability to process spatial information, which we then leveraged into the building of civilizations upon the return of temperate climatic conditions.

To contrive a planet that is so challenging and difficult, yet has not succeeded in destroying life altogether in four billion years, may require a very rare combination of parameters (e.g., our distance from the sun, the size and composition of the Earth, the presence of the asteroid belt, the presence of the Oort cloud), and this rarity has led to our emerging into intelligence before it happened anywhere else in this part of the galaxy.

These parameters may well have special values at which critical behavior occurs, such as the onset of positive feedbacks leading to heating or cooling. Earth may be simultaneously close to several of these critical points, a rare circumstance, but one that does not require extreme, atypical values of any given variable.

My take on the Rare Earth hypothesis therefore emphasizes what are called "evolutionary pumps" (e.g., glaciations, bolide crashes, etc.) in discussions of this hypothesis, as well as the anthropic principle. 

August 28, 2011: An Ottawa sunset inflamed by a recent hurricane in the USA.

Evolution

I further conjecture that the difficulties of our past have left their mark on us, and we call it "evil." Some will deny that this concept has any construct validity, saying, "It's not a thing," but I think that it is an approximate version of something that does, which I term "dispersalism" in this blog. This is because a basic strategy for surviving disasters is dispersal. 

Our planet's predilection for disaster has deeply ingrained dispersal tendencies into most species here, by the mechanism of natural selection. Humans now get their food from agriculture. However, agriculture requires a settled existence and is therefore in opposition to dispersal, so the plot thickens.

This characteristic of agriculture results in the psychological pressure for dispersal relentlessly building, pressure-cooker fashion, across time, until a destructive explosion occurs (war or revolution), thereby accomplishing the long-delayed dispersal.

Wildfire smoke seen in Ottawa, Jun. 2023

#49. A Naturalistic Theory of Worship [evolutionary psychology, population]

 PO    EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Anytown, Canada, Apr. 11

Religion has a theory part and an applied part. The latter are the modes of worship. Since our moral codes are held by at least the Abrahamic religions to be commands from God, it would follow that it’s pretty important to conform to them, and most of us have difficulty doing this all the time. To help us, religion has developed a behavior-modification role, the role of the modes of worship.

The behavior-mod role aims at mitigating the human form of the Calhoun Effect—a tendency to aggression linked to rising population density but not to actual want per se. See post #36. Population density would have been an issue even millennia in the past when the world population was a minuscule fraction of what it is today, when people began living continuously inside walled cities for protection from their enemies. Within the inflexible confines of such a city, you have the makings of a human Calhoun experiment. Not coincidentally, the city of Jerusalem, sacred to three world religions, was a walled city. Nowadays, at a world population of 7.5 billion, it can be said that the world is our walled city. What can religion now tell us about how to get along?

Jerusalem in 1972

I’ll focus on the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which developed in that order, all in the Middle East, each of the last two acknowledging its debt to the previous. I suggest that these three religions form a series of progressively increasing effectiveness in mitigating the Calhoun Effect, by an accumulation of folkloric knowledge. Thus, to see how modes of worship work, the purpose of this post, we need only examine Islam, likely to represent the most efficient solution. Form generally follows function most transparently at highest efficiency.

The Human Calhoun Effect

The natural human population density plot over time has a saw-tooth form, with linear increases alternating with abrupt decreases that return population density to some repeatable reset value. The linear segments are created by a negative-feedback controller in the limbic system that controls rate-of-change of population density to a constant positive value, not absolute density. At this writing, the world is probably coming to the crest of one of these linear segments, which began in 1950. The sudden population-density decrease that ends the cycle may have two phases: a first that produces population-density decrease by emigration, and a second that produces population-density decrease by mass murder, if the first phase does not take the system all the way to the reset value. The first phase accomplishes the biological function of dispersal, which is generally important for long-term species survival. The second guarantees overall stability on a multi-cycle time scale and wards off Malthusian catastrophes.

Both phases demand formally altruistic acts from individuals, but not of the warm-and-fuzzy kind. The first phase uses an exchange of anger signals to lock non-altruists out of the process so that the behaviour is stable over evolutionary time. The second phase locks out the non-altruists using an asymmetric exchange of signals: contempt signals going one way and sadness signals going the other way. The second phase culminates in the mass murder of the sadness signalers by the contempt signalers and the appropriation of all the resources of the sadness signalers by the contempt signalers. The last step guarantees that the contempt signalers will appear entitled to those outside the cycle.

Islam

Islam is conveniently summarized for our purposes as The Five Pillars of Islam, which are explained in the Quran, namely:

1) The Creed. 

(“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”)

2) Prayer.

3) Charity. 

(Concealed almsgiving is preferred.)

4) Fasting.

5) Pilgrimage.

The Theory

The creed is “The Great Why in the Sky” that people need for the control of their most difficult emotions. Strong emotion can be overridden by reason if that is required by a learned worldview, the validity of which the person is willing to bet their life on. Here, I attempt to supply a worldview based on evolutionary psychology. The creed, or “theory part” of a religion, also gets the rational mind cooperating with the behaviour-modification program, which acts on the emotional self. 

Rational override based on some creed may begin the work of extirpating someone's anger or sadness cycle, but behaviour modification may be necessary to finish it and produce a lasting improvement in the person's circumstances. These cycles may have deep roots inaccessible to consciousness and capable of perpetuating self-defeating behaviors if not treated appropriately.

Prayer superficially is a deliberate wasting of time, which is not free in metabolic terms because the worshipper has a basal metabolic rate that must be supplied whether he/she works or not. Regular inactivity is surely a luxury of only those enjoying abundance. This is implicitly saying to the anger and sadness/contempt programs: “Food is still plentiful, so it’s not time to get nasty.” These cycles may be triggered by signs of high population density, not actual want, but they should still be sensitive to metabolic signals that speak to whether actual scarcity exists. High population density acquired its potent psychological effects, after all, because it usually predicted scarcity in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Alternatively, prayer may work like meditation to turn off the internal voice and the unnecessary stress it causes if unscripted.

Charity, on the receiving end, that is, is for contempt signalers, who, as you will recall, are extremely entitled in the final stage of their emotional program. Accepting charity–goods that you did not work for–tells the contempt program that it has achieved its mission and can therefore halt. So, it does. In Islam, almsgiving is said to be best done in secret, an effect of which will be to spare the pride of the recipient. This will be an issue with contemptuous types.

Fasting–going without the necessities of life–is for sadness signalers and it tells their emotional program that they have given or lost all their resources to the contempt signalers, and therefore their program has achieved its mission and can halt. So, it does. On the other hand, based on my own experience with fasting, the practice may work by increasing the faster's energy level post-fast, and an increased energy level can solve a multitude of problems.

Pilgrimage is where you tell the anger-cycle program with your feet that you have been driven out of your homeland forever and must resettle elsewhere. Therefore, the program has achieved its mission and can halt. So, it does. 

Thus, the task of much religious behavior-modification can be likened to persuading a devil to depart by showing him false evidence that he has accomplished his purpose in coming, knowing that he is myopic. However, prayer tells him that he doesn’t even have to come in the first place.

#42. A Discovery of Hackers [population, evolutionary psychology]

PO   EP

Red, theory; black, fact

The hacker phenomenon may be psychologically and sociologically akin to what was once called witchcraft, and I think witchcraft is a scientifically accessible social phenomenon. 

The Past

However, the height of the witchcraft hysteria in Europe occurred during the Sixteenth century, when there were no computers. (I focus on Europe here because my ancestors came from there as did those of most people I know.) It was, however, a time of unprecedented scientific advance, and if science paced technology then as now, quite a few new technologies were coming into knowledge for the first time.

The Future

I suggest that the defining toxic ingredient in black-hat hacking is new technology per se. We should therefore expect that with time, computer hacking will spread to new-technology hacking in general and that the computer-centric version must be considered the embryonic form. This is bad news because there has never been so much new technology as now, but at what point in history has this not been true?

The Mystery of Witch Hysteria

Belief in and persecution of witches is so widespread across human cultures that it must be considered a cultural universal. Scholars focus on the persecution part, blithely assuming that there is absolutely nothing real driving it, and that the subject people of the study are, by implication, gullible and cruel. Is this stance elitist? Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. Those people all have brains in their heads built to the exact same design as our own, and the role of education may be overrated when cultural universals are in play.

A Contemporary Interpretation 

The defining idea of the witches/technology hackers may be viewing new technology as a possible means to increase personal power. After siege mentality sets in, fear of apprehension and punishment leads to a mad-dog rejection of all morality, like a gambler chasing the money, or in this case, the indemnity. 

A Contemporary Interpretation of Black Magic

A technology ideal for hacking/witchcraft must be usable without the identity of the agent coming into general knowledge, and is thus  similar to the ring of Gyges mentioned in Plato's Republic. The anonymity conferred by the Internet makes it one of our worst rings of Gyges.  More will be discovered in other realms of technology as the hackers branch out, perhaps in alliance with the currently popular Maker movement. 

How common are Gygean technologies? Hard to say, but it may help to list some.

• Ionizing radiation was known from the work of Roentgen in 1895 (x-rays) and Villard in 1900 (gamma rays) and for the first time, a means to destroy healthy, living tissue silently and through walls solid enough to conceal all signs of the agent, had become available. 
• The lead pencil, introduced in the Sixteenth century already alluded to, was originally made with actual lead metal instead of graphite and clay mixtures, which we now know to be insidiously neurotoxic, especially to children--knowledge to warm the heart of any proper witch.
• In the time of Christ in the Middle East, the Roman occupiers knew of ten or so plant-derived poisons, including opium. The very concept of a poison could have been new in those days, and poisons are the classical hard-to-detect weapons. If the weapon is hard to detect, so is the agent. A crypto-technological explanation for some of the events of the New Testament seems possible.

Gygean weapons are doubly "invisible" when based on new technology because these modus operandi are not yet on anybody's radar, so the first x number of people who spot them are likely to be disbelieved and their sanity questioned.

Witches have always operated in the zone of perceptual blindness to abuses that transiently opens up after the introduction of any new technology. The psychological invisibility of weapons based on new technology is probably the factor that led witches to become associated with magic. 

Psychological Aspects 

Moreover, since the technology is unprecedented in human evolution, the levels of resentment that become inducible in the victims are potentially unprecedented and unphysiologically intense, leading to grotesquely disproportionate punishments being meted out to discovered witches, and this for strings of crimes that would have been extremely serious even considering strictly proportionate punishments. The historical accounts of witch-burnings may have all been cleaned up for a squeamish readership.

Why were a majority of European accused witches female? It is probably relevant that the female-specific scold’s bridle was in use at this time. At the height of the anti-witch hysteria, the Catholic Church was pushing back against the Protestant Reformation, and yet Catholicism was relatively tolerant of witchcraft. The most witch trials per capita were in high-latitude or high-altitude countries (e.g., Norway, Scotland, Switzerland) that would have been most affected by the  “little ice age” of the 1600s. Other crimes like theft and murder surged when witchcraft did. I’m not sure what all this adds up to beyond a society under stress.

The Present

Today, the hackers are mostly male and the demographic challenge is too many people, not too few. Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents imply that people will become more aggressive if forced to live at higher population densities, and such a relentless increase in aggressiveness may be driving the current reemergence of the witch/hacker. 

It doesn't help that organized religion, the traditional enemy of witchcraft, is withering on the vine in this country, probably due to the intellectual fallout from Darwin's theory of evolution combined with the failure of the public to understand that a scientific world-view is never finished and may some day substantially validate the claims of religion after some reinterpretation of terms.

Photo by Daphné Be Frenchie on Unsplash

#40. The Sadness Cycle [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

EP   NE

Red, theory; black, fact

Niccolo Machiavelli by Tito

The anger cycle and the sadness cycle may reach their full flower in wars of dispersal and wars of depopulation, respectively. 

The Function of the Sadness Cycle 

Wars of depopulation would serve to prevent Malthusian disasters such as general famine. The sadness cycle is a form of altruism that facilitates this depopulation by making a portion of the population sad and suicidal and the remainder contemptuous and entitled. The contemptuous ones take everything the sad ones have, ultimately their lives, and the sad ones let them.

If the sadness signalers were fighting tooth and nail, the transfer of property would leave the contempt signalers with many injuries, which would defeat the purpose of the whole process, which is to leave the residual population stronger and healthier than before under conditions of restricted food supply. Moreover, the sad ones and the contemptuous ones are playing two roles within the same adaptation, and if you can play one role, you can play the other. 

The Sadness Cycle in Evolution 

Since no altruism can evolve in the presence of selfishness unless the altruists are only altruistic to each other, a signaling cycle is required to lock the altruists together to the exclusion of non-altruists. Thus, sadness induces contempt and contempt induces sadness, and so on in a vicious cycle leading to the complete destruction of the sad ones and the transfer of all their property specifically to the contemptuous ones. This dynamic could be the origin of elder abuse and clinical depression.

History Repeats 

Machiavelli wrote, "He is made contemptible who is held to be changeable, light, effeminate, pusillanimous, irresolute, and from these the Prince must guard himself as from a reef." The traits listed appear to be the symptoms of unacknowledged sadness, and were no doubt quite lethal in Macchiavelli's time. Due to the present skyrocketing of the world population with the concomitant "Calhoun effect" from crowding stress, we are no doubt due for a remachiavellianization of daily life. 

The Anger Cycle 

Much of human unhappiness comes from destructive, escalating signaling cycles, usually between two persons. Examples are arguments, feuds, schools of thought, gang wars, and revolutions. The signals exchanged are initially personal expressions of anger. Importantly, these expressions are multi modal, and therefore highly redundant. (e.g., threatening utterances, tones of voice, facial expressions, gait, crashing and banging things, spying, following, etc.) Your anger comes out of you "through every pore."

The Function of the Anger Cycle

These signals are too many and varied for conscious control, which is why most people remain enslaved by their signals and cycles. The anger cycle may be selected so as to escalate until one of the parties must leave the country. When people are threatened, they seek allies, so all of society eventually gets drawn in and polarized as the escalation proceeds apace, like a black hole. Therefore, it is a group that must eventually leave, not a single individual, which is the basis of the refugee phenomenon. 

Evolution of the Anger Cycle 

In ecological terms, the refugee phenomenon is clearly sub-serving dispersal. However, dispersal-producing behavior is fundamentally altruistic in a backhanded way. The benefit to the supposed loser, the group that eventually gets driven out, is that occasionally they find a newly-emptied vacant habitat in which to settle and therefore can reproduce without competition. This is a tremendous benefit in evolutionary terms and may once have been great enough to redeem all the waste and suffering of human-style dispersal. 

However, altruistic behavior cannot evolve in the presence of non-altruists unless a signaling system is established to ensure that altruists are only altruistic to each other. That is why signaling is emphasized here. The reason why the signals are multimodal is that the altruism program probably breaks down occasionally because of the short-term advantages of being a non-altruist. This has probably happened many times in the past and the broken algorithm was repaired each time by natural selection with the addition of yet another signal component. 

The Bigger Picture 

The various signal cycles may reinforce each other. The four signal cycles that seem to form the framework of human life seem to have such an interdependence. These are: mother-child bonding, which could potentiate man-woman bonding, which could potentiate the anger cycle (via jealousy), which could potentiate the sadness cycle.

 

Picture credit: Wiki Commons

#36. Two Kinds of War [evolutionary psychology, engineering, neuroscience]

EN   EP   NE

Red, theory; black, fact

A Nazi Enigma code machine (Canadian War Museum)

There are probably two basic biological uses for human anger: dispersal, and providing an emergency brake on population increase that avoids Malthusian disasters by triggering wars. The second kind of war ends life without being notably efficient in producing mass migration. 

The Past

I have long wondered why the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to include two gentlemen in charge of warlike matters. Why the apparent duplication? The above may give the reason: one (with the bow) represents wars of depopulation and the other (with the sword) represents wars of displacement.

The Coventry Blitz produced so much mass migration into the countryside surrounding that city that it was an embarrassment for the British government, calling into question Britain’s willingness to fight. Was Coventry some kind of watershed, before which the conflict was of the displacement type, and afterward, of the depopulation type?

The facts bear this out, considering Nazi treatment of the Jews as a litmus test of the zeitgeist of that time. After coming to power in 1933, the Nazis aimed at forcing the Jews to emigrate, and by the outbreak of hostilities in September, 1939, 250,000 of Germany’s 437,000 Jews had done so. The Coventry Blitz was in November, 1940. The Holocaust began, in terms of men, women, and children all being targeted for execution, in August, 1941, nine months later. The German zeitgeist seems to have shifted gears in the fall of 1940, aiming at depopulation rather than displacement. I am obviously assuming that the evolutionary, selectionist justification of the Holocaust given at the time, in forums such as the 1942 Wannsee conference, was a rationalization.

A Sociological Theory

Wars brought on by population pressure may begin as the displacement type, and if this does not result in sufficient local reduction in population pressure after a certain time, the hostilities shift gears to the depopulation type of conflict. 

If human population is under PID [proportional-integral-derivative] control by the subconscious, the event causing the shift could be the amount of signal accumulated on the integrator rising above some threshold. This may actually be a second threshold, with the first and lower threshold controlling the outbreak of a war of displacement.

A paradoxical outcome of Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents can be explained in terms of such an integrator. 

Calhoun’s Classical Experiment 

By providing unlimited food and water to a founder population of rats or mice, with regular bedding changes and exclusion of predators and parasites, the rodents were allowed to increase their population to fabulous numbers. However, the rodents were given no extra space. As the population soared to incredible densities, all kinds of pathological behaviors appeared along with a great deal of violence. Birth rates plummeted after a "behavioral sink" developed, and remained low, never recovering, as the population decreased all the way to zero.

An Engineering-inspired Theory 

My interpretation of the behavioral sink is that it is integrator windup, a pathology of humanly engineered PID controllers, and possibly natural ones too. The signal accumulated on the integrator has been building for so long, and the population crash is so sudden, that not enough time is spent at population densities below set point to cancel the "control debt" on the integrator, so it continues to insanely command a zero birth rate even as the population is heading for zero.

Philosophers May Have Noticed This

George Santayana wrote that "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." [source, Wiki quotes, accessed 06-11-2018] Which sounds like integrator windup to me.

The Future 

A third and highest threshold of the control debt may exist, which, if crossed, leads to the human behavioral sink and the possible destruction of the human race due to essentially psychological causes. In the behavioral sink, I postulate that everyone would be a ZPG (Zero Population Growth) fanatic and unable to change without pharmacological help. (Good old booze? It may not be that simple.)