#57. The Drill Sergeants of the Apocalypse [evolutionary psychology, population]

PO     EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Till Eulenspiegel, a classical trickster in European cultures

The trickster type may really be Nature's penetration tester who tests our defences against adversity. 

The type probably emerges in contexts of unequal power (Person A has the shotgun; person B doesn’t). Thus, an abiding fear is the soil out of which tricksterism grows, by the following positive feedback: A successful trick shows up the more powerful persons and shows them in a feckless light, which reduces the fear level of the trickster, which reinforces trick-playing. This is a short-term high that comes at the expense of worse relations with the more powerful persons and thus eventually even greater fear levels for the tricksters, which they try to remedy with still more tricks. An example of an unequal power relationship is between a foreign invader and the defenders. Invasion is such a common event in history that by now, countermeasures will have evolved. Tricksterism is likely to be a tile in the mosaic of any such adaptation. 

Tricksterism also seems to be a form of play. A result from animal ethology is that the play of young animals is a form of learning. The thing learned in playing tricks may be how to manage power inequalities.

A biological precedent for penetration testing?

Evidence for a biological precedent may be the many retroviruses integrated into the human genome. One of these may become active now and then at random and kills the host cell if the anti-viral defences of the latter have become weak due to some somatic mutation. The red team-blue team strategy seems to be too good a trick for nature to miss.

Evolution of the trickster

Modern human populations may have two independent axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control valuer. The first may subserve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may subserve building. Any built thing must serve in a complex world in which many constraints must be simultaneously observed. Thus, after the initial build, a long period of tweaking must typically follow. The role of the tricksters is to powerfully motivate this tweaking, for example, by cleverly making someone’s shelter fall down, before the complacency of the control-valuer builders leads to disaster. This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens. Tricksterism may have evolved out of a previously evolved capacity for military strategy, which involves essentially putting one over on the enemy. 

Tricksterism today

The tricksters can also make mistakes, causing damage that cannot have a silver lining in any possible world, and moving to correct this is a natural role of the builders. If you are a builder, ask this: “What is the best use of my indignation?” It is to keep to a strict harm-reduction approach. 

Tricksterism can intensify into sadism, in which the protagonist takes pleasure in the victim’s torment and wants to make it last. However, if you make it last, you are giving the victim plenty of time and motivation to figure out solutions, like a patient old instructor giving his pupil his lessons one at a time, as he is ready for them, and this is how the wise victim will construct the situation. Such a victim will end up with information and know-how others will pay for. 

Before the trickster

Our evolutionary forebears may have been champion dispersers for a long time before the ice age forced some of them to become champion builders, initially, of shelters and warm clothing. (Champion environment modifiers may be closer to the mark.) It is an interesting fact that physically, humans exceed all other animals only in long-distance running, which can be read as dispersal ability. Our carelessness with preserving the local environments and our propensity for overpopulation can be read as typical r-selected disperser behavior. The r-selecting niche may have been big game hunting. H. erectus sites indicate consumption of medium and large meat animals. Overhunting would have occurred routinely, due to the slow reproduction rates of large animals and the high hunting efficiency of H. erectus due to tool use, so that dispersal of the hunters to new habitats would likewise have been routine.

Picture credit: Wiki Commons

#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

#37. The Fallacy of Justice [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

The Biology of Badness

Evil and criminality may sub-serve either dispersal or preemptive population reduction, both valuable biological processes that tend to prolong the survival of species. 

The algorithms for achieving these ends would have been created over time by some form of evolution.

Evolution and the Role of Emotion

The genetically inherited parts of our behavior enter consciousness as emotions, and can therefore be easily identified. The main outlines of civilization are probably due to the inherited behavior component, and not to the reasoning, conscious mind, which is often just a detail-handler. How could civilization rest on a process that can't even remember what happened last weekend?

Thus, humans have a dual input to behavior, emotion and reason. The above arguments show that evil and criminality come from the emotional input. Yet the entire deterrence theory of justice assumes the opposite, by giving the person a logical choice: "You do this, we do that, and you won't like it. So you don't do this, right?"

However, I think that people commit crimes for emotional reasons. As usual, the criminal's reasoning faculties are just an after-the-decision detail handler. The direction that this detail handler then takes is fascinatingly monstrous, but this does not mean that crime begins in reason.

Conclusion: the deterrence theory of justice is based on a category error.

Past and Future Responses to Badness

Religion, with its emphasis on emotion, was all the formal "law enforcement system" anyone needed up until only about 200 years ago, at the industrial revolution. We may be able to go beyond where religion takes us by means of a disease model of criminality.

It does make some sense to lock criminals up, because with less freedom they cannot physically commit as many crimes. Many prisons become dungeons, however, because of the public's desire for revenge. However, all revenge-seeking belongs to the dispersal/depopulation dynamic and is thus part of the problem. A desire for revenge may follow a crime very predictably, but logically, it is a non-sequitur.

A more nuanced theory of crime prevention is possible, where logical and technological constraints on behavior complement efforts to reduce the motivation for committing crimes at the source: the individual's perception of the fairness of society, which will be due to a combination of objective realities and the filters through which they are viewed. However, I originally wrote as I did because I don't think that logical and technological constraints are the squeaky wheel at the moment.

#17. Hell's Kitchen [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Ever since the assassination of JFK in '63, people of my generation have been wondering why the Americans kill off their best and brightest. It's not just the Americans, of course. The same thing happened to Gandhi and Our Savior no less.

I think a homey kitchen metaphor nails it. Once you have emptied the milk carton of all its milk, you can use it to dispose of the grease. That is, by the logic of "The Insurance of the Heart," once tremendous acclaim has been conferred on someone's name, the physical person no longer matters for the purposes of enhancing the name their descendants will inherit, and so can safely be used to draw the fire of the genetic undesirables; the resulting tremendous indignation will confer bad odor on the name of said undesirable for quite long enough to eradicate their meh genes in all copies.

Thus, Booth's genes were eradicated to make way for Lincoln's, and Oswald's genes were eradicated to make way for Kennedy's, without overall change in population density.

If the intermind could be said to have thoughts, this is what they would be like. Clearly, it's not God.