Groups of mostly strangers—a.k.a. communities, societies, civilizations—are a fascinating object of study in my explorations of design. The fundamental principles of organizing a society—a.k.a. ideology—are not well-known. Many ideologies compete with one another to become the dominant organizational principle.

I don’t expect to answer the question of which societal model is best. I expect even less that I will be able to prove my ideas to anyone. These are mere notes, albeit notes I am holding to a certain standard. In particular, no ideological idea I have is safe from scrutiny.

Ideologies—recall these are merely complexes of ideas about societal design—are creatures to which individual humans play host. Since ideas are a new and relatively primitive life-form that feed off human attention, their presence is not often noticed by the host. Ideologies, because they are particularly important for the functioning of a society, are among the first and therefore deepest ideas that inhabit with their host. Many humans are therefore unable to recognize their own ideology, though they have no trouble identifying competing ideologies. The hosts of those competing ideologies are more often than not branded as “enemy”. This situation is unacceptable in my opinion, as it is an instance of an idea controlling a human—parasitism—rather than a human and their ideas existing in a healthy symbiosis. The unfortunate reality is that an important block of audience will just get angry and leave if I mention their enemy neutrally, so I will be avoiding all mention of specific ideologies.

What Makes a Good Society?

My foundational principle for evaluating ideologies is based in the following question:

Select a single person at random from society, but do not tell me about them. If I were to bet the subjective quality of my life on the subjective quality of theirs, would I like my chances?

Essentially, I think a good society is one in which the most number of people can succeed as much as possible.

The most important thing about this method is that it doesn’t allow my preferences to enter the equation. Strict adherence eliminates the one of the most damaging human biases (at least in terms of designing a society): egocentrism It also keeps at bay my own symbiotic ideology, whose preferences can so easily overwhelm my own thought process in defense of itself.

Freedom

Is individual freedom a fundamental principle in the theory of societal structure?

It is certainly easy to maximize the freedom of every individual: simply eliminate all restrictions from the society. Statistically, there will be a few people whose goal will be to damage the quality of others’ lives, and will be skilled at it. Unfortunately, it is much easier to destroy a life than to protect or rebuild one, so the sibjective accomplishments of these people will be disproportionaltely large. Maximization of individual freedom therefore does not pass my test for a good society. In fact, it is clear that freedom must be restricted in some way. The difficult part is deciding which freedoms to curtail, and in what manner to enforce those limitations.

It is particularly damaging to evaluate a society with respect to the freedom or curtailment of freedom of a specific individual. Such a method involves major biases: cherry-picking data based on how much you relate to the individual in question. No rational thought can survive a combination of egocentrism and statistical failure such as this.

Freedom is not the end goal. It may help or hinder a society. It therefore must be carefully considered.

Violence in Governance

When you live in a stable society, it’s not always clear if it would turn out better or worse were all that structure to vanish. After all, it would certainly get rid of the “violence inherent in the system”. Besides, no one likes paying taxes.

It’s a question of Nash equilibria. There are systems where a simple change will make all the options worse, but everyone’s lives better. One such change, blown up to the scale of a society is the establishment of taxes and their enforcement through violence. It’s messier on this large a scale, but the principle applies. Still, why violence?, violence is inherently bad, right?

Egocentrism is a natural human bias. It takes a significant amount of effort to overcome it, and in most cases the resulting selfless state is not stable. Humans also have finite energy to spend accomplishing their goals. It is much easier to destroy an unwary competitor than out-compete them fairly, so destruction tends to be preferred in practice. That is why violence is a natural state for humans; it’s not a desirable situation, but it is the reality we must deal with in societal design.

The establishment of a monopoly on violence is one way to reduce overall violence. The only way to maintain such a monopoly is to have only one group. The violence it uses will be violence against itself. In the interests of efficiency, there will inevitably be a specialization of labor: those that are best at using violence become soldiers and police. A danger then arises: if a society splits with the warriors on one side, there is no longer a monopoly on violence, merely a monopoly on effective violence.

Monopoly on violence cannot be the only thing we seek in our government. If we did, we’d merely have one group of selfish humans—pulled from the population of all us selfish humans—exercising their selfishness on everyone else. What we need are people who can unify a society. Their primary tasks must be facilitating communication, and expressing the decisions of the society. Secondarily, it must be responsible for enforcement, but enforcement is not merely the dispensing of violence. Where violence is needed is in times of uncertainty, which means violence will inevitably be used incorrectly. Society must recompense people for any misplaced violence used against them. Just as we should be conservative in our pronouncement of guilt, we should be liberal in our compensation.

Education Systems

I want to live in a world where the purpose of the educational system is to inform its members of the workings of their society, and for context also the workings of others. This doesn’t merely mean a civics class every semester, though that might be part of it. It means literacy in the ideas and technologies on which our civilization depend. It means understanding social norms and etiquette. It means being able to perform common adult tasks, such as personal finances, recognizing and treating common illnesses, and identifying falsehoods. It means being able to bring about reform or revolution.