Underappreciated Democracy

Jean Piaget( developmental psychologist) he pointed out something very interesting. He said imagine you ran a set of iterated games as a competition, and the rule in one iterated game was you bloody well do what i tell you to and the other one is well, get together and decide how we are gonna do this. Now we run the competition.

Now what Piaget tells you is you do what i tell you fails. I have to impose force in order to keep you cooperating. And the imposition of the force is a cost. Its an efficiency cost. And across time, that efficiency cost is going to multiple and the equilibrated state solution where we all agree wins. Think of that locally. For example you try to organize your family. You have a little family conference about who is doing what in the household. And if you want peace and harmony in an iterated game, you say well, heres the tasks and they have to be done, people have to agree on that. And then say which task would you do and then everybody agrees. And that was Piagets idea of the equilibrate state. Its a voluntary agreement that can be iterated across time that works at multiple levels on a social organization.

Now thats a serrrrrriooouuuusss set of constraints. Now piaget was looking for a way to reconcile science and religion. He was looking for a biological origiin for morality. And he thought he found it in the idea of the equilibrated state. And its even deeper that that. Now imagine the idea holds for so long in time that it gets integrated throughout society. That exactly what a hierarchy is.

Hierarchies are 350 million years old. Theyre not partarchal white males hierarchies that have formed in the past 300 years. Hierarchies are 350 million years old. Theyre stable solutions to this iterated game problem. And theyve been around for so long that we have adapted to them. And thats part of the reason we have archetypal representations of the social structure. And we also have archetypal representations of the relationships of the individual to the social structure your job as an individual to the social structure is to embody the social structure but to also serve as its eyes and its mouths. So they can update itself when necessary.

So lets say you take on the mantle of your father. But hes dead. Hes the past he cant see. You can see. So you take the structure that is already there and modify it where its necessary. And that modification process is necessary. Or the state becomes too static and collapses, and thats why the state has to be subordinate to the individual. And thats what western culture has discovered. And we just let them go. That the idea of the logos. Thats a big idea. And is you want to live somewhere where the individual is subordinate to the state, well hey, there are many places like that man go ahead, emigrate, go there. 90% of the world’s countriesare like that. If you want to live like that man go find out what its like. You dont see immigration going there thats for sure.