Most everyone reading this is familiar with graph paper. That’s the paper with the little boxes on it. Now, imagine yourself in a world like that graph paper. You are in a room that has four walls and each wall has either a door, a window, or nothing at all. The plain walls range from impenetrable to fairly easy to bust through. You can go through the doors and windows or try to bust through the walls, but you just end up in another room that is a square on the grid. You don’t know what is in each room until you enter it.
Presented with such a puzzle. you could go exploring, looking for the route out of the maze. Let’s make the game more fun and added some dangers in rooms. You will be a lot more cautious about seeing the other rooms. You might take a peek through the door before charging into the next room. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Even without me adding life threatening dangers to the puzzle, your way out of the maze would be trial and error with lots of backtracking. If in your first room you have two doors and those connecting rooms each have two doors, there are four possible outcomes. It is not hard to see how the possible outcomes can multiply quickly.
Now, imagine instead of a simple grid, the maze is like the gaming paper from the 70’s version of Dungeons and Dragons. That’s the hexagonal stuff. Instead of having four choices you now have six options at the start. That means your first decision has thirty possible outcomes. Multiply this out of a few moves and you see how quickly this puzzle becomes very complex. Even after a few moves, you would struggle to retrace your steps without some sort of map.
That last bit is important to understand. Each decision you face is the result of previous decisions. If you make a bad move on step three, but only discover it at step nine, you have an accumulation of bad decisions to contend with before you can get back to the original error. That could be daunting enough to make going backward unrealistic.
The point of this thought experiment is to illustrate how complicated even simple decision trees can become after a few steps. Imagine that each move is decided by a committee that represents the interests of different groups. It’s not just deciding on which box to enter. It is how to decide if that choice was a good choice and then deciding where to go from there.
This is how societies evolve and develop. Even the most autocratic societies make decisions that depend on previous decisions. Kim Jung-un can only choose from the options available to him and those options are the result of decisions made long before he was born. It’s why reductionism should always be dismissed. There’s no great design or plan from which the current actors are working. Every society is playing the hand it is dealt.
This may seem obvious, but analysts are often prone to reductionism, assuming groups are working like individuals. The most obvious example of methodological reductionism is the mythological Zionist conspiracy. Jews are often described as if they are working collectively from a game plan worked out at annual retreats. The reality is that Jews, like everyone else, are working within the constraints placed on them by history. Jews just happen to be smarter than everyone else, on average.
Going back to our puzzle analogy, imagine that instead of a puzzle you can transcend, the hexagon in which you and your tribe exist is where you have always lived, at least in your lifetime. Maybe some of the elders remember a time when your people lived in an adjacent hex. Perhaps your mythology and creation myths talk about some hex at the beginning that lies well beyond anyone’s ability to reach.
In other words, instead of a puzzle into which you were dropped, it is where you have always lived. To you and your people it is not a puzzle. You have no idea it is a puzzle because you lack the perspective to see it that way. Instead, it is your world in the same way the tank is the world as far as the goldfish knows. Leaving the hex, you are in for the adjacent hex is not in pursuit of the way out, because there is no way out.
Now, necessity from time to time will require you and maybe some others to pick up and explore an adjacent square. You have to try something new because the status quo becomes untenable or there is some hope that greater opportunity lies beyond the hex you currently occupy. Again, the options available to you and your clan are the result of similar decisions made in previous generations. History is a nightmare from which you can never awake
Societal evolution may be accretive, but it also happens in fits and starts. If you and everyone you knew were suddenly under some pressure to think about moving to the next hex, some of you could decide to go even further. The need for change opens up a range of choices that were previously off limits. If you’re going to make a change, why not a big change?
We see this in our own lives. When I was a boy, television was a box in the living room and my father cursing on the roof, adjusting the antennae. I recall going with him to the hardware store so he could use the tester to determine which vacuum tubes were dead. In the blink of an eye, I can now watch TV on my mobile phone that has the processing power of the space shuttle.
The thing is my experience with TV as a boy was not all that different from the previous generation’s experience. Kids in the decades after World War II had a consistent material life up into the 80’s and then things started to change rapidly with the microprocessor. The kids of today can’t imagine a world in the old hex of console television, rabbit ears and rooftop antennae.
Think about it. In the 1980’s the fax machine was a whizzbang invention. By the last decade it was obsolete. A decade ago, tapping on a monochrome screen was cutting edge. Today no one remembers the Palm. At the same time, the telephone of 1950 was still in use in most homes in the 1980’s. We think the pace of change today will continue, but history says it will slow to a crawl for a while and then another period of rapid advance, long after we are dead.
The journey of a person, a tribe or a nation is just feeling around in the dark, mostly out of necessity, looking for a solution to current problems. There is no grand plan. The story of humanity in the aggregate and the particular is a random walk. Assigning motives beyond temporary necessity and accident, is reductionism, a structural error in thinking.
“Each decision you face is the result of previous decisions. If you make a bad move on step three, but only discover it at step nine, you have an accumulation of bad decisions to contend with…”
Reminds me of years ago when I was a tank platoon leader. An Infantry PL asked me how I felt about my “personal weapon” being a Beretta pistol rather than an M-16.
I told him, “I start the battle with 4 M1A1C tanks. If it ever comes to having to defend myself with a 9mm pistol, I’ve made so many mistakes I deserve to die.”
The point is – there are jobs and situations where being wrong simply isn’t acceptable and it will be punished in the most severe fashion. Maybe we should begin imposing that standard on our politicians.
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“Kids in the decades after World War II had a consistent material life up into the 80’s and then things started to change rapidly with the microprocessor.”
This isn’t true. You’re mistaking “material” gains with information technology. It is true that there has been rapid increase in information technologies to the point that many innovations seem to be at a standstill. The reality is that they did not stand still. There were amazing material gains in the decades following WWII, that for some reason; that these amazing gains were overshadowed by the shockingly, and completely unprecedented, speed of information tech innovation doesn’t mean they did not exist.
The shipping container revolutionized global trade, significantly dropping the price of shipping costs and dramatically reducing the time it took to load and unload ships.
Air travel innovation democratized air travel, doing for air travel what Ford did for automobiles.
Vaccines were discovered that prevented the the greatest killers of humanity that haunted our existence from the beginning. Some diseases we wiped right off the map.
Some are even greater than the information innovations, such as the incredible medical advances, moving to the point where it was often times worse to go to a doctor for serious medical intervention, to a significant drop if in death rates from many medical interventions.
Economic growth has been exponential since roughly 1800, including the entirety of the twentieth century. Even the so-called “Great Depression” is a minor blip in a logarithmic graph of the American economy from 1900-2000. The time period of 1945-1980 had just as much economic innovation and growth as the rest of the twentieth century.
Why do I feel then that the world is changing faster than I can keep up with? Most people born in the 50s, I bet feel the same way
Are these things true?
1. A Rothschild was proposed the idea of creating modern Israel by an early Jehovah’s Witness leader in the 1880s?
2. The man who helped negotiate the Balfour Declaration was a Zionist Jew who pushed for the speaking of Yiddish over Hebrew, and this man is a candidate for the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
3. Why did ghettos and the Pale of Settlement exist?
4. When was the creation of the earliest synagogue? Where was it?
5. What kind of people would Jews be if they were on average with IQs in the low 90s?
(hint…Israel’s National IQ – 90 Points )
About “This may seem obvious, but analysts are often prone to reductionism, assuming groups are working like individuals. The most obvious example of methodological reductionism is the mythological Zionist conspiracy.”
Actually the Austrian economists have seen this mistaken tendency among “analysts” as what you could call the “reductionism” of viewing individuals working as members of their assigned groups. This is historically and empirically visible in Keynesian economics, the Grand Delusion of economists who cannot believe that people are unpredictable.
As fascinating a series as is the Foundation series from Isaac Asimov, that “psychohistory” is superstitious nonsense. Individual actions can NOT be predicted. Individual valuations cannot be predicted either. This is just one reason the Federal Reserve has ALWAYS been such a miserable failure at what it was purportedly created for, the real purpose being the stealth promotion of oligarchy.
Like when Greenspan once testified before the Monetary Policy committee, saying that the Fed could “simulate” a gold standard in its decisions, Ron Paul observed that he said this “with such a straight face”. –Greenspan had been once upon a time a friend of Ayn Rand, and had advocated the gold standard in earlier days.
As to the “Zionist conspiracy”, one cannot so easily dismiss the complications of history as facile musings of non-thinkers, especially given the known historical fact that it required a LOT of “Zionist conspiracy” to do what Irgun and Stern Gang did in 1947 and 1948, and a LOT of stealth preparation besides to carry out their operations, even under the nose of British authorities. It took a mini-“Zionist conspiracy” to blow up the Hotel David for example. Deir Yassin had absolutely no idea what the plans were of the “Zionist conspiracy”. The plan according to the OFFICIAL Israeli histories are that Begin’s Irgun operatives were to send all the village’s residents fleeing and to demolish all resistance, and that the villagers defending their lifetime homes and livelihood was not a reason to disobey their warnings to flee.
(“God is not mocked… Whatsoever a man seweth, that shall he also reap.” “He that liveth by the sword shall die by the sword.”)
And the Israeli attack on the Liberty ? What would we call that ? A calculated cold blooded act by zionists. Remember the Liberty . Sorry, no one will let us bring up the subject. I say Zionist conspiracy .
I’m glad to see you acknowledge the possibility of breaking free of these past events restraints. I believe as individuals we are constrained only by our fears and failure of imagination. The individual is, after all, as Carl Jung put it, the only reality.
The trouble with this truth is that is also requires a high degree of understanding. Absent that, it is the calling card of the Progressive–We don’t need to be constrained by the past, or even instructed by it. We are brilliant. Forward!
In a society designed around the individual and his rights, there can be no minorities. You cannot divide the individual down below the one. If we all valued as individuals rather than a collective, we should experience the equality blathered about by the left. The differences between us would only be differentiated by our own actions and desires, ambitions and efforts. That is more natural way to exist than a gaggle of collectives, committees, think tanks, study groups, pretend charities and socialist ideas to name a few tar pits.
I hereby christen your theory The Bumbling Through Theory of Everything. And, it’s probably closer to the truth than most, if not all theories of civilization (if there are any; I’m not a civilizationologist by a long shot).
Or as Homer Simpson wisely stated, “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just some stuff that happened”
You punch a hole through the ceiling of the box and go over the top of the grid.
Thing is to be free. Even if you have to die trying. Your still free.
Freedom is everything .. without it even your health means little. No freedom, no life. Resistance is not futile, it is required.
Couldn’t you say individuals and organizations indeed have plans and goals that may be waylaid by chance events and unforeseen consequences?
There’s no doubt that people make plans, groups set goals and kingdoms have ambitions. My point here is that all of those are constrained by past events. The new king may have designs on new territory, but his grandfather’s choices may make it more or less possible for him to execute those designs.
Obama is going to pass executive order for gun grabs.