Erik W. Aslaksen

The Social BondHow the Interaction Between Individuals Drives the Evolution of Society

Erik W. Aslaksen

Gumbooya Pty Ltd, Allambie Heights, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-319-68740-7e-ISBN 978-3-319-68741-4

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68741-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955279

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license

Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

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Contents

1 Introduction

2 Evolution

2.1 A Selective Overview

2.2 Society as a System

2.3 Technology and Its Influence on the Evolution of Society

2.4 Some Further Thoughts on the Evolution of Society

3 The Individual—The Basic Component of Society

3.1 The Good Life

3.2 Intelligence

3.3 External Circumstances

3.4 Freedom

3.5 Will

3.6 Survival

3.7 Identity—Intelligence as Belief

3.8 Evaluation and Selection—Intelligence as Process

3.9 Identity Elements and Social Structures

4 Interaction

4.1 The Social Environment

4.2 Interaction and Adaptive Action

4.3 Basic Features of the Binary Interaction

4.4 Interaction as Persuasion

4.5 Interaction Strength and the Social Bond

4.6 The Role of Technology

4.6.1 Messages, Facts, and Information Technology

4.6.2 Fluctuations and Stability

4.6.3 The Good Society

5 Models

5.1 Individuals as System Elements

5.1.1 Notation and Preliminary Issues

5.1.2 Equal Individuals

5.1.3 Non-equal Individuals

5.1.4 A More Elaborate Model

5.2 Propagation

5.2.1 Propagation and Diffusion

5.2.2 A First Model

5.2.3 A Second Model

5.3 Stability

5.3.1 Some Initial Thoughts

5.3.2 A First Model

5.3.3 A Second Model

6 Implications and Conclusion

6.1 A Measure of The Good Society

6.2 Rethinking the Role of Political Parties

6.2.1 Motivation

6.2.2 The Political Process and Collective Intelligence

6.2.3 Role and Purpose of Political Parties

6.2.4 A Proposal

6.3 Wealth, Power, and Instability

6.3.1 Freedom as a Root Cause

6.3.2 The Current Paradigm: Neoliberalism

6.3.3 Concentration of Wealth—A Source of Instability

6.3.4 The Road to a New Paradigm

6.3.5 Arguments for the New Paradigm

6.4 Conclusion

Appendix A: Evaluating the Measurement Model

References

Index

© The Author(s) 2018

Erik W. Aslaksen

The Social Bondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68741-4_1

1. Introduction

Erik W. Aslaksen1

(1)

Gumbooya Pty Ltd, Allambie Heights, NSW, Australia

Erik W. Aslaksen

Email: erik@gumbooya.com

This book is the culmination of a long and very personal process ; a quest for understanding the world around me and my existence in it. It probably began quite unconsciously in the same way as for everyone, by observing and trying to understand the behaviour of my first friends and then my classmates in school, but I also had a great desire to find out how things worked. I liked to take equipment apart and study their internal mechanisms, and as we had a workshop in the basement at home, I soon started to build my own equipment. An important influence was my father, who was a mechanical and industrial engineer, and who took me along to factories he had designed, and also organised for me to work there in my holidays. By the time I was 15, I could operate a lathe and a milling machine, and do simple gas and arc welding jobs. But all along, my love was electronics, starting with my first crystal radio receiver, but then soon designing and building vacuum tube receivers and transmitters for the 20 and 2 m bands, as well as a foray into some 70 cm band equipment and various measuring equipment. I got my radio amateur licence the day I turned 14, with the call sign LA9EE, and did my military service as a radio technician in the Royal Norwegian Air Force.

Looking back on this now, and comparing with what my friends and acquaintances tell of their youth, as well as with the lives of my own children and grandchildren, it is clear to me that I developed a very mechanistic and systematic view of the world; a view that has had a significant, if diminishing, influence on me to this day, and that is readily discernible throughout this book. Of course, studying engineering and physics, followed by a 50-year career in industry, did not help matters, but at least I did realise that the real problems in any engineering project are rarely technical; they are people problems. However, the desire to understand how the world works, what drives it and changes it, did lead me to spend quite some time on studying religion, philosophy and the history of civilisation. The main outcome of this was a conviction that there are no supernatural or divine forces at work, and, in particular, that the evolution of society, which we shall take a look at in Chap. 2, is a human product. Our society is what it is today because we made it so, and we determine what it will be tomorrow.

This then raises a number of questions: How did we do it? What abilities did we employ? And if we look at the evolution of society over the last 10,000 years or so, from the cave to where we are today, we have to wonder: Why did society end up exactly where it is today and not in some quite different form? There is also another question, which we might consider more fundamental: If we look at the evolution of life on Earth up until the appearance of the genus homo , this was governed by Darwin’s process of random mutations and natural selection in response to changing environmental conditions, resulting in new, more viable species emerging and the less viable becoming extinct. Are we just the current link in this chain, just another species destined to come and go, or do we represent the start of a completely new process? There is a tendency to consider a distinct human character to be something eternal, something we can strive towards fulfilling, as when Maslow says ‘Man demonstrates in his own nature a pressure toward fuller and fuller Being, more and more perfect actualisation of his humanness’ (Maslow 1968) . It is a leftover from a time when mankind had not yet come to grips with its own capabilities, and saw itself as just another of Nature’s creatures; a Nature of which it had little understanding and instead ascribed to the creation by various supernatural beings. Humanness, unless we mean having one head, two arms and two legs, is not something fixed we can strive towards; it is something we are continually developing through our membership of society. It is impossible to know what ‘humanness’ will be, say, a thousand years from now.

These and other similar questions will surface in several places in the book, and in some cases, possible answers will be suggested. But the focus of the book is tied to a simple observation: If there is nothing but us driving the evolution of society, then the driving process must be within each of us, and in Chap. 3, we develop a model of that process and identify it as intelligence . In this model, the intrinsic features of perception and information processing are, of course, important, but the main determinant of intelligence is the information available to the individual over its lifetime. In order to receive such input, and for this local process to have any effect, there must be communication with other members of society, and the ability communicate through language is perhaps the distinguishing capability of our species. Thus, the interaction between individuals is a fundamental feature of society; it is this interaction that converts a collection of individuals into a system , with its own identity and behaviour as emergent properties of the system. The purpose of this book is to make a contribution to our understanding of that interaction and its effect of the evolution of society; in particular, on the stability of the evolution . In this endeavour, I have of course drawn heavily on the work of other authors, but due to the relatively broad scope and multidisciplinary nature of the endeavour, I have not tried to undertake an exhaustive literature survey in any of the disciplines, and the references provided indicate the extent of my immersion in them. This approach is another reflection of my engineering background and the emphasis on being ‘fit for purpose’ .

Among all the many separate characteristics of society, we could use to demonstrate or measure its evolution, such as population density, GDP, energy use and level of education, just to mention a few, none has changed more radically than the nature of the interaction between the members of society. What was once predominantly a physical interaction between collocated individuals, in the form of speech, signs and physical action, ranging from an embrace to aggression and defence, has turned into something much more structured and complex, with face-to-face interaction accounting for less and less of our information exchange, and with applications of technology playing a rapidly increasing role in mediating the exchange. For example, the mobile phone connects any two individuals at any time and regardless of their locations, and an individual sitting in Texas with a screen and joystick can kill people on the other side of the globe without any interpersonal contact whatsoever. Chapter 4 defines and explores basic properties of the interaction—the concept of an alignment rate, the presence of persuasion , its dependence on technology and the particular features that relate it to the evolution of society. Consequently, we will be working on two scales: On the macro-scale, it is about society and its evolution, on the micro-scale, it is about the individual and the interaction between individuals. In addition, we shall sometimes draw analogies with a much smaller scale, that of atoms and molecules.

Because technology plays such a significant role in this narrative, it is appropriate to already in this Introduction emphasise that the focus will be on those applications of technology that influence our behaviour , and within those mainly on the segment that is central in influencing our beliefs, which are applications within information technology (IT) . This is only a small segment of all technology applications, as can be readily observed in our daily lives. Thus, such effects of technology as the change to housework due to appliances; to the structure of our cities due to mechanised transport, and to warfare due to sophisticated weapons, just to mention a few, are not considered in this book.

Chapter 5 presents a couple of further models of the interaction and of the resultant behaviour of the propagation of information in a collection of individuals, with the purpose of exploring the phenomenon of dominance. Some of the other approaches present in the literature regarding propagation of beliefs, ideas and information in society are briefly reviewed, and a comparison provides indications of possible synergies and further development.

The final chapter, Chap. 6, is a discussion of some of the implications of the picture we have built up of the interaction between individuals as a main determinant of the evolution of society. One implication is that the ability to freely develop and exercise our intelligence becomes a hallmark of the Good Society , and a practical means of measuring this characteristic is proposed, with a detailed example of an evaluation provided in Appendix A. Another implication is the need for a reconsideration of the interactions in the political process , and the possibility of improving both the efficacy and the stability of the process by restructuring it and applying recent advances in information technology . A third implication, which is closely coupled with the two foregoing ones, is the role of the economic framework and of the current capitalist paradigm. In view of the increasing concentration of wealth and power, and the associated control of the sources of, and means of transmitting, information, with its implications for the stability of the evolution of society, proposing a shift in the paradigm seems appropriate.

The contents of this book have been developed over a period of about twenty years, starting with The Changing Nature of Engineering (Aslaksen 1996) , as part of a more general endeavour to locate engineering within the wider context of intellectual activity, and as they became available, sections were presented at conferences or published as articles or chapters of books; in particular, the material presented at the three fPET conferences, in 2012, 2014 and 2016 (Aslaksen 2012, 2017a, c). This material has been identified and referenced as such, but as new insight and the context of this book has required, it has been modified accordingly.

There are several approaches to gaining an understanding of a new and complex problem situation, and one of these is to look for a similar problem situation in the past and identify elements of the solution that could be applicable in the current situation. This approach appears in many guises, and we can characterise them by what we might call the distance between the current and the similar problem situation. A useful measure of this distance is the difference in professional specialisation of the people involved in solving the two problems. For example, if the new problem is the development of a high speed bearing, the useful earlier similar problems and their solutions are most likely to be found by searching the literature and patents in the area of high speed bearings. The area of expertise is the same in the current and the earlier problems, and the distance is small. An example of this approach is the well-known TRIZ methodology (TRIZ) .

In this book, we apply this approach to investigate a problem situation in the area of sociology—the interaction between individuals and how this interaction structures society—by identifying a similarity with a problem that was solved in a completely different area—chemical structure , and the title of this book is an acknowledgement of the inspiration provided by Linus Pauling’s well-known book, The Chemical Bond (Pauling 1967). This is obviously an approach with a large distance, and that brings with it its own problems. In his famous lecture series, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger made the connection between physics and biology, and recognised the dilemma poised by spanning such a wide area of knowledge : ‘I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them—and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. So much for my apology’. (Schrödinger 1944). As I am not a sociologist, it is inevitable that sociologists will find some of the descriptions of features of society overly simplified or not according to current scholarship, but it is my intention that the insight provided into what is essentially a very complex, adaptive, self-organising system will more than compensate for these blemishes. Anyway, so much for my apology.

However, in addition to the distance between the two areas, there is an additional significant difference: The evolution of society is a process, and the structures we shall consider are of interest because of how they reflect this process, and the interactions determining the structures are those driving this process . In the case of chemistry, the structure of a molecule is permanent, and is determined by forces rather than by processes. That is, we shall be drawing on similarities between a dynamic and a static phenomenon, and this requires both some mental agility and careful formulation. Hopefully, the formulation is adequate to avoid any misunderstandings.

The Social Bond is the relationship between two individuals, established through the interaction between them; it, and the individual’s intelligence , when extended to a society of interacting individuals, form the elements of the collective intelligence that drives the evolution of society. In order to focus your mind in approaching this book, and also to manage your expectations (always an important task for an engineer), I must emphasise that, while intelligence and the functioning of the human brain play an important role , they are represented in a highly simplified manner, sufficient only in the context of exploring the Social Bond. Reference is made, wherever useful, to the extensive literature on the subjects of cognition and individual and collective intelligence , but I make no claim of contributing to this body of knowledge .

By whatever measure, or group of measures, we choose in order to characterise the state of society, it is evident that society is changing at an increasing rate. It is something we all experience in our daily lives, and while we may cope with it by effectively ignoring the changes that appear not to influence us directly, it leaves many of us with an uneasy feeling of being left behind, and that our attachment to, and involvement in, society—the Social Bond—is being weakened. We live as observers on the periphery of society, rather than as participants in its central processes, such as the formulation of policies (economic, social, political) and of the laws and directives for their realisation. The combination of complexity with speed of change has resulted in these matters being handled by specialists who tend to form sub-societies (both within the government bureaucracy and in industry) that see the external influences as unwanted interference, making it increasingly difficult for the average citizen to provide any meaningful contribution to these processes. This is not an inevitable development, on the contrary, technology offers effective and efficient means of reversing this trend and establishing an unprecedented level of individual participation. But this requires a willingness to rethink many of the relationships and structures that today are accepted as ‘given’, and while these pages can represent no more than a very small contribution to that process, it is hoped that it will be at least that.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many pertinent and valuable comments and suggestions provided by the two reviewers of the manuscript, Roland Herzog and Erik C. Aslaksen , and, as always, nothing much would have happened without the other half of the team—my wife, Elfi.

Open Access   This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

© The Author(s) 2018

Erik W. Aslaksen

The Social Bondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68741-4_2

2. Evolution

Erik W. Aslaksen1

(1)

Gumbooya Pty Ltd, Allambie Heights, NSW, Australia

Erik W. Aslaksen

Email: erik@gumbooya.com

2.1 A Selective Overview

When we think of evolution , we might think of the evolution of the universe, from the Big Bang and then the creation of the stars and their planets, of which the Earth is just one of an extremely large number, but we are probably more likely to think about an evolution much closer to us: the evolution of life on Earth and how humans came into existence, the evolution connected with the name of Darwin . Consider, for a moment, a very simplified view of the evolution of life on Earth in terms of three overlapping phases. In the first phase, which started maybe 3.5 billion years ago, life developed from the simplest, single-cell forms to a myriad of increasingly complex and widely differing forms, with new species emerging and existing species becoming extinct in a relentless process of experimentation and survival in a continually changing environment. However, at any one time during this phase, there was a complex web of interactions between the species, in the form of food chains and various interactions between animals and plants, such as certain plants forming the habitats for certain animals, and so on. The result was the existence of a continuously evolving ecosystem, with mutual dependence and a lack of dominance between species; a sort of natural democracy .

This all changed with the emergence of the genus homo at the beginning of Phase Two, 2–3 million years ago. However the emergence of this one, very different genus took place, the evolution of the genus started to progress at an accelerating rate that soon set it apart from the other genera and liberated it from its role as just another component of the ecosystem. The development of this genus, with its various species and sub-species, is still somewhat open to speculation and disagreement, but just to put our endeavour into a time frame, we might adopt the picture presented by Stringer (2012) , and shown in Fig. 2.1. (Some very recent information is presented in Hublig et al. 2017; Richter et al. 2017 ; and Stringer and Galway-Witham 2017).

Fig. 2.1
Schematic representation of the emergence of H. sapiens from earlier species of Homo. The horizontal axis represents geographic location; the vertical axis represents time in millions of years ago. Blue areas denote the presence of a certain species at a given time and place. Early modern humans spread from Africa across different regions of the globe and interbred with other descendants of Homo heidelbergensis, namely Neanderthals, Denisovans and unknown archaic African hominins (top right) (Stringer 2012)

The development was one of increasing capability rather than a change of external form; capability that manifested itself in manual dexterity, speech and cognitive processes, and which allowed humans to exploit the rest of the ecosystem as a resource and to isolate themselves to a large extent from the fluctuations in that ecosystem. This evolution then continued to modern man, Homo sapiens , which appeared a couple of hundred thousand years ago. This development of the genus Homo , which was characterised by functionally important, but outwardly relatively minor physical changes, and by very significant mental changes, was also characterised by a rate of development more than an order of magnitude greater than that of the first phase.

The third phase, which started, say, a hundred thousand years ago (although, as I argue in the next chapter, there is no need to go further back than 10,000 years ago), is characterised by the formation of groups of mutually interacting and interdependent individuals, and it is now these groups, or societies, that are the individuals of the new ‘species’, Homo conglomeraensis (or something like that). Just like cells combined to form more complex organisms, humans combine to form entities that far surpass the individual in functionality and capability, and this evolution is not one of the physical forms of the individual, but of the interactions between individuals and of the structures resulting from these interactions. What is being transmitted from one generation to the next is not genes, but the knowledge of the social structure and how to survive in this environment. And if we say that a characteristic time for change in the first phase might be something like ten million years, and in the second phase perhaps a couple of hundred thousand years, then the corresponding time in the third phase is, say, a thousand years and rapidly decreasing. Our society is currently the most advanced ‘species’ in this evolution, the end product of a process of trial-and-error (and it might, of course, turn out to be an error).

If we now conceive of evolution as being characterised by two coordinates, with the Darwinian species along the x-coordinate and for each species a second coordinate, the y-coordinate, identifying the entities being created by the interactions within the species, which we might call societies, then, in the case of our species, there is a progression in strength and complexity of the interactions along the y-axis, which we take to be the measure of the societies. Other species may also display entities along their y-axes; some show at least the organisation into families consisting of parents and children, and some show more complex societies, such as those of ants and bees. In most cases, the knowledge of the structure is genetically transmitted, but in some cases there is a learning process involved. To what extent this learning process is itself genetically based, or open to change through experience, is not certain. The two-dimensional characterisation of evolution is illustrated in Fig. 2.2.

Fig. 2.2
A two-dimensional characterisation of evolution of society, with the x-axis representing the development of the individual, and the y-axis representing the development of the interactions in terms of the resulting structures

The x- and y-axes in Fig. 2.2 are labelled by the entities (species and societies) that have appeared, and so there is an implied time dependence, to which we shall return shortly. But there is also another measure that can be attached to these entities—their complexity . It is difficult to give an exact definition of this measure, but intuitively we recognise that it is a combination of the complexity of the species, measured, e.g. by the amount of information contained in the DNA , and the complexity of the social structure , measured somehow by the strength (frequency?) and number of types of interactions between members of the society. This gives me an opportunity to take the analogy between chemistry and society a step further (or too far?), by observing that the progress along the x-axis in Fig. 2.2 involved increasingly complex molecules of a small set of different atoms. In the case of humans, the whole ‘blueprint’ for the construction is contained in a macromolecule (or what Schrodinger called ‘an aperiodic crystal’), the DNA, which is made up of combinations of only three types of atoms: oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. The complexity lies in the structure, which can be seen as a hierarchical structure, starting with atoms of the three types combining to form relatively simple molecules—the four bases—which are then combined in a particular order to form genes, which finally make up the complete DNA molecule with its helical structure. Progressing along the y-axis in Fig. 2.2, the development was also reflected in an increase in structural complexity, starting with the nuclear family and culminating in today’s world society with its highly complex structure, made up of numerous interacting public and private entities, and presenting a division of labour (or functionality) in analogy with that of the molecules in the cell.

There is a variation on this view, to which we shall refer in a couple of places later on, and it is based on the idea that, in a collection of bodies (elementary particles, atoms, molecules, people, planets), there are two forms of energy: kinetic energy and structural energy. The kinetic energy is a property of the individual bodies, and the kinetic energy of the collection is the sum of the kinetic energies of the bodies. The level of kinetic energy can be expressed as a temperature of the collection. The structural energy is a property of the collection; it is an expression of the relationship between the bodies, and while the ability to enter into such relationships is a property of the individual bodies, the structural energy is a measure of the extent to which those abilities are realised in the collection. As we shall see in the next section, the structural energy is the difference between a collection and a system.

The evolution of such a collection of bodies consists of the combination of the bodies into more complex bodies, and the dynamics of the process is determined by two competing effects of the kinetic energy; the creation of more complex bodies, and the decomposition of such bodies into simpler bodies. At high temperatures, the decomposition is dominant, and at low temperature, no complex bodies are created; there is only a relatively narrow temperature range in which there is a net creation of more complex bodies, and it is a function of the complexity level; in principle as shown in Fig. 2.3.

Fig. 2.3
The temperature range in which a collection of bodies of a given complexity can exist

The next step in characterising these two forms of energy is to separate the collections into two groups according to the state of animation of the bodies: inanimate or alive. In the case of inanimate bodies, the kinetic energy is the energy arising from the movement of the bodies, i.e. the change in their spatial locations, and depends on the mass of the bodies. The structural energy is the energy arising from the spatial relationship between the bodies, which is established by the force between them. This force can be characterised by its spatial scale: at the smallest scale we have the nuclear force, at the atomic/molecular scale we have the electromagnetic force, and at the greatest scale we have the gravitational force.

In the case of living bodies, the kinetic energy is represented by the activities performed by the individual bodies without regard to or involvement of other bodies; it is an expression of the capabilities of the individual body. The structural energy arises from the relationships established by the interaction between the bodies, in the form of an exchange of information, or communication, and the scale is given by the strength of the interaction . As both of these energies are now represented by dissipative processes, collections of living bodies, or organisms, cannot be isolated systems , but must be immersed in an environment from which they can extract energy (metabolism). If we now want to apply this view to Fig. 2.2, we have to divide the progression along the x-axis into three segments. At the very left end, the collection is a cell, and the bodies are increasingly complex and differentiated molecules. In the second segment, the collection is a multicellular organism, and the bodies are cells of increasing complexity and differentiation, interacting through structured chemical processes, forming sub-collections (organs). At some point within this segment, the organism includes processes that control the internal temperature (homeostasis), which allows the organism to be exposed to a range of temperatures far exceeding that indicated in Fig. 2.3. The third segment starts when organisms develop the ability to interact indirectly; that is, not through direct chemical interaction, but by using signs (dance/bees), chemical markers (pheromones/ants) or sounds (most animals), and it reaches its culmination in homo sapiens with language as the means of interaction. The collection is now a society, and its existence requires a balance between the kinetic and structural energies, which is achieved through internal processes, such as provided by the legal system and law enforcement.

The purpose of presenting this view is twofold. First, to counteract the common view that humans are the final product of evolution . We are just the building blocks of the next level of complexity, societies. Second, to emphasise that society is a living organism, subject to the same issues as all organisms—health, sickness and death.

There is a further analogy—with computers—that becomes apparent if we plot the development of computers on an x-y coordinate system, as in Fig. 2.2, with the evolution of the hardware plotted along the x-axis, and for each generation of hardware, plot the development of software that could run on it in the y direction. Once a new generation of hardware came on the market, new software applications would appear, and through interaction between software developers this evolution of software would accelerate. And as the body of software grew in size and complexity , it became increasingly structured, both into different programming languages, different areas of application and reusable applications, each with its own techniques and algorithms. Reflecting this analogy onto the current state of our development, the state of the ‘hardware’ is represented by our DNA , and the state of the ‘software’ is represented by our culture, which is maintained by the interaction between its members. We have strict rules for modifying the human genome, but do we have correspondingly strict rules for modifying the information exchange? The thought underlying this book is that tampering with the information exchange is to ‘software’ what tampering with the genome is to the ‘hardware’.

We might expect that the value of any measure of complexity would increase on a diagonal axis from the lower left to the upper right, but that is not necessarily the case; species that appeared later may have simpler social structures than some that appeared earlier. However, while this is an interesting issue, it is not relevant to the subject matter of this book, as we shall be exclusively concerned with the evolution of our subspecies along the y-axis in Fig. 2.2. The evolution of human society has been the subject of study for many centuries, often under the title of sociocultural evolution and focused on the process of structural reorganisation. During the Enlightenment and well into the nineteenth century, the dominant view of social or cultural evolution was as a steady progression in a unilineal fashion through a set of stages, from a state of barbarism to our modern (Western) industrial society. Different societies were just seen as being at different stages of this evolution, and various theories were developed within this view. Some of the well-known authors include Hegel, August Comte, Herbert Spencer and Adam Smith . From the second half of the nineteenth century onward, the field work of anthropologists started to provide an increasing body of empirical data, and while this was first fitted into the prevailing theoretical framework, it soon became apparent that the simple unilineal progression was at best a high-level approximation, and the interests of sociologists turned from society in general to particular societies, both less developed indigenous ones and various more developed, industrial societies, by considering specific, local conditions, such as natural resources and the level of knowledge . It was also inevitable that, as the twentieth century progressed, there would be an increasing emphasis on the influence of technology and on society as a complex, self-organising system. Already the importance of the division of labour (as a result of technology) and of the means of production (and associated class structure), as described by Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx , respectively, and reflected in the critical assessment of Max Weber , showed the direction in which the understanding of social evolution was developing, and these themes (technology and system) were developed further by such authors as Lewis Henry Morgan, Leslie White, Talcott Parsons , Gerhard Lenski , Nicholas Luhmann and Edward Goldsmith . I must emphasise that this book is not concerned with any such work, nor does it aim to contribute to sociocultural theories. The current work is focused on the interaction between individuals as one of the two basic components of any society (the other component being the individual) and, in particular, on the current state of that interaction under the influence of applications of technology within the framework of our political/economic system. However, it does connect with the sociocultural body of knowledge in the two areas of technology and systems, and I shall make reference to it where relevant (and where I am aware of it). And a first reference can be made already here, in that the picture presented in Fig. 2.2 has a counterpart in the Dual Inheritance Theory, as it is set out in the book Not by Genes Alone, by Richerson and Boyd (2004) . Our x-axis represents the genetic evolution , and the y-axis the cultural evolution, and the authors emphasise that the latter is more dynamic, rapid and influential on human society than the former. They also give the following definition of culture:

Culture is information capable of affecting individuals’ behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission (p. 5).

and this is almost exactly what we shall call identity in the next chapter; the only difference being that the identity is not only (although mostly) acquired through social interaction, but also through observation and introspection. The book gives a compelling picture of the cooperation of genetic and cultural processes in the evolution of humanity, and gives a detailed account, supported by numerous examples, of the operation of cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years or so, to which we shall refer in a couple of places further on.

The evolution of society is driven by human intelligence , as the ability to take goal-oriented adaptive action , and by the ability of humans to interact by means of language and symbols, thereby forming relationships and increasingly complex social structures. There are many measures that characterise this evolution , such as the size of individual societies, the division of labour, the level of education and economic activity, but the one that occupies a particular position in the picture of a society is the use and development of technology. This is because of the strong positive feedback effect of technology on the development of society and, indeed, on the smallest elements of society—the individuals—and it has led to what is a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the behaviour of the individuals as stand-alone entities has very little relevance as the elements of a modern society, much as the study of a single ant under the microscope would give little indication of its purpose and behaviour as a member of an ant colony. Intrinsic human characteristics are so intertwined with technological artefacts and their operation that their separation, in terms of the behaviour of the individual in society, becomes artificial. But, on the other hand, the features and evolution of society are completely determined by exactly the intrinsic abilities and behaviour of the individual; society is what it is because we made it so. Technology has no mind or will of its own.

The solution to this conundrum lies in, on the one hand, developing a model of individual behaviour—effectively a simple model of intelligence , which is the subject of Chap. 3—that reflects this intertwining by introducing the concept of the individual’s identity—the things that matter to the individual, the things the individual is willing to make a sacrifice for—and on the other hand by recognising that this identity is a social product, formed by the ongoing and technology-mediated immersion in society through interactions with other individuals, which is introduced in Chap. 4 and then developed further in Chap. 5. The concept of absolute values, unrelated to the society in which they are to apply, is no more relevant than the above concept of the stand-alone individual.

2.2 Society as a System

Throughout this monograph, we shall make use of the system concept . The system concept is a mode of description; any aspect of an entity can be described in terms of three sets:

- a set of elements;

- a set of interactions between these element; and

- a set of interaction with the outside world (which may be simply an observer).

The ability to, and means of, interacting are contained completely within the elements, and the set of interactions determines the structure of the system , as the bonds between atoms determine the structure of a molecule. The interactions with the outside world are basically what we would think of as the contribution of the aspect in question to the behaviour of the system. That behaviour is therefore dependent on both the properties of the elements and on the interactions between them, and can be very much more complex than the behaviour of any of the elements, exhibiting so-called emergent behaviour. But as a system is a mode of description , we can choose what we identify as elements; there are normally several possible descriptions of an entity as a system, depending on what aspect of the entity we are interested in examining. For example, if we are only interested in what the entity does, but not in what it is, we develop a functional description, or view , of the entity, without any concern for its physical realisation. And we develop this view in a top-down fashion, by first finding the most general, or abstract , description of the functionality (which may often be simply to provide the greatest possible return on investment) and increase the level of detail in a step-wise fashion until all functional requirements are met. In this manner, we are hiding the complexity that is not relevant to the aspect of interest, and so the system approach is a methodology for handling complexity. (For a detailed description, see (Aslaksen 2013a) . It may also be worthwhile to note that the meaning of abstraction here is essentially the same as the one used by Georg W.F. Hegel in his essay Who Thinks Abstractly (Hegel 1966) and developed further by Andrew Feenberg as ‘instrumentalization theory’ (Feenberg 2013) .

The word ‘society’ can have a wide range of meanings. Here, we shall understand it to have its most encompassing meaning and consist of the people in a defined group, such as a nation or the whole world, and their institutions, technology and other artefacts; essentially everything these people have created. Through the interactions between these elements, they form a system, and due to the number and diversity of both the elements and the interactions, this is indeed a very complex system. It is also obviously a self-organising system , unless one admits some form of divine guidance.

In order to make this view of society as a system as clear as possible, it might be useful to compare it with a definition by an influential author who we shall encounter a couple of times later on, Jürgen Habermas . In his book, The Theory of Communicative Action, he states

I use the term culture for the stock of knowledge from which participants in communication supply themselves with interpretations as they come to an understanding about something in the world. I use the term society for the legitimate orders through which participants regulate their memberships in social groups and thereby secure solidarity. By personality I understand the competences that make a subject capable of speaking and acting, that put him in a position to take part in processes of reaching understanding and thereby to assert his own identity (Habermas 1984, v2, 184).

So, for him society is what we would identify as the structure of society, and what he calls culture is close to what we call identity, and his ‘personality’ is close to the processes we include in our model of intelligence in Sect. 3.2.

As a brief digression, two very different structures have been prominent in the social and political science literature. The first emphasises the importance of the individual as a social actor, with its interpersonal relations and motivations of personal conduct. The second, identified with the work of Karl Marx , emphasises the importance of classes within society, in which the individuals are members (German ‘Träger’) due to their common circumstances (which we would say is reflected in their alignment, to be defined in Sect. 3.9). The significant interactions are between these classes, in the form of conflicts and class struggle, leading to structural determinism as the dynamics of society. In this sense, the Marxist view of society represents a system approach to handling the complexity of society.

A society is complex, so if we want to describe it as a system , the above general definition needs to be developed somewhat further. First, only in the most primitive of societies is the interaction between individuals limited to direct, person-to-person interaction via speech, gestures, or physical contact. In all other societies there are additional forms of interaction that involve a medium, such as pen and paper, a telephone, a gun, etc.; in short, some application of technology. These media could become additional elements in the system, with their own descriptions of their behaviour , and contribute to the behaviour of the system, i.e. of the society. However, in the following, we shall view these applications of technology as extensions of the human interaction capabilities, so that the human becomes a hybrid of purely human characteristics and technological characteristics.

Second, and again in all but the utopian case of a completely homogeneous society, the interactions result in a structuring of the society, i.e. the system consists of identifiable subsystems, and depending on in which of these subsystems an individual finds itself, it displays different properties. That is, it is not individuals that are elements of society as a system , but individuals performing particular roles, with one individual able to perform many roles (e.g. husband, father, club member, worker, etc.).

Third, the choice, as far as describing a particular aspect of society is concerned, lies in choosing a suitable description of the behaviour of the individual. That is, selecting a subset of the set of the individual’s interactions with the ‘outside world’, but without any concern for the internal structure of the individual, or, in other words, adopting the view of a psychologist or sociologist rather than that of a biologist or neuroscientist. This treatment of the individual is fundamental to understanding society as a system of individuals, and to emphasise this point, I will give an analogy with systems engineering. Consider a very well-known element of many technical systems: an M6 × 20 bolt with hexagonal head. As an individual element, it is defined in great detail in a standard, such as a DIN standard, where all its physical characteristics, including its dimensions, the tolerances on these dimensions, its material composition and grain structure and its surface finish are specified, together with some functional requirements, such as load capacity. This element could be used in numerous applications (i.e. systems), from a sewing machine to a space craft, and within each of these to perform various functions, such as that of a fastener, or to adjust the tension of a spring, or the position of a lever, and so on. In the description of the behaviour (functionality) of any one of these systems, none of the individual characteristics of the bolt listed above appear; the element is described solely in terms of its functionality, its purpose as an element of that particular system. Reflected onto our treatment of society as a system, this means that the individual as a stand-alone entity is of little interest; it is only the behaviour of the individual embedded in the particular view of society that is relevant. This can create a barrier to acceptance of the idea of a system view for some people, in particular, philosophers, who like to view humans mainly based on ideas going back to Plato and Aristotle ; persons who did not have (and could not have) any idea of what modern society would look like.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, society displays a particular kind of dynamics, resulting from the fact that the behaviour of an individual is not time-independent, nor even a known function of time, as is the case with most technical systems; the behaviour of an individual is a function of its previous experience. Starting at birth, the experience accumulated through interaction with parents, siblings, friends, teachers, colleagues, etc., forms the behaviour of the individual. That is, the ability to take adaptive action as a result of sensory inputs is an intrinsic feature of the species; it is part of what is expressed by the x-coordinate in Fig. 2.2. But the basis on which the action is taken is the accumulated experience. What changes from generation to generation is the nature of the interaction, both its form and its intensity, and this change is driven by technology. Direct, face-to-face interaction through increased mobility, and other forms of interaction mediated by information technology , but also through the increase in education, as enabled by the surplus generated by applications of technology. Again, the ability to communicate—the ability to speak and the development of language—is an intrinsic feature of the species; it is the other part of what is expressed by the x-coordinate. But the utilisation of this ability is being greatly enhanced by technology, so that one measure of the progression along the y-coordinate—the evolution of society—is the development and application of technology.

Without drawing too long a bow, we can discern an analogy between how the interaction between individuals evolved into ever larger societies with complex structures, culminating in nations, and how now the interaction between nations is evolving into a world society with its own structures. In the former case, the structuring led, in many cases, to violent struggles between the structural elements within nations; in the latter case, it is not difficult to see the potential for similar struggles, just with enormously increased destructive capability, and some aspects of this possibility are discussed in Sects. 5.3 and 6.3.

As stated in the Introduction, our primary purpose is to develop an understanding of the interaction between individuals, and one way of looking at interactions is as a correlation of actions of individuals. That is, we shall be looking at society, as a system , at the most detailed level, at the level at which the system elements are individuals, analogous to studying an ant colony at the level of the activities of individual ants. The activities people are engaged in are so manyfold and varied that they do not fit into any single taxonomy or ordering, but there are some questions that are useful in thinking about these activities, and the first of these is, obviously, to ask if the activity involves any interaction with other individuals or not. If yes, then a second question is: How direct is the interaction? The most direct is the face-to-face interaction between two individuals; somewhat less direct is the real-time interaction via a medium, such as telephone or Skype, less again through a medium such as writing (letter, email). Further down the scale come such one-way interactions as broadcasting, TV, books, etc., and finally there are indirect, and much more subtle interactions that take place in any activity where we employ some application of technology , from using a toothbrush to driving a car; we are interacting with the creators of those devices; their views and intentions regarding those activities are expressed in the devices.

A related question regarding an activity is then the degree to which technology enters into performing the activity. Take, for example, washing the body by taking a shower. Although supplying cold and warm water on demand involves a significant application of technology, the activity of washing is much as it has been for thousands of years, But, take as another example the activity of travelling by aircraft; it is an activity that is totally dependent on, and an expression of, the application of technology. And, of increasing importance, and central to our development of the Social Bond , are the applications of technology that enhance, or even supplant, our cognitive abilities, such as information processing and interacting with our peers; that is, the numerous applications of information technology , or IT.

A further characteristic is the degree to which an activity requires conscious assessment and decision-making. Most of our daily activities are performed more or less automatically; not only such simple activities as tying shoe laces or paying the bus fare, but also much more complex activities, such as many of our interactions with other people (small talk, gestures, such as shaking hands, etc.). These activities respond to situations that are identified as fitting a known pattern, and are executed according to preconceived rules, acquired through education, training and observation. Rules that are well founded in experience, as well as some that are not, such as prejudices and superstition. The subdivision of our thought processes into two clearly discernible groups—intuitive and deliberate (or fast and slow) is taken up again in Sect. 3.8.

At the other end of the scale of this characteristic are the activities of interest to us, the ones that result from situations or information that do not fit into any preconceived pattern; these are the actions that potentially change society. These actions represent a person’s judgement based on a set of accepted principles or beliefs that constitute the person’s identity; they are the result of the person applying its intelligence , and this is the subject matter of the next chapter. Here, we just note that there is a degree of interaction involved, in the sense that these principles were developed and/or presented by other individuals at some previous time, and that this time dependence, or propagation in time, becomes an important aspect of interactions.

However, already at this point in our development, it is clear that we cannot hope to describe or model the effect of this immense collection of interrelated processes on the evolution of society in any detail; we need to approach them in an analogy with thermodynamics or statistical mechanics. A volume of gas is a very large system, but instead of considering it at a microscopic level, i.e. the level of individual molecules, we usually consider it at a macroscopic level, i.e. as an entity characterised by a few macroscopic parameters, viz. pressure, temperature and volume, that are related to the parameters describing the motions of the molecules through statistics. To find similar ‘macroscopic’ parameters for society, it is necessary to first recognise a significant difference between gas molecules and the elements of society: the latter are active, whereas molecules are passive. The activities make up the processes that describe what the society does, what takes place within the society. Society is ‘alive’, and these processes are the equivalent of the processes taking place within a living organism. The evolution of society is due to the combined actions of all its members; or, as we shall say, to the application of society’s collective intelligence .

The concept of collective intelligence has, in various contexts and formulations, been around for a long time, going back at least to the ancient Greeks. It finds expression in Plato ’s Protagoras and the myth of how Zeus ordered political wisdom to be evenly distributed among men (Plato, Dialogues); in Aristotle’s Politics, where in the opening of Chapter XI of Book 3 he says:

The principle that the multitude ought to be supreme rather than the few best is one that is maintained, and, though not free from difficulty, yet seems to contain an element of truth. For the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse (Aristotle, Politics).

And, again, in Chapter XV, ‘a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual’.

Cicero ascribes the following to Cato The Elder :

Cato used to say that the government of Rome was superior to that of other states; because in them the great men were mere isolated individuals, who regulated their constitutions according to their own ipse dixits, their own laws, and their own ordinances. Such was Minos in Crete, Lycurgus in Sparta; and in Athens, which experienced so many revolutions, first Theseus, then Draco, then Solon, then Clisthenes, afterwards many others; and lastly, to support the Athenian state in its exhaustion and prostration, that great and wise man, Demetrius Phalereus.

Our Roman constitution, on the contrary, did not spring from the genius of an individual, but of many; and it was established, not in the lifetime of a man, but in the course of ages and centuries. For (added he) there never yet existed a genius so vast and comprehensive as to allow nothing to escape its attention, and all the geniuses in the world united in a single mind, could never, within the limits of a single life, exert a foresight sufficiently extensive to embrace and harmonize all, without the aid of experience and practice (Cicero, De re publica).

The concept of a collective intelligence is the foundation of our normative commitment to democracy as the preferred form of government, and has also found its expression in a number of fields and related concepts, as described in Malone and Bernstein (2015) . The introduction to that book contains both definitions of collective intelligence and a large number of references to the relevant literature. In recent times, the focus has been on collective intelligence as a factor in the performance of groups (Woolley et al. 2010) , and in Pentland (2014) it is explored in the context of what the author calls Social Physics , an approach to understanding social processes and dynamics using Big Data (In contrast with the reliance on Big Data in Social Physics, our approach could be said to rely on No Data).

The relevance of the concept to politics and to the evolution of society is indisputable—after all, it is what got us from the cave to where we are today—but it is not as well supported by empirical research (for the obvious reasons of the magnitude and complexity of the task). In this regard, we can note that the book (Malone and Bernstein 2015) , with the title of Handbook of Collective Intelligence, does not actually consider the presence of collective intelligence in the political process , or to what extent it supports democracy. The relationship between collective intelligence and democracy is treated in numerous articles, and constitutes part of the body of knowledge dedicated to the various forms of political systems and assessments of their relative efficiency; many references can be found in Farrell and Shalizi (2012) . That is not an issue of any relevance to the developments in this book, for the following reason: I consider society as a system made up of individuals and the interactions between them, with the emergent behaviour determined by these two sets. In particular, the structure of the interactions will have a major impact on the evolution of the system , and without entering into any arguments about this, the work presented here takes as given, i.e. as an axiom, that the free, unrestricted exchange of information yields the best result, and that any restriction or manipulation of the information exchange will result in a detrimental\change to the process of evolution. However, a recent book by Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence and the Rule of the Many (Landemore 2017) , deserves special mention. Leaving aside such justifications as justice, equality, fairness and consent, she presents a strong argument for democracy on epistemic, or outcome-based, grounds. The history and current status of both explicit and implicit objections to democracy are given careful consideration and countered in a convincing fashion, and her treatment of the two democratic processes—deliberation and agglomeration, or majority rule—will be referenced again in Sect. 6.2, where we return to this under the heading of participatory and deliberative democracy in our discussion of the role of political parties.

In Sect. 5.3.2, we shall introduce a very simple view of society as a system with two main functional elements—Government and Life—with the latter representing all the activities taking place in society outside of Government. To develop an understanding of our use of the term ‘collective intelligence’ already at this early point in the investigation, we can start with a simple picture or model of Life, as shown in Fig. 2.4. On the right is a box labelled ‘Recurrent activities’; they comprise the majority of the activities individuals are engaged in. They are the combined actions of the individuals making up the society, but as these individuals display more or less different behaviours, the collective behaviour is fluctuating. The box on the left, labelled ‘Collective intelligence ’, observes these activities and, in particular, assesses the fluctuations and takes an adaptive actions to either promote them as changes to society or suppress them as undesirable. This collective evaluation process , which we shall discuss again in Sect. 6.2.2, can be interpreted as society’s immune system .

Fig. 2.4
Life, as a combination of recurrent activities and actions driven by the collective intelligence

A superficial consideration of collective intelligence might perceive a contradiction, in that, on the one hand, the process suppresses fluctuations and seems to lead to a consensus and what one might think would be an optimised steady state of society. Whereas, on the other hand, it is exactly fluctuations, in the form of ideas and actions, that are essential for the process to function. This contradiction only arises if we confuse collective intelligence with a means of achieving conformity, and fail to understand the function of collective intelligence in controlling the evolution of society as an ongoing process. What guides this control process of assessment and adaptive action ; is it random or is it goal-oriented , in which case, what is the goal? In Sect. 3.6, we will put forward the belief (and it is a belief, in the sense that can only be made plausible, but not proven) that the goal has always been the same: survival . It is only that what survives, and our strategy for achieving it, have developed and become very much more complex and sophisticated, in line with the increasing complexity of society. One example of this, which is also detailed in (Richerson and Boyd 2004, 169–187) as ‘the demographic transition’, is the reduction in fertility rate in affluent societies. Survival is no longer seen in the quantity of offspring, but in their education and professional standing, and the cost of attaining that leads to a reduction in the number of children.

Society does not evolve towards a goal—a fixed state, some future ideal society, a heavenly kingdom—as much as some would like this to be the case. And when we speak of progress, it must be in the sense of change, not in the sense of getting closer to a goal. What we can observe is the evolution of society over historical times, and with whatever measure we use to characterise the state of society, say, X, we can determine dX/dt. In terms of the wording of the contradiction, the consensus is not about any end state, but about how to ensure the stability of the evolution of society over the next time increment.

But that does not allow us to determine the future course of x(t), except perhaps over a very short time interval. Rather than being concerned about the state of society and its evolution, we should focus on what drives the evolution . Discounting any divine or supernatural force, the driving force can only be found in us. It is our intelligence, the ability to perceive our environment and to take goal-oriented adaptive action , and the goal is the survival of the evolution process itself.

With this, we have arrived at what is an underlying premise of the present work: The evolution of society is good to the extent that it is determined by the exercise of the collective intelligence . It is, essentially, an affirmation of our trust in ourselves, in the human species, and with this, The Good Society becomes the society that provides the conditions for the exercise of the collective intelligence.

2.3 Technology and Its Influence on the Evolution of Society

The use and meaning of the word ‘technology’ are broad and highly context dependent, as can be seen by looking up the word in Wikipedia. The word relates to the field of human activity that may be described as the modification of elements of the natural surroundings in order to meet a need; what we might call a purposeful modification. It started when humans developed the mental ability to recognise the possibility of such a modification and the physical dexterity to realise it, and the purpose included giving visual pleasure or increasing one’s self-esteem (painting, ornaments, sculptures), worshipping a deity (monuments, temples), providing shelter (dwellings), increasing mobility (roads, bridges, boats), providing food (traps, weapons, agriculture), preparing, serving, and storing food (bowls, pots, plates) and so on. This is roughly what the ancient Greeks identified as techné , any creative manual activity and the products that arose from it, and in this sense we can say that the start of technology is identical to the start of our Phase Three.

As we already discussed briefly in the previous chapter, technology has been one of the major measures of evolution throughout Phase Three, and today its impact on our society is both undisputed and very obvious. Just take a look around you, and almost everything you see owes its existence to applications of technology. If you are reading this book in a printed version, the paper on which it is printed was produced by a highly sophisticated process that converts woodchips into a fibrous ‘soup’, which is spread out as a thin layer on a moving cloth that drains off most of the moisture and delivers a continuous sheet of felt-like material to a highly sophisticated machine, where it is pressed and dried by passing through numerous hot pairs of rollers at high speed. The steel used in this machine was produced in a complex process using iron ore and coal as its raw materials, and by many individual pieces of equipment, each one itself the product of a long development and improvement process . These raw materials were excavated, crushed, washed and transported by numerous, high performance machines and so on; a chain that goes on almost without limit. Or take an ordinary drinking glass; the numerous applications of technology involved in converting quartz sand into a finished product at a cost of a dollar or less per glass are each based on a huge body of knowledge . Or the incredible precision required in the manufacturing and operation of the weaving machines that produce the cloth we wear. The involvement of technology in our daily existence has become so ubiquitous that it is no longer given much thought, in the same way that we take our natural environment for granted; as something that is simply there.

In addition to this direct influence of technology on our daily lives, there is another, more subtle aspect of how applications of technology influence us—how we think of ourselves, of the world around us, and of our place in it, and how this again influences our behaviour. This was one of Martin Heidegger’s concerns with technology, that the ease with which applications allow us to exploit our environment changes our relationship to it (Heidegger 1977). We consider it solely as something to be exploited, and value it only as a commodity and for how we can use it, rather than recognising it as an element of the larger system—Planet Earth—of which humanity is just one of the other elements. It is the evolution of that system, with its emergent properties, that should be our concern. Another well-known investigation of how technology can influence our behaviour is Michel Foucault’s study of the Panopticon ; a prison design by Jeremy Bentham that allowed any of its inmates to be observed at any time (Foucault 1977) . The knowledge that they might be observed would enough to modify the prisoners’ behaviour; a psychological effect enabled by technology. Though Bentham’s design was never realised, the idea behind it has been influential in prison design ever since, and is, of course, alive and well in our society today. And the simplest example of technology modifying our behaviour is the speed bump.

Furthermore, in a recent book, Cohen (2014) discusses how the appearance of several technologies in the period around the Renaissance had a significant effect on how people changed both their perception of themselves and of their relationship to Nature. The development of mechanical clocks introduced a discipline into our behaviour, which Cohen exemplifies by the rituals of monastic life, as well as an increased understanding and appreciation of the value of time, as exemplified by Darwin’s dictum ‘a man who dares waste one hour has not discovered the value of life’ (Darwin 1887) . The development of optics, in the form of telescopes and microscopes, allowed people to see features of Nature, both very small and very large, that not only furthered their knowledge and understanding of Nature, but made them see their own position in the world under a new perspective, realising that our concepts of small and large are not absolute, but relative to our own size. Finally, the development of printing with movable type changed our perception of our personal ‘self’ as a component of society, and made us aware of the importance of reflecting this ‘self’ in print, giving rise to literary ambition.

This indirect influence of technology should be contrasted with the direct influence arising out of interacting with, or using, applications of technology, about which there is an extensive body of philosophical as well as sociological/empirical knowledge , and which interaction leads, in its most intimate extent, to the concept of a techno-human hybrid . The indirect influence is a significant factor in what a human is—how we perceive the world around us, the criteria we use in processing the information we receive, how we perceive ourselves, and the like—but it is also a factor that is difficult to define and quantify. And it is certainly something that is way outside my competence and background, hence it will not feature in the further developments in this book, except in Sect. 4.6, where I look at the influence of information technology , and perhaps in the form of an occasional peripheral comment. However, I should say that I am very aware of this influence, and experience it every day in the interaction with my wife, who grew up with minimal exposure to technology. There are so many areas where the presence of absence of an exposure to technology makes a very definite difference to how the two of us understand them, with art being perhaps the most obvious, but more generally with a spiritual and emotional view of the world as opposed to a more mechanistic one.

And it is exactly this ubiquitousness that is the core of the problem when it comes to considering both technology and the environment. But while there is a great deal of discussion about the extent to which we are responsible for changes to the environment, there is no doubt about that we are solely responsible for every development and application of technology. Technology does not harbour any inherent force that determines its development and that makes its increasing influence in our lives inevitable. We control that development, the problem is that our view of the effects of technology have been superficial, in the sense of concentrating on the immediately visible effects, such as the economic effects, or the effects on power projection, or the effects on physical health and so on. What has had much less scrutiny is the effect on the structure and fabric of society itself. As an example, we have now seen a number of cases where military superiority is used as a means of suppressing a problem, starting perhaps with Palestine/Israel, followed by Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now the whole Middle East. (And the use of technology as a means of suppression is now creeping into our own societies in the form of surveillance, enforcement and an associated legal framework.) Technology is increasingly allowing one side to inflict grievous losses on the other side with minor own losses, and so this is seen as a relatively easy and, unfortunately, also popular approach to suppressing a problem without having to address the much more difficult task of reducing or eliminating the cause of the problem.

The lack of understanding of, and concern with, the influence of the application of technology on the evolution of society displayed by the general population does not mean that there has not been a significant amount of thought and effort expended on this issue. As we mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, the concern with what might be broadly subsumed under the concept of technology goes back to the Greek philosophers, and from about 1800 onwards, there was a slowly increasing awareness of the applications of technology as significant factors in society. A good review of this developing awareness and of the major issues under discussion is given in the book Streit um die Technik, by Friedrich Dessauer , most of which was first published in 1926 under the title Philosophie der Technik, and in its final form in 1956 (Dessauer 1956) . It is, unfortunately, only available in German, as is much of the literature on this subject in the years before World War II, but reviews can also be found in some of the works listed in References. The main point, as far as our investigation is concerned, is that most of this work was concerned with the effect of mechanisation on the role of workers, transforming artisans and craftsmen into operators of machinery, without addressing the impact of technology on the development of the fundamental nature of society. There were, certainly, exceptions, such as Marx (1976) , Veblen (1921) , but it was only after the appearance and explosive growth of information technology (IT) in the years following World War II that the influence of technology on the evolution of society became an object of study in its own right, with contributions from philosophy and various branches of social science. A substantial body of work has evolved, and for those readers that would like to examine this further, a few useful references are given in References (Philosophy) . Here, we shall only give a brief overview, and reserve a more detailed discussion of particular interest to our purpose for Sect. 4.6.

The interaction between technology and society is a complex subject, with numerous components and aspects, and one on which the view has changed significantly over time. Much of the early work on the influence of technology regarded it as taking part between two separate spheres of existence; a genuine (or intrinsically, or unsullied) human sphere and a sphere in which technology is prevalent. Technology was seen as developing under its own imperative, and so the interaction was a one-way process, with conflicts arising at the interface between the two, and with humans sometimes seen as the ‘victims’ of technology. More recent work sees the interaction as a process that is both two-way and so dynamic that it is not possible to make a clear-cut distinction between humans and technology. Humans are always hybrids of supposedly human and technical aspects, and what is of interest are the different kinds of human–technology interactions. This is treated in an article by Dorrestijn (2012), and in the present context it is interesting to note how this two-way process is reflected in the system introduced in the beginning of this section. All of the actors in this system (or actor–network, as it is also called) become hybrids, and so there is a feedback between technology and society that makes the relationship between them take on a dynamic character.

This can be seen, for example, in the importance of a collective readiness to accept and try out new ideas when they become available. This sensitivity to invention is a compound of many social, political and cultural factors, sustained by tradition and passed on by education and training. A well-known example is the stagnation of technological development in Chinese civilisation under the control of the mandarins (see, e.g. Buchanan 1992, Chap. 11). Up until, say, 1400, Chinese technology and its applications were on a par with, if not superior to, technology in Europe, but in the following centuries European technology developed rapidly, whereas in China a veneration of tradition and ritual by a centralised government stifled development. Some measure of political liberty, a degree of freedom from the constraints of class and conformity, a tolerance towards unfamiliar and even apparently bizarre points of view are all parts of the ‘social package’ required for technology to develop. This was again demonstrated in the relative rates of industrial development in France and England during the period 1600–1800, when an entrepreneurial middle class in England had considerable freedom to develop new industries, whereas in France such development was mainly the prerogative of the nobility, under the control of a powerful monarch.

A distinct body of research is what is identified as the social shaping of technology (SST) , and a seminal work here is the book The social shaping of technology, edited by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999) . The point of departure of SST is to acknowledge the much greater complexity of the sociotechnical interface that is recognised by either technological determinism, which saw technology developing according to an inner logic, or social determinism, which saw technology development as reflecting a single influence, such as an economic imperative. Central to SST is the concept that there are choices (although not necessarily conscious choices) inherent in both the design of individual artefacts and systems, and in the direction or trajectory of innovation programmes. Different routes are available, potentially leading to different technological outcomes, and they could have differing implications for society and for particular social groups. Rather than merely assessing the social impacts of a given technology, SST examines what shapes the technology which is having these impacts—its artefacts and practices—and draws together views from different areas of sociology and economics to form a deeper understanding of the innovation process and the social factors influencing it.

An important critical strand within SST has highlighted the politics of technology . Technologies can be viewed as ‘politics pursued by other means’ or as the outcome of social conflict; in either case, technologies are not neutral, but are fostered by groups to preserve or alter social relations. Of particular interest to our investigation is the promotion of the Weberian class conflict perspective by proposing that the ability of a society to favour technical change is enhanced by conflicts taking place in a large number of arenas. The nature of the conflicts may be economic competition or social conflicts, and the arena might be industry, a profession, or a neighbourhood, but in any case, in a totally homogeneous society new technology will not be easily introduced, and technical change is more likely to occur in a society or an arena in which power and influence are unequally distributed among a relatively large number of agents.

Closely related to SST is what is known as Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) . It is based on an approach called the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) , which considered scientific knowledge as arising from the socially influenced interpretation of scientific discoveries. SCOT studies technological artefacts and explains how social factors entered into the particular choices among a number of possible ones. One aspect of this social constructivist programme, and which is relevant to our story, is that a problem is closed when the relevant social groups see it as being solved. But this is certainly not true in general; in many cases, closure simply means that the differences between social groups have been reduced to the point where power relations of a political or economic nature make any further development futile. Thus, closure does not mean the elimination of conflict, and it is the suppression of latent conflicts through power relations that reduce the stability of a society, as we mentioned above.

Philosophers and most sociologists have a broad concept of technology, and would accept such a definition as ‘artefacts and their development, production and use’. Philosophers have produced a substantial body of work under the heading of ‘Philosophy of Technology’ . It is concerned with ethical aspects of technology, with the nature of technological knowledge and with fundamental issues regarding the impact of technology on the human condition. Sociologists have likewise taken an increasing interest in technology , studying technology as a social activity and how social issues influence the development and application of technology. However, in both philosophy and sociology, there has been a tendency to confuse technology with science, and engineers with scientists; many publications on the philosophy of technology make no mention of engineering at all, and such concepts as ‘technoscientist’ and ‘technologist’ tend to confuse the issue even more. One reason for this is probably that the philosophy of science was already well established and provided the point of departure for work on technology. This is reflected in the implicit or explicit view of most philosophers and sociologists that technology is driven by scientists, rather than engineers, as evidenced by the common reference to ‘Science and Technology’ and ‘technoscience’. A typical example of this is the proceedings of the 21st Nobel Conference, which is entitled Responsible Science—The Impact of Technology on Society. It considers questions of judgement and values that permeate issues relating to science-based technology, and states that these demand the attention of the entire society: business leaders, politicians, scientists and citizens (Byrne 1985) . What happened to engineering and the engineers?

Science provides the basis for developing new technology, but the main creators of new technology , as well as the creators of new applications of technology, are engineers. And engineering is very different to science, both in its approach and in its relationship to society. A lack of appreciation of this difference, and of the role of engineers in general, has often made publications on the relationship between technology and society seems somewhat artificial. Basically, whereas science is about discovering the truth of our understanding of Nature, engineering is about using that understanding for beneficial purposes. And whereas the paradigm within a domain of science can change relatively rapidly, caused by a single revolutionary new theory, such as the heliocentric view of the solar system, Newton’s laws, Darwin’s theory of evolution , relativity and quantum mechanics, changes within engineering are more gradual. In particular, it is not that existing engineering knowledge and works are found to be incorrect and need to be discarded; it is that new knowledge and works are added and then, over time, replace the old for reasons of greater cost-effectiveness.

One example of how philosophers and sociologists view technology can be found in the book Autonomous Technology by Winner (1977), where most of the Introduction is dedicated to a discussion of the history, use and meaning of ‘technology’. He points out that the concept is used so frequently and in such diverse contexts that it has become amorphous in the extreme, to the point where it has come to mean everything and anything; it therefore threatens to mean nothing. He consequently proposes instead to employ the term apparatus for the physical objects, such as tools, instruments, machines, etc.; the term technique for the activities involved, and the term organisation for all the related social arrangements. However, while this provides a differentiation of the components of technology, it does little to sharpen the definition of the concept itself, or to replace it, as the title of the book, as well as the frequent use of ‘technical’, ‘technics’ and technological’ throughout the book, demonstrates.

A useful perspective on the everyday use of the concept is given by Marx (1994) , where he shows that the character and representation of ‘technology’ changed in the nineteenth century from discrete, easily identifiable artefacts (e.g. a steam engine) to abstract , scientific and seemingly neutral systems of production and control. As a result, the newly refurbished concept of ‘technology’ became invested with a host of metaphysical properties and potencies that invited a belief in it as an autonomous agent of social change, attributing to it powers that bordered on idolatry.

For our purpose of integrating technology into our description of evolution , we adopt a more specific and precise definition of technology : Technology is the resource base developed and applied by engineers in order to meet needs expressed by groups or all of society, and consists of a material base (construction elements, tools, as well as the facilities within industry for fabricating and constructing plant) and a knowledge base (textbooks, publications, standards, heuristics, etc.). Students study technology in order to become engineers. The construction elements range from cement and reinforcing steel rods to integrated circuits, and it is the existence of this vast collection of standardised elements, listed in numerous catalogues and defined in various documents, that underpin the efficiency of modern engineering. For example, if we had to design a bolt or a drill bit every time we needed one, we would get nowhere. Both of these bases are dynamic: new construction elements are continually being added and older elements are being phased out; new knowledge is being generated through research and experience, and what was advanced knowledge yesterday is tomorrow’s accepted practice. Handling this continuous transformation, as well as the current exponential increase in volume, becomes an important factor in increasing the value of engineering to society (The relationship of technology to engineering is discussed in Aslaksen 2017b).

To see how the development of technology fits into Phase Three, Table 2.1 sets out a more detailed time frame and notes some of the most important characteristics of this development (A more detailed description was provided in Aslaksen 2013b).

Table 2.1
A condensed view of the development of technology (Aslaksen 2013b)

Period

Approximate duration

Development of technology

Ancient

Until 500 BC

Knowledge transmitted verbally and by example. Resources limited to timber and stone, with some metals and simple hand tools

Classical

500 BC–400 AD

Written records of designs and of scientific input appear. Resources include bricks and concrete, iron/steel becomes more available

Medieval

400–1400

Slow increase in knowledge base; improvement of existing designs. Increase in mining technology

Renaissance

1400–1650

Expansion of knowledge base due to upsurge in science and printing

Enlightenment

1650–1750

Further interaction with science, improvement in fabrication methods (precision, standardisation)

Industrial Revolution

1750–1850

Rapid increase in all aspects of technology. Formalisation of the technology through education (textbooks)

Production

1850–1980

Very great expansion of the technology; in particular, of the resource base in the form of standard construction elements

Information

1980 and ongoing

An increasing proportion of technology is becoming related to software

Applications of technology have become so embedded in society and of such importance in our daily lives that we can say that technology is now a defining component of our culture, together with such other components as art, religion and the rule of law. The evolution of society is strongly influenced by the development of technology, and as we have seen that we are now in charge of this evolution, our understanding of technology, the manner in which we control the development of technology, and how we decide to apply technology, become essential factors in assessing how evolution will progress from here on.

In the Introduction to the proceedings of the Nobel conference XXI, Byrne (1985) noted that questions of judgement and values permeate issues relating to the use of science-based technology. These issues are more complicated than merely choosing between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. They involve a societal decision as to what is good, or which of competing goods to pursue. Society and its leaders, then, make decisions that determine whether technology will be used responsibly or not, to which of many responsible uses the technology will be put, and what level of undesirable effect will be tolerated. These are matters that demand the attention of the entire society: business leaders, politicians, scientists and citizens.

It is not difficult to find examples of how, in the past, technology and its application had a major influence on the evolution of society. For example, the ability to form large-scale communities, as in cities, and thereby enabling the cooperation we mentioned earlier, depended on the development of civil and structural technology: water supply (dams, aqueducts, wells), sewerage and drainage (pipes, canals, tunnels), brickwork, etc. Or, the ability to separate workplace from place of residence through mechanised transport (railway, ferry, tram, bus and car). And in the present day there are technologies that have, or will have, significant impact on the further evolution of society, such as genetics, nuclear technology and renewable energy technology. These obvious examples can also make us overlook some less obvious, but, in the long run, not less significant influences of technology, and we shall return to that in Chap. 4. The fact that many (most?) applications of technology have both a positive and a negative effect on society was described as ‘the technological dilemma’ in Buchanan ( 1992, Chap. 13), and the author emphasised the importance of a wide participation in the decision-making process in order to minimise the negative effect.

What we need to realise a this point is that technology is so closely interwoven with evolution in Phase Three that any consideration of the manifestations of evolution, or of what drives evolution, or of the interactions between individuals as the elements of evolution, must take account of technology. Technology is an expression of both our manual and intellectual abilities, but has at the same time provided the momentum for the development and exploitation of those abilities. And it is this positive feedback that has resulted in the accelerating pace of evolution in Phase Three. Without a good understanding of what technology is and of the interaction between it and society, it is not possible to comprehend how society got to where it is today and to see what our realistic options for the future are.

2.4 Some Further Thoughts on the Evolution of Society

Our focus is on the third phase; the phase in which the changes within humans, that is, in their physical characteristics, are negligible compared to the development of the relationships between humans. The third phase represents a complete change in the nature of evolution ; it is so different that it is easy to overlook that it is a continuation of the same basic process—a struggle for survival. The subject of evolution has changed from the individuals of the species to entities formed by the interactions between the individuals, the pace of evolution has increased by orders of magnitude, and, above all, a great difference between the first two phases and the third one is not only in the speed of evolution, but in what drives it. In the first two it is the Darwinian process based on genetic information and change of endosomatic organs; in the third phase change is by means of exosomatic instruments, the bearers of knowledge , with education and information exchange forming the core of the process. A similar view, although in a somewhat different context, was expounded some time ago by Sir Peter Medawar in a series of BBC lectures in 1959 (Medawar 1959) , and as a biologist and immunologist (and Nobel laureate), he used the evolution of homo sapiens and, in particular, of the human brain as the basis for his argument . (This was previously discussed in Aslaksen 2017) . For this purpose, he divided the evolution of the brain into four stages: In the first stage, the brain was an organ that responded only to external stimuli by reactions that were already present in the brain. That is, a certain stimulus, which he called an elective stimulus , elected its corresponding reaction, but the brain would not react to stimuli that did not fall in this group. In the second stage, the brain began to be able to accept instructive stimuli ; stimuli that contained information about how it should be processed. The development in these two stages depended entirely on a genetic heredity, whereas in the third stage, a non-genetic system of heredity evolved that allowed brains to do more than merely receive instructions; it made it possible for them to be handed on. The fourth stage is the systematic change in the nature of the instructions passed on from generation to generation; an evolution that has been progressing at an accelerating pace for the last couple of centuries. The conclusion Medawar draws from this argument is that social change is not governed by any laws other than laws which have at some time been the subject of human decisions or acts of mind, and the mechanism that supports this change process is the non-genetic heredity mediated through the transfer of information from one generation to the next.

There can no longer be any doubt about the fact that the development of humanity and our environment is driven by us. We are no longer the pawns in Nature’s game of the survival of the fittest in a distribution created by random mutations; we run the game. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is no longer invisible; it is our hand.

Sometime in the early days of Phase Three (or perhaps earlier), humans became aware that they were different from other living organisms. They no longer saw themselves as just another creature living in and as a part of Nature, but increasingly saw the rest of Nature as the environment in which their individual lives took place and which could, to some extent, be manipulated and exploited to their advantage and from which they could obtain some measure of independence. This recognition and understanding was a result of the shift in the balance of capabilities from the physical to the mental. And besides the increasing ability to develop technology and apply it to modify the conditions of existence, it was accompanied by a shift in the balance between physical and mental activity. Existence had no longer just, or even mainly, a physical content, but also a mental content, and thoughts and mental images could take on a reality in a person’s mind that was divorced from any physical reality. A consequence of this was that the fear of death, which all animals display, but which they presumably accept as the natural end to individual existence, could now be sublimated by a mental construct in which the individual continued to exist in some form in a mental realm, in contradiction to all physical evidence . The preoccupation with and embellishment of this construct in the form of beliefs, rituals and religious systems have been central to the evolution in Phase Three and an inseparable part of our story of how we ended up where we are today.

In the book The Death of Forever, Darryl Reanney explores this issue from various points of view (Reanney 1991). He gives a very good account of the importance of death, whether consciously or unconsciously, in forming our character, and gives many examples of how our desire to transcend death has manifested itself in works ranging from scratches on a cave wall to the pyramids. It shows how all art includes a desire to overcome the transient nature of existence. Now, ‘transient’ means ‘lasting only for a short time’, and this brings us to a consideration of the nature of time. Reanney sees time as the greatest barrier that Nature has erected between the structure of the human mind and reality, and death, as a marker in time, can only be transcended by a pure, universal consciousness that is freed of time. He believes that, to the highly evolved mind, which has filtered out ego noise, reality appears as a timeless continuum. Without entering into the issue of a pure consciousness, Reanney’s treatment of time and its relation to the cycle of human life, both the short-term circadian cycles and the long-term one ending in death, is thought-provoking, but then, in the end it seems to miss what to me would be the proper conclusion: Rather than reality being a timeless continuum; that is, something existing unchanged in time, it is time that has no reality. Time is a concept we have invented as an arbitrary measure of change; the reality is change. In a universe where nothing changes, not a single elementary particle moves, there could be no concept of time. Of course, there would be no humans, either. The concept of time depends on the ability to perceive change, which is again contingent on memory. So, in a universe without organisms with memory there could not be any concept of time, either. We are so conditioned to thinking and speaking of time as an actual physical parameter; for example, we talk of something being a function of time. And when we say something happened later, we think in terms of elapsed time, rather than after something else had changed.

This is relevant to our investigation because, as we saw earlier, the time frames of the three phases are very different. In particular, we shall be concerned with how the rate of change has been, and is, accelerating in Phase Three. In the last century, the lifespan of humans has not increased dramatically when measured in normal time, but if we would use the rate of change of our environment as our ‘time’ scale, we would say that we are now living very much longer than a century ago. This brings us back to Fig. 2.2 and the interpretation of the y-coordinate as time. If we would put a timescale on the y-axis, it would demonstrate how the rate of change is accelerating. Without providing an exact quantitative definition of ‘change’, it is likely that more than 99% of all change to society in historical times have taken place since the introduction of the efficient steam engine in 1770s. We now have two related processes: changes to society from applications of technology and the associated issues arising from these applications, and the process of developing restrictions to resolve these issues, and in a qualitative manner, we can illustrate their relationship as shown in Fig. 2.5.

Fig. 2.5
The curve labelled a shows the issues that have arisen from the introduction of technology-based applications prior to any point in time, and the curve labelled b shows the issues that have been resolved

The vertical distance between the curves, ε, shows the issues outstanding and needing to be resolved, and we see that despite the time required to resolve issues, Δ, is decreasing, it is not decreasing fast enough to prevent the number of outstanding issues, ε, to increase. In short, society’s processes for responding to change are inadequate, and we seem to be facing a potential run-away situation. This problem was identified quite some time ago by William F. Ogburn in his book Social Change with respect to culture and original nature (Ogburn 1922) . He considered the adjustment that was required between different parts of culture (or society, in our current terminology); in particular; the adjustment of the non-material culture to changes is the material culture, where the latter included both the natural environment and industry and its products, and showed that there was generally a delay between the change and the required adjustment, which he called the hypothesis of cultural lag . He discussed the reasons for this lag, and in doing so, in many respects anticipated the hypothesis of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962) . And in the Summary of Part IV, he considered an outcome which we shall also take up in Sect. 5.3:

It is thinkable that the piling up of these cultural lags may reach such a point that they may be changed in a somewhat wholesale fashion. In such a case, the word revolution probably describes what happens. There may be other limiting factors to such a course of development, and our analysis is not sufficiently comprehensive and accurate to make definitive prediction. But certain trends at the present time seem unmistakable.

When comparing the two works, of Ogburn and Kuhn, we see that there is a significant difference. Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm is a belief system within a branch of science, and its revolutionary change as a result of mounting contradictory evidence takes place within this same environment; any consideration of its effect on the rest of society is secondary. Ogburn’s investigation of social change includes this same effect, and identifies many of the same reasons for it, but the ‘revolutionary’ change takes place in another part of the social structure, particularly in government through such actions as new legislation or changes to the educational system . The main part of Ogburn’s cultural lag is the additional lag resulting from this transition across the social structure , and most often predicated on political and economic factors; factors that are of minor importance to a scientific paradigm change.

A different perspective on the situation depicted in Fig. 2.5, and one that resonates with our development of the Social Bond , is the one presented by Habermas in his essay Technology and Science as Ideology (Habermas 1970). He identifies an underlying tension between two types of actions: a purposive rational action, which includes the relationship between technology and nature, and a communicative interaction, which aims at mutual understanding and, by implication, of the establishment of and agreed social framework. There is a balance between these two types of actions, and he sees the problem with our time as a shift in this balance towards the purposive action. That is really only a different formulation of the explanation of the increasing value of ε.

In Sect. 2.2, we introduced the concept of system as a means of handling complexity . Let us now see what this means if we want to describe a society as a system. One approach is a historical, bottom-up development. The simplest society would be a single (extended) family, living largely in isolation, as might have been the case of a family of cave dwellers some twenty thousand years ago. The system consisted only of the people in that family, they constituted the set of elements; everything else, including the cave, was the external world. The animals they hunted and the berries, fruits and the like they gathered, which were part of the external interactions, had no impact on what we would call the environment in which they lived and in which the system existed. As families became settled through starting agriculture and animal husbandry (and also forming themselves into larger groups), they did have a significant influence on the immediate part of what was previously the external world, and their dwellings, stock and field enclosures, and other constructions, such as dams or bridges, would now have to be counted as part of the society and therefore as elements of the description of that society as a system. The external world, which was still largely unaffected by the enlarged system, was outside the system boundary and formed the environment in which the enlarged system existed. The external interactions in the direction from the environment to the system were significant (rain, draught, floods, landslides, changes to river beds, etc.), but there was little impact of the system on the environment.

As populations grew and societal structures became larger and more complex and, above all, under the influence of technology , the boundary between society and the part of the rest of the world relatively unaffected by society moved further and further outwards, society is today, as a system , most appropriately taken to be the whole of Earth, including its atmosphere. There is no unaffected ‘environment’ of this system left; except for solar radiation and our embryonic interactions with space, which in the current context and for the time being we can safely neglect; our society is an isolated system. This is what was popularised as Spaceship Earth by Fuller (1969) and The Club of Rome in The Limits to Growth (Meadows 1972) . In terms of the three phases of evolution and the development of species introduced above, we see that the third phase has advanced to the point where there is only one ‘species’—our society—and the further development is not one of speciation, or cladogenesis, but one of evolution of that one society; that is, a case of social anagenesis.

This bottom-up approach is the classical approach to design, starting with the smallest, most detailed building blocks (in engineering, these are called construction elements or components), combining them into larger elements, then combining these into subsystems, and, finally, combining the subsystems to end up with a system that meets the requirements or, in our case, displays the observed behaviour. However, a complete, detailed description of society would be a very complex system . Not only does it contain innumerable elements and interactions, but these also change over time; it is a dynamic system. It is not possible to consider a whole society at this level of detail, but if we use an analogy with a volume of molecules and remember a bit of thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, we might take this a step further. A volume of gas is a very large system, but instead of considering it at a microscopic level, i.e. the level of individual molecules, we usually consider it at a macroscopic level, i.e. as an entity characterised by a few macroscopic parameters, viz. pressure, temperature and volume. To find similar ‘macroscopic’ parameters for society, we just need to keep in mind the significant difference between gas molecules and the elements of society we alluded to in Sect. 2.1: the latter are active, whereas molecules are passive. The activities make up the processes that describe what the society does, what takes place within the society. Society is ‘alive’, and these processes are the equivalent of the processes taking place within a living organism.

The first thing we must do is to decide what aspects of society we want to investigate and understand by describing it as a system. Do we want to understand what elements society is composed of? Do we want to understand what functions society performs? Do we want to investigate the stability or dynamics of society? Well, to some extent all of these, but above all, we want to understand how society is a result of interactions between individuals. And as individuals and their interactions are in themselves very complex, we need to develop a particular view of them that is simple enough to allow us to operate with them while at the same time contains enough of their essential nature to result in some valuable insights. The central part of that view is constructed by means of two concepts—intelligence and will—which we develop in the next chapter.

As somewhat of an aside, the changes to society as it evolves can be seen as being of two different orders of importance. The more important ones are the changes in the main structure of society, such as from a clan structure to a feudal structure, from a feudal structure to a nation state structure, or from independent craftsmen to factory labourers. But within each of these structures, there were many smaller changes in interpersonal relationships; in relative power, in wealth distribution, in political influence and so on. This brings to mind Noam Chomsky’s two levels of structures in grammar (Chomsky 1980; Smith and Wilson 1979) ; the deep structures generated by the features of the processes inherent in the human brain related to cognition, and the surface structures, generated by transformation rules operating within these deep structures. The analogy in our case would be that the major structures are generated by the processes making up intelligence , and the more detailed structures are generated by the application of such emotions or cognitive biases as love, hate, envy, etc.—Food for thought, and a reminder of how inspiring Chomsky’s work has always been.

In summary, the main understanding I would like you to take away from this chapter is a particular, and highly simplified, view of society, which sees society as a complex dynamic system , embedded in an environment which we might identify as Nature. The elements of this system are identified by two parameters: the individual (or person) and the role in which the individual acts as an element of society. These elements interact with each other and with Nature through inputs in the form of information and outputs in the form of actions, and the capabilities of both of these groups are hybrids of inherent human capacities and applications of technology. In response to information, each element produces actions according to an internal algorithm (or set of rules) that are in part inherent to the human and assumed identical for all elements, and in part determined by the individual’s previous experience. It is essentially a ‘black box’ model of the individual, or a psychologist’s or sociologist’s view, rather than that of a biologist. The structure of society depends on what interactions are active.

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© The Author(s) 2018

Erik W. Aslaksen

The Social Bondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68741-4_3

3. The Individual—The Basic Component of Society

Erik W. Aslaksen1

(1)

Gumbooya Pty Ltd, Allambie Heights, NSW, Australia

Erik W. Aslaksen

Email: erik@gumbooya.com

3.1 The Good Life

Before developing a description of the individual that is focused on the limited aspects of direct relevance to our purpose, it is appropriate to acknowledge that the issue of the interaction between individuals has always been a central concern of philosophy. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the beginnings of philosophy in both the East and the West, often exemplified by the names of Kungzi and Socrates, occurred at a time when society had developed to the point where these interactions became noticeable. Life was no longer that of free individuals with occasional interactions with other free individuals, but of individuals experiencing interactions with individuals structured into organisations and hierarchies, and thereby themselves becoming part of this structure . And so the concept of the individual, which until then had been taken for granted and not given any articulation, became an issue of intellectual concern; the position and behaviour vis-à-vis this new structure and, in particular, a normative view of this behaviour in the form of The Good Life . The concept of The Good Life is perhaps one of the concepts that has received most attention from philosophers throughout the ages and throughout all cultures (others are truth and justice), often with a more or less strong religious component. It is also correspondingly well documented, so that a very brief and selective mention here will suffice as a point of departure for the current work.

In the Western world, the arrival of the concept is often ascribed to Socrates , as documented in the Dialogues by Plato (Plato) . Socrates saw the good life as a life of contemplation and open-minded, critical examination; the life of a constantly inquiring and expanding the mind. But by no means a life in isolation; engaging with the community and discharging one’s civic duty should not be neglected, only this outward life should be simple, without desires for worldly goods and pleasures, so as not to detract from the inner life. The purpose of work is to enable the good life, it is not a goal in itself.

Through the work and teaching of Plato, this view of the good life was elaborated and passed on to his pupil Aristotle , who developed a much more complete (and complex) view of the good life in the form of his Nicomachaen Ethics (Aristotle). Here, he identifies the good life as the unrestricted action of the soul coupled with reason, and achieving this requires a good character, which is something that can be acquired. Besides this work (and a great number of others in various areas of science), Aristotle also wrote a book, Politics, on the organisation and life of the city state.

Aristotle’s work dominated Western philosophy until the Enlightenment, when the concept of the good life was re-examined by several authors, such as Kant and Nietzsche , just to mention two of the most significant ones. Kant considers the good life to be a moral life, and this moral is the result of a self-governing reason, or free will, within each person, anchored in a universal standard, the categorical imperative (Johnson 2004) . In a simplified form, this categorical imperative is often stated as ‘only do unto others as you would have them do onto you’, and from this it is clear that Kant’s view of the good life is primarily one that is free of any religious or supernatural motivation, and that acting in conformance with this categorical imperative is a duty made possible by free will rather than the realisation of a belief or an emotion.

While the categorical imperative defines what an action must conform to, it does not say anything about what actions one should engage in, or if one should engage in any at all. For a view of the actions to be undertaken by an individual, we might turn to Nietzsche. Although often reviled for some of his more extreme views, such as ‘war is good’, a recent book by Luc Ferry , What is the Good Life? (Ferry 2005), which is highly relevant in the current context, explores the positive aspects of Nietzsche’s view of the most enlarged or valuable life as the most singular, the richest, the most intense life; as a life rich in diversity, but without conflict (Nietzsche’s ‘grand style’). The driver is the will to power, but ‘power’ should not be interpreted narrowly as physical power, but rather as power over one’s self; the power to exercise one’s abilities to the full. Simplistic, romantic notions of ‘the good life’ as happiness or harmony with Nature, as a cow standing in a field of clover or, as Kant remarked, an oyster in its shell, discount the essential human characteristics of intelligence and will and do not give any meaning or aim to life.

At about the same time as the foundations of Western philosophy were being laid in Greece, the foundations of Chinese philosophy were being established in China. And if the beginning is identified by a single person, such as Socrates in Greece, it is identified by a single person, Kungzi , in China (Eberhard 1950; Ivanhoe and Van Norden 2001). But the circumstances in which they developed their thoughts were very different. Whereas in the case of Socrates the environment was the secure and prosperous city-state of Athens, Kungzi grew up in one of the many feudal states making up what is today China, during the dying days of the Zhou Dynasty, which started with the overthrow of the Shang Dynasty in about 1045 BC and ended with the unification of central China under the (brief) Qin Dynasty in 221 BC. The early years of the Zhou Dynasty were its days of glory, under its kings Wen and his son Wu, and also the Duke of Zhou, based in the western town of Shensi, near the present Sian. It was a period of internal stability, peace and prosperity, but in the following centuries, the power of the Zhou rulers diminished until, in 771 BC, they were overthrown by an alliance of feudal states and had to escape eastwards and establish a new capital, Lo-yang. Thus, the Zhou Dynasty became divided into two distinct periods, the Western Zhou and the Eastern Zhou, and it was during the latter period that Kungzi lived, from 551 to 479 BC. It was a period of unrest and strife between warring feudal states and of moral decay, and it was on this background that Kungzi’s philosophy, which has come down to us through the Annalects (or Annals of Spring and Autumn), produced by his disciples following his death (much as Socrates’ philosophy is contained in Plato’s Dialogues), is concerned with establishing and maintaining order and continuity. It is based on the traditions and moral codes of the Western Zhou, which he systematised into what was initially a moral code for the ruling class, but which, with the decay of the feudal society and the rise of the gentry, was transformed into a set of rules that have been instrumental in forming Chinese society down to the present day.

Of course, there have been innumerable other philosophers in both the West and in China, as well as in other parts of the world, that have been concerned with aspects of the good life , often associated with one of the great religions. The distinction between philosophy and religion is not a sharp one. Most religions contain significant elements of philosophy , and most philosophers were either adherents of, or strongly influenced by religion. In particular, ethics and the concept of the good life form a continuum across philosophy and religion, and are major components of both. But while the above-mentioned philosophers, and most of the many others that have contributed to an understanding of the good life, do view the good life not only as an internal life, but also in the context of the individual’s interaction with society, they do so from the point of view of society as a collection of independent individuals, and the good society is effectively a society that promotes the good life. That is, each individual sees itself as separate from society, and the actions of the individual, even though they may involve society (i.e. other individuals), are judged only as they relate to individuals. There is no concept of society as an entity of its own, with properties and behaviour that are not just those of individuals. This is reflected in the formulation ‘only do unto others as you would have them do onto you’; a formulation in terms of individuals, with no mention of society, and is also reflected in Socrates’ demonstration of the direct relationship between the properties of states and those of individuals, in Republic (Plato) . As an analogy, this is like viewing individuals as molecules in a gas; between collisions they move about according to the laws of free motion. But as the density increases, the interaction between the molecules increases, to the point where eventually they form a solid body, and now the movement of an individual molecule is only possible either as vibration within the body or then as the movement of the body as a whole. And, even though this body is still the same collection of molecules, the interactions have given it properties, such as conductivity and elasticity, that have no relevance to individual molecules. And so it is with modern society; the interactions between individuals are so strong that the concept of a free, independent individual is no longer valid; the effect of an individual can only be explained as an element of society, much as the functioning of a cell in the human body can only be explained as a part of the body. Conversely, the behaviour of society cannot be determined from that of isolated individuals; society is a complex system, with numerous emergent properties, such as, for example, solidarity.

3.2 Intelligence

An individual’s ability to do something it wants to do will depend on two things: The individual’s inherent capability, and the external circumstances in which the individual finds itself. With regard to the first of these, we can refer back to our earlier thoughts about evolution to show that this capability is closely related to intelligence . The evolution of life on Earth has, until recently, been a process of selection between variants generated by genetic mutations, and the selection criterion has always been survival in a changing environment or, in other words, the ability to adapt. That ability has two components: One is the physical adaptation, such as a variant with thicker fur during a period of falling temperatures; what we might call passive adaptation. The other is the mental adaptation; the change in the organism that allows it to respond to changing situations in the new environment. We might call this active adaptation , and this ability is basically what constitutes intelligence.

Intelligence is a subject with a long history of study and investigation. There are various definitions of intelligence , but one which has wide acceptance is that the intelligence of an organism is its ability to effect goal-oriented adaptive behaviour . A small sample of articles in three handbooks (Sternberg 1982; Wilhelm and Engle 2005; Wolman 1985) , as well as an overview by Robert Sternberg and William Salter (Sternberg and Salter 1982) , demonstrate that the focus of research on intelligence is in understanding, quantifying and measuring that behaviour, either in a classical ‘external’ fashion through stimulus-response descriptions, which form the foundation of intelligence tests, or in a more recent ‘internal’ fashion that sees the behaviour as the result of information-processing processes. As a result of this latter approach, various process models emerge as models of intelligence. The interesting feature of all these articles is that, while the ‘adaptive behaviour’ part of the definition receives in-depth attention, there is almost no discussion of what the goal of the ‘goal-oriented’ part of the definition is. We shall return to that issue in Sect. 3.7; to develop an understanding of ‘adaptive behaviour’ suitable for our purpose, we start with a very simple model of intelligence.

The diagrammatic representation of the model in terms of its main elements and their interactions is shown in Fig. 3.1. The organism responds to an input in the form of the external stimuli representing a new situation by performing an adaptive action . The action is performed by the actuators (feet, vocal chords, etc.) available to the organism, which is controlled by the processes taking place in response to the signals provided by the sensors. The processes are dependent on the knowledge accumulated by the organism through experience and education, and on inherent mental (i.e. instincts) and physical (agility, strength, reach, etc.) features of the organism.

Fig. 3.1
Diagrammatic representation of the high-level model of intelligence

There are several features of this model that require further elaboration. First, the inputs are of two very different types: Observations of the environment in which the individual finds itself, either directly or through the use of instruments and experiments, and inputs arising from interactions with other individuals. Our interest will be focused almost exclusively on the latter, but we recognise that the former inputs are also important in advancing our knowledge . Then, the block identified as ‘Processes’ represents two different groups of processes. One contains the processes that evaluate the input on the basis of the relevant information in the knowledge base (represented by the block identified as ‘Knowledge’) and determines the most appropriate action. The other group contains the processes that determine whether and how the knowledge base needs to be modified in order to reduce or eliminate discrepancies between the information in the input and the information in the knowledge base. Both of these groups will be further discussed in Sect. 3.8.

The identification of the action as an ‘adaptive action ’ is simply meant to indicate that the evaluation leading to the action is based on knowledge that has been adapted to the information previously received. Of course, for most of our actions, such as all our repetitive daily actions, this identification is trivial and unnecessary, and this type of actions is not what we normally think of as a result of intelligence . But for the actions we shall be primarily interested in it can be a useful reminder, and the part of the knowledge base relevant to this class of actions, which is clearly only a small part of our total knowledge, is further distinguished in Sect. 3.7. For the moment, let us define the knowledge base as a set whose elements comprise all knowledge, concepts, information, data and beliefs accumulated during the lifetime of an individual, to which the processes require access in formulating adaptive actions.

What is identified as ‘Mental’ organism features is the same as instincts, defined as a set whose elements comprise all information, data and beliefs transmitted to an individual through genes and to which the processes require access in formulating adaptive actions. Again, the same lack of precision is evident here as was the case for ‘knowledge’ , but it will not be important, as instincts play less of a role in what follows.

The elements of this model have all undergone great changes during the evolution of life on Earth, and stages of these changes can be observed in organisms alive today. In the early stages, all the elements were minimal, and a present-day representative would be a plant. A tree has effectively no knowledge, its sensors can detect the direction of sun and wind and the presence of moisture underground, its mental features are the instincts that tell it to grow towards the sun and to extend its roots towards moisture, and the only actuators are, correspondingly, directing the growth of branches and the extension of roots.

As evolution progressed, organisms became more complex, with more and more capable sensors and actuators, and the other elements of intelligence evolved to take advantage of this development. A present-day example of this stage of development would be a bird. Its sensors include sight and hearing, the actuators are wings, legs and sound generator, knowledge could include information about flight path between summer and winter habitats, the behaviour of food sources (worms, fish), and instincts include procreation, shying away from larger moving objects and loud noises, among others. The processes are correspondingly complex, allowing the bird to respond to changes in the weather, detect the location of food, etc.

Finally, evolution arrived at modern man, or homo sapiens , perhaps 200,000 years ago, and from that time the development of intelligence took a somewhat different route. While the features, the actuators, and the sensors did not develop significantly, the processing capability, and with it, the ability to accumulate and use knowledge , changed dramatically. The processing capability is located in the brain, and the size of the brain is a measure of this capability, but to understand the increase in processing power, it is necessary to consider the brain to contain two groups of processes: those required to interface with and control sensors and actuators, and those involved in the cognitive processes of perception, learning and memory, reasoning and complex problem solving. Various studies and theories of intelligence are based on the idea that the brain weight required for the first group of processes is proportional to some characteristic of the organism’s body, such as weight or surface area, and the ratio of the actual weight of the brain to this predicted weight is an indication of the proportion of the brain available for cognitive processes and therefore of intelligence. But many other factors, both physical (e.g. folding of the brain) and organisational (e.g. interconnectedness of regions), also influence intelligence, and a major one is the development of the element we labelled as ‘knowledge’. An essential ingredient in intelligent performance is the storage and retrieval of knowledge in a way that makes it highly accessible and conveniently usable.

Another essential part of the evolution of modern man was the development of the ability to speak, and with it the development of languages. As with other aspects of evolution, there are differing views on when this took place, but it is certainly safe to say that 10,000 years ago the physical features of humans were developed to where they are today. Accordingly, in the present context of human society, it is the element labelled ‘knowledge’ that is undergoing the most significant change in the form of an accelerating increase, caused by research, education and through support for information processing systems and devices. The inherent processing power of the brain is both changing very slowly and does not vary significantly from one group of people to the next. If a newborn child from a tribe in the Amazon basin would be adopted by an affluent family in a developed country and provided with a good education, it would probably do as well as any of its peers. Likewise, the element labelled ‘Organism features’ does not vary significantly over time or between groups of people, and so it is a lack of knowledge that is a major restraint on the ability to determine an appropriate adaptive action ; that is on the exercise of intelligence.

When we introduced the concept of a collective intelligence , in Sect. 2.2, we referenced the book (Landemore 2017) . Chapter 2 of that book reviews a number of reproaches of, or arguments against, democracy , which essentially are arguments for why there are no such thing as and effective collective intelligence. A common theme in these arguments is that ‘the average person is not only ignorant but cannot think coherently either’; our concept of intelligence contradicts the second part of that statement . And the ignorance is characteristic of society, not an inherent characteristic of a person, as will be reflected in our proposed measure of the Good Society in Sect. 6.1. Furthermore, a central concept in Landemore’s argument for the outcome-based advantage of democracy is cognitive diversity—different perspectives, interpretations, heuristics and predictive models. These items are all contained in the ‘Knowledge’ block of our model, so that cognitive diversity is reflected in the diversity of the knowledge base of individuals.

3.3 External Circumstances

Turning now to the circumstances in which an individual finds itself, we need to realise that they can be divided into two groups. In one group are all the circumstances determined by the physical environment in which the society is embedded, and an example may illustrate what is meant by this. The Aboriginal societies in Australia were embedded in an environment that provided no plants suitable for agriculture (e.g. corn, wheat, potatoes, etc.) and no animals suitable for husbandry and as sources of power (e.g. horses, cows, sheep, etc.). Irrespective of the constraints Aboriginal society placed on the behaviour of the individual and therefore on the opportunity for exercising the intelligence , there would be no effect of doing so, and so the societies remained largely unchanged for tens of thousands of years. In the other group are what might be called societal circumstances, which include cultural, political and economic circumstances. They are the circumstances that can be changed by changing society, and they are closely related to a view of the concept of freedom, which we consider briefly in the next subsection.

The stage of evolution we now find ourselves in can be characterised by two main features of both of these groups of circumstances: One, the rate of change is increasing, reducing the time available for exercising our intelligence and taking adaptive action before the effects of the changes overwhelm us. Two, the changes are generally in the direction of increasing complexity ; both groups of circumstances are now significantly more complex than they were only a couple of hundred years ago. And the two groups have something else in common: their relationship to technology. Technology plays a central and rapidly increasing part in their evolution, and the influence of technology on the evolution of society will depend on both of these groups of circumstances, because the effect of a particular application of technology will depend on both the structure of the society and the environment of the society, and the effect will be felt in both society and its environment.

The great increase in the complexity of the changes in the environment humanity had to adapt to and in the cognitive ability required to handle these changes meant that handling a change required not one process , but a collection of processes, or a strategy. And with increasing complexity it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how the individual processes relate to the outcome of the strategy; the outcome is an emergent property of the strategy. Furthermore, the effect of a particular adaptive action within a strategy is not unchanging; it is very much dependent on the state of the environment in which the action was carried out at the time it was carried out.

This description of the current state of evolution might, at a first reading, appear confused or contradictory. On the one hand, we assert that all changes are the result of human action, i.e. governed by intelligence ; on the other hand, we say that we need to take adaptive action, i.e. use out intelligence, to handle changed circumstances. The resolution of this apparent contradiction will emerge as a result of developing a measure of evolution. This measure will allow us to characterise changes as either desirable or undesirable, even though both are the result of using our intelligence, and thus resolve the apparent contradiction as a correction of undesirable changes by desirable changes.

No matter how intelligence developed, how this development is characterised by the changes in the elements of our simple model, and the complexity of the current state of development, we can ask what the goal of the adaptive action is. And was this goal always the same, or has it been changing? In the Darwinian theory of the development of the species, the goal was the increase in the individual’s ability to survive and reproduce, and this seems to still be the case, although modern biology and genetics have added many refinements to Darwin’ s original work. Let us use the term ‘life’ to mean the life of the group of organisms in question, which might be a species, or a subspecies, or a group within a subspecies, and for it to encompass the life of individuals as well as the existence of the group. That is, we do not differentiate between the survival of the individual and that of the group, or between the individual’s sub-goals of survival and reproduction. Then, at least until the advent of modern humans, the ultimate goal was the preservation of life.

Focusing now on the past 10,000 years or so of evolution , there has been essentially no change to the physical features of humans; that is, to all the elements of the model except the one labelled ‘Knowledge’. That element has undergone a spectacular development under the influence of two related processes. One, the emergence of increasingly complex interactions between individuals, in the form of families, clans, tribes and nations, but also many other organisational groupings, such as political parties, special interest groups, religious organisations, etc. Two, the exponential growth of technology, which afforded these groups increasing control over their environments and the ability to create numerous artefacts supporting their existence. Thus, in order to characterise a group, it is no longer adequate to describe the individuals belonging to the group, but also their interactions and the resultant structure of the group, and the artefacts owned by the group. At first, these artefacts were items like villages with cultivated fields and herds of animals, then boats, wagons, roads, bridges, castles, mines and so on, but also such items as a written language, training and education, and a legal system . Calling such a combination of a group of people and their artefacts a society, the recent evolution is one of the formation of larger and more complex societies, increasing interaction between these societies, and a decrease in the part of the Earth’s resources that is not directly involved in sustaining these societies.

If we look at the life of typical members of our modern society, many of the activities in which we are engaged and which exercise our intelligence appear to have little to do with sustaining life. Art, literature, philosophy, sport and many other activities, including the practice and involvement in religious beliefs, occupy significant parts of our time, and in some cases people will even sacrifice their lives in support of such activities. So, are we seeing a change in the goal of adaptive behaviour away from sustaining life towards some higher ideal? Is our existence changing from a physical existence to a mental existence, where the purpose of the body is only to sustain the brain, and all physical work is done by robots? To investigate these and similar questions, we need to look more closely at these ‘auxiliary’ activities. Starting with education, the desire to learn, study, and research is driven, on the one hand, by the need to succeed in the competition for positions in the workplace and for the security that comes with wealth and the approval of our peers; on the other hand, by the need to conquer the threatening uncertainty of the unknown. Gaining knowledge is important to survive in the competitive environment of modern society, much as physical strength was important in earlier times. Appreciation of, and involvement in, art, literature, philosophy and politics; in short, in the intellectual side of society, serve, on the one hand, to enhance our understanding and realisation of ourselves; on the other hand, to advance our standing and influence in society. But in addition to our standing as individuals in society, we realise that the strength and vitality of society itself is a foundation of our existence, and so many of the activities we undertake are directly or indirectly in support of society.

What is happening is not that the ultimate goal of the adaptive behaviour is changing; it is that the strategies for achieving the goal are becoming ever more complex. Evolution is no longer the evolution of species driven by genetics; it is the evolution of societies. As societies emerged, there was a balance between individual survival and society survival , with that balance shifting rapidly in favour of the societies. Now it is (slowly) becoming a balance between the individual societies and the world community as a single society. When the latter becomes dominant, it will revert to individual survival under limited resources, and evolution will become the internal changes to this society, driven by intelligence , to preserve life in this environment. Then, as now and as it has always been, the purpose of life is simply—life. Which is not surprising, because what else could it be?

3.4 Freedom

In addition to a complexity and a time measure, the evolution of society, i.e. the progression along the y-axis in Fig. 2.2, can be measured by a further quantity: the loss of individual freedom. Being part of a society means accepting certain rules and laws, and they represent a restriction on the behaviour of the individual. These are restrictions on the interaction between individuals, and so must play an important role in our investigation. However, before developing this any further, we need to be clear about what we mean by ‘freedom’ in this case. The Oxford English Dictionary defines freedom as ‘the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants’. This simplistic meaning is related to the existence of early man, the individual hunter roaming through the land with no obligations and with interactions limited to the occasional coupling with an available female or the elimination of an intrusive male. Free, but what he could do with that freedom was very limited, both by his natural environment, over which he had no control, and by the very limited repertoire of activities available to him. Speaking; well, he could talk to himself, I suppose. For an individual as a member of a society, this definition makes little sense. The relationships to other members of the society do necessarily introduce restrictions on the individual’s actions, but they also enable a number of activities that would not be available to an isolated individual. The concepts of the freedom of an isolated individual and of a member of a society are basically different, and this can be illustrated by an analogy comparing the freedom of action of an individual with the freedom of movement of a water molecule. At temperatures above 100 ℃, in the vapour state, it can move around unhindered, with only occasional collisions with other molecules. Between 100 and 0 ℃, as a member of a body of water, its movement becomes restricted through constant interaction with other molecules, and at even lower temperatures it becomes a member of a body of ice. Now its individual movement is completely restricted, but it has gained the ability to participate in an infinite number of collective movements, both in the form of modes of vibration and as a movement of the body as a whole. It is still the same water molecule, but its movements and the concepts we use to describe them are completely different in the vapour and the solid state.

In order to use freedom as a measure, we must provide a definition that is suitable for its use in this context, as freedom is a word that is used so frequently and with such a broad spectrum of meanings. First of all, and drawing upon the major work of Patterson (1991) , we need to realise that the concept of freedom is not an inherent feature of the human character; it is a product of Western civilisation with its roots in antique Greece and with a development that has continued into the present. If we consider it as a function of time along the y-coordinate in Fig. 2.2, it is essentially zero prior to about 500 BC.

As an aside, the tendency to consider ourselves to be it; the final goal of evolution , and for our current concepts, belief , and understanding to have some form of eternal validity, as we noted in Chap. 1, is evident in other contexts also, and one closely related to freedom is ethics . In his book, The Ethics Project, Kitcher (2011) demonstrates how our concepts of ethics and of what is ethical must, if they are to be relevant and effective, relate to our society, the environment in which our actions take place, and as this is a continually developing environment, the same must be the case for ethics. The issue is not primarily about ethical truth, but about ethical progress. Ethical truth is not preordained and something towards which we are striving: instead, we should be striving for each progressive change to be truthful.

Second, and again following Patterson, freedom can be viewed as a composite concept with three components:

- Personal freedom ; the absence of restraints on the one hand, and the ability to realise one’s desires on the other. These two aspects of personal freedom—negative and positive—are just two sides of the same coin.

- Sovereignal freedom; the power to act as one pleases; regardless of the wishes of others.

- Civic freedom; the capacity of members of society to participate in its life and governance.

The distinction between personal and civic freedom reflects the view of the individual as something that has an existence separated from society. As we do not adopt that view, but view the individual as intrinsically an element of society, civic freedom is absorbed into individual freedom. Sovereignal freedom, as the desire to have unrestricted power over others, may seem at odds with our intuitive understanding of freedom, but that view is a result of Enlightenment rationalism; historically persons, such as the pharaohs, have had that power—the power of a god—and others have clearly wished they had it. In that absolute sense it has no relevance in the present context, but in a relative sense, within the limits experienced by the slave–master and the slave, it is a useful concept, although, as is shown below, it can also be absorbed into personal freedom.

Thus, we have arrived at a point where there is no need to distinguish between the three components of freedom for the purpose of defining a measure of freedom in the context of society; we should perhaps just call it human freedom, recognising that the human is inseparable from society—the human is an element of society. However, we need to distinguish another meaning of the term ‘personal freedom’ —as the ability of a person to realise its own humanness. A discussion of this aspect of freedom, as well as a comprehensive literature survey, is contained in the doctoral dissertation by Grodi (1995), where it is identified as consisting of Acceptance of Self, Acceptance of Circumstances, Choice, Non-conformity, Authenticity, Responsibility, Spirituality, Humility and Letting Go. It is something a person has to work out on its own, it is a personal experience, more or less independent of society, and is therefore not really a component of the freedom of the individual as an element of society. It would be tempting to say that the freedom we are looking at is a framework within which this intensely personal freedom can be realised, but that is not correct, as the latter can be realised even in circumstances of external coercion and restrictions.

Freedom, with its two aspects—the freedom from something, and the freedom to something—can be thought of as the totality of actions made possible by the state of development of society, minus the restrictions society places on our actions. Of course, that totality is only virtual, as without restrictions there would be no society, but this picture is nevertheless a useful conceptualisation. It does require us to admit two types of restrictions: those that restrict us from doing something and those that restrict us from not doing something, i.e. that restrict our freedom by compelling us to do something, but this just reflects the same two types of laws. In this manner, we are replacing the simplistic definition of freedom with what we might think of as the richness of society ; the number of actions or opportunities society offers its members.

Included in the restrictions that restrict us from doing something are ones we encounter in our daily routines as restrictions on our social freedom, often of a hierarchical nature, and these restrictions are the most insidious ones and the ones that concern us most, because they are ‘hidden’. A recent treatment of such restrictions, albeit with a focus on women, is contained in the doctoral dissertation by Welch (2010) . Her central concern for social freedom is the obstacles created by hierarchical relations to interaction and to choosing expressions of self-determination, and she constructs a liberatory theory of social freedom by addressing problems of choice for daily life engendered by social forms of systemic oppression, and present normative conditions needed to overcome hierarchical relations in the social sphere. One of the issues she raises in this regard is that of ‘the invisible foot’—the extent to which most rational choices for oppressed persons are coerced via institutional inequities or inequalities, making the choices seem voluntary and thereby reinforcing the inequities and the identification of the persons as belonging to a separate social group. The effect is, in many ways, very similar to that arising from the concept of ‘enframing’ that was introduced and discussed by Hill (1988): the effect of interpreting our experience in accordance with an entrenched worldview, belief , or philosophy, and suppressing anything that cannot be made to fit into it, although enframing includes aspects of the legal framework also.

3.5 Will

From our identification of human intelligence as the driving force behind the evolution of society, we are led to accepting the extent to which individuals are able to exercise their intelligence as an important measure of the process of evolution. However, referring to the simple model of intelligence shown in Fig. 3.1, and the definition of intelligence as goal-oriented adaptive behaviour , this model illustrates how intelligence operates, but why does it operate? What is it that drives the process? The finest intelligence in the world has no effect on the evolution of society if it is not used to generate adaptive actions . The force that drives the process is will . Our sensors may perceive changes to our environment, but to then engage the processes and convert that input into adaptive behaviour requires an effort, an exertion of will-power. We could incorporate this in our simple model by inserting the will as a gate between the processing facility and the actuators, as shown in Fig. 3.2. Will is the force driving evolution ; intelligence is the process steering evolution. They are two sides of the same coin; what we called ‘life’. Or, in a similar vein, as Hannah Arendt said: ‘Will is our mental organ for the future, just as memory is our mental organ for the past’ (Arendt 1978).

Fig. 3.2
High-level model combining intelligence and will

The concept of will, and its central role in human existence is, of course, not new, and was put forward most forcefully by Arthur Schopenhauer in his work The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer 1969) In Book ii, he describes the will to live as the blind impulse towards existence that is present in all things, and that uses knowledge for its purpose, much as in our model in Fig. 3.2. But, maybe due to his pessimistic and melancholic disposition, he saw this will as condemning a man to an unhappy, restless striving to fulfil base desires, and thought that escape from it was only possible by withdrawing from life into asceticism and meditation. That is not the view put forward here; as already noted, the development over the last several centuries has certainly been positive with regard to allowing humans to realise their potential.

In earlier times, the will to exercise intelligence (or capability), such as it were, was very directly challenged by conditions of existence, such as the need for finding food, providing shelter, engaging in person-to-person competition and so on. Today, the challenges are much subtler and more concealed; the necessity to exercise intelligence (i.e. use willpower) is no less urgent, but it is not only about food and shelter, but about preserving and evolving of our society. Under this perspective, will becomes almost synonymous with virtue, as pointed out by Ellul (1992) , a philosopher who otherwise has been highly critical of the expression of will in the form of technology.

A corollary to this is that the goal of the ‘goal-seeking adaptive behaviour ’ can be formulated as allowing the unrestricted exercise of our intelligence , reflecting the realisation that it is our intelligence that determines the path of evolution . That is, the ‘free’ in ‘free will’ refers to the absence of external constraining conditions, and the adaptive action is such as to reduce these constraints. It is futile to ask what the ultimate destination of evolution is; we are not evolving towards something, some ideal state here or in Heaven. And it does not matter; what is important is that we know what the direction of evolution should be right now. In this sense, it is a differential definition of The Good Life .

3.6 Survival

When we speak of ‘survival’, it means on the one hand that something persists in time; on the other hand, that it does so in spite of something that is detrimental to its persistence. As individuals, we speak of surviving an ordeal or a challenge, but when we speak of the survival of the human race, the species homo sapiens , or human society, it must relate to something other than the survival of individuals, which is severely limited. Maybe it is one or more characteristics of individuals that survives, such as the genetic code? But we can already see the possibility of modifying the genetic code; for example, to eliminate a disease or to make people smaller in order to reduce their ecological footprint and make space travel more economical. So, by this definition, the species would become extinct, but there clearly is something that persists. Another characteristic used to define a species is the ability to produce fertile offspring. But we could conceive of a future where all offspring is produced in a factory environment, so again the species would become extinct, but something persists.

We should also consider that we are likely to become increasingly characterised by a combination of what we might consider purely human characteristics and those of applications of technology; that is, we will become hybrids or cyborgs. That development has already started; the behaviour of a person in our society today is significantly affected by technology . And embedding applications of technology into the human body is well underway; currently only replications of human organs and parts, but additional and/or supporting capability will follow. So, if we want to say that we, the human race, is surviving through all of this, what is it that survives? What survives in all of the foregoing examples is the continuity of the evolution of society, whereby society we understand all humans and their artefacts, the interactions between these, and the environment in which they operate. This continuity means that, at any point in time, the changes taking place in society in the next time increment are completely determined by the previous history of society. We can express this symbolically by the equation

(3.1)

where Ξ(a; t) represents society, described by a set of parameters, a, that are all functions of time, and f(a; t) is a function expressing both a weighting of the parameters in determining the future development and the fact that recent developments are more significant than ancient ones. That is, f(a; t) is a rapidly decreasing function as we go back in time, which is why the choice of the point t = 0 is unimportant; starting, say, 10,000 years ago should be sufficient.

We now see that what survives is, in the case of humans, not a particular physical structure; that is, a particular ordering of physical elements in space, such as the molecules in the genome, or relationships between humans, such as a particular social structure , but a particular ordering of events in time, as expressed by Eq. 3.1. And the meaning of ‘survival’ in the context of humans is much more complex than what we might at first think of as the most immediate manifestation: the survival of the individual. We certainly have a strong personal survival instinct; we will fight anyone that tries to eliminate us, we will go to great pains and expense to avoid succumbing to an illness, and do our utmost to survive disasters and persecution. But on the other hand, there are numerous examples of where we are willing to give up our lives for our children, for our country, for a religious belief and so on. And then there is the very deep desire to survive death in some form; again, in our children, but also in works that will remind posterity of our existence, such as a handprint on a cave wall, a poem, a scientific discovery, a world record, actions that will gain us a place in history, or a great monument, such as the Taj Mahal or the pyramids. But it is even more subtle that this; for those of us who cannot on our own produce something that will endure, there is a desire to be part of something that will. An example of this is the dedication and sacrifice of those who built the great cathedrals.

What we have, then, is an inherent will to survive, but that, just as with so many other aspects of what it is to be human, the form of this will to survive has developed as society developed. With an increasing understanding of the meaning of society and our place in it has come an evolving understanding of the meaning of survival; both concepts have become more closely related and more complex. If we again consider evolution in two dimensions, as we defined them in Fig. 2.2, the along the x-axis more than 99% of all species that have existed are now extinct, and a simple-minded extrapolation of that process would indicate that the days of homo sapiens are also numbered. However, as already noted, we will soon have the ability to alter our genetic makeup (in addition to the ability to alter the ‘environment’ in which society exists), and so generate new subspecies as changed circumstances demand. And while that process carries its own risks in the form of unintended consequences, we might avoid the straightforward extinction of the previous 99% of species.

It is the evolution along the y-axis that is of more immediate concern, and here we do not really have any precedents. There are various species that exist in the form of societies, such as ants and bees, but if these societies, which in any case are relatively simple, evolve in any way, it is on a much slower time-scale than that of our society, and so do not provide any significant guidance. At any one point in time, a number of functional components, such as the legal, political, educational and technological systems and their interactions form a framework within which the lives of the members of our society take place. Associated with each of these components are a body of knowledge and a group of people—the professionals—who have studied this body of knowledge and how to apply it, and, to a large extent, we accept that these people are the most appropriate to make decisions in their area of expertise within the framework. We would not think it a good idea to have a new aeroplane designed by a citizens’ committee.

When it comes to the evolution of society, that is, to changes in the framework itself, the body of knowledge in the past, but there is no accepted rule or process for translating that knowledge into the future, and no group of professionals to do so. (In fact, the professionals mentioned above are at a disadvantage, in that the more one has invested in understanding the current state, the more one is inclined to want too simply preserve it.) In terms of Eq. 3.1, the function f(a; t) is unknown. If we compare society and its evolution to a group of people setting out on a journey into a completely unknown territory, it would be very dangerous to make predictions about what lies ahead and acting accordingly. For example predicting that there will be an ocean ahead, and that therefore promoting members with boat-building and fishing skills and tools, and then instead encountering mountainous terrain, where mountaineering skills and related hunting skills are required, could spell disaster. The prudent approach would be to have a mix of all skills and to weld them into a group with a high degree of equality and cooperation, ready to tackle whatever they encounter. The evolution of society is an eternal journey, and survival means the ability to keep going.

3.7 Identity—Intelligence as Belief

In Sect. 3.2 we identified two classes of adaptive actions , and with them two parts of the knowledge base . The smaller part, which is the part we are interested in, contains the knowledge required to evaluate those inputs that are not only not repetitive, but where some or all of the knowledge entering into the evaluation of the inputs is of a probabilistic nature. That is, it is in the form of more or less well-founded beliefs (which may include opinions and conclusions), and we shall further restrict this to beliefs about things that matter to the individual, the things the individual is willing to make a sacrifice for. What an individual considers an item that matters is not determined only by the generally accepted characteristics of this item, such as family relationship, a written constitution, rules and laws, the dogmas of the Church, but by the individual’s perception of the item, by additional features that are important to that individual. The relationship with each of these things that matter is peculiar to each individual, and it is something the individual establishes as it goes through its life cycle. This web of relationships is what we shall, in the present context, call the individual’s identity, and constitutes a subset of the knowledge base . This identity determines, in effect, what the goal of the individual’s ‘goal-oriented behaviour’ is; it is the realisation of those beliefs, making them come true, and thereby it also defines the meaning of ‘survival’ is for that individual. Note that ‘truth’ does not enter into this definition of identity, and we may also note that the concept of identity is close to (but somewhat more limited than) what is contained in the use of ‘ideas’ as a catch-all for concepts, beliefs, and values in the paper (Simpkins et al. 2010) , to which we shall be referring again in Sect. 4.5.

If the set constituting the identity of individual a is denoted by A, the number of elements is termed the size of the set. The size is usually an increasing function of time (age of the individual) up to a certain time, and then fluctuating and eventually declining. The increase is due to the interaction of the individual with its environment; at first parents and siblings, then teachers and school friends, then spouse and children, people in the workplace and people in various organisations (sports, political, etc.), and so on. But the decline is not due to interaction with other people; it is due to the deterioration of the memory function and of the flexibility of the brain to accept and process new information. In the rest of this book we shall neglect this physical effect, and simply assume that the capability of the brain remains constant over the individual’s lifetime.

The concept of an identity element is difficult to define with any precision, as these elements take a multitude of forms that we variously refer to as knowledge , concepts, information, data, and beliefs. An initial definition could be to say that an identity element is a statement , of the form ‘I believe that ….’, but this then raises the problem of defining the strength of the belief , which may range over such statements as ‘I believe it is possible that ….’ to ‘I am certain that ….’. One approach is to base this weight on the supporting evidence , and there is an extensive mathematical theory of evidence, in particular the Dempster–Schafer theory, as set out, e.g. by Shafer (1976) , but that is mainly applicable to the issue of uncertainty in science, with evidence in the sense of determining the probability of the truth of a statement, and of somewhat limited use in the present context. A person can believe something firmly enough to give his or her life for it, without a shred of evidence in that sense. Evidence in support of a belief is a very different concept, and we shall come back to it in Sect. 4.4.

So as not to let this problem become a showstopper, we remind ourselves of the context in which we are undertaking this work. The evolution of society is driven by us—by individuals—and the driving process is the exercising of our collective intelligence . In particular, the deep structure changes we introduced in Sect. 2.4 are determined by our identities, and in this process, the identities themselves change. That is, changes in society are reflected in changes in identities and vice versa, and it is not possible to say that one is the cause and the other the effect. Let us now define a statement as a sentence having the structure of the following example:

I believe Sydney is the greatest city in the world because its building A is the tallest building in the world.

Here ‘Sydney is the greatest city in the world’ is the assertion of the statement; ‘I believe’ simply identifies the assertion as asserting a belief , not a fact, and as all statements express information about identities, i.e. about beliefs, this part is unnecessary (or optional). The phrase ‘because its building A is the tallest building in the world’ is the argument in support of the assertion. The assertion consists of two components: ‘Sydney’ is the subject of the assertion, and ‘is the greatest city in the world’ is the predicate of the assertion.

The subject of the statement, in this case, ‘Sydney’, is one of the things we have called ‘the things that matter’; it is a thing about which I have beliefs or opinions, and about which I can make assertions. An identity contains a number of subjects, and other examples are the Pope, capitalism , Negroes, and global warming. It is possible for an identity to contain assertions for which it has no arguments. We can now define identity elements as statements having the above structure.

An assertion is composed of a subject, S, and a predicate, which we shall identify by the character σ, so that an assertion may be identified by Sσ. A set of arguments will be identified by the character X, with X(Sσ) being a set of arguments associated with the assertion Sσ.

For a particular assertion, Sσ, there will be a large number of possible statements, each with a different argument. These arguments may not all be independent, in the sense that one argument may entail a number of other arguments. For example, if the assertion is that Sydney is the greatest city in the world, one statement could be ‘I believe Sydney is the greatest city in the world because its building A is the tallest building in the world”. This statement entails all statements of the form ‘I believe Sydney is the greatest city in the world because its building A is taller that building B in Buenos Aires’. Then, keeping in mind that the interaction between two individuals is the basic process in our view of society as a system , we define a set, Θ(Sσ), as containing all arguments in support of Sσ that would be recognised as such by the individuals involved in the interaction, but such that no argument entails any other of the arguments.

Before taking this development of our conceptualisation of identity to its conclusion, we need to remark on the difference between truth and significance in relation to statements, and the above example can serve to make this clear. The statement ‘I believe Sydney is the greatest city in the world because its building A is taller that the Burj Khalifa in Abu Dhabi’ would be very significant if it were true, whereas the same statement, but with a one-storey house anywhere substituted for the Burj Khalifa would be trivially true, but completely insignificant. We shall, therefore, limit statements to such that are significant in lending support to an assertion, whether true or not.

The symbol Θ was chosen in order to make a connection with the Dempster–Shafer theory (op. cit.), where Θ is the set of all possible values of the parameter regarding which a statement about its true value is to be evaluated. Of course, parameters are very different from arguments, and evidence is very different from belief , but in both theories, the set Θ is dependent on the perception or cognition of the individuals involved; it is particular to the context in which the theory is applied, which in our case consists of the two individuals involved, their cultural background, and present circumstances. In principle, the size of Θ(Sσ) depends on both S and σ, and could be very large. But as far as being arguments that can be perceived by our intelligence process as being separate and be brought to bear in an interaction, the practical or useful upper limit is determined mainly by our mental abilities, and might therefore be more or less independent of S and σ. In any case, we shall normalise the size of Θ(Sσ) to 1, so that if we define 0 ≤ ξ ≤ 1 as the size of X(Sσ), then we will consider this to be the strength of the belief in the assertion . The various symbols used in this section are listed in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1
Symbols used to define identity elements

Symbol

Name

Examples/Comments

S

Subject

Sydney, Usain Bolt, Islam

σ

Predicate

The best, the fastest, the only

Sσ

Assertion

Bolt is the fastest man in the world

X(Sσ)

A set of arguments in support of Sσ

Because he won the world title, …

Θ(Sσ)

All arguments in support of Sσ

Non-entailing, and recognised as pertinent to the interaction

We have now arrived at a view of identity as comprising a number of subjects, Si, i = 1, …, n, associated with each of these subjects is a set of predicates, σj, j = 1, …, m, and associated with each assertion a set of arguments , X  Θ. The values of both n and m can be very large, but depending on the individual, on the history of its inputs since birth, and, consequently, the number of identity elements —the size of the identity—will be large and dependent on the individual. This is the size of the identity as a part of what was identified as ‘Knowledge’ in Fig. 3.1; it relates to the storage function of the brain. In the following, it will be very important to distinguish this size of the identity from the size of the portion of the identity involved in a particular interaction. In the present chapter, where we are discussing characteristics of the individual, ‘identity’ is as above, but from the next chapter onwards, where we are only considering interactions between two individuals, we shall consider ‘identity’ to mean that part of the identity relevant to the interaction, which may be restricted to a single subject or even a single assertion.

At this point, I need to put the concept of identity into perspective, because many of you will be familiar with the concept as it is used in other disciplines. Anthropologists may use ‘identity’ mainly in the sense of ‘belonging to’; that is, as consisting of characteristics that define membership of a group, such as ancestry, skin colour or language group. This is, therefore, a meaning that is relatively constant over the life cycle of an individual and what we might think of as external in character. It is, therefore, at a first glance quite different to our concept. However, the ‘belonging to’ could also relate to such characteristics as performing certain rituals in response to natural occurrences, such as floods, storms or draughts, in which case the difference between the two meanings or uses of the word is reduced.

Philosophers take a different approach again; an approach rooted in ontology and what exists. What does it mean for a person to exist? What does it take for a person to persist from one instant in time to another? What are the consequences for identity if all or a part of the brain is removed or transplanted? These, and many other similar questions occupy a considerable body of work, but it would appear that they have little bearing on our meaning of identity as what matters for survival .

Within psychology, a distinction may be made between ego identity , the sense of continuity and the issue of persistence; personal identity , the behavioural features that distinguish one person from the next; and social or cultural identity , the collection of social roles that a person is able to play. Within this framework, our use of the concept is clearly close to ‘personal identity’, to the extent that behaviour is an accurate reflection of the survival criteria, an issue we shall return to shortly. However, you will realise that our use of it, as defined above, is a very great simplification. To demonstrate the nature of that simplification, and also in order to be able to refer to some of the detailed features when that proves useful later on, the following is a brief summary of the main characteristics of the concept as used in psychology, drawing on articles by Serafini and Adams (2002), Schwartz (2001) .

The point of departure is the seminal work, Identity: Youth and crisis, by Erik H. Erikson , in which he introduces the three levels of identity (ego, personal and social) and develops a theory of identity formation as the central development task of adolescence, and whose resolutions set the social-cognitive structure of individuality. Then, to measure the state of this process , James E. Marcia expanded on the theory by identifying four types of identity related to two of Erikson’s dimensions of formation—exploration and commitment: identity diffusion in which no ideological commitment has been made or is being explored; identity foreclosed , in which commitments have been made without any exploration (adopting beliefs and commitment to an authority, such as parents); identity moratorium , in which exploration is taking place without making any commitments; and identity achieved , in which exploration has been completed and commitments made (Marcia 1966) . Of these four states of identity, the first two may be classified as passive, and the last two as active (Adams and Marshall 1996), so that we end up with the following characterisation of the state of identity Fig. 3.3:

Fig. 3.3
Characterisation of the state of identity

We can see that ‘identity’ is being used with two meanings: to identify an activity or task, and to identify the result of the task, with the latter being measured by the four types. To characterise the task, Gerald R. Adams and Sheila K. Marshall (op. cit.) proposed five functions that provide

1. (a)

the structure for understanding who one is;

2. (b)

meaning and direction through commitments, values and goals;

3. (c)

a sense of personal control and free will;

4. (d)

consistency, coherence and harmony between values, beliefs and commitments; and

5. (e)

the ability to recognise potential in the form of future possibilities and alternative choices.

A further dimension to the description of identity is the context in which identity becomes observable, such as choice of occupation, political orientation or religion. Each such content area is called a domain, and they can be classified according to a characterising feature. Two structuring of domains have emerged: dichotomous, with only two classes (internal and external, or sometimes expressed as ideological and interpersonal), and hierarchical or clusters, in which three main clusters are commonly used (psychological, interactional and socio-structural). Further details of the issue of defining and structuring domains is contained in Schwartz (2001) ; for the purpose of demonstrating how our use of identity relates to the use in psychology, a particular structure, introduced by Adams (e.g. in Adams and Marshall op. cit.), will be more appropriate. Adams divided the social context into two levels: the micro and macro contexts. The micro context refers to interpersonal exchanges and relations in which personal identity is directly affected by means of dialogue and other forms of direct interaction. The macro context refers to more overarching social and cultural contexts, in which social identity is shaped by the invoking of cultural norms, practices and beliefs. Within this structure , the effects of the macro context are implemented through micro contexts, as in cultural norms being taught to children by their parents. Our approach is, in a sense, the opposite of this; actions on the micro level proliferate to become effects on the macro level, only then, in what might be considered a secondary effect, will there be a reverse process of the effects on the macro level shaping identities on the micro level. As we consider the individual only as an element of society as a system, we do not require any differentiation of the identity. In our model, identity is defined only in relation to its effect on the system; this is a great simplification.

This observation leads us to another relationship between our model and an existing field of knowledge , memetics . As the effect of our identity elements is limited to their effect on interactions between individuals, their nature is close to that of memes. Memes were first introduced by Richard Dawkins in Chap. 11 of his celebrated book, The Selfish Gene (Dawkins 2006), and were very much in vogue for a couple of decades, but memetics was not able to establish itself as an independent discipline, and its only journal, Journal of Memetics, ceased publication in 2005. Memes, which can take on various forms, such as ideas, behaviours or styles, are envisaged as the counterparts, in culture, to genes in evolutionary biology. But there is an obvious difference, in that genes are the physical carriers of genetic information, whereas memes are basically units of information which are only represented in physical form. As a result, there are a number of problems with memetics, as listed, e.g. in the article by Uhlíř and Stella (2012) , and we can see to what extent these problems are reflected onto identity elements, in particular, when we restrict our attention to persuasion , as we shall do in Sect. 4.4:

1. 1.

The difficulty with defining a carrier of memes (in addition to the content). In the case of identity elements , there is no carrier, only transmission channels .

2. 2.

Lack of fidelity in copying. In the case of persuasion, the fidelity is controlled by a central authority (Church, sect, political party, etc.).

3. 3.

Natural selection, which should eliminate mutations and leave only a few viable alternatives, but the contrary is observed. In our case, all ‘variants’ are arguments in support of the same subject.

4. 4.

The alleged agency of memes. Identity elements have no agency, the agency is the operation of the intelligence .

5. 5.

No operationally valid definition of a meme as the smallest unit of culture. In the case of identity elements, the issue of ‘smallest’ is resolved by the requirement of no entailment.

6. 6.

Meaning of memes; each person has a different interpretation. In the case of persuasion (of an ideology), the scope for interpretation is very limited.

However, concepts and analogies introduced in memetics , such as the analogy between the propagation of ideas and the propagation of a disease (see e.g. Lynch 1996) , may be usefully employed in investigating how the Social Bond is established throughout a society.

The concept of identity, as it has been introduced here, is a complex concept, and while we will be using it only as a set of elements, without any further details, there are many aspects of it that could be explored. One is the size of the identity; what is the significance of this parameter? How, and if at all, does it manifest itself in the behaviour of a person? We might think that an opinionated person has a small identity and a broadminded person a large identity, but that is clearly too simplistic, as an opinionated person can have a firm opinion on a large number of subjects (i.e. a large number of assertions and arguments ) and hence a large identity, whereas a broadminded person could have only a few, but varied assertions and arguments about the same number of subjects. Even with regard to a single subject, size does not necessarily distinguish between prejudice and broadmindedness; it is the variety of assertions and arguments rather than their numbers that count.

Another aspect is the dynamics of the identity; does the size of the identity increase as society evolves? A comparison between 10,000 years ago and today would have to yield an affirmative answer, but the shape of the increase is another matter. Until recently, the increase is likely to have been determined by the increase in knowledge in general, but with the current accelerating growth in knowledge one has to ask if there is an upper limit. With regard to a single subject there may be a limit imposed by the ability of the processing function, as already mentioned, but as the identity only takes up a very small part of the storage capacity of the brain, it is difficult to see that the limiting factor could be the storage capacity. It might rather be that there are only so many issues that can be important to us, or that we can be passionate about, and that all others are suppressed, but I would have to leave that question to psychologists.

This brings out another issue concerning the relationship between identity and behaviour: We think of identity as a characteristic of a person, and in the sense of a set of identity elements this is true. But if we recall our definition of Θ(Sσ), it is related to a particular interaction, so that the effective size of the identity, and the associated outcome or behaviour, are dependent on the other partner in the interaction. This is reflected in the concept of cognitive advantage , which we shall encounter in several places.

Finally, an interesting question is to what extent the structure of the brain—its allocation of capacity to different functions (e.g. storage and processing)—will adapt to the increasing use of IT in supporting mental functions.

3.8 Evaluation and Selection—Intelligence as Process

The process illustrated by the block diagram in Fig. 3.1, that is the exercise of intelligence , is a complex decision-making process with several interacting sub-processes. And, what is not displayed in the diagram, it is a dynamic process, in the sense that the process parameters and the decision criteria themselves change during the life cycle of the individual. In order to gain an understanding of this process we start out by proposing a simplified, high-level view of the block in Fig. 3.1 identified as ‘Processes’, as shown in Fig. 3.4.

Fig. 3.4
A high-level partitioning of the block ‘Processes’ in Fig. 3.1 into sub-processes

The descriptions of the processes in Fig. 3.4 are as follows:

Process inputs. If we take our lead from Kant (1781), the signals from the sensory organs are processed through the two faculties of representation and understanding. The former turns the sensations into intuitions, and the faculty of understanding processes the intuitions and generates concepts. Concepts are classes of intuitions, and when we say we understand what an observed object is, it means that we know to which concept it is related. In that sense, a concept can also be considered to be a rule for the reproduction in the imagination of a set of intuitions.

Form identity. In this process , the stream of concepts resulting from the process inputs is considered from the point of view of its relationship to our identity to the things that are important to us. This stream might reinforce our existing identity, or it might change it; at any point in time the identity consists of a collection of things that are important to us (beliefs, people, social structures, etc.) and for each one, an indication of how important it is to us, in the sense of what we would be willing to sacrifice to support or defend it. The concept of an importance ranking is somewhat similar to that developed by Maslow (1943, 1954) , but whereas Maslow’s hierarchy identified five broad classes of needs, the identity consists of specific things that are important to the individual, and while many of these could be fitted into Maslow’s classes, that hierarchy lacks the survival perspective proposed in the present paper.

Identity is peculiar to each person and, while a large part of the identity may be common to persons within certain groups, there might be things that are perceived to be very important by single individuals. What is considered important is a matter of perception, and is developed in each individual as it goes through its life cycle and processes all the sensory inputs; in particular, all the inputs received through interactions with other individuals. This process of forming the identity raises a fundamental question: Is it a random process, in the sense of having no universal or common feature of the evaluation, or is there an inbuilt bias that skews the evaluation towards a particular outcome? The answer we put forward earlier is that there is indeed an inherent feature of all forms of life, in that their responses to perceived changes in their environments are influenced by a common meta-criterion , which is survival . The appearance of the meta-criterion is somewhat analogous to Kant’s introduction of categories. He argued that concepts are not formed in an arbitrary manner; they have certain characteristics or categories, which are pre-existing (a priori of any sense input) in our mind. Categories are to concepts what space–time is to (empirical) intuitions. Intuitions exist within a space–time framework; concepts exist within the framework of categories. Now we are saying that identity is formed subject to the meta-criterion of survival.

The idea that there can be a guiding principle which is not divine in nature, but is built into humans as an intrinsic feature of their inherited nature, was discussed by Luc Ferry in his book What is the Good Life? (op.cit.), where he gave it the very appropriate name of ‘horizontal transcendence’; it transcends what is given to us through perception, but is not given to us by any divine authority. However, there is a significant difference between what Ferry puts forward and survival as a meta-criterion. For example, Ferry would consider our basic idea of what is right and what is wrong to be such a transcendent concept, whereas what is proposed here is that our idea of what is right and what is wrong is generated by each individual as a result of experience (i.e. perceptions) and reflects the meta-criterion of survival in the society in which the individual finds itself.

The significance of ‘influence’ and ‘meta-‘is perhaps best explained by a few examples, in order of increasing complexity . The first example is a plant; say, a tree. A tree has effectively no knowledge , its sensors can detect the direction of sun and wind and the presence of moisture underground. Its identity, the things that matter to it, consist of the instincts that tell it to grow towards the sun and to extend its roots towards moisture, and the influence of the meta-criterion of survival is very direct. The only actuators are, correspondingly, directing the growth of branches and the extension of roots. Because of its limited awareness of its environment, it can easily make an unfavourable response to a change in its environment, say, by extending its growth towards a source of water, not realising that this is the landowner’s new vegetable garden, and will result in it being chopped down.

The next example is a more complex organism, say, a bird. Its sensors include sight and hearing, the actuators are wings, legs and sound generator, knowledge could include information about flight path between summer and winter habitats, the behaviour of food sources (worms, fish), and instincts include procreation, shying away from larger moving objects and loud noises, among others. The processes are correspondingly complex, allowing the bird to make more considered responses to changes in the weather, detect the location of food, etc. In particular, birds can change their responses, that is the criteria on which they evaluate situations, as a result of experience, such as feeding out of a person’s hand. The built-in criteria for survival are still present, as any rapid movement of the hand will demonstrate, but they are influenced by the evaluation of the current situation based on experience. The underlying principle, i.e. the meta-criterion of survival, is realised both in the criterion evaluating the sudden hand movement and in the criterion evaluating the opportunity of food.

The final example is a human being. Now the environment, in the form of society, has become many orders of magnitude more complex, both in its components and in their dynamic behaviour, and the processes by which individuals assess the environment and decide what matters to them, i.e. develop their identities, as well as the processes used to decide on a response to a new situation have become equally complex [we are reminded of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (Ashby 1956)] . The meta-criterion is still survival, but its realisation in decision criteria for determining adaptive actions is greatly modified through individual experience, gained through observation and through interaction with other persons.

Understand situation. As already mentioned, this is also a complex process, or set of processes, if we would care to go to a greater level of detail. It cannot be expressed as a logical process, in the sense of a computer algorithm, and it is peculiar to each individual, in that it relies on the individual’s education, training, and experience. Three features of this process are of importance to the developments in the next chapter: First, while there is some scope for checking of the input data for self-consistency and comparison with known (or accepted) facts, the evaluation of the input data leading to an understanding of the situation they represent is largely through a comparison with similar sets of data experienced in the past. As a result, erroneous understandings (e.g. prejudices) tend to persist. Second, the amount of data received in a given situation is usually much greater than the interpretation part of the process can handle, and so we carry out a selection pre-process, eliminating the data we consider irrelevant to interpreting the data and understanding the situation. As the capacity of this pre-process is limited, the probability of eliminating relevant data increases with the amount of data received, leading to a state of indifference due to input overload. Third, an increasing proportion of the data we receive regarding a particular situation is not by direct observation, but second or third hand through various media. So, in addition to interpreting the data as received, the process needs to try to assess the veracity of the data, essentially through plausibility and correlation with existing knowledge .

Thus, the picture that emerges is one of a process that does not contain any intrinsic judgement of truth; the understanding of a situation is almost completely dependent on the available knowledge. Only in the simplest situations can the question ‘Is it true that…’ be answered unequivocally with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Another way of expressing this is that the understanding of situations of the type we are interested in is inherently uncertain to some extent, and we might say that the degree of uncertainty is the converse of the strength of belief discussed in the previous section. The more arguments we have in support of an assertion , the lower the uncertainty regarding its truth and the stronger our belief in the assertion. This is the view implicit in the development in the previous section, where, when I say ‘I believe that X is Y’, it means that I accept that X is probably Y, with the probability determined by the information available to me (which may or may not be true). But I realise that X may be other than Y, and accept that uncertainty.

However, as we also mentioned, this is not the only meaning that can be given to ‘belief’. There is the meaning of belief as faith, in which case ‘X is Y’ is accepted as true, irrespective of the information available to me, and to the exclusion of any other possibility. Under this perspective, faith is seen as the inability to accept uncertainty. The inability to accept uncertainty is a well-known aspect of the human psyche and an important factor in the process illustrated in Fig. 3.4. A recent book, with the somewhat ambiguous title Nonsense: the power of not knowing, by Holmes (2015), explores the dangers of our need for closure on the one hand, and the benefits of embracing uncertainty on the other; both sides illustrated by numerous examples.

Evaluate situation. With regard to this process, we need to keep in mind that we are considering only evaluation (and possible adaptive action) with regard to the identity elements , i.e., to that part of the knowledge base we are calling the identity. The great majority of the evaluations and decisions we make do not fall into this category (or, more correctly, are only extremely remotely connected to it) and occur in a manner we consider ‘automatic’, such as brushing teeth, crossing the street, driving a car and so on. These are not actions through which the individual influences the evolution of society, which is what we are ultimately concerned with. So, in the overwhelming majority of situations, the outcome of the evaluation is that they do not affect what we believe is relevant to survival . However, in those cases where the evaluation finds that the situation does impinge on one or more of the things that matter, the outcome is a realisation of the importance of the situation and the start of the process of searching for options for an adaptive action.

Determine options. Having identified a situation as one that impinges on one or more of the items that matter for survival, this process considers what options are available for responding to this threat. One might expect this to be a rational process of identifying possible options and estimating the cost and/or effort and the effectiveness in achieving the desired result for each option, but in reality it is often what is termed an emotional response. That is, the most immediate option is chosen without much consideration, in order to relieve the emotional pressure that results from an unresolved threat. It appears that, in general, the greater the threat, the less rational and more emotional the response. another type of response, generally to more basic threats, such as an aggressive movement or a loud noise, are instinctive responses, with the instincts provided by the block termed ‘Organism features’ in Fig. 3.1; they form an intrinsic, inherited core of decision criteria.

Decide action. Most of us probably realise that there are many actions we ought to take, ranging from participating in a protest march and writing to the newspaper to starting an action group, but actually doing it is another matter. It requires the will to do it, as discussed earlier, and that is part of the identity; a measure of how much something matters to the individual. For example, I might realise that a grave injustice is being done to another individual or group of individuals, and that I should voice my protest, but as it does not affect me directly, I do not have the will to do anything about it. This particular aspect of the identity is what is indicated by the dashed line in Fig. 3.3.

From the above description of the process we need to take away two of its important features, and they are both related to the fact that the process is a dynamic process. One, it is dynamic in that the process itself, as it is depicted in Fig. 3.3, changes with time; both the identity and the evaluation are influenced by the information being processed. Two, the process is dynamic in the sense that it takes time into account; time is a variable in the situations being evaluated, and the decisions and adaptive actions are based on predictions of future effects. This introduces additional variability; two persons with exactly the same moral precepts and understanding of right and wrong may take different adaptive actions because they predict different futures in which the actions will take effect.

The purpose of the above picture of the processes involved in intelligence is mainly to provide a better understanding of what is meant by identity in the present context, as this concept is central to the definition of the Social Bond , to be formalised in Sect. 4.5. The picture is not founded on any empirical evidence , nor is it embedded in any relevant theory of brain functions, sociology , or psychology, of which there are several, as well as a vast body of knowledge . The focus in developing the concept of the Social Bond is on the interaction between individuals and on how this interaction determines the individuals’ identities; the processes internal to each individual are not described or investigated in any further detail. However, there is one result from socio-cognitive psychology that is immediately relevant and which gives a further perspective on identity as a segment of the individual’s knowledge base , and that is the distinction between intuitive and deliberate thought processes (and resulting actions, as we noted in Sect. 3.3). This distinction was originally made explicit by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the early 70s, and is described in the Nobel Prize lecture given by Kahneman (2002). The two types of cognitive processes, which are often labelled System 1 and System 2 (sometimes also fast and slow), are described summarily by Kahneman as follows: The operations of System 1 are fast, automatic, effortless, associative, and difficult to control or modify. The operations of System 2 are slower, serial, effortful, and deliberately controlled; they are also relatively flexible and potentially rule-governed (p. 450). There is also a distinction between the accessibility of the information required by the two types of processes—the ease with which particular mental contents come to mind. The processing of intuitive thoughts and percepts via System 1 rely on rapid access; in the language of computer design this part of memory can be considered similar to cache, and in our model of intelligence , Fig. 3.1, this type of information is located partly within the ‘Mental’ part of the box labelled ‘Organism features’. The part of the knowledge base which constitutes the identity has a lesser accessibility and is maintained exclusively by System 2 processes.

There are two final, but important aspects of the relationship between System 2 processes and the processes maintaining the identity. One, to which we shall return in Sect. 5.1.4, is that one of the functions of System 2 processes is to monitor the quality of both mental operations and overt behaviour. That is also one of the functions of the processes maintaining the identity; it is the function that let us know when we are contravening our beliefs. The second is the presence of uncertainty or doubt (which must be distinguished from a lack of knowledge) , which Kahneman identifies as a phenomenon of System 2, a meta-cognitive appreciation of one’s ability to think incompatible thoughts about the same thing (p. 455), and which is also a feature of identity, as we saw in the previous section.

3.9 Identity Elements and Social Structures

In Sect. 3.7 we developed a model of an individual’s identity, in which the identity is a container for a set of identity elements subdivided into a number, n, of disjoint subsets X, where {Si}, i = 1, 2, …, n, is the set of subjects representing the things that matter to the individual, and where ξi, the size of X, is the strength of the belief in the subject. The statement that the subsets X are disjoint is a simplification, one of the several simplifications that make up our particular view of society as a complex system of interacting individuals, as we discussed earlier.

The elements in the identity of a particular individual are members of a universe, or ensemble, of all possible identity elements. This allows us to combine sets belonging to the identities of different individuals. In particular, in the context of a particular assertion , we can identify a set of elements in each individual that supports this assertion (some sets may be empty, of course), and we can also define what they have in common in general by summing over all assertions about a particular subject (e.g. they are of the same religion, belong to, or support, the same political party, belong to the same sports club, etc.).

With This Understanding, We Can Examine Certain Relationships Between Individuals on the Basis of Their Identities, Using the Following Notation

1. i.

A society is denoted by Ξ; it is a set of n individuals. If there are several societies, e.g. as sub-societies of a larger society, they will be identified by a subscript, Ξi, each with n i individuals.

2. ii.

Individuals will be denoted by the lower-case Latin letters a, b and x, and their associated identities by upper-case letters A, B and X.

3. iii.

For convenience, the size of a set of identity elements is also denoted by the same upper-case letter as the set itself, e.g. A. That is, A can be either a set, on which the set operators of union, intersection and complement apply, or a number, on which arithmetic operators apply. Which interpretation applies will be obvious from the context.

We shall now define a number of quantities that will be useful in our investigation of the properties of interactions, in the next chapter. As the first one, the alignment between two individuals is defined as follows:

Alignment between two individuals With a Ξ and b Ξ, let A be the identity of a and B be the identity of b. Then the alignment between the two individuals, αab, is defined by

(3.2)

and it is a number in the range 0–1.

An illustration of the concept is shown in Fig. 3.5, and we see immediately that αab = αba, and that αaa = 1. Hence, there are n(n − 1)/2 distinct combinations (a, b), a ≠ b, and we shall use the symbol Σa,b to mean the sum over these distinct combinations of a and b.

Fig. 3.5
The alignment αab of two identities, A and B, as the ratio of their intersection (heavily cross-hatched) and their union (total cross-hatched area)

We can also define a global alignment within a society, which expresses the extent to which the individuals have the same identity on the average:

Global alignment within a society With a Ξ and b Ξ, the global alignment within the system, αS, is defined by

(3.3)

and it is a number in the range 0–1.

Alignment can also be used to characterise a society through the concept of a core identity , Z, of a society, S, as follows:

Core identity With a Ξ and b Ξ, let A be the identity of a and B be the identity of b. Then the core identity, Z, of the society Ξ is defined by

(3.4)

It follows that, in a society with a core identity Z,

(3.5)

We now have two measures of the extent to which the individuals in Ξ have identity elements in common, αS and Z, but they are quite different. On the one hand, αS > 0, whereas the core identity is zero if only one of the identities has no element in common with all the others. That is, a single deviant individual would make the core identity of the society vanish. On the other hand, αS is a number that says nothing about which elements are shared or how the shared elements are distributed, whereas Z identifies the common elements. The advantage of αS is that it is the sum of simple terms, so that if we can determine the dynamics of these terms, we have a characterisation of the dynamics of the society. The difference between αS and a measure based on Z is reduced if we make the assumption that the identities of all the individuals in Ξ have at least some elements in common, and, indeed, we shall consider this to be a necessary condition for an individual to be a member of Ξ. The difference is further reduced if we assume that αab is greater than a significant value, say 0.1, for all a, b in Ξ, and that will be our approach in considering the stability of society.

Consider now the following thought process: In a given society, Ξ, with n individuals, pick any individual, a. Then pick that individual, b, from the remaining n − 1 individuals who provides the largest value of . Then pick the individual, c, from the remaining n − 2 individuals who maximises Z{a, b, c}, and so on. The result is a function Z(m), with m ≤ n, with a shape as shown in Fig. 3.5 for the case of Ξ = Ξ_0, which is the whole world. The basic shape, as a succession of steps, results from the structuring of society into various sub-societies, such as families, clans, political parties, nations and cultural regions (e.g. western, eastern, and middle eastern). The two curves shown illustrate the effect of choosing different individuals to start the process: no. 1 is a person with strong ties to a large number of people, such as a political leader, whereas no. 2 is a person that has only family ties and maybe some relatively weak ties to a sporting society or something like that. However, as m increases and both curves encompass more and more individuals with a certain part of their identities in common, the difference vanishes.

We see, then, that the concept of a core identity can be used to subdivide society into sub-societies at various levels. With each level, we can associate a critical core identity size, , with being the core identity size for the world society, as indicated in Fig. 3.6. At any one level, there is a number of sub-societies, or simply societies, at a higher level, such as nations at level 2 in Fig. 3.5, which we denote by Ξi, i = 1, 2, …,k, and each of these societies has a core identity, Zi. We can then define the similarity of two societies as follows:

Fig. 3.6
The development of the size of the core identity, Z, for a society Ξ, stating from a single individual and increasing the number of persons included in Ξ, until all the individuals in the world, n 0, are included. Curve 1 starts with an individual with a close relationship to large groups of society; curve 2 starts with an individual with limited personal relationships. The notation [Z] is used here to emphasize that it is the size of Z we are considering

Similarity In a set of societies, Ξi, spanning a society, Ξ, each with a core identity Zi, the similarity of two societies, Ξi and Ξj, is denoted by ζi,j and defined as

(3.6)

It is a number in the range 0–1, and ζi,j = ζj,i.

An illustration of the concept is shown in Fig. 3.7.

Fig. 3.7
The two sets, Zi ∩ Zj and Zi ∪ Zj, involved in forming the similarity ζi,j of two societies

Extending this concept to the whole society, Ξ, we can define the homogeneity of the system, Φ, as follows:

Homogeneity In a society, Ξ, composed of k sub-societies, there are k(k − 1)/2 distinct values of similarity, ζi,j. Denoting the sum over these values by Σ(i,j), the homogeneity, Φ, is defined as

(3.7)

The homogeneity is a number in the range 0–1, and it expresses the extent to which the members of the society share a common identity base. Or, we might say that the quantity 1 − Φ is a measure of the tension within the society.

What we have done above for sub-societies is a replication of what we did for individuals, with core identities replacing individual identities, and the comments we made about the measure αS now apply in similar fashion to Φ.

Open Access   This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

© The Author(s) 2018

Erik W. Aslaksen

The Social Bondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68741-4_4

4. Interaction

Erik W. Aslaksen1

(1)

Gumbooya Pty Ltd, Allambie Heights, NSW, Australia

Erik W. Aslaksen

Email: erik@gumbooya.com

4.1 The Social Environment

The picture developed in the foregoing is of an individual identity that consists of the criteria for deciding the importance of the perceived situations for survival, and it is developed throughout the life cycle of the individual. The inputs to that development occur through the interaction of the individual with its environment; that is, with society. This can be an interaction with Nature, with other people, or, increasingly, with applications of technology. The relative importance of these types of interactions will vary, depending on the local environment, but for the majority of people, the most important one will be the interaction with other people. This can take place through a variety of media: one-on-one, either face-to-face or through some medium (phone, email, letter, etc.), or in a broadcast manner, through print, radio, television and social media. The reach of this interaction will also vary greatly. For some, this might be quite a limited reach, restricted perhaps to an extended family or a small tribal group, but for the majority of humans today the reach is effectively all of humanity. We are becoming a world society.

The interactions with applications of technology are, of course, in the final analysis, interactions with the people who designed them, but there is at least one significant difference: the interactions with technology applications enforce a particular response. (Much of the following material was presented in Aslaksen 2017b). As an example most of us are familiar with, consider getting cash from an ATM . The machine displays a series of questions in a fixed sequence, and to each one, you must provide the appropriate response. Now, you might say ‘Well, that is very convenient, I would not want it to be different from machine to machine’, but that is not the point. The point is that you have no choice as to the format and content of the interaction; you are forced to conform to a set procedure if you like it or not. This fashioning and controlling of our behaviour and responses by means of technology applications is the subject of a body of work with inputs from philosophy, sociology and psychology, exemplified by Foucault (1977, 2000), Ihde (1990), Latour (1993) , Verbeek (2005) and Dorrestijn (2012) . But it is important to recognise that this is one of the several aspects of the interaction between technology and society, and two of the other ones are relevant here. One is the way in which the ubiquitous presence of technology influences the way in which we view our environment, both Nature and society. This is the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt school and often taking Martin Heidegger as its point of departure (Heidegger 1977), and reflected in the works of Marcuse (1964) , Habermas (1984) and Arendt (1958), and more recently in Andrew Feenberg (1995) , just to mention a few of the numerous works produced by these authors. Basically, it argues that our human nature and the environment in which we act as humans is being invaded by a world of power and consumerism that is driven by and based on technology; a world in which everything is considered a resource, something to be used, but that has no value in itself.

The second aspect is that we are being conditioned to accept and, in many cases prefer, the interaction with technology applications and whatever they provide. The issue here is not with every individual interaction; for example, we accept that we should stop at a red traffic light. We know why, and we find this an acceptable solution. The issue is that we get conditioned to accept the dictates of technology without critical assessment. This is one reason why Internet scams are so successful; people accept a request to provide information from what looks like an official source without thinking ‘can this be true?’. Technology has come to embody a certain authority.

This type of conditioning should be contrasted with the one associated with Pavlov and his dogs; a conditioning resulting from repeated exposure to the same situation. Our acceptance of the demands of technology, even in completely new situations, has the nature of a belief , which is why technology is sometimes called ‘the deity of modernity’. Both types of conditioning result in a change of our knowledge base , but while the Pavlov-type adds to the store of automatic responses, the technology-type changes our identity.

The evolution of society is driven by the interaction between each individual and society, and it is one in which each party influences and is influenced by the other. This is illustrated in Fig. 4.1, which shows the individual receiving information by observing society through various channels and evaluating this based on the criteria making up the individual’s identity. This evaluation may result in an adaptive action , and this action is carried out in the forum provided by society; that is, as an interaction with other elements of society. The new state of the society is again observed by the individual, and so on.

Fig. 4.1
Illustration of the mutual interaction between the individual and society. Society provides the means for realising the actions of the individual, the individual provides the means (the identity) for evaluating the performance of society (Aslaksen 2017b)

However, not only does society change, but the identity of the individual also changes; identity is a social product. Through observing its environment, the individual continuously assesses what matters for survival, and the evaluation criteria that make up the identity undergo an evolution that is related to that of society; the two are coupled. The coupling mechanism is a statistical one, in that the evolution of society is influenced, to some degree, by the actions of every individual. The degree of influence, or power, varies greatly from person to person, and the process by which power is developed is a highly non-linear one, in that, power provides the means for its own increase through the feedback inherent in the loop illustrated in Fig. 4.1. Consider for a moment, as a very simplistic picture, a society in which the individuals are all equal and indistinguishable with regard to the influence of their actions and their access to information. However, due to the fact that local sources of information are accorded a greater importance than distant ones, and the actions of individuals have a greater impact locally than on distant events, each individual is associated with a local environment, and society is the system consisting of all of these local environments. Let the state of society be characterised by a single parameter, say, x, which is the average of that parameter in each local environment, then x will change with time as a result of the feedback process indicated in Fig. 4.1. In terms of the behaviour presented by Eq. 2.1, the parameter x is a representative of the more detailed set of parameters, a; x might be some high-level concept like happy life years or the richness of life. The dependence of x on time is shown as the smooth curve in Fig. 4.2, where x changed as humanity progressed from the cave to life in a developed society today, and at each point in time, the change in x, that is, the value of dx/dt, is what human intelligence , on the average, judged to be optimal. Any deviation from this curve is detrimental; it is not the case that the greater the value of x at any point, the better it is. This is, of course, the problem with different parts of the global society being on different points on this curve at the same time; what might be likened to a non-equilibrium situation in physics.

Fig. 4.2
Illustrating how the evolution of society is not a smooth progression when looked at in detail. The parameter x is some measure of the richness or complexity of society (Aslaksen 2017b)

If, in this utopian society, we would look at the value of the same parameter, but averaged over only a part of society, we would find that it fluctuates around the value for the whole society, and the fluctuations are greater the smaller the part under consideration is. Consequently, if we look at the curve in Fig. 4.2 with a greater resolution, we would find that it is not a completely smooth curve, but one with fluctuations, also called ‘sampling fluctuations’ and discussed, e.g. by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman in (1981) , as indicated in the figure. But because these fluctuations are detrimental, and are recognised by the rest of society as such through the evaluation process, they do not persist. However, if the evaluation process is perverted, the fluctuations can become significant, and the proposition put forward here is that the fluctuations are, in the final analysis, due to failures of the evaluation and action process described above, what we called the social immune system at the end of Sect. 2.2. The nature of the failures can be characterised in terms of three causes:

1. (a)

Interference with the flow of information as input to the evaluation, either through limiting the information, falsifying it or by obscuring it in a mass of irrelevant data.

2. (b)

Limiting the opportunities for taking adaptive action , either through direct repression or by promoting a structure of society that isolates the individual from its environment.

3. (c)

Restricting the size of the society, and thereby the averaging process , through such strategies as nationalism, sectarianism and an unwarranted focus on local issues.

Addressing each of these three groups of causes separately, we begin with (a). When we are awake, we are continuously receiving information. One major part of it relates to our surroundings and is not the subject of any conscious processing. Another major part relates to the control of what we might call automatic actions, such as eating, drinking, crossing the street and saying ‘hello’ to people we meet. A third major part consists of those inputs that result in a conscious assessment, and the outcome of which is that some are relevant to the things that matter to us, i.e. to our identity, and the rest are not. This latter group contains those inputs carrying information that is considered irrelevant to the individual, such as most of the advertising we are exposed to; the remaining group contains most of the inputs to our work and to our other activities, such as, sport, hobbies and cultural activities. Many of these inputs would, at some earlier stage of our lives, have been assessed in relation to our identity and contributed to forming that identity, but they now fit into what we might call a framework of accepted inputs .

The inputs of relevance to the current subject matter are those that do not fit into this framework, and which therefore lead either to a change in our identity or to an adaptive action, or both. And with respect to these inputs, the current state of our society displays a couple of significant characteristics. First, the amount of input presented to us on a daily basis, through a number of media, is so great that it is becoming impossible to assess and classify it properly, and as a result, relevant information is lost or obscured. Second, it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine the veracity and accuracy of the information. Rather than being a direct result of interaction with the source of information, more and more of the information is being processed by the media delivering it, resulting in a view representing the interests and opinions of the media owners. These characteristics of the flow of information in modern society were very well described by Schiller (1981, 1982) , Garnham (1987, 2001), and Chomsky and Herman (1988) , just to mention three prominent critics who do not need to be further detailed here, but to whom we shall return in Chap. 6. The point to be made here is simply that these characteristics of the information industry, which are reflections of the capitalist economic system, are drivers of the fluctuations on the evolution of society.

The causes within group (b) are those that prevent adaptive actions , or that limit the range of possible actions. The motivation for adaptive action results from either of two outcomes of the process of evaluating an input. One is that the input is found to be so completely at variance with the identity that it represents a threat, and the adaptive action would have the purpose of countering this threat. The other is that part of the input resonates with the identity to the extent that the individual accepts the remaining part as a change to its identity and is motivated to display this change of identity through an adaptive action. However, in order for the individual to be able to realise a desire for action, there needs to be established means of doing so. These may take the form of voting in elections or referendums, posting a comment on public media, participating in the activities of an organisation or action group or even starting a new group, and so on. Some or all of these means can be suppressed by a dictatorship, by a legal organisation, such as a church, or by an illegal organisation, such as the Mafia or a terrorist group. But these means can also simply be rendered ineffective by structuring society so that it is not affected by them; real power rests in entities not visible or accessible to the general public.

The third group of causes that can lead to failure of the evaluation and action process, group (c), are those arising from not recognising, or taking account of, the changed environment in which the society finds itself. In particular, in not recognising that both the structure and the boundary of the society, e.g. as we defined them in Fig. 3.2 by means of the core identity , has become artificial, and that the society is holding on to an image of itself and its uniqueness that is no longer valid. Information is manipulated to fit this image. In today’s dynamic world, the significant relationships are between groups of people, defined by shared beliefs and interests, and the nation should be seen primarily as a framework for managing relations between groups of people, both internally and externally. As the beliefs and interests change (not least due to increased level of education and economic development), the framework should adapt in order to manage the new relations. This is true for both intranational as well international relationships, and with regard to the latter (and of particular relevance to the Australian context), we are reminded of the words of George Washington:

Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times, it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favourite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favourite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favourite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter (Washington 1796) .

There is a further characteristic of the social environment, perhaps the most important one of all with regard to the interaction between individuals, and that is the level of education. Education is the main shaper of identity and of establishing the Social Bond, and with the major role of technology in the evolution of society, a good understanding of science and technology is a prerequisite for contributing to the social discourse. This is well understood and has resulted in calls for an increase in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects in the public education curriculum. It was recognised already by Max Wartofsky , who stated that for a democratic revolution to take place in the decision-making process regarding applications of technology, two changes had to be realised: the radical democratisation of power in society, and the education, in a major way, of the scientific and technical understanding of the public to the extent that some forms of democratic participation in scientific-technical policy-making becomes feasible and useful, and not simply an empty populist piety (Wartofsky 1992). Because the present development of the Social Bond is focused on those interactions leading to adaptive actions , we are effectively limiting ourselves to considering only individuals of voting age and whose further development of identity takes place through observation, analysis, and the social discourse. But in the proposed measure of the Good Society , in Sect. 6.1, education is a major component.

4.2 Interaction and Adaptive Action

So far, we have not allowed for any interaction between the individuals, and we have suppressed any time dependence. The structuring introduced in Sect. 3.9 is valid at any one point in time; it is in this sense static. But the identity of an individual is a dynamic set of knowledge elements and, as already noted, the size of the identity is usually an increasing function of time (age of the individual) up to a certain time, and then fluctuating, and then declining towards the end. However, even if the size is declining, the elements are changing, and so the alignment of the individual with other individuals will generally not be the same function of time as the size of the identity and may be increasing even as the size is decreasing. Be this is it may (and we will generally assume that the size of the identity is constant and normalised to 1, as noted in Sect. 3.9), the point is that all the quantities defined above will be functions of time, and this time-dependence arises because of the interaction of individuals with other individuals.

The interactions an individual has with its environment are so varied that it is difficult to find any useful way of structuring the totality of them. Trying to classify by the organ involved does not seem to be very definite; a conversation between two people involves not only the voice and ears but also body language and facial expressions. The hands can produce messages through such varied means as writing, typing, painting, drawing, carving and the like. Another classification might be by how direct the interaction is, with face-to-face the most direct, then through voice by telephone, then through writing (letter, book, newspaper article, etc.), then through clothing and ornaments, and then through architecture and sculpture as the least direct; it is probably a classification very open to disagreement. Another classification might be in how effective it is in reaching its intended ‘audience’, and there are no doubt many others. We will return to this issue in Sect. 4.5, when we look at how to define the strength of an interaction .

A different approach is to, at least initially, classify the interaction by its intended purpose, such as, to transmit facts and ideas (teaching/learning), describe, amuse, threaten, praise and many others. As a point of departure, we can recognise four main groups of purposes: To convey factual information; to find a solution to a problem through dialogue and evaluation; to reach a mutual understanding or belief , as a combination of the understanding and beliefs present in the two participants in the interaction, i.e. a combination of elements of their identities; and to induce an action. The first two groups distinguish themselves from the third in that they can result in new identity elements ; the interactions in the third and fourth (and to a lesser extent the second) groups have an element of persuasion . If we give some consideration to our own experiences, we can recognise that a not inconsiderable part of our interactions can be described as having, at least partly, the purpose of persuasion. If I tell someone about a good book I have just read, or a good movie I have just seen, I am not only, or even mainly, transmitting facts about it; my purpose is to persuade them that it is something they should read or see. In so much of our interactions, there is a strong element of persuasion; we want the other person to believe what we are presenting. This probably has a deep psychological explanation; our fear of being different, of not fitting into our society, as well as the converse, our fear of someone that is different, and therefore a potential disruption to our society. It correlates with our view of evolution along the y-axis in Fig. 2.2; as a species, we, explicitly or implicitly, understand that cooperation—forming and maintaining a society—is key to our survival, and we fear and oppose anything that we perceive as threatening it.

In the context of this book and its explicit purpose of investigating the effect of the interaction between individuals on the evolution of society, as well as our view that changes to society are driven by changes to the identities of the members of the society, we can see that persuasion is the main component of the interactions we are interested in, and it will be a focus of our further development of the Social Bond. If we recall the picture we formed, in Sect. 3.7, of an individual’s identity, persuasion is the process of enlarging the subset of the identity containing the elements relating to the subject of the persuasion. The size of the subset is a measure of the strength of the individual’s belief in the truth of the subject, and of the probability that the individual will act in accordance with this belief, given the opportunity. But this probability depends not only on the strength of this one belief; the evaluation process in Fig. 3.3 will search for other beliefs in the identity that are relevant to a particular input or set of inputs, and so an important aspect of persuasion is a ‘negative’ one; persuading the individual to discard any conflicting beliefs.

We should also recognise that, given the connection between identity and adaptive actions , there is a fine line between persuasion and enforcement. As we discussed in Sect. 3.4, being a member of society necessarily involves some restrictions on the individual’s actions, and every society has some means of enforcing these restrictions. With the rapid development of information technology , to which we shall return in Chap. 6, new possibilities of enforcement are opening up. Basically, instead of forcing people to behave in a certain way by physical means, we are able to influence their behaviour by manipulating the information they receive. For example, instead of controlling street protests by means of massive police presence, barricades, etc. and incurring the inevitable damage in the form of people injured, looted stores, cars set alight, etc. a much more cost-effective approach would be to suppress the information that lead to the protests in the first place. But such manipulation of information as suppressing selected parts to avoid certain behaviour is really at the primitive end of what is becoming possible with information technology , and to make a start on understanding this, consider the following, highly simplified picture: The adaptive action resulting from a particular information input is a function of two variables, the information, x, and the belief system used to evaluate the information, what we have called the identity, y. We recognise that the identity is a dynamic variable, formed by all the information received by each individual and therefore continually changing, and we can express this as

(4.1)

with

(4.2)

and where t = 0 indicates the time of birth of the individual, and t 0 is the time at which the adaptive action is to take place. Of course, A and B are generally complex functions with very many parameters and somewhat different for each individual, but the basic process expressed by these two equations is well known in politics, advertising and, above all, in religion—repeat something often enough, and it will be accepted as a fact and result in a corresponding adaptive action (vote for a candidate, go to war, buy a product, enforce conformance).

Now, because the identity of each individual is different, the time it takes to modify the identities of the members of a society, or at least a significant portion of them, to the extent that they will exhibit the same adaptive action given the same input, can be quite long, even many years, depending on the shift in identities required. This problem can be overcome by tailoring the input to the existing identity. Ideally, this would immediately result in the desired action, but at least it would reduce the indoctrination period considerably. This is illustrated in Fig. 4.3; again, in a highly simplified manner.

Fig. 4.3
The combinations of inputs, x, and identities, y, that will result in a particular adaptive action, A 0

The combination of inputs, x, and identities, y, that will result in a particular adaptive action is represented by the curve A 0 (x, y). For a society consisting of only two individuals, with identities y 1 and y 3, providing the two tailored inputs x 1 and x 3 will immediately result in both taking the desired adaptive action A 0. Let us call this approach One. If it is too difficult to find inputs x 1 and x 3, it may be possible to find inputs x 1* and x 3* that, while not resulting in any adaptive action, will move y 1 and y 3 towards a common identity, y 2. Following this period of individual indoctrination, we then apply the input x 2 to achieve the desired action. Let us call this approach Two. Finally, if we have no knowledge of y 1 and y 3, we simply apply what we believe to be a convincing input again and again until both individuals have performed the desired action. This approach, Three, is the simple one we mentioned above.

In approaches One and Two, technology has two important roles to play. First, through data harvesting, mining and analysis it becomes possible to determine the ‘value’ of y for every individual. As individuals, our interactions with the outside world are conducted more and more through electronic data channels that are being monitored, both by service providers and by the Government. Second, data processing power is also increasing exponentially, so that maintaining, updating and extracting information from such big data sets are no longer limited by processing capacity. These two processes constitute the core of what Pentland calls Social Physics , as mentioned in Sect. 2.2. So, as far as data storage and processing is concerned, technology has advanced to the point where the question is no longer ‘can we do it’, but ‘should we do it’, and we shall return to this issue in Chap. 6.

4.3 Basic Features of the Binary Interaction

The simplest social structure is the relationship between two persons, corresponding to a diatomic molecule, such as, e.g. HCl, in our analogy between social and atomic structures . This binary interaction is what forms the Social Bond, and we shall see that all changes to the collective identity and to society can be represented by combinations of such binary interactions. The relationship we are concerned with consists not of what we might characterise as surface interactions, interactions that only have an effect at the time of occurrence, but of interactions that have a lasting and binding effect. These interactions are in the form of exchanges of information that leads to a change in the individual identities, and, as we noted above, we are primarily interested in interactions that where one partner is engaged in persuading the other partner.

The claim of a similarity between society and a chemical structure (gas, liquid, molecule, crystal, etc.) is based on mapping individuals to atoms and noting the ability of both to form structures through interactions. A structure-less society, as could possibly have existed in small, primitive groups, would correspond to a gas of atoms, and the interactions between the individuals in the group correspond to the random collisions between atoms. In a society made up of families the family would correspond to a molecule made up of different atoms, with each type of atom corresponding to a type of family member (father, mother, etc.), and here we come to the first illustration of the difference between the dynamic social structure and the fixed molecular structure. In a given family, members enter and exit, and the strength of interaction varies over time, so, in order to use the correspondence between social structures and chemical structures, we have to abstract from this detailed description and say: ‘We can identify a social structure called a family, to which we may be able to assign some useful characteristics, and we should think of it as an average over all actual families in the society. The correspondence is between this family and a (small) molecule, to which we may also assign some useful characteristics. This is not different to talking about a member of society as a concept, even though all members are different, and to characterise this average member by per capita quantities. It is this member that corresponds to an atom.

In Sect. 3.9 we looked at the identity of an individual as an unstructured set of identity elements , and denoted this by a capital letter, e.g. A being the identity of the individual a. In most of what follows, we shall only be interested in the subset of the identity relevant to the matter of the interaction, and we will make the significant simplifying assumption that an interaction is concerned with a single assertion about a single subject only. That subset will normally contain identity elements from a group of arguments about the assertion and, as already alluded to in Sect. 3.7, we shall now specialise both our definitions and notations to this case. The maximum amount of the identity that is available to either party in the interaction is independent of subject and assertion, and from now on, unless specifically noted otherwise, this quantity of identity elements is what is meant by ‘identity’ and what we identified by Θ(S σ). The identity of individual a will be denoted by W a , and we do not distinguish the subjects that contribute to the identity.

In order to describe changes to the identity, we need to give it an internal structure, and the following segmentation will prove to be useful (i = a, b):

W 0

The elements that are common to the two individuals, resulting from a current background and culture; these elements are not affected by the interaction.

W i,1

The elements that result from the individual’s own experience, but that are subject to being copied to, and removed by, the other individual by the interaction.

W i,2

The elements that have been copied to the individual from the other individual in the interaction.

For simplicity, and without affecting our arguments in any significant way, we assume that both identities have the same maximum size, which we normalise to 1, so the segments can take on values that are a fraction of 1. And, based on the fact that the number of elements in any identity set A is a very large number, we may, for convenience, consider these numbers to be continuous functions of time. With this understanding, we can use the differential operator d/dt to denote ‘the rate of change’, even though, in the strict sense, it is always zero.

The reason for this particular segmentation is that we assume that there exists a well defined and measurable quantity that can be identified as the strength of the interaction between two individuals, a and b, and we shall denote it by μ ab . We want the strength to somehow express the ability of a to align the identity of b with a’s identity, and that alignment can be increased either by eliminating elements of W b,1, or by increasing W b,2, or a combination of both. Correspondingly, the strength of an interaction has two components; , which relates to the ability of a to copy elements from W a,1 to W b,2, and , which relates to the ability to remove elements from W b,1. Note that, as elements of W a,1 are added to W b,2, the part of W a,1 available to be copied shrinks correspondingly, as a given element of W a,1 cannot be added to W b,2 more than once. The elements that are copied to the other identity are kept track of in two virtual parts of the identity, W a,1x and W b,1x , so that it is only the quantity (W 1 − W 1x ) in either identity that is active in the interaction. We also need to account for the fact that the size of the identity is limited to 1. As it fills up, it takes more effort to add elements, and this is accounted for by multiplying μ + by the size of the free space in the identity, (1-W 0-W i,1-W i,2). Then, considering only the interaction between the two individuals a and b, the four components of the strength are related to the changes in the identities through the following equations, which also effectively provide the definitions of the components:

(4.3)

The reason for introducing W a,1x and W b,1x already here, where it is not really necessary, as the two last equalities show, will become clear in Chap. 5.

With this, the expression for the alignment (see, Sect. 3.9) becomes

(4.4)

The strength of the interaction , , is determined by three factors. The first is a characteristic of individual a, and may be described by such terms as charismatic, magnetic, persuasive, or dull, uninspiring, and so on. The second is the communications channel between a and b, the access a has to b, such as through the media, through an organisation (e.g. religious group, political party, union, business affiliation), or through informal groupings based on friendship or common interests, and so on. The third is the nature of the individual b, in the sense of receptiveness to changes in identity. That depends on the extent to which the suggested changes resonate with (or conflict with) the identity elements already present in b; something that was identified as ‘cognitive advantage ’ by Simpkins et al. in (2010) . While that work is concerned with interaction between communities rather than individuals, and with idea networks rather than identities, many of the characteristics identified and discussed there can be reflected onto our binary interactions, e.g. the fact that the interconnectedness of the identity elements is a significant factor. Strong interconnectedness presents less opportunity for new elements to intrude and be accepted. However, we need to realise that most of the literature on network-enabled interaction is focused on the effect this has on cognition, as by Benjamin Smart , Winston Sieck , Paul Smart and Shane Mueller in The Extended Mind and Network-Enabled Cognition (Smart et al. 2008) or by Clark and Chalmers in (1998), whereas we are concerned with a particular subset of this—persuasion rather than cognition, as in conversion of belief . And also, our current basic model of the binary interaction does not allow this third factor to be expressed. We shall return to a more detailed discussion of interaction strength in Sect. 4.5.

For any one individual, the two strength coefficients, μ + and μ −, may often have the same, or nearly the same, value, as both depend on the persuasiveness of the individual. But they may not have, as in those cases where the identity elements in A–B do not detract from or interfere with those in A∩B, and in cases where there is an asymmetry in the effort required to develop the two components of the dependence. Moses was successful in getting the Jews to accept the new god and forsake all others, whereas missionaries often had some success in getting indigenous people to accept the Christian god as an additional god, but could not get them to completely renounce their old ones.

The relationship between two individuals may be symmetrical, μ ab ≈ μ ba, as between two friends, or asymmetrical, with μ ab ≫ μ ba, as between Moses and the Jews, or between an emperor and his subjects. In the latter case, such an asymmetry is not reflected in the alignment, α, so that in order to include it in the characterisation of the relationship between the two identities, we need to introduce a further parameter, the asymmetry , ε ab , defined as follows:

(4.5)

Obviously, ε ab = −ε ba , and |ε| ≤ 1.

Solving the equations in Eq. 4.3 is straightforward by means of a small VBA routine, and for the particular, but important, case where μ ab  = μ ba , three results for the alignment as a function of time are shown in Fig. 4.4. The alignment increases towards its equilibrium value, which for the parameter values chosen is 1, but it is not mainly this value that is of interest to us; it is the initial rate of increase, which we want to interpret as the strength of the interaction . While the general form of the function α(t) is a function increasing monotonically towards its equilibrium value, the derivative is not always a monotonically decreasing function, and so does not allow the initial part of the function to be approximated by an exponential function characterised by its time constant as a single parameter. However, the values of the functions coincide, more or less, at the point half-way between the initial and final values, and so, in this case, we shall define the alignment rate, α 0, as follows:

Fig. 4.4
Three alignment functions, all with W 0 = 0.1, W a,1(t = 0) = W b,1(t = 0) = 0.5. Top function, μ + = 0.02, μ − = 0.1; middle function, μ + = 0.05, μ − = 0.05; bottom function, μ + = 0.1, μ − = 0.02. The horizontal scale is in units of time, and the dimension of μ is per unit time

(4.6)

The three quantities Δα, t 0, and α 0 are all functions of the seven parameters , , , , W a,1, W b,1 and W 0. There are some simple relationships, e.g. if and are both non-zero, then Δα = 1 − W 0, and if  =  =  =  = μ, then there is a linear relationship between α 0 and μ, with the initial value of W a,1 = W b,1 = W 1 as parameter, as shown in Fig. 4.5. However, in general, there is no simple relationship, and it is better to consider the significance of particular cases, as we shall do in Chap. 5.

Fig. 4.5
The alignment rate, α 0, as a function of the interaction strength μ, with the initial value of W 1 as a parameter, from the top, W 1 = 0.2, 0.5, 0.8, and all with W 0 = 0.1. Both α 0 and μ have the dimension per unit time

The subject under consideration may be a more or less limited subject within an area such as religion, politics, social justice and so on, and the various quantities, such as W 0 and W 1, are then specific to this subject. As a hypothetical example of such a situation, consider two friends a and b, who relate to one another on an equal basis, e.g. μ ab  = μ ba , and who meet once a week for 1 h. At one meeting, a raises an issue that is of great concern to him, and on which he has quite strong opinions (many identity elements) and discovers that b also has strong, but generally different opinions. Thus, on this issue the common ground, W 0, is small, say, W 0 = 0.1, and the strong opinions take up more than half the remaining space in the identity that can be allocated to a single issue, so that the initial value of W a,1 = W b,1 and equals, say, 0.6, which means that the initial value of the agreement on this issue, α(t = 0) = 0.0769. This issue dominates their discussions for the next meetings, until they have increased their agreement to, say, α = 0.5 (and they might agree to disagree about the remaining opinions).

If we, at first, assume that each one spends an equal amount of effort on persuading the other to accept his opinions and to abandon his own, so that μ + = μ − = μ. Now assume that each one only tries to show the other one how wrong he is; that is, μ + = 0. At the other extreme, the two friends are very concerned not to antagonise each other, so they do not persuade the other one to give up any of his existing opinions; that is, μ − = 0. The model gives the results for these three cases shown in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1
For each of the nine evaluations, the upper value is t 0, in hours, and the lower value is the alignment rate, α 0, in per hour. The values of μ are in per hour. The three values in the bottom row are the end values of the alignment, α(t → ∞)

μ

μ + = μ −

μ + = 0

μ −  = 0

0.1

9.64

26.39

12.97

0.0479

0.0175

0.0173

0.2

4.83

13.21

6.76

0.0956

0.0349

0.0340

0.4

2.42

6.61

3.40

0.1906

0.0698

0.0678

1

1

0.538

If we equate the effort expended by each individual on the bond to (μ + + μ −) t 0, we see that the best strategy is to spend the time on both to accept and abandon opinions.

The reason why the rate of increase of the alignment is more important than the equilibrium value is that in society there is no ‘equilibrium’ in the sense of a final, static value of the identity. Through the activities of observation, introspection, invention and innovation, the individual identities are continually changing; what we can study is the effect of the interaction between individuals in a short time interval, effectively the dα/dt. It may be useful to think of the interaction between individuals as having two components, say, a transverse and a longitudinal component. The transverse component is the interaction based on the current state of society and on the current state of its environment; the longitudinal component is the interaction based on the previous history of society. It is the component based on memory and on the transmission across generations; it is what is, to a large extent, transmitted in the early stage of life through education and upbringing. It could be tempting, then, to say that the longitudinal component promotes stability and the transverse component promotes change and possible instability, but that is too simplistic a view, and the issue of stability will be taken up again in Sect. 5.3 and, in a particular context, in Sect. 6.3.

4.4 Interaction as Persuasion

Persuasion as a component of interaction was identified in Sect. 4.2, and in Sect. 3.7 we encountered two different meanings of the word ‘evidence’ . The relevance of both of these issues arises because in the Social Bond we are dealing with beliefs rather than with facts, as we realised also in Sect. 3.7. The purpose of the current section is to bring these insights together to form a coherent picture of this important aspect of the Social Bond.

Persuasion is not a very sharply defined concept and is used with a wide range of meanings, including instruction, training, education, indoctrination, coercion and brainwashing—any form of interpersonal interaction whatsoever. It is also a concept that has received considerable attention in academia, and in his doctoral thesis, Naas (1990) makes the interesting observation that the pre-Platonic Greeks, in particular as expressed by Homer in the Illiad, saw persuasion as a turning-away from oneself, threatening the identity of the individual, and therefore something that was to be avoided; a view that has quite some merit today. However, the Greeks and the Romans then developed models of persuasion that were aimed at oratory, which was seen as an art-form judged solely by its effectiveness, divorced from truth and any wider consideration of desirability, and this is the prevalent view today, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon justice system, which is essentially an oratorical joust between lawyers.

An excellent treatment of the subject matter is given in the doctoral thesis by Mark J. Stoda, Symbolically seeking a change of mind: a model for comprehending, constructing and critiquing persuasion (Stoda 2006) , and the following observations are inspired by that work. After reviewing the various definitions and views of persuasion in the literature, he is careful to delimit his treatment to interpersonal persuasion, which is defined as being a deliberate activity accomplished symbolically and seeking a voluntary change of mind that favours the persuader’s goal. This limitation fits very well with the use of persuasion within the Social Bond. He then goes on to review Greek and Roman developments of rhetoric, exemplified mainly by Aristotle and Cicero , respectively, and it is notable how Aristotle and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Cicero emphasise the importance of the moral quality of the persuader, something that would indicate that the persuadee is expected to have a direct personal knowledge of the persuader, but that is very unlikely in most of our interactions today. Moral integrity might indeed be a disadvantage in today’s political arena, as was demonstrated by one of the most successful persuaders in the last century, Adolf Hitler.

Most of the other factors characterising successful persuasion identified by Aristotle and Cicero are equally valid today, such as knowledge of the persuadee’s background and attitude, the ability to transmit a sense of passion, being attuned to the persuadee’s emotions, and appearing concerned and personally committed. Progressing from this classical foundation, Stoda then analyses the more recent literature and integrates its various claims and viewpoints into a model of persuasion with a logical and useful structure, but before displaying this model, let me briefly highlight a few points that I found particularly relevant to the present work. The first is the important role of uncertainty ; if there is no uncertainty, there is no need for persuasion. Not only does the persuader need to be cognisant of the full range of possibilities, but also understand the extent to which the competing possibilities are present in the persuadee’s mind; this will determine whether to refute them or to just downplay or ignore them. The second point is the necessity for the persuader to expose his or her arguments to public scrutiny; to stand by them without making any concessions or compromises, no matter what the consequences. Even if this results in a long period of ridicule, ostracism and persecution, people will start to think that if the argument is this important to the persuader, there must be something in it. This brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s discussion of vita activa as political action (Arendt 1958), where a central aspect of action is its revelatory character; the actor has to reveal himself, has to have the courage to stand up amidst his peers. And he has to commit himself, so there is a heroic side to action. The importance of political (i.e. public) commitment has also been noted by other authors, e.g. Luria (1985) , and its relevance to engineering was discussed in (Aslaksen 2017) .

The third point is the interpretation of knowledge as believed information, which is a good description of the part of the ‘Knowledge’ block in Fig. 3.1 we called ‘identity’, and that the argumentation that leads to it is a social process. It is not formal logic, but proactive empathy and practical reasoning within a public discourse. The existence and properties of the public discourse are central to the functionality of the collective intelligence and to our view of The Good Society , as will be further developed in Sects. 4.7 and 6.1.

Stoda’s model of persuasion consists of two closely related parts: an entity-relationship diagram, and a process flow diagram. The entity-relationship diagram is constructed by heeding the imperative of focusing on the characteristics of the persuadee; this leads immediately to the recognition that the mental processing of a persuasive appeal consists of two distinct processes. One, the peripheral process , is a judgmental-heuristic process, a quick evaluation based on picking up clues in the persuasive appeal that activate pre-existing judgements regarding credibility or latent mental discords. Two, the central process, is a systematic and considered process involving analysis of the content of the appeal based on reason, conscience and imagination. These two processes are basically the two processes defined in Kahneman (2002) and described in Sect. 3.8. Accordingly, the entities making up a persuasive appeal stand in a one-to-one relationship with the mental capabilities of the persuadee, resulting in the two-level diagram shown in Fig. 4.6.

Fig. 4.6
The entities of a persuasive appeal and those of the persuadee’s mental capabilities, and the relationships between them

The process flow diagram, shown in Fig. 4.7, illustrates how the persuadee’s mental capabilities determine the outcome of the persuasion appeal, i.e. its success or otherwise. The initial stage of the process is an evaluation of the appeal based on the mental state of the persuadee relative to the content of the appeal, which can be characterised in terms of two parameters, aptitude and attitude, each of which has two main components:

Fig. 4.7
Flow diagram of the persuadee’s decision-making process

If both Aptitude and Attitude are positive, the persuadee will seek decision-making reliability, but if either Aptitude or Attitude are negative, the persuadee will seek decision-making expediency. However, it is not always a one-or-the-other situation; as indicated in the diagram, it is possible for both central and peripheral processing to be involved, and, as a result, the mental impact (i.e. the modification of the identity) to be a combination of longer term and shorter term elements. A detailed description and discussion of each of the entities in these two diagrams, together with numerous examples, are included in the dissertation (op.cit.), and we shall refer to them at various places in the rest of the book.

While Stoda’s model is very useful, it has, from our point of view, a few limitations that we need to be aware of. The first is that it does not consider the various channels involved in transmitting information between individuals, such as print (incl. email and social media), radio and TV. The second is that it does not consider the frequency or repetition of persuasive appeals , and the third is that it does not consider the influence of technology and the opportunities technology offers for modifying the persuasion process. In particular, the opportunity for making it interactive. Also, the model specifically excludes any form of coercion; not only physical, but also mental. In this regard, a thorough and very readable discussion of both the psychological and physical aspects of the whole spectrum of persuasive techniques, is contained in the book The Science of Thought Control, by Taylor (2004) , with a focus on the more direct and oppressive forms, as applied by sects or oppressive regimes, and illustrated in the dystopian visions of Orwell and Huxley. But the book also touches on persuasion, as found in advertising, education and in the bias of the mass media.

However, this discussion of persuasion provides a suitable opportunity for commenting on the relationship between this form of interaction and the propagation of a meme . We introduced memes in Sect. 3.7, as discrete, faithfully replicated units of knowledge . In the case of persuasion, the end result is the establishment, in the mind of the persuadee, of a certain belief , in the form of a set of arguments supporting and assertion . But in order for his to happen, the interaction will generally involve other information; possibly praise for the persuadee or the promise of some sort of reward or advantage, and it will probably involve some information the persuadee rejects. Also, the thought processes of the persuadee may transform some of the information into different arguments supporting the assertion, reflecting his or her previous knowledge and experience. In short, the process of transmitting a belief is a much ‘fuzzier’ process than transmitting a meme.

The readiness of society to accept and try out new ideas when they become available, as was discussed in Sect. 2.3, with reference to Buchanan (1992), can be seen as a collective reflection of the persuadee’s mental state in this regard. In the simple model of the binary interaction in the previous section, this is reflected in the quantity (1 − W 0 − W 1). Returning to this model, persuasion is represented by the case where one of the individuals in the interaction, a, is intent on persuading the other individual, b, of a’s belief on a particular subject. As a boundary situation, we might assume that all of a’s identity is taken up by this one subject, so that W a,1 = 1 − W 0, and that b has no preconceived differing beliefs about the subject, i.e. W b,1 = 0. Then, for a value of the interaction strength , μ (and there is only one relevant component) equal to 0.1, we find the following dependence of the alignment rate on the initial level of alignment, W 0: Table 4.2.

Table 4.2
The alignment rate, α 0, as a function of the initial level of common belief, W 0, for the case where W a,1 = 1 − W 0, and W b,1 = 0

W 0

α 0

0.1

0.0603

0.3

0.0376

0.5

0.0198

0.7

0.0072

0.9

0.0007

This result can be expressed by saying that the effort to erase the last bit of independence, or lingering doubt, in individual b takes a disproportional amount of effort.

A further case arises when individual b actually has some differing views on the subject, i.e. W b,1 ≠ 0. In that case, both and are relevant, and Table 4.3 shows the alignment rate as a function of W b,1 for three choices of and , again with W 0 = 0.1 and W a,1 = 0.9.

Table 4.3
The alignment rate, α 0, as a function of the strength of the diverging belief in individual b, W b,1, for three cases of the interaction strengths and

/

W b,1

0.2/0.1

0.15/0.15

0.1/0.2

0.1

0.0648

0.0531

0.0384

0.3

0.0458

0.0434

0.0352

0.5

0.0357

0.0374

0.0326

0.7

0.0299

0.0333

0.0305

0.9

0.0263

0.0304

0.0288

Comparing the two outside columns shows the increasing importance of persuading individual b to give up its differing views as W b,1 increases. It is interesting to note that even at the highest value of W b,1 it is better to put equal effort into positive and negative persuasion (the centre column) than to concentrate on getting b to give up its differing views (right-hand column).

4.5 Interaction Strength and the Social Bond

The model of the binary interaction presented in the two previous sections is very simple, and the calculations and their results may at first appear almost trivial. One reason for that is that much of the ‘social’ aspect of the model is hidden in the parameter μ—the interaction strength , and through it, in the concept of the Social Bond , and so in the current section we examine these two concepts in more detail. However, the real significance—or usefulness—of the model is then demonstrated in Sect. 4.6 by considering some of its implications.

The interaction strength, μ, as defined in Sect. 4.3, is a high-level parameter that hides within it a number of more detailed features of the interaction between two individuals. It expresses the total effect of the interaction, and as we now know, this effect is dependent on such factors as the content and format of the messages being interchanged, the relationship between the messages and the identities of the participants, the relationship (alignment) between the two participants, the type of transmission channel and the intensity of the interaction. But before considering each of these factors, we should first realise that the interactions can be divided into two groups according to their main purpose, or intended effect: In the one group are the interactions that are aimed at making an individual change its identity; to accept new identity elements and, possibly, also abandon previously held elements. It is a matter of making the individual believe something. In the other group are the interactions aimed at making an individual do something; belief without action will have no influence of the evolution of society. Our model of the binary interaction, as well as the persuasion model, put forward in the previous section, apply specifically to interactions in the first group; interactions in the second group have to be considered as part of a detailed treatment of adaptive action . Adaptive action is certainly an essential component of intelligence ; it is the output of intelligence as a process . Our focus has been on the input side, on the binary interaction and the part of intelligence that results in a change to the identity, creating the precondition for adaptive action. Adaptive action is implied in various places in the rest of the book, but the only place where it will be explicitly discussed is in Sect. 6.2. However, with that in mind, the following discussion of the factors influencing interaction strength is applicable to interactions in both groups.

When we speak of ‘interaction’ in the context of the Social Bond, we generally mean the process involved in the transmission of information between the participants. Not the content of what is being transmitted, nor the processing of the transmitted message by the receiving individual; the Stoda model is an example of treating these two matters. We now focus on the transmission process, as exemplified by the basic model introduced in Sect. 4.3.

Let us start out by considering the transmission channel , and in doing so, we shall always consider the channel to be between two persons; it is only the situation in which the channel is active that can display a range of participants. For example, in the situation where one individual is delivering a speech to a group of individuals, there are simply many identical channels being active simultaneously, between the speaker and each individual in the group. But each individual in the group may also receive multiple messages via multiple channels, in that it receives messages from some of the other group members in the form of body language, or shouts of ‘Yeah!’ or ‘Shame!’, etc. this is what leads to group dynamics. A channel can be described from several different points of view, each one characterised by a parameter, say, a i; not necessarily independent or orthogonal, and one possible set of parameters is the following:

i = 1:

The means used to express the message, with three values: auditory, visual and both. Auditory includes such means as speech, song and music; and visual includes text, pictures, signs and body language. There are other possible means, such as mechanical (touch, vibration) and olfactory (smell), but they would be of a secondary importance.

i = 2:

The flow of the message, with two values: one-way and two-way. One way includes such activities as viewing, reading and listening; two-way implies an exchange of information relating to the same subject, as in a conversation or an exchange of letters or emails. The significant difference is that the two-way channel supports a process involving the system consisting of the two participants in the exchange, and as such may result in the emergence of knowledge that was not present prior to the exchange. That is, while the exchange may only result in a consensus as a compromise based on the information exchanged, it may result in genuinely new insight, new knowledge.

i = 3:

The permanency provided by the channel, with two values: fleeting and stored. It is important to recognise that this refers to the channel, not necessarily to the message. For example, a conversation is fleeting, but the message may be stored in the memory of the participants. A stored channel implies that the message is contained in a storage medium, such as a letter, a book, a photo, a CD or a computer memory (i.e. as a file).

i = 4:

The authenticity of the channel, with two values: original and processed. Original means that the message is not altered by the channel and is delivered as produced by the acknowledged originator, whereas processed means that the channel has modified the message without acknowledging any such authorship. One example is where a reporter produces a highly biased and one-sided report of a news item; this is still an original message. An example of a processed channel is where a newspaper report quotes very selectively from a speech given by someone, thereby actually altering the message produced by the acknowledged originator.

Besides the channel, another factor in the interaction is, as already mentioned, the situation in which the interaction takes place. Here also there are a number of aspects to consider, say, b j, and two of these are as follows:

j = 1:

The exclusivity of the interaction, with the three values Yes, No Positive and No Negative. If Yes, both of the participants in the interaction are occupied exclusively with this one interaction. If No, one or both of the participants are involved in other interactions at the same time, and then we have to consider if these other interactions are affirming or negating the message.

j = 2:

The environment in which the interaction is taking place, with three values: indifferent, positive and negative. The difference between the environment and exclusivity is that the latter relates to active interactions, i.e. involving other people, such as the interactions experienced in a crowd, whereas the environment is about passive interactions, such as an impressive building (e.g. a church), a show of power (e.g. a military parade or a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier), or a noisy environment.

The concept of a channel in the transmission of a message has been treated by various authors in different contexts; the most famous one probably being that provided by Claude E. Shannon in his seminal work, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon 1948). Another treatment is given by Everett M. Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovation (Rogers 2003). He categorises channels as (1) interpersonal versus mass media and (2) localite versus cosmopolite. Interpersonal channels involve a face-to-face exchange between two or more individuals; mass media channels are means of transmitting messages that involve such media as radio, television, newspapers and the Internet. Localite channels are those linking individuals inside a particular social system; cosmopolite channels are those linking an individual with sources outside its social system. With regard to our classification of interactions by purpose, in Sect. 4.2, Rogers states that mass media channels are best suited to create knowledge and spread information, whereas the formation and change of strongly held attitudes (our identity elements) is accomplished mainly by interpersonal channels. He also notes that it is often difficult for individuals to distinguish between the source of a message and the channel that carries the message; something that resonates with our parameter a 4 above. One issue with Rogers’ categorisation is the restriction of ‘interpersonal’ to a face-to-face interaction; this seems to exclude the use of such media as telephone, email and Skype, and does also seem, at least on the face of it, to conflict with his statement that interpersonal channels may be either local or cosmopolite. However, we shall return to his book and the process of diffusion in Sect. 5.2.

At this point, we should recollect that what we have been considering here are the characteristics of the transmission process that enter into determining the interaction strength ; what we identified by the parameter μ in the previous two sections. That is, these characteristics are concerned with the effect of a process that operates on the identities of the two participants in the interaction continuously during a certain time interval, with the purpose of achieving an increase in the alignment between the two identities in relation to a particular subject. But this transmission process is not the only factor determining the effectiveness of achieving this purpose. Two other factors are the quality of the message , represented by the overlap between the content of the message with the mental capability of the recipient of the message, as was discussed in the previous section, and the reinforcement , either in the form of repetition of the same message, or in the form of different, but supporting messages. Both of these factors are related to the concept of cognitive advantage ; a concept that appears to have been introduced in the paper Idea Propagation in Social Networks: The Role of ‘Cognitive Advantage’, by Simpkins et al. (2010) , where it was defined as ‘the acceptability of an idea to a particular (culturally circumscribed) community. It determines the tendency of ideas to become established in a community, as well as the rate at which those ideas are transmitted from one individual to another’. In our context of the interaction between two individuals, this definition needs to be focused somewhat more sharply, and we shall refer to cognitive advantage as a characteristic of the relationship between a message and the identity of the recipient of the message. If we now combine our view of identity in Sect. 3.7 with our model of interaction in Sect. 4.3, the identity of individual a with respect to the subject S is a set of assertions , W a , each one with an associated set of arguments , and the identity of individual b is a set of assertions, W b , each one also associated with a set of arguments. The set W 0 consists of those assertions that are common to both W a and W b , and the arguments associated with an assertion in W 0 is just the union of the two sets of arguments. However, it is in the process of establishing W 0 that cognitive advantage arises, a process that is not explicitly included in the model but is implied to be part of initiating the interaction process. In the context of an interaction between two individuals, the cognitive advantage will be understood as the shared statements about the subject of the interaction, existing in the identities of the individuals prior to the interaction. The cognitive advantage is an alignment, as per Eq. 3.2, established through interaction; an alignment both participants are aware of. And persuasion, which we considered in the previous section, can now be seen as a process of establishing a cognitive advantage.

In identifying W 0 as a measure of cognitive advantage , we need to keep in mind the simple nature, or high level in a hierarchy of abstraction, of the model of the binary interaction presented in Sect. 4.3. It is the model of one, isolated interaction between two particular individuals regarding a single assertion. In most real situations, both of these individuals will have interactions with other individuals, or make observations, or even have internal cognitive processes with regard to this assertion , all of which will increase the number of relevant elements—i.e. the size of Θ(S σ).

The concept of the Social Bond was introduced in several places in this work but without any formal definition. You have probably understood it intuitively well enough for our use of it so far; now we are in a position to develop this understanding somewhat further. We realise that the concept is concerned with the relationship between any two individuals and that it is close to the concepts of interaction and alignment, which we introduced formally earlier. But a couple of examples will show that it is not such a simple matter.

Consider a group of individuals, each with an amount of factual knowledge in a different discipline or specialty. If their interaction consists solely of interchanging this knowledge, i.e. teaching each other facts, then this will not convert the group into a society, and the interactions do not qualify as establishing Social Bonds.

As a second example, consider a group of individuals whose identities show a high degree of alignment, but that have had no interaction with each other. This group does not constitute a society, and there are no Social Bonds between its members, as they are not aware of the alignment.

As a final example, consider your relationship to an element of the social structure, e.g. the nation. It is represented by such symbols as the flag and the national anthem, but if you were the only person in the world, the concept of a nation and these symbols would be meaningless. It is the fact that they imply a relationship to other individuals that gives them meaning. Such structural elements of society as associations , organisations and nations are emergent properties of the system formed by the Social Bond .

The Social Bond is the relationship between any two members of a society defined by the sum of cognitive advantage over all the subjects present in the identities of the two members, and it is the Social Bond, extended to all pairs of individuals in a set, that binds them together to form a society.

It should be noted that there is a body of work under the title of Social Bond Theory, more generally known as Social Control Theory, based on the work by Hirschi (1969), which is concerned with the bonding of persons to social institutions and the effect of this bonding on their tendency to criminal behaviour. And the concept of a social bond relating individuals to society is used quite generally by many authors, which contrasts with the quite specific use in the present work.

We see that there is something inherently self-referential in the concept of the Social Bond; it creates a society out of a collection of individuals, but the Social Bond exists only in the context of a society. As a brief side step, we note that the notion of something being self-referential can be given a precise meaning in mathematics, to a large extent, due to the work of Karl Gödel. But a more relevant application is the one made popular in the books by Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Esher, Bach, and I am a Strange Loop, (1979, 2007), in the exploration of consciousness and the meaning of ‘I’. The same issues that are raised there could be raised with respect to the ‘consciousness’ of society, in the sense that the collective intelligence of society is a product of the individual intelligence . Society’s ‘consciousness’ is an emergent property of the system formed by the consciousness of individuals interacting based on a Social Bond, and just as individual consciousness develops through childhood, social consciousness develops as society progresses along the y-axis in Fig. 2.2.

The above examples demonstrate that the Social Bond is the result of our interaction with another individual that influences our behaviour—our relationship to the rest of society—by changing our identity, and so it is dynamic or time-dependent. The interaction between two individuals may be intense for a period of time and then cease altogether, but the effect, in terms of the increase in the Social Bond , stays on in the identities of the two individuals and continues to influence their behaviours towards other members of the society and their interaction with these members. This propagating effect of the Social Bond is one of the main determinants of the dynamics of the evolution of society, and we shall consider this aspect of it in Sect. 5.1.

In the previously referenced book (Richerson and Boyd 2004) , the authors introduce two processes involved in the evolution of culture—imitation and adaption—and they illustrate them with numerous examples. How do these two processes relate to our model of intelligence , as in Fig. 3.1, and to the concept of the Social Bond? To answer these two questions, we start by noting that imitation may result from observation of someone else’s behaviour or product (e.g. as in copying the style of artists by studying their paintings). There is no direct involvement by the person being observed, and there is no element of persuasion, which is often so important in the interactions that establish a Social Bond. But imitation is not mindless acceptance; it is simply a case of where the cognitive advantage for the information contained in the observation is so overwhelming that the evaluation process appears to be automatic, and no modification of the identity is required. Imitation may also be the result of interaction with the individual whose behaviour is being imitated and may be the result of a lengthy process of persuasion . Just by seeing me imitating the behaviour of another person, you would not be able to know if this has come about from me observing that person or from having been persuaded by that person.

Imitation is something we can easily observe. It is still the main component of education, more so in the early years than in the later years, and it is something we all practice throughout life, to varying degrees, as we imitate successful people, people in positions of authority and role models, and accept their judgements and views. But, as Richerson and Boyd point out (p. 99), if imitation was the only process, society would not be able to adapt to changes in the environment; everyone would just be imitating everyone else, and we end up with a society in which the alignment between any two individuals is 1, as in Fig. 4.4. However, if the information received, either through observation or through interaction, does not immediately conform to the identity, the evaluation process will be more demanding and require more time and effort, and the outcome is either rejection or an adaptive action; the latter either as a physical action or as a modification of the identity, or a combination of both. This result will be transmitted to other individuals and evaluated by them, and it is this collective evaluation process , or collective intelligence that results in the evolution of society, or, as Richerson and Boyd would say, in the adaptive capability of culture.

Thus, imitation and adaption are both accounted for in our model; they are just separated by their position vis-à-vis the current state of the identity, as measured by cognitive advantage. This also shows that there is not a sharp division between the two processes, both can be active in the same circumstances; it is a question of relative importance. With regard to their relationship to the Social Bond, imitation is an expression of the existence of a Social Bond; adaption is an expression of the exercise of intelligence —individual and collective. The ability of society to adapt depends on its ability to exercise its collective intelligence , which we shall develop as a central measure of the state of society in Sect. 6.1.

The Social Bond and the alignment may, at first glance, appear to be identical, but while that is true as expressed by the contents of the two identities involved alone, there is a very significant difference between them, as the second example above demonstrates. The Social Bond is an alignment of which both parties are aware, either because it has been developed jointly by them, or because they have acquired it through a common process, such as education or indoctrination. It has much in common with trust, which is a hallmark of a healthy society, and with commitment, in the sense of a willingness to reveal themselves and have the courage to stand up in public, as we noted in the previous section, in connection with Hannah Arendt’s description of the vita activa . Thus, the use of ‘social’ in the Social Bond has a dual significance. One is to indicate that the bond is an element of the complex system that is society; the other indicates that the bond is an enabler of a sincere engagement. This puts a requirement on any interaction for it to result in, or strengthen, a Social Bond: it must reflect the participants’ identities. It is, of course, entirely possible to create statements that do not reside in an individual’s identity; effectively creating a ‘virtual identity’ for the purpose of promoting a particular outcome, as was indicated in the discussion around Fig. 4.3. This possibility, while always present, becomes easier to realise, and more difficult to detect, with increasing involvement of technology applications in the processing and delivery of messages. In particular, messages could be constructed by IT solely on the basis of information about the recipient and the intended change in the recipient’s identity or behaviour, without being part of the identity of any person at all.

4.6 The Role of Technology

4.6.1 Messages, Facts, and Information Technology

If we recall our model of intelligence , Fig. 3.1, then what is labelled ‘Inputs’ can be described and classified in various ways, and there is no obvious, ‘best’ classification scheme; it depends on the context and what we want to achieve with the classification. For our purpose of describing the Social Bond, a natural first level of classification is of inputs into two groups, according to whether they are perceived by the individual to convey a message or to convey facts. A few examples may help to make the distinction between the two groups clearer: If I contemplate the beauty of a flower or a landscape, study a specimen under a microscope, read a textbook, listen to a piece of music or attend a lecture on quantum theory, the inputs are perceived by me to be facts. If I discuss an issue with another person, view an advertisement or read a letter, the inputs are perceived by me to be messages. But if I look at a woman in a short skirt and singlet top, my perception is likely to depend on who I am; as an inhabitant of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where this is a pretty common attire, I simply register this as a fact; but if I am a devout Muslim refugee newly arrived from the Middle East, I might well perceive it as a message. So, the distinction between the two groups is definitely subjective.

The reason for our interest in this classification is twofold: One, the extent and influence of technology applications shows some distinction between the two groups. Two, the inputs we are interested in are a subset of the first group; those that result from the active involvement of another individual. It is possible for the input to result from an interaction with a number of other individuals simultaneously, as can be observed in crowd behaviour (e.g. stampedes and mass hysteria), but these are relatively infrequent events; the vast majority of interactions are between two individuals. Furthermore, the ratio of the second group to the first is only large in the early years of life, say, up to age six or so, during which time the increase in knowledge has relatively little to do with what we have defined as identity. After that age, the first group of inputs, both direct and through media, becomes dominant in the form of what we have termed binary interactions, and they can be classified according to channel and environment, as in the previous section. But let us first look at those aspects of technology applications that apply to both groups.

As a general comment, we all intuitively realise that technology and its applications provide an essential support for the lifestyle we enjoy in a developed society, but we have become so used to having this support that we rarely think about the nature of this support; how it has determined some of the basic characteristics of society. A number of authors have certainly given considerable thought to these issues, and expressed some concerns, as we noted in Sects. 2.3 and 4.1, but for the average citizen they are mostly peripheral. Let us look briefly at two of these that are particularly relevant, the first one being our relationship to the physical components of our daily lives. Before the rapid rise of technology during the Industrial Revolution, it was a more direct relationship. We might grow some or all of our food, raise animals for food, men would build dwellings, women would make clothes and so on, and we would have a first-hand understanding of what went into creating these things. They had a value as things in themselves. Today, technology has turned us into consumers; we see these things strictly as commodities through a suitable interface, such as a supermarket or a computer screen (for online shopping), with price and ease of access and use as the main parameters. From time to time concerns are raised about the ethics of the production process or its effect on the environment, but in the scheme of things, they have a relatively minor impact on our attitude as consumers.

The second issue relates to capital; developing and applying technology requires investment. And with investment comes the need to generate a return on this investment, and the associated ownership and control; the hallmarks of the capitalist system. ‘He who pays the piper gets to call the tune’. In principle there is nothing wrong with this; the need to generate a return leads to a quest for efficiency and a reduction of waste, as does the competition in an open market. However, the system also carries within it the seeds of instability and exploitation; in particular, because the interface between supplier and consumer, expressed in the consumer’s acceptance of the product, is based not only on a rational, demonstrable value of the product, but on the consumer’s perceived value of the product. This introduces the concept of advertising and, again, while much of advertising serves the useful purpose of making the consumer aware of what is available, it can also be employed to manipulate our judgement, belief and value systems.

Both of these issues take on an enhanced importance if we focus our attention on information as the product and, in particular, on the information that relates to our identity, to the things that matter and that causes us to modify our behaviour through adaptive action . Regarding the first issue, nowhere has the change in our relationship with our environment been more significant than in our relationship to information. Not only is technology allowing us to generate an enormous amount of information every day through an array of measuring devices, recording equipment and processing systems, but information technology is bringing it to us through various channels, such as print media, radio, TV and the Internet, and presenting it through interfaces ranging from billboards to mobile phones. We are being inundated with information, and as a result, we view it as a commodity, something without any value in itself, valued only for its immediate usefulness. An increasing proportion of the information concerns issues and conditions to which we have no direct relationship. We cannot take any action, nor does the information seems to have any immediate consequences for us; we are simply spectators, and technology is conditioning us for that role.

Here, it might be appropriate to quote a passage from a letter written by Karl Marx to Kugelmann, on 27 July 1871, on the subject of atrocity stories in the British press during the Paris commune: ‘Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not invented then. Precisely, the contrary, the daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spread inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths … in one day than could have formerly been done in a century’. (Quoted in Cohen and Young 1973) .

A related feature is the selection of the information that is presented to us. The amount of information generated everyday is in orders of magnitude greater than what can be presented through the main public media, such as newspapers, radio and TV, so a selection is made on a set of criteria . Information technology allows this selection to be carried out in part automatically and to be based on an increasingly sophisticated set of criteria. In addition to such straightforward ones as offensive language, gruesome images, and legal limitations, these criteria can also include ones relating to commercial and political objectives, something that can be observed daily in the public news media. We are no longer able to process this information, to consider its truthfulness and its implications; we accept it uncritically as something to be used as is, not as an input to, and to be transformed by, our own processing capability. In the more remote past, the small amount of information available led to a large amount of thought and speculation. We might often be tempted to ignore it as nonsense (which, in terms of our current knowledge it often was), but we should not overlook what it represents in human intellectual effort.

In addition to the public, or mass, media, technology is enabling a much more targeted delivery of information. On many applications, such as Google, email, Facebook, LinkedIn and ResearchGate, just to mention a few of the more general ones, we are known as individuals, and by analysing our use of such applications, profiles of our identities can be built up. Recalling the mention of ‘cognitive advantage ’ in Sect. 3.2, the effectiveness of information in initiating an adaptive response depends very much on the overlap of the information with elements of the identity and on being able to target those elements that need to be removed. A current example of this is the success achieved in radicalising Muslim youths, but many organisations practice the same approach. Information processing technology is increasing this ability at a great pace, driven both by security concerns and by the desire to influence people’s judgement and spending choices.

Now, while the first issue of the relationship between technology and information was what we might consider a direct one, in the sense that applications of technology directly influenced the creation and delivery of information, the second issue—the relationship between information and capital resulting from the applications of information technology —is indirect. It is difficult to put an exact value on the technological infrastructure that supports the information industry, in the sense that we are considering it here (providing information to the society at large), but it is certainly in the many trillions of dollars, and this investment needs to produce a return. If this return were to be provided by the subscribers to the information content alone, the whole industry would collapse; the return is provided mainly by advertising. There is no in principle problem with this, as long as the advertising conforms to the applicable legislation (e.g. ‘truth in advertising’) and industry guidelines; in practice, the effect may be to selectively drown out parts of the information. The problem lies in the fact that the symbiotic combination of investors and advertisers is the power driving the information industry, and it is a power that has little interest in the quality of the information. It sees the industry as any other business; the product is only a means of obtaining the best return on the investment. The result is a potent tool for influencing the development of society that is rapidly increasing in reach and sophistication through the application of technology , and it is effectively available to the highest bidder.

Some implications of this situation are considered in Sect. 6.3, where we refer to the book Social Physics, by Alex Pentland , already cited in Sect. 2.2. But the main message of that book—the use of Big Data to generate knowledge about the behaviour of individuals and groups of individuals—is very relevant in the context of the current section and, in particular, in relation to the concept of cognitive advantage . Pentland demonstrates how IT provides the means, not only for (legal or illegal) data acquisition on a scale most people could not even imagine, but also for sophisticated processing of this data to extract quite detailed knowledge . In particular, it makes it possible to build up a profile of the behaviour, and thereby of the identity, of an individual. With this knowledge, the next step is to modify the identity of the individual by subjecting it to appropriately edited information; information that will seem plausible by resonating with parts of the existing identity.

Such manipulation decreases information diversity and creates what is called ‘filter bubbles’ in (Bozdag and van den Hoven 2015) . That article discusses several software applications aimed at countering this and, with regard to information in the political arena, restore civic discourse and democracy . The interesting point the authors make is that the efficacy of the applications depends on one’s view of what constitutes democracy; different views of democracy have different informational requirements. Perhaps more important is whether the average citizen would employ any of these applications; they seem to be mainly useful as research tools to reveal the extent to which information has been manipulated.

Details of the extent of data capture, including through surveillance, and its processing are largely hidden from public view, but there have been some revelations is this regards, e.g. as detailed in (Deibert and Rohozinski 2010) , who stated ‘Even in democratic countries, surveillance systems penetrate every aspect of life, as people implicitly (and perhaps unwittingly) consent to the greatest invasion of personal privacy in history. Digital information can be easily tracked and traced, and then tied to specific individuals who themselves can be mapped in space and time with a degree of sophistication that would make the greatest tyrants of days past envious’. A further aspect of mass surveillance raised in (Stahl 2016) is its ability to influence the form of social relationships and to constrain the collective self-determination, effectively amounting to a form of political power.

A use of Big Data that is already being trialled is ‘nudging’; providing people with small messages that are intended to correct some part of their behaviour that is deemed harmful or reward behaviour that is deemed beneficial; typical examples being eating habits and exercise. While such applications might, at a first glance, seem positive, it is not difficult to see how this technology in effect leads to a diminishing of our free will. A brief discussion of this and related Big Data issues is contained in (Gal 2016), and some ethical aspects of this technology is discussed in the recent article by Portmess and Tower (2015) , in which they state: ‘We argue that Big Data should be recognised as manifesting multiple and conflicting trajectories that reflect human intentionality and particular patterns of power and authority’.

To conclude this subsection, we might ask: Do the new applications of technology strengthen the Social Bond? Popular opinion, as expressed in numerous blogs and on other Internet sites, would seem to be overwhelmingly in the affirmative. People feel that the various forms of social media allow them to express themselves and to interact with a greatly expanded audience, not just a few close friends, and even with these, the interaction is more intense. There is no doubt that IT has expanded the geographical reach of the Social Bond ; the two individuals involved can be in widely separated locations. Also, the delays involved in the interaction, as compared, say, to an exchange of letters, are much reduced, to the extent that many people feel they have to be instantly available during their waking hours. But what about the quality of the interaction? How much of this increased interaction is really contributing to strengthening the Social Bond and developing the trust and empathy that are such important aspects of it? Is the flood of information drowning out the significant items, the information related to ‘the things that matter’? And what about the opportunities for using IT to damage the Social Bond? These and many other questions show that the impact of IT on society and on the Social Bond is a highly complex issue, of which we will only consider a few aspects. But one thing is certain: there is no going back. The rate of development of technology is going to continue to increase; we just have to pay more attention to how we handle it.

4.6.2 Fluctuations and Stability

In the previous subsection, we raised the issue of the control that goes with the ownership of the capital required for developing and implementing the technology. The nature of this control is often presented as a balance between opposing forces or ideologies, such as in the relative economic importance of capital and labour, or as between private and state ownership, or as between small government (minimal restriction on the production process and its proceeds) and big government (significant involvement through labour laws, taxation, etc.), or, finally, in a very simplistic form, as a balance between the two ideologies of capitalism and socialism. The latter characterisation is simplistic in the sense that both ideologies span a wide spectrum of economic, political and social features. At present, the trend in the developed (western) world seems to show a shift in the balance toward capitalism , but while the generation of capital is inevitable, there is nothing inevitable about the shift towards capitalism.

While both of these ideologies, and everything in between, are promoted on their benefits to society, relatively little is published regarding their effect on the stability of society, and what is published, is often concerned with economic or social measures (e.g. education or public health). An article that discusses the synergy and contrast of the approaches of Emile Durkheim (sociology) and Friedrich Hayek (economics) is the one by (Birner and Ege 1999) ; other well-known contributions are various works by Edward Goldsmith (Goldsmith) and, of course, the apocalyptic prophesy by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, of which a relevant condensation can be found in Spengler (1931). In his well-known textbook, Human Societies: A macro level introduction to society, Gerhard Lenski sees technology as an intrinsic aspect of sociology and as the main driver of change. In this regard he perceives that the rate of change could become psychologically or socially intolerable, and states: ‘It is only logical to suppose that there is a limit to the rate at which individuals and society can adapt to change’. (Lenski 1970, p. 480). In the section where Lenski discusses regression in the evolution of societies, he makes the following comment: ‘This serves as a reminder that evolution often involves not only change in the phenomena in question (e.g. organisms or societies), but change in the operation of the evolutionary process itself. Failure to recognise this has been responsible for many sterile debates over evolution in the past’. (p. 117). This corresponds to our view of a disruption of the exchange of information as the cause of a breakdown of, or fluctuation in, the evolutionary process. Lenski was concerned with such examples as the regression following the collapse of the Roman Empire and that which took place in the Indus river valley around 1500 BC; changes that played out over many hundreds of years. What I am concerned with in this subsection is a sudden change in the core identity of a society, starting as a local fluctuation caused by a single person, or small group of persons, and spreading so rapidly, by means of controlling the information channels, that it sweeps all opposition before it until it reaches a catastrophic climax. This has happened before, and I suggest it could happen again.

The probability of such an event and its consequences are both dependent on technology, but before we look at that, we need to be clear about the nature of such a change of core identity, and an important insight into this was provided by Hannah Arendt in her report on, and analysis of, the Eichmann trial (Arendt 1963). At the time, some people, particularly in the Jewish community, accused her of trivialising the Holocaust, but nothing could be further from the truth. Her conclusion, that the problem with moral truths is that they can be exchanged for other value systems, exposed the Holocaust as an example of an extremely dangerous feature of any society; there is nothing trivial about it at all. A society, or a sufficiently large proportion of a society, can be made to modify the basis on which its members evaluate information. The identity is not a fixed set of precepts and beliefs; it is constantly being modified by the information it processes, as already introduced in Sect. 2.3. The results of that process are not only adaptive actions ; depending on the individual and the situation it finds itself in, the results may be mainly modifications to the identity, without any externally observable change. The change only becomes externally observable when information is received that, when evaluated by the state of the identity at that time, calls for adaptive action.

Throughout this paper, we have treated the interaction between individuals in a society in terms of a pair of interactions strengths , μ + and μ −, and their very simplified actions on the identity: adding and removing identity elements . Looking below this high-level treatment, the interaction between individuals, either in a one-on-one setting or in a group setting, is a very complex issue, and one on which there exists a large body of knowledge . Without venturing into this issue in any detail, as it is one for which engineering provides very little theoretical or experimental background (but lots of practical experience), it is beneficial to look briefly at an article by Sunstein (1999) that provides a number of insights relevant to our purpose, as well as a large number of references for further study. In it, Sunstein develops the concept of group polarisation, the phenomenon that, when a group of people come together to deliberate on a particular issue, such as gun control, affirmative action, and gender issues, the members move towards a more extreme point in whatever direction is indicated by the members’ predeliberation tendency. He discusses a number of processes that contribute to this phenomenon, and also links it to other well-known phenomena, such as social cascades. Two statements are particularly relevant; the first relating to our comments on Arendt above: ‘The problem with group polarisation is not that people subject to it suffer from some cognitive or motivational defect. The Problem is instead that people may be shifted, as a result of entirely rational processes, in the direction of factual, legal or moral mistakes’. (p. 20). At the end of the article, and in view of group polarisation, he raises some doubt about the efficacy of deliberation but then qualifies that by the statement ‘Perhaps group polarisation could be reduced or even eliminated if we emphasised that good deliberation has full information as a precondition; but that requirement is extremely stringent, and if there already is full information, the point of deliberation is greatly reduced. Not eliminated; there remains the question of what to do, given a certain understanding of the facts’. (p. 27). This resonates strongly with my current work on the importance of information and, in a world that relies increasingly on applications of technology, on the role of engineers, as the creators of that technology , to provide the information (Aslaksen 2015b) . Group polarisation should be seen as one of the several mechanisms that exacerbate the effects of manipulated or incorrect information.

The change in the core identity of a significant part of the German people in the period between the two world wars might at first seem an extreme example that is unlikely to be repeated, but this is mainly because of the extent of the resultant catastrophe. If we consider the humiliating position Germany found itself in after the first world war, and then the crash of 1929, it was not so unlikely that someone like Hitler could rise to power by creating a narrative (Jews and Slavs as ‘untermenschen’, the superiority of the Aryan race, etc.) that played on powerful elements of the core identity at the time (sense of betrayal at the loss of the war, punitive peace conditions, etc.). And even in a democracy it is not necessary to have a majority of the population on side; Hitler’s party gained only 33% of the votes cast in the 1932 election, but with the opposition in disarray, it was the largest party, and so Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. And the more recent times offer other examples of how a significant part of a population can be led to accept information based not on fact, but on conformance with a successively established set of beliefs. One such example is the beliefs nurtured in the Anglo-Saxon world about the Middle East, which allowed a significant part of the population of the US, Britain and Australia to accept some blurry photos of a few trucks driving around in the desert as proof of a world-threatening WMD capability, and as justification for slaughtering more than 100,000 innocent Iraqis and turning the region into an ongoing nightmare. We should recognise that we are playing with fire and that we cannot afford to be complacent, and that the distance from ‘from my cold, dead hands’ to a cold, dead world may not be as great as we think.

Returning now to the central theme of this section—the influence of technology on the stability of society—it may be formulated in the form of two questions, the first of which is ‘How will the rapid advance of technology increase the probability of a catastrophic instability?’. An attempt to provide an answer is presented in the form of a number of arguments:

1. (1a)

The ability to change the core identity. The prerequisite for a fluctuation to grow a point where it may have catastrophic consequences is that the core identity , or belief system, of the society has been changed so as to make the information content of the fluctuation acceptable. This requires presenting a version of events that is consistent with the desired change and, as we saw in Sect. 3, disparaging any conflicting version. In other words, immersing the individual in an information environment that promotes the changed beliefs, and this is what information technology is increasingly able to do. It provides the means of, more or less subtly, modifying or editing the content and meaning of any verbal, written or visual message or report, as well as the means of delivering the content to all of the society.

2. (1b)

The ability to target individuals. In a further development of the previous argument , it is becoming increasingly possible to present individuals with information that is tailored to their current identities for maximum effectiveness. A related, if simpler technique has been applied in online marketing for some time, where it is known as personalised retargeting; it simply uses a person’s activity on an internet site, such as Google or Facebook, to deduce what the person is interested in and then present ads accordingly. More advanced schemes build up a profile of a person based on information from various sources, and at least one company now offers this information for targeting voters leading up to elections (www.wpp.com/wpp/).

3. (1c)

The speed of change of the core identity. As a corollary to the previous argument, information technology is providing information with an increasing intensity, above all through mobile media. As a result, the time it takes for a change to become effective has changed from many generations (e.g. Christianity) to one generation (e.g. Reformation) to a few years (e.g. Nazism) and now, possibly, only months. This greatly reduces the likelihood of debate and rational considerations.

4. (1d)

The complexity introduced by technology. The increasing application and complexity of technology in all aspects of life makes it increasingly difficult for the average citizen to make an independent judgement in many areas of information, ranging from economics (big data , statistics) to nuclear technology (enrichment, reprocessing and weapon’s technology), which makes it easier to get selective or modified information accepted.

5. (1e)

The sophistication and extent of weapons technology. The means of conducting an armed conflict are developing rapidly. As non-experts, we tend to think in terms of what we know from recent conflicts, which is mainly based on pictures of guns, aircraft, tanks, naval vessels, etc. all items that take many years to develop. But the real smarts lie increasingly in the information technology , much of it space-based, that determines how these assets are deployed, as well as in the intelligent and partly autonomous munitions they deliver. For these items, the development time is much shorter, and so the probability of making an incorrect assessment of a potential adversary’s capability is increased.

The second question is ‘How does technology increase the consequences of a fluctuation?’ , and again, an attempt to provide an answer is contained in the following arguments :

1. (2a)

Rapid escalation. Once the potential for armed response to a conflict is established, the time needed to ramp up to a major aggressive capability is very short. With the relative importance of technology versus manpower swinging rapidly towards technology, there is no need for conscription and lengthy training; the standing, professional military force is adequate for any level of response. What starts out as a relatively minor incident could, in a sequence of tit-for-tat responses, escalate so rapidly that it might be very difficult to contain it by diplomatic or any other non-military means.

2. (2b)

Powerful weapons. The build-up of military forces in all parts of the world, together with the sophistication and power of their weapons, increases the scale of destruction and loss of life. Nuclear weapons were until now considered to serve the role of a deterrent, via the doctrine of ‘assured mutual destruction’, but with the ongoing development of tactical nuclear munitions, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, the distinction between tactical and strategic may become blurred.

4.6.3 The Good Society

We started the previous chapter with a section on the Good Life . Now, after having realised that the quality of our existence is increasingly determined by the interaction between individuals, rather than by the intrinsic properties of individuals (which have remained largely unchanged over the last 10,000 years); that is, by the society formed by these interactions, we should perhaps formulate our goals and aspirations in terms of the Good Society , which we introduced already at the end of Sect. 2.2. The purpose of the final section of this chapter is simply to show how the concept of the Good Society, as it is presented in a few examples of the relevant literature, forms a context for our high level, but sharply defined and measurable version of this concept in Sect. 6.1, and to provide some background material for our discussion of the economic paradigm in Sect. 6.3.

As a starting point, we can take what might be called the ‘Bible’ on the Good Society, the book The Good Society, by Bellah et al. (1991). It gives a thorough and perceptive account of the development of US society, and in doing so, identifies and discusses many of the issues and problems confronting modern society in general. But, for all its good qualities, it is a US-centric view of the world and also reflects a characteristic of the presentations that becomes evident even in our very cursory review of the literature: how the political landscape in the US differs from that in the rest of the world, in that it is much less ideological than we find, e.g. in Europe, and more in the form of discussions about variations on a business plan for the maintenance of a superpower. One example of this is the article (Champlin and Knoedler 2005) , which gives a good overview of the state of the US version of the Good Society; a view which involves a bewildering use of variations of ‘liberal’, but in which such a central concept as socialism is completely absent. However, the authors bring out the importance of the concept of freedom (and its interpretation), to which we shall return in Sect. 6.3.1, and, in quoting (Lakoff 2003) , of the political discourse and its rhetorical dimension, which we discussed in relation to persuasion, in Sect. 4.4.

In Sect. 2.2, we presented a picture of society as a system of interacting individuals, with the evolution of society driven by the collective intelligence formed by this interaction of individual intelligences . Thus, there has been, from the emergence of the first societies, a dichotomy, or tension , between the individual and society, in that society provides the individual with the infrastructure that makes a good life possible, but it can do so only by modifying what it means to be an individual; this is inherent in any interaction. A simple view of the Good Society , then, comes down to the relative importance of individual and society, and such views are presented in various terms that can be visualised as forming a matrix, with the one dimension including such terms as freedom, ownership, equality, justice, and rights, and the other dimension including economic, political and moral aspects of these terms.

An article that focuses on the political aspects of justice is Building the Good Society , by Cruddas and Nahles (2009). In it, the authors describe a new model of social democracy based on ideas of the British Third Way and the German Neue Mitte , championed by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder in 1999, and traces the limited success of this initiative to an uncritical embrace of the new global capitalism . The two Prime Ministers underestimated the destructive potential of under-regulated markets, and believed that a class-based society had given way to a more individualised, meritocratic culture. The authors advocate a good society based on solidarity and social justice, which requires that each citizen has the resources—money, time, relationships, and political recognition—to make a good life for themselves. They state that for this to happen, the main task in the years ahead will be to create and consolidate political trust in public life.

Michael Walzer , in What is ‘The Good Society’? (Walzer 2009), argues that there is not only one good society , but several; each generated by the constant flux of movements, with their associations , communities, and states. Goodness requires plenitude, with people participating in many different ways in many different groups. Amitai Etzioni also considers society as a collection of communities; each a combination of a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, and a measure of commitment to a particular culture (Etzioni 2002). The article examines the value of bonds and their limits, and the dialogue that results in the establishment of moral values, including the limitation of such dialogues. The author states that for a society to be good, much of the social conduct must be regulated by reliance on the moral voice, rather than on the law, and the scope of the law itself must be limited largely to what is supported by the moral voice. The good society is defined as one that balances two values—social order and autonomy—rather than maximising one.

In an article published in the Australian forum The Conversation, Denis Mueller addressed a number of issues associated with a free press as an essential element of the Good Society (Mueller 2016) . He starts out by saying ‘a free press—now including all news media—is essential to the functioning of a capitalist democracy . Without it, citizens have no means of exercising the powers of what John Locke called the sovereign people. They would be robbed of the information necessary to making political and economic decisions, and of knowing what others in society, outside their immediate circle, were doing’. He then goes on to demonstrate how, for all its importance, free press and speech is not an absolute value; we have laws concerning national security, defamation and contempt of court—to name the most obvious—all of which constrain free speech, and even the ‘free’ press will try to suppress information that goes against its own ideology, as he illustrates with a recent example.

In an interview published in 2001, John Kenneth Galbraith addresses the dangers to society of inequality and the concentration of wealth, and the political power that goes with it (Galbraith 2001). In this regard, he points to the danger of excessive privatisation. He also raises (but does not pursue) the issue that, with an increasing corporatisation of our society, a new class is being created—the managerial class—that represents a further challenge to democracy . In Australia, an example of this are the managers of the superannuation industry.

Johannes J. Britz consider the ethical dimensions of the Global Information Society from a social perspective and as an application of the moral notion of justice (Britz 2008). He emphasises that a precondition for the Good Society is a moral consensus, and in citing (Lötter 2000) he recognises that there may be features in the existing social structure that make the introduction of a just Information Society difficult. An example is ownership ; ownership of information will be different to that of physical property.

In her book Access to Information as a Human Right, Cheryl Ann Bishop uses the process of conceptualisation (i.e. developing the implications inherent in a concept) of four basic rights—freedom of expression, information privacy, a healthy environment, and the truth about human rights abuses—to develop a justification for the right to information, and supports this by reference to a number of authors (Bishop 2012). As a further conceptualisation, she quotes (Weeranmanty 1994) , who perceived that the right to information is a prerequisite for achieving world peace.

Focusing on economic aspects of the Good Society, Robert J. Shiller discusses the role of financial capitalism in society (Shiller 2012, 2013). His view is that, if developed on the basis of democracy and humanism, the financial market could mitigate many of life’s risks, and that, to a large extent, the bad repute the financial market, in the form of the collateralised mortgage obligation, received after the GFC, was as much a result of public ignorance and greed as of any defect in the basic financial structure. Regulation of financial markets must take account of human nature, and to become an integral part of the Good Society , it must also conform to accepted society standards (rational or not). In addition to being both informative and innovative, the book is relevant to our development of the Social Bond, in that Shiller acknowledges and discusses two of our main themes: the central function of information in all aspects of modern society , including the operation of financial institutions and markets (e.g. pp. 9–12, 160), and the fact that the control of capital equals power, ‘the almost unlimited power achieved by the very successful in business (and their heirs) is almost unknown in other walks of life’ (p. 165). The ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ of financial capitalism are clearly presented, and given that financial institutions and markets are a fact of modern society, the issue is only how the ‘cons’ can be reduced while enhancing the ‘pros’, and Shiller gives numerous thought-provoking suggestions. His enthusiasm for financial innovation did briefly bring to mind the engineer that was working for peace by developing a more efficient weapon, but really the only question that remained at the end was what appeared to be a contradiction between his intention to democratise financial operations and the statement that new and improved financial instruments will be more complex and only understandable to a small elite of specialists. This is an issue that is found also in both law (increasingly complex terms and conditions for everyday transactions) and in politics (the citizens are a hindrance to effective execution), and is reflected in the Social Bond, as will be considered again in Chap. 6.

There is a journal dedicated to the topic, The Good Society ; a journal of the Committee on the Political Economy of The Good Society, published by Penn State University Press. PEGS is a nonpartisan, ideologically diverse, non-profit organisation whose goal is to promote serious and sustained inquiry into innovative institutional designs for a good society.

The main point of this brief excursion into the literature on the subject of the Good Society is that all the contributions acknowledge the central importance of information—of the quality of the information and of its free interchange. Whether in finance, in politics, or in belief systems, the manner in which information is treated is a determining factor in the success of that aspect of society. The concept of the Social Bond is intended to express that in a mode that is independent of the particular aspect or issue of society it is applied to. As the Social Bond is one of the two main components of intelligence (the other is the individual’s inherent processing power, about which it is currently less in our power to do anything about), and if we see the extent to which individuals are able to exercise their intelligence as members of society—which is what we have identified as the collective intelligence —as a measure of the Good Society , then that becomes, in effect, a measure of the effectiveness of the Social Bond. Section 6.1 proposes such a measure.

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© The Author(s) 2018

Erik W. Aslaksen

The Social Bondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68741-4_5

5. Models

Erik W. Aslaksen1

(1)

Gumbooya Pty Ltd, Allambie Heights, NSW, Australia

Erik W. Aslaksen

Email: erik@gumbooya.com

In the previous two chapters, we developed a high-level view of the two components that constitute the Social Bond. Chapter 3 proposed a model of human behaviour in the form of a process that evaluates new information by reference to a knowledge base formed by previously received information, and takes goal-oriented adaptive action , with the goal being survival . The process was identified as intelligence , and it was asserted that the evolution of society is a result of the combined action of individuals—the operation of a collective intelligence . Only a part of the knowledge base is involved in those actions that influence the evolution of society, which we labelled as the individual’s identity, and it is the alignment of this identity between two individuals that is the Social Bond . Thus, the second component is the process that establishes this alignment, and Chap. 4 considered a number of aspects of this binary interaction, and proposed a very basic model in terms of an interaction strength .

In the current chapter, we examine how this view of the Social Bond can be incorporated into a model of society as a system of individual identities interacting via binary interactions. That is the content of Sect. 5.1; the following two sections then look at two particular characteristics of the dynamics of any system: propagation and stability. Section 5.2 is still based largely on the model from Sect. 5.1, whereas Sect. 5.3 considers stability from an even more generalised perspective, using an analogy with physics, and without any reference to intelligence or identity.

All of these models are conceptual models, in the sense that, while the parameters used in the models are clearly defined as concepts, there are no definitions of how they might be measured. The purpose of the models is to further understanding, and to give more substance to the concept of identity by providing it with a structure. And perhaps, it will also provide a framework within which specialists in fields such as neuroscience and psychology can develop connections to physical reality through measurements.

5.1 Individuals as System Elements

5.1.1 Notation and Preliminary Issues

In a society, Ξ, with n individuals, there will be n(n − 1)/2 distinct binary interactions, and the change to the identity of an individual resulting from such an interaction will depend on the particular interaction. Consequently, the description of the identity needs to be able to reflect this, and to that end, we shall extend the structure introduced in Sect. 4.3 and identify the individuals by an index, i, with i = 1,2, …, n, and define the identity, W i , of individual i, as consisting of two sets:

1. i.

The initial core identity , W 0, of Ξ, which is not affected by the interaction; and

2. ii.

a set consisting of n disjoint subsets, W i,j , j = 1,2, …, n.

Comparing with the structure in Sect. 4.3, we see that W i,i corresponds to W x,1, and the set UW i,j , j ≠ i, corresponds to W x,2, where x = a or b.

We shall only be considering societies, or social components, with either no structure, i.e. all interactions are equal, as in the next subsection, or in which only one individual has a different interaction strength . That is, the strength coefficients, and , are independent of the values of i and j, except for and , which may be different, but independent of j. Consequently, and with reference to Sect. 4.3, we shall use the notation  = ,  =  whenever a ≠ 1, and  =  and  = . Also, we shall account for the fact that each individual can only engage in one binary interaction at the time by dividing the interaction strengths by (n − 1).

In the next two subsections, we further impose the following initial conditions:

1. i.

W i,j≠i  = 0; and

2. ii.

W i,i  = W 1 < 1 − W 0.

Condition i. means that, at time t = 0, any pair of individuals have the same identity elements in common (those in W 0, and only those), and condition ii. means that, at time t = 0, every individual identity has the same size. These initial conditions are completely unrealistic, in the sense that no real society would ever be in this state, but they are not impossible, in the sense of not contradicting any other feature of our model of the society as a system. And they will allow us to display some main characteristics of the dynamic behaviour of this society.

Furthermore, when extending the binary interaction to more than two individuals, say, three, a, b and c, we are faced with a choice between two assumptions:

1. 1.

The influence of a on c is due only to a’s own identity, not to any identity elements a has acquired as a result of its interaction with b.

2. 2.

The influence of a on c is due to all the identity elements in a.

What happens in the second case is that an individual will receive the same identity element more than once; actually, once from each of the individuals in the system. So, while this does not result in any new identity elements, hearing the same statement more than once has a reinforcing effect. We can simply take that into account as an increase in the value of μ, so that, as far as our model is concerned, there is only one case.

We now need to digress for a moment and recall our basic knowledge of thermodynamics . The equations connecting the variables describing a system assume that the system is in equilibrium . This might seem to be a contradiction, because how can we speak of thermodynamics if the system is in equilibrium? But we remember that the equilibrium referred to the microscopic processes, such as collisions between molecules, and that the contradiction disappeared when the rate of change of the thermodynamic variables was very much less than that of the microscopic processes, and that the relationship between the two domains is provided by statistics.

The same situation is now present in our view of society as a system of interacting individuals; the exchange of knowledge between individuals and the processes that modify individual identities take place in a much shorter time frame than changes to a society as a whole; typically days compared to years. Accordingly, we expect that we should be able to find relations governing the dynamics of a society by taking a statistical approach to the dynamics of individuals. However, even if we treat all the members of a society as identical (i.e. equal to an ‘average’ member), a society is very different from the systems normally considered in thermodynamics, such as a gas of molecules, in that the members do not move around at random in a given space and interact equally with every other member. Society has a complex, multi-dimensional structure, and correspondingly our statistical methodology will need to reflect this, even if it is in a simplified manner. As a building block in such a structured approach, we consider a small group of individuals, no greater than, say, a dozen members, for which we can postulate that they all interact with each other within a (short) time period, which we shall take as the time step in our numerical calculation of the dynamics of this system. The changes to the identities resulting from the interactions within this time period are small compared to the size of the identity, i.e. much smaller than 1, so that the state of the individuals is never far from their average, which is the equivalent of thermodynamic equilibrium in this case.

5.1.2 Equal Individuals

In this case, all the binary interactions have the same strength , so there are only two interaction strength parameters, μ + and μ −. Also, we can simplify the notation, in that for any i and j ≠ i, W i,i  = W 1 and W i,j  = W 2. The equations governing the system follow from the equations for the binary interactions, Eq. 4.3 and the associated definitions of the strength parameters:

(5.1)

(5.2)

(5.3)

The parameter ω is just the space available in the identity for new elements, as indicated in Fig. 5.1. In this figure, the quantity W 1x is included only as a reminder (or illustration) of the fact that an identity element can only be transmitted to the other individuals once, as is also reflected in Eq. 5.1.

Fig. 5.1
The identity of any one of the individuals in the group of n individuals (here shown as five), at some time t > 0. The area of the whole figure is the maximum size of the identity, and the area labelled as ‘Available’ is the space available for expansion of the identity, and is given by the parameter ω

The relationship between any two individuals now takes on a somewhat different meaning to what it was when there were only two individuals, as illustrated by Fig. 5.1, which shows the content of the identity of any one of the individuals at a time t > 0.

If we define alignment between any two individuals in the group, as before, as the ratio of the intersection of their identities to the union of their identities, or

(5.4)

then we see that the dependence on the partners has disappeared, so that the relationship becomes increasingly impersonal with increasing n. The identity elements particular to the partner in a binary interaction is drowned out by all the other elements they now have in common, and there is no difference between individual and system alignment.

Figure 5.2 shows the evolution of the alignment for two cases, one with μ − = 0, and one with μ − = μ +, and while the results are much as we would expect based on the results we obtained in Sect. 4.3, we need to realise that the shape of the curves is discontinuous as μ − reaches zero.

Fig. 5.2
The evolution of the alignment, α, with regard to a subject in a society of 10 individuals for the case of W 0 = 0.1,  = 0.2, and μ + = 0.05. In the upper curve, μ − = 0.05, in the lower curve μ − = 0; μ always in units of per unit time. The horizontal axis is in units of time

We now have two cases, with the first one being subdivided into two subcases:

1. Case 1:

If μ − = 0, value of W 1 remains unchanged and equal to its initial value, , and there are two subcases:

Subcase 1a:  > (1 − W 0)/n. Then, the identity eventually fills up, so in the end-state ω = 0, and

where , and an example of this is the lower curve in Fig. 5.2, where α equals 0.7822.

Subcase 1b:  < (1 − W 0)/n. Then α(t → ∞) = 1, and the end-state of this mini-society is total homogeneity with respect to the subject of the interaction; the individuals have surrendered a personal belief for an input to a common belief . However, there is room for change, as ω = 1 − W 0 − n · .

2. Case 2:

If μ − > 0, then α(t → ∞) = 1, and the end-state of this mini-society is again total homogeneity with respect to the subject of the interaction. In this end-state W 1 = W 2 = (1 − W 0 − ω)/n, and the value of ω depends on the ratio μ +/μ −. However, ω is also a relatively complex function of the three parameters n, W 0, and , and for the particular case of n = 10, and for 0 ≤ W 0 ≤ 0.3 and 0.1 ≤  ≤ 0.3, this function can be expressed as follows (with an accuracy within ±0.02):

where u(W 0) = 0.973 − 0.963 · W 0;

and v(W 0, ) = 31.7 − 185 ·  + 320 · ()2 − (15.85 − 109 ·  + 180 · ()2) · W 0.

5.1.3 Non-equal Individuals

In the previous subsection, we assumed that all the individuals in the society were equal, in the sense that their interaction strengths were equal. Now we shall examine the case where a single individual, say, individual number 1, is more convincing than the other individuals, which we express by assigning a greater interaction strength to this individual than to the other individuals of the society. That is, we have two sets (+ and −) of interaction parameters, μ 1 > μ i>1 = μ 2. The effect of this is that the identity of individual 1 becomes dominant, and we express this in terms of a parameter, the dominance, κ, and to understand how this is defined, we need to revisit the picture of the identity in Fig. 5.1. The maximum size of the identity of every individual was normalised to 1, and, at time t = 0, the identities had the same subdivision. A portion, W 0, was common to all the individuals, which is what we called the core identity , and the set of identity elements peculiar to each individual, W 1, was the same size for all. But now, one of the W 2 segments, namely, the one corresponding to W i,1, i ≠ 1, and which we might label for convenience, will be larger than all the other W 2 segments, which are labelled . And the identity particular to the individual no. 1 will develop differently from that of the other individuals, so if we denote it by , and the others by we have the following equations:

(5.5)

(5.6)

(5.7)

(5.8)

There are several ways to define the dominance of the identity elements of individual number 1 over those of the other individuals, but a reasonable requirement is the if there is no difference between the elements, the dominance should be zero. That requirement is met by defining the dominance of individual number 1 by

(5.9)

Figure 5.3 shows the result for the case where  =  = 0, and with the value of μ + for individual number 1 being 2, 4, 6 and 10 times that for the same parameter for the rest of the individuals. The result is that the dominance increases rapidly for a time, but then reaches a maximum and declines towards a steady-state value. Both the maximum value and the steady-state value increase with the increase in the ratio μ 1+/μ 2+. The steady-state values are 0.638, 1.400, 1.793 and 2.103, and in the limit of a very large value of the ratio, it is straightforward to show that the steady-state value is 2.2. What is happening in this case, is that all the identity elements peculiar to individual no. 1, , are transferred to each of the other individuals fairly quickly; that is, by a time close to the peak dominance, after which the elements peculiar to the other individuals, i.e. , are exchanged until their identities reach maximum capacity (normalised to unity).

Fig. 5.3
The dominance, κ, of individual no. 1 as a function of time (in units of time), for the case of  =  = 0, W 0 = 0.1,  =  = 0.2,  = 0.05, and  = 0.5, 0.3, 0.2 and 0.05, from the top to the bottom curve. The interaction strengths, μ, are in units of per unit time

Another case of some interest is to start with one of the foregoing results, say, the second from the bottom, i.e.  = 0.2, and then increase . The results are shown in Fig. 5.4, and what is happening is that is prevented from increasing, which leave room for to develop further. Both of these cases illustrate situations well known in reality: getting in and making ‘the hard sell’ early and then cutting off any further deliberations, and the importance of reducing the existing beliefs and structures before establishing a new belief. The first stage of revolution is increased uncertainty, or even chaos.

Fig. 5.4
The dominance of individual no. 1. The bottom curve is the same as the second lowest in Fig. 5.3 (but note the different timescale); the further curves result from increasing to 0.05, 0.1and 0.2

5.1.4 A More Elaborate Model

The previous model was the simplest extension of the binary interaction to a society of more than two individuals, and it had a couple of unrealistic features. First, the initial conditions; switching the interactions on at t = 0. While this was suitable for investigating the dynamic response, it is a very special and in practice unusual case, and it has the peculiar feature that the fluctuation , in the form of the dominance of individual no. 1, develops simultaneously with the rest of the society. A more realistic and interesting case is that the society is initially in an equilibrium state, and then, at a particular time, say, t = 0, one individual suddenly transforms itself into a more forceful figure (the prophet arises, so to speak). The second feature is that, dominance or not, the society develops into an equilibrium state where nothing more can happen; there is full consensus and no scope for change, which does not correspond to any real society. It is therefore of interest to look at a slightly more complex model that does not have these features; the added complexity being that we ascribe to each individual a capacity for generating new identity elements through observation and the process described in Sect. 2.3, as well as a capacity for rationalisation by eliminating identity elements through contemplation. These added activities are also characterised by a pair of strength parameters:

the strength of an individual’s interaction with the environment (generation of new identity elements through observation); and

the strength of the internal intellectual activity (rationalisation, elimination of existing identity elements),

and they are defined as follows:

- the number of new identity elements added to an individual’s identity, i.e. to W 1, in a time step Δt equals multiplied by Δt and by the size of the free space in the identity (defined as ω in Eq. 5.3); and

- the number of identity elements deleted from an individual’s identity, i.e. from W 1 and each of the (n − 1) segments W 2, by rationalisation in a time step Δt equals multiplied by the size of the segments and by Δt.

Here we need to make an important comment regarding two simplifications we have made in our models of the Social Bond. First, we are treating the individuals in a society as identical; i.e., as ‘average’ individuals. Second, we are dealing with segments of the identity, not with individual identity elements , and the segments are characterised by their size only; i.e., by the number of elements, without regard to any details of the elements, such as their importance. When we now introduce the two identity-internal processes above, we need to assume that they have the identical effect in each individual, and that this is represented by changes to segment sizes only, in order to maintain our two simplifications. That is, we are not only assuming that the individuals are identical as far as their interactions with each other are, but also that they think and observe alike. This puts additional strain on the efficacy of the model, and we will have to see if it can still reproduce some significant features of the behaviour of real societies.

The details of this model are then as follows:

The temporal evolution of the society takes place in two stages: In the first stage, there is no difference between the elements; i.e.  =  = μ + and  =  = μ −, and this is, except for the additional effect of the interaction with the environment, the situation we considered in Sect. 5.1.2. So we again simplify the notation in the same manner, and the two equations governing the evolution of the society are now:

(5.10)

(5.11)

We are primarily interested in the equilibrium state, which is the end of the first stage, in which case the left-hand side of the above equations is zero. Equation 5.10 then provides a relationship between W 1 and W 2, and inserting this into Eq. 5.11, we obtain a quadratic equation for W 2. The following two diagrams, Figs. 5.5 and 5.6, show some results of changing the values of the strengths of the internal processes, while keeping the other parameter values, i.e. the values of W 0, , n, μ +, and μ −, constant.

Fig. 5.5
The sizes of the two identity segments, W 1 and W 2 (shown multiplied by 10), and the values of the two characteristics of the society, the available identity space, ω, and the alignment, α, as functions of the ratio of the strength of the individual processes to that of the binary processes, i.e. the ratio μ 3/μ, for the case of W 0 = 0.1,  = 0.2, n = 10, and μ + = μ − = μ = 0.1

Fig. 5.6
The sizes of the two identity segments, W 1 and W 2 (shown multiplied by 10), and the values of the two characteristics of the society, the available identity space, ω, and the alignment, α, as functions of the ratio /, but with ·  = 0.01, for the case of W 0 = 0.1,  = 0.2, n = 10, and μ + = μ − = μ = 0.1

In Fig. 5.5 we have set , which represents the strength of the individual processes, and vary the ratio of this value to the value of μ + = μ −, which represents the binary processes (i.e. the interaction between the individuals) from 0.1 to 10. An increase in this ratio means that the individual is more concerned with exploring the world and understanding it on its own, rather than through interaction with the other members of the society—a less sociable individual. This is, as we would expect, reflected in a decline in the alignment, α, whereas the change in ω is only slight; the growth in the individual part of the identity, W 1, is off-set by the decline in the common part, W 2, as shown by the two dashed curves.

In Fig. 5.6, the main change is in the available identity space, ω, and the decline with an increase in the ratio is as we would expect. A small ratio indicates a contemplative individual in a state of ‘thoughtful uncertainty’ , with plenty of room for new insights and revelations, as is also indicated by the decrease in W 1. A greater value of the ratio indicates an individual very much attuned to its environment, and accepting the world as it is, filling up the identity in an unquestioning manner.

In a further interpretation of these results, we can think of ω as indicating how open the society is to considering new ideas; if ω = 0 there is no space available in the identity for new ideas. The alignment, α, indicates how unified the individuals are in their beliefs. A large value of ω and a small value of α, therefore, indicates a society that is vulnerable to change, or, conversely, the ratio α/ω could be interpreted as a measure of the stability of the society. The two diagrams above show that the greatest stability is achieved for a small value of the ratio of individual to binary processes and for a large value of acceptance versus contemplation.

Let us now turn our attention to the second stage of the evolution of this society. Having reached an equilibrium state at a point in time which we define as t = 0, one of the individuals suddenly becomes much more influential, in that its interaction strength with the other individuals becomes much greater than that of the other individuals, μ 2, which remains at its previous level. The interaction strength of this one individual is μ 1 (both positive and negative), and if we, as before denote the variables pertaining to this individual by the index a, and those pertaining to any one of the n − 1 other individuals by b, then we have the following set of equations (compare with Eqs. 5.5–5.8):

(5.12)

(5.13)

(5.14)

(5.15)

where

(5.16)

(5.17)

The locations and relationships of the various identity segments identified in the above set of equations are illustrated in Fig. 5.7, and comparing with Fig. 5.1, it is important to realise that the interpretation of the indices a, b and 1, 2 now has to take into account that the individuals are not all equal, and so the identity segment , which is created by element a, is located in the b-elements.

Fig. 5.7
Illustrating the segmentation of the identity, with a being the identity of the one, dominant individual, and b being that for the n − 1 other individuals. Note that appears in the b-identity

The diagram in Fig. 5.8 shows the development of the dominance, κ, as defined in Eq. 5.9, for three cases, each one starting with a different equilibrium situation at t = 0. There is a difference in the ultimate dominance, as t → ∞, but the most striking difference is the difference in the rate of increase. A high rate of increase, i.e. a large value of dκ/dt, means that the new information promoted by individual a is readily accepted, whereas a small value of the rate of increase means that the society is relatively immune to change. If we denote the society’s immunity by γ, and define it by

Fig. 5.8
The development of the dominance, κ, in the second stage, after the society has reached an equilibrium state at time t = 0. The vertical axis is the value of κ, and the horizontal axis is the time (in units of time). The model parameters are: W 0 = 0.1,  = 0.2,  =  = 0.75 for t > 0 (but 0.1 for t ≤ 0), and  =  = 0.1.  = 0.1, but  = 0.1, 02 and 0.5 in the three curves, from top to bottom, at the right-had edge of the diagram

(5.18)

then Fig. 5.9 shows some values of γ for a set of representative values of two temporary system characteristics, x and y, which we define as follows:

Fig. 5.9
The immunity, γ, defined in Eq. 5.18, as a function of the two auxiliary parameters x and y, defined in Eq. 5.19, with x along the horizontal axis, and the curves labelled by y: 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, from the lower to the upper. The model parameters are the same as in Fig. 5.8, except for the two μ 3 process strengths

(5.19)

The results presented in Fig. 5.9 show that a society, whose members have strong individual processes as compared to their interaction with other members (i.e. a greater value of y), will be more immune to the influence of a dominant personality (e.g. a demagogue, but, of course, also someone with a really good idea), which is what we would expect from a valid model. The results also show that, as far as immunity is concerned, the model gives preference to the individual’s internal rationalisation process over its observation process; we might say, to introspection over empiricism. This is mainly due to our definition of dominance; as Eq. 5.9 and Fig. 5.7b show, our definition relates to a dominant influence rather than to dominance over the individual, as it does not take into account the segment of the identity particular to the individual, i.e. W 1 − W 2.

Finally, to conclude the investigation of our basic model of the Social Bond, we might recall our earlier comment regarding the concept of stability , which we thought should be reflected in the ratio α/ω. It is now reasonable to expect that there should be a correlation between immunity and stability, and Fig. 5.10 presents the value of that ratio for the same values of x and y as in Fig. 5.9. While it is generally true that both immunity and stability increase with decreasing values of x and with increasing values of y, the sensitivity is less for stability than for immunity. In particular, this is true for the dependence on x, and the reason is the same as that given in the previous paragraph: immunity is concerned with the relationship between the W 2 segments of the identity, whereas both α and ω include the W 1 segment in their definitions.

Fig. 5.10
The ratio α/ω, identified as stability, as a function of the auxiliary parameters x and y, displayed in the same manner as in Fig. 5.9

5.2 Propagation

5.2.1 Propagation and Diffusion

While persuasion is a purpose of our interactions with other people, it is usually only one of several purposes, such as getting to know the other person, obtaining information from the other person, or imparting factual information. That is, the interaction ranges over a number of subjects. But in some instances, persuasion , in the form of propagating a particular belief , is the only purpose, in which case an important feature of the process is the extent to which the belief is propagated past the initial contact into the wider society. The model of society developed in the previous section allowed only a completely uniform change of its state, which is really an extreme case of averaging, not only over a large time interval, but also spatially, over all the individuals (the ‘per capita’ idea) . In reality, change will be initiated in a local part of society, either through locally changing environmental conditions, or through the emergence of an exceptional individual, and how such a local fluctuation might spread is the subject matter of this section.

Our use of ‘propagation’ is in the practical sense of spreading a message so as to establish a community defined by a Social Bond , much as it is used, e.g. in ‘The Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith’. We will not be concerned with the much more formal use as belief propagation in Bayesian networks and in Perl’s algorithm (see ‘Belief propagation’ in Wikipedia). But there is another concept closely related to our use of ‘propagation’, and for which there is a large body of knowledge  based on case studies, and that is the concept of diffusion of innovations . A standard reference in this area of research is the book Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers (2003) , which we encountered already in Sect. 4.5. Rogers presents a great number of case studies that illustrate and give insight into the characteristics of the diffusion of innovations , many of which are identical or similar to those we have identified for the interactions establishing a Social Bond. However, the majority of the case studies, and the focus of the book as a whole, is on innovations based on applications of technology and involving a product, so that if the innovation is adopted, it is possible to determine the resulting benefit (or otherwise). The successful application then becomes an essential factor in the diffusion of the innovation. But in the case where the innovation is a pure idea or ideology, there will generally not be any immediate and visible benefit. That is, the diffusion must rely mainly on the content of the message alone, not on any results of its application. This is the case of the interactions we have been considering, leading to the establishment of a Social Bond. Rogers points out that for this type of innovation interpersonal relationships are the most important ones (p. 93), but does not really consider it any further.

Another type of diffusion considered by Rogers is the diffusion of news, such as the news of the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of Princess Diana, and he includes a case study on the September 11 terrorist attack. The crucial factor here is saliency, the degree to which a news event is perceived as important by individuals, but this should not be confused with the extent to which the statements in a message overlap with identity elements . The importance can often simply be the extent of the event being reported; one person dying in a mudslide is much less newsworthy than a whole town being wiped out.

However, the main difference between diffusion and propagation , as it is explored in the present section, is that we are viewing it only as a repeated application of a binary interaction, whereas diffusion a la Rogers is the process in which an innovation is communicated through certain channels through a network which is contingent on the structure of the social system; issues that are not considered at all in this book. The recipient of the inputs that lead to adaptive behaviour and/or a change of identity is an average or generalised individual without any particular location in society; this is appropriate for our purpose of investigating the influence of technology on the evolution of society.

5.2.2 A First Model

We can use an extension of the simple model, defined by Eq. 4.3, to get a first look at what is involved by having three people, individuals a, b and c, interacting. They are assumed to be all from the same basic cultural background, so W 0 is common to all three, and, as before, individuals b and c have no preconceived opinions or ideas regarding the subject under consideration; i.e. W b,1 = W c,1 = 0, and  =  =  = 0. Individual a starts to persuade b, and as b accepts elements of a’s belief , b starts to persuade c, so that we now have two measures of the intensity of the interaction: the rate of alignment of b with a, and the rate of alignment of c with a. An example of the two alignments as functions of time is shown in Fig. 5.11.

Fig. 5.11
The alignment of individual b with individual a, upper curve, and the alignment of individual c with a, lower curve, for the case where  =  =  = 0,  =  = 0.1 per unit time, W_0 = 0.1, W a,1 = 0.9, and W b,1 = W c,1 = 0. The horizontal axis is units of time

If we say that the alignment of b with a is the measure of a primary bond , we would say that the alignment of c with a is the measure of a secondary bond . And, again, taking the alignment rate, as defined by Eq. 4.6, as a measure of the alignment process , the above example yields that the ratio of the primary to the secondary bond is 0.0404/0.01482 = 2.726. What this result shows, is that, if we think of individual a as the Master , individual b as a disciple, and individual c as a convert, it is inefficient for the Master to continue on persuading the disciple past a certain point instead of starting with a new disciple.

A (slightly) more realistic and interesting situation is that the Master starts indoctrinating a new disciple every T units of time, and instructs his disciples to choose a new convert every 3T (3 being the integer closest to 2.726). We are interested in seeing how the aggregate alignment , א, defined as the sum of the alignment of each disciple and convert, depends on the period T. However, for that to make any sense, we have to assume that, initially, there is no alignment between the belief of the Master and that of all other individuals with regard to the particular subject the Master wants to propagate (otherwise, just adding disciples and converts without any persuasion would still lead to an increase in א). Consequently, we set W 0 = 0 for all individuals, and for the Master, W 1 = 1.

With this, the alignment of a disciple with the Master, α(t), is given by a function similar to the upper function in Fig. 5.11. Then, a small amount of curve fitting shows that the alignment of a disciple with the Master (or convert with disciple), as a function of time, can be approximated by the following function,

(5.20)

where x is the value of W 1 for the individual driving the interaction, i.e. in the case of Master/disciple x = 1, and in the case of disciple/convert x = f(T, 1), and where τ(x) and ε(x) are as shown in Table 5.1. The half-time, t 0(x), is as defined in Eq. 4.6, and t is measured from the time of the start of the interaction.

Table 5.1
The parameters entering into the alignment function, as functions of the driving belief , x

x

τ(x)

ε(x)

t 0(x)

0.2

0.6804

0.9394

7.36

0.3

0.6630

0.8695

7.85

0.6

0.6406

0.7853

8.43

0.8

0.6120

0.6728

9.14

1.0

0.5854

0.4972

10.03

With some further curve fitting, the functions τ(x), ε(x) and t 0(x) can be approximated by the three functions

(5.21)

(5.22)

(5.23)

We now have the situation illustrated in Fig. 5.12, noting that the disciples only start the conversion process once the Master has finished with them. The final alignment of disciples is A = f(T; 0.9), the alignment of converts is BN = f(N · T; A − 0.1), and the aggregate alignment , א, is then given by the expressions in Table 5.2.

Fig. 5.12
The composition of the aggregate alignment , א, as a function of time, assuming that the Master takes on a new disciple, d, every T units of time, and each disciple takes on a new convert, c, every 3T units of time. The quantities A and BN are defined by the alignment function in Eq. 5.20

Table 5.2
The aggregate alignment, א, at the discrete times n · T

n = t/T

Aggregate alignment, א

1

A

2

2A + B1

3

3A + B2 + B1

≥4

n · A + (n − 3) · B3 + B2 + B1

As an example, Fig. 5.13 shows the aggregate alignment achieved over a period of 400 units of time, as a function of the choice of T. The behaviour as T goes to zero can be easily checked: Using, the values of the parameters given in Table 5.1 in Eq. 5.20, it follows that, to a reasonable approximation,

Fig. 5.13
The aggregate alignment , א, as a function of T, achieved over a period of 400 units of time, for the case of μ = 0.1

and as the number of A contributions goes as 1/T, the product is proportional to T −1/2.

However, this result is clearly unrealistic, as it would indicate that the most efficient strategy is for the Master to spend as little time as possible with each disciple, and the underlying reason for this result is that we have assumed that the interaction strength , μ, is a constant. For several reasons, such as the practical need for the Master to establish a relationship with the disciple, but also because of the effect of cognitive advantage , which was mentioned a couple of times earlier, and to which we shall return in the next section, μ should increase as the relationship develops. That is, the interaction becomes stronger as the disciple accepts more of the Master’s identity elements . To reflect this, the constant μ is, in the case of the Master/disciple interaction, replaced by the function

(5.24)

for the discipline/convert interaction, the fraction is replaced by W c,2/W b,2. With this, the alignment of a disciple with the Master, or a convert with its disciple, as a function of time, takes the form shown in Fig. 5.14.

Fig. 5.14
The alignment, α, as a function of time, for the case of x = 0.8, μ = 0.3 and γ = 0.01

As before, we can find an analytic approximation to this function:

(5.25)

where, in the case of Master/disciple x = 1, and in the case of disciple/convert x = f(T, 1), with the following values for τ(x), ε(x), and t 0(x) (Table 5.3).

Table 5.3
The parameters entering into the alignment function, Eq. 5.20, as functions of the driving belief , x

x

τ(x)

ε(x)

t 0(x)

0.2

0.8904

2.0988

15.83

0.4

0.8760

1.9126

16.36

0.6

0.8559

1.7005

16.97

0.8

0.8245

1.4412

17.68

1.0

0.7638

1.0675

18.55

With some further curve fitting, the functions τ(x), ε(x) and t 0(x) can be approximated by the three functions

(5.26)

(5.27)

(5.28)

With this function, g(t, x), in the expression for the aggregate alignment , א, as defined by Table 5.2, the result is as shown in Fig. 5.15, and there is now a definite maximum around T = 23.

Fig. 5.15
The aggregate alignment , א, achieved over a time period of 400 units of time, as a function of the time spent by the Master in indoctrinating a disciple, T, in units of time, showing a maximum at T = 23

5.2.3 A Second Model

The interaction models we developed in Sects. 3.3–3.6 are really only applicable to a small, homogeneous, and closed society, such as a small secret society centred on a guru-like personality. On the scale of, say, a nation, the structure of society is complex and multi-dimensional. There is a government structure (federal, state, council), a political structure (parties, branches), and industry structure (sectors, companies), a professional structure (unions, institutes, academies) and so on. A fluctuation has to propagate in this inhomogeneous environment, experiencing not only different conditions within each structural component, but also the effects of the transitions from one component to another. To make a start on developing and understanding of this, we propose the following, highly simplified model of the propagation from one structural component into another, as illustrated in Fig. 5.16. In this illustration and in the numerical calculations to follow, the inner component and each of the outer components all have the same number of members; but in general our model allows for the inner and outer component components to have different number of members.

Fig. 5.16
A simple model of the propagation of a fluctuation from one structural component of society into another. The fluctuation is initiated by the central member of the inner component, propagates to the other members of this component, and then each of these members becomes the carrier of the fluctuation into a sector of the outer component

The propagation of the fluctuation from the central member of the inner component, who we shall call the prophet , to the other members of this component is described by modelling each of the two components by the model described in Sect. 5.1.4 (i.e. W 0 = 0.1 and  = 0.2 in each component), but making one of the individuals take on a dual role. Individual no. 2 of the inner component is also individual no. 1 of the outer component and, for reasons of simplicity, the behaviour of this individual, who we shall call the acolyte , is determined solely by its membership of the inner component. The individuals of these two components are identical, and so they are initially in the same state of equilibrium for t < 0, and governed by the same two parameter pairs, μ 1 and μ 2. At time t = 0, individual no. 1 of the inner component suddenly becomes dominant (i.e. becomes the prophet), as defined by the parameter pair μ 3, and the evolutions of the two components start to diverge. As the behaviour of these two components for t > 0 depends on the six parameters μ 1, μ 2, and μ 3, a detailed display of this behaviour would take up too much space in this chapter, so we just illustrate a single feature of the behaviour.

In Fig. 5.17 we show the evolution for a particular case of parameter values, assuming that, as far as the interaction with the other individuals in the outer component, the acolyte remains a normal member of society (i.e. μ 3 = μ 2 in the outer component). As we see, the effect is very small; the dominance of element no. 1 goes from about 0.075 to 0.095.

Fig. 5.17
The two dashed curves belong to the inner component, with the upper curve being the dominance of identity element no. 1, and the lower one being the unoccupied part of the identity of individuals in the inner component. The two solid curves belong to the outer component, with the lower curve being the dominance of identity element no. 1, and the upper curve being the unoccupied part of the identity of individuals in that component. The parameter values are  = 0.2,  = 1,  =  = 0.2,  = 2,  = 1, n = 10, and the time step is equal to 0.005. However, in the outer component  =  and  =

But we could also assume that, in addition to being indoctrinated and having its identity changed, the acolyte also becomes more influential in the outer component, e.g. by training and/or better means of communication, and we express this by setting μ 3 in the outer component equal to a new, time-dependent strength parameter, μ 4, defined as follows:

(5.29)

with μ 4(t = 0) = μ 2. Here, x expresses the speed with which the acolyte learns the technique of persuasion from the prophet , and y expresses the degree to which the acolyte manages to emulate the prophet, with 0 ≤ y ≤ 1. The result in Fig. 5.17 is that of x = 0, in which case the value of y is irrelevant.

In Fig. 5.18 we show what is basically the same case as in Fig. 5.17, except that we have introduced the new variable strength of Eq. 5.29. We see that, as we would expect, the rate with which the acolyte manages to emulate the persuasion technique of the prophet  determines the time delay in the propagation of the dominance from the master to the individuals in the outer component, but the equilibrium dominance is the same in both components. Figure 5.19 is again basically the same case, but now with y = 0.5, and the result is that the equilibrium value of the dominance is less in the outer component than in the inner. The equilibrium value of the dominance, which does not depend on the value of x, is shown as a function of y in Fig. 5.20.

Fig. 5.18
The same basic case as in Fig. 5.16, but with the learning speed, x, equal to 0.1, and the attainment, y, equal to 1. The learning speed determines the delay in the propagation from the inner to the outer component

Fig. 5.19
As in Fig. 5.17, except that the attainment, y, is equal to 0.5

Fig. 5.20
The dominance (full curve) and free part of the identity (dot-dash curve) as a function of the attainment parameter, y. The two dashed lines are the equilibrium values in the inner component, shown for reference only

In this model, the propagation from the inner to the outer component is by means of a person, the acolyte (or disciple). However, there is the possibility of propagation across component boundaries by means of what we might call ‘broadcasting’, where the central, or dominant figure interacts directly, mainly through electronic media, with the individuals in remote components. That type of propagation, in which applications of technology feature prominently, involves some further considerations and corresponding changes to the model, but these are not pursued here.

5.3 Stability

5.3.1 Some Initial Thoughts

The simplest and most general concept of a society is as a group of individuals interacting in order to realise a common purpose. What binds them together is the benefit they receive, or perceive that they receive, from realising this purpose. The purpose is realised by means of the group interacting as a whole with its environment, but there are two other interactions that take place. One is that the members of the group also interact with the environment as individuals and become diverted from the common purpose, and the second is that subgroups within the society interact in order to pursue objectives that may or may not be beneficial to the purpose of the group as a whole.

An example of the latter can be presented, if we consider the whole world to be a single society. The interactions in this world society are currently predominantly on a nation-to-nation basis, as the embryonic organisations exercising a world-wide management function do so often at the discretion of nations (e.g. in the implementation of sanctions). However, in the vacuum left by the absence of any effective world government structure, a structure is emerging that is based on a combination of shared culture and commercial interests—on alliances . The component of this structure that is furthest developed is the coalition of Western nations under the leadership of the United States, who is seeing its hegemony, built on great national resources, technological supremacy, military power and, through some of its allies, the remnants of a colonial past, with its accompanying exploitation of less developed parts of the world, being increasingly challenged and steadily diminished. This component consists of numerous treaties and agreements, such as NATO (which has managed to extend the meaning of ‘North Atlantic’ to include Turkey) and the ANZUS treaty , with Australia as its most obsequious member. Other potential components, based, e.g. on China, Russia and possibly India (unless it is enticed into the US alliance), are in various stages of development. An interesting, although strictly Marxist, view of such transformations of power and sovereignty is contained in the book Empire, by Hardt and Negri (2000).

The relationships of a nation to its fellow nations in the world society should be as much an issue for the citizens of the nation as nation-internal issues, and be subject to the same control and influence as discussed above. That is clearly not the case; not only do nations regularly engage in activities that would not be approved by their citizens, but the feedback process between the government and its citizens is much more restricted. Many international agreements, on anything from trade to arms control, are negotiated in secrecy (e.g. the Trans-Pacific Partnership), and some are never disclosed, under the cover of ‘the national interest’. There is, therefore, in the matter of the functioning of this feedback process and the effectiveness of collective intelligence , a definite distinction to be made between its two levels (national and international), This is a direct reflection of the difference in the state of development of the two systems; the world society is somewhere between a tribal and a feudal stage of a national society.

If we, for a moment, see the evolution of society as the development of a hierarchical structure, then we could distinguish two different processes at work. If at one stage a society consists of a collection of one type of structural elements (e.g. families, clans, tribes, fiefdoms, nations), then, in a first process, the weaker elements will be absorbed into the stronger ones, resulting in a smaller collection of larger elements, but still of the same type. These will then compete for supremacy, and once they are sufficiently exhausted, a new type of element is created in a second process, one step up on the hierarchical ladder; a system with the original type of elements as its elements. This will have happened in many places, so that now there is a collection of these new elements, and the two processes start again. The world is now at the stage, where the elements are nations, and with the first process starting to form alliances . It would be good if we could avoid this process and the accompanying struggle to exhaustion (or worse), and proceed directly to the second process, focusing on forming a society of nations, with an overarching, effective structure, with global laws and institutions, including enforcement. This does not mean that nations disappear, any more than any of the other element types on the ladder have disappeared; they just change their nature when they become part of a society.

If we think of interactions as representing a form of energy, then any society may be characterised by two opposing forms of energy: a positive energy that strengthens the society in the pursuit of its objective, and a negative energy that diverts the members from the common purpose and thereby weakens or even disrupts the operation of the society. This basic behaviour can be observed in societies of all sizes and types. In a family, there are many benefits of a stable relationship, both economic and emotional, but interactions with the environment can also have a disruptive effect, as observed in the divorce rate. In professional and sport societies, and in clubs of all sorts, there are benefits of cooperation, which is why they became established, but we can also observe how many such societies wither away due to internal disagreements and external pressures. And even states and nations can fall apart; examples of the former are the French and Russian revolutions, of the latter the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Sudan. Hence, the issue of stability must be a concern for any society.

Pursuing, for a moment, the picture of the two types of energy, we are reminded of two analogies with physics. The first is with the stability of substances, for example, water (which we used as an example earlier), where there is a binding energy attracting the water molecules to each other, and a thermal energy, in the form of the kinetic energy of the molecules and measured by the temperature of the water, that acts to break the binding. At low temperatures, below 0 ℃, the binding energy is much greater than the thermal energy, and the molecules form a solid–ice. At 0 ℃ the thermal energy becomes large enough to disrupt the binding forces and turn the ice into water. The substance has lost its structure, but the molecules still form a substance. The analogue case in society would be a revolution, where the whole structure and fabric of society is disrupted, but the people still form a recognisable entity. Finally, when the temperature reaches about 100 ℃, the thermal energy is great enough to overcome any attraction between the molecules, and they are dispersed as water vapour. The analogous case would be a society that, through a combination of internal strife and external pressures, is dissolved and its members absorbed in other societies, such as, e.g. the Etruscans.

If we characterise the relative strength of the two groups of interactions by a single parameter, it could be thought of as the ‘temperature’ of society. Alternatively, this ‘temperature’ could be thought of as characterising the balance between the benefits of being a member of society and conforming to the rules of this society, and the restrictions and loss of personal freedom these rules represent. This parameter determines the stability of the society, and if the interactions that decrease the binding become dominant, the society might fall apart. This is the equivalent of a phase transition in thermodynamics, the ‘temperature’ of society reaches the ‘melting point’.

The second analogy is the one reflected in the title of this book—the analogy between a society and a molecule, with individuals as atoms and the Social Bond representing the energy that forms them into a society. It is generally true that the dissociation temperature of a molecule, i.e. the temperature at which the thermal energy overcomes the covalent binding energy, is lower the greater the complexity of the molecule. But for large organic molecules involved in processes, such as the ones in living organisms, the efficiency of the process also depends on the temperature (i.e. on the energy available); below a certain temperature , the process comes to a halt. In many organisms, including the human, this is taken care of by regulating the temperature of the environment in which the processes take place; in our case, to a narrow range around 37 ℃. Our analogy would then say that the ‘temperature’ of society also has to be regulated, and the question arises as to how society should be structured in order to make the acceptable range as wide as possible; essentially a question of the resilience of society as a system.

As an aside, in Australia the current debate about education seems to miss the point that one of the important benefits of a common public education system is that it provides perhaps the strongest of the binding interactions, and the debate about immigrants and refugees seem to miss the point that the influx into a society has both a positive (invigorating) and a negative (perturbing) effect, and that optimising the balance between the two requires active, real-time management (i.e. ‘temperature regulation’).

The models presented earlier illustrated the dynamics associated with a change in the core identity of a society (or a component of society), but did not provide any indication as to how great such a change had to be before it would become irreversible and lead to a catastrophic event. That is, what is modelled is only the change in individual identity that, when aggregated, would allow an irreversible ‘flipping’ of the core value of the society. This issue, which we shall take up in Sect. 5.3.3, was discussed for a different situation in an earlier paper, where it was shown that random fluctuations in the structure of a system will eventually lead to instability. These are the fluctuations that we neglected or, more correctly, averaged out through our method of calculation. An interesting project would be to combine that random mechanism with the growth of dominance modelled above; it should show what every revolutionary has known, that to effect a significant and permanent change in an existing system , you first have to create chaos (the random fluctuations) and then present the new system as a solution, not only to the problems with the old system, but also as an end to the chaos.

At this point, it is both useful and appropriate to acknowledge that there is, within the discipline of political philosophy , a body of work related to the structure and stability of societies, and while it is not within the scope of this book to attempt any form of review of that body of work, the account given by one of its prominent authors, John Rawls , in his book Political Liberalism (Rawls 2005), puts forward a number of concepts that have analogies in the present work. They have to be considered analogies, as they are presented in the utopian environment of an isolated democratic society of idealised citizens, with little or no regard for the issues currently affecting real societies or for the accelerating rate at which those issues are changing, and with no mention of the role of technology, but they provide valuable insight into the issue of political stability . Briefly, Rawls defines stability in terms of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines (i.e. world views, incl. religions) on a political conception of justice. He promotes a conception of justice as fairness, but the important insight is that this conception is not the intersection of the doctrines existing within the society nor, indeed, any one of them. Its content is expressed in terms of certain fundamental ideas seen as implicit in the political culture of a democratic society and presented as freestanding and expounded apart from, or without reference to, any wider background (of comprehensive doctrines) (Part One, §2). The importance of this can be see, if we compare a society based on such a political conception of justice with an association of parties, each with its own comprehensive doctrine, and based on an agreement which, presumably, represents an equilibrium point in the sense that it would not be advantageous for any party to violate it. But each party is ready to pursue its own interests at the expense of the others, and should conditions change they may do so. This situation is what Rawls calls a modus vivendi , and its stability is contingent on the circumstances; in particular, on the balance of power. Whereas ‘an overlapping consensus is not merely a consensus on accepting certain authorities, or on complying with certain institutional arrangements, founded on a convergence of self- or group interests. Both the object of consensus—the political conception of justice - and its affirmation are grounded in moral concepts, including the conceptions of society and of citizens as persons, and an account of the political virtues through which those principles are embodied in human character and expressed in public life’ (p. 147).

Earlier, we raised the issue of choosing a structure for a society that would make it as resilient as possible. On the level of the global society, with nations as the elements, one particular structure is that formed by alliances , as noted above. Aa distinguishing feature is that it has a dominant nation, the nation that is able to attract other nations because it has something to offer. This is usually some form of economic incentive, but always involving protection against those who are not in the alliance. This ‘us and them’ view of the world is essential to maintaining the cohesion of the alliance, and submitting to it is a condition of joining the alliance. That is, the relationship between the nations within the alliance is not that of a democratic assembly; it is based on belief , much as in a religion. If a nation would perceive an action proposed by the dominant nation (i.e. the high priest) to be foolhardy or even immoral, it would rather go along with it than to be branded a heretic. The result is a lack of flexibility and innovation within the alliance and of the ability to respond rationally to changes outside the alliance (recall the wise words of George Washington, copied towards the end of Sect. 4.1).

What we have termed ‘alliance ’ includes what Rawls terms‘association ’, and our ‘collective intelligence ’ is close to Rawls’ ‘public reason’ . Rawls sees a sense of justice as an innate feature of being human; we see the basic feature of the human intellect as the ability to discern the moral principles that will support survival in the given circumstances. The will to survive is the basic feature of all living organisms; it is the essence of life. The human is simply the species with the (by far) greatest ability to realise this feature as a strategy for living.

The issue of the stability of society has continued to attract attention. In particular, Rawls’ assertion that people with differing comprehensive doctrines would be able to affirm a common political conception of justice through the faculty of public reason has been questioned (Grose 2008), and (Chow 2009) discusses issues with Rawls’ argument for a congruence between the desire to act justly and a person’s own good. However, none of these arguments change the importance of Rawls’ work for us, it is just that we replace his sense of justice with our will to survive as the a priori, and insert an additional step in the process of generating the political conception of justice.

5.3.2 A First Model

We have developed a particular view of society as a complex and dynamic system, in which the Social Bond plays a major role in maintaining the relationships between the system elements. The complexity is reflected in the structure of society, with its vast array of elements, such as individuals, families, clubs, associations , companies, government bodies and more; all interconnected by a similarly vast array of relationships. In the language of thermodynamics , such a system is in a state far from equilibrium and, in the face of random disruptive forces, constant work is needed to maintain this state. The question then arises as to the stability of the system ; which states are stable and which are not, where a stable system is one in which the damage caused by the disruptive forces is less than the ability of the system to repair it. Using the analogy with a molecule, the covalent bond provides the binding energy that maintains the molecule, and the disruptive force is represented by the thermal energy of the atoms. The molecule is stable as long as the kinetic energy of the atoms is less than the potential energy of the bonds. But, as mentioned already in the Introduction, this analogy is severely limited, in that both what holds the society together and what tends to disrupt it are not energies, but processes, and society is not an unchanging system, like a molecule, but a highly dynamic one, and with an accelerating rate of change. So, in addition to the issue of the stability of a system configuration at any particular point in time, there is the issue of the dynamic stability; that is, the stability of the evolution of the system. In this section, we present two views of the stability of society.

Perhaps the greatest limitation of the analogy with a molecule is that, while in the molecule the two energies are clearly distinguishable, in society, as a system, the two groups of processes—those maintaining the system and those tending to disrupt it—are not easily distinguishable; for example, the same person can be involved in processes in both groups. To overcome this problem, we again apply our system methodology of simplifying, or abstracting, to the extent that the effort involved in applying the simplified model is less than the value of the resultant insight and understanding. Our point of departure is the observation that any society, of any form and size—a family, a sports club, a company, a political party, a nation—includes some form of management. Consequently, we can always partition a society into two elements according to their functions: The element whose function is to manage the society, and the element that comprises all the other functions, and we shall call these two elements Government and Life. And while there is nothing in this view that limits it to a nation as the society, our model is aimed at nations.

The first thing to note about these two elements is that they are functional elements. That is, it is not a partitioning of the people in society into two groups, but of the activities taking place in society. The people performing the Government functions also perform functions in the Life element; such as the functions of parents. It is also possible to characterise the two elements by the types of organisations in which the functions are performed, such as the judiciary and the legislature in the case of Government, and family and corporation in the case of Life.

Our definition of the element identified as Government is narrowly focused, as follows:

1. a.

Interacting with the people of the society to determine their will with regard to the development of society, both internally and with regard to its membership of the world society;

2. b.

formulating laws that ensure that the development of society is in accordance with the will of the people, and that it progresses in a continuous and stable manner; and

3. c.

administering the operation of, and enforcing compliance with, these laws.

The meaning of ‘laws’ is to be taken as including such words as acts, regulations and rulings, and these laws concern much more than the most common issues, such as individual behaviour in society, as enforced by the police. In particular, they include laws that define the structure of society, in the form of wealth distribution (taxation), power relationships (employer vs. employee, corporate structure and responsibility), and, indeed, the role and operation of Government itself. But even so, this definition of Government is much narrower than our understanding of what functions ‘government’ normally includes, such as education, health care, research and defence. There are two reasons for this: One, it provides the partitioning of society most suited to our purpose; that is, a view of society that exposes its dynamic stability . Two, it avoids the issue of public versus private ownership, and the extent to which government should be involved in commercial activities (an issue we shall take up in Sect. 6.3). The element identified as Life then encompasses all the other activities people are engaged in; they are so manyfold and varied that they do not fit into any single taxonomy or ordering, but there are some characteristics that can be useful in thinking about these activities, as was noted in Sect. 2.2.

Our two-element model is illustrated in Fig. 5.21, and we see that the relationship between these two elements has the form of a feedback loop. Life evaluates the state of society and decides on appropriate changes by exercising its collective intelligence within the life processes, Government accepts these changes, formulates laws to express the changes as changes to the framework within which the Life processes take placeand implements and enforces these changes. Life then progresses within this new framework, and the whole process repeats. Note that the two arrows between Life and Government represent flows of information; Life informs Government of desired changes, and Life receives information about the Government’s implementation (not necessarily only from Government).

Fig. 5.21
The three main functions of Government, and the interaction of Government with the other element of society, Life

To approach the issue of how the view of society shown in Fig. 5.21 can be used to understand the issue of the stability of society, it is useful to draw an analogy with another simple feedback circuit, the one applied in an oven, such as a kitchen oven. It consist of a heating element with a power rating of P, a temperature measuring device, a means of selecting the desired oven temperature, T, and a control element that switches the heating element on if the oven temperature falls a certain amount, a, below T and off if the temperature reaches the same amount, a, above T. The behaviour of this circuit is illustrated in Fig. 5.22a, and the dashed line in this figure indicates a lower temperature limit, below which whatever is processed in the oven is ruined.

Fig. 5.22
The behaviour of the oven model for three operating cases

The oven temperature is a periodic function of time, with the period divided into two parts: q, where power is turned off, and the temperature decreases, and p, where power is turned on, and the temperature increases. The downward slope of the temperature function, shown as the angle α, is determined by the heat loss; i.e. by how well the oven is insulated. The ‘upward’ slope, defined as the angle β, is determined by the power rating P, and both slopes are, of course, also dependent of the heat capacity of the oven and whatever is in it. We have put ‘upward’ in quotation marks because the slope is only truly upwards (i.e. β > α) if P exceeds the heat loss. The average power consumed by the oven is simply P · p/(p + q).

Consider now the situation, shown in Fig. 5.22b, where the selected temperature is increased at some constant rate, indicated by the angle γ. It is evident that this puts an additional requirement on the minimal value of P, as it must now equal at least the heat loss plus the power needed to increase the temperature of the oven and whatever is in it (i.e. β > α + γ), and the average power consumed has increased, as q has become smaller, and p larger.

Finally, Fig. 5.22c shows the case where there is a delay, d, between when the temperature hits the lower limit and when power is applied to the heating element. The temperature continues to decrease in this time interval, and if d > D, the oven has failed in its task of supporting the process for which it was needed.

To relate this model of an oven to our two-element view of society, the heating element represents Government, the oven temperature represents some measure of what we above called the quality of the Life processes, the selected temperature corresponds to the will of the people, and the heat loss represents the disruptive forces. The condition β > α then says that the capability of the Government to enforce law and maintain the state of society must exceed the disruptive forces.

However, the Life processes are not only of the disruptive sort; they also result in all the changes that form the long-term evolution of society, and this is represented by the constant rate of increase of the selected temperature in Fig. 5.22b. These changes include those driven by new applications of technology, but also (hopefully) changes resulting from new insights into and understanding of the workings of society. The increase in the power demand represents the increased demand on the performance of Government, i.e. on the performance of the management functions included in the Government element in Fig. 5.21, as a result of the changes to society, and the implication of the accelerating rate of change is obvious.

The final case in this analogy is the one which includes the delay, d, as shown in Fig. 5.22c. It is the most realistic case, as the legislative and executive processes involved require some time before there can be any implementation and enforcement. The implication is clear: The longer the delay, the greater the fluctuation from the desired state of the society, and if it becomes too long, society becomes unstable and collapses (e.g. revolution, genocide, catastrophic war). This should be compared with our discussion around Fig. 2.4, which demonstrated the effect of the accelerating rate of change on the relationship between the delay and the magnitude of the fluctuation.

Instead of viewing Fig. 5.21 as a feedback loop, we can view it as depicting a ‘macroscopic’ Social Bond between Government and the governed. And indeed, the same properties that were identified, at the end of Sect. 4.5, as important for the Social Bond to be effective apply here also: sincerity on the part of the government, and trust on the part of the citizens. When the government stops listening and does what it believes will keep it in power or in order to pursue an ideology, rather than what the people want, and masks this with a smokescreen of disinformation, the relationship becomes dysfunctional, and at some stage the citizens lose their trust in the government. This provides fertile ground for any anti-government, populist rhetoric, as has been demonstrated many times, most recently in the US.

5.3.3 A Second Model

A very different view of society as a system and of the concept of stability is one in which the elements are the individual members of the society, as was the case in Sect. 5.1, and in which they are identical with respect to the function of interest to us. They all cooperate equally in carrying out the function and producing the system output. Examples of such systems can be found both in the social and the physical sphere; for example, as the productivity of organisations (companies, military units, sports teams, political parties, etc.), markets (consumers), physical many-body systems (lasers) and engineered systems (phased arrays). A model of such a system was detailed in (Aslaksen 2003) ; the following is only an outline with sufficient detail to make the results obtained by executing the model plausible.

The model system consists of n identical elements, each producing an output characterised by two parameters, an amplitude which, because we are only interested in exploring the concept of coherence , we may set equal to 1, and a phase, φ, which can take on any value in the range −π to +π. That is, the element output can be represented by a two-dimensional vector in a polar coordinate system, with a fixed length of 1, and the system output shall be the sum of these n vectors.

Each element is subject to an influence (or disruptive force) that tends to change the phase in a random fashion; such changes are considered as failures of the elements and take place at a constant phase failure rate, λ. But there is also an interaction between the elements that tends to align their outputs and which acts as follows: Each element sees the combined output of the other n − 1 elements, called the interaction, and, the phase of each element is aligned with the interaction phase (set arbitrarily at φ = 0) at a rate, the phase repair rate, μ, which is determined by the product of the interaction amplitude, E, and a constant repair coefficient, μ 0. Consequently, the distribution of the phase of an element, ϕ, with −π ≤ ϕ ≤ π, is given by

(5.30)

where

For this system, we make the following two definitions:

Definition 1

The system amplitude is the vector sum of all the element outputs, divided by the number of elements, n. It is a stochastic function, and takes on values in the range 0–1.

Definition 2

The measure of the coherence of the system shall be the expectation value of the system amplitude. It takes on values in the range 0–1.

If the system is initially in a state where all the element phases are identical, the coherence is initially total, but under the influence of the failure process, the phases of the element outputs will start to differ from one another and the system output will start to decrease in a random manner. That is, both the system amplitude and the system phase become stochastic variables. If there is no repair process , i.e. μ = 0, the coherence decays to its minimum value, which may be denoted by η 0 and is a decreasing function of n. But if μ > 0, then the coherence will stabilise at a steady-state value greater than η 0, η(n), given by

(5.31)

If the system is initially in a chaotic state where each element phase is equally likely to be anywhere in the range −π to +π, the coherence χ starts out being equal to η and then increases to its steady-state value, Eq. 5.31; this is illustrated in Fig. 5.23. This occurs because the element phases lock together and fluctuate around the phase of the system output, but the value of this system phase is arbitrary, and it also ‘drifts’ in either direction (like Brownian motion). That is, the frequency spectrum of the system phase has significant components at both high and low frequencies, whereas the frequency spectrum of the amplitude has no significant components at low frequencies, which is why the amplitude rather than the phase is chosen as a measure of coherence .

Fig. 5.23
Mean (heavy line) and standard deviation of the system amplitude for a system of 100 elements with λ = 0.0005 per unit time, μ = 0.02 per unit time. The TimeStep equals 30 units of time (i.e. 30 calculation steps). From Aslaksen (2003)

If we run the model for a long time (i.e. many time steps), we can observe that the system phase angle, φ, ‘flips’ to a new value from time to time. This may be interpreted as the system flipping spontaneously from one operating mode to another. What happens is, of course, that so many of the element phases take on random values at the same time that the system is momentarily back to its initial state of random phases, and then goes through the transient locking phase again, but to a new value of φ. The relevance of coherence can now be illustrated by an noting that such ‘flips’ in the system phase can be observed in some everyday situations, one of them being a meeting to discuss and finalise a position on an issue. Documentation on the issue has been circulated previously, and the issue has been discussed one-on-one with all participants prior to the meeting, with everyone agreeing that a certain general direction would be the preferred one. However, during the meeting, discussing the details of the preferred direction, the opinions of the participants start swinging around in all directions, and suddenly lock on to a direction which is quite different to the one preferred prior to the meeting. No new facts were presented, no new aspects of the issue were raised that had not been raised before; the ‘flip’ is solely a result of the system interaction. It must be that feelings, opinions, attitudes, etc. that are repressed in a one-on-one situation because one wants to appear rational can blossom in a system setting; rationality is no longer the main criterion, it is the good feeling of being in agreement with everybody else.

Another, and more specialised, interpretation of these flips is as failures of the system, in the sense that the system performance (which is now characterised by both amplitude and phase) deviates from its normal (or specified) value. The dependence of the MTBF on the ratio μ/λ and the number of elements, n, and the results are shown in Table 5.4.

Table 5.4
The MTBF for the coherence model, in units of 1/λ

μ/λ

n

10

20

50

5

40

300

650

10

54

450

1200

20

180

765

From Aslaksen (2003)

In the model so far, there has been no external influence, and therefore nothing that could fix the phase of the system output; it was arbitrary. We now amend the model such that whenever an element output undergoes a ‘failure’ and the phase angle is set to a random value, this random value is multiplied by (1 − ε). That has the effect of making φ = 0 the preferred value of the system output, and some qualitative observations (from repeated running of the model) are:

1. a.

Even such a small external influence as ε = 0.01 is enough to ensure that the system phase aligns itself to φ = 0.

2. b.

The duration of the transient ‘locking-in’ behaviour is now dependent on both μ/λ and ε, with an increase in ε from 0.01 to 0.1 decreasing the duration by at least a factor of three.

3. c.

The MTBF increases dramatically with ε; above ε = 0.05 no failures could be detected.

The influence represented by ε can be interpreted as management effort, e.g. in the form of edict or guidance, but can also be a truly external influence, such as fashion. Another interpretation of ε is that it could represent the degree of consensus among the members of the group making up the system with respect to their values and purposes. If we accept this interpretation, our model shows the high leverage one may obtain from a small amount of training or indoctrination in a social setting. Second, it correlates with the high importance accorded to developing a company culture and maintaining conformity to this culture in modern management theory and practice; an outstanding example of this is General Electric, where cultural conformity was put ahead of any performance measure (Welch 2001) .

Finally, a considerably more complex model of a self-sustaining system exhibiting the life cycle phases of growth, survival, and decay was developed some time ago (Aslaksen 2004) . The model, which is anchored in thermodynamics, does not make any assumptions about the functionality or physical nature of the system, and only very general assumptions about the structure of the system and the processes involved in growth and decay. As such, it could be developed further for the special case of a society, which would be of interest because the central features of the model are that the interaction between the system and its environment depends on the match between the structures of the system and the environment, and that the decay of the system is caused by fluctuations in this match. In the context of the Social Bond, we would now identify system structure with the content of the identity, and the match between the two structures as the degree of cognitive advantage . However, this further development is still in the future, and the existing model is too complex to be presented here.

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© The Author(s) 2018

Erik W. Aslaksen

The Social Bondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68741-4_6

6. Implications and Conclusion

Erik W. Aslaksen1

(1)

Gumbooya Pty Ltd, Allambie Heights, NSW, Australia

Erik W. Aslaksen

Email: erik@gumbooya.com

The view of society presented in the previous chapters is just that—a particular view of its evolution focused on the information exchange between its individuals, resulting in the Social Bond , as the main enabler of the force driving the evolution: the collective intelligence . You might now say “so what?”. Is there any benefit in adopting this view? Does this view contribute to our understanding of the evolution of society, which was the purpose I stated in the Introduction. Well, that is really up to you to decide, based on your own beliefs and assessment of the world around you—or, as we would now say, on your identity. But adopting this view has a number of implications, and in the next three sections I consider some of these.

6.1 A Measure of The Good Society

The fundamental premise of the view of society presented in this book is that, in the long run, it is the exercise of the collective intelligence , as constituted by the interaction of the individual intelligence and its exercise through the application of will of all the members of the society, that determines the evolution of society. And, based both on past experience and on the lack of any credible alternative, the direction of this evolution is the one most likely to guarantee the continued evolution of society as the life-form of the human species. Consequently, at any point in time, a measure of the state of society should be the extent to which it supports and promotes the exercise of our intelligence; i.e., this becomes a measure of The Good Society , introduced in Sect. 4.7. For the moment, let us label that measure by X, with X = 1 signifying a perfect society. That extent is a function of two variables: one a characteristic of the individual—an aspect of the individual’s moral character—and the other the restraining circumstances in which the individual finds itself. The reason for differentiating these two variables is that they relate to the individual in principally different ways. The moral aspect, which we shall identify with corruption, while a measure of society, is something the individual can decide to participate in or not; it is, to a certain extent, a measure of a person’s willpower. Whereas the restraining circumstances are beyond the individual’s control.

Before continuing with the detailed development of the measure X, it is appropriate to acknowledge that there are a number of other measures of The Good Society contained in a significant body of work, often under the heading of Social Quality. They fall broadly into two groups: those that focus on “hard” data, such as data on income, wealth, education, and health, and those that focus on “soft” data, based on people’s perception of wellbeing and happiness, as obtained from surveys. Some measures also combine the two types of data. The measure proposed below falls squarely into the first group, and was chosen for its easily demonstrated relevance to the free exercise of intelligence , as we have defined it, and, above all, for the availability of data for a significant part of the world from organisations that can be expected to continue to produce this data on a regular basis. The data sources are detailed in Appendix A.

If we denote the moral aspect by w, and the extent of restraint by r, the dependence of X on these two parameters can be expressed by the equation

(6.1)

but no significance should be given to this particular expression at this point in our development, as we have not defined how r and w are measured.

The measure of the Good Society is essentially one of information-processing , and until recently the processing power was provided by the collective brains of the members of society. But now information technology provides an additional means of processing, and control of this process is effectively the same as control of peoples’ brains and of the evolution of society. This clearly raises some significant novel philosophical questions of an ethical nature—the beginning of an information ethics —and so the purpose of the measure proposed in this section can be seen as indicating one possibility of relating this ethical domain to measurable characteristics of our society. A focal point for activities related to information ethics is provided by the International Centre for Information Ethics (http://icie.zkm.de/), which also maintains an exhaustive catalogue of published material on this subject.

Our aim is to determine the current value of X for each group in the society of interest, and then form the average. For this to be possible, the data entering into the definition of X must itself be both available and well defined, and it must be possible to assign it to the chosen grouping. In practice, this means choosing an evaluation model of X in terms of parameters that are both significant and for which data is available. Starting with the restraint, there are many possibilities, both as regards the number of restraints and the definition of each restraint. The following proposal is just one such possibility:

1. a.

A significant factor is clearly the financial situation in which the individual finds itself, as measured by income per person per year, q. If the subsistence level at the location where the individual lives is denoted by s ($/year), the financial restraint, r 1, is defined to be of the form

(6.2)

where q ≥ s, r 1(q < s) = 1, and q a is the income averaged over all the members of the society. The interpretation of this restraint is that at (or below) the subsistence level the individual has essentially no time or energy to exercise intelligence ; all effort is absorbed by mere existence. Nor is there any surplus income for acquiring information. As the income rises above the subsistence level, the restraint is reduced, but the reduction depends not directly on the value of this increase above the subsistence level, but on the relationship of this value to the average income in the society. If this is the most appropriate measure of the effect of increasing the income above the subsistence level is open to discussion; the choice in Eq. 6.2 is reasonable, but somewhat arbitrary.

2. b.

The access to and level of education is a prerequisite for obtaining and evaluating information, and thereby generating the knowledge which forms such an important part of exercising intelligence. As the exercising of intelligence we are considering relates to the evaluation of technology applications for their impact on the evolution of society, the knowledge required is of a general rather than of a detailed nature (such as is required for creating technology). Consequently, the lower levels of education are more important; literacy is very much more important than having a Ph.D. We might therefore propose to evaluate the attained educational level as 0.6 for primary education, 0.9 for secondary education, and 1.0 for tertiary education, and define the educational restraint , r 2, as

(6.3)

3. c.

Having both the time and the education to process information into knowledge still leaves the issue of being able to obtain the information. That ability can be considered to consist of two separate factors: One, access to the media carrying information (printed matter, radio, television, internet, social media) via such channels as newsagents, public libraries, broadband, and mobile phone. Two, the quality of the media, reflected in the level of censorship, diversity, ownership and control, accuracy and completeness of the information, and so on. Evaluating access on a scale of 0–1, with the value 1 signifying full access to all existing information channels, as would be the case in many parts of the developed world. Similarly, evaluating quality on a scale of 0–1, the value 1 signifies the absence of censorship, a vigorous multiplicity of sources, and a high degree of independence. We therefore define an information restraint , r 3, as

(6.4)

4. d.

Being able to formulate an adaptive action is one thing; being able to action it is a different matter, and so lack of access to participation in a democratic and political decision process becomes a further restraint. Democratic, in the sense that all involved have the same rights, is not enough; for the outcome of the process to have any effect, it needs to be a political process. That is, a process that is part of the public affairs of a society and of its government. Consequently, if we denote the level of political rights by u, of civil liberties by v, and of democracy by w, all measured on a scale of 0–1, we define the process restraint, r 4, as follows:

(6.5)

Having chosen and defined four components of the restraint, r, there remains to decide how these four components are to be combined to form r. There are numerous ways to do this, depending partly on what importance one assigns to each component. For example, one might consider that the financial restraint, r 1, is so important that if it goes to zero, the other components are insignificant, and so decide on a combination of the form r 1(r 2 + r 3 + r 4). The combination proposed does not make such a radical distinction, but allows for a certain weighting of the components:

(6.6)

A particular choice of the constants c i is used in the sample evaluation presented in Attachment A6 to Appendix A, but a standardised set of values would have to emerge as a matter of consensus among users of the model.

As was discussed earlier, the extent to which persons exercise their intelligence in the form of taking goal-oriented adaptive action depends on both the moral fortitude (or willpower) of the person and the restraints presented by the society in which the person is embedded. So, what determines a person’s will to overcome or reduce the restraints? We might think of personality traits, such as strength of character, motivation, and the like, but how would we measure them? Interrogating or testing enough individuals in whatever society we are considering in order to get a significant measure of the average would seem a hopeless task. Rather than starting with the individual, a different approach would be to ask: What characteristics of a society reflect the strength of will of its members? However, a difficulty with this approach is that restraints are characteristics of the society, whereas will is a characteristic of individuals. Is there a characteristic of society that does not represent a significant restraint, as compared to the four we have identified, but that is a good indication of the average strength of individual will? One such characteristic might be the level of corruption ; we would expect that the will to oppose corruption is in some way related to the will to overcome restraints, but corruption is not in itself a significant restraint on exercising intelligence.

This issue also points to a characteristic of the measure of the Good Society proposed here: It is indirect, in the sense that it infers the Good Society from objective, measurable parameters of society, such as the attained level of education. A different approach would be to define the Good Society directly in terms of subjective features, and then conduct surveys to let people themselves express to what extent they consider society to be good. This is the approach taken by the European Social Survey (www.europeansocialsurvey.org/), which conducts a survey by means of face-to-face interviews in the majority of European countries every two years. The data is made freely available for non-commercial purposes.

The moral fortitude , w, shall be expressed by the level of corruption , c, measured on a scale of 0–100 with 100 being very clean and 0 being very corrupt. The relationship between w and c will, without any further justification, be taken to be as follows:

(6.7)

where σ is a scale factor that can be adjusted as a better understanding of the problem complex emerges through use of the evaluation model.

This concludes the definition of the proposed model for the evaluation of a measure of the state of society—a measure that indicates our progress towards the Good Society (remembering that the Good Society is not a static end-goal, but a state of society in which evolution is determined by the collective intelligence ). That this is also a practical model, in the sense that the data required for its application is readily available, is demonstrated in Appendix A, with its six Attachments.

6.2 Rethinking the Role of Political Parties

6.2.1 Motivation

Why, in a work about the Social Bond, would I want to include a discussion about the role of political parties? The motivation arises out of the following sequence of thoughts:

The current turmoil on the political front is the subject of daily reports and comments in newspapers, newsletters, and blogs, with the rise of populist, right-wing political groupings and rhetoric as a common theme. And while the easily discernible causes include the effects of economic inequality and mass migration, there is an underlying dissatisfaction with the political process in general; people feel that they are not being listened to and their concerns not being recognised. Nowhere was this more starkly demonstrated than in the recent US presidential election, where the most outrageous statements were accepted as a welcome respite from the usual bland drivel; where the candidate who spoke most clearly to the underlying concerns, Bernie Sanders, was sidelined by the political machinery; and where something like 40% of the eligible voters were so disillusioned that they could not even be bothered to vote.

In Europe the situation is complicated by the European Union creating an additional structural component in the political system, in which the balance between the legislature—the European Parliament—and the bureaucracy—the European Commission—is skewed strongly in favour of the bureaucracy, an issue I will get to shortly. This appears to be an additional significant factor in the present unrest within the EU, and one cause of the emergence of populist right-wing or nationalist parties within the member states (and, of course, Brexit). The issue of right-wing parties was analysed already in Rooduijn (2015) , and some recent articles on the subject of the EU’s problems are Social Europe (2017) and Archick (2017) . The future of social democracy in Europe is discussed in Meyer and Rutherford (2012) , and in Chapter 8, The Greatest Happiness Principle: An Imperative for Social Democracy, Christian Kroll makes the observation that “People no longer vote for the same party over and over again, out of loyalty, but have become consumers of political ideas who feel free to decide anew, before each election, who deserves their vote”. This change in the behaviour and expectation of voters should be reflected in a corresponding change in the political system and, in particular, in the function of the political party.

There are many signs of dissatisfaction with the political system here in Australia also. Among these are the numerous complaints about the performance of our political leaders to be found in the Letters section of the Sydney Morning Herald , the rise of minor parties and independents, and the latest Scanlon survey, which found that support for the statement “the system of government we have in Australia…needs major change” has risen form 23% of respondents in 2014 to 31% in 2016, with a further 11% who would like to see the system replaced (Scanlon 2016).

The interesting point of all the discussion and analyses of this current situation is that there is practically no consideration of the possibility that there might be something wrong with the role of the party within the political process; it is so firmly entrenched in the common understanding of the process that questioning it is unthinkable; a classic case of enframing . Taking a leaf from Thomas Kuhn’s description of scientific progress, in which an existing belief system , or paradigm, is further developed and defended in the face of mounting evidence of its inadequacy, until a new idea is put forward that solves the problems and leads, in what is termed a scientific revolution, to the acceptance of a new paradigm, we might ask if the time is not ripe for a revolutionary change to the political paradigm—a re-examination our political system, in particular, the role of political parties, in the light of what technology has to offer.

Almost every other social activity has been significantly influenced by technology : Shopping, via the Internet and home delivery services; entertainment, vie download on demand; social interaction, via social media; common information, such as phone numbers and time-tables, via the Internet; financial transactions, via the Internet; and so on. In short, the ability and convenience of the individual to pursue all of these activities have been greatly enhanced; only the ability of the individual to participate effectively in the political process has not improved, and has avoided taking advantage of technology. This section discusses the role of the political party in this situation, and proposes a possible remedy based on information technology .

6.2.2 The Political Process and Collective Intelligence

In Sect. 5.3.1 we described the process driving the evolution of society as a feed-back process within a two-element model of society. The most important feature of this process is that the decisions about changes take place within the Life processes; that is the location of the collective intelligence , it is not within Government. However, for the process to work well, the conditions that promote the collective intelligence , as introduced in Sect. 2.2, need to be realised to a significant extent. We might think of these conditions as expressing the quality of the Life processes, and a measure of this quality is proposed in Sect. 6.1 Because raising the level of this quality requires a great effort over an extended time period, it has been expedient to compensate for a low level of this quality by (temporarily) shifting the decision-making to the Government; a current example of this is China. But with the quality level present in most Western democracies, there is little excuse for this. On the contrary, a major responsibility for Government should be to ensure that the quality level and the effectiveness of the collective intelligence are monotonically increasing with time.

In order to focus on the relationship between the political process and the collective intelligence, we recast Fig. 5.21 i the form shown in Fig. 6.1, where the political process is shown as it actually is—partly within Government and partly within Life. Within Life, we also show both collective intelligence and business as two distinct components.

Fig. 6.1
A particular view of society as consisting of two first-level subsystems, with the four second-level subsystems relevant to the discussion of the political system

The main building block of the political system is the party, and a possible definition of the concept of a political party is the following:

“A political party requires (1) continuity in organisation—that is, an organisation whose expected life span is not dependent on the lifespan of current leaders, (2) manifest and presumably permanent organisation at the local level, with regularised communications and other relationships between local and national units, (3) self-conscious determination of leaders at both national and local levels to capture and to hold decision-making power alone or in coalition with others, not simply to influence the exercise of power, and (4) a concern on the part of the organisation for seeking followers at the polls or in some manner striving for popular support” (LaPalombara and Weiner 1966, p. 6) .

This definition, and most others that can be found by searching the Internet, are general enough to allow the political party to appear in a variety of political structures, both competitive, multi-party structures and non-competitive, single-party structures . And there is nothing in these definitions that restrict the appearance of political parties to democracies. However, we shall focus on political parties as they appear in a multi-party democracy .

In order to manage the interface to government, a party is structured accordingly; i.e. into national, state, and local (council or county) levels. At each level it is represented in the legislative function of government by its elected representatives, or Members. In performing their duties, these representatives have a dual allegiance—to the people who elected them, and to their party—and as a rough rule, the allegiance to the people relative to that to the party is strongest at the local level and weakest at the national level, as one would expect from the size of the electorates alone.

In Fig. 6.1, the path from the collective intelligence to the political system is meant to represent the democratic process, i.e. the process in which the whole population of eligible voters—the electorate—can participate, which is the process of the secret ballot, and which is a main adaptive action of the collective intelligence . This process is normally organised by a branch of the bureaucracy (in Australia it is the Australian Electoral Commission), without any direct involvement of political parties. However, the parties are heavily involved in choosing and promoting the candidates, which is the subject of the next subsection. What is not shown in the figure is the “non-democratic” interface from the electorate to the parties, in the form of party congresses and caucuses of party members. Theoretically, this interface is not “non-democratic”, as party membership is open to anyone, but in reality party discipline ensures that this interface has relatively little effect as an expression of the collective intelligence.

The block labelled as “Business” in Fig. 6.1 represents a wide range of organisations, including corporations, NGOs, industry and labour associations , and a host of organisations promoting special interests, and the interface to the political system is partly to the representatives and partly to the party organisations, through such activities as lobbying and political donations, and, in the latter case, through exchange of personnel.

The block labelled “Bureaucracy” contains the Executive and Judiciary components of Government. The separation between the legislature and the bureaucracy, as well as the detailed composition of these two components themselves, is somewhat different in different countries, but in all cases one can observe that the route from the people’s will to its implementation, in the sense of an ideal democracy , is dependent on both components. The democratic nature of the legislature can be perverted by the presence of minor parties exploiting a balance-of-power situation, and may also fail to correctly anticipate the effects of a particular formulation of a law; after all, there is no formal qualification required to become a member of the legislature. The bureaucracy is not simply an isomorphic transformation of laws into practice; the implementation in the form of policies and/or procedures may result in effects that vary from both what society expected and what the legislature had intended. The degree to which the legislature delegates policy decisions to the bureaucracy, and the consequent degree of independence of the bureaucracy—what might be seen as a trade-off between politics and expertise—has been the subject of numerous studies within political science and public administration, such as Epstein and O’Halloran (1999), Huber and Shipan (2002) , and Farazmand (2010) , and a particular aspect of this issue will be an important factor further on. We shall not consider this whole complex of the functioning of Government and public administration; we simply accept that it is subject to numerous non-democratic forces. Our interest in the current context is with the effectiveness of the collective intelligence as both a driving force and a corrective force in the feed-back process in Fig. 5.21, and this effectiveness is being determined by the two interfaces between Government and Life: by the extent to which Government recognises and accepts the will of the people, and by the extent to which the people are able to know the outcome of the Government’s management actions, allowing them to take corrective action. It is in the first of these interfaces that the political party plays a dominant role, which we consider in the next subsection. But we should recognise that there is a contradiction involved in the relationship between Government and Life.

The contradiction is one that has always been present, and may be seen as an intrinsic feature of the concept of a society—providing the greatest freedom for individual expression while at the same time maximising the benefits of close interactions. The contradiction arises from the demand on Government to enforce the laws required to implement the decisions made by society on the one hand, and for the members of society to be unrestrained in the execution of their intelligence on the other hand. In particular, we object to being forced to do something against our will, but we have agreed to let Government use force if required, within prescribed limits. And we want that enforcement to be as effective as possible, so, as an example, we allow police to use the best technology available, such as automatic weapons, water cannon, tear gas, surveillance cameras, command-and-control systems, and so on. But if we refer back to the discussion, in Sect. 4.2, of using the manipulation of information as a means of influencing behaviour, we can understand how tempting it is for Government to restrict or modify the information provided to Life.

What is not detailed in Fig. 6.1 are the many activities of the political party in its interaction with the rest of society, and which provide inputs to the collective intelligence ; they are indicated collectively by the fat arrow, and will be considered in the next subsection.

6.2.3 Role and Purpose of Political Parties

In rethinking the role of political parties, we should remember that societies have been governed for thousands of years, but political parties are a relatively new appearance. Real political parties emerged only after about 1850; before that time there were such structures as informal alignments among parliamentary representatives and political clubs, for example those associated with the French Revolution—Jacobin, Girondin, and others—and in England the Tories organized the Carlton Club and the Whigs the Reform Club. In NSW an early political organisation was the Australian Patriotic Association , founded by W.C. Wentworth in 1835 together with a group of influential colonists; the Adelaide City Council held its first election in 1840, and the secret ballot (with Government supplied ballot papers) was introduced in Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania in 1856. In the US, the two components of a two-party political system emerged soon after the founding of the republic, in the form of the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, and the Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson. These two components went through a number of transformative stages, during which the original Republican Party became what is currently the Democratic Party, and the current Republican Party arose out of the remnants of a Federalist-Whig Party transition in the 1850s.

Correspondingly, the theory and understanding of political parties, both as a concept and in practice, as a main part of political science, is a fairly immature science, as was pointed out by Riker (1982) . One of the standard works is the book Political Parties, by Duverger (1964) , which introduces a taxonomy of political parties, based on the manner of their creation and their internal structure, and then goes on the describe different party systems. The work is based on detailed examination of actual parties, with focus on developments in France and Britain, with lesser coverage of the Germany, US, Belgium, Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland (very little). Of particular relevance in the present context are the following statements (note, by “elector” Duverger means “eligible voter”):

Democracy requires that parliamentary representatives should take precedence over the members of the party, since the electors constitute a larger group than party members, who are moreover included in it. In practice the opposite often takes place: in many parties there can be seen a tendency of party leaders to give orders to the parliamentary representatives in the name of the militant members. This domination of the party over its elected representatives constitutes a form of oligarchy that might be termed ‘external’ by comparison with the oligarchic nature of leaders within the community of party members (p. 182).

The reference to “militant members” reflects the time in which it was written; the post-war era of strong ideological motivation for political participation. Today, as a result of increased affluence and the conversion of a large part of the “working class” into “middle class”, the preoccupation of political parties is mainly with economics and with their own survival as entities within this economic view of society.

In practice elections, like the doctrine of representation, have been greatly changed by the development of parties. There is no longer a dialogue between the elector and the representative, the nation and parliament; a third party has come between them, radically modifying the nature of their relations……If we wish to maintain the juridical theory of representation we must admit that the representative receives a double mandate: from the party and from his electors. The importance of each varies according to the country and the parties; on the whole the party mandate seems to carry more weight than that of the electors (p. 353).

Here the word ‘representation’ is applied to a sociological phenomenon and not to a legal relationship; it signifies the resemblance between the political opinions of the nation and those of parliament. Deputies represent their electors not as a mandatary represents his mandatory but as a photograph represents a landscape, a portrait its model. The fundamental problem consists in measuring the degree of accuracy of representation, that is the degree of correspondence between public opinion and its expression in parliament (p. 372).

The party system existing in a country is generally considered to be the result of the structure of its public opinion. But the converse is equally true: the structure of public opinion is to a large extent a consequence of the party system (p. 372).

In these three last excerpts, Duverger seems to capture some of the main reasons why citizens would become increasingly disillusioned with and disinterested in political parties, but he does not draw the conclusion that maybe there is something wrong, or anachronistic, with the role of political parties.

Two further relevant contributions to the theory of political parties are Strom (1990) and Levy (2004) . The firs develops a model of party behaviour baser on a consolidation of the three rational choice behaviours originally proposed in Downs (1957)—vote-seeking, office-seeking, and policy-seeking; it is an example of the common view of the political party as an organisation with its own identity and purpose, with the voters making up the environment in which it exists. If the party is the plant, the voters constitute the soil in which it grows. The message of the second paper is essentially that the party allows the politician to represent a richer and more optimised and effective combination of policies than would be possible for stand-alone politicians. This is, to a systems engineer, fairly obvious, with the effectiveness of the combination as an emergent property, and it is also something that can be observed in that independent candidates promote themselves mainly on single issues, but it highlights an important function of the political party that needs to be preserved and further developed. And this brings me to the article by Ann-Kristin Kölln, The value of political parties to representative democracy (Kölln 2014) , which addresses some of the main issues in any assessment of the role of political parties. The point of departure is her statement that the core of representative democracy is the authorisation and accountability through means of regular elections; these two measures are then used to compare parties with individual representation. Individual representation is essentially what Strom , in a taxonomy of political organisation called pluralistic democracy, and as it is the organisation most closely related to party democracy in that taxonomy (Strom 2000), Kölln focuses her comparison on these two types of political organisation. She concludes that parties have a slight edge, and this is further strengthened by a more detailed comparison of how the two systems fulfil an expanded set of requirements. In a thought-experiment, the author illustrated how she imagines individual representation might operate; In the case of e.g. Australia that model, with multiple representatives per constituency, would apply only to Senate elections. In elections for the House of Representatives there is only one representative per electoral division.

However, for all the good points Kölln makes in her comparison about fulfilling valuable functions, there is no mention of the adverse effects of the party organisation on the democratic process; effects that basically arise as a result of the necessity for the party to maintain itself as an organisation. Viewing the actions of parties through the media here in Australia, one might easily get the impression that our political system has turned into a business, with the parties as corporations, and with a business model in which the main purpose is to maintain the viability of the party by trading favours with special interest groups, giving preferential legislative treatment in exchange for electoral and financial support, and with the politicians as executives. This mode of operation was, in the case of US political parties, noted by Lenski (1970, 358) , already half a century ago, and it seems to now have invaded most Western democracies. Thus, when assessing the current status of political parties, we must differentiate between the function of the party as a component of the business world and its function as a key component of the democratic political process . If we compare these two functions of a party, or, perhaps better, simply consider the balance of their importance in society, it appears that this balance is shifting in favour of the business function, and we could imagine that in the end, society will be run as a business, with the citizens as the shareholders.

That is unlikely, because there is another trend that opposes this shift, and that is the increasing level of education and social awareness of the population. But harnessing this increase in what is, in effect, the collective intelligence , is proving to pose a number of challenges for the current organisation of the polity. A discussion of these challenges, together with a survey of the scholarly literature on political parties, can be found in the article by Montero and Gunther (2003). The authors list the following challenges: Trends toward secularisation have sapped the strength of denominational parties; increasing affluence has shrunk the electoral base of working-class parties; the greater participation of women in the professional workforce has placed new demands on the internal structure of parties; massive international migration has resulted in groups with no previous representation; and a higher level of education has given rise to greater individuality and critical assessment. And, finally, they note that various applications of information technology have had a significant influence on structure and operation of political parties; something we touched on in Sect. 4.6, and which will be central to the proposal put forward in the following subsection. However, while the authors have great faith in the continued existence of political parties, the most interesting feature of this review of the state of relevant research is that it also seems to ignore the influence of business and capital on the structure and function of political parties, and on their focus away from the citizen and toward business interests. It is these adverse effects that have prompted the proposal that follows.

6.2.4 A Proposal

The underlying purpose of the following proposal is to enhance the conditions for exercising society’s collective intelligence , as it was developed in the previous chapters. In particular, it addresses three of the conditions that were considered as essential: The availability to all individuals of true information in a useful form, i.e., in a form adjusted to the abilities and circumstances of the individual; opportunity to participate in public discourse as part of the deliberation process; and the ability of individuals to express the outcome of their evaluations of this information as meaningful actions.

As is demonstrated e.g. in the analysis by Kölln (op. cit.) , both the party and the individual representative bring value to the democratic political process. So, rather than choosing one or the other, why not try to combine the valuable features of both, while at the same time eliminating those features of the party that are detrimental to democracy ? The key to doing this is to separate the individual representative from the operations of the party, but use valuable products of the party as an important part of the interface between the representatives and their electors.

The rise of political parties was due to the enlargement of the franchise, and started out as a means of gaining popular support for the election, or re-election, of candidates. Today, the key tasks of political parties are considerably more numerous and demanding. In the article Types and functions of parties, Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond identify a number of functions that a party should perform:

1. a.

candidate nomination;

2. b.

electoral mobilisation;

3. c.

issue structuring;

4. d.

social representation;

5. e.

interest aggregation;

6. f.

forming and sustaining government; and

7. g.

social integration (Gunther and Diamond 2001)

In addition, the following functions (not totally different from the above) have been introduced and discussed in various places in the literature:

1. h.

Soliciting and articulating public policy priorities and civic needs and problems as identified by members and supporters;

2. i.

socialising and educating voters and citizens in the functioning of the political and electoral system and the generation of general political values;

3. j.

balancing opposing demands and converting them into general policies;

4. k.

activating and mobilising citizens into participating in political decisions and transforming their opinions into viable policy options;

5. l.

channelling public opinion from citizens to government; and

6. m.

recruiting and training candidates for public office

Based on the belief that, in a democratically constituted society, the primary purpose of a political system, including parties, the elected representatives, and the structure within which these representatives operate, is to ensure that the will of the people finds effective expression in the performance of government, and if we view this political system to consist of parties, electors, representatives, and the government, my proposal now proceeds as follows:

The political party is reborn as a think tank, dedicated to analysing the state of society, identifying its problems, defining its preferred policies for dealing with these, and advocating these to the public through various channels, such as the Internet, but also including public meetings and rallies. Parties promote policies, not candidates; and they are financed by private donors: the public, industry, unions, etc. Of the above functions, the party covers the following:

- c, e, h, j, and k: This is the main purpose of the party: to produce a coherent, realistic, and well-argued package of costed policies and, where necessary, specific actions, all anchored in current factual information.

Regarding the electors, each citizen of voting age is provided with a secure password; this is no different to what is already provided for communication with the government in Australia via the myGov site, and most of us do our financial transactions online, using a password.

Regarding the representatives, any citizen of voting age and good standing (no outstanding criminal charges, etc.) can become a candidate in his or her electorate by first registering with the government and placing a bond of, say $10,000, and then receiving endorsement from a proportion of the voters in that electorate, say, on the order of a thousand “signatures” (see below). Once this level of endorsement it reached, the bond is released. Support for individual candidates is on a voluntary basis within each electorate, financial support is limited to say, $500 from any one citizen of voting age (i.e. owner of a password), and any other form of financial support is not allowed. Once elections have been held (see below), the successful candidate becomes a representative. The formation of the legislative arm of the government, i.e. ministers, speakers, etc., is carried out by the elected representatives through an internal election; the prime minister position might rotate on a yearly basis among the senior ministers (as in Switzerland). This will avoid the unseemly brawling that goes for deliberation in the Australian Parliament, promote cooperation, and focus attention on the task of governing. People who cannot work together as a team for the benefit of the nation should not be elected, and certainly not re-elected. Of the above functions, the representatives cover the following:

- a, f, and l: The legislative body formed by the representatives is responsible to the people for all aspects of the Government’s operations.

Within government there is an organisation dedicated to the political system (in Australia this is the Australian Electoral Commission). Besides being responsible for the security of the IT infrastructure supporting the political system, this organisation maintains a web site on which all registered candidates are listed, with a CV and a statement from each candidate about which policies they will support if elected. This may be a selection of policies from different think tanks. At this web site there is also a link to an online discussion forum (e.g. blog) for each candidate, also provided by the government. Access to such a site requires the secure password, so that there can be no anonymous entries.

An important function of this organisation is to organise elections, say, every four years, and half-yearly referendums on major issues. Any citizen, or group of citizens, may call for an issue to be decided by referendum, following very much the same procedure as for candidates, except that the required bond and the number of signatures would be substantially higher. The organisation provides educational material about the political system, including to schools and to prospective candidates, and advertises elections, referendums, and all deadlines associated with them, so that, of the above functions, it covers the following:

- b, d, g, i, and m: The purpose of this organisation is to administer and maintain the infrastructure supporting the political system.

The main feature of this scenario is that it restores the primacy of the individual citizen in the democratic process (both as elector and representative), eliminates a parasitic organisation (the current party), and reduces the influence of business and wealth. It also elevates the relationship between citizen and candidate to a more personal level. At present, even though people who vote, say, Liberal in different electorates vote for different candidates, they might as well just vote for the Liberal party. Unless they know the candidate socially, they cannot know what the candidate really thinks, as he or she is not allowed to deviate from the party line. In the proposed scenario, the candidates have to reveal themselves, and not hide behind a party platform. This was what Hannah Arendt saw as an essential feature of the vita activa as political action, as we noted in Sect. 4.4.

The account of the deliberative democratic process given in Landemore (2017) can be summarised by describing the process as composed of two sub-processes: the deliberation process and the aggregation process , with the latter represented by majority voting. The epistemic competence of the process—that is, the degree to which the outcome is superior to that of any other political process—is achieved through both sub-processes, with the important features being inclusiveness and cognitive diversity, as prerequisites for the effective operation of the collective intelligence . From this perspective, our development of the Social Bond is seen to provide a measure of the outcome in the form of the measure of the Good Society defined in the previous section, and our proposal has the following advantages:

- The process of deliberation is extended from a small proportion within a small number of political parties to a significant proportion of all members of society, greatly extending both inclusiveness and cognitive diversity;

- the quality of deliberation is increased by improving the access to the information that serves as input to the deliberation; and

- the aggregation process is more closely reflective of the state of public opinion following deliberation, instead of being limited to a choice between the policies of a few political parties.

Besides all the other obvious objections to this scenario (e.g. the demise of a profitable business), the problems associated with online voting will be prominent. That is basically a red herring, and only demonstrates how the thinking on this subject is mired in the past. If our whole financial system functions online, including the international transfer of billions via the SWIFT system every day (although that now also seems to have fallen prey to the world’s master hacker, the NSA, as reported in SMH 2017) , there is no reason why this relatively simple interaction with the public could not be conducted online. And it is not a new issue or a new technology; there are a number of voting systems available (such as Google “online voting”), and a report issued in 2014 by the Australian Parliament discusses the arguments in favour of electronic voting (Second Interim Report 2014). There is no doubt that there are a number of currently unsolved problems (and unimplemented solutions), as detailed e.g. in the report from (Verified Voting) , but given the importance of the issue, which is that a system at the centre of democracy is essentially broken, as demonstrated by the 100 million that did not vote in the last US presidential election, it is difficult to believe that they could not be readily solved.

6.3 Wealth, Power, and Instability

6.3.1 Freedom as a Root Cause

In this final section I shall argue that the greatest risk facing humanity is a discontinuity in the evolution of society, caused by an inhibition of the exercise of the collective intelligence , caused by preventing the free flow of information between all members of society and thereby the maintenance of the Social Bond, caused by a concentration of wealth and ownership , caused by the current political/economic paradigm, which may be traced back to an outmoded concept of individual freedom. That is, there is a causal chain, shown in Fig. 6.2, which leads to the possibility of a catastrophic fluctuation in the evolution of society, something that was raised in Sect. 2.4 and again in Sect. 5.3.

Fig. 6.2
A causal chain leading to a catastrophic fluctuation in the evolution of society

Consequently, the rest of this section is divided into subsections as follows:

1. 6.3.2

The Current Paradigm: Neoliberalism

2. 6.3.3

Concentration of Wealth and Instability

3. 6.3.4

The Road to a New Paradigm

4. 6.3.5

Arguments for the New Paradigm

The perception that the view of freedom prevalent in the Western part of the world is at the start of this chain is a personal one, based on my admittedly limited discussions with colleagues about the issues raised in this book. They always seem to come back to the issue of freedom—understood as personal freedom with little consideration of how this fits in with our role as members of society and the requirements for a stable society. This was discussed in Sect. 3.4, where we developed a view of freedom as the totality of actions made possible by the state of development of society, minus the restrictions society places on our actions. In this manner we are replacing the simplistic definition of freedom with what we might think of as the richness of society ; the number of actions or opportunities society offers its members.

This view of freedom as the range of choices available was also put forward in Lenski (1970) , where technology was seen as the enabler of these choices by overcoming natural limitations. But as technology is connected with wealth, the relationship between technological progress and gains in freedom is dependent on the economic status of the individual. In the same vein, if the effect of restrictions, or government regulations, is seen as a redistribution of freedom, and we want to maximise the average gain, it is necessary to understand the individual quantification of freedom, which also varies with economic status.

The main group of restrictions comprises those imposed by the legal framework on every member of society; it contains almost all our laws and regulations, dealing with everything from warfare to burning rubbish in the back yard. These restrictions have arisen in response to changes in society, i.e. changes to the interactions between individuals, and the driver behind these changes has generally been new knowledge leading to new technology resulting in new applications of technology. This sequence is represented in Fig. 6.3, and it illustrates that the restrictions are most likely to be created towards the end of the sequence, when the effects of the changes on society have become very noticeable. The sequence begins with science, with mankind’s insatiable curiosity and quest for knowledge and understanding. As the consequences of the new knowledge are generally poorly understood at this point, there are very few restrictions; exceptions are e.g. stem-cell research and research on humans. The next process in the sequence uses the new scientific knowledge to develop technology, the knowledge of how to create solutions to practical problems. As part of this development, unwanted effects become obvious, and restrictions are put in place to prevent these. The third process in the sequence utilises technology to create applications that meet needs expressed by society. This process, which relies heavily on engineering, takes place in the element of the functional structure of society identified as industry, and here numerous restrictions are required to ensure that the wider requirements of society are met, e.g. with regards to safety and disclosure of product characteristics, but also on the structure of society itself, such as discrimination and inequalities. The final process is the acceptance and use of the applications by society, and through this experience many effects become visible that require further restrictions.

Fig. 6.3
A simplified sequence of processes leading from scientific knowledge to meeting the needs of society, and the accompanying introduction of restrictions, shown as the coloured triangle, in order to eliminate unwanted effects

This whole sequence of science- and technology-driven events takes place over a period of time that can vary greatly from case to case, and this brings us back to Fig. 2.2 and the interpretation of the y-coordinate as time. If we would put a time-scale on the y-axis, it would demonstrate how the rate of change is accelerating. Without providing an exact quantitative definition of ‘change’, it is likely that more than 99% of all change to society in historical times have taken place since the introduction of the efficient steam engine in 1770s. We now have two related processes: changes to society from applications of technology and the associated issues arising from these applications, and the process of developing restrictions to resolve these issues, and in a qualitative manner, this is what we illustrated in Fig. 2.4. It shows that our ability to resolve the issues is inadequate, and I perceive that a main contributor to this inadequacy is our failure to evolve our understanding of freedom to reflect our transition from stand-alone individuals to elements of a system, tightly bound into a social structure. In particular, this failure is exemplified in the manner in which freedom is used to justify the current politico-economic paradigm, with its relationships between the accumulation of wealth, ownership, and control, and this is the subject of the following subsection. As a crude metaphor, we seem to have reverted to a feudal society, only with capital instead of castles, and with the general population suffering under financial manoeuvres instead of under armed oppression and rivalry.

In an article introduced briefly in Sect. 4.7, Dell P. Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler point out the importance of freedom in the understanding of the Good Society in the Us and, by implication, given the dominance of the US, in the Western democracies. They state “Freedom, an iconic work in American culture, is the most important moral value and, for libertarians, perhaps the only value that matters.” Here “libertarians” are what we would call neoconservatives or neoliberals, and are located on the opposite side of “liberals” in the US political spectrum, as is evidenced by “Consequently, longstanding liberal concerns for inequalities in income and wealth distribution are not only dismissed by conservatives but viewed as threats to a free society. In essence, a moral stand by a liberal against economic injustice is interpreted as an immoral and insidious threat to the libertarian’s cherished value, freedom.” The authors then go on to show how the libertarians have managed to link this view of freedom with democracy , co that “Freedom and democracy” is the catchcry of the conservative rhetoric. However, for that actually to be true, a considerably different meaning of “freedom” is required; one that places the freedom of the individual within its proper social setting.

6.3.2 The Current Paradigm: Neoliberalism

With the foregoing considerations as an introduction and overview of the relationship between the evolution of society in terms of technology and the concept of freedom, the scene is set for reviewing the current economic paradigm, its relationship to the concept of freedom, and its problems, and demonstrating the need for a paradigm shift in both our economic system and in our understanding of freedom. The concept of a paradigm, and of a shift in paradigms, was brought to prominence by Thomas and presented in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1996) , to which we have referred several times. Kuhn showed that, for long periods of time, science works within a set of accepted truths and norms, which he called the scientific paradigm, and that it is the existence of this stable framework that, to a great extent, underpins the efficiency of scientific work. However, these periods of stability are interspersed by relatively abrupt changes to the paradigm, brought about by two factors: the number of experimental results that cannot be explained within the existing paradigm reaches a critical value, and a new theory is put forward that explains all or most of these results.

In economics or, perhaps more specifically, in political economics, it is possible to discern a similar behaviour, but with two important differences: As economics is an empirical science tied to the state of evolution of society, an economic paradigm can vary in importance over its existence, whereas this is not possible for a scientific paradigm; there is no way the Newtonian paradigm will come back to replace relativity. And economic paradigms contain a significant component of ideology, which is no longer the case with scientific paradigms. Despite these differences, Kuhn’s paradigm concept can be usefully applied to economics, and we shall apply it here to capitalism .

Under the capitalist system, an increasing proportion of income is in the form of return on investment, i.e. on capital. Capital has been with us from the beginning, and over time, it has taken on various forms, such as hoards of precious metals, land, and slaves. And, increasingly, it has taken the form of applications of technology , starting with the first stone axe. With technology came the concept of production, the transformation of a material into a more useful form, and with it the means of production. For simple transformations, these means of production could be the tools or the plot of land belonging to each worker, but as technology evolved and allowed more elaborate transformations, establishing the means of production required an expenditure in excess of what the workers could afford, and so they would have to borrow money, or conversely, someone would have to lend the required capital. Assuming the enterprise was successful, the workers would be able to pay back the loan at some stage, but having had the use of the money over that period clearly had been of significant value to them, for which it was only reasonable that the lender should be reimbursed, and so money, in addition to its immediate value as a means of exchange took on an additional, time-dependent value when it was invested, in the form of an interest rate. This is, essentially, the difference between money and capital. In this way, money took on some of the nature of a product, in that it could be traded without any other, physical product being involved; the most immediate example of this is insurance.

Now, this feature of money as capital, and the process of lending and borrowing, and of paying interest, has been around for a very long time, certainly it was prominent in Rome, and was the modus operandi of most of the traders that travelled between Europe and the East in the Middle Ages. It is one of the pillars of the economic system we call capitalism ; another one is a particular extension of the concept of ownership. Going back to the example of the workers that borrow money to set up their production facility, they own the means of production, and they reap the full benefit of whatever success they achieve. There is, in principle, no problem with this, and it is realised in many small workshops and other businesses, and it was also realised in the early phases of many large enterprises. However, in practice there are two factors that mitigate against this: the economy of scale and risk. Most industrial applications of technology display an increase in efficiency with size due to the sharing of common overheads between individual processes, from management to maintenance, so that, unless a small company has some special advantage, such as a patent, or is operating in a small niche market, it cannot survive in open competition with larger companies. All new enterprises involve a measure of risk; about half of all new employer firms fail within five years (SBA 2014). Lenders therefore require some form of guarantee which, in our example, the workers would have to provide, e.g. in the form of their houses or other private assets, something that is unusual in all but small firms. In the overwhelming part of industry (e.g. by turnover or capitalisation), the capital is provided by people who can afford to take the risk, i.e. in the worst case lose the investment, which is one way of defining a capitalist, and so the owners of the means of production and the workers are separate groups of people; the workers are employed by the owners and provide the labour power required for production. The concept of ownership is extended from things that are directly related to me, such as my house, my block of land, my tools, etc. to things that are only related to me through the capital involved. The converse of this is that, in those investments that are successful, the investor can make a substantial return on the investment, or profit, and on the average, the returns on the successful investments must exceed the losses on the unsuccessful ones, otherwise the investment process would come to a halt, and so the stock of capital accumulates. This positive feed-back mechanism is the driver of wealth inequality , which we consider in the next subsection.

In all of the above, there was no assumption made as to the identity of the investor/owner; it would all apply equally to the case of private owners as in the case of government ownership, or any combination of these two. Furthermore, the two factors just discussed are closely related to the third pillar of capitalism , the market. Successful investment in production facilities requires that the products can be converted into money, to cover the production costs (labour and materials) and produce a profit, and the mechanism for this conversion is the market or, more specifically, the free market, although there are numerous factors that make this freedom less than absolute. It is the competition in this market that favours the larger enterprises, and it is also this mechanism that generates the risk, not only from other firms producing the same product and competing for the same group of consumers, but also from completely different products that find more favour with the consumers.

We identified three pillars of capitalism : the concept of capital (extending the nature of money from a means of exchange to a product), an extended concept of ownership (mediated by capital), and the concept of the (free) market. They form one part of the capitalist paradigm, what might be called the rational part. Another part is what might be called the ideological part; it is essentially a view of human relations that sees competition as the ideal form of these relations. The most immediate and visible support for this view is sports, where competition brings out the best performance in each individual; other cases that seem to provide support are found in the competition for promotion, for awards, for the most desirable partner, and so on; all of which are seen as expressions of Darwin’s theory of evolution , and expressed as “survival of the fittest” by Herbert Spencer, in the human domain. This view has a number of consequences, of which three important ones are:

- Competition should be encouraged in every instance, and where there are barriers to competition, e.g. in the form of government restrictions , these should be removed. And as the competition takes place in a market where the only measure is a monetary one, this means that the valuation of all human endeavour is simply what the market is willing and able to pay for it—an exchange value.

- The logical outcome of competition in a limited market is that there is a winner, and so an inherent trend in capitalism is an increase in size and a reduction in number of competitors; i.e. an oligopoly. And should this process end in a monopoly, capitalism sees no in-principle problem with this, as long as the monopoly is open to a competitive challenge in a free market.

- Almost as a corollary to this dogmatic stance is the view of private ownership ; the right of every person to accumulate wealth, both in the form of things and in the form of financial capital, over which he or she can dispose and benefit from at will . It is seen not only as a fundamental component of liberty, but also as something admirable and a moral duty, in the sense that making a profit and accumulating wealth is the opposite of sloth and dissipation. One expression of this attitude can be observed in people who go to any lengths to minimise their tax payment, but then give large amounts as philanthropy to charitable organisations. (Of course, the latter approach might earn you a medal or something; nobody ever got any thanks for paying tax.)

This has been the paradigm of political economy for much of the time since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It faced a serious challenge in the period between the two world wars, but since the last war it has regained its position as the dominant paradigm, championed by such public figures as Reagan and Thatcher, and vindicated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and by an increase in living standards, and it has now become the meaning of neoliberalism .

It is worth noting that a recent book by Suarez-Villa is concerned with a particular aspect of this stage shift—technocapitalism (Suarez-Villa 2009). The hallmark of this new stage of capitalism is the commodification of innovation and creativity on a global scale by means of what Suarez-Villa terms “fast accumulation”, which is supported by IT , and he sees technocapitalism as more aggressive and farsighted than any previous versions of capitalism, as it seeks to re-engineer humanity and nature itself for its own ends.

However, as with all paradigms, issues are emerging that conflict with the paradigms claim to provide a better life for all and the economic foundations for a more just society, such as the perversion of democracy by wealthy individuals or organisations, and economic inequality, both within nations and between nations. It is becoming increasingly clear that “more of the same” is not going to work, and numerous researchers and social activists have analysed the problems and suggested ways forward; one excellent example is Shiller (2012) . Here we shall only look briefly at the aspect of particular importance in the context of the Social Bond: the influence of IT.

Due to the strong and ubiquitous interaction between IT and society, as already introduced in Sect. 4.6, the presence of IT in the structure and functioning of society can be considered a defining characteristic of society, and one speaks of the information society . Garnham emphasizes the need to distinguish between two types of theories about the impact of IT on society: those that focus on the direct impact of developments in IT on politics and culture, and those that focus on the impact on the economy or mode of production (Garnham 2001) . With regard to the former, he states that “this whole strand of thought is the view that problems of social and cultural inequality can be solved and barriers to full political participation removed by technologies for the production and distribution of information. Put the processes of democratic politics on-line and full political freedom will be achieved. Put University and school courses on-line and the age of universal education will finally arrive.”

With regard to the latter, Garnham refers to the work of Daniel Bell and the argument , based quite explicitly on both Marx and Weber, that post-industrial society is developing in stages. Capitalism is moving from a stage of industrial capital based on the exploitation of matter and human energy to a post-industrial stage based on upon the exploitation of what Bell called “organised knowledge”. The core resource has shifted from monetary capital to knowledge . Garnham makes the observation that much of the talk of an Information Society is just the Service Economy relabelled, and that arguments about IT having caused an epochal shift in either economy or society are largely specious.

In the book Information technology : Impact on the way of life Bannon , Barry , and Holst (1982) several authors point out that what we are witnessing is a second “industrial revolution” in which an increasing number of human activities in all fields are being taken over by IT. Robins (1982) states that the past history of multinational corporations gives little promise that they will have democratic interests at heart in the future. For them, IT represents just another series of exchange values which by no means correspond to real social needs, and they have shaped it—without democratic participation and consultation—to express specific corporate values and priorities. There is no reason to believe that IT will not reinforce, and aggravate, existing inequalities at both national and international levels. He quotes Schiller (1981) as saying “contrary to the notion that capitalism has been transcended, long-prevailing imperatives of a market economy remain as determining as ever in the transformation occurring in the technological and informational spheres”, a view that is further detailed by Schiller (1982) , who argued forcefully that the current role of the media in modern society, and in the US in particular, is to support the capitalist economy and suppress any meaningful debate on alternatives. Similar concerns were raised earlier, in Mills (1956) .

In the same volume, Garnham presents a view that we will have to take into account in our development in the subsection after next, and it goes as follows Garnham (1982) : He challenges the view that the information technology will usher in a new era of cultural freedom, diversity and abundance and shows that we are here in the presence of ideology in its pure, classical form; that is to say, a social analysis that not only misrepresents its object of analysis by focusing on its surface rather than its underlying structure and by denying its real history, but also misrepresents it in such a way as to favour the interests of the dominant class. In this case, the trick is played by concentrating upon the technical potentialities, rather than upon the social relations that will determine the form in which those potentialities are realised and by denying history by exaggerating the novelty of the process in question. We are witnessing merely the latest phase in a process integral to the capitalist mode of production; an “industrialisation of culture” or “colonisation of leisure” by which massive market interests have come to dominate an area of life which, until recently, was dominated by individuals themselves.

Garnham then discusses the growing information gap in western societies , between the information-rich and the information-poor, and how this is related to the widening gap between rich and poor. Also, the information technology is structured to reinforce this, splitting the culture into two classes. Choice, being increasingly expensive, is offered to upper-income groups, while an increasingly impoverished, homogenised service is offered to the rest. Eventually, we will have to choose between two social forms. On the one hand, we can choose s society which primarily fosters social relations, based upon the Aristotelian notion of men and women as essentially social animals, based therefore upon notions of social reciprocity and interchange, upon the public as opposed to the private as the essence of humanity. Without such a notion, politics in any true sense is unthinkable. On the other hand, we can choose (or more likely have forced upon us) a society which is merely a social structure within which atomised, privatised individuals interrelate, primarily through commodity exchange, and by so doing necessarily reproduce the dominance of the capitalist mode of production and of those who control it, namely the owners of the means of production. Such a society will necessarily subordinate the public to the private sphere and destroy politics in favour of a manipulative form of elite control if we are lucky—what Bertram Gross has dubbed ‘Friendly Fascism”. These latter tendencies will be powerfully reinforced in the cultural sphere by the introduction of information technology under market conditions. Such introduction should therefore, as far as possible, be opposed.

6.3.3 Concentration of Wealth—A Source of Instability

An immediate indicator of a problem with our current politico-economic system is the increasing economic inequality . Despite all sorts of tinkering, from tax initiatives to international assistance and assertions that the trickle-down effect of the free economy will have a levelling effect and eventually eliminate inequality, as hypothesized by Kuznets (1955) , the inequality is increasing. A recent and thorough examination of the historical development of the factors involved in economic inequality, in particular, the accumulation of capital, is provided by Piketty (2014), although some of the conclusions he draws from the data have been the subject of debate, such as in Summers (2014) . But before considering some of the implications of this increase in inequality we need to be a bit more precise about the definition of ‘inequality’. There is wealth inequality and income inequality; and looking at the latter first, we have to be aware that this measure depends on whether we consider gross income, which is the sum of all sources of personal income before tax and other redistribution measures, or disposable household income. The latter is the more appropriate measure in a social context, as the household is (still) the most universal social structural component. The most recent OECD Rapport (OECD 211) for its 27 reporting countries shows that while the income for the lower decile increased by 1.3% from the mid-1980s to the upper 2000s, the income for the upper decile increased by 1.9%, and the average Gini coefficient increased from 0.29 to 0.316. If gross income is used as a measure, the Gini coefficients are higher, because taxes and other redistribution measures have the effect of lowering the inequality.

There is nothing wrong with income inequality in so far as the income is represented by wages; given the great range of capabilities, energy, and desires of people, a considerable variation in income is to be expected. A problem arises only because, under the capitalist system, an increasing proportion of income is in the form of a return on investment, i.e. on capital or wealth.

Wealth inequality is measured in much the same ways as income inequality; by examining the wealth distribution, or by a Gini coefficient. However it is measured, wealth inequality is increasing, as is demonstrated by the data in Piketty (2014) and in a recent Oxfam Briefing Paper (Oxfam 2016), a document that includes an extensive list of references to relevant data. The data shows an overall increase in wealth, and also that the number of people living in extreme poverty has been halved in the period from 1990 to 2010. But it also shows how the increase is skewed towards the wealthier half of the world’s population, although the exact extent of this imbalance depends on the definition of personal wealth, and its interpretation is the subject of some debate (Oxfam debate 2016). Oxfam is primarily concerned with alleviating poverty and with the plight of the poorest half of the population; the crucial feature of the wealth distribution data in the current context is the accelerating trend towards a concentration of wealth at the very upper end of the distribution. In the years since 2010, the share of the world’s wealth owned by the richest 1% of the world’s population has been steadily increasing, to the extent that it now is approximately equal to 50%. That is, this 1% of the population has as much wealth as the remaining 99%. But even more significant is the concentration within this 1%: About 4500 individuals, out of an adult population of 4772 million, each have wealth exceeding 500 million USD, and we note that most of these ultra-wealthy individuals reside in the Western part of the world, i.e. North America and Europe (Credit Suisse 2015) . These individuals constitute what William Robinson identifies as the Transnational Capitalist Class, or TNC (Robinson 2014) , and to the extent that they are able to coordinate their actions, this TNC is a force that can challenge most national governments and play a significant political role on the world stage. Hence, not only is capitalism , in its current form, resulting in increasing economic inequality, but it is creating a new entity, a new structural element in the world society as a system . And it is a very powerful element; wealth is power, not least in its ability to influence government through lobbying, as discussed by Hanna (2013). In the US, by 2012, direct lobbying had reached $3.28 billion, up from $1.44 billion in 1998—more than double. And in the previously referenced book by Shiller (2012) , a chapter is devoted to the issue of lobbying in the US.

We have realised that society is a complex, dynamic system, and that the stability of its evolution can be seen as a matter of checks and balances between a number of structural elements with competing views and interests: unions versus employer organisations, socialists versus conservatives, churches versus humanists, and so on. The sudden (on an evolutionary timescale) appearance of a new and very powerful structural element must make us ask what impact this might have on stability. Answering that question, in the form of a likely prediction, goes way beyond my capabilities; all I can do here is indicate one possible scenario.

The scenario is based on a conjunction of two developments: the subdivision of the world society into a small number of alliances , and the emergence of a dominant TNC within each alliance. If there were no alliances, and the world society were a collection of very many nations, the TNC would tend to spread its domination over all of them, and it would use its power to suppress opposition in any one nation, but would not have any interest in a confrontation between nations. On the contrary, from the TNC’s point of view, the ideal situation would be a state of universal docile economic serfdom. However, with the emergence of competing alliances, it is likely there will be a TNC within each alliance, maybe not constituted in the same way, but each embodying the same concentration of power, and they will see each other as competitors. If one feels threatened and believes it is in the process of losing out, it is not inconceivable that it will see its best way forward in military action. The TNC on its own cannot wage war, but this is where control of the media comes in. With a skilfully designed propaganda campaign, using all the means of persuasion at their disposal, it might not take too long to whip up paranoia to the extent that the people in the alliance themselves feel that both their lives as well as their cherished democratic institutions (which, in reality, they lost long ago) are threatened with extinction unless they act.

Now you might say that this is all completely unfounded and unrealistic speculation, and, of course, to a large extent it is that. But it is undeniable that the existence of the three main factors in this speculation—the rise of a TNC , the growth of alliances , and the control of the media—is an observable fact. The question is only to what extent we let them develop unchecked. The next subsection advocates a change to the economic paradigm that would reduce the rate of accumulation of wealth and power.

6.3.4 The Road to a New Paradigm

The focus on competition as the main interaction between individuals is a limited and primitive view of human nature, discounting our perception and intelligence . It is a view appropriate to the progression of species along the x-axis in Fig. 2.2, but of decreasing applicability for our progression along the y-axis. There are numerous examples of how people perform at their best without any significant competitive incentive, from nurses and missionaries to teachers and judges, and there are many organisations that function very well without being in a competitive environment, such as Médecins Sans Frontières.

There is no doubt that competition plays a significant role in the behaviour of both people and organisations, but that role should change as society evolves; from a means of survival towards a refreshing intellectual and physical challenge—it should be fun. Its interpretation in capitalism , and its expression in accumulating wealth, is going in the wrong direction, as was explained so well by Weber (1930) . Capital (i.e. the existence and use of capital) has been around for a long time, since before Antiquity, but it was always either a property of authority, administered by bureaucracy (and tax farming), as in ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire (note also the importance of slaves as capital), or then, in the Renaissance, a necessary adjunct, in the sense that making a profit was more like a sport. The change came with Protestantism, when hard work and making a profit became a moral duty; not making a profit on capital was seen as a waste and an affront to the Lord’s intention for mankind, and Weber illustrates this with quotes from Benjamin Franklin. Thus, capitalism became a central part of culture and of society. As an aside, this finds an analogue in technology. In the early days, much of the development of technology , often but not always rooted in science (e.g. Hero of Alexandria, also Leonardo da Vinci), was for amusement; only with the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism did the application of technology become a moral duty; not doing so would be a waste.

Relaxing the insistence on competition means that the importance of private ownership and its reflection in the Holy Grail of Small Government could be somewhat reduced. In particular, should we not differentiate the ownership of things from the ownership of the means of producing things? And within the latter, is there not a significant difference between the production of services seen as part of the infrastructure of our society, as services everyone has a claim to, such as education, health, justice, and safety, and the production of more differentiated and discretionary items, such as e.g. clothing, household goods, and entertainment? This would also give recognition to the fact that the rate of change of infrastructure is much less than that of consumer goods, and that this is reflected in the business strategies, with an emphasis on long-term planning rather than on agility.

In defence of the current paradigm one can bring many examples and studies that show how government owned enterprises are performing less well than comparable privately owned enterprises. However, there are also numerous counter-examples, as documented in Hanna (2013) , where it is also noted that the current extent of public ownership is much greater than most people would realise. A recent book, The Public Wealth of Nations (Detter and Fölster 2015) shows that poor management is not an inherent feature of being publicly owned; it is a result of the manner in which governments have traditionally managed state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The authors demonstrate, through an array of examples, that public assets can be managed just as successfully as private assets, and also emphasize how this frees politicians and government administrators from the pressures of vested interest groups for a share in the spoils of public wealth, and allows them to concentrate on issues concerning individual citizens and the economy as a whole.

The key to this is to consolidate all SOEs and other commercial assets into a national wealth fund (NWF) , a ring-fenced holding company at arm’s length from short-term political influence by the government and with professional management. Quoting from the book:

The NWF uses all the appropriate private sector tools and institutional frameworks that enable the government to consider the portfolio of commercial assets as a whole from the perspective of operating income and liabilities without any of the constraints of a public sector bureaucracy. Consolidation under a private sector vehicle allows the government to establish strategies for handling lossmaking assets, while the priority of improving performance provides greater opportunities to raise financing and choose optimal circumstances for disposals, in the same way as a private sector owner (p. 144)

While Detter and Fölster definitely see privatisation as one of the management mechanisms, their other suggestions for how to set up and run a NWF provide much of the basis needed for a new national economic paradigm in which the economy consists of two parts: the private sector economy, with private ownership , and the public sector economy, with government ownership. The details of how to make this transition would vary considerably from nation to nation, as the current organisation of the national economy varies, with some nations having already realised elements of the transition, as reported by Detter and Fölster . But the transition does not have to be done all at once; it would be a gradual process, sector by sector, with each sector having issues peculiar to individual countries, such as labour relations, current level of privatisation, and international obligations and contractual arrangements. The sectors for immediate consideration would be those where government already has a significant role, such as education, health, justice, safety, and transport, but in the next section we shall consider how other sectors of the economy might transition from the private into the public part within this new economic paradigm.

However, the greatest difference between nations would be in the required shift in ideology, with current economic ideologies ranging from a Wild West belief in the free market and private ownership to almost complete government control and ownership . Not that the shift would be any easier in the latter case than in the former; politicians are as loath to give up the power that direct management of state resources gives them, with its possibilities for nepotism, corruption, and cronyism, as private sector entrepreneurs are to give up their ability to engage in any part of the economy. In Western nations, in particular in the US, the cultural shift, and how it could be coupled with a successive shift in business structure , is discussed by Kelly (2013). She defines a class of business structures that she calls Generative Ownership Designs , because they generate the conditions for our common life to flourish, rather that focus exclusively on maximising profit. However, it is not clear to what extent this reorientation would actually change the power relations in society, and the reference to “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker” as an idealised form of enterprise seems to neglect the role of technology and the capital that goes with it.

So, given the problems involved in this paradigm shift, why should it take place? Referring to Kuhn, it is not enough that problems with the existing paradigm become significant, but that new models, results, or insights provide convincing resolutions of the problems; only then will the paradigm shift take place. In that sense, what is outlined in this subsection is just a proposal for what could become a new paradigm, and what is provided in the next subsection are arguments for why a shift should take place. Both the development of the details as well as the proof that it results in a better society will only be provided if and when it is gradually implemented.

6.3.5 Arguments for the New Paradigm

In advocating a transition to the new paradigm, we need to answer the following four questions:

- Why is the transition to a new paradigm relevant in this point in time?

- What current problems will it solve?

- What are the obstacles to the transition?

- What is the relationship to freedom?

One answer to the first question is that as society is undergoing rapid change, measured e.g. by the intensity of interaction between individuals and the integration of individuals in the structure of society, or by the development and application of new technology, it is unrealistic to expect our understanding of one of the major aspects of society—its economy—to continue to be based on a view of the role of the individual that goes back to Antiquity. Another answer is that while in the case of paradigm shifts in science the timing is not critical, it happens when it happens, the speed of change makes the need to address emerging problems in society critical, in order to prevent them resulting in significant, and in the worst case catastrophic, fluctuations in the evolution of society. But let us now turn to some specific answers to the second question.

Better return on public wealth. Much of the world’s public wealth is providing little or no return; by consolidating it into NWFs, under professional management, the increased return is, for the government, the equivalent of an additional tax, and offers the same options for its employment (e.g. increased investment in public infrastructure, or as input to a sovereign wealth fund).

Reduction in such management failures as corruption and cronyism. Replacing short-term political manipulation by fully transparent, professional management greatly reduces the opportunities for corruption, cronyism, and the undue influence of vested interests.

Freeing up politicians to focus on their job. For many politicians, the pressures exerted by vested interest groups for access to some of the “hidden” public wealth is an unwelcome, but unavoidable distraction. As a corollary to the previous answer, this pressure would be practically eliminated.

Control of public resources. For many countries, Australia among them, a significant portion of the public wealth is in the form of natural resources, such as oil, gas, coal, and minerals, but in many cases the public receives only a small fraction of this wealth; it is essentially given away to private industry. The new paradigm provides the framework for nationalising extractive industries, without suffering the criticisms regarding poor management previously attached to nationalised industries, and at the same time providing the means for greater compliance with environmental requirements. One example of such a SOE is the Norwegian oil and gas company, Statoil.

Reduction of economic inequality. If we allow that public wealth belongs to the people, and that the returns on this wealth is distributed in a manner that meets the needs of the people, then the new paradigm will reduce inequality. Detter and Fölster estimate that the world’s public wealth held by national governments is at least 75 trillion USD, probably considerably more (p. 52). This number does not include local government assets and natural resources, but from the limited data available, it is at least clear that the total value of public wealth is comparable to the total value of private wealth, which is about 250 trillion USD (Credit Suisse 2015) . Hence, the public wealth would provide a significant counterpart to the private wealth, and under the new paradigm the two components of the economy would be comparable. This would not eliminate the inequality inherent in the private economy, nor should it, as a degree of inequality reflects the inherent difference in individual capabilities, and motivates innovation. But it would eliminate the excessive inequality manifested as poverty and lack of basic opportunities, and it would reduce the pressure exerted by capital accumulation, and introduce a stabilising effect on the inherent instability of the free market.

Regarding the third question, there are a number of reasons for why a transition is resisted; most of which are related to the very nature of a paradigm. As Kuhn explained, a process becomes a paradigm because it works successfully over an extended period of time, and through this success is able to repel any challenges from divergent processes. A wealth of experience is built up, together with significant investments in whatever infrastructure is required to make the process work, and any problems that appear are always solved within the paradigm, simply because it is unthinkable to go outside it. This is the issue of enframing we encountered earlier. We have become so conditioned to the concepts and language of the capitalist society in its neoliberal version that we have difficulty thinking outside this framework and question its foundations.

Another reason is the fact that much of the success of capitalism , in the form of wealth and a high standard of living, is concentrated in the West, i.e. Europe and America, whereas most of the problems—inequality and poverty—are concentrated in other parts of the world. So, for the majority of us in the West, the problems seem fairly remote and not sufficient to require any change to our comfortable lifestyle, even though it is from us that the impetus for change should come.

A further reason is the current extension of the paradigm to the international level, in the form of clauses in trade agreements that limit the ability of national governments to implement changes that would affect private business interests. It might remind us of the regulations imposed by colonial powers on their colonies, making national governments seem like colonies of the TNC .

The answer to the fourth question is that the issue of freedom is inherent in any structural part of society, including its economic structure , and that underlying the two economic paradigms we have considered here are two considerably different views of freedom. The current neoliberal paradigm sees freedom as the freedom of the individual economic agent, and the role of the societal framework to be to allow the greatest possible expression of this freedom. The restrictions of the framework should only be restrictions on actions that would limit this freedom; it is a concept of freedom focused on the individual, with little concern for its effects on society as an entity in its own right, with its own “individuality”. Indeed, to quote Margaret Thatcher (Thatcher 1987) , “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.”

The concept of freedom associated with the new paradigm is one of being able to use our abilities to contribute to society; it is a concept that only makes sense when the individual is viewed as an integral element of society. It involves an explicit recognition of the fact that almost every feature of our lives is dependent on us being embedded in a society, and that the concepts describing our existence, including that of freedom, need to reflect the complex structure of society. There is something simplistic, almost primitive about the view of freedom within the neoliberal paradigm, with its focus on personal wealth and ownership, when what is needed is a reorientation; from the economic to the political aspects of freedom, and from independence to participation. This is not a reduction in freedom; on the contrary, it is an increase by extending its applicability and relevance, and the shift to the new economic paradigm would be a significant and very visible step in this reorientation.

6.4 Conclusion

The point of departure for the work presented in this book was the realisation that the evolution of the human species is currently not primarily an evolution of the individual, but of the relations between individuals, i.e. of society. At any one point in time, society consists of its members, structured by their interactions into various organisational components (families, companies, professions, etc.), physical infrastructure and artefacts, and, increasingly, its knowledge base . But, because the members are living organisms, society is not static; it is a complex, dynamic, self-organising system, whose behaviour is determined by its two groups of functional elements: the intrinsic capabilities of the members, and the interactions between them.

Technology and its applications are integral to society, both in enabling the production of the infrastructure and artefacts, and in mediating the interaction between individuals. It is futile to ask whether technology drives the evolution of society or vice versa; they are inseparable. But what we can say is that the development of technology and its applications is determined by us; technology has no will of its own.

Chapter 3 developed a model of the behaviour of the individual in terms of a simple picture of intelligence , defined as the ability to take goal-oriented adaptive action . The model focused on those actions that would influence the evolution of society, and it was argued that the goal had always remained the same, throughout both the evolution of species and the evolution of society. It has always been survival ; it is only that the nature of what survives has changed. With the increasing integration of the individual into society, survival shifted from the individual to society. This cannot be the survival of any particular version of society, as society is a living “macro-organism”, for which the absence of change would mean death; it is the process of evolution that must survive, the assurance that there will be a society tomorrow. Society does not evolve towards anything—a fixed end state; evolution is an unending process.

The simple picture of intelligence shows performance as depending on the intrinsic processing capability, in the form of an evaluation of the sensory input, and on the information available to the individual on which to base the evaluation—the individual’s knowledge base . This knowledge base is developed throughout life by three main processes: direct observation, interaction with other individuals, and introspection. It is convenient to think of this knowledge base as consisting of two types of knowledge: what we might call facts, like the value of π, or how to cross the street, and beliefs, the knowledge that has a meaning to the individual, and for which the individual is willing to make a sacrifice in order to maintain it. This second type of knowledge constitutes the individual’s identity, and in Sect. 3.7 we introduced a simplified structure of the identity, which led to a definition of an identity element .

Of the three processes through which the data base is developed, the interaction with other individuals has, as a hallmark of the evolution of society, become by far the dominant process. Not only did the increasing density of population make direct, face-to-face interaction more feasible, e.g. in the form of schools, but numerous technological advances, such as printing, mechanised transport, telephone, internet, etc. made interaction much more convenient and affordable. To a very good approximation, an individual’s interactions with other individuals are always with one individual at the time, i.e. they are binary interactions, and Chap. 4 explores the main characteristics of such interactions.

In accordance with our model of intelligence , a binary interaction is an exchange (which may be highly asymmetric, as in persuasion) of identity elements , and the result of the interaction is an increase in the number of identity elements common to the two individuals, which we defined as the alignment of the two identities. However, the alignment between any two individuals may not be the result of interaction between them only, but could also result from interaction with a common third individual (e.g. as in education). This led us to recognising a subtle distinction in the identity elements in the alignment between two individuals: those elements that the individuals are aware of and those they are not aware of as being common. It is the former that constitute the Social Bond , and it is this that is the analogue of the Chemical Bond. As the bond between atoms allows the construction of complex molecules, so the Social Bond between individuals in a group transforms the group into a society. However, in contradistinction to the Chemical Bond, the Social Bond is a dynamic relationship; the bond between two individuals will change not only as a result of interaction between these two individuals, but also as a result of their interactions with other individuals. It is this ongoing realignment of identities that forms the intelligence of individuals into the collective intelligence of a society that, discounting any divine intervention, guides the evolution of that society.

The axiomatic basis of the view of the evolution of society presented in this book is then that the most desirable course of evolution will result from the free exercise of the collective intelligence , and that any restriction of this freedom will result in an undesirable fluctuation of evolution. Or, conversely, the definition of the desirable course of evolution is whatever results from the unrestricted exercise of the collective intelligence. The degree to which the collective intelligence can be exercised becomes one measure of the Good Society , and an operational definition of this measure, in terms of data that is readily available from international organisations, was proposed in Sect. 6.1.

As a consequence of this view, any restriction or manipulation of the flow of information within society becomes potentially disruptive to the continuous evolution of society, which lead us to consider the roles of three important components of society: the political system, the economic paradigm, and information technology (IT) . Applications of technology constitute the most visible and influential feature of society; the development of technology has transformed society from bands of cave-dwelling hunter/gatherers to the immensely complex structure it is today, and the existence of the members of society has, on the average, increased greatly in richness . And while many applications have both positive and negative aspects, and can sometimes lead to unexpected consequences, it is true that almost no part of the lifestyle in developed countries would be possible without this heavy reliance on technology. But any application of technology is inextricably connected with the need for capital; one might say that the concept of capital arose in response to realising applications of technology, although tody that relationship is to a large extent reversed due to the capitalist economic paradigm, which drives technology to provide ever increasing opportunities for investment of the accumulated capital. Be that as it may, the neoliberal paradigm also sees private ownership as the preferred form of ownership, and as ownership implies control, and with the increasing inequality in the wealth distribution, the current situation is that increasing power is vested in a relative small group within society. In particular, given the application of IT in the transmission and manipulation of information, there is an opportunity for this group to influence the operation of the collective intelligence , i.e. to pervert the democratic process . It is this coupling of the political process with the economic paradigm through IT, and the implications of this for the stability of the evolution of society, that gave rise to the two proposals, in Sects. 6.2 and 6.3.

The call for a rethink of the role of parties in the political system is motivated by the dual desire to revitalise the deliberating process by removing it from dependence on any non-democratic power structure , and to allow greater diversity through the voting method, with in both cases taking advantage of features offered by IT . It is one possible realisation of the promise of a more inclusive political process that was made in promoting the current revolution in communications, but that, despite increased wealth and education, has not materialised. This is, of course, due not only to the political system; the pressure to generate this wealth on the one hand, and the multitude of offers for how to spend it on the other hand, provide little time for paying attention to political matters; in particular, as long as everything seems to be rolling along without any significant threat to our lifestyle. But the extent of voter apathy, and other signs of dissatisfaction with the current state of Western representative democracy , such as the emergence of independent representatives and the flight from major parties, point to the need for change. The political party has become a business, and rather than acting as an administrative support for candidates during elections, the representatives have become employees of the party. And instead of being seen as participants in the political process , the voters are treated as consumers, and the relationship is one of persuasion instead of deliberation—What I have proposed is one way of restoring the importance of the individual in the political process by making the representatives represent voters instead of parties, by establishing the referendum as a regular feature, and by removing the direct role of the party in government.

The proposal in Sect. 6.3, which advocates an increased role for government ownership, is based on the assertion that the products (incl. services) produced by society can be separated into two groups, which are distinguished by the characteristics of the relationship between producer and consumer. In the one group, which includes such products as healthcare, education, justice, public transport, and telecommunications infrastructure, the requirements on the product and on the conditions on which they are offered to the consumer are determined by society as a whole, through the political process . In the other group, generally labelled consumer products, the requirements on the product and on the conditions under which they are supplied, except for general standards and statutory requirements, are determined by the producer, and the involvement of the consumer is limited to selection among products offered.

In the first group, there is no scope for competition between suppliers as far as the characteristics of the products are concerned. The timeframe in which the requirements change is considerably greater than for products in the second group, reducing the need for agility in product innovation. Marketing and sales, which represent such a major component of the commercial process, are insignificant for products in the first group. Efficiency is of equal importance in both groups, but there is no evidence to support that it is any less due to public ownership , all else being equal. There therefore does not appear to be any obvious disadvantage to having the products in the first group provided by government-owned enterprises. There is, however, a significant advantage: it removes a large part of the economic activity from the requirement for providing a return on the invested capital, and thereby reduces the speed at which capital accumulates and the accompanying pressure on the stability of society through the coupling of wealth with power.

So, in conclusion, if this book has a single purpose, it is to promote an understanding of our global society as a living organism, albeit a very unique one, subject to processes of growth and decay that require careful management in order to avoid a catastrophic fluctuation in its evolution .

In particular, we need to acknowledge the inherent unstable nature of the capitalist mode and the need for control. The larger and more complex the economic system becomes, the more control it needs. The laisser-faire ideology on the neoconservative side of politics is a combination of stupidity (in ignoring the obvious warning signs) and a lack of basic understanding of systems, and I leave you with the following suggestive illustration (Fig. 6.4).

Fig. 6.4
Illustration of the economy stability problem. The stable (or desirable) operating condition is parameterised by the set-point, which is a function of the size of the economy (besides many other parameters), shown as the control function. The little ball at the top of each stability curve represents the economy, and left to itself, the smallest disturbance will make it roll down one of the sides. As the economy grows over time (t_1 < t_2 < t_3 < t_4), the stability becomes more and more precarious, and more effort is required in order to balance the economy at the top of the curve

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Appendix A: Evaluating the Measurement Model

The usefulness and significance of the model of a measure of The Good Society introduced in Sect. 6.1 is determined not only by the structure of the model and by the choice and definition of the restraints, but also by the availability of data as input to the model. Of course, the data required depends on the definition of ‘society’ in each case, and also on how the people in the society are structured into groups. If the society is the global society, or a region thereof, there are a number of institutions that generate relevant data structured by nations, and in the following, we look at some calculations based on this data.

1. (a)

Financial Restraint :

In order to calculate the financial restraint, r 1 , we need the following data for each nation:

- q Individual income

- q a Average per capita income

- s Subsistence level per capita.

All of these parameters are measured in international (PPP) dollars, and for convenience in the following calculations, they are normalised to the average per capita income (i.e. q 0 = 1). Let the interval 0– h , with 0 ≤ h ≤ 1, contain the fraction of the population for which any individual in that fraction has an income less than any individual in the rest of the population, then the function q ( h ), normalised to the average income, is the income distribution function . That is, q ( h ) is a monotonically increasing function, with

(A.1)

and the ratio of the average income of the richest t % of the population to that of the poorest t % of the population is given by

(A.2)

There are numerous definitions of the subsistence level, and its measurement varies between countries. Often a connection is made between subsistence level and poverty , such that the subsistence level is the income below which a person is said to live in poverty. If the fraction of the population living in poverty is denoted by p , then s = q ( p ). With this, the expression for r 1 in Eq. A.2 becomes

(A.3)

In order to evaluate this expression, we need to know the income distribution function, q ( h ). The development of a proposed form of this function, as well as the numerical evaluation of r 1 , are contained in Attachment A.1— Financial Restraint , and the required data was extracted from the following sources:

Per capita income

International Monetary Fund—World Economic Outlook Database, October 2014, www.imf.org/external/

The World Bank—Gross National Income on a per capita basis, using the Atlas method and converted to US$, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gnp.pcap.cd

In using this type of data, it should be noted that economic activity that does not result in monetary income, such as services provided within the family, or for barter, is usually not counted; the importance of these services varies widely among different economies. Also, per capita income does not take into account how income is deployed; whether it is invested in factors likely to improve the development of a country or nation such as medical facilities, educational facilities, transport infrastructure, etc.

Population

One World—Nations Online, http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/population-by-country.htm

Worldometers, http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/

Income distribution

United Nations Development Program—Human Development Report, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/269/hdr_2009_en_complete.pdf

Wikipedia reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_quality

Poverty (+other)

OECD, http://stats.oecd.org . Where poverty data is available, which is in less than 20% of the nations, it has been used; otherwise the common assumption s = q 0 / 2 has been adopted.

1. (b)

Educational restraint :

In order to calculate the educational restraint, r 2 , we need data on the level of education within each nation and, as discussed in Sect. 6.1 , we intend to characterise this level in terms of three parameters that define the levels of primary, secondary and tertiary education. The best data for the global society is provided as part of the United Nations Development Program—2014 Human Development Report, http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/hdr/2014-human-development-report/ . In the spreadsheet Educational Attainment of the Population Aged 25 years and Older/Latest Year Available , the data (as percentages of the population) is given in terms of the ISCED classification of educational levels (see http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/isced-2011-en.pdf ):

ISCED level 1

Primary education . Programmes at ISCED level 1 are typically designed to provide students with fundamental skills in reading, writing and mathematics (i.e. literacy and numeracy) and establish a solid foundation for learning and understanding core areas of knowledge, personal and social development, in preparation for lower secondary education. It focuses on learning at a basic level of complexity with little, if any, specialisation. Primary education typically lasts until age 10–12.

ISCED level 2

Lower secondary education . Programmes at ISCED level 2 are typically designed to build on the learning outcomes from ISCED level 1. Usually, the aim is to lay the foundation for lifelong learning and human development upon which education systems may then expand further educational opportunities. Some education systems may already offer vocational education programmes at ISCED level 2 to provide individuals with skills relevant to employment.

ISCED level 3

Upper secondary education . Programmes at ISCED level 3 are typically designed to complete secondary education in preparation for tertiary education or provide skills relevant to employment, or both. Exit from upper secondary education may range across education systems from usually 11–13 years of education since the beginning of ISCED level 1.

ISCED level 4

Post-secondary non-tertiary education . Programmes at ISCED level 4 are typically designed to provide individuals who completed ISCED level 3 with non-tertiary qualifications required for progression to tertiary education or for employment when their ISCED level 3 qualification does not grant such access. The content of ISCED level 4 programmes is not sufficiently complex to be regarded as tertiary education, although it is clearly post-secondary.

ISCED level 5+

Tertiary education builds on secondary education, providing learning activities in specialised fields of education. It aims at learning at a high level of complexity and specialisation. Tertiary education includes what is commonly understood as academic education but also includes advanced vocational or professional education. It comprises ISCED levels 5, 6, 7 and 8, which are labelled as short-cycle tertiary education, bachelor’s or equivalent level, master’s or equivalent level and doctoral or equivalent level, respectively.

For our purposes, the three levels of attained education are defined in terms of the ISCED levels as follows:

- Primary: ISCED levels 1 and 2

- Secondary: ISCED levels 3 and 4

- Tertiary: ISCED levels 5, 6, 7 and 8.

The OECD data and the resultant value of the restraint are contained in Attachment A.2— Education Restraint .

1. (c)

Information restraint :

The information restraint, r 3 , is composed of two main factors, the access to information, and the quality of the information. However, it should be noted that this leaves out an important aspect of information; the ability use information, or what UNESCO calls Media and Information Literacy (MIL). The MIL website, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/media-development/media-literacy/mil-as-composite-concept/ , makes the following statement:

Empowerment of people through Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is an important prerequisite for fostering equitable access to information and knowledge and promoting free, independent and pluralistic media and information systems. Media and Information Literacy recognizes the primary role of information and media in our everyday lives. It lies at the core of freedom of expression and information—since it empowers citizens to understand the functions of media and other information providers, to critically evaluate their content, and to make informed decisions as users and producer of information and media content.

In the approach taken in this paper, the information restraint considers only the infrastructure that makes information available and the quality of the information. The ability to use information is assumed to be included in the education restraint.

The access can be considered to be composed of two components: the communications channels available to the average person in society, as a measure of the volume of information available, and the means of accessing these channels. The first component is characterised by a number of parameters, such as the number of radio channels, the number of TV channels and the number of daily newspapers. However, while there are several sources of this type of data, such as that provided by an UNESCO pilot survey, http://www.uis.unesco.org/Communication/Pages/media-statistics.aspx , or that contained in the Wikipedia List of media by country , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_media_by_country , this data cannot easily, if at all, be converted into a meaningful score on a fixed scale; providing such a score by country would require a major effort on its own.

What is available is data provided by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in the form of percentages of households that have radio, TV and Internet access, downloadable from http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx . In addition, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) provides information regarding literacy for the population over 15 years of age per country, http://www.uis.unesco.org/DataCentre/Pages/regions.aspx , which may be taken as an indication of the ability to absorb information through the media, so that the access is calculated as the sum of the three percentages multiplied by the literacy rate, divided by 300.

The quality of information is measured by the Freedom of Information score generated by Reporters Without Borders. Data is collected through questionnaires that are completed by a diverse, but knowledgeable international group of people. The questions consider six general criteria, and using a system of weighting for each possible response, countries are given a score of between 0 and 100 for each of the six overall criteria. These scores are then used as indicators in calculating each country’s final score, also between 0 and 100, with 0 being perfect freedom and 100 being a total lack of freedom. The six criteria are:

- Pluralism (indicator Plu)

- Measures the degree to which opinions are represented in the media.

- Media independence (indicator Ind)

- Measures the degree to which the media are able to function independently of the authorities.

- Environment and self-censorship (indicator EnA)

- Analyses the environment in which journalists work.

- Legislative framework (indicator CaL)

- Analyses the quality of the legislative framework and measures its effectiveness.

- Transparency (indicator Tra)

- Measures the transparency of the institutions and procedures that affect the production of news and information.

- Infrastructure (indicator Inf)

- Measures the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information.

Reporters Without Borders meanwhile calculates a score of between 0 and 100 reflecting the level of violence against journalists during the period considered. The score is based on the monitoring carried out by RWB’s own staff. The overall score, the one that determines a country’s ranking, is calculated on the basis of these seven scores in a three-step process. A first score (SCOA) is calculated on the basis of the questionnaire alone, using the following weighting:

A second score uses the first score but incorporates the violence score, giving it a weight of 20%:

The final score is determined as follows:

The violence score (scoreExa) is calculated according to the following formula:

Mor : number of dead, Emp i : number of imprisoned since i years, Enl : number of kidnapped, Med : number of media attacked and ransacked, Exi : number who have fled the country, Arr : number of arrests, Agr : number of physical attacks, noteHT : score on respect for freedom of information in foreign territory.

The longer a journalist, netizen or media assistant is imprisoned, the more this imprisonment penalises the country concerned. The weighting coefficient has the following values, based on the length of imprisonment in years:

1−

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

10+

10

20

35

60

80

85

87

88

89

89.5

The quality parameter is simply the Score Final divided by 100, as is shown in Attachment A.3— Information Restraint , in the column Freedom, with 0 being perfect and 1 being as bad as possible.

1. (d)

Process restraint :

The process restraint, r 4 , is composed of three components: political rights, civil liberties and a global democracy rating. Data for the first two is sourced from World Concern Institute, publisher of World Audit, www.worldaudit.org , data for the last is sourced from Democracy Ranking Association, http://democracyranking.org/ , as follows:

Political rights

u

Scale 1–7 (1 = best, 7 = worst)

Civil liberties

v

Scale 1–7 (1 = best, 7 = worst)

Democracy

w

Scale 0–100 (0 = worst, 100 = best)

The raw data is normalised to a common scale of 0–1 (with 1 = best, 0 = worst), and then the values of the democracy component, which considers a number of factors (political system, economic environment, gender equality, health, environment, knowledge) and which is included here as in order to have two independent sources, are multiplied by a factor, m , which makes the average value of the two sets of data identical. The process restraint is then given by

(A.4)

The raw data and the calculation of r 4 are shown in the Process spreadsheet in Attachment A.4— Process Restraint .

1. (e)

Moral Fortitude (Willpower) :

Having decided to measure the parameter w in terms of the level of corruption , c , data on the latter is sourced from Transparency International, www.transparency.org , and from the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/index.aspx#home . Both sources provide the data in the form of a score between 0 and 100 for each nation, with 0 being highly corrupt, and 100 being very clean. The data and the calculation of w is contained in Attachment A.5— Moral Fortitude ( Willpower ).

1. (f)

The Global Value of X :

From the definitions of the various quantities entering into the determination of X, we see that in the case of the global society, our evaluation model involves a number of parameters:

- Primary parameters:

r 1

Financial restraint

r 2

Educational restraint

r 3

Information restraint

r 4

Process restraint

w

Moral fortitude (willpower).

- Adjustable parameters:

c 1

Financial restraint weight

c 2

Educational restraint weight

c 3

Information restraint weight

c 4

Process restraint weight

σ

Corruption scale factor.

Input parameters:

F

10% ratio

>0

G

20% ratio

>0

p

Fraction living in poverty

0–1

q

Per capita income by society element (nation)

PPP $

q 0

Society per capita income

PPP $

Fraction of households with radio

0–1

Fraction of households with TV

0–1

Fraction of households with Internet access

0–1

Level of political rights

0–1

Level of civil liberties

0–1

Level of democracy

0–1

Level of corruption

0–1

The value of the measure X, for the data selected as detailed above, is presented in Attachment A.6— Summary , and the global value is X = 0.404. However, as is shown in the Attachment, the number of nations for which a complete set of data is available is quite limited, so that the label ‘global’ is currently somewhat euphemistic.

1. (g)

Other Groupings and Societies :

For some purposes, the grouping into nations may not be appropriate. As there are nearly two hundred nations, this may still be too large a set to be the basis for a simple and intuitive model, and it may be difficult to obtain or estimate data for each nation. One approach is to group the nations into a small set of groups according to their per capita income (expressed by purchasing power parity (PPP) in so-called international dollars), but this does not give a realistic picture of the distribution of income among individuals, which is what we need for our model. For example, a country might have a relatively high per capita (i.e. average) income, but this can be the result of having a small, very wealthy part of the population, while the rest is actually relatively poor. A better approach is to use available information on the income distribution within each nation, e.g. in the form of the ratio of the average incomes of the richest to the poorest 10% of the population, and the same for the richest and poorest 20% (what was labelled as F and G above). A small Visual Basic module converts that data into a distribution over four income ranges, defined by three income values, a , b and c , as follows:

A—Low income:

Income < a

B—Lower middle income:

a ≤ Income < b

C—Upper middle income:

b ≤ Income < c

D—High income:

Income ≥ c

The values of the quantities A, B, C and D are the number of people within each range, with the total making up the population of the nation, as provided e.g. by One World—Nations Online, as referenced above.

The input data is identical to that used in Attachment A.1, and the result of one such calculation is shown in Table A.1 .

Table A.1
The percentage of the world’s population in each of the four income per capita ranges

PPP Income

Low

<$3000

Lower middle

$3000–$12,000

Upper middle

$12,000–$48,000

High

>$48,000

23.2%

36.4%

32.3%

8.1%

This approach can also be used when considering the impact of a new technology application in a society that is a single nation if there is expected to be a significant correlation between income and impact.

Attachment A.1—Financial Restraint

1. (a)

Introduction :

In order to determine the value of the financial restraint, r 1 , as defined by Eq. A.3 , it is necessary to know the form of the income distribution function, q ( h ), for each nation. However, readily available data is presented in the form of average per capita PPP (purchasing power parity) income (e.g. International Monetary Fund) and the ratios {F, G} of the average income of the richest {10 and 20%} and the poorest {10 and 20%} of the population of each nation (e.g. United Nations). Thus, any income distribution function to be defined by these two ratios will need to be a function with only two parameters, and in the following, a possible function is proposed.

1. (b)

Distribution Model :

The income distribution model is shown in Fig. A.1 . From this model, it follows that the two ratios, F and G, define the two parameters m and n. It follows immediately that

Fig. A.1
The simplified income distribution model. For any particular nation, the vertical scale is defined by the requirement that the area under the distribution (i.e. the average) equals the per capita income of that nation

Furthermore,

or

which has the solution

With this, the average income (i.e. the average of the distribution in Fig. A.1 , Q, which is the area under the function) can be expressed in terms of F and G:

The values at the segment endpoints are as follows:

α

1.5/n − 0.5/m

β

1.5/m − 0.5/n

γ

1.5m − 0.5n

δ

1.5n − 0.5m

The segment functions are as follows:

a

1.5/n − 0.5/m + 10(1/m − 1/n)h

b

2/m − 0.667/n − 0.5m + 0.167n + (2.5m − 0.833n − 2.5/m + 0.833/n)h

c

9.5m − 8.5n + 10(n − m)h

The requirement that the income distribution must be a monotonically increasing function results in the condition γ ≥ β. which equates to G > 1.5 + 0.329 F, as well as the requirement that G ≤ F. Consequently, G is constrained to lie in a range that is a function of F, as shown in Fig. A.2 . This is satisfied for all the nations listed at the end of this Attachment, except Honduras and Nicaragua.

Fig A.2
In order for the model to be valid, the value of parameter G must lie between the two lines. The lower line is in fact two lines, one being the straight line approximation to the exact lower bound

1. (c)

Gini Coefficient :

A frequently used measure of income inequality is the Gini coefficient. The Gini coefficient is defined in terms of the proportion of the total income of the population (y-axis) that is cumulatively earned by the bottom x% of the population, as shown by the so-called Lorenz curve in Fig. A.3 . The line at 45° thus represents perfect equality of incomes. The Gini coefficient can then be thought of as the ratio of the area that lies between the line of equality and the curve (marked A in the diagram) over the total area under the line of equality (marked A and B in the diagram); i.e. G = A /( A + B ).

Fig. A.3
The Gini coefficient is defined as A/(A + B). From Wikipedia

The Lorenz curve is the integral of the income distribution function.

In the calculations of the Gini coefficient based on our model, the division by Q is left to the end. The Lorenz curve, shown in Fig. A.4 , now consists of three segments—u, v and w—each a quadratic function of p , as shown below.

Fig. A.4
The curve is the Lorenz curve, defined as the integral of the income distribution function, and the Gini coefficient is defined as the ratio of the area A to the total area A + B. The area B is calculated as the sum of the three segments indicated

u

(1.5/n − 0.5/m)p + 5(1/m − 1/m)p 2

v

0.05m − 0.0167n − 0.25/m + 0.2167/n + (2/m − 0.667/n − 0.5m + 0.167n)p + (1.25m − 0.417n − 1.25/m + 0.417/n)p 2

w

−3.95m + 3.45n + 0.55/m − 0.05/n + (9.5m − 8.5n)p + 5(n − m)p 2

The boundary values (used to determine the integration constants) are as follows:

a

0.1(1/m + 1/n)

b

0.45m − 0.15n + 0.55/m − 0.05/n

The areas under each of the three segments are as follows:

U

0.0033/m + 0.0167/n

V

0.09m − 0.03n + 0.24/m

W

0.107m − 0.027n + 0.11/m − 0.01/n

As a result, the Gini coefficient is given by

and the values, as functions of F and G, are shown in Table A.2 .

Table A.2
The Gini coefficient, as a function of F and G, as determined by the model distribution shown in Fig. A.1

F

G

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

5

0.298

0.321

0.339

0.355

0.369

0.381

0.391

0.400

0.409

0.416

10

0.320

0.363

0.405

0.446

0.488

0.529

0.570

0.610

0.650

0.689

15

0.315

0.350

0.387

0.424

0.461

0.500

0.539

0.578

0.619

0.660

20

0.309

0.339

0.369

0.399

0.431

0.463

0.496

0.529

0.563

0.598

25

0.305

0.330

0.355

0.381

0.407

0.434

0.462

0.490

0.518

0.548

30

0.302

0.323

0.345

0.367

0.390

0.413

0.436

0.460

0.484

0.509

35

0.300

0.318

0.337

0.357

0.376

0.396

0.416

0.437

0.458

0.480

A test of the applicability of the income distribution proposed in Fig. A.1 is now to see how well the Gini coefficient is reproduced for those countries where both F and G and the Gini coefficient are listed, and the current model has an rms error of 0.054 and underestimates the Gini coefficient by about 0.7%, on the average.

1. (d)

Calculating the Financial Restraint :

The income distribution function, g(h), shown in Fig. A.1 consists of three straight line segments, identified as a, b and c in Sect. A.3 . Consequently, the integral in Eq. 10 will consist of one or more integrals of the form

where α and β depend on the segment, and the boundary values k and l depend on the segment and/or the value of p . There are two cases, p < 0.2 and p ≥ 0.2 (p is never greater than 0.8), and in the first case, the integral consist of three parts, in the second of two parts. A small Visual Basic module evaluates the integral and determines the value of the financial restraint, r 1 , and the results are shown in the table below.

Input data

Calculated

Country

Population

Per capita income

F

G

Gini

Financial restraint

Afghanistan

24.485

1924

7

4.5

0.200

0.940

Albania

2.832

10,596

7.2

4.8

0.290

0.744

Algeria

37.1

13,788

9.6

6.1

0.353

0.702

Angola

20.609

7978

Argentina

42.7

22,363

31.6

17.8

0.436

0.656

Armenia

3.275

7034

8

5

0.303

0.815

Australia

22.902

45,138

12.5

7

0.305

0.419

Austria

8.452

44,402

6.9

4.4

0.260

0.359

Azerbaijan

9.111

17,028

9.7

6

0.337

0.664

Bahrain

1.234

49,633

Bangladesh

142.319

3167

7.5

4.9

0.321

0.905

Belarus

9.46

17,623

6.9

4.5

0.265

0.642

Belgium

11.036

40,760

8.2

4.9

0.330

0.373

Benin

10.3

1793

9.4

6

0.435

0.943

Bolivia

10.624

5928

93.9

42.3

0.466

0.858

Bosnia/Herzegovina

3.84

9563

5.4

3.8

0.362

0.758

Botswana

2.038

15,241

43

20.4

0.610

0.766

Brazil

192.4

14,987

40.6

21.8

0.527

0.727

Bulgaria

7.245

16,518

7

4.4

0.343

0.666

Burkina Faso

17.4

1638

11.6

6.9

0.398

0.948

Burundi

10.2

877

19.3

9.5

0.333

0.971

Cambodia

13.396

3056

12.2

7.3

0.379

0.908

Cameroon

19.406

2861

15.7

9.1

0.389

0.912

Canada

35

43,253

9.4

5.5

0.337

0.478

Central African Rep.

5

604

69.2

32.7

0.563

0.967

Chad

11.274

2432

Chile

17.402

22,534

26.2

15.7

0.508

0.636

China

1347.35

11,868

21.6

12.2

0.370

0.680

Colombia

47.015

12,776

60.4

25.3

0.535

0.826

Congo-Brazzaville

4.043

6232

Costa Rica

4.302

14,344

23.4

15.6

0.486

0.689

Côte d’Ivoire

21.395

2710

16.6

9.7

0.415

0.916

Croatia

4.291

20,222

7.3

4.8

0.337

0.612

Cuba

11.241

Czech Republic

10.512

27,347

5.2

3.5

0.260

0.564

Dem Rep Congo

65.966

655

Denmark

5.58

43,080

8.1

4.3

0.240

0.445

Dominican Republic

9.379

12,173

25.3

14.3

0.457

0.614

Ecuador

14.483

10,908

35.2

17.3

0.466

0.790

Egypt

82.019

10,870

8

5.1

0.308

0.670

El Salvador

6.2

7783

38.6

20.9

0.418

0.809

Eritrea

6

1197

10.8

6.4

0.360

0.961

Estonia

1.318

26,052

10.8

6.4

0.298

0.590

Ethiopia

84.321

1427

6.6

4.3

0.955

Finland

5.408

40,045

5.6

3.8

0.269

0.444

France

65.35

39,813

9.1

5.6

0.327

0.482

Gabon

1.505

20,520

The Gambia

1.728

1642

20.2

11.2

0.473

0.927

Georgia

4.469

7156

15.4

8.3

0.413

0.825

Germany

80.5

43,475

6.9

4.3

0.306

0.484

Ghana

27

4029

14.1

8.4

0.428

0.882

Greece

10.787

25,126

10.2

6.2

0.343

0.473

Guatemala

14.714

7290

33.9

20.3

0.524

0.806

Guinea

10.537

1321

10.5

6.6

0.394

0.957

Guinea-Bissau

1.521

1411

19

10.3

0.355

0.954

Haiti

10.085

1703

54.4

26.6

0.592

0.914

Honduras

8.385

4592

59.4

17.2

0.574

0.973

Hong Kong

7.103

52,984

17.8

9.7

0.387

Hungary

9.962

23,236

5.5

3.8

0.312

0.566

India

1210.57

5450

8.6

5.6

0.336

0.848

Indonesia

237.641

9635

7.8

5.2

0.340

0.761

Iran

76.8

16,165

17.2

9.7

0.383

0.702

Iraq

33.33

14,367

Ireland

4.588

44,663

9.4

5.6

0.343

0.464

Israel

7.87

32,717

13.4

7.9

0.392

0.562

Italy

59.464

34,103

11.6

6.5

0.360

0.440

Jamaica

2.706

8487

17.3

9.8

0.455

0.797

Japan

127.3

36,654

4.5

3.4

0.381

0.434

Jordan

6.297

11,639

11.3

6.9

0.354

0.739

Kazakhstan

16.734

23,038

8.5

5.6

0.290

0.591

Kenya

38.61

3009

13.6

8.2

0.477

0.877

North Korea

24.052

South Korea

48.58

33,791

7.8

4.7

0.313

0.490

Kuwait

3.328

70,785

Kyrgyzstan

5.477

3230

6.4

4.4

0.362

0.907

Laos

6.256

4666

8.3

5.4

0.367

0.866

Latvia

2.07

22,832

11.6

6.8

0.366

0.622

Lebanon

4.228

17,326

Lesotho

2.171

2765

39.8

44.2

0.525

0.900

Liberia

3.477

887

12.8

Libya

6.4

20,681

Lithuania

3.19

25,374

10.4

6.3

0.376

0.590

Macedonia

2.057

12,587

12.5

7.5

0.432

0.729

Madagascar

20.696

1398

19.2

11

0.441

0.953

Malawi

13.102

748

10.9

6.7

0.390

0.975

Malaysia

30.017

23,160

22.1

12.4

0.462

0.650

Mali

14.528

1493

12.5

7.6

0.330

0.951

Mauritania

3.341

3187

12

7.4

0.405

0.903

Mauritius

1.286

17,118

Mexico

112.336

17,390

21.6

12.8

0.481

0.605

Moldova

3.56

4666

8.2

5.3

0.330

0.867

Mongolia

2.78

9293

8.2

5.4

0.365

0.769

Morocco

32.548

7356

11.7

7.2

0.409

0.810

Mozambique

23.7

1046

18.8

9.9

0.457

0.965

Myanmar

47.963

4345

Namibia

2.283

10,234

106.6

56.1

0.613

0.777

Nepal

26.621

2245

15.8

9.1

0.328

0.929

Netherlands

16.838

46,440

9.2

5.1

0.309

0.699

New Zealand

4.434

33,626

12.4

6.8

0.362

0.562

Nicaragua

6.071

4593

31

8.8

0.405

0.959

Niger

16.275

984

46

20.7

0.346

0.966

Nigeria

177.5

5746

17.8

9.7

0.488

0.849

Norway

5.009

64,363

6.1

3.9

0.258

0.505

Oman

2.773

43,304

Pakistan

184

4574

6.5

4.3

0.300

0.869

Palestine

4.293

Panama

3.406

19,080

49.9

23.9

0.519

0.565

Papua New Guinea

7.014

2290

23.8

12.6

0.509

0.928

Paraguay

6.382

8064

38.8

25.7

0.480

0.780

Peru

30.135

11,557

26.1

15.2

0.453

0.746

Philippines

92.34

6597

15.5

9.3

0.430

0.754

Poland

38.501

23,273

8.8

5.6

0.341

0.593

Portugal

10.487

25,643

15

8

0.385

0.634

Qatar

1.792

14,5894

Romania

19.043

17,440

7.5

4.9

0.300

0.646

Russia

143.056

24,298

12.7

7.6

0.401

0.612

Rwanda

10.718

1608

18.6

9.9

0.508

0.948

Saudi Arabia

27.137

51,779

Senegal

12.855

2243

12.3

7.4

0.392

0.930

Serbia

7.12

12,465

Sierra Leone

5.4

1924

87.2

57.6

0.425

0.894

Singapore

5.184

78,762

17.7

9.7

0.454

Slovakia

5.445

26,616

6.7

4

0.260

0.846

Slovenia

2.057

28,512

5.9

3.9

0.312

0.535

Somalia

9.797

South Africa

54

12,507

33.1

17.9

0.650

0.750

South Sudan

8.26

2401

Spain

46.185

31,942

10.3

6

0.347

0.546

Sri Lanka

20.653

9583

11.1

6.9

0.364

0.769

Sudan

30.894

4429

Swaziland

1.186

7646

25.1

13

0.515

0.733

Sweden

9.49

43,407

6.2

4

0.250

0.370

Switzerland

7.952

53,977

9

5.5

0.337

0.418

Syria

21.566

0

Taiwan

23.293

41,539

Tajikistan

7.8

2536

7.8

5.2

0.308

0.917

Tanzania

43.188

1834

9.2

5.8

0.376

0.942

Thailand

65.5

14,136

12.6

7.7

0.400

0.706

Timor-Leste

1.066

7678

Togo

6.191

1390

Trinidad and Tobago

1.318

30,197

12.9

7.6

0.403

0.440

Tunisia

10.673

10,998

13.4

7.9

0.414

0.676

Turkey

74.724

18,874

6.6

4.6

0.390

0.621

Turkmenistan

5.105

12,863

12.3

7.7

0.408

0.719

Uganda

32.939

1681

16.6

9.2

0.443

0.946

Ukraine

45.426

8651

5.9

4.1

0.264

0.777

United Arab Emirates

8.264

63,181

United Kingdom

62.262

36,208

13.8

7.2

0.380

0.571

United States

317

53,001

15.9

8.4

0.411

0.512

Uruguay

3.251

19,679

11.8

Uzbekistan

29.123

5176

10.6

6.2

0.367

0.858

Venezuela

27.15

18,453

18.8

16

0.448

0.491

Vietnam

87.84

5295

6.9

4.9

0.356

0.850

Yemen

24.527

3838

8.6

5.6

0.377

0.887

Zambia

13.046

3926

Zimbabwe

13.061

1954

The global value of the financial restraint, r 1 , is then given as the value for the average of the values for individual nations, weighted by their populations, for those nations for which a value could be calculated. The sum of the inhabitants of those nations is 6480 million, or about 94% out of a world population of 6901 million. The calculated value of the financial restraint is r 1 = 0.729.

Attachment A.2—Education Restraint

Country

Population

Primary

Secondary

Tertiary

Restraint

Afghanistan

24.485

Albania

2.832

52.1

41.8

1.5

0.30

Algeria

37.100

38.8

7.6

0.70

Angola

20.609

Argentina

42.700

47.7

13.7

0.58

Armenia

3.275

16.3

61.2

20.4

0.15

Australia

22.902

23.4

35.2

41.3

0.13

Austria

8.452

23.0

59.0

18.0

0.15

Azerbaijan

9.111

9.8

63.6

25.1

0.12

Bahrain

1.234

30.7

38.4

11.2

0.36

Bangladesh

142.319

30.1

4.2

0.78

Belarus

9.460

13.8

32.3

50.2

0.12

Belgium

11.036

30.2

33.0

29.8

0.22

Benin

10.300

16.0

2.2

0.88

Bolivia

10.624

17.2

25.6

0.64

Bosnia/Herzegovina

3.840

41.6

26.6

6.2

0.45

Botswana

2.038

Brazil

192.400

36.1

11.4

0.67

Bulgaria

7.245

27.5

51.0

21.5

0.16

Burkina Faso

17.400

4.7

0.3

0.2

0.97

Burundi

10.200

Cambodia

13.396

29.3

6.3

0.77

Cameroon

19.406

Canada

35.000

17.3

35.1

47.7

0.10

Central African Rep.

5.000

Chad

11.274

3.0

3.2

0.95

Chile

17.402

31.7

18.0

0.63

China

1347.350

71.1

18.7

3.6

0.37

Colombia

47.015

50.2

19.7

0.50

Congo-Brazzaville

4.043

Costa Rica

4.302

42.7

20.9

0.54

Côte d’Ivoire

21.395

Croatia

4.291

26.2

18.3

0.66

Cuba

11.241

45.6

9.4

0.63

Czech Republic

10.512

11.3

71.2

17.3

0.12

Dem Rep Congo

65.966

0.00

Denmark

5.580

23.1

42.2

31.1

0.17

Dominican Republic

9.379

32.0

10.8

0.70

Ecuador

14.483

38.9

21.4

11.6

0.46

Egypt

82.019

El Salvador

6.200

28.9

11.2

0.71

Eritrea

6.000

Estonia

1.318

12.7

51.2

36.0

0.10

Ethiopia

84.321

15.8

7.7

1.1

0.82

Finland

5.408

28.8

38.6

32.6

0.15

France

65.350

34.7

37.8

25.9

0.19

Gabon

1.505

The Gambia

1.728

Georgia

4.469

14.6

57.8

25.8

0.13

Germany

80.500

17.9

56.4

25.6

0.13

Ghana

27.000

44.1

17.4

3.1

0.55

Greece

10.787

39.7

33.6

20.0

0.26

Guatemala

14.714

38.5

13.1

0.65

Guinea

10.537

Guinea-Bissau

1.521

Haiti

10.085

Honduras

8.385

34.4

14.3

4.2

0.62

Hong Kong

7.103

Hungary

9.962

22.4

56.6

21.0

0.15

India

1210.570

Indonesia

237.641

45.5

7.9

0.65

Iran

76.800

55.4

20.0

0.47

Iraq

33.330

Ireland

4.588

30.2

32.9

30.3

0.22

Israel

7.870

15.0

44.5

0.47

Italy

59.464

47.1

34.5

12.8

0.28

Jamaica

2.706

Japan

127.300

16.7

39.9

29.9

0.24

Jordan

6.297

43.8

25.2

16.2

0.35

Kazakhstan

16.734

3.7

70.8

25.5

0.09

Kenya

38.610

28.5

21.6

0.63

North Korea

24.052

0.00

South Korea

48.580

21.6

35.3

0.52

Kuwait

3.328

31.8

23.2

9.5

0.51

Kyrgyzstan

5.477

9.7

70.3

17.9

0.13

Laos

6.256

Latvia

2.070

13.6

58.9

27.2

0.12

Lebanon

4.228

45.4

15.3

0.57

Lesotho

2.171

27.1

11.9

1.9

0.71

Liberia

3.477

Libya

6.400

Lithuania

3.190

17.1

52.2

29.3

0.13

Macedonia

2.057

Madagascar

20.696

Malawi

13.102

14.6

0.5

0.91

Malaysia

30.017

40.3

34.5

16.4

0.28

Mali

14.528

8.4

3.2

0.92

Mauritania

3.341

Mauritius

1.286

23.1

37.8

5.2

0.47

Mexico

112.336

43.4

16.3

0.58

Moldova

3.560

24.5

55.7

18.9

0.16

Mongolia

2.780

27.9

43.9

23.7

0.20

Morocco

32.548

Mozambique

23.700

Myanmar

47.963

Namibia

2.283

31.5

14.8

2.2

0.66

Nepal

26.621

Netherlands

16.838

31.0

37.5

29.0

0.19

New Zealand

4.434

29.5

30.9

34.8

0.20

Nicaragua

6.071

Niger

16.275

Nigeria

177.500

Norway

5.009

23.4

42.6

31.4

0.16

Oman

2.773

24.9

27.4

14.0

0.46

Pakistan

184.000

24.2

7.4

0.78

Palestine

4.293

18.7

13.2

24.8

0.52

Panama

3.406

30.2

21.5

21.3

0.41

Papua New Guinea

7.014

Paraguay

6.382

38.4

10.4

0.67

Peru

30.135

23.5

22.1

0.64

Philippines

92.340

40.6

24.2

0.39

Poland

38.501

16.6

60.3

21.8

0.14

Portugal

10.487

58.3

15.1

15.4

0.36

Qatar

1.792

33.7

20.5

20.9

0.40

Romania

19.043

32.7

52.6

13.3

0.20

Russia

143.056

14.4

21.9

60.1

0.12

Rwanda

10.718

Saudi Arabia

27.137

32.4

27.9

21.0

0.34

Senegal

12.855

16.2

3.0

0.87

Serbia

7.120

42.7

17.3

0.57

Sierra Leone

5.400

Singapore

5.184

16.7

28.1

39.6

0.25

Slovakia

5.445

Slovenia

2.057

14.4

17.2

0.74

Somalia

9.797

20.5

23.7

0.64

South Africa

54.000

South Sudan

8.260

Spain

46.185

19.3

54.3

6.4

0.33

Sri Lanka

20.653

Sudan

30.894

65.0

14.1

0.47

Swaziland

1.186

Sweden

9.490

20.7

48.3

29.4

0.15

Switzerland

7.952

16.7

48.1

34.8

0.12

Syria

21.566

45.6

15.7

6.2

0.52

Taiwan

23.293

Tajikistan

7.800

18.2

68.3

10.6

0.17

Tanzania

43.188

47.2

0.7

0.9

0.70

Thailand

65.500

33.0

15.2

11.8

0.55

Timor-Leste

1.066

Togo

6.191

41.1

6.2

2.6

0.67

Trinidad and Tobago

1.318

37.7

46.9

9.6

0.26

Tunisia

10.673

12.5

0.88

Turkey

74.724

52.3

12.9

0.56

Turkmenistan

5.105

Uganda

32.939

33.5

7.7

2.9

0.70

Ukraine

45.426

22.8

36.0

38.0

0.16

United Arab Emirates

8.264

27.3

29.1

18.0

0.39

United Kingdom

62.262

13.8

53.0

33.1

0.11

United States

317.000

11.1

47.0

40.7

0.10

Uruguay

3.251

60.8

10.9

0.53

Uzbekistan

29.123

0.00

Venezuela

27.150

39.7

15.9

0.60

Vietnam

87.840

67.6

19.0

6.7

0.36

Yemen

24.527

Zambia

13.046

Zimbabwe

13.061

54.7

8.8

1.5

0.58

The global value of the education restraint, r 2 , is then given as the value for the average of the values for individual nations, weighted by their populations, for those nations for which a value could be calculated. The sum of the inhabitants of those nations is 4755 million, or about 69% out of a world population of 6901 million. The calculated value of the education restraint is r 2 = 0.427.

Attachment A.3—Information Restraint

Mio.

Score

%

Households %

Country

Population

Freedom

Literacy

Radio

TV

I’net

Restraint

Afghanistan

24.485

37.36

38.16

Albania

2.832

30.88

97.62

13.7

Algeria

37.1

36.54

80.20

59.6

98.1

10

0.716

Angola

20.609

6.82

71.14

47.8

38.5

5.7

0.797

Argentina

42.7

37.8

98.09

47.5

Armenia

3.275

25.67

99.65

3.6

98.7

22.2

0.693

Australia

22.902

28.04

82.7

Austria

8.452

15.24

80.9

Azerbaijan

9.111

47.73

99.82

99.6

100

46.8

0.571

Bahrain

1.234

62.75

95.70

23

98.9

79

0.761

Bangladesh

142.319

42.01

61.55

11

32.2

2.8

0.945

Belarus

9.46

48.35

99.73

98.8

51.9

Belgium

11.036

12.94

80

Benin

10.3

28.33

38.45

25.4

1.4

Bolivia

10.624

32.8

95.65

74.7

67.2

7.4

0.680

Bosnia/Herzegovina

3.84

26.86

98.48

97.4

Botswana

2.038

22.91

88.46

Brazil

192.4

32.75

92.58

85.6

98.1

39.6

0.537

Bulgaria

7.245

28.58

98.39

27.6

97.9

53.7

0.580

Burkina Faso

17.4

23.7

36.02

18.4

2

Burundi

10.2

38.02

85.62

0.1

Cambodia

13.396

41.81

77.19

43.7

62.4

5.5

0.833

Cameroon

19.406

34.78

74.99

33.1

1.9

Canada

35

12.69

98.9

81.5

Central African Rep.

5

26.61

36.75

Chad

11.274

34.87

40.17

Chile

17.402

26.24

97.51

40.9

China

1347.35

73.07

96.38

23.7

Colombia

47.015

37.48

94.68

77

91.1

35.7

0.598

Congo-Brazzaville

4.043

28.2

79.31

54.3

46.8

1

0.806

Costa Rica

4.302

12.08

97.76

72.6

96.9

46.7

0.381

Côte d’Ivoire

21.395

29.77

43.11

1.1

Croatia

4.291

26.61

99.27

97.1

64.6

Cuba

11.241

71.64

99.85

3.4

Czech Republic

10.512

10.17

72.6

Dem Rep Congo

65.966

41.66

63.82

0.6

Denmark

5.58

7.08

97.9

92.7

Dominican Republic

9.379

28.34

91.79

86

19.6

Ecuador

14.483

34.69

94.46

38.2

86.8

28.3

0.685

Egypt

82.019

48.66

73.75

48.9

96.9

34.5

0.772

El Salvador

6.2

22.86

87.99

39.1

85.3

12.7

0.690

Eritrea

6

84.83

73.77

1.2

Estonia

1.318

9.26

99.83

98.9

80.3

Ethiopia

84.321

39.57

49.09

Finland

5.408

6.38

89.2

France

65.35

21.6

98.6

81.7

Gabon

1.505

28.69

83.18

6

The Gambia

1.728

45.09

55.55

76

Georgia

4.469

30.09

99.76

3.5

95.6

34.6

0.689

Germany

80.5

10.24

95

87.7

Ghana

27

17.27

76.57

51

11

Greece

10.787

28.46

97.69

100

56.3

Guatemala

14.714

29.39

81.55

72.4

71.4

8.6

0.707

Guinea

10.537

28.49

30.41

1

Guinea-Bissau

1.521

28.94

59.91

Haiti

10.085

24.09

60.73

Honduras

8.385

36.92

88.48

69.4

6.8

Hong Kong

7.103

26.16

0.00

79.9

Hungary

9.962

26.09

99.05

99.2

71.5

Iceland

0.32

8.49

71.24

19.9

47.2

3.1

0.847

India

1210.57

41.22

93.88

71.6

5.7

Indonesia

237.641

41.05

86.85

56.4

98.7

35.8

0.674

Iran

76.8

73.4

79.69

Iraq

33.33

44.67

0.00

82.4

Ireland

4.588

10.06

0.00

89.4

70.3

Israel

7.87

32.97

99.15

68.9

Italy

59.464

26.11

88.69

85.1

87.9

21.3

0.576

Jamaica

2.706

9.88

0.00

86.2

Japan

127.3

25.17

95.37

97.6

35.4

Jordan

6.297

38.47

99.79

86.8

49.4

Kazakhstan

16.734

55.08

77.97

74

28

3.4

0.877

Kenya

38.61

27.8

North Korea

24.052

83.9

98.8

98.1

South Korea

48.58

96.27

62

Kuwait

3.328

28.28

99.52

37.4

98.5

7.2

0.660

Kyrgyzstan

5.477

32.2

79.86

3.4

Laos

6.256

67.99

99.89

71.6

Latvia

2.07

22.89

93.94

61.8

Lebanon

4.228

30.15

79.36

Lesotho

2.171

28.36

47.60

49.9

8.6

Liberia

3.477

29.89

91.02

Libya

6.4

37.86

99.82

99

64.7

Lithuania

3.19

7.35

0.00

58.3

Luxembourg

0.512

18.24

64.66

15.2

38.9

Macedonia

2.057

34.27

65.79

45.6

8.7

5.5

0.914

Madagascar

20.696

28.62

94.64

64.7

Malawi

13.102

28.18

38.70

31.3

2

Malaysia

30.017

42.73

94.44

99.3

78.8

Mali

14.528

30.03

52.10

25.1

Mauritania

3.341

26.76

90.62

97.4

39.2

Mauritius

1.286

26.47

95.14

79.3

94.9

30.7

0.522

Mexico

112.336

45.3

0.00

73

93

27

Moldova

3.56

26.01

98.38

9.2

89.3

14

0.727

Mongolia

2.78

29.93

98.73

77.2

98.9

55

0.467

Morocco

32.548

39.04

58.77

Mozambique

23.7

28.01

93.09

Myanmar

47.963

44.71

81.94

41.8

10

Namibia

2.283

12.5

63.95

38.6

3.3

Nepal

26.621

34.61

99.2

94.6

Netherlands

16.838

6.48

96.9

76.8

New Zealand

4.434

8.38

82.82

65.6

2

Nicaragua

6.071

28.31

19.13

Niger

16.275

23.08

59.57

68.7

40

6.1

0.825

Nigeria

177.5

34.11

94.3

Norway

5.009

6.52

91.14

35.7

93.9

77.6

0.412

Oman

2.773

41.51

57.94

68

Pakistan

184

51.31

96.50

51.3

96.7

30.4

0.721

Palestine

4.293

43.09

95.05

73.3

85.5

30.5

0.659

Panama

3.406

32.95

64.23

Papua New Guinea

7.014

22.97

95.56

81.4

89.4

25.1

0.519

Paraguay

6.382

28.78

94.48

80.3

77.2

20.2

0.601

Peru

30.135

31.87

96.29

73.6

10.1

Philippines

92.34

43.11

99.79

71.9

Poland

38.501

13.11

95.68

62.3

Portugal

10.487

16.75

97.30

48.4

95.3

96.4

0.352

Qatar

1.792

32.86

98.77

58.1

Romania

19.043

23.05

99.72

14.2

87

67.2

0.569

Russia

143.056

43.42

70.52

62.6

5.3

Rwanda

10.718

55.46

94.65

54.4

Sao Tome & Principe

0.165

23.84

57.67

78.5

62

4.5

0.788

Saudi Arabia

27.137

56.88

98.11

40.2

Senegal

12.855

26.19

0.00

86.7

94.6

34

Serbia

7.12

26.59

48.09

Sierra Leone

5.4

26.35

96.76

84

Singapore

5.184

43.43

77.9

Slovakia

5.445

13.25

99.72

75.6

Slovenia

2.057

20.49

Somalia

9.797

73.59

94.27

67.5

74.5

33.9

0.854

South Africa

54

24.56

South Sudan

8.26

36.2

98.10

69.8

Spain

46.185

20.5

92.63

5.9

Sri Lanka

20.653

56.59

86.4

34.9

Sudan

30.894

70.06

75.90

29.3

Swaziland

1.186

46.76

87.47

Sweden

9.49

9.23

92.6

Switzerland

7.952

9.94

92.7

80.7

Syria

21.566

78.53

86.43

35.2

Taiwan

23.293

23.82

Tajikistan

7.8

35.71

99.77

Tanzania

43.188

27.34

0.00

65

15

Thailand

65.5

38.6

96.67

58.1

98.1

23.2

0.645

Timor-Leste

1.066

67.52

Togo

6.191

28.45

66.55

1

Trinidad and Tobago

1.318

23.12

98.96

Tunisia

10.673

39.93

81.78

66.6

97.7

17.1

0.703

Turkey

74.724

46.56

95.01

49.1

Turkmenistan

5.105

79.14

99.69

Uganda

32.939

31.69

78.39

6.4

Ukraine

45.426

36.79

99.76

5.2

95.8

35.6

0.713

United Arab Emirates

8.264

33.49

93.84

52.9

94.6

72

0.543

United Kingdom

62.262

16.89

88.4

United States

317

18.22

71.7

Uruguay

3.251

15.92

98.49

90.9

97

48.4

0.348

Uzbekistan

29.123

60.39

99.59

Venezuela

27.15

34.44

96.32

72.5

96.3

28.6

0.584

Vietnam

87.84

71.78

94.51

4.6

87.8

12.5

0.907

Yemen

24.527

69.22

70.07

2.9

Zambia

13.046

27.93

63.38

58.3

30.7

1.3

0.863

Zimbabwe

13.061

38.12

86.50

37.9

36.3

4.8

0.859

The global value of the information restraint, r 2 , is then given as the value for the average of the values for individual nations, weighted by their populations, for those nations for which a value could be calculated. The sum of the inhabitants of those nations is 1478 million, or about 21% out of a world population of 6901 million. The calculated value of the information restraint is r 3 = 0.491.

Attachment A.4—Process Restraint

Country

Population

Political rights

Civil liberties

Democracy

Process restraint

Afghanistan

24.485

6

6

Albania

2.832

3

3

55.4

0.337

Algeria

37.1

6

5

Angola

20.609

6

5

Argentina

42.7

2

2

68.5

0.174

Armenia

3.275

5

4

45.9

0.541

Australia

22.902

1

1

78.9

0.022

Austria

8.452

1

1

79.4

0.020

Azerbaijan

9.111

6

6

Bahrain

1.234

38.7

Bangladesh

142.319

3

4

49.3

0.417

Belarus

9.46

7

6

Belgium

11.036

1

1

79.8

0.018

Benin

10.3

2

2

48.9

0.251

Bolivia

10.624

3

3

55.4

0.337

Bosnia/Herzegovina

3.84

3

3

49.2

0.362

Botswana

2.038

3

2

53.3

0.290

Brazil

192.4

2

2

62.8

0.197

Bulgaria

7.245

2

2

63.9

0.192

Burkina Faso

17.4

5

3

43.0

0.497

Burundi

10.2

5

5

41.0

0.616

Cambodia

13.396

6

5

Cameroon

19.406

6

6

Canada

35

1

1

78.2

0.025

Central African Rep.

5

7

7

Chad

11.274

7

6

Chile

17.402

1

1

70.9

0.054

China

1347.35

7

6

39.2

0.790

Colombia

47.015

3

4

58.0

0.382

Congo-Brazzaville

4.043

6

5

Costa Rica

4.302

1

1

70.2

0.056

Côte d’Ivoire

21.395

5

4

34.0

0.588

Croatia

4.291

1

2

66.4

0.127

Cuba

11.241

7

6

Czech Republic

10.512

1

1

69.5

0.059

Dem Rep Congo

65.966

6

6

Denmark

5.58

1

1

84.8

0.010

Dominican Republic

9.379

2

3

57.9

0.271

Ecuador

14.483

3

3

57.4

0.329

Egypt

82.019

6

5

39.3

0.678

El Salvador

6.2

2

3

59.4

0.266

Eritrea

6

7

7

Estonia

1.318

1

1

72.6

0.047

Ethiopia

84.321

6

6

Finland

5.408

1

1

85.5

0.010

France

65.35

1

1

77.7

0.027

Gabon

1.505

6

5

The Gambia

1.728

6

6

Georgia

4.469

5

3

56.9

0.442

Germany

80.5

1

1

81.0

0.014

Ghana

27

1

2

57.2

0.163

Greece

10.787

2

2

64.3

0.191

Guatemala

14.714

3

4

51.2

0.409

Guinea

10.537

5

5

40.4

0.618

Guinea-Bissau

1.521

6

5

Haiti

10.085

4

5

Honduras

8.385

4

4

49.2

0.472

Hong Kong

7.103

74.6

Hungary

9.962

1

2

66.8

0.125

India

1210.57

2

3

53.1

0.290

Indonesia

237.641

2

4

53.6

0.344

Iran

76.8

6

6

Iraq

33.33

5

6

Ireland

4.588

1

1

80.1

0.017

Israel

7.87

1

2

71.7

0.106

Italy

59.464

1

1

69.9

0.058

Jamaica

2.706

2

3

59.7

0.264

Japan

127.3

1

1

73.0

0.045

Jordan

6.297

6

5

Kazakhstan

16.734

6

5

Kenya

38.61

4

4

46.1

0.485

North Korea

24.052

7

7

South Korea

48.58

2

2

69.3

0.171

Kuwait

3.328

5

5

49.0

0.584

Kyrgyzstan

5.477

5

5

45.7

0.597

Laos

6.256

7

6

0.000

Latvia

2.07

2

2

69.7

0.169

Lebanon

4.228

5

4

47.0

0.537

Lesotho

2.171

2

3

51.6

0.296

Liberia

3.477

3

4

51.7

0.407

Libya

6.4

4

5

Lithuania

3.19

1

1

71.1

0.053

Macedonia

2.057

1

3

52.4

0.237

Madagascar

20.696

5

4

45.2

0.544

Malawi

13.102

3

4

48.6

0.419

Malaysia

30.017

4

4

50.1

0.469

Mali

14.528

5

4

Mauritania

3.341

6

5

Mauritius

1.286

1

2

66.7

0.126

Mexico

112.336

3

3

56.6

0.332

Moldova

3.56

3

3

57.1

0.330

Mongolia

2.78

1

2

61.8

0.145

Morocco

32.548

5

4

42.9

0.553

Mozambique

23.7

4

3

44.0

0.437

Myanmar

47.963

6

6

Namibia

2.283

2

2

56.0

0.223

Nepal

26.621

4

4

46.8

0.482

Netherlands

16.838

1

1

82.6

0.010

New Zealand

4.434

1

1

81.3

0.013

Nicaragua

6.071

4

3

54.9

0.395

Niger

16.275

3

4

46.6

0.427

Nigeria

177.5

4

4

39.9

0.509

Norway

5.009

1

1

87.8

0.010

Oman

2.773

6

5

Pakistan

184

4

5

35.9

0.581

Palestine

4.293

Panama

3.406

2

2

64.8

0.189

Papua New Guinea

7.014

3

3

52.3

0.349

Paraguay

6.382

3

3

53.1

0.346

Peru

30.135

2

3

61.7

0.256

Philippines

92.34

3

3

59.2

0.322

Poland

38.501

1

1

69.7

0.058

Portugal

10.487

1

1

73.9

0.042

Qatar

1.792

Romania

19.043

2

2

63.3

0.195

Russia

143.056

6

5

44.4

0.658

Rwanda

10.718

6

5

Saudi Arabia

27.137

7

7

Senegal

12.855

2

2

53.5

0.233

Serbia

7.12

2

2

60.2

0.207

Sierra Leone

5.4

3

3

Singapore

5.184

4

4

65.3

0.409

Slovakia

5.445

1

1

67.2

0.068

Slovenia

2.057

1

1

73.9

0.042

Somalia

9.797

7

7

South Africa

54

2

2

53.0

0.235

South Sudan

8.26

Spain

46.185

1

1

74.3

0.040

Sri Lanka

20.653

5

4

48.8

0.530

Sudan

30.894

7

7

Swaziland

1.186

Sweden

9.49

1

1

85.8

0.010

Switzerland

7.952

1

1

85.9

0.010

Syria

21.566

7

7

28.3

0.888

Taiwan

23.293

1

2

Tajikistan

7.8

6

6

Tanzania

43.188

3

3

48.1

0.366

Thailand

65.5

4

4

54.0

0.453

Timor-Leste

1.066

53.2

Togo

6.191

4

4

38.3

0.516

Trinidad and Tobago

1.318

2

2

57.1

0.219

Tunisia

10.673

3

3

51.5

0.352

Turkey

74.724

3

4

53.6

0.399

Turkmenistan

5.105

7

7

Uganda

32.939

6

4

41.7

0.613

Ukraine

45.426

4

3

52.4

0.404

United Arab Emirates

8.264

6

6

United Kingdom

62.262

1

1

78.4

0.024

United States

317

1

1

76.9

0.030

Uruguay

3.251

1

1

72.6

0.047

Uzbekistan

29.123

7

7

0.000

Venezuela

27.15

5

5

45.5

0.598

Vietnam

87.84

7

5

Yemen

24.527

6

6

29.6

0.772

Zambia

13.046

3

4

44.4

0.436

Zimbabwe

13.061

5

6

0.000

The global value of the process restraint, r 4 , is then given as the value for the average of the values for individual nations, weighted by their populations, for those nations for which a value could be calculated. The sum of the inhabitants of those nations is 6043 million, or about 88% out of a world population of 6901 million. The calculated value of the process restraint is r 1 = 0.412.

Attachment A.5—Moral Fortitude (Willpower)

Country

Population

Corruption score

Transparency

WBC

Average

w

Afghanistan

24.485

12

1.9

7.0

0.844

Albania

2.832

33

25.8

29.4

0.756

Algeria

37.1

36

38.8

37.4

0.714

Angola

20.609

19

5.3

12.1

0.828

Argentina

42.7

34

40.7

37.3

0.714

Armenia

3.275

37

39.7

38.4

0.709

Australia

22.902

80

93.8

86.9

0.231

Austria

8.452

72

90.0

81.0

0.316

Azerbaijan

9.111

29

18.7

23.8

0.782

Bahrain

1.234

49

69.4

59.2

0.558

Bangladesh

142.319

25

20.6

22.8

0.787

Belarus

9.46

31

37.3

34.2

0.732

Belgium

11.036

76

91.9

83.9

0.275

Benin

10.3

39

22.0

30.5

0.751

Bolivia

10.624

36

33.0

34.5

0.730

Bosnia/Herzegovina

3.84

39

52.2

45.6

0.663

Botswana

2.038

63

79.4

71.2

0.438

Brazil

192.4

43

55.0

49.0

0.639

Bulgaria

7.245

43

49.8

46.4

0.658

Burkina Faso

17.4

38

33.5

35.7

0.723

Burundi

10.2

20

2.4

11.2

0.831

Cambodia

13.396

21

16.3

18.6

0.804

Cameroon

19.406

27

9.6

18.3

0.805

Canada

35

81

95.2

88.1

0.212

Central African Rep.

5

24

14.8

19.4

0.800

Chad

11.274

22

6.2

14.1

0.821

Chile

17.402

73

90.4

81.7

0.306

China

1347.35

36

46.9

41.4

0.690

Colombia

47.015

37

42.6

39.8

0.700

Congo-Brazzaville

4.043

23

5.7

14.4

0.820

Costa Rica

4.302

54

10.5

32.3

0.742

Côte d’Ivoire

21.395

32

71.8

51.9

0.618

Croatia

4.291

48

23.4

35.7

0.724

Cuba

11.241

46

61.2

53.6

0.604

Czech Republic

10.512

51

62.2

56.6

0.580

Dem Rep Congo

65.966

22

62.7

42.3

0.684

Denmark

5.58

92

100.0

96.0

0.077

Dominican Republic

9.379

32

21.1

26.5

0.770

Ecuador

14.483

33

32.1

32.5

0.741

Egypt

82.019

37

32.5

34.8

0.729

El Salvador

6.2

39

48.3

43.7

0.676

Eritrea

6

18

23.0

20.5

0.796

Estonia

1.318

69

81.3

75.2

0.391

Ethiopia

84.321

33

38.3

35.6

0.724

Finland

5.408

89

98.1

93.5

0.121

France

65.35

69

88.0

78.5

0.349

Gabon

1.505

37

36.4

36.7

0.718

The Gambia

1.728

29

26.8

27.9

0.764

Georgia

4.469

52

66.5

59.3

0.557

Germany

80.5

79

94.3

86.6

0.235

Ghana

27

48

56.5

52.2

0.615

Greece

10.787

43

55.5

49.3

0.638

Guatemala

14.714

32

34.0

33.0

0.738

Guinea

10.537

25

13.4

19.2

0.801

Guinea-Bissau

1.521

19

4.8

11.9

0.828

Haiti

10.085

19

11.0

15.0

0.817

Honduras

8.385

29

17.2

23.1

0.785

Hong Kong

7.103

74

92.3

83.2

0.286

Hungary

9.962

54

64.6

59.3

0.557

India

1210.57

38

35.9

36.9

0.717

Indonesia

237.641

43

31.6

37.3

0.715

Iran

76.8

27

27.8

27.4

0.766

Iraq

33.33

16

7.2

11.6

0.829

Ireland

4.588

74

90.9

82.5

0.296

Israel

7.87

60

78.5

69.2

0.460

Italy

59.464

43

57.4

50.2

0.631

Jamaica

2.706

38

45.5

41.7

0.688

Japan

127.3

76

92.8

84.4

0.268

Jordan

6.297

49

60.8

54.9

0.594

Kazakhstan

16.734

29

20.1

24.5

0.779

Kenya

38.61

25

12.9

19.0

0.802

North Korea

24.052

8

3.3

5.7

0.848

South Korea

48.58

55

70.3

62.7

0.526

Kuwait

3.328

44

53.6

48.8

0.641

Kyrgyzstan

5.477

27

11.5

19.2

0.801

Laos

6.256

25

19.6

22.3

0.789

Latvia

2.07

55

64.1

59.6

0.555

Lebanon

4.228

27

18.2

22.6

0.787

Lesotho

2.171

49

63.6

56.3

0.583

Liberia

3.477

37

28.7

32.9

0.739

Libya

6.4

18

1.0

9.5

0.836

Lithuania

3.19

58

67.0

62.5

0.528

Macedonia

2.057

45

59.3

52.2

0.616

Madagascar

20.696

28

27.3

27.6

0.765

Malawi

13.102

33

31.1

32.1

0.743

Malaysia

30.017

52

68.4

60.2

0.549

Mali

14.528

32

25.4

28.7

0.760

Mauritania

3.341

30

28.2

29.1

0.758

Mauritius

1.286

54

65.6

59.8

0.553

Mexico

112.336

35

39.2

37.1

0.716

Moldova

3.56

35

23.9

29.5

0.756

Mongolia

2.78

39

40.2

39.6

0.701

Morocco

32.548

39

46.4

42.7

0.682

Mozambique

23.7

31

29.7

30.3

0.752

Myanmar

47.963

21

12.4

16.7

0.811

Namibia

2.283

49

65.1

57.0

0.577

Nepal

26.621

29

29.2

29.1

0.758

Netherlands

16.838

83

96.2

89.6

0.188

New Zealand

4.434

91

99.5

95.3

0.090

Nicaragua

6.071

28

24.4

26.2

0.771

Niger

16.275

35

35.4

35.2

0.726

Nigeria

177.5

27

9.1

18.0

0.806

Norway

5.009

86

98.6

92.3

0.143

Oman

2.773

45

60.3

52.6

0.612

Pakistan

184

29

17.7

23.4

0.784

Palestine

4.293

26.3

13.2

0.824

Panama

3.406

37

45.9

41.5

0.690

Papua New Guinea

7.014

25

15.3

20.2

0.797

Paraguay

6.382

24

15.8

19.9

0.799

Peru

30.135

38

42.1

40.1

0.698

Philippines

92.34

38

43.5

40.8

0.694

Poland

38.501

61

70.8

65.9

0.494

Portugal

10.487

63

78.9

71.0

0.440

Qatar

1.792

69

84.7

76.8

0.371

Romania

19.043

43

52.6

47.8

0.648

Russia

143.056

27

16.7

21.9

0.790

Rwanda

10.718

49

72.2

60.6

0.545

Saudi Arabia

27.137

49

58.4

53.7

0.604

Senegal

12.855

43

50.2

46.6

0.656

Serbia

7.12

41

50.7

45.9

0.661

Sierra Leone

5.4

31

19.1

25.1

0.777

Singapore

5.184

84

96.7

90.3

0.176

Slovakia

5.445

50

59.8

54.9

0.594

Slovenia

2.057

58

73.7

65.8

0.495

Somalia

9.797

8

0.5

4.2

0.853

South Africa

54

44

54.5

49.3

0.637

South Sudan

8.26

15

3.8

9.4

0.837

Spain

46.185

60

75.1

67.6

0.477

Sri Lanka

20.653

38

51.7

44.8

0.668

Sudan

30.894

11

1.4

6.2

0.847

Swaziland

1.186

43

48.8

45.9

0.661

Sweden

9.49

87

99.0

93.0

0.130

Switzerland

7.952

86

97.6

91.8

0.151

Syria

21.566

20

7.7

13.8

0.822

Taiwan

23.293

61

72.7

66.9

0.485

Tajikistan

7.8

23

10.0

16.5

0.812

Tanzania

43.188

22.5

11.2

0.831

Thailand

65.5

38

49.3

43.6

0.676

Timor-Leste

1.066

28

21.5

24.8

0.778

Togo

6.191

29

14.4

21.7

0.791

Trinidad and Tobago

1.318

38

47.4

42.7

0.682

Tunisia

10.673

40

54.1

47.0

0.653

Turkey

74.724

45

61.7

53.4

0.607

Turkmenistan

5.105

17

4.3

10.7

0.833

Uganda

32.939

26

13.9

19.9

0.798

Ukraine

45.426

26

12.0

19.0

0.802

United Arab Emirates

8.264

70

87.6

78.8

0.346

United Kingdom

62.262

78

93.3

85.7

0.249

United States

317

74

85.2

79.6

0.335

Uruguay

3.251

73

88.5

80.8

0.319

Uzbekistan

29.123

18

8.1

13.1

0.824

Venezuela

27.15

19

6.7

12.8

0.825

Vietnam

87.84

31

36.8

33.9

0.733

Yemen

24.527

19

8.6

13.8

0.822

Zambia

13.046

38

44.0

41.0

0.693

Zimbabwe

13.061

21

2.9

11.9

0.828

The global value of the will, w , is then given as the value for the average of the values for individual nations, weighted by their populations. The calculated value of the will parameter is w = 0.662.

Attachment A.6—Summary

Model parameters:

C1

2

C2

1

C3

1

C4

1

σ

50

r1

r2

r3

r4

w

X

Afghanistan

0.9405

0.8445

Albania

0.7436

0.2968

0.3369

0.7563

Algeria

0.7022

0.6982

0.7155

0.7142

Angola

0.7967

0.8275

Argentina

0.6563

0.5771

0.1741

0.7144

Armenia

0.8153

0.1475

0.6926

0.5411

0.7085

0.345

Australia

0.4194

0.1299

0.0220

0.2306

Austria

0.3593

0.1511

0.0200

0.3165

Azerbaijan

0.6643

0.1188

0.5715

0.7820

Bahrain

0.3579

0.7613

0.5579

Bangladesh

0.9049

0.7772

0.9453

0.4165

0.7865

0.212

Belarus

0.6416

0.1249

0.7320

Belgium

0.3725

0.2244

0.0184

0.2748

Benin

0.9430

0.8822

0.2515

0.7509

Bolivia

0.8580

0.6407

0.6801

0.3369

0.7301

0.298

Bosnia/Herzegovina

0.7584

0.4495

0.3615

0.6633

Botswana

0.7664

0.2898

0.4377

Brazil

0.7272

0.6690

0.5366

0.1966

0.6393

0.395

Bulgaria

0.6662

0.1610

0.5803

0.1921

0.6578

0.445

Burkina Faso

0.9476

0.9673

0.4969

0.7234

Burundi

0.9711

0.6158

0.8307

Cambodia

0.9076

0.7677

0.8329

0.8035

Cameroon

0.9121

0.8049

Canada

0.4782

0.1041

0.0247

0.2117

Central African Rep.

0.9670

0.8004

Chad

0.9497

0.8205

Chile

0.6360

0.6297

0.0535

0.3063

China

0.6796

0.3690

0.7896

0.6900

Colombia

0.8257

0.5014

0.5979

0.3821

0.7001

0.337

Congo-Brazzaville

0.8062

0.8196

Costa Rica

0.6886

0.5351

0.3806

0.0561

0.7420

0.394

Côte d’Ivoire

0.9155

0.5879

0.6180

Croatia

0.6119

0.6601

0.1266

0.7235

Cuba

0.6329

0.6045

Czech Republic

0.5643

0.1180

0.0591

0.5802

Dem Rep Congo

0.6844

Denmark

0.4450

0.1705

0.0100

0.0769

Dominican Republic

0.6135

0.7002

0.2715

0.7700

Ecuador

0.7902

0.4582

0.6848

0.3290

0.7406

0.324

Egypt

0.6705

0.7724

0.6782

0.7287

El Salvador

0.8091

0.7145

0.6898

0.2656

0.6759

0.333

Eritrea

0.9612

0.7961

Estonia

0.5896

0.1022

0.0468

0.3914

Ethiopia

0.9552

0.8246

0.7240

Finland

0.4439

0.1538

0.0100

0.1211

France

0.4825

0.1922

0.0267

0.3492

Gabon

0.7181

Gambia

0.9270

0.7636

Georgia

0.8250

0.1342

0.6892

0.4422

0.5573

0.430

Germany

0.4839

0.1290

0.0136

0.2346

Ghana

0.8822

0.5472

0.1632

0.6153

Greece

0.4729

0.2587

0.1907

0.6376

Guatemala

0.8056

0.6509

0.7075

0.4089

0.7382

0.293

Guinea

0.9570

0.6183

0.8013

Guinea-Bissau

0.9536

0.8283

Haiti

0.9137

0.8173

Honduras

0.9728

0.6222

0.4724

0.7851

Hong Kong

0.3870

0.2858

Hungary

0.5660

0.1461

0.1252

0.5569

India

0.8477

0.8475

0.2903

0.7167

Indonesia

0.7615

0.6482

0.3441

0.7147

Iran

0.7021

0.4676

0.6742

0.7660

Iraq

0.8294

Ireland

0.4644

0.2188

0.0171

0.2960

Israel

0.5619

0.4654

0.1059

0.4595

Italy

0.4398

0.2791

0.0576

0.6306

Jamaica

0.7970

0.5756

0.2645

0.6882

Japan

0.4339

0.2421

0.0451

0.2679

Jordan

0.7389

0.3489

0.5944

Kazakhstan

0.5915

0.0857

0.7789

Kenya

0.8772

0.6345

0.8770

0.4847

0.8023

0.224

North Korea

0.8484

South Korea

0.4902

0.5173

0.1710

0.5260

Kuwait

0.5055

0.5844

0.6409

Kyrgyzstan

0.9071

0.1299

0.6595

0.5974

0.8011

0.279

Laos

0.8663

0.7886

Latvia

0.6217

0.1163

0.1693

0.5546

Lebanon

0.5744

0.5367

0.7874

Lesotho

0.8996

0.7111

0.2962

0.5826

Liberia

0.4072

0.7389

Libya

0.8364

Lithuania

0.5900

0.1338

0.0526

0.5277

Macedonia

0.7288

0.2375

0.6158

Madagascar

0.9531

0.5439

0.7648

Malawi

0.9751

0.9076

0.9138

0.4192

0.7431

0.209

Malaysia

0.6498

0.2836

0.4690

0.5488

Mali

0.9513

0.9177

0.7598

Mauritania

0.9033

0.7577

Mauritius

0.4688

0.1258

0.5527

Mexico

0.6051

0.5768

0.3323

0.7157

Moldova

0.8665

0.1631

0.5222

0.3301

0.7560

0.347

Mongolia

0.7686

0.2006

0.1452

0.7012

Morocco

0.8098

0.7270

0.5528

0.6821

Mozambique

0.9652

0.4671

0.4374

0.7518

Myanmar

0.8109

Namibia

0.7765

0.6556

0.2233

0.5765

Nepal

0.9291

0.4820

0.7578

Netherlands

0.6988

0.1865

0.0100

0.1880

New Zealand

0.5619

0.1974

0.0126

0.0904

Nicaragua

0.9587

0.3945

0.7714

Niger

0.9656

0.4271

0.7264

Nigeria

0.8493

0.5093

0.8058

Norway

0.5047

0.1617

0.8247

0.0100

0.1430

0.728

Oman

0.4642

0.6121

Pakistan

0.8694

0.7811

0.4116

0.5805

0.7841

0.257

Palestine

0.5210

0.8239

Panama

0.5647

0.4121

0.7206

0.1886

0.6898

0.410

Papua New Guinea

0.9277

0.6587

0.3491

0.7975

Paraguay

0.7802

0.6656

0.3458

0.7985

Peru

0.7465

0.6373

0.5193

0.2565

0.6985

0.360

Philippines

0.7543

0.3924

0.6014

0.3219

0.6941

0.371

Poland

0.5933

0.1395

0.0584

0.4943

Portugal

0.6343

0.3603

0.0417

0.4404

Qatar

0.4048

0.3707

Romania

0.6457

0.1980

0.3517

0.1947

0.6478

0.472

Russia

0.6116

0.1153

0.6581

0.7904

Rwanda

0.9482

0.5693

0.5450

Saudi Arabia

0.3444

0.6040

Senegal

0.9296

0.8732

0.2331

0.6562

Serbia

0.5714

0.7877

0.2069

0.6614

Sierra Leone

0.8941

0.7766

Singapore

0.4537

0.2509

0.4089

0.1759

Slovakia

0.8456

0.0681

0.5942

Slovenia

0.5353

0.7421

0.0419

0.4950

Somalia

0.6400

0.8527

South Africa

0.7500

0.2352

0.6374

South Sudan

0.8366

Spain

0.5463

0.3320

0.8540

0.0402

0.4773

0.529

Sri Lanka

0.7691

0.5296

0.6682

Sudan

0.4692

0.8467

Swaziland

0.7329

0.6611

Sweden

0.3700

0.1472

0.0100

0.1303

Switzerland

0.4175

0.1187

0.0100

0.1512

Syria

0.5231

0.8880

0.8215

Taiwan

0.4846

Tajikistan

0.9173

0.1695

0.8117

Tanzania

0.9420

0.7010

0.3656

0.8305

Thailand

0.7063

0.5475

0.4535

0.6761

Timor-Leste

0.7779

Togo

0.6709

0.5156

0.7912

Trinidad and Tobago

0.4402

0.2563

0.6451

0.2190

0.6822

0.459

Tunisia

0.6764

0.8752

0.3524

0.6533

Turkey

0.6206

0.5568

0.3995

0.6065

Turkmenistan

0.7192

0.8325

Uganda

0.9459

0.7002

0.7030

0.6134

0.7984

0.210

Ukraine

0.7769

0.1593

0.4043

0.8022

United Arab Emirates

0.3941

0.3458

United Kingdom

0.5712

0.1096

0.0240

0.2495

United States

0.5118

0.1036

0.7129

0.0299

0.3352

0.645

Uruguay

0.5263

0.5434

0.0468

0.3194

Uzbekistan

0.8578

0.8242

Venezuela

0.4913

0.6028

0.5982

0.8250

Vietnam

0.8496

0.3565

0.3478

0.7333

Yemen

0.8868

0.7721

0.8216

Zambia

0.5845

0.4359

0.6927

Zimbabwe

0.5769

0.9067

0.8282

The global value of the measure, X, is then given as the value for the average of the values for individual nations, weighted by their populations, for those nations for which a value could be calculated. The sum of the inhabitants of those nations is 1239 million, or about 18% out of a world population of 6901 million. The calculated global value of X is X = 0.404.

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Index

A

Abstract

Acolyte

Adams, G.R.

Adaptation

active

passive

Adaptive

action

behaviour

Alignment

aggregate

Alliance

Anthropology

ANZUS (treaty)

Archick, K.

Arendt, H.

Argument

Aristotle

Ashby, W.R.

Aslaksen, E.W.

Assertion

Association

Asymmetry

ATM

Attained educational level

B

Bannon, L.

Barry, U.

Belief

Bellah, R.N.

Bernstein, M.S.

Big Data

Birner, J.

Bishop, C.A.

Bond

primary

secondary

Boyd, R.

Bozdag, E.

Braines, D.

Britz, J.J.

Buchanan, R.A.

Byrne, K.B.

C

Capitalism

Categorical imperative

Cato The Elder

Cavalli-Sforza, L. L.

Chabris, C.F.

Chalmers, D.

Champlin, D.P.

Channel (transmission -)

Chomsky, N.

Cicero, M.T.

Clark, A.

Club of Rome

Cognitive advantage

Cohen, A.M.

Cohen, S.

Coherence

Collective evaluation process

Collective intelligence

Complexity

Core identity

Credit Suisse

Critical core identity

Cruddas, J.

Cultural lag

D

Darwin, C.

Dawkins, R.

Deibert, R.

Democracy

Dessauer, F.

Detter, D.

Diamond, L.

Diffusion (of innovations)

DNA

Dorrestijn, S.

Duverger, M.

E

Eberhard, W.

Educational restraint

Ege, R.

Elective stimulus

Ellul, J.

Enframing

Engelbrecht, P.C.

Engle, R.W.

Epstein, D.

Equilibrium

Erikson, E.H.

Ethics

Etzioni, A.

Evidence

Evolution

F

Farazmand, A.

Farrell, H.

Feenberg, A.

Feldman, M.

Ferry, L.

Fit for purpose

Fluctuation

Fölster, S.

Foucault, M.

fPET

Framework of accepted inputs

Freedom

personal

Fuller, R. B.

G

Galbraith, J.K.

Galway-Witham, J.

Garnham, N.

Gel, U.

Generative ownership designs

Goal

Goal-oriented

Goldsmith, E.

Good life

Good society

Grodi, R.H.

Gunther, R.

H

Habermas, J.

Hanna, T.M.

Hardt, M.

Hashmi, N.

Hegel, G.W.F.

Heidegger, M.

Hendler, J.A.

Herman, E.

Hill, S.

Hofstadter, D.R.

Holmes, J.

Holst, O.

Homo (genus)

Homogeneity

Homo sapiens

Huber, J.D.

Hublig, J-J.

Hybrid

I

Identity

cultural

ego

personal

social

achieved

diffusion

foreclosed

moratorium

Identity element

Ihde, D.

Immune system

Information

ethics

restraint

society

technology

Information Technology (IT)

Instructive stimuli

Intelligence

Interaction

strength

Invisible hand

Ivanhoe, P.J.

J

Johnson, R.

K

Kahneman, D.

Kant, I.

Kelly, M.

Kitcher, P.

Knoedler, J.T.

Knowledge

Knowledge base

Kölln, A.-K

Kuhn, T.S.

Kungzi

Kuznets, S.S

L

Lakoff, G.

Landemore, H.

LaPalombara, J.

Latour, B.

Law of Requisite Variety

Lenski, G.

Level of corruption

Levy, G.

Lötter, H.P.P.

Luria, S.E.

Lynch, A.

M

MacKenzie, D.

Macro context

Madsen, R.

Malone, T.W.

Marcia, J.E.

Marcuse, H.

Marx, K.

Marx, L.

Maslow, A.H.

Master

Meadows, D.H.

Medawar, P.B.

Meme

Memetics

Meta-criterion

Meyer, H.

Micro context

Military superiority

Mills, C.W.

Mode of description

Modus vivendi

Montero, J.R.

Moral fortitude

Mueller, D.

Mueller, S.

N

Naas, M.B.

National Wealth Fund (NWF)

Nahles, A.

NATO

Negri, A.

Neoliberalism

Network

Neue Mitte

Nietzsche, F.

O

Ogburn, W.F.

O’Halloran, S.

Ownership

P

Panopticon

Parsons, T.

Patterson, O.

Pauling, L.

Pentland, A.

Pentland, N.

Per capita

Persuasion

Persuasive appeal

Philosophy

Philosophy of Technology

Piketty, T.

Plato

Political Economy of the Good Society (PEGS)

Political liberalism

Political process

Portmess, L.

Process

Propagation

Prophet

Public reason

Q

Quality (of message)

R

Rawls, J.

Reanney, D.

Reinforcement

Representative democracy

Restriction

Richness (of society)

Richter, D.

Riker, W.H.

Robertson, P.J.

Robins, K.

Robinson, W.I.

Rogers, E.M.

Rohozinski, R.

Role (social)

Rooduijn, M.

Rutherford, J.

S

Salter, W.

Scanlon

Schiller, H.I.

Schopenhauer, A.

Schrödinger, E.

Schwartz, S.J.

Self-referential

Serafini, T.E.

Shadbolt, N.

Shafer, G.

Shalizi, C.

Shannon, C.E.

Shiller, R.J.

Shipan, C.R.

Sieck, W.

Simpkins, B.

Smart, B.

Smart, P.R.

Smith, A.

Smith, N.

Social Bond

Social Bond (definition)

Social Construction Of Technology (SCOT)

Social Europe

Social Physics

Social Shaping of Technology (SST)

Sociology

Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)

Socrates

Spaceship Earth

Spengler, O.

Stability

Stahl, T.

Statement

State Owned Enterprise (SOE)

Stella, M.

STEM

Sternberg, R.J.

Stoda, M.J.

Storage function

Strength (of argument)

of interaction

Stringer, C.

Strom, K.

Structure

Suarez-Villa, L.

Sullivan, W.M.

Summers, L.H.

Sunstein, C.R.

Survival

Swindler, A.

Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)

System

System concept

System 1

System 2

T

Taylor, K.

Techné

Technology

Temperature

Tension (in society)

Thatcher, M.

Thermodynamics

The third way

Thoughtful uncertainty

Tipton, S.M.

Tower, S.

Transnational Capitalist Class (TNC)

TRIZ

U

Uhlíř, V.

Uncertainty

V

Van den Hoven, J.

Van Norden, B.W

Veblen, T.

Verbeek, P.-P.

Verified voting

View (system)

Vita activa

W

Wajcman, J.

Walzer, M.

Wartofsky, M.W.

Washington, G.

Wealth

inequality

Weber, M

Weeranmanty, C.G.

Weiner, M

Welch, J.

Welch, S.R.

Wilhelm, O.

Will

Wilson, D.

Winner, L.

Wolman, B.

Woolley, A.W.

Y

Young, J.