TWELFETIDE 24:06 macrodeme absentia

December 30, 2024

One of the common phrases in modern political commentary, and I find it depressing, is that we are no longer working with principles; everything is now transactional.   To a degree, I am exhibiting a degree of hiraeth here, a nostalgia to return to a past that probably never existed in the way I remember it anyway.  Corruption and self-interest are hardly without precedent, nor is the manipulation of information to control people’s perception of reality.  But things have changed and can be characterised (incompletely) in three ’S’ words:  shame, speed, and scale.  In some ways, the most significant of these is the first.  While corruption, self-interest and a willingness to lie and double down on the lies no longer trigger either shame or rejection.  Indeed, it can be celebrated.  One of my weirdest pre-Christmas experiences was in the final session of Map Camp, where there was a clear difference between the US and UK participants.  Simon and I believed that freedom of speech does not include the freedom to lie, particularly when those lies can hurt people.  These days that provides for anything from mild reputation damage to make you a target for physical abuse or make you a target for assassination.  This wasn’t an acceptable constraint for the US participants or at least one of them.  Truth as an objective and an objective standard has increasingly had less and less to do with what people believe.  When someone is proven a liar, their defence is to say that everyone lies anyway, and people accept that.

Now, when I was in the US in November, post the election, one leading Democrat said to me that the problem had been that they were treating the electorate as if they wrecked all Yale graduates engaged in fact-based ‘rational’ decision-making; they ignored sentiment.  For the past two decades, in various political forums, I have argued that street stories matter, not the response to pollsters or focus groups.  The day-to-day micro-concerns matter; the least bad arguments don’t work when people want things to change. When they are increasingly desperate for some change, any change will do, even if you characterised it as turkeys voting for Christmas. Doling, that will make things worse, it’s patronising at best.  Proximate threats matter more than distant threats, so doing things now to avoid triggering more irreversible climate changes is not a priority when the basics of life are in danger – we are not naturally inclined as a species to sacrifice, but we are capable of it.  Worst still, uncertainty is interpreted as a reason not to take action.  The reality of climate change cannot be denied if you have a basic education, some ability to sort the wheat from the chaff in the information you receive, logical reasoning capability and the time, willingness and opportunity to use all three.  But uncertainty about events, catastrophic predictions that fail within the time horizon of people’s attention span, or the span of things that are brought to their attention, lead to a denial that one-day such events, or similar, may happen.  An old friend, Tom, who worked in intelligence for the Canadian Government (at the time of writing, competing to be the 51st US State with Greenland said it well: It used to be that every village had an idiot, and it didn’t matter because everyone knew who the idiot was, but now the idiots have banded together on the internet to legitimise idiocy to which I would add and do a few other things besides.  

Getting a group of people together from a specific culture, possibly with token neo-colonial participants, to talk about how other people should not behave like this and should instead adopt our mindset is pure lotus-eating. It has the opposite effect than intended—it plays into perversion. We need to think and act differently, and to that end, we need to pay attention to our species’ social evolution and work to change the substrate – more on that tomorrow. For the moment, let’s go back to the village.

The village was a legitimising substrate for the validation of information.  The source of any information was as important as the information itself.  It constitutes a deme and will be a part of a network that makes up a macrodeme.  Those words are important, and I got them from Caporael’s work, which I summarised in 2021 as fundamental to understanding how human systems are scaffolded.  A deme or band handles migration and collaborative behaviour between hunting and foraging groups and provides for a shared construction of reality.  A macrodeme goes up to 300 and is used for seasonal gathering genetic variety, stabilising language and more collective identities.  This work primarily focuses on hunter-gatherer communities, but I have long argued that in a virtual world, we can start substituting the idea of identities for individuals.   The downside of a village is that it can become very narrow-minded: the demes without the periodic assembly of macrodemes lack genetic variety and diversity of perspective.  Social media works similarly as it clusters like with like to the point where individual differences disappear, and groups with millions of participants behave like an isolated village taken over by a cult.   In a macrodeme, a common purpose (never articulated) means empathy can overcome differences.   Indeed, Graeber and Wengrow  X suggest that the demes may have been at war with each other until they engaged in monument building; no differences that can make any difference.  In effect, the speed of interaction allows the rapid and unpredictable scaling of perverted forms of information, and consequent action or inaction, and shame is a weapon to attack the other rather than a moral inhibitor.   


I took both of the pictures I used today.  The banner picture at dusk in West Kennett just before Christmas; the river Kennett has spilt over its boundaries.  The opening picture is of the cairn, a signpost for Wayfarers, at the highest point of  Y Grib, known as the Dragon’s Back in the Black Mountains, looking on to Mynydd Bychan.  The Symbolism is hopefully self-evident.

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