These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry. If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers.
The monkey trap is apocryphal. It dates back at least as far as Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", where it appears as the 'South Indian Monkey Trap'. In line with Pirsig it's most often used as a metaphor for intellectual rigidity in which someone is unable to abandon a once successful strategy which has become unsuccessful in the face of changing circumstances. I seriously doubt either new world or old world monkeys would allow their greed (or rigid thinking) to overcome their survival instincts.
I've gotta say I disagree with your assertion "If we want to explain IR, as distinct from describe it, we have to drop down a level to look at the individual humans who make up the mass. Mass behaviour is simply the product of all the individuals except that, at the international level, decisions are made by a small group vested with a great deal of authority by the rest of the population.". In part it's for the reason Lottaz raises in the interview - emergence. Complex systems routinely display properties and behaviours that can't be explained by reference to their components. But even more so because institutions such as nation-states, corporations, religions, etc operate in different 'ecosystems' to those of their human components and are driven by completely different survival imperatives. They're on non-human evolutionary paths and develop non-human 'moralities' as a result.
So, for example, if a CEO puts his personal human morality ahead of the sociopathic corporate imperative of maximising shareholder value it will be reflected in falling stock prices and he'll either be replaced by someone able to set his morality aside during working hours or his company will suffer a hostile takeover from a corporation run by someone with less scruples than he. Similar principles apply to how nation states are run. The logic of the machine selects (or makes) its cogs, not visa-versa.
IMHO trying to explain IR by reference to individuals is as ill-advised as trying to explain mind by reference to synapses.
As far as the personal dynamics of being ground-down into a 'correctly' functioning cog go, I think I've known enough politicians from both before and during their careers to be able to say that many *aren't* driven by the desire for power but a sincere desire to improve society combined with the belief the system can best be changed from within. As I tried to warn several of them - the system *is* the people trying to change it from within and it's not the system that's gonna get changed.
Some of the moral compromises are part of the to-and-fro of politics - you bargain away one principle in the hope of enacting another until you're left with far fewer than you started with. But even more arise from the way the institutions of political parties operate in the ecosystem of representative electoral politics. You bow to the shallow PR imperatives of campaigning and staying on the right side of the media so as to not imperil the jobs of your colleagues, especially the office staff you work with every day who will probably be unemployed if you lose preselection or the election. I've seen this happen time and again to people I still consider close friends and can testify to how corrosive of principles and ideals the human quality of personal loyalty can be in work environments as dysfunctional as parliament house. I've also seen it in myself during my career as an IT contractor working in a variety of dysfunctional industries, companies and bureaucracies.
The reason I'm labouring this is because I think the error of attributing human agency to the behaviour of institutions is one routinely exploited by propaganda organs to excite popular moral outrage against the impersonal workings of a machine. So Russia is at war with the Ukraine not because its security is existentially threatened by having NATO troops and weapon systems on its border, but because Putin is a Bad Man. It's also the error of liberal reformers who think a broken system can be fixed by weeding out the bad apples and putting the 'right people' in charge.
I also think the notion our systems routinely fail us because human beings are intrinsically flawed is one that appeals to the heritage of the Abrahamic fall from grace that remains even among avowed atheists in our society but which makes us even more likely to surrender our autonomy, responsibility and humanity to a 'higher authority' - whether that's a god, an ideology, a government, a rule book or a cult of the expert. I think the guilt and feeling of inadequacy it induces contributes to the suffering that leads many of us to turn to institutions as thoroughly fucked up as religions, party politics or psychiatry for relief.
Thanks Jock, you paint a gloomy picture but when i look around the world i see a gloomy picture so it seems you are reflecting reality. I have another thought about the poor monkey: she may also have been motivated by curiosity and the courage to explore new places - but that led her to the same tragic ending.
The world is gloomy, worse than I've ever seen. As for monkeys, apparently it's only good for catching greedy boy monkeys, the little girls are too smart to stick their hands in a dark hole.
The monkey trap is apocryphal. It dates back at least as far as Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", where it appears as the 'South Indian Monkey Trap'. In line with Pirsig it's most often used as a metaphor for intellectual rigidity in which someone is unable to abandon a once successful strategy which has become unsuccessful in the face of changing circumstances. I seriously doubt either new world or old world monkeys would allow their greed (or rigid thinking) to overcome their survival instincts.
I've gotta say I disagree with your assertion "If we want to explain IR, as distinct from describe it, we have to drop down a level to look at the individual humans who make up the mass. Mass behaviour is simply the product of all the individuals except that, at the international level, decisions are made by a small group vested with a great deal of authority by the rest of the population.". In part it's for the reason Lottaz raises in the interview - emergence. Complex systems routinely display properties and behaviours that can't be explained by reference to their components. But even more so because institutions such as nation-states, corporations, religions, etc operate in different 'ecosystems' to those of their human components and are driven by completely different survival imperatives. They're on non-human evolutionary paths and develop non-human 'moralities' as a result.
So, for example, if a CEO puts his personal human morality ahead of the sociopathic corporate imperative of maximising shareholder value it will be reflected in falling stock prices and he'll either be replaced by someone able to set his morality aside during working hours or his company will suffer a hostile takeover from a corporation run by someone with less scruples than he. Similar principles apply to how nation states are run. The logic of the machine selects (or makes) its cogs, not visa-versa.
IMHO trying to explain IR by reference to individuals is as ill-advised as trying to explain mind by reference to synapses.
As far as the personal dynamics of being ground-down into a 'correctly' functioning cog go, I think I've known enough politicians from both before and during their careers to be able to say that many *aren't* driven by the desire for power but a sincere desire to improve society combined with the belief the system can best be changed from within. As I tried to warn several of them - the system *is* the people trying to change it from within and it's not the system that's gonna get changed.
Some of the moral compromises are part of the to-and-fro of politics - you bargain away one principle in the hope of enacting another until you're left with far fewer than you started with. But even more arise from the way the institutions of political parties operate in the ecosystem of representative electoral politics. You bow to the shallow PR imperatives of campaigning and staying on the right side of the media so as to not imperil the jobs of your colleagues, especially the office staff you work with every day who will probably be unemployed if you lose preselection or the election. I've seen this happen time and again to people I still consider close friends and can testify to how corrosive of principles and ideals the human quality of personal loyalty can be in work environments as dysfunctional as parliament house. I've also seen it in myself during my career as an IT contractor working in a variety of dysfunctional industries, companies and bureaucracies.
The reason I'm labouring this is because I think the error of attributing human agency to the behaviour of institutions is one routinely exploited by propaganda organs to excite popular moral outrage against the impersonal workings of a machine. So Russia is at war with the Ukraine not because its security is existentially threatened by having NATO troops and weapon systems on its border, but because Putin is a Bad Man. It's also the error of liberal reformers who think a broken system can be fixed by weeding out the bad apples and putting the 'right people' in charge.
I also think the notion our systems routinely fail us because human beings are intrinsically flawed is one that appeals to the heritage of the Abrahamic fall from grace that remains even among avowed atheists in our society but which makes us even more likely to surrender our autonomy, responsibility and humanity to a 'higher authority' - whether that's a god, an ideology, a government, a rule book or a cult of the expert. I think the guilt and feeling of inadequacy it induces contributes to the suffering that leads many of us to turn to institutions as thoroughly fucked up as religions, party politics or psychiatry for relief.
Thank you for your great work, your contributions and effort to understand mental phenomenona and the state of our planets people ❤️❤️❤️🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
Thanks Jock, you paint a gloomy picture but when i look around the world i see a gloomy picture so it seems you are reflecting reality. I have another thought about the poor monkey: she may also have been motivated by curiosity and the courage to explore new places - but that led her to the same tragic ending.
Carolyn
The world is gloomy, worse than I've ever seen. As for monkeys, apparently it's only good for catching greedy boy monkeys, the little girls are too smart to stick their hands in a dark hole.