1/ Libertarianism and Social Justice for all (thread)
2/ Individual Liberty and Collective Justice are our main conflicting social values. Both values scale across various levels of social organization, from individual to global village, and, though not logically incompatible, are nearly always in practical conflict.
3/ Individual psychology can help explain why the essential social conflict is between liberty and justice.
4/ Game theory can help explain why liberty tends toward indivdiualism, while justice tends toward collectivism.
5/ And the recent history of communication technology can help explain why the tension between individual liberty and group justice, which had been simmering on the back burner for a few decades, began heating up again.
6/ Many a philosopher, at least as far back as Plato, has proposed a tri-partite division of the soul. The main utility of such schemes is that they help us understand internal motivational conflict in ways that resonate with personal experience.
7/ None of these schemes is satisfyingly scientific, but, until Science gives us something better, we might as well take advantage of their utility.
8/ The scheme I want us to consider involves a "lizard control system" a "troop control system" and a "justification control system."
9/ One might imagine that these evolved in sequence in the lineage between humans and the common ancestor we share with, say, lizards. Though this is more memory aid than serious evolutionary hypothesis.
10/ This scheme is specifically tailored to explain normative governance and discourse, not every form of individual and social motivation.
11/ The Lizard Control System (LCS) motivates the individual to make plans to meet individual needs and execute those plans.
12/ The Troop Control System (TCS) causes compunction about actions, words, and attitudes that would be frowned upon by one's normative audience (usually one's home-tribe or most salient in-group)
13/ The Justification Control System (JCS) tries to adjudicate between the LCS and TCS where they conflict. It's goal is to justify self-serving actions, words, and attitudes to those in one's normative audience who might otherwise object.
14/ These three systems are similar to Freud's id, super-ego, and ego. It might be tempting to assign: LCS = id, TCS = superego, and JCS = ego. But the mapping is inexact, and the Freudian categories carry a lot of extra baggage. I ask the reader to resist this urge.
15/ Most human beings need to occupy social roles in order to meet their personal needs.
16/ Groups often hold power over social roles. And the more one's actions, words, and attitudes diverge from the group norm, the more difficult it will be to continue occupying the roles which are controlled by those groups.
17/ To the extent that one's social roles depend on staying in the good graces of others, one will feel pressure to justify many of one's actions, words, and attitudes to those others.
18/ If one's social roles span multiple groups, and those groups are in normative conflict with each other, one will be in a situation of "normative complexity".
19/ There are three main ways to deal with the risks (and opportunities) that come with normative complexity. One is LCS-dominant, one is TCS-dominant, and one is JCS-dominant. All have upsides and downsides.
20/ The LCS-dominant strategy is to reduce normative complexity by reducing dependence on social groups. Insofar as a group offers "free agent" roles, the LCS-dominant strategist will consider taking them.
21/ LCS-dominants will tend to avoid roles that require conformity, even if those roles would otherwise meet individual need better than current roles.
22/ The TCS-dominant strategy is to reduce normative complexity by limiting interactions to an in-group or two and bringing personal conduct into conformity with the norms of those in-groups.
23/ This reduces the risk involved in holding a group's most important social roles, but comes with strong loyalty and conformity constraints.
24/ If a TCS-dominant person does occupy important roles with more than one group, they will tend to keep their roles in a strict hierarchical relationship with each other. ("unit, corps, god, country"). The result is that they often have a single most important in-group.
25/ Because TCS-dominant folks are "all-in" with their most-cherished in-group, they not only conform, but enforce conformity on other members.
26/ They try to avoid the slightest impression that they are not loyal to the group, and react strongly to the slightest possibilty that a member is disloyal to the group, or an outsider is attacking the group.
27/ The TCS-dominant strategy is commonly called "tribalism" (though this is an unfair oversimplification of actual tribal governance).
28/ The JCS-dominant strategy is to embrace normative complexity by developing a personal normative system that will allow them to BOTH meet their personal needs AND justify their actions, words, and attitudes to all the various groups, well enough to keep their roles.
29/ This makes JCS-dominant folks good bridge-builders and allows them to risk taking on roles that a TCS-dominant might avoid (because it's an out-group role) or a LCS might avoid (because it requires too much burden of justification).
30/ But the greater the normative complexity, and the more dependent the JCS-dominant is on their roles, the more creative energy is required to justify one's suitability for those roles. This often manifests as anxiety and other forms of brooding and self-conscious rumination.
31/ While LCS and TCS-dominant folks can be driven by curiosity or power to update normative and descriptive models of the world, JCS-dominant folks have an extra motivation to do so.
32/ Better models allow them to better justify their actions, words, and attitudes to all their various stakeholders.
33/ In general, LCS-dominant folks prize autonomy. TCS-dominants prize loyalty. and JCS-dominants want to build bridges, forge peace, and generally reduce normative conflict between the groups with which they affiliate.
34/ Scale this up, and we can see that LCS-dominant folks might coordinate to push an autonomy-promoting agenda (such as Libertarianism).
35/ TCS-dominant folks might coordinate to push a group-justice-type agenda (such as modern social justice activism, religious fundamentalism, or populist nationalism).
36/ And JCS-dominant folks will explore ways to balance the needs for individual and collective justice with the needs for individual (and group) autonomy.
37/ With the help of game theory, we can see that collective autonomy projects will be undermined by free-riding, creating a natural affiinity between liberty and individualism.
38/ With the help of kin-selection theory and game theory we can see that individual justice will become difficult when perpetrators can retreat to their clans before retaliation is possible.
39/ This means that conflict between individuals, in the absence of a system of legal-indvidualism, will quickly become conflict between groups. These group conflicts can occur at various scales, typically depending on the lineage distance between individuals.
40/ Again, game theory, and the need to prevent free-riding, helps explain why, if group justice is going to work, it must be augmented by something like a culture of honor and politeness.
41/ At one time TCS-dominant strategies were the only game in town. Lineage-based clan justice ruled almost everywhere. Indivduals longing for more personal autonomy mostly had to reign in their aspirations and toe the line.
42/ A few hundred years ago, some nations started moving toward a system that allowed both LCS-dominant and JCS-dominant strategies to thrive (though only among fully enfranchized citizens). This was the period of Enlightenment Individualism.
43/ The TCS-dominant strategy did not go away, but the energy of those who adopted it was channeled into maintaining nuclear families, churches, and nations (instead of a multi-level clan lineage structures).
44/ Thus, the period of Enlightenment Individualism overlapped substantially with a period of Nuclear-Family Nationalism.
45/ More and more during this period, the tension between honor, loyaly, and social justice, on the one hand, and individual liberty on the other was managed by JCS-dominant journalists, scientists, and politicians who curated political discussion.
46/ Peak JCS-influence arose with broadcast media. It started waning a bit with the repeal of the fairness doctrine and the simultaneous rise of talk radio and cable news.
47/ It further waned when Web-1.0 started splintering our attention in a million different directions. And it began coming apart entirely with the advent of social media and smartphones with built-in cameras.
48/ And without the moderating-JCS influence (which wasn't all good, mind you), society is re-factoring itself into various group-justice poles and an individual-liberty pole, with a bunch of disorganized JCS-types struggling to carve out solutions that might work for everyone.
49/ End (for now)
50/ TCS-Dominant energy is increasingly being channeled in to race/sex/gender identity groups. This is trickier than channeling it into extended lineage groups or geographic groupings, because race/sex/gender provide multiple dimensions and don't form modular hierarchies.
