Angina Monologue 3

His Majesty was thinking about the little people this morning.

And I don’t mean Ewoks (shudder).

It is a truism that the elite never quite accept that they must live by the same rules as the unwashed masses. (And they always, in every time and place, consider the masses unwashed.)

I assumed this line of thought was triggered by the latest display of theater by Greenpeace. Certainly what he said applied to them, but he never actually brought them up.

I think this is an unhappy consequence of the kurtosis in the distribution of intelligence.   There are both more idiots and more geniuses than a normal distribution would predict, and more idiots than geniuses. We may discount the idiots in the present discussion; their chief social significance is that they absorb a disproportionate share of societal resources and, among the borderline cases, are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime. The criminal mastermind is almost entirely a character in fiction only; real masterminds find ways to make their activities legal, and the majority of criminals are of below average intelligence.

I thought to point out here that the fact that most criminals are stupid does not mean that most stupid people are criminals, but I caught myself. This is true, and it is a reason to behave charitably towards the feeble-minded;  but it irrelevant to His Majesty’s point.

The fact that there is a sizeable population of geniuses means that there are enough geniuses to form a distinct and insular community. In the past, this was partially mitigated by poor communications and the resulting geographical isolation of most of humanity, which prevented most geniuses from forming communities. Social institutions such as arranged marriages tended to further dilute the genius pool. One might imagine that the hereditary monarchy would tend to amplify genius and, over time, produce a brilliant aristocracy, but the historical evidence is strongly against this actually happening — the only real evidence I am aware of that inbreeding produced idiots.

The prominent exception is the Church, but the requirement of celibacy ensured that monastic communities remained small and relatively uninfluential. In addition, monastic communities deliberately isolated themselves from worldly affairs. It would be fascinating to hear a evolutionary psychologist explain how the one medieval community with the potential to breed a brilliant elite threw away this potential through the rule of chastity, but I am not myself much of an evolutionary psychologist. I prefer a more pragmatic approach to social engineering.

Nevertheless, the fact that various technological and societal circumstances limited the growth in intelligence of the elite does not mean there was not an elite, nor that the elite was not of above average intelligence. And when you have a community that is of above average intelligence, and which believes itself to be even more unusually intelligent than it actually is, the temptation to impose a different set of rules on their inferiors seems to be irresistible.

And why not? Society progresses only when it takes risks, and risk-taking is dangerous. Why not restrict the right to make risky choices to the more intelligent, who can better judge the risks against the possible benefits?

Because there is precious little evidence that intelligence has much to do with correctly evaluating relative risks and balancing costs versus benefits, particularly when the risks and benefits mostly accrue to other people for whom you have made yourself the proxy. No, I didn’t say it out loud. One does not interrupt His Majesty when he is monologuing.

In any case, His Majesty already knew this, and was speaking ironically.

The changed circumstances, technological and social, of the modern world have led to a fatal conceit.

Heh. His Majesty is about to channel Hayek.

It is now easier than ever for an intellectual elite to organize itself from the broad masses of humanity. Colleges act as a particularly effective filtering mechanism for bringing together those of above average intelligence, and forming them into lasting communities.

No, not Hayek after all. Murray. — Can you channel someone who is still alive? Oh, all right … figure of speech.

What is obvious to the discerning Sith is that the very growth of the elite that has allowed it to form a more insular and highminded community than ever before has also ensured that the pool of talent available to the elite is more dilute than ever before. When anyone of modest intelligence — say, the upper 20% — can attend college, and is strongly pressured to do so, the resulting elite is going to be awash in the unwashed. Because one in five persons is not nearly selective enough to form a genuinely talented elite.

In a way, it’s the opposite of the problem in medieval societies. They had trouble building a truly intelligent elite because the pool was too small, due to social and technological constraints. Our modern elite lacks true intelligence for the opposite reason, that it is too large.

But this is tangential to the real problem, which is that the complexity of society has grown so quickly that even a rapidly improving elite would have difficulty keeping up. Now, this business of an increasingly complex society is easily misunderstood. The average craftsman in a medieval society had as much expert knowledge as the average LAN administrator in modern society. The kind of complexity I am speaking of is the complexity of the group, not the complexity of the individual. Most modern individual are downright simple.

The medieval craftsman was part of a community which in all probability did not number more than a few hundred persons, of which he might know a few dozen well. However impressive his personal skill, the group of which he was part was relatively simple.  The modern LAN manager has potential connections to thousands in place of dozens. His world is vastly more complex, in this sense, and yet he has basically the same brain and social instincts as the medieval craftsman.

It’s a simple matter of scaling. The number of potential elite increases linearly with the size of the community, but the number of potential interactions increases as the square of the size of the community. Complexity wins out.

Hence, the more modern and connected the society, the less control the elite can actual exercise over it.

I wonder how this plays with the idea of a single central Emperor.

Bureaucracy doesn’t do a good job, except in the earliest phases of modernity. You have to have a distributed hierarchy of authority.

The regional governors must have direct control over their territories, eh?

It’s the societal equivalent of Auftragstaktik. Don’t dictate how the local leadership must carry out their responsibilities; simply outline what those responsibilities are. Federalism combined with particularlism.

But never mind that. The present situation is most amusing, in the same sense that people used to pay to see staged train wrecks. You always have an elite, who are always superior to the masses of humans, but never as superior as they think. In the modern West, this elite is more bloated and less talented than ever, while at the same time becoming more insular and arrogant than ever. It’s a beatiful illustration of Dunning-Kruger. At the same time, improved communications technology has made society more complex than ever.

This leads directly to the phenomenon of Jonathan Gruber.

Gruber appears to be bright, but not nearly bright enough. His arrogance has now become legendary. And modern technology has made it possible for his unintelligent calculations to propagate at electron speed, backed by what is left of the full faith and credit of the United States of America. I speak, of course, of moral faith and credit; actual fiduciary faith and credit were pronounced effectively dead by Standard and Poor before Gruber’s creation had lurched off the table and staggered away to terrorize the villagers.

I found myself wondering if there was any more to His Majesty’s mental meanderings than a paean to the free market. Not that I don’t value the free market, but it’s a song and dance others have done very well before.

Incidentally, His Majesty has always been a free market advocate. His interest is power, not wealth. During his tenure in power, he regarded material goods as an excellent distraction with which to keep his subjects from thinking about other things that might lead to unrest in the Galaxy, and so he adopted free market approaches out of sheer pragmatism. And quite evenhandedly taxed the resulting profits.

 And here we see a delicious irony. The very conditions that have created a bloated, undertalented elite, while simultaneously ensuring that it cannot possibly maintain central control over the society over which it aspires to rule, has likewise ensured that the folly of the elite cannot be kept hidden. Oh, the elite will try. You will see efforts, as we now do, to redefine journalism as an elite activity, with all the preferential rules and licensing implied. The notion of newspapermen as part of the elite would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago; it has now become the conventional wisdom. The press has tried to kill the Gruber story, but it just won’t die; it has too much resonance, and technology in the form of the Internet and other communications ensures the story will continue to propagate.

We will follow this developing situation with great interest.

I think he said that once about my career. It didn’t turn out well.