Are our Rulers Human?

Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

If Bill Gates were the Emperor of the world, it would be bad for several reasons but, at least, we would know that we are ruled by a human being. But it may well be that, instead, we are ruled by a non-human entity. Think about this: an ant colony is not an ant, a brain is not a neuron, and a flock is not a bird. It is the same for “humankind” which is not a human being. It is a cruel, insensitive, and extremely destructive entity that has no pity, no compassion, and no empathy. An Emperor, being human, may be seen as a first line of defense for humans against humankind. It may be for this reason that Emperors were so popular in the past. Could they become popular again?

The COVID-19 pandemic was a game of deformed mirrors, where we saw each other in forms we couldn’t have imagined before. Why did a virus that never was especially lethal become a global madness that swept the whole world? Who decided that we were to be locked down inside our homes, tested, masked, sanitized, told what we were authorized to do, and where we were allowed to go? Why were those who protested turned into enemies of the people, insulted, fined, discriminated against, and, in many cases, deprived of their jobs and their subsistence?

When we face events that we don’t understand, we tend to react in the same way we do when we see human faces in clouds or in Martian rocks. We tend to search for a human “agency” behind. It was more fashionable long ago when people tended to explain everything as caused by sentient beings, say, lightning being sent by Zeus. So, was there an agency behind the pandemic? In other words, who rules the world?

As I noted in a previous post, we have no proof that a group of dark figures collected in a smoke-filled room in the basement of Bill Gates’ mansion to create a global pandemic plan. The pandemic looks very much like the way Tolstoy discusses the causes of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in “War and Peace.” “An incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the event.”

In 1812, everyone, including Napoleon himself, did what they thought was the right thing to do, and somehow, this myriad of actions aligned with each other to push an army to invade Russia. In 2020, everyone, probably including Bill Gates himself, did what they thought was the right thing to do, and somehow, this myriad of actions aligned with each other to push the world into the great pandemic scare. It looks magic, but it is the way complex systems work. A good way to grasp (or “grok”) their behavior is to look at simplified models. Here is one that, I believe, catches the essential elements of what happened with the pandemic (I discussed it already in a previous post)

These birds behaved very much like Napoleon’s soldiers as described by Tolstoy. Each one did what it thought was a good way to react to a perceived threat. There was no central command center, no “king bird” or “general bird” that gave the order. One bird perceived a danger and panicked. The others may have perceived it, too, or simply decided to fly because they saw other birds fly, and they flew up, too.

This reaction is a property of the network that we call “flock,” where every bird is a node, and every bird is connected to all other birds. It is a kind of network we call “fully connected” and where a perturbation may be amplified by the kind of mechanism we call “positive” or “enhancing” feedback. Humankind is a much bigger and more complex network but, in the case of the pandemic, it behaved very much like a fully connected network. Not exactly, because the panic diffused from one geographic location to another, sweeping the world as a giant wave. This kind of behavior is more typical of locally connected networks, sometimes called “lattice networks.” A lattice can delay collapse but not avoid it.

Perturbations propagate rapidly in a connected network in the form of those virtual viruses we call “memes” which hijack the machinery they find in the human mind to reproduce themselves and be passed to other nodes of the network — other human beings. Daniel Dennett aptly described human beings as “meme-infested apes.”

Some memes are harmless, such as Gangnam styles and Covfefes. Others may do (hopefully) only modest damage to the infected people (e.g., “sanitize your hands several times every day”). Some memes damage society as a whole (e.g., lock down everybody inside their homes), but at least don’t kill anyone. Others kill individuals after a certain time (“smoke a cigarette to look cool”). The huge problem comes with those memes that invoke extermination, genocides, and the like. We saw a wave of “killer memes” appearing in 1914 with World War 1. A similar wave appeared in 1939, and today, we may be witnessing exactly the same process just starting.

When human society is prey to one of these powerful memes, it behaves very much like birds scared by a predator. It embodies James Schlesinger's definition of human beings: “They have only two modes of operation, complacency and panic.” The similarity extends to other elements of the network. Note how a flock of birds has no memory of where it was feeding before it panicked — only individual birds do, and only a bird’s brain can steer the flock back to where it was. During the pandemic, the human flock lost the memory of some things that were well known before, for instance, the concept of “herd immunity.” It remained present only in the minds of a few individuals.

Is there a way to structure the global network so that it doesn’t fall prey to a new killer meme, maybe directed against a new subspecies of “human animals?” Politics is about how to structure the social network in such a way as to avoid this possibility and other events that cause death and suffering to humanity. Unfortunately, politics is in itself a meme, but not a very effective one at this task. Capitalism and Democracy, Marxism, and others have been tried, but societal engineering is a difficult task that often worsens the situation.

More typically, our ancestors thought that a way to avoid the worst excesses of killer memes was to put society in the hands of a single Godking or Emperor and hope for the best. Emperors tend to crack down on killer memes because they have no interest in seeing society split into two halves fighting each other. They also have no interest in genocides or extermination. Their main interest is keeping the stability of the society that led them to become Emperors. And a human brain, no matter how limited, can still hold much more information than the network called “humankind.”

It may work because you can look, for instance, at the history of the Roman Empire, and you won’t find much that qualifies as genocide. And there have been emperors who were compassionate individuals who did their best to help the citizens of the Empire. Of course, Roman Emperors were also perverts, psychopaths, criminals, and more — just like elected politicians nowadays. But the advantage of an emperor is that even if he develops — say — a taste for baby meat, the number of babies he can kill is small in comparison to the results of the same meme sweeping the whole society. And, as we all know, the worst genocide of the 20th century is attributed to a person who took power by regular elections.

How could a world emperor come about? Of course, not by elections. Emperors take power by divine right or, more simply, by money. So, suppose that Bill Gates proclaims himself Emperor of the world after having bought the support of the generals who command the world’s military apparatus. It would be the same way in which the ancient would-be Roman Emperors bought the support of the Praetorian Guard. Also, the same way that a President of the United States can survive in office for a whole term. Having bought military support, nobody could challenge Emperor Bill 1st except another warlord with even more money. But not much would change if the new emperor were Elon 1st or Jeff 1st. Would the World Emperor prevent humankind from sliding along the slope it is following now toward a new round of wars and genocides? Difficult to say, but he could hardly do worse than the current batch of elected leaders.

These thoughts look far off, of course. Yet, the current situation is incredibly scary. Our society is defenseless against the new killer memes that sweep it—so much so that we might prefer to be ruled by a Godking than by an impersonal network incapable of piety, compassion and empathy. A meme called “World Emperor” may never take hold of humankind, or that may happen sooner than we may imagine.

As a final thought: past Emperors normally attributed their powers to the support of super-human divine entities. Could the super-human entities supporting a world emperor be in the form of Artificial Intelligence? The beauty of the future is that its possibilities are endless.