Amerika

Humanity suffers because people insist on having a tangible enemy. They want someone they can see, identify, touch, smell, and easily understand. They do not want what Amerika offers, which is an intangible enemy: ideas and psychologies that cannot be captured except in abstraction.

Here we point out that individualism is the core of civilization decay and it manifests through contrarian ironism that takes the form of egalitarianism. Until we defeat the root idea, “me first before culture, nature, and divine orders,” we will get absolutely nowhere like we have for the last twenty plus centuries.

Decay after all is a slow process. It starts on the periphery and hides in the details. Eventually it gains enough ground that it becomes pervasive, at which point it dominates by being a large enough portion of the civilization to have the swing vote and then dominate.

It has taken a long time to get here, but to get out, we have to figure out where we took a wrong turn and go back to that point, reverse, and try again.

Our understanding began here with the notion that Crowdism manipulates politics, not the other way around:

No human organization in history has been so well-managed that it could pull off a conspiracy of this nature without revealing itself or collapsing in infighting. Whatever engendered this particular mess did not have a leader, or a central organizing principle, although it has manifested itself in centralized authority. A systematic change to this kind of order comes through a shared assumption, much like when a group of friends, upon perceiving their favorite bar is closed, meet at the next most likely place without having to communicate the name amongst themselves. More than a leaderless revolution, it was an unconscious one: those who brought it about had no idea they shared an ideology, or no idea what its name might be, or even why they did it. They simply did it because it was natural to do, and because nothing has since opposed it, it continues to this day in grossly simplified form.

It is a belief system based on appearances: emotions come before logic, personal boundaries come before the necessity of doing what is right for all, and abstract divisions of “good” and “evil” regarding intent come before a realization of the effect of any action. In short, this is a belief system which manipulates by preventing certain actions rather than by recommending others, and it attacks before any action is ever committed.

It does not have a goal. It does not have an ideology. It is wholly negative in nature, in that it identifies certain things that are destabilizing to those who find it important, and it attempts to censure and criminalize those. It in fact replaces the idea of having a goal with the idea of not doing wrong, and thus restricts what can be done to those whose actions might be so selfish that any sort of goal would conflict with them. These sort of people might be described as passive criminals, then, since what they do is not outright criminal, but by being what is done instead of pursuing a healthy goal, and by requiring a morality that prevents others from interrupting it, it supplants the seeking of a healthy goal. It is thus a crime of omission if nothing else.

The belief, whether known in language to its bearer or not, that the individual should predominate over all other concerns is Crowdism. We name it according to the crowd because crowds are the fastest to defend individual autonomy; if any of its members are singled out, and doubt thrown upon their activities or intentions, the crowd is fragmented and loses its power. What makes crowds strong is an inability of any to criticize their members, or to suggest any kind of goal that unites people, because what makes for the best crowds is a lack of goal. Without a higher vision or ideal, crowds rapidly degenerate into raiding parties, although of a passive nature.

It helps to understand that this “collectivism” is comprised of individualism. Everyone in the Crowd wants me-first morality, so the Crowd defends that idea, and soon it is a mass of people using each other for their own ends. Autonomous individuals do not need a Crowd but individualists certainly do.

This Crowd formation creates an uneasy codependency between the individual and the group. The individual needs the group to promote individualism, but because of that, is also subject to the needs and whims of the group. This makes the individual both master and slave in a cult of the individual:

The individual, destabilized, demands that itself come before all else. For this reason it demands an order that supports the cult of the individual; a crowd of uniques, a mob of iconoclasts, an army of freestylers. We refer to “individualism” as the philosophy which (a) puts the individual above all else and (b) interprets all else through its impact on an individual considered alone and isolated from all other factors.

Individuals, if the choice was up to them, would all be kings, although the best king would be one who rules not for individual reasons but for the best of the country — people, land, customs, values — as a whole. Every individual a king, and since we cannot rule other individuals or they cannot be kings, we want to be in our own island kingdoms, isolated from all else. If we need other people, we will pay them, and so convince ourselves that we are not intruding upon their kingship (it’s only fair that we all work and earn money to be kings; money, like time spent at a job, is equally accessible to all king-individuals).

We do not want to be placed into any competition where our inherent abilities are revealed, because this reminds us too much of natural selection. We want an end to all rank, to all hierarchy, so that our deficiencies are masked behind the equalizing factor of recognition.

Individuality is the first casualty of this process; it is sacrificed to the public image of the individual, through which the individual receives “equality” or its ability to participate in equal stature i.e. freedom from hierarchy. Individuality the motivation of self gives way to individualism the social motivation.

With that comes the usual caveats of a dirty secret hidden in plain sight. Any who critique the relationship are bad and must be shamed; those who promote the secret through contrarian ironism, or rejecting reality in flamboyant ways, are celebrated.

This creates an era of trend-chasing and political correctness where vital things cannot be mentioned but anything that is either trivial or rationalizes the decline as “good” is celebrated. A society in the grips of this pathology actively embraces the bad and rejects the good. It wants to die.

Even more, by that point, most of its citizens are fully in the grip of resentment. They hate their society but cannot articulate this because it is still wealthy. They detest those who are doing well in it. They want revenge and care about nothing else, and in this pursuit, they destroy most of what their civilization has built.

Imagine a giant tantrum. This is what happens when you have herd behavior; the herd is comprised of individuals, they have fears, and in response the herd becomes a goal in itself instead of adaptation to the environment. At this point, the herd becomes an obligation which individuals both cling to and rebel against.

Normal herd behavior consists of conformity in order to avoid being blamed and attacked by the herd:

Herding can be defined as the phenomenon of individuals deciding to follow others and imitating group behaviours rather than deciding independently and atomistically on the basis of their own, private information. Herding theory has its roots in Keynes, who focused on the motivations to imitate and follow the crowd in a world of uncertainty (Keynes 1930). Keynes conceived herding as a response to uncertainty and individuals’ perceptions of their own ignorance: people may follow the crowd because they think that the rest of the crowd is better informed. This can generate instability and in financial markets herding is a key factor generating speculative episodes.

Keynes observed that it is better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right and this is because following others may help individuals to maintain good reputations; it makes sense to follow the crowd because there is safety in numbers. Scharfstein & Stein (1990) incorporated this insight about social influence into their analysis of herding in fund managers’ decisions. Fund managers have to convince people that they are investing wisely and, as short-term performance is not a good indicator of skill, they rely for their reputations on comparisons with peers.

If herding is the outcome of a rational algorithmic process, e.g. as used in the Bayesian updating theories described above, then this fits with Simon’s concept of substantive rationality. On the other hand Keynes’s analyses of financial markets are more consistent with a view of procedural rationality, i.e. behaviour which is sensible and reasonable reflecting the judicious balancing of the pieces of information in a process of ‘appropriate deliberation’ (e.g. using intuition, heuristics and rules of thumb).

The takeaway you need here: Keynes notes that herding occurs because it preserves social reputation. Herding is motivated by social factors among human investors, who unlike wild animals in herds, are reacting not to risks external to the group but to social risks within the group.

To put it another way, if you screw up by doing something that no one else has done, people will assume you are the problem; if you screw up while doing what everyone else is doing, it will be seen as “bad luck” and you will not be blamed or will be blamed less.

The root of conformity is peer pressure, and the root of peer pressure is people trying to preserve their social position through conformity instead of risking it by independent action. This is how entropy enters human groups and is the method it uses to cement its control.

An important point is that collective herd behavior comes about through rational individual decisions based on risk/reward in a manner that is similar to democracy:

Even human beings will tend to follow each other with a herd mentality — say, out of a crowded theater. New research provides some surprising insight into what’s going on, including a group penchant for democratic decisions.

For instance, there may be five individuals who know of a food supply to the east, but four others who have spotted food to the north. The researchers found that the entire group will tend to settle on the direction with the greater number of informed individuals.

“In the real world, you do have individuals with different information, needs and preferences,” Couzin explained. “What we show is that – using very simple rules – the group will choose the majority. It’s almost like a democratic decision.”

In other words, each individual acts so that his decisions mirror that of the majority, which makes that majority come about. Democracy is herd behavior.

Even more importantly, this herd behavior reflects the individual balancing decisions between desire for what others have and fear of their judgment on non-conformists.

In this way, a type of Crowdism occurs: the herd focuses on the new thing, ignores what it knows, and through the individualism of its members, pursues the easy answer en masse while leaving behind the question of what is real, eternal, and of quality.

As it turns out, this social entropy becomes self-defeating because the rational herd does not take its own actions into account:

In Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, economist Charles P. Kindleberger noted that “mob psychology or hysteria is well established as an occasional deviation from rational behavior”; in such situations, “the action of each individual is rational — or would be — were it not for the fact that others are behaving in the same way.” The economist Robert Shiller, in Irrational Exuberance, argued that herdlike behavior, “although individually rational, produces group behavior that is, in a well-defined sense, irrational.”

If it were merely the individualist acting, his choice to emulate others would work out well for him, but since everyone else is doing the same thing, he merely enters a trend.

These tend to do well at first. If everyone buys a certain stock, for example, the value of the stock goes up, but then that speculation bubble slows down and at that point, the trend inverts: where those who got in first were doing well before, now those who exit first are the ones doing well.

Herd behavior takes on several forms. One is rushing for a bonanza, another is fleeing fears. Yet another is flocking (PDF) or seemingly social behavior that disguises a motivation to hide from predators behind the rest of the thundering herd:

This paper presents an antithesis to the view that gregarious behaviour is evolved through benefits to the population or species. Following Galton (1871) and Williams (1964) gregarious behaviour is considered as a form of cover-seeking in which each animal tries to reduce its chance of being caught by a predator.

Cover-seeking means that each animal is trying to hide in the herd. Much as they act with the herd in order to avoid being blamed for being dissidents or non-conformists — a herd, being based on mutually codependent unity, sees these two as the same thing because they are interruptions to unity — now they use others as camouflage.

This leads to the selfish herd hypothesis which holds that herds are not formed of unity, after all, but collective fear of predators and each other:

The selfish herd hypothesis [11] suggests a further benefit to individuals: risk for any particular individual in the group can be reduced, but at the expense of other group members, for whom risk is increased.

Although in our study the mean number of close neighbours did not differ between clear and turbid water before the simulated predation attack, previous work has shown that high levels of turbidity can lead to the formation of looser aggregations under non-threat conditions [24,25]. This implies that already increased inter-individual distances could exacerbate the reduction in ability to respond to multiple neighbours we observed here, leading to further dispersal of prey shoals. If groups are less cohesive, then the anti-predator benefits associated with large, dense groups, such as confusion [8,9] and dilution effects [5,7], are likely to be weakened, increasing individual predation risk.

In large, dense groups each individual has a reduced risk of being the one chosen by a predator. Since predators favor weaker prey, this may be the first mode of wealth transfer: raise the risk to the healthy so it can be decreased for the unhealthy.

The herd behavior becomes flocking behavior where each individualist in the herd attempts to maneuver so that his risk is reduced and that of his neighbors is increased. In other words, this is a type of competition more vicious than anything capitalism or chivalry could ever dream.

Ironically it turns out that this selfishness produces more risk than collaboration:

In this model, I relax this assumption and find that individuals who adopt ‘selfish herd’ behaviour are often more likely to be captured, because they end up at the back of a fleeing herd. By contrast, individuals that adopt a rule of ‘neighbour to neighbour alignment’ are able to avoid rearmost positions in a moving herd. Alignment is more successful than selfish herding across much of the parameter space, which may explain why highly aligned fleeing behaviour is commonly observed in nature.

However, like many forms of competition, this forms both a collective and a “crab bucket” crowd where each tries to rise by suppressing others. This crowding behavior turns flocking into mutual risk, but the mathematics of it reveal the individualism or me-first-before-all-else behind it:

Our analyses show that under this crowded environment, cohesive and steady herds were consistently replaced by morphing and moving aggregates via the attempt of border agents to share predation risk with the inner members. This kind of collective motion emerges purely from the competition among selfish individuals regardless of any group benefit. Our findings reveal that including the crowding effect with the selfish herd scenario permits additional diversity in the predicted outcomes and imply that a wider set of collective animal behaviours are explainable purely by individual-level selection.

The “individual-level selection” explains all of the behavior: individual rational actors doing what is best for them and the fate of the herd or others be damned.

It is exactly what you would expect of disordered individuals. Without a plan and a hierarchy, they simply do what benefits them in the short term and what will not get them attacked by others.

Western Civilization arose by suppressing such things, just like evolution happens by suppressing broken traits through natural selection. If you filter out defective behaviors, you get a higher grade of people.

In nature, no such organization happens in most species, so instead you get organized chaos: each individual does what is convenient, the predators take what they will, and the rest get interbred to nearly uniform behaviors.

This shows us that nature will, over time, hammer any species down into a lowest common denominator, unless there are goals/hierarchy to keep it aiming toward the transcendent arete (excellence) and therefore, to rise above itself and become what it is but at a higher level of quality.

Safety in numbers reflects individual fears more than herd unity, although it appears like unity because the flocking herd moves together as one:

One way in which individuals may gain protection from predators by joining a group is through a simple ‘dilution’ effect—for any one predator attack, the larger the group of prey animals, the smaller is the chance that any particular individual will be the victim.

The dilution effect results in a constant pressure for more individuals to be added to the herd, since the risk to the individual is the number of predators divided by the number of members of the herd. The pacifistic, pluralistic impulse in humanity may be a vestigial form of that.

The interesting thing is that social risk becomes more important in these situations:

In studies involving risk posed by rivals (social risk), most documented a more rapid decrease in vigilance with group size at low than at high risk, as predicted if the need to monitor rivals increases in larger groups.

Social risk means the risk posed by others of the same species, especially in times of crisis like predator attack, and evidence suggests that flocking behavior navigates between submission to social risk (peer pressure) and strategic behavior to ward it off (Ayn Rand style me-firstism).

Funny how those almost map to Left and Right.

Flocking behavior turns out to be incorporated into the herd mentality which we find in many areas of human behavior based on individual choice or bottom-up organization, both of which are most completely explained by methods borrowed from economics:

A herd instinct is a behavior wherein people tend to react to the actions of others and follow their lead. This is similar to the way animals react in groups when they stampede in unison out of the way of danger — perceived or otherwise. Herd instinct or herd behavior is distinguished by a lack of individual decision-making or introspection, causing those involved to think and behave in a similar fashion to everyone else around them.

Human beings are prone to a herd mentality, conforming to the activities and direction of others in multiple ways, from the way we shop to the way we invest.

Conformity is seen as lack of individual decision-making, but in fact it is individuals choosing to do what others are doing to minimize risk of external loss (predation, error) as well as social loss (non-conformity).

The herd is not conformist, so much as it is an attempt to avoid the appearance of non-conformity, since non-conformity signals a lack of obedience to whatever social contract (rules, methods, procedures, means) the flock has adopted.

In fact, what we see as conformity may simply be an attempt to find the center of the herd, which in human terms means lifestyle and behaviors since competing in that arena gets us to the center of cities and social groups:

Instead of scattering randomly when faced with danger, sheep selfishly head to the safety of their flock’s centre, a new study has confirmed.

He suggested that groups of animals as diverse as insects, fish and cattle all react to danger by moving towards the middle of their swarm, school or herd, known as the selfish herd theory. Individuals in a herd benefit from being able to control where they are relative to their group-mates and any potential predator. It also reduces the chances of being the one the predator goes for when it attacks.

The selfish herd theory explains how individuals choose conformity as a means of reducing both external and social risk.

In it, individual choices appear to be conformity, but in fact reflect each individual making a calculated compromise: they will pretend to be like the others, while maneuvering to their own advantage.

If we follow the Iron Rule of nature — all things (ideas, groups, individuals, genes) act only in their own self-interest alone — this makes sense since altruism is a manipulation in this view, not an actual goal.

Even more, we know that individuals and groups react to fears (risk, predation, loss) more than opportunity:

One of the most renowned explanations for the evolution of social species is the selfish herd hypothesis, first formalised by Hamilton in 1971. The premise of the selfish herd is that fear of predation is the driving force of movement (Hamilton, 1971). Hamilton reasoned that an individual’s exposure to predation risk is related to the amount of space that is inherently ‘theirs’ and coined the term danger domain. The danger domain is the space surrounding an individual that is closer to it than any other member of the group. He hypothesised that an attempt to reduce the amount of risk to which one is exposed by reducing the danger domain to selfishly avoid a predator would lead to aggregation.

An individual in a selfish herd is motivated by minimising its risk and, as presented by Hamilton, this translates to moving “in a way that will cause its polygonal domain to decrease”.

In other words, selfishness causes individuals to want to be closer to others because this reduces their exposure to attack by predators.

They use others as a type of armor or distraction, hoping the predator goes for them. As the old joke goes, when your group is attacked by bears, you just need to be faster than the slowest guy and he will get eaten.

This shows us the nature of egalitarianism: people want to be equal so that they are camouflaged. They do not mean well for others; they want them to get eaten first!

Herd flocking behavior of this nature is egalitarian because it seeks to reduce the advantage of those who are fastest, stronger, smarter, or healthier:

Group formation can help mitigate predation risk through various mechanisms, including risk dilution and group vigilance. The selfish herd hypothesis proposes that prey can reduce their risk by minimizing the area around which all points in that area are closer to them than to another conspecific (i.e. by minimizing their ‘domain of danger’ (DOD)).

Unlike some other hypotheses for grouping behaviour, the selfish herd mechanism does not rely on inclusive fitness to confer a selective advantage to individuals that exhibit grouping behaviour

If you are a weaker animal, forming a flock and getting to the center ensures that the more capable animals on the outside who are less afraid are exposed more to predators. This diminishes the inequality of ability.

Animals move to the center of the group where they are least exposed to predators:

Analyses of relative sheep movement trajectories showed that sheep exhibit a strong attraction towards the centre of the flock under threat, a pattern that we could re-create using a simple model. These results support the long-standing assertion that individuals can respond to potential danger by moving towards the centre of a fleeing group.

This is rewarded most in larger groups where the risk of any individual being taken is low:

Flocking is a striking example of collective behaviour that is found in insect swarms, fish schools and mammal herds [1]. A major factor in the evolution of flocking behaviour is thought to be predation, whereby larger and/or more cohesive groups are better at detecting predators (as, for example, in the ‘many eyes theory’), and diluting the effects of predators (as in the ‘selfish-herd theory’) than are individuals in smaller and/or dispersed groups [2]. The former theory assumes that information (passively or actively transferred) can be disseminated more effectively in larger/cohesive groups, while the latter assumes that there are spatial benefits to individuals in a large group, since individuals can alter their spatial position relative to their group-mates and any potential predator, thus reducing their predation risk [3]….Analyses of relative sheep movement trajectories showed that sheep exhibit a strong attraction towards the centre of the flock under threat, a pattern that we could re-create using a simple model. These results support the long-standing assertion that individuals can respond to potential danger by moving towards the centre of a fleeing group.

Oftentimes flocking and herding behavior are referred to as information cascades because the first actor sets the course, and others follow from the most informed to the least, passing a middle point where people are afraid not to conform because of the risk of being seen as wrong.

Ironically, this shows us replacement of private information (subtext) with public information (text) as a rational behavior designed to avoid missing out on what others have discovered:

To summarize, an invest cascade, say, starts with the first individual who finds that the number of predecessors who invested exceeds the predecessors who rejected by two. This individual and all subsequent individuals, acting rationally, will then invest regardless of what their private signal tells them about the value of the investment. Once a cascade starts, an individual’s action does not reflect her private information. Consequently, once a cascade starts, the private information of subsequent investors is never included in the public pool of knowledge.

In other words, people conform because they are afraid not to conform because if they do not conform and something goes wrong, they will be seen as having made a bad decision.

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) fits very much into this model, but the root is fear of peer pressure: doing whatever everyone else is doing will result in no blame to the individual, but when things go wrong, non-conformists and dissidents get scapegoated.

The information cascade creates the Hegelian stepladder where every response after the first is a reaction to the first, and the herd gets re-oriented from paying attention to reality to paying attention only to itself.

Like most economic decisions, this one reflects a tradeoff between fear of competition and fear of loss:

Optimal spacing between animals in groups generally is likely to be determined by a trade-off between the detrimental effects of competition and the beneficial effects of reducing predation mortality.

The instinct to herd is not just hard-wired in humans, but reflects a social awareness that autists do not have:

We found that human groups tend to spontaneously herd, particularly in terms of directional synchrony, supporting the notion of a human herding instinct. We further asked whether individuals with high traits of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit differences in their herding tendencies. Results indicated that individuals with high ASD traits showed greater social separation from the group, compared to individuals with low ASD traits.

Perhaps the autists will save us from ourselves by being blind to the social signals and symbols that neuter and domesticate us.

Since larger groups are more efficient because individuals must spend less time watching out for predators, herd flocking creates an incentive to overpopulate in order to achieve those numbers:

The argument that individuals benefit from foraging in flocks through spending less time in predator surveillance and hence more time foraging and feeding, has been formalized in terms of a mathermatical relationship (Pulliam 1973). We have tested the model using house sparrows (Passer domesticus), and our results support its prediction of an inverse relationship between the time spent in predator surveillance and the flock size.

It turns out that while flocking seems to benefit the individual, it leads to civilization decline if abundance declines:

In fluid, highly mobile aggregations, individuals are constantly moving in response to changing environmental conditions, the locations of predators, or the movements of conspecifics. However, when the ability to rearrange is limited and spatial reconfiguration occurs on slower time scales than changes in population size, systems may become trapped in suboptimal arrangements.

We find that declining abundance leads to fragmentation even in a homogeneous environment, which has population-level consequences for reproductive success because predation is biased towards colony edges. Strong edge effects from heterogeneous predation coupled with fragmentation in response to population declines create a positive feedback cycle that can accelerate population decline.

In this way, individualism builds a flock to high numbers, which causes it to run out of food, at which point population pressures cause herd behavior to work against the herd.

Nature wants to kill us so that only those intelligent and disciplined enough to escape the trap persist. This is a type of check and balance that prevents overpopulation by stimulating it and then sacrificing the herd.

In other words, if you want to survive in nature, you have to plan ahead to avoid excessive herding behaviors.

That however requires executive functions or critical thinking with a realistic and forward focus:

Executive functions (EFs) are a set of processes that are critical for organizing thought and behavior in the service of achieving goals.

Acquiring new skills in the classroom has much to do with how students organize, seek, and evaluate information, aspects of thinking that depend of EF. EF is also important for managing challenges, be they purely intellectual or socio-emotional in nature. For example, EF predicts not only SAT scores, but also a capacity to cope with stress, uncertainty, and conflict (Mischel et al., 1989).

One example, referred to as the Gratton effect (Gratton et al., 1992), is driven by the statistics of a task environment, such that tasks saturated with incongruent stimuli show smaller interference effects than do tasks saturated with congruent trials. These effects can be highly localized in time such that the magnitude of an interference effect is markedly attenuated following a single incongruent trial relative to when the same interference effect is measured following a single congruent trial.

Herding works against this because when following the herd is rewarded, there is no need for executive function, which makes it an inefficient expense for individuals.

In human societies, this herding behavior occurs through peer pressure and the subsidies it creates, both in removing inequality through flocking and through benefits passed down by the herd:

Drawing on ethnographic data from a not-for-profit school, I show how an external actor — beneficiaries — can become a source of normative control. I develop a multistage process that explains how teachers were socialized by parents, specifically by hearing these parent beneficiaries narrate their needs; engaging in collective storytelling about beneficiaries; experiencing episodic shaming centered on how teachers’ daily performance met (or did not meet) beneficiaries’ needs; and receiving validation from beneficiaries. Because these sequential stages establish beneficiaries as sources of control through social interactions set in specific times and places, and establish shared emotional states among organizational members, I theorize that these stages compose a ritual of integration. Although teachers initially arrived at the school with heterogeneous values, this ritual led many of them to internalize the organizational value of self-sacrifice.

Control arises from herding as a reaction to it instead of an alternative to it. A leader could either stop herding behavior by having a better goal instead, or can accept herding behavior and try to limit it with subsidies and rules, but the latter simply domesticates the population and removes their ability to make choices.

This creates a situation like political correctness where any mention of inequalities provokes censure, but no one thinks to praise what is done well because that creates a new inequality:

Their research revealed that members who are about to be evaluated themselves participate in more peer evaluations. However, members are less likely to participate in evaluations if their evaluation may offend someone or be pivotal in impacting a peer’s overall assessment, focusing their negative evaluations on inactive members. Negative evaluations are also targeted toward those that are unlikely to swing the evaluation outcome in either direction, in which the overall outcome is already obvious.

The research also found no evidence that members focus on giving positive evaluations to active peers, suggesting they avoid negative reciprocity but do not attempt to invoke positive reciprocity. Further analysis suggests that this strategic use of peer evaluations is effective, with members more likely to be evaluated positively and to get promoted by their peers.

In this way, we see the full cycle of herd behavior: it starts out as an efficiency, quickly becomes a liability, and then creates a population crash which leaves behind creatures less able to make decisions.

This resembles how human societies find prosperity, take it for granted, and then decay into third world level civilization-ruins.

It also shows how, because individuals act toward their benefit through following the herd, we constantly re-invent the wheel without preserving social capital by escaping the Hegelian stepladder and referencing reality as a big picture whole:

It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

But that’s what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren’t fun. Fixing bugs isn’t fun; going through the bug list isn’t fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because “this time it will be done right”, ha ha) and so that’s what happens, over and over again.

From this come the broken and related human behaviors: individualism, pacifism, egalitarianism, pluralism, egotism, narcissism, solipsism, and finally sociopathy.

The further we drift from reality into the Hegelian stepladder — this is a herd flocking behavior — the farther we venture into the infinite mirrored caverns of the self, where we become lost because there are no fixed points of reference, only relatives and tradeoffs; in the process we lose the ability to have goals.

That further accelerates a tragedy of the commons which mimics rational individual herd behavior but sacrifices things held in common like institutions, culture, nature, wisdom, and the divine:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Each person acting in me-first individualism (this is the definition of individualism: the individual above all else) does what is rational if he exists in a world solely of himself and one other party, which consists of “everyone else” plus the world and its different rules.

In this two-person world, his rational action pays off; he does what the world wants him to, after all, since democratically it has chosen a path he can follow. In reality, things go well at first but then crash catastrophically as is usually the case with popular illusions.

You live in a time of scapegoats. They want to blame politicians, Jews, the Rich, billionaires, the Whites, Christians, Satanists, or WASPs. In reality, our problem is flocking and herd behavior in humans — called Crowdism — leads us into self-destruction every time.

Tags: collectivism, conformity, control, executive function, flocking, herd behavior, individualism, information cascade, selfish herd theory