I'm watching The Trap by Adam Curtis, BBC Documentary from 2007, telling amazing story about modern times. By coincidence (or synchronicity) it adds some information to my previous post. Not very optimistic :) Few thoughts, inspired by first two parts:
1. Mechanistic, reductionist view of what we are, processing units, planning, rationalizing, strategizing, is only partially true. It should be obvious, to most people it probably is intuitively true, that we are more than biological machines. We can't be reduced to numbers, performance targets, statistics. When it happens, and it does happen a lot since the second world war, we lose on individual and collective level - feeling like a cogwheel in a great machine of society makes us feel small and depressed, and society that looks at itself as just a very complex but still mechanical system is poor in terms of spiritual and emotional wealth.
2. When our productivity, creativity and value as individuals is measured and determined by just numbers, unexpected happens. From mathematical and rational points of view it makes sense to require hospitals to reduce number of waiting patients, and ask police to reduce number of crimes. But when reward and punishment is administered according to those narrow numbers, people use their creativity to improve numbers, not what they describe. For example hospitals prioritized "easy" patients, who could be dealt with faster, so statistics improved, and police reclassified street fights as "suspicious behaviors", and then announced great success - it's all on paper, all in the numbers... Reality is so much more complex than its models.
3. Game theory, which some left-brained managerial types are so fond of, is based on assumption that we are generally selfish and rational beings. That theory works in theoretical cases much better than in reality, because reality is, well, messy, and we are human. Thanks gods we are unpredictable, industrious gnomes who get irritated when expected to behave like... adults... Adults who behave like proverbial adults are slightly boring, not to use the word "dull". But I digress. Conclusion of the second part of the movie was that the two groups who play the game theory well are economists and psychopaths. Us ordinary, messy humans don't fit well in the model, which makes me think there is hope for humanity after all. But the problem is that:
4. People who rule the world seek ways to reduce complexity in order to be able to, well, rule. That's why game theory is so popular. That's why alcohol is OK, but LSD is considered worse than death - beer makes you predictable, but LSD changes your perspective and makes you ask inconvenient questions. That's why so much money is pumped into mind controlling media - we are complex creatures, but we have common traits - fear, lust, etc - which can be exploited on great scale. Society consisting of emancipated individuals who think for themselves and are irrationally unselfish, such a society can't be ruled by existing power structures. Democracy, hell yeah, but when the ruling class wants to go to war - they have to manufacture consent (there are great videos on YT about that too), and it takes lots of money and time. Hence the dumbing down that's going on for decades now.
5. John Nash ("A Beautiful Mind" movie is about him, but paints much prettier picture than reality was), brilliant mathematician, known for his game theory and economics contributions (Nobel in Economic Sciences) suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which colored his view of the world black, in pessimistic and paranoid way, and that influenced his view of how economics should be working optimally. And his work contributed greatly to the idea that Free Market and its invisible hand are better left alone, and they will reach optimal performance, stability and prosperity for all. They well could, if it wasn't for the pesky and messy human factor :) So, free market based on individual freedom of participants - yes, definitely, but not only free market. There is more to it than just numbers.
6. Prozac and mass-prescribed similar drugs "curing" or at least "helping with" various usual human feelings like anxiety and depression were direct but not very predictable result of the idea that normalizing human behavior is a good thing - from game theory point of view maybe, but again, it reduces our internal complexity and individuality to just numbers or charts, and that is simply wrong.
7. One interesting thing that deserves much attention is direct comparison between economy and politics. To be precise, both market and democracy are ultimately expressions of our wishes - what we want to have and how we want to be organized. But then what we see is that free market with its immediate, precise and measurable (in simple numbers) is much, much better in fulfilling those wishes than democracy, which is slow and ineffective, due to unmanageable complexity of modern society. Communism tried direct hands-on approach and fall on its face terribly. Capitalism fares much better, but it is likely to collapse the roof over our heads. Main difference? Degree of freedom in each system. Not even who owns what, but just freedom of expression, thought, creation. These factors are reduced and misused when numbers govern the world...
And now I'm off to watch the 3rd part. Sadly, it's the last one.
