Yep...our society has its own brain. We’ll call it the “society brain.” The fact that each day isn’t utter chaos with 8 billion humans implies that there is some stabilizing force at play. This force is not like your brain and it’s not like my brain. The society brain is a complex incentive system that influences our behavior.
We’ll explore what this incentive system is made of, its weak points, and how it could evolve.
Here’s what the society brain looks like
We’re always making decisions. What to eat today, who to spend time with, which job to do, which school to attend, how many children to have, and many more choices. Each choice that you make has an effect on the people around you. If you have 10 children, it will affect your neighbors differently than if you have 2 children. If you have 3 slices of deep dish pepperoni pizza before you get on the airplane, it will affect the person sitting next to you differently than if you had opted for chicken soup. If you spend your life working to solve nuclear fusion vs spend your life optimizing digital ads, it will affect those around you differently.
In an attempt to coordinate our decisions in some consistent direction, we’ve created a collective brain of sorts that tells us what to do.
What does the society brain actually look like? It’s certainly not a 3 pound fleshy mass.
The society brain is composed of ideas that people throughout history have contributed as to how our society should function. These ideas have evolved into incentive systems that guide our collective behavior, much like a brain does for an individual.
There are three organization types that try to embody many of these ideas and act as dense nodes of the society brain that guide our behavior: governments, economies, religions.
To look at governments, take the U.S. constitution as an example. It acts as a guide for making decisions about how to run a country. There are humans such as those on the supreme court who attempt to explicitly use the constitution as a decision making tool. The U.S. government has taken that list of rules and translated their spirit into a million and one laws, which citizens are incentivized to obey otherwise they risk punishment.
To look at economies, let’s consider today’s most popular system we call capitalism. Capitalism gives people the freedom to create whatever it is they want and the means to keep creating that thing as long as there’s someone who will pay for it. Generally speaking, this system incentivizes participants to spend their time producing goods and services that other people want today, in the short-term.
To look at religions, they provide part of the society brain by laying out their “commandments” and “precepts” and “pillars.” These lists of rules, similar to the constitution, are upheld by various groups of “religious workers” such as priests, clergy, and the like. Religious systems have many features that maintain their place as part of the society brain, from books, holidays, specific clothing, weekly gatherings, dietary restrictions, and many other behavior recommendations that serve to remind adherents that they need to stay on the religion’s path. The religious person is incentivized to act according to the religion’s recommendations in order to receive the reward at the end of the path, whether that’s heaven, enlightenment, or according to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a beer volcano.
Looking just at government, economy, and religion you might think that the society brain can be neatly organized into those three buckets. Unfortunately that’s not the case. There are many sub-buckets with a wide variety of governments, economies, and religions, along with other buckets like academic institutions, media, and nonprofits. And then these parts of the society brain all interact in curious ways. For example, governments, economies, and religions do not exist in silos. Governments typically play active roles in economies, printing money or creating antitrust regulations, and religions live at the foundation of many governments and economies. Here’s an example of those three buckets interacting:
This dollar bill is a government printed economic unit expressing a religious conviction. A fascinating combination of the three institutions most responsible for upholding the society brain.
Where does the society brain fail?
Alright, so we’ve established that there’s a “society brain” which is this complex incentive system composed of governments, economies, religions, and a variety of other organizations that try to guide our collective behavior. When we make a decision about our life, there’s a high likelihood that our choice is influenced by one or more of these systems. The society brain at work.
Where does this brain fall short?
To start, having a society brain is a good thing. It enables us to coordinate our individual decisions so that at the collective level it’s not chaos. If we are to make sustained progress as a species in whatever direction we deem relevant, we need some decision coordination. The society brain is a critical part of that coordination.
Now onto the weaknesses. While there are failure points within each part of the society brain- governments, economies, religions, academia, media, nonprofits, etc.- to focus on weaknesses of any individual part would make this post too long and would miss the point. Instead, I’m going to focus on a higher level failure point: lack of visibility.
For an individual person, self-awareness is a highly valuable asset. If you understand what makes you tick, then your ability to live a fulfilled life will be higher than if you were flying blind. It’s the same for our society.
We need to develop a societal self-awareness that enables us to understand what makes our society tick. As it currently stands, our governments, economies, religions, etc. exist as these opaque blobs of undulating chaos that we’re each impacted by. How they incentivize behavior is unclear, how their interactions change incentives is unclear, and then how all of that impacts us as individuals is unclear.
Our relationship with the society brain, with the incentive systems that guide our behavior, should be an explicit one where we each know exactly what we are signing up for. We need a high-resolution fMRI of society’s incentive systems. With that visibility, we would gain a collective self-awareness of what drives us, placing us in a better position to evolve our society.
Here’s how that brain could evolve
In order to change something, it helps if you can see it first. By mapping out the society brain, we would gain the ability to strategize upgrades to our incentive system.
And with a digital map of society’s incentive system, the improvement process could become more dynamic and collaborative. Currently, improvements to the society brain tend to happen offline among small groups of “insiders,” whether they’re lifelong politicians, ultra-wealthy participants, or others who’ve accrued high social capital. These insiders all have partial information given the lack of visibility and they likely aren’t the best decision makers for all topics anyway.
If the “architectural drawings” of our society were digitized and therefore cheaply visible to anyone with an internet connection, then we could co-create the rules of society alongside the best people for the job.
Next Up
I’m going to go meta for the next post and explore existential relevance through a materialist perspective. For a short teaser of the next post: we’re all patterns of existence, how do we determine both which pattern we want to become and which pattern we want to change our surroundings into?
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Have the best week of your life,
xo, Michael.
Love the brain metaphor!
The economy seems to have a clear operating framework of "more," right? The economy doesn't concern itself with environmental well-being (as one example), that's society brain getting involved.
Society at the moment seems to gravitate towards a framework of popularity and lesser evils. Those officials are elected on the premise of moving society into a direction which, if agreed upon by the most number of people, is put into motion. While campaigning, the narrative is traditionally "better" but always ends up being "less bad" due to slowness of progress and inefficiency of government.
One would then think - government reflects the societal direction the highest percentage of the population is interested in but is clearly an imperfect system as dynamic candidates with stances that aren't endorsed by one party aren't elected.
Really good post. Brain metaphor is excellent.