Beyond Hegemony: Hoping for a Better World
(WARNING: LONG)
It’s very clear that something is wrong with the United States, although it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what that is. A healthy country does not fall into two recessions within the span of twenty years, nor does it have an insurrection in which its own citizens destroy parts of the capital. But to an outside observer, it looks as though our country is led by the right people, Ivy League-trained economists and presidents and financiers and technologists, who are supposedly the best and the brightest this country has to offer. So what could explain this dichotomy? What unknowable sources are at play that govern America, and perhaps even the world, yet make such terrible decisions against our collective interest?
To that I respond with the notion of a global hegemony. Both of these events, and many others, follow patterns of influence which build up towards the idea of a global superclass whose decisions influence much of our policies and views towards one another, i.e. the global hegemony. Namely, these patterns of influence are noticeably top-down, making entry into the top difficult but allowing for certain exceptions so as to keep outsider elements under control. Furthermore, this state of being has stayed alive due to the strength of its own momentum, but under current conditions is almost certain to collapse at the rapid pace of technological growth our world is undergoing. The current state is bad enough that it is worth wondering as to whether an alternative means of world existence without a global hegemony would be possible. So, I’d like to take a look into the issue and give my own take on things. Without further ado, let’s begin.
PART 1: THE GLOBAL HEGEMONY — inspired by Noam Chomsky et al.
Look around you. At the clothes you wear, the technology you use, the media content you consume. Notice how similar these are to the people around you, particularly those closest to you?
In psychology, social inclusion theory helps explain these behaviors. In a nutshell, the theory states that people congregate with others who are similar to themselves. The reasoning seems pretty natural — as a thought experiment, try throwing yourself into a completely new city. Would you naturally find yourself sympathizing most with people from your hometown or of your same skin color, or that one weird dude with the strange mustache? For the most part, you do congregate with people similar to yourselves, and as a byproduct synchronize into similar worldviews and habits as a result. As a vast simplification, this is how social groups coexist and endure.
Now, at first glance there seems to be nothing wrong with this sort of thinking. However, let’s continue with this line of reasoning. Suppose that most people do adhere generally to social inclusion, so they hang around to similar groups of people to themselves. By simply following this one principle, these groups of similarity will tend to solidify over time, particularly because everyone has a limited brain capacity to remember people, creating cultural barriers which become more and more noticeable as the entire group syncs in thoughts and habits. And thus segregation is born, a line of reasoning which is indeed borne out via mathematical model.
This might not be a surprise if you’ve ever seen children at play. Where this becomes problematic is that for the most powerful and rich in the world, the most similar people are not actually in the same country — they’re similarly rich and powerful people around the world. Particularly because of modern technology, this rich and powerful group can travel to visit one another at a moment’s notice and often do. And they solidify the status of being rich and powerful by throwing exclusive parties, wearing designer clothes, owning expensive yachts and mansions — in short, by having similar thoughts and habits to one another, just like any other social group of humans.
Again, this on its own is not a problem. The problem lies in the fact that this rich and powerful class dictates both media and policy for the rest of the world. And with only a few exceptions, this rich and powerful class does not live like the rest of the world, because that isn’t part of the social contract for belonging to said class and having access to its privileges. Which means, assuming sufficient insularity, that this class makes decisions and media for itself and leaves the rest of the world to fend for the scraps.
Let’s understand this via example of, say, higher education. Let’s suppose that you are a parent who wants the best for your child and wants to use school as a means to prepare your child for the future. Furthermore, to prove a point, let’s say you are yourself poor. So, this leads you to think about sending your child to the best colleges in your country, or perhaps even the world. When you actually visit these “best colleges,” however, you notice that they are very different from your local community college. In particular, you notice that all the students have particular mannerisms and ideals which are common among these colleges but completely different from how local community college students think. This is an example of the global hegemony at work: these students have been raised since birth to think in a way which suits how the global superclass thinks it operates in the world. In fact, the education at such a college, assuming you desire to provide for your children, is less about the actual knowledge gained in coursework and more about social integration into this world so they can live in wealth. Hence the desirability of limited and competitive enrollment, so the rich social class doesn’t collapse in upon itself, and the twin effect of reputation of said school. And this stratification starts from birth, from attending select and well-endowed schools and enrichment programs, and continues all the way through into being trained for the most selective, and hence well-paying, jobs, an effect which continues to compound throughout a person’s lifetime.
Which is all to say that being born into such a social class makes writing policy which suits people outside said social class socially undesirable. Who in their right mind would write a law into existence which hurts their own overall status and financial standing? For that matter, why would anyone in said social class consider seriously changing this situation when the people who will play the most important parts of their life — the people who they will form lifelong friendships with, the people they will end up marrying, the people whose world they share — stand far more to benefit from nepotism and trading favors than truly fair politics? Thus politicians, who these days are by and large part of this social class, can freely engage in lobby money and pork barrel tactics knowing that their actions are essentially guilt free from the people who can actually influence their day to day lives. And others who are in this class — technologists and lawyers and doctors — write policies which serve themselves instead of the people they’re surrounded by.
I hope that by now you aren’t surprised to see why corruption keeps happening the higher up you go. If you are part of this social class, you have every reason to benefit from such practices. If you are not, you are out of sight of the global hegemony except perhaps as a number on a balance sheet or a low-level employee. In fact, it is a miracle that any policies which benefit common people beyond the bare minimum actually happen at all, given that incentives don’t align in such a manner — one might call such politicians insane or hypocritical.
To sum up: the global hegemony exists and by and large serves itself. Everyone else wants in, but the global hegemony restricts entry in order to preserve its own existence. And having such a social class be cut off from the lives of the people it governs can lead to disastrous consequences.
PART TWO: IMPLICATIONS
It would be nice if this hegemony-commoner relationship could exist peacefully. Unfortunately, in the real world this isn’t often the case, and the hegemony often wants more than its unfair share of wealth and influence.
The most notable example of disharmony is climate change. Currently our planet is headed towards a global temperature which will render many parts of the world uninhabitable by 2050. The causes of such a rise in temperature are well-documented: rampant industrialism, exploitation of natural resources in developing countries, consumerism which demands more and more and technology which causes more problems than it solves. And the effects are already happening around us: rampant forest fires, devastation from larger and larger hurricanes and typhoons, flooding, and ecological collapse in the worst cases. Despite knowing that the problems around us are caused by climate change, we as individuals largely don’t really do our part to fix climate change because it doesn’t suit our incentives — if not part of the hegemony we can’t exercise enough impact to drive change without impacting our own livelihood, and if part of the hegemony we ourselves are propped up by capitalist processes which are necessarily exploitative to fund a rich lifestyle. And COVID has made it abundantly clear who exactly is causing climate change problems — just look at how much of a difference in CO2 emissions there was, and the noticeable difference in levels of smog and pollution around the world, before and immediately after the outbreak.
Beyond climate change, one also sees an increase in scientific advancement at the same time, paradoxically, as unlivability for those at the lowest rungs of society. To a hegemonic observer it looks as though society is better than it’s ever been; several diseases have been cured, GDP is at an all-time high, and crime rates are at all-time lows. Yet since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, alongside technological progress has come the emergence of large slums, some which harbor the same diseases which have been supposedly “cured”, others whose residents live so poorly they can barely afford to feed themselves, and most of which entrap their residents into the cycle of poverty. How could such a situation be happening? Again, drawing back to the point above, our hegemonic system feeds off of maintaining its own existence, namely by the global superclass largely serving itself, which means that the vast majority of humanity is necessarily exploited to maximum efficiency by the cruel demands of capitalism. This is why in some countries such as, say, India, there is such a large wealth gap and other countries such as Norway there is less of one; within India the rich exploit their own people, while in Norway the exploitation is exported to a point where most people in the country can live well, but people outside Norway must pay the cost. Because humans have a limited brain capacity, it is not a reasonable assumption to assume that the average person will work towards humanity in the abstract, and as a result exploitation must follow industrialization.
What this means in practice is that the differences between the hegemony and the commoners will over time form a feedback which will reach unsustainable levels and almost certainly guarantee societal collapse if the greed of the hegemony goes unchecked. Not only is the hegemony better poised, physically and mentally and financially, to deal with any changes wrought by climate change and worsening poverty, but that these differences will compound to the point of providing commoners with the bare minimum, until through the power of sheer economic forces the bare minimum is broken through and commoners are forced by sheer hunger to act, whether that entails fleeing to another country or revolution. Although this is certainly a painful conclusion, and one that would best be avoided through the hegemony checking itself, the incentives currently in place strongly suggest that this is where we as a society are headed to whether we like it or not, barring a consensus change across the hegemony.
Of course the image is not quite as clear-cut as this; for example, at various points in the recent past there has existed a middle class which was neither super-rich nor trapped in poverty. And yes, within such a commoner-hegemony system there is room for a LOT of potential outliers, including outliers on the level of entire tribes or small countries. However, in spite of these outliers the hegemony-commoner model is a good model to explain how certain policies get made and understand where our world might be headed to.
PART 3: ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS
So what is the solution to our societal woes? Is it, as Karl Marx proposed through communism, for the commoners to rise up and overthrow the hegemony? Is it to return to monarchies and single rulers? Do we keep our current state of capitalism with varying levels of democracy and continue creating unequal situations? What are we to do?
Again, we have to go back to the root causes of these problems to find our answer. Two theories currently underpin the root of social inequality: a human’s limit to how many individuals they can care about (Dunbar’s Number) and social inclusion as context for how humans think about sympathies, and correspondingly resources. So an adequate system should cover both restrictions around how humans operate naturally; it should create a world in which each person’s money and time spent should both satisfy their need for social inclusion and natural limits and also work on a societal level.
To me, the solution that best aligns with how our brains currently work is for humans to go back to living in tribes. More specifically, within your tribe you don’t need to make everyone equal, you just need to make everyone feel valued. But outside your tribe people are strangers and you give them scraps of affection, saving your most valuable time and resources for the people within your tribe. And by and large this organizational structure forms on its own; just think of the friends and family you regularly associate with and whether or not you would treat them the same as a random stranger in major life decisions. However, my argument is that beyond the natural formation of tribes, organizational structures such as governments and corporations are very prone to wastefulness and great evil due to, in many cases, ending up being led by the same group of people who serve themselves no matter the culture; hence it might be best to do away with them altogether.
You might naturally point out to the advantages to having a larger system of human organization such as a government or corporation. One can more easily pool resources for larger projects such as infrastructure and scientific research, and mitigate individual deficiencies through larger teamwork. And yes, many of the scientific and technological breakthroughs we have had such as vaccines and sewage systems and trains would not have been possible without organized human cooperation. However, one must note that even in the earliest stages of human civilization, with the existence of large societies came stark differences in equality; just think of the difference in stature between the pharaohs and emperors who commissioned the Great Pyramids and Great Wall versus the actual laborers who worked and probably died to make said structures. If the question of a society which works for everyone is seriously the bedrock of our government and not just lip service, there is no doubt in my mind as to whether tribal living is a better option.
And I want to emphasize a further point as to why tribal living doesn’t suffer the same problems that having large societal structures does. In order for a large societal structure such as a government or a corporation to operate well, the leader can’t just think of themselves and their immediate family and friends like most people. They have to think of the abstraction of their corporation, or for government their people, and make the best decisions in service of this abstraction. Try putting yourself in the shoes of a leader who makes decisions “for humanity” instead of just for his family. Your mind might conjure images of, say, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., but it could just as well conjure images of Adolf Hitler or Mao Zedong, who killed countless numbers of people in pursuit of their vision of “benefitting humanity”. To expect that any average person who hasn’t been trained to deal with abstractions can make the right decisions for humanity is absurd; to expect them to not occasionally give into more unsavory temptations like greed and abusing power is a hard ask; and worst of all is that by virtue of technology bad decisions, which happen more often than good ones, are magnified hundreds of times to the point where one could wipe out humanity with a few wrong moves. So although it seems a step backward, living in tribes is an effective solution to ensure that global catastrophe is mitigated and that as many people as possible feel happy and fulfilled with their daily lives.
PART 4: REFLECTIONS
It seems hypocritical to criticize the very edifice that has given rise to my entire life and humanity for thousands of years, namely democracy and to a larger extent civilization. Yet that is what we must do. To stick with a solution which clearly will not work is to willingly accept the fallout of it not working out, and turn a blind eye to the almost-certain extra suffering that will come from a forced transition away from a global hegemony. And the transition is inevitable because there is nothing stopping the global hegemony from eating the world alive, because it is both the police and the dictator of the world’s activities and it fends for itself. With the accelerating pace of technology and science, the day will come faster than expected when civilization as we know it will fall apart at the seams, and all we can do is to best prepare ourselves for a post global world.
It is worth noting that there may be an alternate solution to tribes which may be able to support larger groups of people and hence civilizations. Namely, something akin to Tibet: rather than having power be inherited through bloodlines as in monarchies, which is prone to ineffective leaders taking charge due to birthright, one selects the new leader in a special process who may be completely unrelated to the current ruler. Rather than the system that Tibet has in place, though, that of the ruler selecting the new ruler, it would be far more effective in today’s world to have an objective system to select a new ruler when necessary. And one could probably do that using a computer given the progress of today’s technology. Define what qualities make for a good ruler objectively and rigorously, and then have the computer search humanity for its next ruler, and continue to update the algorithm as needed to suit a changing world. I am less supportive of this option as a hierarchy may end up forming anyways which would cause the same problems we have today, but in my mind this is a far better solution than having a ruler chosen by incestual inheritance or the whims of an uninformed public. Regardless, I firmly believe that tribal living is the most effective long term situation for humanity as a whole by a very long margin.
How would living tribes work in a post technological society? I’m not sure, lacking training in sociology or psychology which would better answer this question. Perhaps it’s wise to fall back on a solution which has already existed, that of nomadic tribes (perhaps with cars instead of horses) who use technology but nevertheless empathize with and take care of the environment around them. Or, tribes are naturally determined by people as their interests grow and when they become adults they join “temporary societies” to self-determine tribes, and the temporary society is an anarchy without a single ruler and just has guiding principles to keep the peace. I would love to see if these ideas work in practice, but am loath to preach a single solution lest it lead to something like Communism. I have no doubt that there will be sacrifices though, such as perhaps doing away with luxury living styles, exotic foods, mass communication (as it helps to create the hegemony-commoner relationship), and perhaps even ideas about how we live today that we very much hold dear. But the benefits gained — ensuring that every person on Earth is trained to find food, even if primitively, knows how to fend for themselves, and nevertheless feels a strong sense of belonging and purpose for their life — are in my mind very much worth the tradeoffs of our current technological progress. And in any case, we may have no other choice.