I'm out of time this week to write much of a post. I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a trip across Australia before I return home to England for the foreseeable (and hopefully long-term) future. But this week, in my continuing series of posts about how to Know Thyself, I'm up to the very last topic concerning others, and concerning society, so I really wanted to get it done. I'm on to the topic of justice, but I'm rushing around trying to pack and clean and finish some other writing projects so I just don't have time to give justice much...justice.

Australia is an interesting place to spend time thinking about this concept. It was originally a penal colony set up to mete out justice to criminals in England (and push them out of civilized society). It's still retained an uneasy balance between a culture of outback individualism free from the state, and a punitive, oppressive government culture that can take guns away and take your drivers license away for 3 months for going 19 miles per hour (30 km/h) over the speed limit. Then of course there is the long history of purposefully destroying the aboriginal land and culture and trying to give them justice by saying, "I'm sorry." Maybe I'll write more about this topic after my month-long trip through the countryside here, but if you give me some thoughts to work on, I'd definitely consider it even more. Here are the two points I wrote about justice in my philosophy.

Since justice is a public good, its provider - the government - must have a monopoly on force. Progress is maximized in the long-term when there is freedom from oppression and maximum participation (i.e. a minimization of criminals who in essence defect from society). In a cooperative society concerned with the long-term survival of the species, which understands the workings of evolution and therefore insists on tit for tat justice and never allowing cheaters to win, the various means of punishment should be doled out as necessary and appropriate in an escalating order of: restoration, rehabilitation, and finally incapacitation as a last resort. The focus of these punishments is the education of the criminal and the deterrence of future offenses by the populace. Seeking retribution gives way to short-term emotions of vengeance that were useful in nature before the public good of justice was provided for by the state. Now, the emotions of the victim of a crime must not be allowed to override the use of reason to create justice and stability for the long term.

Intention and causation are not necessary for an action to be judged good or evil. Those judgments are based on objective reality and whether or not the actions promote or hinder the long-term survival of life. Praise or blame for these actions is tied to intention or neglect of intention. The magnitude of reward or punishment doled out from society should be proportional to the intention or the neglect.

These are the seats of the New Zealand government - the executive branch offices, parliament, and the library of congress - the world's most open government (US was 7th), the world's least corrupt government (US was 19th), the 4th most efficient government (US was 8th), and the 5th overall best government (US was 28th). We have so much we can learn from other countries.
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By now, I've already written a ton about politics. In four blog posts, I've discussed the Purpose of Government, I gave my 2012 Endorsement from Evolutionary Philosophy to President Obama, I described why his presidency resembled the Middle of a Turnaround using ideas from corporate change management, and I posted a sample passage from my novel Draining the Swamp, which is all about government and politics and one heroine's efforts to make a difference in them.

I love political philosophy. I love the possibilities that good governance can give us. I love the freedoms and interdependencies it has already given us. I love the step that America took to lead the world toward open, democratic societies. But I can't stand the constant stream of bad news lately about how broken the US political system is these days (with Republican obstructionism, the criminal ROI of corporations paying small sums to lobbyists for their enormous tax breaks, the apolitical IRS stupidly focusing on one political party, Monsanto getting politicians to anonymously add benefits for them into bills) and what that has done to our society (poor education, poor health care, crumbling infrastructure, dying ecosystems, high income inequality, mass shootings). It all gets me so angry because I want to do something about it, but then depressed because there's just not much more I can do. Some day, when I'm done writing these essays to help introduce and illustrate all the parts of Evolutionary Philosophy, I'm sure I'll write many op-eds (or is that op-Eds, short for the Opinion of Ed) about the politics of the day and what we might do to change them. It's something I'm hugely passionate about. If I thought I were electable, I'd run for office. But for now, let me just lay down some of my guiding principles of political philosophy.
 
Government / Politics
The purpose of government is to regulate the economic system by correcting market failures in order to best ensure the long-term survival of the species. Different strategies are required for the markets of different types of goods. Public goods (non-excludable, non-rivalrous) such as national defense, justice, and public utilities must be highly regulated or provided by government. Common goods (non-excludable, rivalrous) such as air, water, fish stocks, and timber must be protected for long-term sustainability. Club goods and private goods (both excludable) should be regulated towards perfect competition, which ensures maximum benefits for consumers. The six characteristics of perfect competition are: 1) many suppliers with an insignificant share of the market; 2) identical output produced by each firm; 3) consumers with perfect information about goods and prices; 4) all firms have equal access to resources and technologies; 5) there are no barriers to entry or exit in the long term; 6) there are no externalities in production or consumption of the goods.

The regulation of the economic system is an extraordinarily powerful position to occupy so there is great possibility and temptation to succumb to corruption by the money in the economic system. Corruption can occur anywhere singular people have hidden control over a decision. This is why checks and balances and transparency within the political system are of the utmost importance. It is also why only people of the highest character development should be chosen to work in this field.

Authoritarian or monarchical rule is plagued by the tyranny of the individual. A true democracy (all decisions made by majority vote) is plagued by the tyranny of the majority. The proper construction of a government is somewhere in the middle - a republic with representatives empowered to speak for the majority and the minority.

Among life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, life is paramount. This does not mean the life of an individual though; it means all life. Survival of the species is paramount. Individual freedom must therefore be constrained. Individual freedom must be subsumed to the cooperative goal of creating a lasting society. This is not a heavy burden as true happiness can only be found in a society that is safe for life. The appropriate sacrifices of the individual for the sake of society are merely the wise sacrifices of the short term for the sake of the long term.

Countries that recognize the evolutionarily philosophical goals of humanity, economics, and government will naturally desire to form coalitions of cooperation. Countries that do not recognize these goals may try to compete with these coalitions. They cannot be allowed to win. Cheaters within evolutionarily stable systems must not be allowed to win. Sovereignty is not a valid shield to hide behind when actions go beyond borders. Diplomacy, aid, ostracism, and force are the escalating options to deal with countries (corrupt leaders, really) that do not cooperate.

There are some commons that are common to the world. These must be regulated by an international system of protection and enforcement.

Political discussions become heated very quickly in today's world. I'm hoping discussions around political philosophy will be less so. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this - even though I kind of hate politics right now.

When I graduated high school in 1989, the Berlin Wall was still standing and the Soviet Union (formed in 1922) was still going strong. Our communist enemies were stockpiling nuclear weapons in an arms race seemingly destined to bring our world to an end. This battle between capitalism and communism was an existential threat that had loomed over America and Americans for almost 70 years, shaping the world view of several generations of adults. When the USSR shockingly collapsed on Christmas day in 1991, it was a victory present for all of us, and revealed the rotten core of Russian communism. The market economy had won - hallelujah! Our biggest threat was gone and we had the market to thank. All hail the market!

If free markets beat communism, then what we needed for the future was...more free markets. Bolstered by presidents who believed in trickle down economics, economists who believed in rational selfishness, and businessmen whose personal interests aligned with a deification of Ayn Rand and a misunderstanding of Adam Smith, American politics - fueled by self-interested and self-righteous money - embarked on long process of deregulation and lower taxes. All in the name of...The Market. The invisible hands of the marketplace would lead us all to more motivation, more progress, more wealth, and more pursuits of happiness. Or so we were told. Flash forward 20 years, and what have we gotten?

Setting aside the issues of global warming, overfishing, soil erosion, super weeds, oil spills, industrial explosions, biodiversity loss, and a host of other dangerous planetary boundaries and commons that we are despoiling, how has the economy itself done? How are we being served by a slavish devotion to The Market?

Since the election of Ronald Regan in 1980, the share of national income that the richest 1 percent bring home has gone from 8.5 percent to 24 percent (nearly tripling) while the bottom 50 percent of Americans have seen their share drop from 18 percent to just 12.5 percent (a 30% loss). That's the current story for income inequality. For wealth inequality - the accumulated affect of these income disparities - the story is much worse. In the United States, the top 1% has 40% of the wealth, while the bottom 80% has just 7% of the wealth. See these facts (fact checked by the Washington Post) portrayed visually in the astounding 6 minute video below.

Faith in the market has clearly swung too far. But this doesn't hurt just the bottom 20, 30, 40, 50, or even 80%. It hurts all of us. Now, and for a long time to come. The Spirit Level, by epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, point out a whole host of social ills that come along with this kind of societal inequality. Mental health, physical health, obesity, education, teenage births, violence, imprisonment, social mobility - they all do worse when our societies are more unequal. In their excellent book, The Gardens of Democracy, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer (both affiliated with The Evolution Institute) also point out how inequality even harms our economy:

In November 2010, IMF economists Michael Kumhof and Romain Ranciere published a paper pointing out that the economic crises of 2007-08 and 1929 were caused by the same phenomenon: radical income inequality. In their paper, Kumhof and Ranciere demonstrated that inequality and financial leverage create an unholy and fatal feedback loop. As the wealthy accumulate ever more money they generate price bubbles in real estate and other assets, which force all participants in the economy to borrow more just to keep up. As the wealthy accumuate capital, their need to find returns for these assets grows. The rich come to financialize their assets in the form of loans to - whom else? - the poor and middle class. Easy credit is the natural result of enormous pools of money seeking returns. As the poor and middle class borrow more in order to maintain lifestyles increasingly beyond their means, unsustainable leverage follows. In both 1929 and 2008, collapse was the inevitable consequence.

How did we get here? Here are three more great quotes from The Gardens of Democracy that really help illuminate what happened, why, and how we should be thinking about that.

Traditionalists assert, in essence, that income inequality is the result of the rich being smarter and harder working than the poor. This justifies government neglect in the face of inequality. The markets-as-garden view would not deny smarts and diligence are unequally distributed. But in their view, income inequality has much more to do with the nature of complex adaptive systems like markets, which result in self-reinforcing concentrations of advantage and disadvantage. This necessitates government action to counter the unfairness and other counterproductive effects of concentration.

The agenda (of trickle down economics) - as exemplified by the Reagan rewrite of the tax code and the Bush perpetuation of it - is itself government-mandated redistribution of wealth: to the already wealthy. The "state of nature" does not dictate preferential treatment of capital over work, or regressivity of taxation, or the tax-free inheritance of unearned wealth and power: these are all consequences of man-made rules. The question, then, is not whether redistribution, but in which direction.

When we tax what Teddy Roosevelt called the "swollen fortunes" of a tiny few - vast fortunes made possible by the investments in public goods by prior generations - and recirculate that wealth in public goods like schools and health care so that the middle and bottom can participate in the economy - we are doing something good for the many and, in the long run, for the few.

This is not socialism in the derogatory sense espoused by believers in The Market who are still afraid of the specter of communism that haunted their youth. This is a a new understanding of the market failures that arise in an under-regulated economy. This is an effort to discover the best way to design capitalism to work for the long-term survival of life - the true definition of good. This is what we need to recognize as a voting electorate, if we are going to reshape our society to meet our next existential threats - ourselves. Younger generations get this. They didn't grow up under threat from the Soviet Union. Their threats now come from oil companies, Monsanto, and Wall Street bankers. And groups like Occupy Wall Street are growing increasingly frustrated by the political economic systems' protection of these players. If we do not recognize this in time, we are headed for a collapse of our ecosystem, a revolution from the 99%-ers, or both.

So what can evolution tell us about the economy? Evolution is principally about finding the balance between competition and cooperation in order for an individual and a species to survive. Written large - this is precisely the drama at play between the forces behind free markets and communism and our struggle to find the right balance between them. Evolutionary philosophy, which seeks to understand the world so we can survive and thrive in it, has this to say about our economics:

Economics
The goal of an economic system is to maximize the survival of the species. Its goal is not to maximize profits or consumer benefits.

Advocating free market capitalism for an economic system is advocating for extreme competition. But as competition gets fiercer and fiercer, the time horizon for survival becomes shorter and shorter as too many firms must sacrifice the long term just to stay alive in the short term. Sacrificing the long term threatens the survival of the species.

Advocating communism for an economic system is advocating for extreme cooperation. But without competition, there are no losers and no incentives for winners. Progress grinds to a halt and the species remains stagnant until it is overtaken by events or other species. This is also a threat over the long term.

The perfect economic system is somewhere between these extremes of competition and cooperation. No perfect balance can be known ahead of time and the economy is too complicated to forecast its design with great accuracy. We must set broad and balanced goals for outcomes and adjust market mechanisms by trial and error to reach these goals. Minimize market failures. Protect commons. Price in externalities. Create a long-term bias. Favor sustainability. Protect consumers. Ease the movement of and access to capital and labor. Provide employment or retraining opportunities. Invest in innovation. Keep exposure to debt default low. Favor robustness over fragility. To each according to his or her talent and effort; not according to his or her means or needs. Replace the extremes of capitalism and communism with these sustainable principles of "evism."

Perfect equality is not possible, but extreme inequality is not sustainable in the long-term. Wealth is generated by talent and effort. Extreme wealth is generated by the economic system and the rules that society has evolved over the course of its history. A large portion of extreme wealth is therefore owed to society. Citizens will need to come to an agreement over what are acceptable ratios of wealth inequality. Ten to one? Thirty to one? Two hundred to one? Three thousand to one? Over the vast history of evolution, the ratios of wealth within tribes were significantly less than they are today.

Labor is not the primary means of producing value - the use of technology and knowledge as the means of production are the primary creators of value. Surplus value comes about from capitalist owners having access to technology and knowledge that laborers do not have access to and cannot bargain for. Exploitation comes from this access, which arises after small differences in the rate of material accumulation become amplified through continued investment and inheritance of that material towards ever more expensive means of production. This does not lead to a collapse of profits as Marx forecasted; this leads to a concentration of profits, which can be used to fortify the owners’ access to the means of production, thus entrenching capitalism. What undermines capitalism is not the falling rate of profits, but the rising levels of inequality that foment revolution. This is a threat to the stability of society and the survival of the species. This is why access to the means of production must be shared. This is why employee-owned cooperatives are a more just and sustainable means of organizing corporations and the economy. These cooperatives must compete with one another, thus ensuring their continued investment in progress, but no few individuals capture an unfair portion of the profits to be used for exploitative means. The same principles of checks and balances of power that make government cooperative and tenable must be applied to corporations as well.

So what can evolution tell us about the economy? Plenty. If we want it to help us survive.

Is education simply about teaching us to parrot back answers we have been given a few days ago? It's quite obvious the answer is no.

This week, I'm moving on to another item concerning societies. I'm moving from culture to education, which is one of the chief methods by which culture is created and passed on. I'm not an educator, but like all of you, I have spent many years of my life in an education system. I don't have children, but children all around the world are joining me in society after passing through their own education system. I'm not an expert in education, but I know it's important enough to pay very close attention to experts who do devote their lives to this field. I have an old friend Jonathan Martin who has been a very progressive teacher and headmaster at schools in the past and who is now consulting to schools around the world about how they can improve their techniques. He runs a wonderful blog that explores trends in 21st century education and I have picked up not only many interesting ideas from his site, but perhaps more importantly, a small passion for news about the field. (Inculcating passion, curiosity, the desire to learn - these are big themes of his.) And there is no shortage of stories about education in the news. Just in the last few weeks there have been fascinating articles about the need for greater professionalization of teachers, the ongoing exploration of  MOOCS (massive open online courses) and their place in learning institutions, and even the technique of encouraging "cheating" in the classroom to help students understand the game theories that underlies all our social interactions. I love reading about these things.

Another leading education thinker is Ken Robinson (who I probably came across on Jonathan's blog ages ago, but I don't really remember anymore), who has given a couple of very compelling TED talks about the education system. His first one, Do Schools Kill Creativity?, contains the following quotes: 

"Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects ... at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. ... And there is a hierarchy within the arts: art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to students the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? ... We all have bodies. ... but we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. ... The purpose of education systems throughout the world now is to produce university professors. They are the people who come out at the top. ... But they are rather curious ... They live in their heads, and slightly to one side. ... Our education systems are predicated on the idea of academic ability. ... They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. ... The hierarchy rests on two ideas ... 1) the most useful subjects for work are at the top ... and 2) academic ability (is paramount),  because the universities designed the system in their image. ... The consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative, people, think they're not."

(see the entire talk here:)

This is tragically wasteful. And it is not evolutionarily robust. Monocultures are fragile, and our education system has become one. I should point out that I'm not picking on just educators. This is a typical evolution of all distinct cultures - they become more extreme as a majority arises and they share their views with one another, becoming more and more convinced they are right and less and less aware of minority opinions. Who designs education systems? Professors! Of course they end up designing a system that suits their impression of the world. The same holds true for lawyers and legal systems, doctors and health care, police and law enforcement. I'm not trying to single out teachers; this is just what happens to groups when they are separated. That's not to say these issues aren't recognized by elements within these groups, but it does make it harder for those prescient people to successfully change the culture. But we know we need to.

Ken Robinson's second TED talk urged precisely this need to change. It was called Bring on the Learning Revolution and you can watch it below if you like.

His guiding principles for the future of education are good ones. Get kids excited about learning. Recognize diversities of intelligence. College is not the only goal. Focus on personalization not standardization. I agree with all of these, but wanted just to add some more momentum to the movement by putting some principles of evolutionary philosophy behind the argument as well. To wit, I have written:

Education
Gene-culture coevolution, the ability to learn and pass on our learning from person to person and generation to generation is the greatest strength of our species. Education is required for the further progress and survival of the species. Education is required for each individual to find his or her place in society where they can be happy and productive. This is the purpose of education - to ignite the spark of learning that lies within each human and make accessible the learning that they need.

The diversity of our species is what makes it so strong and adaptable. Education needs to account for this diversity in the population. Education needs to take into account different abilities and interests. No one should or needs to be left behind. Society requires many levels and different kinds of ability. Society works much better when everyone is in their own “flow states,” when they are functioning at levels that are just hard enough to challenge them out of boredom but not so hard as to induce frustration. A one-size-fits-all, production line mentality for education makes no sense with this view of humanity. The goal is not minimum of complication, it is maximum production. Different requirements should not be stigmatized, but celebrated, and met. Education in this manner costs less than a broken society filled with uneducated and unhappy citizens.

The ongoing development of our brain over the first 25 years of our lives implies the need for a long education. One of the defining characteristics of our brain development is the increasing capacity for long-term thinking as we age. While we are young, society must restrain our actions because that is when we are more likely to be short-term-focused and destructive to self or society. Education should have as one of its goals the inculcation of a long-term cooperative outlook on life.

These are just a few guiding thoughts - vision statements as it were. Like pretty much all of my topics right now, whole books can, are, and should be written about them, but those details will be explored later. For now, it's enough to point the general direction and move on if it is agreed to. In the spirit of a life-long education, I hope you will share with me any points of view I haven't taken into account. We need to hear them, and I would be glad to learn about them.

Yes, that is a rugby choir outside of a stadium in Australia. Yes, they have thick songbooks with many, many songs about rugby. No, there is no accounting for taste in different cultures. :-)

I'm widening the aperture again in my quest to know thyself. Last week I moved on from items concerning me to look at items concerning other individuals. Now it's time to scale that up even further to take a look at collections of others - to look at society in general, and at culture in particular. So what is culture?

I come at this question having two particularly relevant experiences in my own background. The first was as a Peace Corps volunteer where we were given 3 months of language and culture training upon arrival at our new post so we could see the world through our host country's citizen's eyes, so we could understand norms and expectations for behavior, and so we would be less likely to misunderstand others' actions and responses. I had traveled a bit before I did this. I had moved to San Francisco from rural Pennsylvania. I had lived in Mexican border towns. I had spent a summer with eskimos in Alaska. I'd been to several foreign countries. I thought I had observed cultural differences in the past and knew a thing or two about dealing with them. But nothing showed me my ignorance of culture as much as living in a truly foreign one for two years did. As much as I studied the language, watched old movies, read history books, and talked with locals over beer (and vodka - it was Ukraine after all), there was always something new that baffled me. Some new turn of phrase, a superstition I hadn't been aware of, or...a cultural reference that I had not known. One that I couldn't possibly have known. (This isn't just a difference between first and second- or third-world countries either. Try going to British pub quizzes for two whole years and continually coming in dead last to less educated drunks.) I left Peace Corps with a deep understanding of what a shallow tourist we all are whenever we encounter a new group of people with a strong culture. I thought I had known this already, but after two intense years of trying to bridge the gap and still seeing a chasm before me, I knew it better.

My second deep experience with culture came when I left the Peace Corps and became an internal management consultant with the FBI and the Secret Service. Both of these proud organizations had century-long histories and were filled with employees who rarely left. And although they were THE two "elite federal law enforcement agencies" in the country with all the similarities around crime and punishment that would seem to entail, they possessed two very different cultures. As a new employee in those places whose job it was to try to create change and improve inefficient business practices, I was keenly aware of the need to fit in and learn the norms of behavior if I was going to get anything done. You can't rock the boat if you get thrown overboard. Looking for help, I studied the literature of organizational change management and found MIT professor Edgar Schein - the recognized guru on corporate culture. Schein was clear about what exactly makes up a culture. To him, culture is simply defined as a shared set of experiences. Over the years, successes and failures of everyone from individuals, to groups, to divisions, to the entire organization, who got promoted, what areas were merged, what spies or shooters (in the case of my odd workplaces) slipped through the cracks - all of these are turned into stories that are passed around for everyone to learn from. All of these are stories that outsiders never hear. These water cooler bouts of gossip are what embed norms of behavior among people who work together. This sub-culture of an office - of any group really - is made up of the experiences and stories that are shared within that group.

Now I'm a writer; one that's driven by my philosophy. I'm trying to study cultures across the globe to see what works and what doesn't. But I'm aware of the knowledge gap that exists between any group of "others." I'm looking for the shared experiences from our evolutionary history to find our universal commonalities. But I know how malleable our cultures can be and how strong an influence they are in all of the many individual places we live and work. I'm trying to write stories that will spread legends of successes and failures. But I want them to inspire new actions for new and better shared histories. As for my take on what an evolutionary philosophy can tell us about culture, here is what I wrote that guides me:

Culture
As Diogenes of Sinope said in the fourth century BCE, we are citizens of the world. Yet we are ensconced in a variety of local subcultures. Understand your local influences. Visit and live in other cultures to see what elements are changeable. Adopt good practices no matter the source. Recognize systemic influences that underlie seemingly singular differences. Learn by looking at the world from multiple perspectives. Gain understanding from this learning and use it to further the happiness of you and those around you.

Cultures are in competition with each other. Cultures that produce robust progress over the long term are the cultures that succeed. This is what makes one culture “better” than another. Cultures that produce large short-term benefits though, may gain enough of an advantage to extinguish other better cultures. Without knowing what is truly best in the long term, it is unwise to judge harshly and attempt to develop a world monoculture. Species remain adaptable when they contain a mix of abilities and allow trial and error to lead to the future. Cosmopolitan advice is therefore wise: accept others as different but equal, until actually proven otherwise.

Societies rise and fall on the basis of their balance between competition and cooperation, their balance between the short-term and long-term. The dangerous trap that occurs is that as a society becomes wealthier and wealthier, its citizens' long-term safety seems surer and surer. This safety can easily lead to relaxation and giving in to the ease of short-term pleasures. Society must educate its citizens about the greater benefits of long-term happiness. Even if it seems like you don’t need to, work hard. You will be happier. Successful societies that do not encourage this slowly rot from the inside.

What guides you as you navigate the cultures of your life? Is there something about a culture you deal with that you don't like? You can change it. Systems are stable when winners continue to win and actions that have lost continue to lose. You upend the system when you find a new action that wins, or redefine what it means to win at all. Do that, and you can write a new story. And it will be one that others will want to know and incorporate into their own culture.