Fermi Paradox: Society’s M.A.D. of clashing interests

The Fermi Paradox is the paradox behind why we have no evidence for the existence of aliens, in a universe that should teem with them. Back when that question was first asked about where everyone else was, by physicist Enrico Fermi, the general belief was that alien life was common across the cosmos. The Drake Equation, first written up by a academic named Frank Drake, was an equation meant to count the number of habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Based on the Drake Equation in its earliest incarnation, the Milky Way would’ve been host to thousands or even millions of intelligent civilizations. Based on what we’ve detected so far, that is most likely not the case, hence why the Fermi Paradox exists. As the Drake Equation continues to evolve and has more variables added into it to account for new things we’ve learned, the likelihood of alien life diminishes more and more. That being said, today’s article was inspired by a thought I had about the Posadist theory that any alien spacefaring civilization would have to be socialist by nature. Posadists believe this mainly because a1ny civilization that had advanced far enough to engage in interstellar travel, would live in a post-scarcity society that no longer required capitalism. In the following paragraphs, I’ll put forth a new Fermi Paradox hypothesis: a successful model of socialism never establishes itself in time to save the world.

In Dialectical Materialism, there is a gradual movement towards grander and grander organizations as civilization progresses. With stones, clay, and seeds, we have early agricultural settlements run by warlords of one variety or another. With concrete, steel girders, and endless glass panels, we have modern cities run by municipal governments. As technology progresses and the surplus generated by our labor grows more and more, the state grows in tandem to support, accommodate, and regulate new industries. In early agricultural settlements, the simplicity of the economy didn’t require much direction, if any, at all. The warlord and the priest in these settlements operated as just power brokers, using force and faith to direct the village’s meager resources towards defense and cohesion, while providing legitimacy for the  laws they made.  In modern cities, we have large bureaucracies and endless departments that scrutinize the economic actors and individuals inside the city. In such a large, varied economy with so many things dependent on one another to function, this is a necessity of modern life. The legal minutiae of today is largely backed up by proven function, rather than faith, and established by politicians, rather than priests. 

Talking to very religious people or very politically “engaged” people yields the same takeaway: fanaticism in their faith. Even while the state has grown beyond its humble origins of warlords and priests, the structure  that these positions fulfilled has simply expanded and evolved. As long as there’s political systems, there will be priesthoods in the form of political parties, that advocate and profess certain things. All the media people consume today, from propaganda to movies to news articles to the far-too-occasional book, converges into coherent belief systems for people today. A hardline Democrat in San Francisco is as fanatical as a hardline monarchist in Saudi Arabia. The difference between the political cults of today and the faith cults of old is the way in which they were crafted, based on where political power rested. Political cults by design try to appeal to people in representational republics, as they only find success in what they offer to the voting populations. In systems with distributed political power, appeals to the masses, or at least segments of the masses, are necessary in order to gain the consent of the governed and impress it on the institutions of the country. Faith cults by design were designed to appeal to the managers of systems, as they only found success in what they offered to warlords, monarchs, and so on. In systems with centralized political power, faith wins on whether or not it gets consent of the governors, and from there it’s forcefully pushed on people.

The belief structures of today, which are changed by political parties to stay current with demographics and economic conditions, aren’t necessarily secular or rational. This is what leads to the dysfunction we see today in society, in things like affirmative action that cater to people, rather than systems. The fact that the government incentivizes priority hiring of people based on race, at the expense of skillset and credentials, lessens the capabilities of organizations across the board. A technological society necessitates a shift towards secular, unbiased rationality, because as our societies grow increasingly complex, the potential for disorder increases exponentially. When systems are easier to understand, it’s more simple to identify the problem. When we’re not dealing with tribes but rather with states that have hundreds of millions of citizens, it becomes a Herculean task to simply identify all of what’s wrong. Irrational policies, crafted by political parties to appeal to their bases, ripple across all of society’s fabric. Human society, as it grows in complexity, gets harder to manage in general and as the managers multiply in number, the diverging class and cultural interests multiply as well. As society progresses, it’s institutions resemble more and more tumors in democratic systems, since the actual systems’ needs are never addressed. An ant colony gets harder and harder to manage, when all the decisions by different factions are based on promoting the welfare of different groups of the ants. At the end of the day, the ants rely on the colony, and without the colony wouldn’t be able to survive and thrive. 

In this way, as technology advances and society evolves, top-down unbiased systems with feedback loops to promote change become more essential. This is because discussion has to center more and more on the health of the overall society, as people become more dependent on its infrastructure and institutions. In such complicated societies, policies based on the big picture are the only ones that can benefit the members within that society. The reason this has not occurred in any society yet is because it’s not immediately convenient for the powers that be. For existing top-down systems, like China and Saudi Arabia, they’re still bound by the same relationship to faith that older states used to have. While it may be strange to lump China in the faith-based governance category, there’s sound reason behind it. You cannot be anti-communist and anti-party in China, especially the higher up you go. Party membership, in-group favors systems, and belief systems do take priority over efficiency and “big picture” thinking. You’re not allowed to be a critic there, just the same as you’re not allowed to be a critic in Saudi Arabia or North Korea. In governments bound together by singular political ideologies, they function the same as more traditional belief-based societies. 

Introducing secular rationality to the discussion and promoting efficiency within the system would lead to crises within top-down countries’ smaller, more cohesive leadership castes, where division isn’t tolerated and arguments lead to bloodshed. Totalitarian systems aren’t friendly to change due to their orthodox and absolutist nature. Totalitarian states, if they live long enough, die due to stagnation. Given that monopolists of force, be it warlord or inner party member, are only secure in their positions when unified, and have no recourse besides deadly infighting when differences can’t be bridged, systematic change is an existential threat to them. Similarly, in bottom-up systems, the powers that be rest in entrenched demographic interests, who leverage their votes through political parties to try to get what they want. In bottom-up systems, different groups and classes compete against each other, and this is reflected in the messages pumped forth by political parties. Differences are settled via voting, and the end result is the resources being devoted towards one group’s vanity projects or businesses over another group’s. The state in either situation is ultimately hopeless in surviving long-term, if it can’t settle these differences between people, resolve the conflicts of interest, and tackle the issues that matter. Rather than create systems that benefit the people or fortunate persons, the system should be built to benefit itself first and benefit workers as a byproduct of its functions. What wins politically will possibly never be ideal for this reason, because it’s harder to sell people on cybernetics than handouts and privileges.

Similar to the state, the institutions that conduct economic activities also change, growing in scale and scope as technology increases. The function that the black smith fulfills in a village is gradually fulfilled by the factory in the town or city. As technology increases, the economic entities grow larger and larger in the size and scope of their activities. Companies are replaced by corporations, that don’t face the issues of being run by families. The market stall becomes the supermarket in time, the computer company becomes a phone company as well, and we generally see corporations move and expand outwards from their initial industry. In time, upstart businesses become unfeasible, because the dominant market actors have thousands of specialists and limitless funding. The market   economy initially resembles a coral colony, composed of thousands of different creatures cohabitating and filling in niches, but gradually evolves into a monoculture as society progresses. Technological development means that beyond companies in pioneering industries, the resources needed to compete in traditional industries are too great for upstarts to rival. The most effective way to gain market share becomes corporate mergers, as the market becomes more and more locked down and split into different segments by oligopolies. 

With these new resources in the hands of fewer and fewer economic actors, the most effective way to compete gradually becomes political manipulation. This is because entering politics allows corporations to sidestep market boundaries and erodes the competitiveness of industry rivals, allowing them to acquire more market share in areas they wouldn’t have succeeded otherwise. We’ve seen that with the Keystone Pipeline and it’s protestors, presumably bought and paid for by BNSF, a rail company that transported oil at a higher cost than the pipeline would’ve. We’ve seen that with the Russian state oil company Gazprom, who has been caught paying for protestors to protest the development of competing facilities in other countries. There’s countless other examples of this, but interestingly enough, the corporations themselves have no political flavor. Corporations support the politicians in charge wherever they reside, in order to curry the most favor to implement the most change. Google isn’t a liberal dystopian megacorp, but rather a megacorp that uses liberalism as a facade to advance its own interests, because it’s headquartered in the Bay Area. As the general rate of profit decreases more and more as technology advances, it becomes more economical for corporations to merge and cut down on redundancy. Monopolizing industries and manipulating political parties becomes a survival strategy for corporations more and more as technology increases, until the government itself is run by the special interests it was created to govern and regulate.

The amount of dysfunction this causes in any modern state, as more and more changes accumulate faster and faster as technology increases more and more, poses an existential threat to modern states that aren’t focused on the system but rather its benefactors. The general welfare of the masses declines, as their states’s decision makers begin to be composed more and more of people against their interests as workers. The corporate money that floods American politics today out of necessity, creates a climate where the real issues aren’t addressed because it isn’t profitable for the corporations that function as legislators or it isn’t favorable for the self-interested voting blocs that elect the corporate political options. We live in a country tearing itself apart, and as the general rate of profit continues to decrease, we’ll see this situation only intensify as corporations and groups become more desperate. The fact that the state today, with its command over such vast resources, is fought over in a zero-sum political game by conflicting interests is a tragedy. And it’s probably not a tragedy unique to humans.

Creating a system sophisticated and complex enough to work within and adapt to changing conditions in an industrial society is no easy task. Selling that system to the powers that be, and in the process getting the powers that be to relinquish their undue privileges and profits, is possibly insurmountable in a nonviolent setting. Perhaps the reason why we have the Fermi Paradox at all is because no species yet has saved itself from the mutually assured destruction of conflicting interests in their own societies. Any group that had formulated a system fine enough to work at the scale and scope of modern society, might not have found an audience intelligent or interested enough to understand.  America has seen its political dialogue reduced enough to be understood by someone with the same English skills as a third grader. Similarly, diversions like video games have advanced to the point that many people cocoon themselves in virtual environments, rather than address the challenges that reality poses to us. Just as likely, any such enlightened group might not have been able to take on the combined weaponry of the modern state. As we’ve already seen, the surveillance state has grown powerful enough to largely know what you’re thinking, based on what you’ve read, what you search up on search engines, what sites you visit, and what organizations you join. If these systems are advanced enough to identify dissidents before they do anything and are willing to silence criticism, it’s very likely that they’ll most likely end after labored decades or even centuries of dying slow deaths due to inefficiencies accumulating. The problem here is that with the death of the state, in a society so dependent on its systems and favors, naturally the society dies as well. 

In all likelihood, the Fermi Paradox might best be resolved as chalking the lifeless nature of the cosmos up to, “life can’t handle itself beyond a certain point and that point happens to be just after a small few of us leave our atmosphere, a bit more of us fiddle with computers, and the rest of us watch sportsball or play video games while the environment degrades, the birth rate declines, and our resources dry up.”