When the Earth first gave birth to life, it was believed that there was several orders of magnitude more phosphorous in the oceans. As life continued to consume this precious resource, it became more scarce over time and in turn, life had to become more complex in order to hunt for its necessary nutrients. This drive towards complexity and development in search of resources can even be seen in the more superficial aspects of the human physiology, with the human organism gaining musculature, resilience, and more as it undergoes certain kinds of stresses. Up to a certain point, within tolerable limits, it is almost a universal fact that as times get harder, life becomes more complex.
Similarly to how organisms have increased in complexity and abilities as the accessible sources of phosphorus on earth have dwindled over the eons, market actors in market economies have tended to also grow greatly in complexity and abilities as the general rate of profit has plummeted over the centuries. Just as pioneering companies tend to grow and become more sophisticated in scale and scope as the field they’re in matures, the corporations also eventually cover economic niches in the market just as successful species would cover ecological niches in the ecosystem. Just as an amoeba has difficulty competing with its far larger multicellular brethren in the acquisition of resources, self-employed workers and small businesses are also increasingly relegated to irrelevance in markets that have had the time to mature. The amoeba is relegated to the role of being a microscopic scavenger, rather than a true competitor.
With all this in mind, it doesn’t hurt to approach the market and society from a biological perspective because it gives people an honest impression of what workers are: cells. The individual, no matter their importance in ethical matters, is far smaller than the institutions that they operate within and support, and are at best simply beneficiaries or victims within a system that works on aggregate scales in terms of its consideration for the cells within and outside itself. As markets and populations grow and mature, the corporations and institutions within these societies care less and less over time for the concerns of the individual, not out of apathy or malice, but because the individual increasingly loses their relevance in the ongoing functioning of the organism.
The question that comes to mind, in regard to the inevitable diminishment of the individual in any given society, is what to do in such situations. The simple answer is that if corporations and state enterprises are the most convenient vehicles for the generation of services and surpluses, pushing out all the competition over time in their economic niches to the point that the idea of competition becomes a delusion, then we need to think about what we as workers (i.e. cells) want to receive from our institutions (i.e. host organisms). Just as cells that serve an organism require resources and comfortable conditions to operate within and sustain their host organism, workers require a certain baseline of resources and comfortable conditions to operate within and sustain their own host institutions. Rather than asking what the cell can do for the organism or what the worker can do for his country, the question becomes what the organism can do for the cell and what the institutions can do for its workers.
We as workers and as organisms have a finite amount of time in this world. The institutions around us have arisen from voluntary associations and more abundant conditions in the past, and these institutions at this level of development will function regardless of how much its cells consume to sustain themselves – within reason. If the cells within the organism cannot afford to undergo mitosis (reproduction) due to resource restriction, if the cells within an organism are hampered by their genetic instructions in carrying out their daily duties by over-regulation, if the cells within an organism are hampered from productively and meaningfully interacting with each other due to hostile conditions, if a minority of the cells within an organism consume undue amounts of resources, if some of the cells within an organism contribute overwhelming to polluting the host organism, and so on, the organism over time will fall into dysfunction and eventual death. All of this is the same for workers and the institutions they contribute and thrive within.
Just as corporations naturally emerge within the less profitable and later periods of a market’s development, privatization as a whole loses its value increasingly over time. The increasing restriction of resources, and the increasingly undue consumption of resources by those who delegate and outsource work to other workers, mimics the same ways that cancer cells destroy their host organisms over time. Just as more complex organisms rely on the biological laws of socialism within themselves to maintain their competence and sustain their existence, it is apparent that society needs a similar transformation in order to sustain itself. Extropy, by its nature, arises from simpler conditions but the manifestations of such complexifying forces inevitably have to operate by more sophisticated operating principles in order to survive. The Hyena must think and behave in more complex ways than its unicellular ancestors, after all.
The question that will determine the long-term survival of humanity in the industrial age is whether or not the cells within our society’s various organisms can comprehend the need to create new instructions and new methods for operating. The nucleus has an astounding memory and the cell is unburdened by ego, with cancerous cells even martyring themselves when they receive instructions to do so, but humans are not the same. Industrial societies and their various institutions may come and go, but the resources consumed by these faulty organizations are often not renewable. Humanity requires the equivalent of cells in this day and age that can conceive of the functions in their respective regions of the body, and figure out what measures, reforms, and regulations need to be implemented to ensure the efficient and sustained existence of their host organisms.
Meta-cognition in at least some cells is needed for future societies to survive, because while the forces that push for these socialist ideas naturally emerge on their own, the philosophical and economic understandings necessary to create sustainable regulations will not be selected through Darwinian means. Earth simply does not have the resources for Social / Societal Darwinism to play out in meaningful ways over time for the various human civilizations that have and will come and go, so those of us who care and are capable need to begin thinking critically about these issues within society because eventually there will be an end to civilizational complexity in sight if we do not take action. Eventually, the cells that have grown dependent on the host organism will find themselves confronted with the eventuality of their host organism dying, and will be tasked with trying to make it in a degraded environment that none of these cells – no matter their pretensions – were ever built for.
Marx once said, “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” With how complex society and its various institutions have become, abstraction and collaboration in these matters across different industries is needed now more than ever if we are to survive, as no cell can meaningfully understand the entirety of the body it is part of and draft up regulations suitable for the entirety of the body all on its own. Meta-cognition within a decentralized technocratic model, in which educated workers work with one another in their own institutions and industries to create generous conditions for themselves and sustainable outputs for their host organism, is the only way forward without the creation and reliance upon omniscient artificial intelligences or inept top-down administrators to do this variety of heavy meta-cognitive work.
IBM once stated quite prophetically in 1979, “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” With the development of artificial intelligence in the following decades, computer scientists noticed a disturbing trend among computers to engage in Specification Gaming and shirk any of their intended functions in favor of satisfying their objective’s requirements as minimally as possible. Computers are not alone in displaying this lack of accountability and shirking of duties, as we’ve seen with the top-down administrators of past socialist regimes, who have similarly evaded producing any desired results through a mixture of unregulated greed and insulated apathy. While the machines and men who administrate may eventually meet their deserved end as their host society dies, it is worth saying that in the time that it takes for this karma to manifest, millions of workers will have paid the price. At the end of the day, organisms arose because cells found it beneficial to work together. Similarly, civilization arose because humans found it beneficial to work together. The needless sacrificing or impoverishment of the cells or workers by the organism or the administrators, for this reason, is inherently unethical and a breach of the societal contract that creatures and societies make with their constituent parts. Just as man is indebted to society, society is indebted to man.
In the socialist era of human civilization, proletarian philosophy becomes the only viable framework for civilization, with society ideally built and maintained by the workers that take the time and effort to understand and regulate it. Rather than the highest form of society being governed by philosopher kings, as envisioned by Plato, the highest form of society can only be governed by philosopher workers because only workers will ever feel the losses and the gains of their own decisions, while accumulating the ground-level experiences and understandings to meaningfully observe and regulate the industries and institutions they work within. A socialist society for its people, and a socialist people for their society, will be as sustainable as an organism for its cells, and their cells for the organism. These iterations of proletarian-led socialism may vary over time, just as iterations of life have varied over time, but this is natural and to be accommodated, because change is the only constant that we can count on in this universe. While this struggle over conflicting material interests and the shortcomings of man will be Sisyphean to win against, we will become stronger and more resilient in our struggles to tame society and remake it in an image befitting its obligations to us as workers. Virtue and greatness, after all, are only gained and maintained by constant struggle and a self-regulating socialist society will drive development in mankind beyond what we can imagine.
