Democracy and evolution

I\'m stuck with the line in "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah about how the switch 12,000 years ago from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies was a really bad move for human: it made our lives much less satisfying. More precisely, it stratified humanity into classes. The kings of course led better lives, but the average person's life was worse: objectively worse, but also psychologically worse. The average person now could compare their life to the king and know they got a raw deal. We don't have a good word for that raw deal/aspiration feeling, but since 12,000 years ago, it may that feeling that's been driving humanity so fast. That and another feeling born from living in cities: "how can I stand out from the rest?". There are dumber ways to do that -- find a gun and find a king -- and there are smarter ways. Maybe that's the point of meditation: just to take us back to the hunter-gatherer era before civilization really stoked our sense of ego.

Now, in the 21st century, is the average person finally happier than their ancestors 12,000 years ago? Not the king, but the average person in an average country. There's the rub.

If 12,000 years is just a blink of an eye, so, really, is the 100,000 years of our species. I'm amazed at how the process of evolution works so perfectly over time to create perfect species for their niche. Just as the laws of physics got created along with matter in the Big Bang, the laws of evolution bootstrapped themselves along with matter in the Big Bang of life. OK, more of a shlorp that a bang. Not much happened during the first 3/4 of the time Earth life has been around.

What other processes are evolutionary, where over time the process itself becomes more efficient? When it happens, it tends to happen at an exponential rate. Look at the history of science and technology: that appears to have an evolutionary component. Look at capitalism: business has gotten more efficient at an astounding rate, partly in its interconnectedness with technology.

Many people hate capitalism: sweatshops in the factories of China creating fashion gowns for the wealthy countries. But I don't see that. As wealth rises in a country, sweatshops get less sweaty, because behind and in front of the business are humans. Sure, oil companies play the green game, as all businesses do, but they know that beneath the talk they have to change. Exxon is an organism that has to respond to the new niche in time or die. And the new niche is formed from humanity's fast-moving sense of ethics.

There's an American woman, Leila Janah, who is dedicated to getting people out of poverty. She first moved simple jobs needed by Silicon Valley to Africa. She saw that the internet would allow jobs to be created in the poorest countries (as long as the connection is cheap). But over time, she recognized that the best mechanism for reducing poverty is happening naturally: companies like Upwork and Fiverr bring work from the wealthy countries to the poor countries. Microcredit was great before the internet. It gave entrepreneurs a real chance, but it only redistributed money within the poor country. With the internet, capitalism is going to enter a golden age of redistributing wealth to wherever labor is cheapest. (And wealth will also freely leave certain parts of wealthy countries.)

Has democracy evolved? In the USA, is it working better now than it did 200 years ago? Certainly there are cycles. Corruption has ebbed and flowed. We may be entering another Tammany Hall era, but the USA got out of Tammany Hall corruption before. But I see no signs that democracy improves itself over time. Constitution sit mainly untouched, even though they need working over as human history moves on. Be honest: which form of government is more capable of solving the climate crisis: democracy or a junta-dictatorship? Al Gore was right: the best chance to solve the crisis is by tying the solution into capitalism, with cap-and-trade. To think the fate of humanity rested on 1000 votes...

If there were only a way we could build an evolutionary component into the rules of democracy. I hear Finland is trying to bring the experimental model in to test the effectiveness of laws. With all the democracies in the world today, how little we have experimented in our forms of democracy.

That's a shame. Politicians cannot solve the climate crisis. Only the human pressure behind the capitalist locomotive has a shot at it -- the same locomotive that created the climate crisis. Creation is slow, destruction is fast, but as the yogis tell us, the seeds of creation are in the destruction. A forest fire clears the ground for new growth. Our willing destruction of the economy in the face of the coronavirus is not bad. It is neutral. And our experimentation with solutions will prepare us for the coming crises of this century. Meanwhile, any country up for a new constitution?