Meditations on Moloch is a long 2014 article by Slate Star Codex (Scott Alexander). It introduces the concept of Moloch as a metaphor for collective action problems.
This post is noteworthy as it seems to be a source on [[Collective action problems]] for many people in “the space”, even if not particularly novel. It is also source for other pieces of terminology e.g.
Overall the piece is an very readable – albeit quite long – introduction to collective action problems and ways you can address them (eg. having a government!).
This is a classic [[prisoner’s dilemma]] with many participants.
Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill ‘‘them’’, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.
And okay, this example is kind of contrived. So let’s run through – let’s say ten – real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how important this is.
Aa I shared elsewhere, the solution may be SIMPOL, simultaneous policy. Something similar happens when putting together the team for a movie. The producer gathers a set of possible actors, artists, writers etc and tries to get them to provisionally agree to the film.
Say you get a good writer and script and Julia Roberts agent agrees provisionally, then you build from there, if Julia Roberts does this will you, Brad Pitt/Ralph Fiennes, join, also as potentials? You build more on the strength of that, until the project is extremely attractive, even foolish to ignore, despite the fact nothing has been done apart from a script. Even if some pull out you may be able to slot others in because you have built a momentum and a team of note to push the project forward. https://uk.simpol.org/
“Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person.” - as soon as you mention it to another person, there’s a good chance they’ll snitch on you and get you murdered, otherwise they risk getting killed themselves.
Indeed this is a problem, in the abstracted thought experiment that is not real. In reality people look, see mutual suffering, whisper, grumble, conspire in secret, until revolution breaks forth. The greater the suffering of the population the greater the potential for rebellion of the many. So to expand here SIMPOL will be carried out in secret, at each individual risk and hope for a better world. All risk their lives.
Secret has always been difficult - never more than now. Talking about the “secret group” principle in public forums like this will do little to obscure your intentions.
Ah ok, although I’m fine to dialogue on that, I think it was because you mentioned secrets, and it was me that spoke of things happening in secret, not Rufus.
Yep, I responded to your post about secret - Multi polar trap deals with secrets - every time you tell your secret to someone else - it loads them with complicity and triggers the response - which is betraying you to the others.
That’s really not a great strategy, hoping and being prepared to risk your life.
Yet that is exactly the strategy that allows us as beings in relationships of care and community to rebel against the tyranny and suffering. The number of bees that sacrifice themselves so the hive may thrive. The paradox is that the more bees that offer sacrifice, the less the danger to each individual bee.
I’d love it if SIMPOL were as simple as that! What SIMPOL is doing certainly will not hurt, but I have a few geopolitical quibbles about the all nations adopting similar policies idea.
First all of, self-sacrifice against tyranny is as old as civilization - even older. The warrior ethos - found all over the planet prior to modernity - saw clinging to one’s personal life as cowardly and disgraceful. Only problem was, in all those many rebellions against some tyranny or another, the victors generally then set up their own tyrannies. No large scale civilization (that I am aware of) tried to set up flat egalitarianism across the board.
So … political theory writ large … but not our topic here. Assuming humans stay wired in the future the way humans have generally been wired up till now, I imagine the contest for power will be ongoing and some will do better at that than others. The best we can hope for, AFAIK, will be a relatively stable oligarchy in which some constellation of great powers a) collaborate to keep themselves in regional power and b) agreed to keep conflicts between themselves within some tolerable limits to allow persistence of both the biosphere and civilization itself. The post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe is a prototype of that model.
Where I think SIMPOL can help is in combating myopic xenophobia that will make any sort of global compromise or collaboration unworkable. For a world order to be - orderly - it will need legitimacy up and down the line. SIMPOL can contribute to that.
Another potential detailed example for study, inspired by Gen’s comment here: The Hungarian people just recently overthrew their 16-year oligarchy. How did the Hungarians overcome all the collective action issues involved within a political regime where everyone is at risk? And this reaches back to the great philosophical-existential meditation on collective action within the Soviet system of the 1970s in Czechoslovakia: the great essay by Vaclav Havel “The Power of the Powerless” - based on the work of Czech philosopher Jan Patocka - which is reasonably credited with helping to launch the Solidarity movements that eventually collapsed the Soviet system from within… I bring this up to point out that any effective construct for thinking about and enacting commons frameworks to address major collective action problems involves more than just technical tools (like SIMPOL) for helping everyone to collaborate more effectively (though these are certainly an essential part of the mix). There are much deeper spiritual-cultural-political aspects of a commons framework that need to be engaged in combination with the technical tools, AI, etc. in order to make real transformational movement in relation to collective action bottlenecks possible.
Bravo! In the research group subcircle (next meeting, May 22) we are exploring cultural change mechanisms. As subcircle moderator, I need to bite my tongue a bit on the live call to let others get some conversational action, but no such constraints here!
Why not try the direct approach? The culture change model I favor is 1) people absorb all the signals they get from the environment (both social and physical), 2) they process those - mostly unconsciously - through their fully embodied nervous systems (and more, perhaps), 3) they synthesize all that into both speech and behavior actions, 4) others process such speech and behavior as part of their own environmental influences, 5) cycle repeats and cascades from person to person down through the millennia.
OK, back to your case. I’d hypothesize that the recent Hungarian political turning involved a lot of meaningful looks between friends and family, implicit understandings, subtle shifts of tone of voice in relation to references to certain political actors, and quite a bit of very meaningful - but very quiet - communication that did not grab headlines. Some very high percentage of human communication is pure body language. In effect, to understand this culture shift in a deep way, you really needed to be there.
Richard Flyer, in his recent book offers a few such case studies. (AI summary below). Flyer is in the process of moving to Europe soon. He is looking for an audience for his book. I’ve suggested to him he may wish to reach out to some of the continental intentional communities.
Flyer’s cases:
Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement (Sri Lanka): Cited as a primary inspiration, this movement integrates Buddhist spirituality with civic action across 15,000 villages, focusing on community-driven development and the “awakening of all”.
The Early Christian Church: Described as a “parallel society of mutual aid and belonging” that operated under the Roman Empire.
Gandhi’s Village Republics: Cited for their focus on self-reliance and community-level action.
The Parallel Polis: Inspired by Václav Benda, this concept refers to creating independent, voluntary, and organic parallel structures of community, culture, and economy alongside existing state structures.
Local “Re-Villaging” and Community Efforts: Examples include neighborhood peace initiatives in San Diego (e.g., Vecinos Unidos) and local food system/network efforts in Reno, Nevada.
Solidarity-Economy Movements: While critical of rigid, exclusionary approaches within them, he mentions new-economy, degrowth, and post-capitalist movements as examples.
For another kind of example RE: the specific task of constructing the kind of coordinating structures that can assist civil society/intermediary orgs with addressing collective action problems, Jonah Wilberg recently posted on his substack an interesting podcast discussion with Brandon Norgaard, who presented his Civic Enlightenment Project, linked to his work with the Eudaimonia Institute at the California Institute for Human Science.
Hi Robert, I came back to the Forum today to review any further discussion of the query I posted last week re: the collective action discussion, and potential interest in developing a subcircle around it, and I was a bit perplexed to find that the whole strand on collective action that I initiated last week seems to have been deleted?
Can you help me to understand what’s going on with that and the forum, since as a person who is obviously new to the forum, it looks like the overall opening I offered was quickly getting narrowed down and rejected? Can you assist a potential new collaborator to understand protocols or what I’m missing about why the initial offering of a new member would be so quickly shut down and even deleted, without explanation? I attended the 2R Conference last fall, and it seemed like a very open and creative group interested in exploring the ways the 2R framework could be generative for a new developing movement, so I’m having trouble matching that sense of openness to creativity during the conference with initial responses here on the Forum, which appeared (to a new participant) to be more about closing down, rather than opening up, potential engagements…
Is this Forum/Working Group not interested in new participants? If so, that would be good to know upfront to warn away new participants from attempting to join, as I was attempting to do last week. If that is not the case, can you please let me know who I can ask about why the conversation was deleted without any basic common courtesy to the initiator to let them know why this was done?
Very puzzling altogether, since the 2R framework was very intriguing, but as always praxis indicates the true ethos of any group or project initiative. But perhaps you can give me some sense of what’s going on here that I may not be aware of as (potential) new participant in this forum…?