Flowing together, flowing apart
Robustness, rationality, and human social behaviour
A coherent human society is, in too-simple terms, kind of like a flock of birds or a school of fish. The basic dynamics are an emergent, living contract. As long as individuals sense what their neighbours are doing, and enact a tendency to follow them in relevant ways, the society will cohere. No single individual needs to fully and precisely grasp the big picture of the emergent structure of that society, and largely they could not do so anyway due to differences in scale and complexity. Evolution hardly needed to provide for that.
But in the end, it did happen to provide for intelligence which, ever-imaginative, tempts itself to impose structures from above. The most famous political example is the French Revolution. The revolutionaries saw themselves as inventors. Some of them had infected each other with the notion that they, as individuals, should and even must grasp the big picture of their society. But when a naïve and earnest progressive finds, inevitably, that the world does not bend to their conceptions, little choice besides force may seem to remain. After all, these conceptions are the truer thing! Have you seen the alternative we’ve been living with?
You probably know how the revolution turned out.
Some individuals don’t flow so well with others. While their neighbours are shaking hands, they miss their cue, breaking the contractual rhythm. Well, it happens to everyone, but it happens to these people enough that they are rather more ejected from the party than usual. Divergent.
Maybe this arrhythmia happens at first due to the peculiarities of personal history, to traumas or other complications. Maybe it arises because of deep personal differences in architecture. In any case, cleaved from the main stream, such a one has a tendency to supply more of their own vibes, at more of their own pace.
Cast adrift, filled with less of the flock-stuff, their reward is more space to think and act oddly. At least, so long as the flock does not set its fear on them.
Obviously, not all freethinkers are autistic. Intelligence is complicated, and the flock holds many patterns. “Being a researcher with original ideas” is one, and there isn’t a bouncer that verifies your neurodivergence credentials prior to entry. All you need are certain skills, which contrary to how the cope of the divergent might whine, are mostly not unique to the divergent.
What is a rationalist? In one sense, someone with a comparative advantage in crossing into the wilds of unorthodox shapes and unthinkable diagnoses. At times, that’s what a society most needs. So it might come as a surprise to some innocent rationalists that there are societies that adapt and thrive for decades, but are not run by rationalists.
It’s interesting that the rationalist community exists in the first place. Such a thing had not quite existed before, not on such a scale. It’s as though, after the right scaffolding sprung up, the intelligent divergents were finally able to locate each other through the flocky fog. Building enough common ground, they created a flock, a school all their own. One that was not quite so conditional on tenure or wealth.
But it’s a sort of simulacrum of a normal human society. A convergence of divergents, not quite dripping with the robustness of normativity. Rationalists like to talk about common ground, but their words may be as wild as they are. The meta-concepts that bind them are as the strongest steel... but bound lightly. As much as they have prodigious discursive flexibility, they aren’t as resolute in evolution’s ancient solution to the coordination problem.
It’s for this reason that populism can be so successful when it’s also so mentally bankrupt. We didn’t need to care about relinquishment and levity! We could have optimized for mindless robustening, organizing not around truth-seeking but around volumes of largely arbitrary statements serving as mere veils over a raw consensus. Then contracting as a colossal muscle, we would crush our adversaries!
And fuck them, right? How dare they be so thoughtful.