I heard an interesting idea from an interview with Michael Shermer. Our natural animism (seeing human agency everywhere) could also explain our capacity to believe in conspiracy theories. If our brains are good at assigning human causes to simple things, they could be good at assuming complex events are caused by deliberate manipulation & not accident.
Of course for hundreds of years people have been seeing God as the ultimate agent behind everything — the ultimate conspiracy theory. Our brains are much better suited to seeing the world as a top-down system. (For example evolution is very unintuitive: children are die-hard creationists.) This might explain why people usually talk about solutions to global problems in terms of a top-down approach. The orders/actions must be initiated from above, whether by governments, companies, whatever.
But reality is of course a bottom-up system. The laws of particle physics combine to guide the molecules in movement, which combine into the workings of solids, gases, stars, galaxies, etc. This is even more true for people. I think utopian thinking was the greatest mistake of the 20th century because it relied on top-down theories. A revolution must, by definition, be based on imposing some idea in a top-down fashion. Since humans are complex, your top-down approach is very likely to have major flaws. And in the social arena, flaws often lead to mass murder.
Of course it doesn’t mean there is no room for government, that the social sciences should be disbanded, that it’s all futile. (One of the most interesting ideas that has persisted is a blind faith in the bottom-up-only approach that lets the invisible hand of the market take care of everything. There’s no evidence that this is better than a similar system with some top-down meddling.) No, the point is that top-down social adjustments need to be embarked on very cautiously if we’re to avoid The Killing Fields Take 23.
Most change is largely driven from the bottom up. Even top-down government actions are greatly influenced by individual citizens. A dictatorship where the people have REALLY had enough can be overthrown rather quickly. Genocide is most devastating where individual will assists government.
So the “individual can’t make a difference” mantra is bunk. Not for some feel-good new-agey reasons. Because there are fewer puppetmasters than we think. Because almost every major event comes out of “the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat“.
4 comments ↓
“children are die-hard creationists”
Which is why religion is so prevalent. It’s a way for adults to not have to grow up.
Absolutely — we’re born with common sense but I think a major part of growing up is learning that some things in the world go against your common sense.
Then again, most religions would also go against a child’s notion of common sense, so they’d have to grow into them as well.
Not a huge fan of the “bottom up” argument, with the exception of populist uprisings…
The laws of chemistry utilise the laws of physics, but can in no way be predicted from physics. Likewise biology from chemistry, and humans from biology. On a societal level we cannot use a human and predict what society will be like.
Having said all that, I HATE “top down” government because, at some level, I’m a little kid who hates being told what to do. Or I’m an adult who hates being treated like a little kid.
but social phenomena might still be more effective when they come from the bottom up even though we can’t predict in advance what will happen.
so i agree just like we can’t in practice go from physics to biology (though we could with enough knowledge and computing power), we can’t go from small movements up to society — but this might still be the most relevant force for social change
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