Social Tech Series Part 1: The Foundations of Human Flourishing
What Patagonia vests, pee and human sacrifice have in common.
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Social Tech Series Part 1: The Foundations of Human Flourishing
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
We are born bawling and flailing; dependent on someone to wipe our bums and fill our bellies.
This is the human condition.
Hold in Your Pee
It is not surprising then that parents’ eagerly await the first time their child speaks. Language removes the fog of the world; more importantly it means I can tell you when to stop-crying-for-god’s-sake and to hold-in-your-pee so we can make it to the bathroom. But language is not an inherent property or object that exists. Unlike gravity or gold, the creation of language requires effort over many generations.
The effort was and is worthwhile. Once a common language was established among your tribe, you could pass on knowledge asynchronously of dangerous animals, the nearest stream, or which bush provides the juiciest berries. This then encouraged the creation of villages. Villages could then communicate with each other, forming larger and larger bodies of connected peoples that became institutions and states. Language enables us to coordinate far beyond our 150 closest friends.1
So we rely on not just everyone alive today, but also the efforts of those who came before us. Some of these efforts are social technology - the shared tools, norms, and institutions that allow humans to coordinate and cooperate at scale.
Wear Your Patagonia Vest
Language is a form of effective social technology. Norms are another. One widely accepted norm is wearing clothes in public. Beyond protecting you from wind chill, clothes signal “We’re part of the same tribe.” This may be easier to conceptualize in the absence of a norm. If you were sitting in a park and a naked stranger sat down next to you, you might think, “Are they right in the head? Are they protesting something? Is there a meeting of the-naked-people-of-SF nearby?”2 Generally, this is a sign of a norm being violated.3
Laws emerged to better standardize certain norms into explicit social contracts; enabling cooperation at a societal scale. Governments exist as a form of social technology that create, modify and enforce laws.
But even getting a small room of people to agree on something is quite tricky, much less a country. So whatever the deal is, it’d have to be a win-win.
So in exchange for acknowledging a government and agreeing to give up certain rights, we receive a guarantee of other rights. For example, it’s illegal to set up your own kingdom in the United States, to rob a bank or to litter.
Now you might say well “Hey, I’d like to start my own kingdom and do what I want! I want freeedommm!” Well by enforcing these agreements, the government also prevents other people from stealing my money in the bank, harming me and in general, preventing me from suffering at the hands of people wealthier, stronger and more powerful than I am. I then don’t have to worry about dealing with any of these things; I can worry about what color shirt I want to wear on a date, what species of indoor plant is going to survive on my dining table or what show is just right to binge on a Friday night.
Government sets the floor of what’s acceptable and shapes appropriate paths to power and wealth.
You can run for election and become a U.S. Senator.
You can’t buy and sell other humans.
You can shill marketing courses and tea tree oil to retirees.
You can’t rob a jewelery store.
These enforcements shape interactions as simple as buying a coffee. I don’t need to know the local barista’s name or life story to trust her to buy a cup of coffee. Historically, we didn’t trust anyone outside of our immediate tribe with something as intimate as food. I trust that if she does something to my coffee, I can report her to authorities, and she believes she will be punished. Similarly, she trusts that I will pay for my coffee with money backed by U.S. Treasury and believes if I cheat or steal, she can report me to the authorities and I believe I will be punished.
It’s a win-win; rule of the pen > the rule of the jungle.4
But it wasn’t always this way.
Human Sacrifice
“The priest quickly sliced into the captive's torso and removed his still-beating heart…Priests… [decapitated] the body. Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull. Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way. The skulls were bound for … Templo Mayor—a pyramid with two temples on top. One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.”
The 16th Century Mexica people (located in modern day Mexico City) were a human sacrifice society; they believed that without human sacrifice, the sun would refuse to rise, crops would fail and the world itself would cease to exist.
As such, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, were maimed and decapitated (among a variety of brutish ends) to appease the gods.
The means by which the Mexica organized themselves was not around human flourishing but rather human suffering and death.
Democracy, liberalism5, free trade, humanitarian law, freedom of speech; none of these which were predestined. They were built, cultivated and restored over hundreds of years. Today they form the bedrock of human civilization and are required to flourish on an unprecendented scale.
Our shared prosperity depends on them and I’ve come to realize that in many ways, we’ve seen a decline in the resilience, capability and capacity of these social technologies. This erosion threatens the foundation of human flourishing.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore what it looks like when social technology is failing and the aftereffects.
Until next time,
- Kiran
Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT for editing.
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
“Carefully choosing our aim is important. As a matter of fact, I believe it’s the single most important thing you can do. Because your aim focuses your actions, and your actions give shape to the rest of your life." My friend
spent 41 days writing How to be happy and damn, it’s got to be one of the most insightful essays I’ve read recently.“But legions of you are trapped in lives that no longer inspire you, and you’re hemmed in by man-made psychological incentive structures that you accept by default. The light has gone out of your eyes, and—worse than giving up on changing the macroscopic world—you have given up on your individual world, your own happiness.”
’s Renaissance or Bust makes you think of where the pursuit of endless optionality leads you to.“In most of human history, if someone didn’t understand a natural phenomenon, they would attribute it to some kind of god. Today, if people don’t understand politics, they attribute political and economic outcomes to some kind of god.... People claim their gods (politicians, Elon Musk, “billionaires,” millenials, etc) cause various things with omnipotent directness, for good and ill, without reference to anything specific, or if it is specific, it is often just made up—the equivalent of “Zeus does lightning.”"Slaying your political gods is a quest
’s recommended to every person and I’m trying it myself with ’s Civilization Lab. :)
Dunbar's number suggests that the cognitive limit to the number of stable relationships one can maintain is around 150.
Knowing SF this is likely a club.
Violating norms can actually be a great thing; protestors sitting at White-Only bars were violating norms to nudge society to a better future. As to whether a norm is useful or not, most likely follows some sort of normal distribution.
Furthermore, most people care far less with how they acquire a comfortable living and more so that they can. You could fight medieval wars and live like an 16th Century English king but why deal with early mortality, poor hygiene and constant betrayal when you can work for your six-figure tech job, sit in your lumbar-supported chair and watch Netflix at night on a 60-inch LED TV screen?
Excellent analysis