I:1 The scientific ideal
E = mc2, Einstein’s little formula, is the great ideal of all mad scientists. To press as much relevant information about a multi-faced reality into as comprehensive a space as possible, that is the grand challenge.
In the social sciences, such attempts are extra mad, but irresistibly tempting.
I:2 The Active Adrenalinomaniacs
The most essential traits in the history of our societies since the Neolithic Revolution some ten thousand years back, I claim, can be written as if a World Spirit had tried to minimize A/P. My formula for history thus becomes:
MIN. A/P.
"A" stands for the Active Adrenalinomaniacs. This name I have given to the leaders, those who take the final, and often fatal, decisions in the marginal situations of history.
In the concepts of "adrenalinomaniacs", I have summarized five assumptions about human leaders:
1. Adrenalinomaniacs are normally males. In situations of stress, boys excrete more adrenaline, more fighting spirit, than girls. Adrenaline may partly be regulated by the level of testosterone. In studying the behavior of Mike Tyson and John F. Kennedy, I have also been toying with the concept of "testosteronomaniacs".
2. These males are driven more by their "juices" than by any higher rationality. Adrenaline is only one...testosterone another...serotonin and monoamin oxidase are other "juices". When the Human Genome people have laid bare the basis of our behavior, we will have the full map.
We now suspect that genetic "juices" are important for criminals and mentally depressed. Why shouldn’t they also affect professors and presidents? We mainly study the failures. Close study of leaders are not as popular among the foundations, celebrating former adrenalinomaniacs, like John D. Rockefeller, the Fords, Gulbenkians, Wallenbergs or Agnellis. Such studies may be dangerous. They may show that these great men, too, were only driven by their "juices", regulated by the reptile part of their brains.
3. These leadership types are unchanged over the last few thousand years. The genetic deck of about 100.000 cards is the same today as it was at the time of Homer. Achilles, Agamemnon, and Hector are freely interchangeable with, let us say, Clinton, Kohl and Yeltsin. Had the latter three been born 3.000 years ago, they might have been the heroes of the Iliad. Had the former three been born today, they could have become presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of our biggest nations, or local bosses in Chicago and Brussels.
4. In the imperative "Minimize" A/P lies the greatest pleasure and the highest motivation of the adrenalinomaniacs. It is to "win" over their closest competitor. In another essay, I have suggested that we even might be equipped with a CAIN-gene.
In finishing his great life work as a scholar, Gregory Vlastos summarized his latest work on "Socrates. Ironist and Moral Philosopher" with words indicating the supreme value of all strong adrenalinomaniacs: "Socrates is a winner. He has to be. Desiring the kind of happiness he does, he can’t lose." Even Socrates!
To win over, to outcompete, to defeat, to conquer, to become Number One, is what matters most to them. Cain and Abel is the Ur-archetype. Two adrenalinomaniacs can rarely stand at the side of each other without entering into some contest that both want to win. The Jewish story was repeated in Egypt between Seth and Osiris, in Greece between Eteocles and Polyneices, in Rome between Romulus and Remus, in Russia between Igor and Vsevolod, and in our soon past century in the Cold War between Western capitalism and Soviet communism.
History, since the birth of agriculture, can be seen as an elimination contest, like in tennis. If 100,000 adrenaline-stuffed males played one round every 1,000 years for the past 10,000 years, we would now be down to less than 200 members or would-be-members of the political elimination game, leading to the United Nations. And after the defeat of communism and the fall of the Wall, only one Wimbledon superpower remains.
Unfortunately, the elimination game is not only of a historical nature. It is repeated in every century, in every year and in every minute throughout the world, in politics, economics, as well as inside science, everywhere where two strong males meet.
5. In order to win, the adrenalinomaniacs develop ever better weapons and other instruments in each generation. The rackets of tennis are changed into the rockets of ABC-warfare. This is what R&D essentially is about.
Unfortunately, this elimination contest is not a tennis tournament. More often than not, it is literally an elimination contest with ever better instruments, done with cunning, deceit, treachery, cruelty, violence, murder, revolutions and wars, on an ever greater scale.
Unfortunately, the struggle for ever better instruments leads to an unending arms race in which everything and everybody is doomed to be ruthlessly used, leading towards resource depletion in nature and stress in humans.
Unfortunately, the result is also an ever-recurring hierarchy of inequality, with an ever-growing sea of human suffering at the bottom. Yesterday it hit Troy, today ex-Yugoslavia, where a pregnant mother got her child cut out and hanged in front of her eyes, or Rwanda, where close to a million human beings were chopped up by machetes. In this horrible game, Man adds the suffering to Man, described by Anne Frank, Osip Mandelstam or Primo Levi.
Unfortunately, this seems to be part of Man’s Nature.
Unfortunately, this Nature cannot be changed.
But somewhat, to some extent, the resulting behavior can be guarded and guided. This is our Hope against Hope.
In summary, these five points show that ever similar males, driven by their genetic juices to win over and eliminate their closest competitor, equipped with ever more potent instruments, tend to reduce the "A"s of my formula towards 1, or, if we are truly unlucky, towards 0.
During the Cold War, when we thought we had two superpowers and 159 UN members, I used to formulate my problem in the following manner: What happens to a mathematical series which starts with 100,000, passes 159 and goes towards 2? Does it end by a 1 or by a 0?
I:3 The Passive Population
The "P" in my formula stands for the followers of the "A"s, that is, the Passive Population. Three things need to be said about them.
1. "Passive" does in no way mean that they should be idle and lazy. On the contrary, "passive" only means here that they should obey and be loyal to their masters. Free wheeling masses become unruly and may make revolutions. No good! They should be disciplined by schools, military service and stupidifying mass media. They should work hard and obediently, always scared by unemployment, and be willing to offer their lives in total loyalty to that system into which they by chance were born.
2. The individuals forming the masses also want to be Number Ones. Not having the strength or the capacity to reach this goal as individuals, they identify with their chosen "A"s, forming the more or less dangerous "foules" of Gustave Le Bon and the "herds" of Wilfred Trotter.
3. The greatest pleasure in the life of the Population is copulation. That leads to the so-called population explosion. If the growth of the human population continues unabated, population will tend to go towards an infinite amount of individuals, towards oo.
If what is said about my "A"s and "P"s is true, the formula will tend towards an ever smaller fraction: A/P will go towards 1/oo. Hopefully not all the way, as that would be my frightening zero.
is thus my "einsteinian" formula for the essence of the history of mankind over the past 10,000 years.
It also happens to be a good expression for monotheism: one God, before whom everyone should prostrate himself. Assume for a second that God didn’t create Man, but Man God. If that were true, the first commandment of Moses contains the innermost dream of all strong adrenalinomaniacs!
I:4 Empirical support
What do we know about the "A"s and the "P"s over this stretch of history?
Our grand-forefathers, the prosimians and others, may go back some 50 or 60 million years. What we know about the primates indicates that they often lived in groups with one leader, an A, and the rest as followers, Ps. The primary group, not the individual, may be the basic evolutionary unit of mankind. Our own forefathers, with mother Lucy as the most renowned one, rose on their hindlegs some four million years ago; Homo sapiens arrived some 200,000, conquered the neanderthalensis 30,000, and started agriculture some 10,000 years ago. This is the period in which modern human nature was formed.
In 8,000 BC, estimates say, we were three to five million human beings on the globe. They lived in small groups, in "family kingdoms", with some 30 to 50 members in each. Assume five million people living in groups of 50 members each. We then get 100,000 primary groups, bands of family kingdoms dominating the world. If so, we had 100,000 leaders, and 4,900,000 followers. The fraction
A/P becomes 100,000/4,900,000 = 0.0204
At the end of the second millennium after Christ, we - hopefully - will have some six billion people living in about 200 nations who are, or desire to become, members of the United Nations. Assume these numbers are correct. Then we have only 200 formally sovereign national leaders. All the others are followers. The fraction
A/P becomes 200/5.999,999,800 = 0.000,000,033
the latter fraction being infinitely smaller than the former.
As my theory suggests, "A" tended towards 1, "P" towards oo.
The World Spirit of History has been minimizing A/P.
Q.E.D.
I:5 Why?
Add the two fractions to each other:
A/P: 100,000/5m ---- 200/5,000m
Then one gets two quantitative, empirically testable expressions for human maxi-history from 8,000 BC to about 2000 AD One gets two long-run tendencies throughout 10,000 years, one for social integration, one for population growth.
One starts to wonder if there is some determinism, some set of social "laws" involved. One wants to know why the struggle between the adrenalinomaniacs evidently is an elimination contest, leading to what is now called "globalization". One wants to understand why and how mankind has been able to increase its numbers more than a onethousandfold when, some say, there was only room for ten million hunters and gatherers without (agri-)culture.
You start to doubt even Shakespeare when he lets Macbeth say that life, or history, is but "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
"I, for one, fail to perceive in the sources before me any indication of a higher purpose" in "The Russian Revolution". So writes, for instance, the chronicler of that major event of our century, Richard Pipes of Harvard. He is evidently engaged in a Shakespearean polemics against any type of maxi-history "writ large". Pipes prefers history "writ small".
I am less sure. There may be a meaning, even if only an animal meaning.
The Cold War can be seen as the latest round in the serious elimination contest between the adrenalinomaniacs; in this case between the U.S.President, whatever his name, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, whatever his name. They both wanted to win. The President did so. The Soviet Union disappeared.
OK, OK, so it is. But WHY?
Look upon societies in all their complexities as upon instruments for the "A"s in their eternal struggle against each other. And remember the rule that basically explains the "why" of the behavior of all other animals: reproductive success.
Then my general hypothesis, against Shakespeare, can be formulated like this: those societies which have had the best instruments for the survival of their children have been "winners" in more than 51 percent of the elimination games, which have been forming our history.
My specific hypothesis, against Pipes, would then be as follows: It is at least 51 percent likely that the free market, the Western capitalist system, with its ruthless competition, is a better system than the on paper nice-looking, altruistic, planned, socialist system, for the survival of our children. And mankind couldn’t learn that without this inhuman disaster.
"Better", I said, not perfect! Perfection in societies exists but in dreams.
If my hypotheses are correct, we are, however, not dealing with a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Then history is a tale told, indeed, with lots of sound and fury, but signifying the survival of more and more children.
When the World Spirit minimizes A/P on a limited earth, it maximizes human reproductive success. That is the "why" behind my simple formula. That is an hypothesis around which a meaningful maxi-history might be written.
I:6 How?
Man is a tool-making animal. Man is unique in his capacity to talk. So it is said when we want to explain what makes us different from the rest of the animal kingdom. But what really matters since the Neolithic Revolution may be Man’s unique capacity for institution-building, for creating and keeping together tribes, villages, cities, nations, federations, NATO and hopefully, a European Union.
Man is an institution-building animal.
Other animals, like ants or rooks, may multiply their nests on a very large scale. But what they do is to repeat an inherited pattern time and again. Man differentiates his greater societies, creates an ever more refined division of labor, and thereby an ever more productive economy. From a given piece of land on a finite planet, he is able to create ever more food and luxuries.
The growth of the human population, the enormous reproductive success of our own species, is a result of this institution-building capacity, that is, of the integration process which follows from the formula, Min A/P.
I:7 The World Spirit: Evil leads to Good
This capacity is, no doubt, the outcome of human intelligence. But it is not the result of our conscious intelligence. On the contrary, both integration and population growth are unintended consequences of the Social Darwinist behavior of the "A"s and the "P"s.
In 1992, James B. Twitchell, for instance, wrote in his book on Western "Carnival Culture" that "sex and violence are the central concerns of our culture." 2,325 years earlier, in 333 BC, Alexander came upon the tomb of Sardanapalus (Assurbanipal) in Anchialus. The relief of the old King showed him snapping his fingers. "Eat, drink, copulate! The rest is not worth that!", said the inscription.
Man has always copulated. What needs explaining is not any "exponential rate of copulation" in the "P"s, but why the result survives.
Adrenalinomaniacs have always fought their closest competitors. In order to win over them, the "A"s have always developed better and stronger instruments. Those instruments which have been the most efficient for human survival in the eternal struggle for the illusion of power have survived and are still with us. The rest are displayed in museums.
Thanks to Man’s desire for ever more efficient instruments in his struggle against his closest competitor, we have also developed ever more efficient instruments for the survival of our children!
At one time the army was the major instrument, Today, in the age of ‘total war’ , total society may be seen as an instrument for the ruling adrenalinomaniacs. In the case of Stalin’s Russia, we clearly see it. In the case of our own Western democracies, we don’t. But so it is.
The good results, our lives, are the outcome of a horrible history of murder, violence, and warfare. The maleficent brutish behavior in one generation has, in the next, led to the beneficial survival of ever more children.
The process has been blind, unconscious.
But out of Evil, Good was born.
Given our (lack of) intelligence, we do live in the best of all possible worlds!
I:8 The future
Isn’t this just another clever, academic play with abstract symbols?
No, it isn’t!
Does the formula, Min. A/P, have any practical importance whatsoever?
Yes, it does, and very much so!
We know enough about my "P" to suggest that over the next two generations, mankind will grow by about equally many living individuals as it has done over the latest ten millennia.
Look at my formula, which says that a World Spirit is minimizing A/P. And then look at the empirically falsifiable history:
8000 BC 2000 AD 2060 AD
A/P 100,000/5m 200/6,000m ?/12,000m
If my reasoning is approximately correct, four conclusions of some political importance suggest themselves:
1. We can look forward to equally many creative changes in the instruments of unchanged Man in the next two generations as we have had since we invented agriculture. Considering that all creation is also destructive, this will bring us problems.
2. If history teaches us anything, it is that when "P" goes up, "A" goes down. If "A" has decreased from some 100,000 to 200 to feed the first six billion human beings, it seems likely, at least to me, that "A" must go from 200 towards 1, as we now will add another six billion. We must move towards one global super-productive economic system, with a planetary division of labor, able to give food and a decent material life to ten, twelve, or more billion inhabitants on our restricted planet.
Tendencies to political disintegration may thus be economically disastrous, unless, of course, we are in a process in which economic agents replace the political ones as ultimate, global decision-makers. That is, in which supranational banks and multinational companies take over the power from too nationalistic-minded governments. In which case we are forced to reconsider democracy.
3. If we are to improve upon our violent history, this final integration of mankind should be done in a peaceful manner, without war. This means that we must voluntarily agree upon one world government, upon one planetary center monopolizing physical violence, keeping order, and creating the legal preconditions for the free but responsible elimination game of those economic agents which are capable of transforming barren land into fruit-giving Eden’s.
Ideally, this would be done by the United Nations. Realistically it can, in such a short period as two generations, only be done by the one remaining super-power, the United States, hopefully backed up by the European Union, Russia, Japan and even China.
4. For the few who will understand this, a great responsibility follows. In order to break the historical, suffering-creating circle of a violent elimination game, much must be changed. Human hate should be guided, not against other men, not against Jewish or other scapegoats, but against the brutish parts of Man’s Nature in marginal survival situations.
It is not the rich or the poor, communists or capitalists, Moslems or Christians, white or black that are to blame for the tragedies of Man, but rather the ugly parts of our common Human Nature.
That is the enemy we must defeat if we want our children to survive in a peaceful world.
thinks Gunnar Adler-Karlsson©
Published in 1992; somewhat changed in July 1998.