Today's thought, critique welcome (I'm trying to figure out why I viscerally hate/fear totalitarianism, to the point that I quit my job to work on tech that I think helps prevent it): Humans are many things, but a majorly salient one, is that they are a memetic species. Compared to many life forms, they are weak, unprotected, and helpless given only the devices of their physical form and abilities. Their memes are their power, and they are the dominant species, and compoundingly so, through their ability to efficiently share memes. Each generation starts from a new point, unlike other species. Cultures are centralization points of memetic patterns. Since there are many cultures, the evolution of memes continues despite these centralizations, and arguably, much better, since many people can develop the culture to explore its local optimum better than an individual, given the shortness of one individual's life. Different cultures produce different steps forward, and create memes that other cultures end up adopting. Humanity moves 'forward'. But cultures resist change. And some cultures are more resistant than others. The continued existence of a culture depends on its ability to balance the maintenance of its core defining characteristics, along with the appropriation of successful memes demonstrated by other cultures (or luminaries from within the culture). If the culture biases too conservative, and the culture eventually finds itself irrelevant, outdated, and powerless compared to surrounding cultures that have since evolved; too liberal, and the culture can destroy itself by disintegration, all shared memes, beliefs, and assumptions being lost. History has seen many dynamics in culture interactions, but one driving force has been, despite ebbs and flows, the successive march of centralization of culture (which has thus far always been disrupted by forces I'll explore in a second, forces which may soon cease to exist). Monoculture is a word that has entered the lexicon in recent decades, with the advent of mass media. Many aspects of the Western world's culture can be described once, and applied reasonably accurately to many peoples. This wasn't nearly as true 100 years ago for those same geographical peoples. The world only remains with a handful of such 'monocultures', something like: the West, the Russians, the Chinese, and a few others. Should trends continue, in another 100 years, there might be only one. If there is only one culture, then the qualities of that culture become very important with respect to the continuation of memetic evolution. If it is too controlling/opinionated/oppressive, the progression and evolution of novel memes will slow down among humanity: controlling governments have demonstrated their for dislike the uncertainty that comes with the open-mindedness, creativity, experimenting, and inventive nature of some humans. See also 1984, Fahrenheit 451, etc. Oppression, whether explicit or covert, is a natural path for an entity that gets power and wants to keep it (which is, all entities that get power.). Governments usually only exist with the consent of the culture they administer to. But in a scenario with only one culture, if its government became totalitarian, the usual forces of competition from other cultures wouldn't exist as a correcting force. And add to that a scenario where technology is sufficiently advanced, the usual forces of the raw difficulty of human survival would be less pressing as a correcting force. Technology makes survival easier. Advanced technology makes it easy. For example, if the Soviet Union/Roman Empire/ didn't become economically stagnant, and didn't have other cultures fighting it, it probably wouldn't have fallen. If it had human-level AI and robots, it probably would have been fine economically, and if it were the only game in town (on Earth), it wouldn't need to defend itself, and its people wouldn't have other cultures to look at as a mirror to see whether they really like their own culture. And another point on the tech, if it could all but monitor, predict, and control its people's thoughts through the media they consume and share, it could gaslight everyone so hard that nobody thinks to revolt. Western governments, and cultures, have demonstrated their weaknesses to falling to controlling tendencies: mass covert and unconsensual data surveillance, covid-era policies, and most recently, age-verification requirements online, which many see as a trojan horse for another step in the direction of surveillance and control. We need to find the 'lines in the sand' so to speak, the powers and explicit non-powers, of a theoretical healthy government/culture that would allow humanity to continue to progress despite the advent of a world monoculture, which may be in our future. Obvious things on the right side of the line would be things like protection from violence and a functioning justice system. Obvious things on the wrong side of the line would be things like controlling thoughts, opinions, and speech in heavy-handed ways. The line is often gray, and some muddy it intentionally, but unless we can arrive at a clarity and consensus, the arrival of a world monoculture may be the announcement of humanity's possible descent into a dark age, whether in a year or 5 generations, a dark age whose duration could be indeterminate. During that time, the creative, exploratory, and adventurous elements of the human spirit could be stamped out, in favor of a controllable, predictable, and stale populace. And along with the heart-breaking darkness and ignorance imposed on the individuals that exist then, the retardation of humanity's progress on understanding ourselves and the universe (the ultimate memetic achievement), finding better ways to exist, and creating the technology to expand throughout the universe and survive beyond the life of our cosmically precarious planet. If it lasted long enough, it could spell our extinction. Summary: we really need to solve governance BEFORE we arrive at a world monoculture and technology so good that material survival is easy. Otherwise we could have a long dark night for humanity, create a real dystopia that trillions of people have to suffer through, and jeopardize the eventual achievement of our most human, most transcendent goals. We gotta keep making new memes, man.
