Making Sense of a Preference for Authoritarian Government

Did y'all ever read that book The Maze Runner? I loved that book. I love any book about people working together to survive in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

The Maze Runner is about a kid named Thomas who finds himself thrown into a reality that he doesn't recognize. He doesn't remember who he is, and he has no idea how he ended up there. When he arrives, other kids who've been there for a while introduce themselves and tell Thomas that everyone else is in the same situation. Nobody knows how they got there, who they are, or where they are.

The only thing they've figured out is that they're trapped inside a maze, and this maze changes shape every night. Thomas and the other kids have no idea how to get out. To make matters worse, wandering the maze is dangerous! 

The rest of the book is about how they work together to find a way out.

I think stories like this appeal to me because Thomas's situation is pretty much the same situation every single one of us found ourselves in when we were born. 

In the course of our day-to-day living, we don't normally spend much time pondering the nature of our reality. Just managing to find our way through the difficulties of everyday life is quite enough, thank you. But, like Thomas, the truth is that none of us are born knowing how we got here, where we came from, nor how to navigate this maze. 

While we usually assume that we do know who and where we are - that we're humans living on a planet inside the universe - the truth is that our reality is far too complex for any person to truly comprehend. To illustrate, let's look at some science facts.

Scientists infer, based on what we can observe, that somewhere on the order of 95% of everything that makes up the universe is, in fact, un-sensible. 

That's right - everything you think you hear, taste, smell, touch, and feel may represent nothing more than 5% of all the "stuff" that surrounds us. Everything else, which scientists call dark matter and dark energy (dark because we can't sense it), is thought to make up 95% of the reality we inhabit. 

Of course, we don't need to think about dark matter or dark energy to conclude there's a ton of stuff around us all the time that we can't sense. We can look our cell phones, laptops, and radios to conclude that things like radio waves must be passing by us all the time without our ability to sense them. 

In other words, we are barely able to sense our surroundings. And, to the degree that we do sense our surroundings, each of us tends to interpret those surroundings differently according to our culture and history.

Living in a reality we can barely even sense poses a pretty serious threat to our existence - something like walking around in a dark cave full of bears. If we don't know what's out there, how can we know what to do?

If you read the title of this blog post, you might be wondering what in the world a conversation about the nature of reality has to do with a preference for authoritarian government. We're almost ready to unpack that question. 

The point I'm trying to get to here is that our health and safety as human beings depend on our ability to make sense of a complex reality.

Our health and safety depends on our sensemaking. In other words, the totality of our lives depends on the accuracy of our perceptive and interpretive abilities.

Okay - bear with me just a little longer before we get to the topic of the title. I want to briefly go through how we may have evolved to do sensemaking before explaining how we got to a place where many of us might actually desire an authoritarian government.

Archeologists tells us that the earliest evidence of anatomically modern humans is about 300,000 years old. And, for at least the last 290,000 years, people generally lived in nomadic gatherer-hunter societies. This was a time when people lived in much smaller groups than we do today and rarely encountered strangers. 

The way we evolved to make sense of our reality was in small communities, extremely small in comparison to today's societies. 

Anthropologists tell us that a lot of these groups were fiercely egalitarian, and some suggest that their ability to thrive depended not so much on their ability to craft material technologies (like the bow and arrow) as on social technologies (like gift-giving and reciprocity). Social technologies help groups form the bonds necessary for authentic information sharing and ultimately better sensemaking abilities. In the early years of human existence, the ability to rely on groups of people we trusted may have been like lighting a candle in that dark cave of bears.

In other words, we may have evolved a sensory apparatus (like a form of antennae) that depended on relatively democratic sharing of information. If human survival depended on processing the information of all of the group members, then ignoring the intelligence of any individual decreased the group's ability to understand reality, and that would have been a threat to survival. 

Democratic information sharing gives us access to information about reality in a way that no individual can manage on their own. It also offers opportunities for interpreting that information in ways that increase our chances for survival and create opportunities for thinking about more interesting questions: What is this place? Why are we here? 

Language and storytelling allow us to pass our best thinking to our descendants, who are then able to build on that knowledge to increase their opportunities for survival and meaning. 

Around 10,000 years ago, our sensemaking was radically altered by the agricultural revolution. Humans began to move away from a nomadic gatherer-hunting approach and toward settled civilization. This meant cities, laws, writing, production of surplus goods, and extreme social hierarchy. It led to big increases in population and advances in material technologies. It was also a traumatic and massive disruption of our sensemaking apparatus. We're still reeling from its aftermath.

Settled agriculture saw humans living in political groups that were too large for the sensemaking we had been used to. Decisions made about the fate of cities and empires by political elites excluded the information gathered by people from lower rungs of society. In some ways, we might even say decisions became dumber because they were made by leaders who had limited and poorly processed information. 

Of course, civilization created new approaches to sensemaking. Rather than regular communication among all members of the group, civilization created communities of experts and information-gathering committees that still very much relied on the ways we evolved to do sensemaking. It's just that these new ways excluded the participation of the majority of society.

Settled civilization changed the way we related to each other by disrupting the traditional community sensemaking of our ancestors. It was if our antennae had been clipped, as if whatever light we'd accumulated to walk around that dark cave was diminished.

The loss of community literally diminishes our senses, and in that way it diminishes our access to health and safety.

Okay - sorry for what may have seemed like a detour, but I think we're finally ready to get to the point.

As access to authentic and healthy community decreases, authority increases. 

Authoritarian governments attempt to fill in the gaps of our understanding with information (not all of it being the result of honest sensemaking). This is one way that governments attempt to stabilize that which is inherently unstable: social inequality. It substitutes the need we all have to do democratic sensemaking with the idea that we can safely rely on authorities to do it for us.

This is not to say that governmental authorities can't do good sensemaking. They can, and the information that create can be useful to everyone. However, the type of sensemaking that they do will inevitably be limited and done in the interests of whoever gets to participate in it. 

The real need we have to participate in sensemaking as humans (to see and be seen; to hear and be heard) is undercut by a society where authorities do sensemaking for us. Sensemaking supports our health and safety not only because it creates valuable information about reality, but also because it roots us in a community of belonging that makes us feel safe in a place that would be otherwise entirely unknown.

Because the sensemaking done by any authority is inherently limited, the information it offers the rest of us will correspond with our experiences in some ways but not in others. When the difference between lived experience and the information being offered us by authorities becomes too large to ignore, we face a difficult choice. We can a) trust the information from government above our experience (which leads to a numbing of experience and, ultimately, a form of psychosis, but is also generally less work and feels safer), or b) trust our experience above the information (which creates conflict between us and those who make the former choice). This is another serious source of instability.

As our individual sensemaking abilities become fractured, we tend to see the world with less and less clarity, becoming more and more vulnerable to egocentric traps.

It's only in the last ten thousand years that we've switched to settled societies, and I think it is extremely useful to see this form of organization (that is, civilization itself) as an approach to sensemaking that is not the one evolution equipped us for.

Over time, many of us have learned to accept information from authority as a substitute for our need to do real sensemaking in community. This is sort of like a drug addiction. It temporarily seems like it meets a real need, but the long-term effects are the opposite of health. Also like an addiction, it's become all we know. Finding ways to regrow our sensemaking apparatus will be uncomfortable and take serious time.

This is not to say there aren't people in the world today who aren't doing authentic sensemaking. It's just to say we're experiencing dangerous trends that entice us away from community and away from healthy sensemaking.

The reason I started the blog was to make sense of our world right now, particularly in the way of explaining the differences between fascism and democracy. 

I think we can understand fascism and antidemocratic impulses a lot better when we understand the appeal of authority. Civilizational culture (as opposed to many indigenous cultures) has numbed us to our need to do real sensemaking. It's replaced the activity of sensemaking with lots of other things (mostly work), and so a lot of us have become skeptical about the possibilities for democratic sensemaking. 

We may have lost trust in our own ability to make sense of the world, and we might even think that a lot of other people are too dumb to do sensemaking with. We'd rather learn from an expert and be led by a leader. At this point, it just feels safer, and maybe even natural.

I would argue that the degree to which we accept this idea is the degree to which we unwillingly participate in our own illness. Overreliance on authority can be a way to suppress confronting that illness. It understandably seems easier and safer than healing through authentic sensemaking with others.

In The Maze Runner, Thomas and his friends don't rely on authority because they can't. No authorities exist to tell them what's going on. They have to figure things out on their own, and in that way, they have to grow up.

It's worth noting that the practice of democracy is the practice of freedom in that it demands that we recognize we're all in a reality none of us can understand on our own, but also that each of us is inherently capable of doing meaningful work in that way when we process our experiences in healthy communities.

When we're ready to admit that, we're ready to let go of need for external authority.