Superminds, States, and the Domestication of Humans

How durable is the state? How resistant is it to being overthrown? How closely does it reflect our desires? Is it possible it has its own desires?

I- Rome and the Upcoming Election

It’s common to compare the United States to the Roman Empire.¹ Or, more specifically, to the Roman Republic just before the creation of the empire—to Rome in the days of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. Or to those with a deeper knowledge of events, to the period before that, the time of Gracchi brothers, and the civil war between Marius and Sulla. These comparisons have merit, but it would be foolish to overlook the many differences. In fact, it’s precisely these differences that I would like to discuss. 

(The epistemic status of this discussion is very tentative. I have some ideas based on a couple of books I’ve read and some things I’ve picked up here and there on a blog or podcast. I'm hoping that they will cohere into something that’s actually insightful by the end, but we’ll have to see.)

To begin our wandering inquiry into these differences, I’d like to start with Peter Turchin’s much discussed theory of elite overproduction. This theory is designed as a framework for explaining historical moments of great political unrest. I don't recall reading anything he’s written specifically about the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, but it certainly appears there was a surplus of elites battling for control of Rome. We’ve already mentioned many of them: Caesar and Pompey, Marius and Sulla. To those four we could also add Augustus and Anthony. But the more important point for our purposes is that each of these elites could command large armies that were personally loyal to them, not the larger state. Because of this, civil war was not only straightforward, but inevitable. 

When the Roman Senate demanded that Caesar disband his army and return to Rome to face prosecution he was still left with one very obvious path forward: cross the Rubicon with his army, conquer Rome, and take over. And what’s perhaps more important is that this choice was very obvious for his soldiers as well. They were loyal to him and would follow where he led. When he did this the Senate didn’t summon “the army.” Rather, they asked Pompey to summon his army. Civil war ensued. Caesar won and became the de facto ruler of Rome. He was assassinated later, but that also seemed like a pretty straightforward plan.

Clearly there are a lot of elites these days, and they all want some piece of the pie, but none of them have armies. They have followers and some of those followers might be armed, but the arena of conflict is much different. For example, let's consider what Trump and Harris might do if placed in Caesar’s position. (And perhaps they are. Perhaps, given the contentious nature of our times, whoever loses is going to get thrown into jail.) 

Perhaps if you’re conspiratorially minded, you might say it’s Trump vs. Obama or Clinton. Whatever the sides, neither is a Caesar or a Pompey. Neither of them is going to “cross the Rubicon” with an army and attack Washington DC if they lose the upcoming election. But it’s nevertheless worth asking what will happen when one of them does lose the election, especially if it’s incredibly narrow. For example, what if Trump narrowly loses Pennsylvania by 1000 votes, and because of this Harris wins the Electoral College 270 to 268. Given how loud the cries of a stolen election were in 2020, how loud will those cries be should this happen in 2024?

In this case, one could imagine Trump doing everything in his power to overturn the results of the election. Filing lawsuits, demanding additional recounts, and even ordering the military to rise up and ensure he’s installed in the White House, or that states and people loyal to him rise up in rebellion. Assuming he does all this, which doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility, what happens?

Obviously such an attempt would be crazy and chaotic. It would almost certainly result in widespread civil unrest, and probably some actual deaths. But it’s very difficult to draw a straight line for Trump assuming power in the same way it was for Caesar. This lack of a straight line isn’t just a problem for Trump, it’s a problem for his followers as well. It was easy for Caesar to get his soldiers to follow him. They were in essence “his” soldiers, and the path towards success was obvious. Even if you imagine that Trump’s followers are just as willing to die for him as ancient soldiers were to die for Caesar. (Which I strongly doubt.) They are going to want there to be a plan. (January 6th, which we’ll talk about more in a moment, did have a plan, which is a big reason for why it happened.)

What about the reverse? Harris losing the election 270 to 268? Further imagine that she wins the popular vote and at some point the Supreme Court intervenes in a way similar to 2000. In other words, absent their intervention it’s easy to construct a narrative where Harris wins. Now it’s Harris demanding extraordinary measures. Her version of going to the mattresses would obviously not look the same as Trump’s. For one she would probably have a lot more support in the media, and this time we might have large liberal states threatening to secede, but again, just as with the Trump scenario, there’s a lot of “well they can maybe do this” or “maybe this will happen” but no obviously straightforward path to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision, despite the anger of millions, or the perception that, but for the Supreme Court, she would have won.

II- What’s Different?

What has changed between now and the time of Caesar? Or even between now and the time of Napoleon? 

Do we have fewer disaffected elites? It doesn’t seem like it. 

Are arguments and division less heated? Maybe.

But there’s also a sense in which they have permeated deeper. Did the average Roman citizen really build their whole ideology around whether Caesar or Pompey won? Did they even have that sort of political ideology? Did the average citizen of the Confederacy spend all day arguing with his ideological opponents in the North? Anger is definitely different then than it was, which is not to say that it's worse, merely that I don’t think our different methods of dispute represent an obvious point of demarcation.

Maybe people are better. As I already alluded to, we seem less willing to fight and die over these sorts of political disputes. Is this cowardice or wisdom?

Clearly the fact that we have a democracy helps out. Much of Napoleon’s success was due to the fact that France was “in between” systems of government when he came along.

There’s also the issue of technology. It was easy for Caesar to maintain an army that was the equal of any other army. It’s not possible for Trump or Harris to maintain their own wing of F-35s. Not only do they not have an army, perhaps more importantly they don’t have an air force. It’s not impossible to imagine that they might be able to acquire one under the right conditions, but it’s very difficult to imagine the chain of events that would have to occur. 

Speaking of events, it’s instructive to consider the example of January 6th. I mentioned that there was a plan, which, upon reflection, is probably giving them too much credit. They had step 1 of a plan. Or maybe steps 1a and 1b. 1a) Get Mike Pence to reject the electoral votes from states which had voted for Biden. 1b) If he wouldn’t then force him to do so.

There was then the vague outline of a step 2 which consisted of sending things back to state legislatures (those controlled by the Republicans) or sending it to the House where it would be voted on in a one state-one vote system, in which the Republicans also had an advantage. But none of this actually results in Trump as President. That’s like step 15. Steps 3-14 would have to consist of dealing with the Supreme Court, who would have been asked to rule on the legality of the whole mess. I would have been willing to bet significant money that they wouldn’t have ruled in Trump’s favor. So then Trump ignores them? That’s easy enough to do, but can you ignore the military?

I’m sure Trump and his supporters would claim the military is on their side. Claiming this would be a vast oversimplification of what is actually a very complicated situation should it ever come to that. I suspect that anything resembling an organized military would just want to stay out of it, even if individual soldiers did dumb things. 

The point of all this is to demonstrate no matter how many disaffected elites there are, or how popular a person is—is Trump more popular in percentage terms than Caesar was?—taking control of the state is far more complicated than it once was. I have already mentioned various potential reasons for that, but I think the biggest reason is the power of the state itself.

III- Superminds and Leviathans

So what is the state? Thomas Hobbes referred to it as the Leviathan in his book of the same name. Considering the difficulties we just discussed, that description seems apt. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker ran with this theme and made the further claim that our current, relative, lack of violence, along with most other elements we consider progress, come from this leviathan. 

It is against the backdrop of all of the above that I recently read two books that made particularly salient points about this leviathan. The first was The Journey of the Mind by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. I’ll publish a review of it shortly, but for the purposes of this discussion I’m interested in their idea of a supermind. The two of them follow the development of minds from the simplest archaea all the way up through the human mind and beyond into the supermind of civilization. 

The metropolis principle suggests that as a city gains in population, wealth, and influence, its sewer lines, transportation networks, and skyscrapers improve, too. The most prosperous cities tend to have the best shoe shiners, jugglers, and falafel…

…even as the supermind contrives to make most of us smarter, healthier, and more productive, the metropolis principle has bequeathed us another trend. To achieve these gains, the supermind binds us ever more securely within its ever-tightening dynamics of shared attention, making it ever more difficult to dictate our own fate. We become more and more like neurons in a brain: highly individualized, to be sure, with our own distinct personality and purpose, but increasingly entangled with hordes of humans, near and far.

This all sounds very similar to an egregore or group mind. A concept which was much discussed last year even making an appearance in this space. Though in their book Ogas and Gaddam frame it as the perfectly natural evolution of the mind. That as human minds followed bird/dinosaur minds which followed insect minds, superminds would eventually follow all of them. Is this also the leviathan? Is the supermind somewhat synonymous with the state. Or, as I posited in my post from last year, are there multiple superminds? We’ll return to that thought in just a moment, but first how do Ogas and Gaddam view superminds?

[H]umans are willful beings. Despite the benefits that accrue from our bond with the supermind, we still seek control over our lives. This desire has been wired into our minds over more than a hundred million years of module mind evolution. We don’t always want to do what the supermind wants us to do. This tension gives rise to the free-will dilemma: How can a module mind maintain its own independent purpose while still contributing effectively to the purposes of the supermind? Or, more pointedly:

Should I do what I want to do, or what society wants me to do? [Emphasis theirs]

The metropolis principle suggests that by willfully expanding your own consciousness—expanding your knowledge of your Self and expanding your range of potential actions—you will contribute to the expansion of the consciousness of the supermind. If you become more compassionate, tolerant, and decent, then the supermind will become more compassionate, tolerant, and decent. According to the metropolis principle, the only way for Mind to advance to new stages of adaptiveness is through cooperation. By linking together Mind’s topmost thinking elements. In plain terms, the only way for the sapiens supermind to advance to new states of intelligence, resilience, and awareness is through love.

That’s a pretty rosy view. And it leads me to have the same problem with Ogas and Gaddam that I have with Pinker. They offer up a vision in which humanity and indeed all of history is the story of progress to a more and more perfect world. 

They both offer caveats. Ogas and Gaddam worry that we will abandon the compassion, tolerance, and “love” that is needed to advance to “new states of intelligence” and Pinker worries that we will abandon the principles of the Enlightenment that undergird our remarkable progress. But they all think that the arrow naturally points up and to the right. 

I agree with Ogas and Gaddam that some sort of supermind is present. I think they overfit their description to mechanisms of actual brains, but there is something going on. Where I take great issue is with the idea that it will triumph through love, and that it’s inevitably benign. 

Ogas and Gaddam don’t mention the state in their description, but everything they say maps very well to Pinker’s description of the leviathan and how it operationalizes all of the things they talk about. Also if they’re not talking about the state what are they talking about? They’re certainly not talking about religion (you can see the review of the book for more information on that). Do they imagine that there’s some post-state supermind where we all are bonded by love and we don’t need any further apparatus? A sort of supermind anarchy? I saw no indication that’s where they thought things were headed. Nor does it feel very realistic. Pinker’s progress relies on the state and so does Ogas and Gaddam’s supermind of love, tolerance, and compassion.

IV- Being Domesticated by the State

This all takes us to the second book I read recently: Against the Grain by James C. Scott. In this book Scott set’s out to correct the record on the rise of agriculture. In this corrected version, the state has a large role to play on how we ended up with modern, grain-based agriculture. He talks a lot about domestication: we domesticated numerous animal and plant species. What is less well understood is that we also domesticated ourselves. Or more specifically while we were working to domesticate the rest of the world, the state was working to domesticate us.

I suspect that it’s going to take a while to absorb how radical that claim is. I think we all like to imagine that we are the state. Not quite to the extent that Louis the XIV did, but we imagine that the state, or the leviathan is an outgrowth of our best impulses. An expression of our intellectual progress in the case of Pinker, or an outgrowth of our love and kindness in the case of Ogas and Gaddam. Or at the very least a manifestation of our collective will. But if you imagine that it’s a supermind, then it’s also a form of life, with its own evolutionary interests; its own terminal goals.

This is the reality that people completely overlook in their discussion of the state. We imagine that it will give us what we want because it’s just a distillation of our desires and goals, particularly in a democracy. But as Scott points out, the state has its own goals: it wants to harness our work, tax our creations, and control our time. In order to do that it has to make us legible. That goal is far more important than making sure we have enough to eat or that we have some degree of material success. In support of this, Scott offers up the comparison between grains and other potential agriculture products:

Why, however, should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states? After all, other crops, in particular legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, had been domesticated in the Middle East and, in China, taro and soybean. Why were they not the basis of state formation? More broadly, why have no “lentil states,” chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record? Many of these cultivars provide more calories per unit of land than wheat and barley, some require less labor, and singly or in combination they would provide comparable basic nutrition. Many of them meet, in other words, the agro-demographic conditions of population density and food value as well as cereal grains. Only irrigated rice outclasses them in terms of sheer concentration of caloric value per unit of land.

The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops—legumes, tubers, and starch plants—have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation.

The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation.

There are other examples of the way in which the state has domesticated us. Whole chapters on barbarians, the qualities associated with domestication, and the fact that sedentism long preceded the development of the state. But the example of picking grain over every other agricultural product is the starkest example of how the state has directed the flow of history. 

V- Bringing It All Together

Three ideas got the ball rolling on this post:

First, there’s the enormous power of the state, and how that constrains the possibilities for what might happen if there’s a close election. Western Democracies have an all encompassing power the likes of which we’ve never seen. I’m reminded of an observation Curtis Yarvin made just after the events of January 6th, 2021. He noted that after the mob of Trump supporters managed to break into the capital, which was unprecedented, that they really had no idea what to do next. And they mostly wandered around like video game players wondering what they had to do to get the next level to load. Even if Mike Pence had still been around and they’d done something unthinkable, it still wouldn’t have had any actual effect on the transfer of power.

I entirely agree, and this illustrates both the strength of the state, and the way in which it has domesticated us into powerlessness. Also, this echoes Pinker’s point, we do seem to be a pretty gutless lot. In the last civil war hundreds of thousands of people died. How would Americans react if even a hundred people had died on January 6th. On either side? 

Second, there is the idea of the state as a supermind, an entity that might have desires and goals of its own. How does this super mind work? Is it an engine of progress, or something designed to bring about more complete expressions of love and understanding? Or is it something more malevolent? 

Which takes us to our third, and closely related point, if its goals are not in harmony with our goals, then what are they? And how does it view the various things we might try to engage in? From the perspective of the state were Caesar and Napoleon akin to cancer? Is Trump an auto-immune disease? Or just a bad cold. 

In other words, the big question is what does the idea of an increasingly powerful state as a separate entity with its own aspirations mean for our aspirations?

Does the State want us to go to Mars? Does it want well-aligned AI or does it not care about AI Risk? Does it want to reduce the deficit or run-it up? Does it have any foresight? Or is it just in primitive near term survival mode? 

Are we headed towards the utopia foreseen by Ogas, Gaddam, and Pinker? Or are we on our way to become a nation of lotus eaters? Which would the state prefer? Of all the trends one might discuss, the clearest seems to be an increasing level of dependence on the state. 

I understand all of this may come across as a libertarian fever dream. To be fair, I did say that the epistemic status of this discussion is very tentative. But, let me close by asking you one final question: when was the last time you encountered a true barbarian?

---

I suspect that a lot of people with a substack newsletter imagine that they’re a barbarian standing up against the excesses of civilization, or at least a civilization gone mad. And maybe they are, only time will tell. For myself I have no illusions about my barbarity. It’s non-existent. If that sort of honesty appeals to you check out my archives where you can find even more cowardly sniping from the sidelines. 

1. Francis Ford Coppola has a movie in theaters right this moment which does exactly that. Unfortunately by all accounts it’s a gigantic mess.