Earth Hanging in the Balance. A New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a three part series on how to create a functioning communications system to save democracy and the planet. We face an existential crisis in this world and no one seems to know what to do about it. We are just beginning to explore solutions while others seem willing to profit from anarchy, chaos and sensational clickbait.

Part I: Can Altruism Trump Selfishness to Save Democracy and Planet Earth?

Part II: Case Studies — Donald Trump and George Wallace – How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism

By Glynn Wilson –

Who wants to stop Donald Trump and Facebook from destroying democracy and the planet?

This is a problem I’ve been grappling with for the past three years as a journalist and social scientist. In December, 2018, sitting around in Mobile, Alabama on the smoking porch out of the rain, I had an epiphany about what is needed to begin to solve this problem. I wrote a business plan for a new app to take on Facebook and create something better for real news consumers in search for the truth amongst all the fake news, and a better tool for activists struggling to save the world in their own way, grappling with the problems inherent in the Facebook popularity algorithm.

This year, hiding out in a national forest on the Gulf Coast, watching Venus and the crescent moon in a dark night sky and listening to the coyotes howl like wolves, I had another epiphany.

So I started doing research looking for answers in the science of human evolution.

While following the yellow brick road, so to speak, I ran across a scientist involved in the new field of Cultural Evolution named Joe Brewer. He’s from Wheaton, Missouri, but now lives in Columbia, and he’s trained in math, statistics, atmospheric sciences and cognitive policy.

On his personal Facebook page, he describes his mission in life, which sort of reminds me of my own mission.

“I have dedicated my life to one goal,” he says. “Secure the existence of a complex thriving global civilization in 100 years. Everything I do is in service of this mission.”

So I contacted him and conducted a video interview, and we had a wide ranging discussion about everything from the latest thinking on the science of evolution to the solutions to solving our essential problem of creating a functioning communications system to save democracy and the planet.

My own academic training is in Science Communications and Environmental Sociology, as well as Political Science and Journalism.

It didn’t take long for him to pick up on what I was after, so he began to lead me to the other science and social science sources I needed to explain the problem I’m tackling and the solution we are both searching for.

The essential problem is how to find a way to help speed up the evolution of the culture by fostering prosocial behavior and fighting anti-social behavior, which is rampant in politics and on social media.

“Part of the way to deal with this is to figure out how to develop pro-social functioning groups of groups, up and down the chain,” he said.

We talked about the research on the selfish gene and the altruistic gene, which we covered in part one of this series. Some scientists focus on quantitative research and the selfish gene, for example, while others focus on qualitative research on the altruistic gene, and visa versa.

Part I: Can Altruism Trump Selfishness to Save Democracy and Planet Earth?

He reminded me of something I had already concluded for myself 20 years ago when in grad school we often engaged in the debate about “Nature versus Nurture,” often over strong beers and good weed.

You remember this debate, right? Is human behavior more influenced by our genes (nature), or are family, education and cultural influences more powerful (nurture)?

“Of course it’s both,” we said simultaneously, and laughed out loud.

“The lesson then becomes, how do we bring the cultural evolution process to a higher level,” he said. “It’s about pro-social behaviors, like how do we … think of a basketball team. How do you get your star player to play as part of a team, uplevel, for a functioning team? Thinking of that example and dynamic helps you to see multi-level selection more clearly.”

A star player’s nature may be to hog the ball and take all the shots, but even the best players miss the goal a certain percentage of the time. So a team of altruistic individuals who work well together will defeat a team with one star player much of the time. If you have a star player and you can teach him to play well with others, then you have a championship team.

This is what we need to save democracy and the planet. A team with a star player who is trained to work well with others.

Otherwise, an ego-maniac narcissist with no altruism will win and bring the entire system down.

I think you see where I’m going with this. Can you say Donald Trump?

So Brewer led me to the research of Elinor Ostrom, an American political economist, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons,” which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. To date, she remains the first of only two women to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Ostrom identified eight “design principles” of stable local common pool resource management. This research is well known in international relations, and while not making it explicit, the Obama administration was using it to push what was called “soft” cultural power to promote democracy around the world.

In other words, the United States doesn’t just have military power and economic power. We have cultural power, and it’s possible to use that to foster democracy and work to save the planet.

This stands in stark contrast to the political power of a selfish, cheating, narcissistic bully, who is so ignorant of science that he thinks America’s power derives from military might, which can be used to make lots of money.

So in thinking about how to stop an authoritarian dictator from using existential anxiety to turn our democratic republic into just another totalitarian state, (which we covered in Part II), we must develop a functioning communications system based on an understanding of altruism, to counter all this selfishness that is out of control in a world where most people are now depending on Facebook for news, information and entertainment.

I know many people have become addicted to Facebook, which feeds the same chemicals in the brain that come from snorting a line of cocaine or listening to the Hallelujah Chorus, but think of the symbolism of the selfie. As everyone aims the camera at themselves, and says, “Look at me, look at me,” what happens to the evolution of the altruistic gene that we actually need far more than the selfish gene to survive as a species?

In thinking through the process of creating a new social media app to start from scratch and create something better, there is a matrix, an outline, a blue print we can draw upon to build this, if we can put the budget together to do it.

As I alluded to in Part I, what if Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook, instead of dropping out of college would have gone around on the Harvard campus and found some experts in all these fields to consult with on how to build something to save the world, he could have created a powerful tool to do just that. Instead, he was like a star basketball player (computer programmer) who selfishly created something to make himself a billionaire, and didn’t have any liberal arts or science understanding of how to work altruistically in groups to make something that was not just about the money, capitalist.

He created a Frankenstein monster that threatens to destroy democracy and the planet.

So let’s talk about Ostrom’s model.

“Caring for the commons had to be a multiple task, organized from the ground up and shaped to cultural norms. It has to be discussed face to face, and based on trust,” Brewer says. “It’s how we interact that matters.”

Core design principles for managing the commons and creating successful pro-social groups requires developing a group with a clear identity and purpose, a clearly thought out mission.

Have you taken the time to look up and read Facebook’s mission? It never had a clear mission, so over the years, Zuckerberg’s team struggled to craft one. This reminds me a little of journalism historians struggling to define objective journalism in textbooks. I discuss this problem in my book, Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.

A few years ago, faced with growing criticism for the disfunction of its platform and the spread of fake news in the 2016 election cycle that helped Trump win, confounding all the public opinion experts and elite pundits, Facebook changed it’s mission statement to “bring the world closer together” and “making the world more open and connected.” But according to critics, this had one fundamental flaw: It didn’t push for any specific positive outcome from more connection. Rather the new mission was just a muddled statement of a goal or simple philosophy, not a mission.

So this thing worth $200 billion is based on one goal, to make Zuckerberg a billionaire? Well, it worked for that. This past year he visited Donald Trump and slept in the White House, then came out and said he would not stop allowing misleading political ads on Facebook. As a computer programmer who has read a few psychology books, he has no idea how to decide what a false claim is in an advertisement, so he will keep making billions more in advertising revenue, while the world burns.

According to Ostrom’s model, now used by the United Nations and countries around the world in International relations, a group must have a clear identity and purpose.

“Who is in the group, who is not in the group, and what is the group for?”

A successful social media app would necessarily have a fair and timely way to conduct conflict resolution, just like countries do when faced with bad actor countries, which foster and support anarchy and chaos through terrorism and violence. This requires a system of “graduated sanctions.”

Administrators must have the ability to monitor the behavior of the members and have support mechanisms that increase helpful behavior and reduce unhelpful behavior.

This is the theory behind why I do not publish hateful and false comments in my web interface as most other news media outlets do, or allow Trump trolls or other ignoramuses to run all over me in Facebook comments. Successful communication requires strong moderation. If you allow selfish bad actors to undermine the altruistic content, you lose, we lose.

Even psychologist B.F. Skinner knew about designing experiments to show the consequences from reinforcing or suppressing anti-social behavior.

According to Ostrom, a successful system absolutely requires an effective communications system based on trust and reciprocity. Once trust breaks down, reciprocity stops, and existential anxiety is introduced by an authoritarian leader who is willing to abandon any scientific basis for establishing what’s true and what’s not. Any ability to solve problems like climate change, for example, are lost.

“What we don’t have is monitoring and regulation of behavior in coherent and functional groups,” Brewer says.

He’s right. That’s where we are.

“You take the ability to form a dominance hierarchy, have the group invert it, to stop the dominator from rising to power,” he said when I asked him for his thoughts on how to create a replacement for Facebook for people interested in a way to find real news and engage in successful activism on social media.

“We do this with language and coordinated action,” he said. “What you see with Facebook is how we lose the ability to do it.”

There are basically three levels of regulation that evolved from hunter-gathering tribes of humans.

People used “shaming stories” on bad actors and shaped social norms. This starts with “giving people gentle consequences for smaller actions, and supportive guidance for how to change their behavior.”

“When that doesn’t work you go to the next level,” he said. Ostrom called it graduated sanctions, “increasing levels of consequences depending on the level of the harm.”

If the bad actor simply won’t take the hint, there is the option of ostracism, “temporary, then permanent.” Like leaving folks out in the wilderness when they won’t play well with others to accomplish an altruistic goal.

Even churches know something about this. They have the option of excommunication.

Research indicates that in hunter-gathering societies, kicking selfish bullies out of groups often resulted in death to the bully, although perhaps at times they found another group to join, like rogue male chimps sometimes do in the wild.

Of course the most extreme but least common punishment for anti-social behavior is execution, which in the criminal justice system is the death penalty.

“Every now and then, if a serial killer invades your group, you’ve got to take them out,” Brewer says.

Humans have this capacity for pro-social coordination, based on trust and generosity, “to come together and keep these dominators from dominating,” Brewer says. “This is the basis for democracy.”

Egalitarianism evolved from those early groups of humans, he said, but the rise of city states, civilizations, a division of labor and complex societies, led to the mechanisms of social norms to stop working. In small, homogenous countries and some small towns, this can still work.

These principles have been tested in third-world countries by non-profit groups and worked. Can we make it work on a global scale? That is the question that must be asked if we are to survive as a species.

“When you know how it works, you can critique something like Facebook and say, how would you keep a narcissist from spreading misinformation the way the Trump group does, Cambridge Analytica,” Brewer says. “People without conscience have more evolutionary strategies available to them. So the sociopaths and psychopaths are at an advantage because you don’t have any of the behavior regulating mechanisms structured into the social system.”

So what’s a potential solution?

Near the end of our conversation, I laughed out loud and asked: “What if we could kick Trump off of Twitter?”

“It would really help,” Brewer said.

Conclusion

We’re all in this together. We have not evolved for millennia to be isolated behind digital screens, connected only via text message and social media, or to grow up playing violent video games in windowless basements. Science proves that our genes and our brains have evolved to be compassionate, to cooperate, and to foster community. This is common sense. Hopefully, the science presented here reinforces what we already know intuitively. Being altruistic and kind to one another benefits us all.

Part I: Can Altruism Trump Selfishness to Save Democracy and Planet Earth?

Part II: Case Studies — Donald Trump and George Wallace – How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism

Further Reading

There are lots of other scientists and social scientists looking into various aspects of how we evolved and survived that might teach us how to continue evolving and to survive in the future.

One of the most impressive thinkers I found through talking to Joe Brewer is evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm, author of Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame and Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.

“From the age of Darwin to the present day, biologists have been grappling with the origins of our moral sense,” according to the abstract for the first book. “Why, if the human instinct to survive and reproduce is ‘selfish,’ do people engage in self-sacrifice, and even develop ideas like virtue and shame to justify that altruism? Many theories have been put forth, some emphasizing the role of nepotism, others emphasizing the advantages of reciprocation or group selection effects. But (Boehm) finds existing explanations lacking, and in Moral Origins, he offers an elegant new theory.”

Tracing the development of altruism and group social control over 6 million years, Boehm argues that our moral sense is a sophisticated defense mechanism that enables individuals to survive and thrive in groups. One of the biggest risks of group living is the possibility of being punished for our misdeeds by those around us.

“Bullies, thieves, free-riders, and especially psychopaths — those who make it difficult for others to go about their lives — are the most likely to suffer this fate.”

Getting by requires getting along, and this social type of selection, Boehm shows, singles out altruists for survival. This selection pressure has been unique in shaping human nature, and it bred the first stirrings of conscience in the human species. Ultimately, it led to the fully developed sense of virtue and shame that we know today.

“A groundbreaking exploration of the evolution of human generosity and cooperation, Moral Origins offers profound insight into humanity’s moral past — and how it might shape our moral future.”

Another good read is The Nurture Effect by Anthony Biglan, about how nurturing can affect our family life, environment, how we live and increase the well-being of society. Written from a behavioral psychology perspective, it outlines how rewarding good behavior is a better way to get the desired outcome.

For more information about Darwinian evolution, check out David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society and Beyond Individualism.

For a better understanding of altruism, check out this review of the Edward Sloan Wilson’s book Does Altruism Exist by Paul Johnston.

Other Links

Is There an Altruism Gene? A recent study suggests how our generosity is influenced by our genes.

The Evolutionary Biology of Altruism

Cultural evolution is the change of culture over time.

The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America

Does Capitalism Destroy Cooperation?

6 Ways Social Media Affects Our Mental Health

Molly Crockett: Moral outrage overload? How social media may be changing our brains

Osamu Sakura: What Is the Evolution of Communication?

: Our world is a system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control?

Atlantic: The First Days of the Trump Regime