Political Physics

 

Much of the book I’ve written called Benevolent Libertarianism uses physics as a supporting lens through which to assess economics, markets and human behaviour in society, because there is a lot of overlap. For example, entropy and economic complexity overlap in that, in thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder or the number of possible configurations of a system; and economically, societies tend toward more complex arrangements (akin to higher entropy), especially in free markets where countless agents interact. Just like in physics, where energy moves toward states of higher entropy, markets evolve toward more decentralised, diverse, and adaptive structures. In most cases, a centralised economy is like a low-entropy system - highly ordered but fragile. And in most cases, a decentralised market economy mirrors high entropy – untidy but resilient.

Another example, Newton’s First Law (inertia) states that objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon. You can think of institutions and social norms as having "inertia" – in that, once they are established, they tend to persist unless disrupted by significant forces (revolutions, economic crises, technological shifts, and so forth). This principle helps explain the resistance to change in economic systems. One of the catch 22s of libertarianism is that the idea of a libertarian reform is likely to come up against institutional inertia, requiring strong catalysing forces to shift public policy.

You can also observe in physics that phase transitions occur when a system hits a critical point. Similarly, in social systems, network effects (like viral trends, revolutions, or financial panics) behave similarly. A small trigger can cause a systemic shift once a critical mass is reached – and this shows similarities around tipping points in markets or social movements.

I’ve also been fascinated for many years in how power laws or trends in society mirror nature's laws, especially tail end distributions or severe deviations from the mean.  Zipf’s Law is an intriguing one (which I’ve written about before in my paper on parsimony and power laws) - it states that the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its rank. This applies to language (most common words are used exponentially more often) and cities (a few mega-cities dominate, wealth distribution, online traction, etc). It mirrors distribution patterns in natural systems, such as the size distribution of solar flares or earthquakes – and once you delve into more and more examples of this, as I do in the book, it becomes more and more interesting.

The Pareto distribution (the 80/20 rule – although it’s not always exactly that, of course) crops up everywhere too - from income and productivity to software bugs - and resembles the power-law distribution seen in self-organised systems in physics. In Benevolent Libertarianism, I try to argue for outcomes that enable voluntary rebalancing or opportunity creation without coercive equalisation – what you might say (although I might ditch this if it proves too provocative for a publisher) a kind of capitalism with a heart and a socialism with a head.  We also find with consistency that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of its participants. This applies to markets, social networks, and economies of scale – and it’s similar to gravitational attraction increasing with mass - interconnectedness yields increased (sometimes exponential) utility. One of the fundamental principles that has seen this human progression-explosion in terms of material standard of living is that free markets, open communication platforms and mutual connectivity gain value as participation scales, encouraging more and more organic growth.

At this point, it might have occurred to you that we can also discern political manipulation through a similar heuristic. I believe one of the most interesting things happening right now is that, in greater numbers, the public suspect they are not being told the full truth, but it's hard to come together in a co-ordinated way to challenge it. Discerning political manipulation through the above heuristics is really to be seen as analogical and metaphorical, especially in regard to physics, but I try to make it compelling in the book because sometimes when you have a situation that’s hard to capture in your mind, an analogy or metaphor can help bring about a eureka moment. So, here’s one way you could think of it. In physics, massive objects bend space-time, creating gravitational fields that influence smaller bodies. I think that’s similarly what’s happening with powerful political actors (corporations, lobbyists, governments) – they generate a "field" of influence that bends public discourse, policy direction, and media focus – in fact, it has become its own heuristic for gaining more traction (like Wagner’s law predicts in economics) where there is a kind of "gravitational lensing" effect, where the narrative becomes distorted based on proximity to manipulative political or financial mass. It’s a reliable mechanism for sucking people in. There are, of course, many good and noble cases where that happens in a free market economy, where successful innovators enjoy well-deserved spoils – but here I’m taking specifically about the negative aspects of manipulation into perverse and distortionary narratives. 

I also think there are interesting parallels in societal behaviour and conservation of energy in physics. In physics, energy is never destroyed – it is only transformed or redirected. Similarly, I think in many cases, political pressure or dissent is rarely extinguished; it is redirected or channelled elsewhere. Firstly, this means that suppressing people’s free expressions or dismissing them won’t work if the dissent is strong enough – it will pop up elsewhere, manifested in different forms. You can see with the left, how populist social fervour has been co-opted by establishment figures to maintain power under a new guise of extreme environmentalism, for example. When a bottom-up movement is suddenly adopted by the mainstream, just pay attention and analyse where the original intent is being repurposed, and you’ll probably see the patterns I’m talking about. I suppose, also, if you’ll allow me the grace to push the analogy further, with thermodynamic information theory, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio, the clearer the message. And sadly, socio-political manipulation often gains traction by lowering this ratio by flooding the public with noise (misinformation, skewed reasoning, distractions, hyper-partisan content, galvanisation to an external cause that makes participants look good) to drown out clarity and critical thought.

I think in an age where 1) information is so readily available to nearly everyone, and 2) critical thinking is rarely practiced by the majority trying to process all this information, political discourse becomes more fragmented and unstable as political leaders push for polarisation – a bit like a societal equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics. And unless the energy of reason, logic and empiricism is applied to decrease the entropy, it’s likely to get worse. This feedback loop can be seen as analogous to a system of particles in a confined space. When one particle exerts force, the reaction may cause the system to shift, with some particles moving closer together (strengthening the political base) and others moving further apart (deepening polarisation). The interaction between these forces is not one-directional; it's a constant interplay that politicians and the media can navigate to maintain their position, much like how forces in the physical world create dynamic equilibrium.

It’s surely as plain as day at the moment that the official narratives provided by political leaders and the media is so veiled, biased, and intentionally misleading that we must be close to a tipping point. The system of information that is presented to the public is like a quantum system where the "true" state is elusive and constantly shifting, dependent on the perspective of those who observe it. If you sense the position, the momentum is abstracted, and if you sense the abstraction, you no longer pin it down to straightforward empirical justification – and even in cases when you might, the battleground is a morass of often justifiable resentment and partisans.

Just as the universe operates through immutable physical laws, the political landscape is shaped by forces, both seen and unseen, that guide the movement of ideas, policies, and public opinion – and in this day of technological connectivity, we are probably in the advent of a system of organic resistance and bottom-up networked intelligence that can mount a serious challenge to the hegemonies that have pervaded for so many decades. And while we’ll never get rid of top-down central intelligence – and in some cases, we shouldn’t wish to do so - we may be witnessing the birth of a decentralised, self-correcting force capable of at least challenging legacy power structures in a way that’s not been possible before.

Two Models

Here are two models, which, for simplicity, we’ll call the private model and state model. The private model undergoes the following test: if people are willing to pay for what you’re providing, then you must be serving them in providing value. If anyone has made a lot of money from this model, then they are likely to be serving society prodigiously. Alternatively, the state model takes our money in the form of taxation and purports to serve us on our behalf. Within the private model, consumers are spending their money as they choose, so inefficiencies will be few. Within the state model, there’ll be some cases where the government spends our money in a way that benefits us, but also, given the model, there’ll be many cases where the state spends our money poorly and in ways that give us bad value for money. Even if you’re someone who really values a big state, it’s still the case that due to top down information failure, and self-serving interests from within the political establishment, a lot of money will be spent on things that rob us of greater value elsewhere through the private spending model. This inefficiency gets exacerbated by the fact that the state keeps growing its sector to serve these interests, so the inefficiencies increase alongside it.

But it doesn’t end there. Politicians become incentivised to fatten up their state model, and to do this they have to constantly adapt to reflect the views of the people on whom they rely for their power. The popular views held in society are often of the most absurd and ridiculous nature, which means as they become more ubiquitous, they are inevitably going to be absorbed into the state mindset, and eventually, as the Overton window shifts, they become part of mainstream policy. At this point, sheer nonsense has become part of lazy political gesturing, and the voters have become so inured that neither the governors nor the governed call any of it into question.

I think this relationship is a bit like the relationship between the greyhound and the hare on the racetrack. Greyhound racing uses an electrically controlled and propelled mechanical hare that must stay far enough in front of the dogs to keep them chasing, but not be so ahead that they stop bothering to chase. Politicians do that; they impose a small enough thrall to keep the majority tolerant of their aims, but they are careful not to go so far that folk reject the political system altogether and bring about anarchy (although watch this space - there is a lot of unrest out there). That is, they keep the hare close enough so people are willing to chase, and ensure it’s not sufficiently out of reach that people go off and do their own thing. You’ll notice that people in abusive/coercive relationships often do this too; they provide enough allure to keep their partner emotionally conjoined, yet are not so awful that they run a mile. The awareness of this is often what causes the victim to eventually extricate themselves. There is an analogue here too in countries with dictators and oppressed citizens who flee the tyranny in order to begin a better life.

All that is to say, there is a sub-standard co-dependency going on between the general population and the people that they elect into power – which means that if absurd views begin to proliferate in society, they are likely to find representation in the establishment too – and that makes everyone worse off. The government takes shape by moulding itself around their own perception of their electoral popularity – and as a weighted average, it is generally about as good or bad, and as prudent and imprudent, as its perception of the people it claims to govern.

More On Critical Thinking

 

If you’ve found my previous blogs on critical thinking helpful (see here and here for previous entries), you might also like to consider a further piece of insight that will serve you well. Most of the incorrect beliefs or viewpoints in the world succeed in duping people by cunning sleight of hand omissions, or by omissions due to basic ignorance or misinformation. That’s why, if you want to detect the errors in bad ideas, look for what is being omitted, because if you were to put the omitted evidence or data back in, it would usually undermine the argument.

It’s like if someone predicts that you should invest in a particular stock in the stock market because it has been rising consistently over the past 10 years. The evidence omitted is that periods of growth are often followed by significant downturns which has to be factored into your risk. Or if someone declared that, as their father smoked all his life and lived until he was 89, perhaps smoking isn’t that bad for people. The evidence omitted is that large-scale studies consistently show that smoking increases the risk of cancer, heart disease, and early death, even if some individuals appear to be exceptions. Or they do it a lot with statistics by omitting the base rate; so they’ll say doing x increases y risk by 20%, so x is dangerous, even though the 20% increase is relative risk, not absolute, and the base rate is a fraction of a percent, and the absolute risk remains relatively low.

Practice the art of looking for what is being omitted, especially in politics and pseudoscience, and you’ll become attuned to seeing what’s wrong with all kinds of bad arguments, manipulation claims, and misinformation. Before long, instances of selective referencing, data-mining, half-baked reasoning, cherry-picking, false framing, and misleading narratives will be like second nature to you.

Beauty's Metaphysical Reality

 

In my book The Genius of the Invisible God, I have a chapter called The Genius of Beauty. Here are a couple of extra thoughts on the subject that didn't quite make it into the book. Our love of beauty is one of the most remarkable aspects of human experience, and beauty is one of the most stupendous features of the reality we inhabit - especially as there appears to be no evolutionary advantage to valuing beauty at such a deep metaphysical level when it comes to survival and reproduction. Some will try to have us believe that our value of beauty is a mere evolutionary spandrel (a trait that emerges as a by-product of other adaptations, rather than being directly selected for) - but I think this raises several problems, especially when considering beauty's deeper metaphysical significance. Under the spandrel hypothesis, beauty is not something valued as a Divine phenomenon rooted in objectivity, but merely a subjective set of preferences that have been riveted onto our evolutionary legacy without any deeper meaning. 

This is a view that is going to come to grief once we start to drill down into the deeper truths of objective reality. For there is every indication that once we start to think about this more profoundly, we understand a very powerful objectivity attached to beauty, one that seems to exist on a higher metaphysical level to mere personal preference (see my paper on this here). 

Don't get me wrong, the human aesthetic experience of beauty, awe and wonder is of course woven into our evolutionary legacy too, as a complex interplay of adaptive traits and spandrels. And that doesn't mean that, when it comes to apprehension of beauty, there are no goal-making advantages in our evolutionary selection processes - just that they are secondary not primary - just like how an embedded narrative is a subplot within the grand overarching plot. 

Beauty, like goodness and love, reflects something greater than its earthly existence - it bears a resemblance to the likeness or qualities of God. When we encounter beauty in this world, we are tapping into qualities in creation that imitate the Divine in nature; whether that be in truth, in mathematical elegance, in creativity, in love, in goodness, or other properties that have their origin in God.

On The Problem of Political Authority

 

Mike Huemer, in The Problem of Authority, argues that political authority - the state’s supposed moral right to command and coerce - is an illusion. Mike challenges two primary propositions, that of political legitimacy and political obligation: 

1.         The government is entitled to rule over the society, including doing things that would normally (if someone else did them) be considered rights-violations. This is called political legitimacy.

2.         The rest of us are obligated to obey the government’s commands simply because they come from the government. This is called political obligation.

(Mike's words)

One of his central beliefs here is that if ordinary individuals cannot justly coerce others, neither can the state. He concludes that government authority is an unjustified form of coercion, making anarchism - where voluntary cooperation replaces state control - the morally superior alternative. Mike's very impressive; he has been an influential and highly competent philosopher at seriously questioning long-standing assumptions about the legitimacy of state power, and advocates for a more voluntary libertarian society. He's also a jolly nice chap, and has been on my show for a very enjoyable discussion about God's existence (which you can access here).

What about his central beliefs in The Problem of Authority, though - is he onto something? I think he's onto a lot more than many people would countenance - and Mike and I are certainly similar in our advocacy of free market economics and the espousal of general human liberties. And, of course, on the inefficiencies and overreaching of the state, we also concur. But… I don't think I can go as far as Mike in his rejection of any moral authority of the state - I think it's too strong, and that there are conditions under which a central authority and/or top-down central intelligence are/is necessary to maintain social order.

In my book Benevolent Libertarianism, I lay out several ways in which some services and institutions require the kind of large-scale coordination that wouldn't be optimally performed by the market. It's not just the case that the practical challenges of implementing and sustaining a Huemer-esque stateless society are prohibitively complex and costly, I think the end result would be both unrealistic and sub-optimal too. Just because the state is inefficient at most things it does, that doesn’t mean we should abolish it.

Standard economics teaches that services should be provided by the most efficient agent. While the market often outperforms the state in delivering goods and services, that doesn’t mean the state has no role in the cases it provides unique value. Some functions are better handled by the state than the market. The key is not to eliminate the state, but to ensure it focuses on what it does best and leaves the rest to more efficient providers.

Moreover, I won't lay the whole thing out here, but I also argue in my book that abolition of state is a problematic idea on several other accounts, to do with hardwired human incentives, human will, and human nature in general when it comes to power struggles. To take the latter as a case in point, an attempted stateless society would soon see people forming new power structures in hierarchies that would not differ significantly from the state.

Consequently, I do think Mike Huemer makes a compelling partial (perhaps majority) case against the illusion of political authority. But I'd only go so far as to say that the fundamental problem isn’t the existence of a state but its inefficiencies and overreach. I think the purported problem of political authority is not an absolute, totalising problem, it can be ameliorated with a state that is restrained, accountable, and limited to those areas where it is the most efficient provider, allowing human liberty and voluntary cooperation to flourish wherever possible.

Faith Alongside Science

 

Here’s a really obvious statement that is surprisingly not accepted by a large number of people. The primary arguments for God’s existence are not threatened or undermined by scientific advances one jot. And not only that; there is no way an individual could be thinking logically and rationally and even get close to concluding that primary arguments for God’s existence could even be threatened let alone undermined by scientific advance however far science advanced. Its illogicality doesn’t make it sparse; many high-profile public intellectuals believe in it. But this belief is an embarrassing amateurish one to hold philosophically. The gulf between the obviousness of this statement - ‘It’s so self-evident that it’s absurd to think otherwise’ - and the reality that many still reject it, is one of the most absurd intellectual gulfs in human history.

Here’s a better way to look at the relationship between God as Creator and our scientific advancements. God has created a universe with enough uniformity for us to do science, but enough mystery that the more we discover the deeper the mysteries abound. In that created model, there is also a striking connection between beauty, mystery, psychology and scientific truth, which forms a dynamic and healthy relationship between discovery and humility. Just as a good housemaker wouldn’t need to constantly intervene to make the house not fall down, but would expect the owners to maintain things to preserve its quality, our perfect God is obviously clever enough to have created a smoothly functioning system that operates freely on its own mathematical and physical ordinances, but still leaves room for wonder, awe, and the continual pursuit of understanding, knowing that the more we explore, the more we are reminded of the limits of our own grasp, and the infinite wisdom of the Creator who designed it all.

What Will Just Stop Oil Do Next?

 

For a much-needed break from a day and half of book editing - now that Just Stop Oil have ceased active civil disobedience, here are 15 alternative equivalent socially useful things they could do to pass the time: 

1. Chase ducks around the park while making quacking noises to the theme tune of Mission Impossible. 

2. Form a competitive interpretive dance troupe that only performs routines based on melting ice caps. 

3. Start a YouTube channel where they whisper Greta Thunberg quotes to confused houseplants. 

4. Develop a board game based entirely on guessing the emotional state of bamboo flutes. 

5. Camp outside petrol stations and dramatically faint every time a car fills up. 

6. Descend to supermarket car parks, find all the abandoned trolleys, and insult them in a Glaswegian accent. 

7. Spend afternoons dramatically re-enacting scenes from The Crucible using only sock puppets and deep existential sighs, and charge men 11% more for a ticket than women. 

8. Take their grandparents shopping in IKEA and turn their noses up at the fossil-fuel-scented candles. 

9. Host silent discos in public libraries using imaginary headphones and extremely aggressive eye contact. 

10.  Stand on Westminster Bridge and coordinate group farts to the chimes of Big Ben, freshly recreated from the hiss and gurgle of a barista frothing oat milk. 

11.  Open a community art gallery featuring only finger paintings of emotions they’ve never personally felt. 

12.  Petition the government to make every Monday a Saturday and every Tuesday a Sunday, and apply for state funding to research the carbon footprint of pavement shadows made from tall buildings. 

13.  Perform spontaneous flash mobs to pigeons in UK seaside towns. 

14.  Walk backwards in remote Welsh villages for 30 days to undo the mistakes of society. 

15.  Run workshops teaching teaspoons how to embrace their individuality in a world full of forks, knives and tablespoons.

Still Don't Underestimate Old Testament Advances

Following on from all that was said in yesterday’s blog post about harsh Old Testament verses, I had some further thoughts, because it’s good to remember how "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), and how our wisdom is bound up in an unshakeable desire for goodness and moral rectitude. Perhaps what seems like God’s harsh Old Testament injunctions are, in fact, necessary sanctions against societies that have become so deeply corrupt and morally depraved over time that they are beyond hope of redemption. Maybe if we could get the truest sense of how far these tribes had fallen from basic goodness and cultural decency – perhaps like a modern day Hamas or Islamic State (ISIS) and the atrocities they committed in the Middle East – and pictured ourselves as being part of the enslaved victims under their cruel tyrannies, we might feel differently about the call for Divine justice to be wrought on the offenders.

You may say that even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain the calls for the women and children in these ghastly tribes to be put to death too. But even if we do ascribe those motives to God Himself (and it’s not evident that we can always do so), it is possible to conceive of conditions under which societies in those times could have become so wicked and corrupt that even the death of the entire tribe can become part of a broader Divine judgement, especially if the alternative of allowing the society to carry on with its wickedness is less preferable to the creation story than destroying the entire nation.

And in response to people who recoil at how harsh God seems to be in the Old Testament compared with the New, I think we have to be careful that we don't look past some deeper truths about what's happening. Because the proper reading of the Old Testament reveals the duality of a) A God who is good and sovereign in a way that's higher than we can imagine; and at the same time b) human beings who are, in a number of ways, much less morally, socially and culturally developed than people of today. I think that's at least part of the reason why some of the Old Testament presents moral cases that modern folk don't necessarily see as being moral. In other words, it's because the societies of the day were so comparably crude, primitive and barbaric that we have to understand how good and sovereign God is if we are to see those judgements as moral.

We might think of the situation as being a bit like a medical unit during an ancient battle zone. In the context of survival in war, with comparable limited resources and knowledge, some of the treatments might seem severe or barbaric by today's standards - but they were administered on the best understanding and tools available at the time. Similarly, God's interventions in the Old Testament, though apparently harsh by today's standards, were administered in the context of what He knew was the spiritual and moral condition of humanity at that time - and severe conditions often require severe measures.

In the end, we must remember that God's justice is always coupled with His infinite grace and mercy, even when we struggle to fully understand it. The Old Testament’s seemingly harsh judgments reflect not only the depths of human depravity but also the lengths to which God will go to protect the sanctity of His creation. God’s actions in those times were not arbitrary or cruel, because He is not arbitrary or cruel, but a reflection of His righteous and sovereign nature, aimed at preserving the goodness and flourishing of the world He had made. While we, with our limited perspective, may find these acts difficult to comprehend, we trust that God, in His perfect wisdom and holiness, was acting in ways that were ultimately for the good of humanity, preparing the way for the ultimate revelation of His love and grace through Jesus Christ. 

This is the same God who, in the fullness of time, sent His Son to bear the ultimate wrath on our behalf - offering forgiveness and redemption to all who would turn to Him in faith. It’s absurd to think that He is cruel and unjust – and only through superficially hasty reading of the texts and historical and cultural contexts could one believe otherwise. 

 

Don't Underestimate Old Testament Advances

 

I find it a peculiar solecism and irony that many people of today will have no truck with the so-called immoral teachings of the Old Testament. It is one of the most abject failings of the imagination. It's true that the tribes in the Old Testament were base and ignoble by the standards of modern Britain or America. But what you have to realise is that they were so bad, in fact, that those prescriptions we read about in scripture are actually quite advanced in the context of the day. They are radical steps in the right direction that, although startlingly under-developed by today's standards, assert moral culpability to nations that previously lacked it in such sophisticated codified form.

Moreover, nowhere else in the world at that time saw those kinds of advancements achieved even by human influence, let alone imparted by Divine revelation. Criticising those Old Testament teachings as immoral by today's standards is as foolish as criticising Britain in the Industrial Revolution for not being as materially prosperous as the Britain of today. In both cases, comparing the alternatives around them, their achievements demonstrate significant contextual advancements.

Truth, Beauty & Power

 

In my writings previously, I have talked about how beauty is connected to truth (see here and here). It’s beautiful to seek the truth, and beautiful things have an extra level of beauty by being true. Special & general relativity, the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, the double helix of DNA, celestial mechanics and quantum mechanics can be thought of as beautiful intrinsically (especially mathematically) but beautiful on an even higher level because propositionally they are true. Even the 4 billion years of biological evolution on this planet, despite being “red in tooth and claw”, has beautiful mathematical ordinances that underpin it, and beauty in the vast and rich diversity of life we see all around us. Truth in is beauty, and beauty is in truth.

On the other hand, an artist or writer might be able to conjure up a beautiful alternative to Stalinist Russia, or a beautiful troupe of fairies, or a beautiful fantasy world of dragons, legends and myths – but they would be beautiful on the first level, but not the second.

Given the power of truth in beauty, and beauty in truth, I think it’s good to note three further things. The point that there is beauty in truthseeking ought to be very inspiring to us, and encourage us to seek the truth to make the most out of all the good that is on offer. Given 1, it’s plausible that the thrusting reservoir of ugliness, dissatisfaction, anxiety, confusion and division that has flooded our society in recent times has the primary cause of a lack of truthseeking at the heart. Given 1 and 2, it’s as essential as ever to be reminded that God is the truth, and the source of all goodness and beauty – and that the search for truth and beauty is a search for God, much like how a need for light and warmth is really a need for the energy of the sun.