The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."
Showing posts with label Witches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Witches. Show all posts

Sunday, October 3, 2021

The Age of Exterminations (III). Why you Should be Worried. Very Worried


 Disclaimer. I am no prophet and I have no crystal ball. I am just trying to find patterns in history. And I think many historical events can be explained simply on the basis of the tendency of people to try to make money whenever possible, even at the cost of doing the most evil things imaginable. That sometimes leads me to making rather somber predictions, as in this post, the 3rd of a series on mass exterminations (part one and part two). Sorry about this, but think that I may well be wrong -- and I hope so! (above: a hospital in Chernobyl in 2018: is that the destiny of our health care centers?) 


The extermination of social subgroups is a relatively recent phenomenon in history but, unfortunately, it seems to have become more and more frequent in recent times. Often, as in the case of the witch-hunting age, extermination is the result of a perfectly rational attitude that develops in societies under heavy stress. When a social subgroup is relatively wealthy, can be identified, and can't offer significant military resistance, there are good chances that its members will be exterminated and their assets confiscated. That was what happened to the people branded as "witches" in Europe during the 16th and 17th century in Europe. Another classic case was that of the Jews, a few centuries later.  

At this point, considering that our society is surely under heavy stress, the question is: which subgroup could be the next target for extermination? I asked this question to the readers in a previous post of this series, but almost nobody could identify the right target. Now I think I can propose the answer:

The most likely target for the next extermination round are middle-class retirees. 

Retirees satisfy all the requirements: They are identifiable, of course, they are old! They are often relatively wealthy and, more than that, they cost a lot of money in terms of health care. Finally, they can hardly put up serious military resistance. Exterminating the middle-class elders would be both easy and profitable

Let's make a few calculations. In the US, there are nowadays about 46 million retirees living on social security. The US spends about 7% of its GDP on pensions, that is, about 1.5 trillion dollars per year (about $30.000/person/year). That's more than the about 1 trillion dollars that the US government spends for the military budget, bloated as it is. 

Assuming that you could remove just 10% of the retirees, it would mean saving some 150 billion dollars per year. But, in practice, much more than that if you take into account the health care costs. For instance, summing nursing care facilities and home care for the elderly, we are talking of something close to 300 billion dollars per year, and that does not include hospitalization costs.  The potential savings are truly huge: hundreds of billions of dollars. 

Of course, exterminating the elderly cannot be done using the same demonization techniques used in the past against the witches and the Jews. Old people are parents and grandparents and their offspring won't normally like to see them burned at the stake or gassed in extermination chambers. But extermination takes many forms, and it is rarely explicitly proclaimed. After all, it never happened in history that you could find a sign with the words "extermination camp" at the gate of an extermination camp. During WWII. for instance, the Germans were told that the Jews were just being relocated, not that they were being exterminated. In other cases, the people being exterminated were glorified as heroes

So, what form could the extermination of old people take? It would be done using well-known propaganda techniques, the main one being to state the exact opposite of what is being done. In other words, when the idea is to kill some people, propaganda will convince everybody that the plan is to do them a favor (do you remember the "humanitarian bombs" dropped on Serbia?)

In practice, the weak spot of the middle-class retirees is that they need medical assistance and that they cannot normally pay the skyrocketing costs on their personal saving. So, they could be gently removed from the state budget by degrading the public health care system while saying that it is being modified in order to protect them. A clever way of doing it would be to focus so much on curing a specific single disease that the result would be a decline of the care for the illnesses that mostly affect aged people: cardiovascular diseases and tumors. A parallel measure to intensify the effect would be to degrade the quality of the food available, making it become less nutritious and contaminated with all sorts of pollutants.This method would not affect the elites, who can pay for good health care and and good food, but it will hit directly those who live on pensions.

Now, let's take a look at the current situation. In 2020 the average life expectancy in the US has declined by nearly 2% for a total of 600,000 extra deaths, most of them old people. So, we are talking of some 20 billion dollars saved just in terms of pensions. But it is much more than that considering the saving in health care costs. These numbers are not large in comparison to the US GDP, but not peanuts, either. And what we are seeing is just the start of a trend. 

At this point, it is customary to start screaming: "conspiracy theory!" It is true that, in most cases, pretended conspiracies are based on nothing. The world is so huge and complicated that it is unthinkable to see what happens as the result of a group of evil people collecting, say, in the basement of Bill Gates' mansion in Seattle. The mechanism that leads to collective events is collective: society as a whole is a complex network with a certain ability to process information. It does that without being "conscious" of what is being done: there is no plan, no specific objectives to reach. But often society moves as a whole in a specific direction. 

In this case, Western Society seems to perceive the problem created by an excess of elderly people, and it is moving to solve it. It is brutal, yes, but only individuals have moral restraints, society as a whole has none. Every decision taken individually affects all the other decisions, and we are seeing the results. It is nothing new in history where, typically, everything that happens, happens because it had to happen.

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This said we have arrived at a worrisome (to say the least) conclusion. Most readers of the "Seneca Effect" blog are middle-class Westerners (maybe Mr. Gates reads my blog? Unlikely, but who knows?). And sooner or later we are all going to become middle-class retirees. Of course, we are not going to be "exterminated" in the literal sense of the word. That is, no firing squads, gas chambers, or the like. But we will have to live on a progressively poorer diet and we won't have the same kind of free health care that our parents and grandparents had

What can we do about that? The answer is, unfortunately, "very little." Of course, you'll do well in following a healthy lifestyle, exercise, try to avoid the worst kinds of junk food, all that. A sane mistrust in doctors and their unhealthy concoctions may also help a lot. But you have to face it: the life expectancy of the people who are alive today is going to drop like a stone. It will be a classic example of a Seneca Cliff. 

But is it so bad? I don't think we should take this as a reason for despair. At least, we'll avoid the sad trap of overmedicalization in which so many of our elders fell. When my father was 87, he had a heart attack. I remember that while we were waiting for the ambulance, he said, "I think it is time for me to go." He was not happy, but I think he understood what was happening to him and perhaps he savored the idea of being reunited with his wife, who had died the year before. But that was not to be. He was kept alive for five more years, every year worse than the previous year, until he was reduced to a vegetal, his mind completely gone, kept alive by tubes and machinery. Being humiliated in that way is not something anyone would desire. When it is time to go it is better to leave this world in peace. If possible, at home. 

Since this blog takes inspiration from the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, at this point I might suggest to you to read Seneca's "De Brevitate Vitae" ("on the shortness of life"). Seneca was not so great as a teacher of wisdom and he made some egregiously unwise mistakes (with Queen Boudica, for instance). But when his time came, he died an honorable death. The death of a true stoic



Monday, May 10, 2021

Memes that Kill: Witch Burning and Other Extraordinary Popular Delusions


A modern interpretation of Anna Göldi, executed in 1782 for witchcraft in Glarus, Switzerland. She is said to have been the last witch killed in Europe, at least as the result of a formal trial. The story of the great witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries remains a mystery in many respects. What caused this folly to take hold of the minds of the Europeans? And what caused that folly to abate? It turns out that evil has a natural cycle of growth and decline. It is possible to accelerate the decline of a killer meme if good people get together in rejecting it.


In 1841, Charles MacKay published his "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Crowds." It was a milestone: the first study in the field that today we call memetics, a term coined by Richard Dawkins for how ideas ("memes") spread in the collective human consciousness. MacKay was perhaps the first to state publicly that the great witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries were a form of collective madness. Not even Voltaire (1694-1778) had touched on that subject, despite his criticism of all kinds of religious superstitions

As exterminations go, the war on witches was not the worst on record. In Europe, it caused about 50 thousand victims over a little more than a century. But it was so shockingly cruel in targeting mostly helpless women that it is remembered to this day as a form of collective madness. With us, the expression "witch hunt" is even proverbial. 

The extermination of the European witches generated plenty of studies in modern times, mostly concentrated on the causes of the phenomenon. Explanations are many but, in general, it is agreed that it was related to the stress generated by the Reformation and the associated wars. Apparently, torturing and killing women was a form of stress release. The human mind must have plenty of serious problems, evidently, but this much we know not just because of witch hunting.

In any case, it happened, and we should be happy that it didn't last more than it did. But this generates another question: what made the hunt cease? It is a fundamental point: if we could understand what makes people stop believing in killer memes, we might stop them earlier. 

But few of the studies examining the war on witches make a specific effort to understand why the hunting ceased. The general idea seems to be that when the conditions that caused the hunt disappeared, things returned to their normal state. Sometimes, it is also proposed that the enlightenment movement put an end to the killings. Lesson and Ross (1) proposed in 2018 that:

"The seventeenth century, however, was the time of the scientific revolution, whose effects may have eventually eroded popular belief in witchcraft, eroding popular demand for witchcraft prosecutions along with it until witch trials could finally be easily abandoned by religious producers. "

Not to disparage a study that's excellent in many respects, but this interpretation seems to me completely wrong. The death penalty for people found guilty of poisoning or harming others had the aspect of a rational response of society to a threat that, at the time, looked real and documented. During the 16th and 17th centuries, science had little to say about whether or not it was possible to poison people using herbal concoctions or other methods.

As Chuck Pezeshky says, "truth is the reliable and valid representation of information that allows shared coordination of action inside a social network." In some cases, this social representation coincides with the scientific views of the matter, but that is not the rule and it is not even common. 

Finding witches and killing them was not just a job for inquisitors. The book by Trevor-Roper "The European Witch-Craze" (1991) tells us how widespread was the belief, and how intensely it was believed that killing witches was a social duty for everyone, to be done for the good of everyone else. A leader who didn't engage in witch hunting was seen as a bad leader. In some regions, expressing doubts on the idea that killing witches was a good thing could be dangerous. 

If truth is a social concept, then we need to understand witch hunting in a social context, in the form of the entities that we call memes. What makes memes live and die? Charles MacKay gives us an interesting hint when he says, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” As I said, MacKay was a great innovator and this sentence, in itself, is a correct statement of how memes propagate. They behave exactly like physical pathogens in an epidemic: you are infected by others but you recover by yourself. 

Indeed memetic infections can be described by the same equations used in epidemiology, as we showed in a 2018 paper together with my colleagues Perissi and Falsini. Epidemics are the result of internal feedbacks that, in turn, are the result of the networked structure of the system. This internal structure generates typical "bell shaped" cycles. Witchcraft trials are probably the first historical case of a memetic cycle for which we have quantitative data (from Leeson and Ross, 2018 (1)).

The model tells us that the diffusion of the memetic epidemic is a collective phenomenon due to people being infected by others. Conversely, the epidemic declines because people become "immune" to the meme. The concept of "herd immunity" holds not just for physical epidemics, but also for virtual ones. It is what makes society eventually resistant to these killer memes. So, the first step to fight one of these memes is to reject them individually.

There is an even more fundamental point about the decline of killer memes here, well expressed by Trevor-Roper:

Third rank intellectuals and officials started saying that the craze was unjust and irrational. And what they said was taken for granted. Then came the intelligentsia, showing that what it said for two centuries was wrong because of some minor detail in the interpretation of the scriptures. And that was the end of the process.

This statement marks a difference between physical and memetic epidemics. A physical epidemic doesn't care too much about human hierarchies: a king may die of the plague just like any commoner. But, in a social network, the propagation of memes is affected by the hierarchical structure: people tend to trust authorities more than other sources of information. Trevor-Roper hit a profound truth with his statement: witch hunting declined because ordinary people ("third rank intellectuals and officials") started realizing that the meme was evil and that they (or their wives, sisters, or mothers) risked being burned at the stake. And they stopped believing in the official truth as spoken by the leaders.

So, it seems that if we want to stop evil memes, we have to do that starting from the bottom. We can't put too much hope in laws, tribunals, treaties, and lofty principles: they are all under the elites' control and can be bent, transmogrified, or ignored. The leaders, typically, have an interest in maintaining alive memes that are profitable for them. But the memetic war is fought at all levels of the social network. People may be dazed for a while by the "Shock and Awe" treatment they receive from above, but in the long run, they understand. We cannot expect to be able to stop evil all of a sudden but an evil meme cannot last for long when good people get together to fight it. If history is a guide, evil is surprisingly fragile.


An meiner Wand hängt ein japanisches Holzwerk
Maske eines bösen Dämons, bemalt mit Goldlack.
Mitfühlend sehe ich
Die geschwollenen Stirnadern, andeutend
Wie anstrengend es ist, böse zu sein.

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.

 Bertolt Brecht 

 


1. Peter T. Leeson, Jacob W. Russ The Economic Journal, Volume 128, Issue 613, 1 August 2018, Pages 2066–2105, https://www.peterleeson.com/witch_trials.pdf