Money is the root of all evil, we are told, and that case is not hard to make. Almost any crime one person commits against another is driven by the aggressor’s wants and unfulfilled desires, and money fulfills a great many wants and desires.
There is more to it, of course; “money” doesn’t cover the full spectrum of wealth, and is in fact not actual wealth but merely the representation of it. We defer to Tolstoy in clarifying:
“States and governments intrigue and go to war for property: for the banks of the Rhine and territories of Africa, China, or the Balkan Peninsula. Bankers, traders, manufacturers, and landowners work, scheme, and torment themselves and others for property; officials and artisans struggle, cheat, oppress and suffer for the sake of property; our Law Courts and police defend property; our penal settlements and prisons and all the horrors of our so-called repression of crime, exist on account of property. Property is the root of all evil, and the division and safeguarding of property occupies the whole world.”
And both property and money are fairly recent innovations in the human story, having arrived as a consequence of agriculture. Wouldn’t we then say that the cause of property and money was evil’s actual root?
Economist Jim O’Reilly offered up Tolstoy’s quote in support of his premise that evil in the world derives from the power conferred by money and property, control over others exercised by oligarchs – the richest among us, who wield their wealth in pursuit of power. They need that power to protect their wealth, and in so doing, impose their will on the majority. So it has been for more than 5,000 years, across nations and societies around the globe.
If property and money weren’t concentrated in the hands of the few, it is then argued, a great reduction in evil would follow; inequality, which drives discontent and injustice and oppression in myriad circumstances everywhere, is the inevitable consequence of great concentrations of wealth.
Is the oligarch, then, the root of all evil?
That, too, is a compelling argument to make. Oligarchs appear in the form of kings; of tyrants; of dictators; of popes. How many wars have such men launched? How many conquests? How many genocides?
If we’re going all the way to actual roots – a pursuit, in my profession, termed root cause analysis – we're not quite there.
Oligarchs (read: social dominators) are empowered by the property they control, to be sure; but their rise is not strictly a function of property. No oligarch can rise alone; for the social power they require to leverage their property in order to impose their will, they require the cooperation of some fraction of the society in which they rise.
We’ve seen elsewhere, in the cited work of David Erdal and Andrew Whiten, that small communities tend to quash oligarchs before they can rise, “often with a bump.” Small communities were, they point out, the rule for most of human existence. This is long confirmed by the work of Robin Dunbar, who gave us “Dunbar’s Number” - the optimum population for healthy social balance. Put another way, a Dunbar-sized community – roughly 120 to 150 people – is a community that offers the number of other people our brains have the capacity to know and accept and understand. Larger communities require that we depersonalize some relationships, based on the human brain’s limitations in the ability to keep track of them all. And nations, of course, lead to our dehumanizing of entire other nations.
The thing is – in a small community, it is possible to quash oligarchs and prevent social dominance by any one person because the group is small enough that no one faction can overpower another. Balance can be maintained indefinitely.
But with the advent of agriculture, permanent settlements capable of storing food for months led to expanded groups of hundreds, even thousands. It became possible for groups of like-minded people to huddle together and take focused action without immediate pushback; there was now no way to police the rise of a social dominator in time to suppress it. With permanent settlement and the accumulation of resources came the idea of property, wealth – and the power they confer.
We might call those huddles of like-minded people cognitive clusters – groups of people who think the same way and want the same things, and are collectively willing to act against the community to get what they want. And such groups are ripe for exploitation by a social dominator.
Put another way, the rise of an oligarch requires the existence of cognitive clusters, the cultivation of one that suits the needs of the oligarch, and the wealth to secure that oligarch’s power.
Our root cause analysis, then, reveals that evil requires 1) property, and 2) a social dominator; but that these can go nowhere without 3) the cognitive cluster.
If we can say that a cognitive cluster is another term for a group of like-minded people, it’s easy to further characterize that group in terms that illuminate the problem. In such a group, ideas become fixed, even petrified; dialog is perfunctory; change and growth grind to a halt. There is stagnation of thought, inflammation of emotion. Without a wide range of thoughts and ideas and perspectives, any group of people will eventually grow rigid and inflexible. And reactionary. And dangerous.
And, from the other direction – if we deal with the problem of cognitive clusters, we are equipped to solve the problem of the social dominator, and to fix the problems of inequality and mis-distributed power.
That’s not an explicit solution; but it’s a useful direction to turn in looking for one.
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