Fear and Society

The world is what we make it, stop worrying about your privacy, and we will have nothing to worry about. Cheap ubiquitous cameras are everywhere, we can use these to watch eachother from afar. Do not let this scare you by taking only the perspective of the victimized individual. You are the entire society. You are doing the watching as well as being watched. Consider this an opportunity to grow closer to your fellow netizens. All relationships must be symmetrical, and the same technology available to everyone. Individuals engage in horrible arms races and power struggles. Fear drives it all, the individual fears the other individual, who in turn fears him back. Have no fear, and have no problems. You have nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing that you can do that could make me hate you, irregardless of whether you do it in front of a camera. Symmetrically, you have no grounds to hate or shame me, or anyone else for anything you observe them doing, or believe them to be doing. We are not individuals, we are society. There is no point in shaming ourself when our actions, and attitudes towards those actions are all under our control.

If you feel that some behavior is wrong, like dancing, then you will shame anyone whom you see dancing. If they know that, and feel ashamed, they may stop dancing. But they may just keep dancing and hide it from you. This second scenario is more chronic and pathological. Huge rifts in society develop this way. The only way to heal the rift is for the dancers to come out in great numbers and dance all over the place until everyone is comfortable with that. Cameras, and communication networks are slowly healing the many rifts in society by exposing people to eachother. Surely you have been on the internet at some point and thought “wow, there sure are a lot a crazy people out there.” That is society facing itself and admitting how diverse and conflicted it is. The world really is full of crazy people right now, and as they get used to that, they will not seem so crazy to eachother anymore.

So you don't want your webcam to turn on when you are not aware? Why not? Somebody might see you changing clothes? Smoking pot? Making a mistake? or simply not looking your best? All these activities are bruises in our opinion of ourself. There is nothing hurtful about being naked in front of other people, so don't be ashamed of it. If you watch someones webcam all day without their knowledge, you may come to realize that they are much like you, and most of what they do is quite unremarkable. Maybe you don't want the police to catch you doing something illegal. This is proximately valid fear, but ultimately it is no different than everyday shaming. The executive branch of our government is just the physical realization of fears we have coded into law. This is just like any other fear, except that we have less control over it. I must stress that the only way to heal a rift is to face the fear that caused it. Bring the hidden out into the open.

Maybe there are some things that we should be ashamed of, maybe some activities really are bad. We are a society, but a society can act in a goal-directed way, much like an individual. Societies can compete for dominance on the global scale. Actions of individuals that are detrimental to societies goals, must not be performed. Shame is one way to implement this. There are other ways, like education, and preemptive design. Shameful actions might include destroying infrastructures, and killing many people for no good reason. (I am reluctant to choose petty crimes because I can dream up scenarios where they would be desirable, but even these large crimes may be good in some exceptional situation. We can make no predictions whatsoever about the shameful actions without knowing the goal) But can a society be goal-directed without hiding information, lying to itself, and introducing rifts? Only if everyone understands organization of the whole society and agrees with it. A very unrealistic notion right now, but not impossible.

If you tend to ignore connotations, you might recognize a resemblance between rifts in society produced by fear, and the process of modularization in a growing system, such as an organism, a brain, or a large software project. Could these really be the same process, when stripped of their consequences and contexts? Is fear a mechanism for modularizing society? People only act on the information they have. If there is to be an efficient division of labor, there may need to be a difference in the information available to different people. Is the information people have available to them a good determinant of their actions? In other words, if you had that information, could you predict what they will do with high accuracy? If you could, then society could control itself by controlling who gets what information. When you hide your activities from the shame of others, you are controlling what information they have and how they will act upon it.

Suppose you, and only you, know the milage on your car. Decisions that must be made based on this knowledge, such as whether to get the oil changed, or whether the car is worth the cost of repairing it, are now solely your responsibility. If you are a member of a society of equally well informed people with a common goal, it would not matter who knew this, all would make the same decisions. But we are not in such a society, and one is not likely to ever exist. A purely self-interested individual will hide the information from others, so that they cannot gain additional power over him. But we are not in a purely self-interested society either. Ours is a hybrid, where mostly self interested people do share information often. There are people who specialize in deciding whether a car is worth the cost of repairing it. We entrust these people with the information they need to make their decisions because it is in all of our best interests for people to have liability insurance. And the insurance company must make rational decisions about risks in order to not go bankrupt.

What does a non-modular society look like?
What are the benefits of modularity in the first place?
Do the different modules of the brain hide information from eachother? Do they do it out of self-interest? Shame? Efficiency?