Month: November 2021

Organized Violence

Organizing Violence

Posted on by jabittan
“Of all human collective activities,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, “the one most difficult to organize is violence.”
 
 
I generally think we have a lot of misunderstandings of violence. When it comes to violent crimes, catastrophic wars, or mass genocide, I think that most of us misunderstand what is at the heart of violence. I think we also misjudge how much violence and danger there is in the world and what is driving the actual trends that exist.
 
 
First, in the book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues the world is becoming less violent, even as most people believe the world to be more violent. In 2020 the trend reversed slightly, with violence picking up relative to the downward trend we had been seeing since the 1990s, but it is still to early to say if it is a small blip or the end of a downward trend in violence. We also don’t know exactly what caused the upward tick in violence in 2020 with great certainty yet. Nevertheless, Pinker’s argument that humans are becoming more civil, less impulsive, and less violent seems to violate our basic intuition on violence, and it hints at different causes of violence than what we typically believe.
 
 
Second, it is worth noting that when it comes to denouncing violence, we are often motivated by signaling more than by high minded ideas such as crime reduction, rehabilitation of dangerous individuals, or long-term reductions in recidivism. This perspective is in line with Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s view who suggest in The Elephant in the Brain that we are often doing things to make ourselves look better, to signal desirable traits about ourselves, and hiding our true intentions (even from ourselves) while we do so. Denouncing violence is a chance for us to demonstrate how much more moral, kind, and nice we are than dangerous, violent, and degenerate criminals. Heaping as much negativity and outrage on criminals as possible just shows how good we are in comparison. Moral outrage can be more about the outraged individual than the outrageous thing.
 
 
The end result is a misunderstanding of violence. We have trouble understanding crimes of convenience, even violent crimes of convenience. We fail to recognize that most crime and murder occurs between people who know each other, not complete strangers. We fail to consider the larger social and contextual factors which may drive people toward violent crime – such as age, levels of lead in the body, and other factors – and we tend to view bad guys as alternative, evil versions of ourselves. We are inundated with media reports and social media posts about random violent attacks, making us feel as though the violence is all around us.
 
 
But we don’t just misunderstand individual level violence. We also constantly fear that an evil regime (possibly an American regime led by the wrong political party) is going to drive a massive global war. But as Harari argues, large scale organized violence is difficult to maintain. “Why should the soldiers, jailors, judges, and police maintain an imagined order in which they do not believe?” writes Harari. To organize large scale violence takes a very compelling narrative and imagined order, one that few men or nations have been able to truly muster for long term wars – even though our history books like to focus on such wars. It is true that we can be incredibly violent and that violence can exist on massive scales, but it is harder to maintain and build than we like to believe, and it is also likely that violence of all forms is on a downward trend that we can work to understand and maintain into the future. Doing so will likely make it even less likely that large scale organized violence can occur.
Imagined Orders Versus Natural Orders

Imagined Orders Versus Natural Orders

Posted on by jabittan
Imagined orders are myths that we agree upon and uphold through our actions and beliefs. There is no clear or objective basis to an imagined order to which everyone can agree at all times. Often, imagined orders exist on a continuum with numerous caveats and carve-outs as needed to maintain order and stability. They help shape our institutions and societies by creating a sense of common understanding and accepted beliefs and behaviors.
 
 
Natural orders, on the other hand, are the basis of the scientific theories and observations that humans can make. No matter where we are on the planet we can make the same observations of the speed of light, of protons and electrons, or of gravity. An important distinction is that natural orders exist whether we believe in them or want them to exist. Imagined orders only exist when we believe in them and want them to exist. Yuval Noah Harari describes it this way in his book Sapiens,
 
 
“A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.”
 
 
We can ignore natural order, pretend it isn’t there, and abandon trust and belief in the scientific institutions that deliver knowledge regarding natural orders, but that doesn’t make the natural order itself go away. However, this is something that has occurred throughout human history with our imagined orders. The divine right of kings to rule is an institution that has been discredited and largely abandoned across the globe, but at one time was a powerful institution. Similarly, Roman and Greek religions were abandoned and were left for me to study in English class in high school as mythical stories. The myths which held the Soviet Union together also failed and were abandoned. Once a myth is no longer accepted, it is easily rejected as little more than fiction.
 
 
Harari argues that this fragility of myths is what drives us toward constant vigilance and ritual surrounding myths. Our judges wear long robes to appear more wise to help give credibility to their decisions. We hold large official and serious investigations around events such as the January 6th riot at the US Capitol to help preserve our electoral system. We play the national anthem ahead of sporting events to remind everyone of the fiction of our Nation. The reality, however, is that judges only have authority if we all recognize and agree that their words and declarations are important. Determining what was a violent riot and what was an impassioned plea for freedom can depend on perspective (though when it comes to January 6th and how objectively awful Trump was this one doesn’t seem defensible). And the United States isn’t a real thing. There is no clear reason why our country exists in the exact place that it does – indeed at one point the same territory existed but it was not the United States.
 
 
This doesn’t mean that these myths are bad or are not useful. They help us live our lives, cooperate, and coexist. They are useful fictions, even if they are fragile, built on little more than vague concepts and ideas, and require silly rituals like singing a special song before playing sports. 
Imagined Orders

Imagined Orders

Posted on by jabittan
Humans evolved from small social tribes that ranged from roughly a dozen individuals to tribes upward of 3 or 4 dozen individuals. From that very basic starting place as a species, social groups and tribes grew to be possibly as large as 250 individuals until eventually humans began to cultivate crops, live in a single place, and form larger communities. Much of our modern psychology as humans seems to still be connected back to these early days when humans lived in small tribes or small communities. This historical time stamp in our psychology creates a lot of challenges for living in large technologically advanced societies.
 
 
Our societies today are held together by what Yuval Noah Harari calls imagined orders in his book Sapiens. Imagined orders are ideas, concepts, and constructs that we as a society agree to. They anchor the institutions we build, the interactions we have as individuals and groups, and how we organize our social world. Without them, we would be in chaos and wouldn’t be able to cooperate on a global scale, or even a national, regional, or local scale. Indeed, I think Harari would argue, we couldn’t live together in social groups of any size if we could not coalesce around imagined orders.
 
 
Some primates are able to live in relatively large social groups with some level of complex political and social interactions, but physical force and violence often play a role in how order is maintained. Consequently, that is a limiting factor for how large a social group or tribe can become. Our early human ancestors solved this problem by inventing imagined orders. Early religions and social practices allowed groups and tribes to adopt customs and beliefs that everyone could (more or less) agree to. This set the foundation for human institutions to order life without resulting to violence (at least not all the time). As far as we have come in terms of technology and our knowledge about ourselves and our universe, we still rely on imagined orders to keep our society in order without resulting to violence and genocide.
 
 
When writing about imagined orders and using the concept of human rights as an example, Harari writes, “we believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.” Whether the order we believe in is the Divine Right of Kings, human rights, capitalism, or whatever you want to call the economic and political system of modern China, there is no objective truth and reality at the heart of the system. There are ideas and concepts that are intuitive, that are agreeable to some extent of the population over a certain range of circumstances, and that help people live and cooperate within a society. Without imagined orders we wouldn’t be able to trust strangers, wouldn’t be able to coordinate actions, and wouldn’t be able to exist in complex societies. Imagined orders help us construct a world where we can live together in a mostly peaceful and cooperative manner. We can change what we believe and why over time, but we need to have some agreed upon and (mostly) accepted imagined order around which we can organize ourselves and our societies.
Political Myths

Political Myths

Posted on by jabittan
Throughout the book Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari argues that modern humans are able to cooperate and live in large societies because we share common myths. There are certain institutions which we have developed based on little more than myths that smooth our interactions with others, allow us to follow basic norms, and create a shared understanding of the world. This allows us to buy food from people we have never met, to bestow authority on others, and to coordinate movements over vast distances. But at the heart of our system is myth.
 
 
Harari demonstrates this through the political thought of the United States, specifically looking at the founding texts of the United States, such as the Declaration of Independence. Harari compares the founding principals of the United States to the principals of Hammurabi, an early human political leader thousands of years before the United States existed. Demonstrating political myths and their roles in unifying people and creating institutions within society, Harari writes:
 
 
“Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principals exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.”
 
 
Ideas of divine leadership, equality among all humans, human rights, or reciprocal punishment, are little more than myth. To be clear, these ideas are incredibly useful political myths, and when everyone agrees and accepts these myths a society can function well. But nevertheless, each of these ideas can be demonstrated to be an inadequate way of understanding the universe given various situations. They are not inherently and objectively accurate and correct ways to understand humans and the world we occupy, but they can be incredibly useful ways of organizing ourselves for cooperation and peaceful living within large societies. Harari continues, “It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into superiors and commoners is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth.”
 
 
Within the United States we have superiors and commoners, but we call them by different names. Business owners, managers, and landlords all fit into a category of superiors with authority over other people. We have specifically written down the ways in which they can and cannot exercise that authority, but they clearly exist within a hierarchy. We strive for a level of political equality among all people, where the law applies equally regardless of ones authority or status as a superior, but we all know that we don’t manage this process perfectly. We believe we are all equal and that one person is not more valuable or inherently better than another, but we can demonstrate that not all people are equal. For example, I don’t have a learning disability and I excelled in school, while others have dyslexia and struggled in school. I was born to a solidly middle class family which offered me a safe and enjoyable childhood, while others grew up in poverty stricken homes and others still grew up in incredibly luxurious homes that provided a great deal of opportunities for future economic success. Clearly there is no real equality either biologically or socially within our society.
 
 
What I am not trying to do with this post, and what I don’t believe Harari is trying to do in his book, is to argue that myths are bad. Instead, I am trying to demonstrate that many of the things we believe and hold as obviously or intuitively accurate, is little more than happenstance. Some ways of living and being are excellent for the current time and place, while others have been excellent in the past or will be more advantageous in the future. It is important that we recognize how much of our lives is driven by myth, so that we can adapt and be flexible where needed in how we understand and approach the world. It is easier to believe that our myths reflect an inherent reality about the universe so that we don’t have to question our beliefs, but that would be incorrect and could lead us to make essentially tyrannical decisions that belie the actual reality of the universe. We can use myths to cooperate and function in a society, but those same myths can be abused when believed too strongly or in the wrong scenarios.
Mass Cooperation Instincts

Mass Cooperation Instincts

Posted on by jabittan
The last few years in the United States have been a difficult time in terms of political disagreement. President Trump was an incredibly polarizing figure who clearly lied, made up a lot what he said, and was simply not a good president. Nevertheless, he had a huge number of supporters who liked his persona, liked that he praised their social groups, and supported him so strongly that they tried to prevent the government from certifying the election that Trump lost by rioting through the nation’s capital. The former President and those who supported him in such a fanatical manner represent a problem with human cooperation and evolution. Whether we like it or not, and whether we want to admit it or not, we still have tribal instincts that drive much of our behavior.
 
 
“The problem at the root of such calamities,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, “is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms, and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.”
 
 
In the book, Harari explains that humans have been evolving for a few million years separate from apes and other close cousins. Homo Sapiens specifically, has only existed as a distinct species of human for a couple hundred thousand years. That is an incredibly long time on the scale of a human lifetime, but in terms of evolution, it is a very short time. For the couple hundred thousand years of the existence of homo sapiens, only about 70,000 years has passed since the very beginning of the Agricultural Revolution – perhaps about one third of the full time that homo sapiens has existed. Humans went from a relatively insignificant species that lived in small tribal bands to the most dominant force on the planet in less than 100,000 years. And as I stated, this is a long time in the life of a single human, but a blip in evolutionary time.
 
 
Such a fast ascent was made possible by our incredible brains and unsurpassed adaptability. But our quick ascent has not been perfect. We have not fully evolved in a way that helps us support the world we have built and the lives we now lead. As our recent political experience demonstrates, our minds still seem to be evolved to fit within small tribal bands, not within global populaces. It is easy to be altruistic among a small group of friends and to provide aid and assistance to those you personally know or to those individuals in front of you who need life saving help. It is harder to be supportive of people you differ from culturally and it is hard to find the will to aid people across the globe who are slowly dying from preventable causes. Cooperating at large scales is difficult, and it doesn’t fit the millions of years of human evolution that came before the Agricultural Revolution. Our brains allowed for a quick ascent to dense cities and eventually metropolitan statistical areas comprised of millions of people, but that change was faster than evolution. The challenge we face today is to cooperate together and find ways of living in a world we did not evolve to fit. The challenge is to develop an instinct for mass cooperation, even if it is not biologically natural for us right now.
Advanced Planning - Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens - Joe Abittan - Stoic Thinking Contradictions

Advanced Planning

Posted on by jabittan
Within much of Stoic thinking, which I generally embrace pretty strongly, there is a contradiction between being ready for the future and focusing on the present movement. Stoicism encourages a sense of presence, of living in the present moment, being aware of ones body and ones surroundings right now, and managing and controlling the things under ones control at this moment. We cannot control the future, and cannot predict exactly what will come to pass. Within Stoic thought, all we can control is how our mind reacts to the present moment, so we should focus on how we are using our time and attention in an effort to be our best selves right now.
 
 
What this mindset leaves out, or at best inadvertently omits, is the importance of long-term planning. To get to where we want to get, to achieve goals, and to utilize our resources and energy the most effectively, we have to be able to look ahead and plan for the future. Advanced planning means we have to tie the present moment and our actions to specific steps to help us achieve future desired endpoints and outcomes. We have to form theories of the world and build causal structures to form our own mental models that tell us, “if I do this now, then a certain effect will be produced in the future.”
 
 
There is a paradox in Stoic thinking when it comes to being present. The whole idea of presence is that it enables us to be less stressed, to focus on the tasks at hand, and to bring our best selves to each moment throughout the day. The ultimate end goal of all this, however, is to better achieve future goals. Presence on its own doesn’t matter to much, unless we are ok with living a life where we drift without a long-term plan. This paradox is not limited to Stoic thought, and in some ways ties back to our ancient foraging roots.
 
 
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes about the shift in planning and thinking about the future that occurred with the Agricultural Revolution. Foragers, Harari explains, couldn’t save food for a long period of time. They could bring a handful of nuts or fruits with them, but carrying a large amount of nuts and fruits was cumbersome, and fruit would go bad quickly. Farmers, however, could produce a surplus of crops that could be harvested and saved for a longer period of time. Successful farming rewarded and required an ability to plan ahead, while foraging encouraged more thinking about the present moment. Harari writes, “in the subsistence economy of hunting and gathering, there was an obvious limit to such long-term planning. Paradoxically, it saved foragers a lot of anxieties. There was no sense in worrying about things that they could not influence. The Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important than it had ever been before.”
 
 
Our ancient foraging and farming ancestors seem to highlight the contradiction that we find in Stoic thinking of the present moment. Foragers lived in the present moment and didn’t have anxieties and concerns over the future. They moved where their food sources were and didn’t have to plan ahead too far. But they also didn’t become farmers and set human evolution on a path toward modernity. The farmers who kicked off the Agricultural Revolution were the ones who broke from living in the present moment to push humanity in the eventual direction evolution favored, building small farming communities, then towns, and eventually nations with massive metropolitan areas. Planning ahead was crucial for successful farming, even though it came with stress and anxiety, and broke against the ancient human evolved tradition of living in small foraging bands focused on the present moment. Planning ahead also helped ensure more people could survive and propelled the technological advances that enabled the Agricultural Revolution.

Evolutionary Success & Individual Experience

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari shares examples of how evolutionary success for an entire species doesn’t always mean positive things for individuals within the species. His conclusion, and the evidence of evolutionary success for humans, livestock animals, and other species, is similar to the Repugnant Conclusion, an idea common in ethical psychology. As a quick summary, the Repugnant Conclusion can be thought of in the following way. Imagine our planet has 10 billion people living, and all 10 billion people would score their happiness at a 7. If you summed up the total happiness of the planet you would get 70 billion. But imagine that our world could support the lives of 100 billion people, but only if each person had a miserable life and rated their happiness level as 1 – just barely worth living rather than not living. If you summed up the total happiness of all 100 billion people, you get 100 billion, an increase of 30 billion in terms of total happiness over the planet with 10 billion fairly happy people.
 
 
Hardly any of us would want to live in the planet where there were more living people, but almost all of them were unhappy, with lives they considered only barely worth living. But evolution doesn’t really care about happiness. Evolution seems to just care about whether lives are barely worth living, and whether genes are being passed along. Yuval Noah Harari would argue that throughout history numerous species have successfully evolved through strategies that seem to follow the Repugnant Conclusion.
 
 
When we imagine evolution, we tend to think of everything getting better. Humans, plants, and animals evolve to become bigger, faster, stronger, and better able to survive. Surely, we imagine, that means that each individual has a better life and experience than the individuals that came before it. After all, each successive generation, per evolutionary pressure, should be a better fit for survival than its predecessors. Unfortunately, we can evolve in the direction of the Repugnant Conclusion, with fitness for survival having nothing to do with actual individual level fitness and happiness. Greater numbers of individuals may be able to survive if they are all a little less happy, require a little less in terms of resources, and can better manage being crammed into a tight space. Harari writes, “this discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.”
 
 
When we think about evolution, Harari argues that, “we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience.” Today, there are far more chickens alive than at any other point in history. By evolutionary standards, chickens have done great. They continuously pass their genes along and even have another species invested in the continued survival and population growth of chickens. However, individual chickens have miserable lives, often confined to cages they cannot move around in or stand-up in. Their lives are also very short, very congested, and their deaths can be brutal. The individual experience for a chicken is about as bad as it could be, but the species as a whole is booming. Harari argues that similar things have happened in Human Evolution. We might not all be trapped in cages, but we have had changes in our species that have made the individual lives of humans worse while propelling the survival and continued evolutionary success of the species forward. Evolution does not simply mean better. It means continued survival and change in the face of challenges for survival. Sometimes the experiences of the individuals can improve, but that is not always the case.
Shepherds

Shepherds

Posted on by jabittan
“It was no accident that kings and prophets styled themselves as shepherds and likened the way they and the gods cared for their people to a shepherd’s care for his flock,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens.
 
 
I don’t like bucolic narratives and I don’t like the way that we equate people we don’t like with sheep in modern American political discussions. Bucolic romanticism requires a reductionist way of looking at history, and equating people to sheep is reductionist way of viewing anyone we disagree with and dislike. As Harari’s quote to open this post shows, both styles of rhetoric are much older than their current usage in modern American politics.
 
 
What Harari is saying in the paragraph that the opening quote came from is that some agrarian societies and ancient (and not too ancient) human civilizations treated their domesticated animals very well. Sheep were well cared for, in order to get the most wool possible from them. War horses and workhorses were well cared for, again for the benefit of humans. And even today we pamper our pets as if they were our children. The narrative of the shepherd comes from the care with which humans are capable of treating animals under their protection. A shepherd is a benevolent god who directs his flock to greener pastures and protects them from wild beasts and the evils of nature. Bucolic imagery calls up a simplistic time when humans lived in nature, protected and shielded from the evils of modernity. Combining these two perspectives allows people to feel a child-like protection under the watchful eye of a benevolent leader while we live in a natural peace and harmony with the planet.
 
 
I think the narrative associated with both narratives is deeply troubling, and untrue. David Deutsch was recently on Tyler Cowen’s podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and argued that the belief that we are living in a simulation is no different than believing that Zeus is the supreme god who directs the course of the world. His argument is that if we live in a simulation, there is a barrier at which we can no longer gain more information about the universe. A Simulation, he argues, is the same as a religion where there is a barrier at which people cannot know more about their god, the course of the universe, and why things happen. Invoking the imagery of a shepherd, to me, seems to be exactly the same. A leader comes along, invokes such a message, and says to the people they wish to lead that only they know how to help them, that there is a barrier which normal people cannot cross in terms of knowledge for what is good for them and how to live their lives. The shepherd seems benevolent, kind, and praiseworthy, but really, they are dehumanizing people. They are making statements that there is knowledge and information that only they can know and appropriately utilize, and they are hiding that from the masses. The same process happens in reverse when we call people sheep. We deny their humanity and assume they are non-thinking morons without preferences who are easily misled.
 
 
Bucolic imagery can be just as pernicious as the ideas and narratives surrounding the shepherd or equating people to sheep. Just as the idea that there is some boundary on knowledge which normal people cannot surpass, the idea of a bucolic nature to which we should return or maintain is equally flawed and inaccurate. We romanticize a past and a ‘natural’ way of living that never existed. We don’t fully understand what life with nature has been like for the billions of humans that evolved before our modern times. We fail to see the diseases, the dangers, the struggles, and the deaths of humans living in pre-modern times. We call up this idea to put people in a romantic and child-like state of mind, reassuring them that someone else will take care of them and protect them. It is a narrative that combines well with the narrative of the shepherd to create a false view of reality that we can find comforting, and that we may find the motivated reasoning to believe. Ultimately, however, I think bucolic thinking and the narratives of sheep and the shepherd should be tossed aside and discounted if we want to think more accurately and rationally. 
Luxuries, Necessities, and Agitated Lives

Luxuries, Necessities, & Agitated Lives

Posted on by jabittan
Yuval Noah Harari has taken silent meditation trips and has worked hard to increase his focus and see the world clearly. This helped him while writing Sapiens with taking an objective view of the history of humanity and describing where we were, how we got to where we are, and where we might head in the future. As someone who meditates, it is not surprising to see a criticism of modern life make its way into his book while he reflects on ancient humans.
 
 
Harari writes, “one of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.” Humans are incredibly adaptable, and often this is for our own good. Ancient humans adapted to living in set places, rather than roaming across varied landscapes at different times of the year. We can adapt to climate across the globe, adapt to changing family and tribal structures, and we can adapt to daily routines and expectations in life. This superpower, however, can have a downside. Sometimes we adapt to great new technologies and advances, viewing them not as modern marvels, but as common necessities that we cannot do without.
 
 
In modern life we are dependent on cars, dependent on smart phones, and dependent on the internet and everything connected to it. Every year we invent something new, improve some existing technology, and create something else that we are excited about, only to see that invention become commonplace. We get used to super fast communication, complain about how long it takes to travel across the country on an airplane, and become frustrated when our high expectations are not met. Increasing quality of life doesn’t seem to increase our life sanctification. Harari might argue that it diminishes it long-term. “We thought we were saving time,” Harari writes, “instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.” Luxuries become necessities and we become less flexible and patient without them. Harari may have been writing a book about ancient human history, but his views on the modern world, as someone who believes in disconnecting and taking silent meditation retreats, influenced the way he described the progress humans have made.
Slippery Slopes

Slippery Slopes

Posted on by jabittan
In American Politics, it is common to hear arguments about slippery slopes. The Republican Party will argue that any new government policy or program places the nation on a slippery slope toward complete autocracy. Civil rights lawyers will argue that any change in policy or regulation could open the door for new policies, leading to a slippery slope where the nation regresses on civil rights legislation and equality. The party is afraid that one small change will lead to a cascade of larger changes. They fear that one policy they don’t like will build momentum for larger policies that go further in what they consider the wrong direction (to be fair, this isn’t limited to the Republican Party, but as the general “anti-government” party they are an easier example).
 
 
The rhetoric is often overblown, but the truth is that there are many examples of slippery slopes in politics and in human nature more broadly. Public policy research, as well as the history of the last several years in American politics, has demonstrated that it is harder to get rid of an existing policy than to implement a new policy. The fight to pass the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was a drawn out legislative onslaught. The attempted repeal of large sections of the bill was booted from the realm of possibilities when a single senator gave a thumbs down on the Senate floor. Once a benefit is in place, once people have something, it is hard to go back.
 
 
Yuval Noah Harari shows that this isn’t just something that happens in modern politics, it is likely what happened when the very first human institutions and communities formed. The Agricultural Revolution in general helped support more people in a given space than foraging and hunting/gathering. However, it was barely a tradeoff that was worthwhile for the humans who made the first transition to cultivating crops. Their lives were less fun, their diets were worse, and while they had some protections from animals and weather, they were still vulnerable to a host of maladies that were in some instances worsened by farming and living in close proximity to other humans. But once a few generations had settled into farming, once ploughing fields had begun to increase crop yields, a slipper slope was in place, and there was no going back to foraging from farming.
 
 
Harari writes, “if the adoption of ploughing increased a village’s population from a hundred to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times?” Generally, it is hard to take away some sort of benefit (in the case of Harari’s quote the benefit is sufficient food for survival) even if it is for the good of most of the people to take the thing away. Getting rid of farming, ploughing fields, and agriculture would have returned the small human communities to foraging bands that roamed in smaller numbers but didn’t have to spend all day working to cultivate a single crop. The tradeoff may have been worth it for those who survived, but the foraging lifestyle would have supported fewer people in the tribe, and it would have been hard for everyone to abandon farming and accept that someone was going to die without enough food.
 
 
It’s worth noting that slippery slope arguments are shallow. They are often dependent on fixed or zero sum economies. They assume that people won’t make changes or adapt, and they generalize an entire population as behaving in a single way. The end point of a slippery slope is hardly ever as bad as it is made out to be at the beginning (we don’t have socialism in 2021 after all – 10 years past the passage of Obamacare). But it is true that slippery slopes do exist, and that policies and programs are harder to take back once they are in place. Slippery slopes have existed in the world of politics for a long time, and have existed within the history of humanity for even longer.