Thinking a bit more about your government-related examples, it seems like one problem is that you don’t specify how exactly the notion of “exploiting” translates from the animal world into human relations. Those forms of exploitation that are a clear analogy of animal predatory behavior (e.g. robbery and plunder) are normally illegal in any organized human society and done openly only by rogue criminals. When they’re done by organized and persistent structures, rather than outlaw individuals, they’re typically given a pretense of a mutually beneficial relationship (e.g. extortionists claiming to sell “protection”).
Now, the question is: since the social arrangements that appear exploitative by some criteria will normally be backed by at least some theoretical pretense of mutual benefit, how can we discern to what extent such pretenses are false in each particular case? Moreover, since it’s unlikely that any human relations will be purely exploitative or mutualistic in any meaningful sense, how to devise a reasonable measure by which we can rate concrete arrangements on this scale, without any unjustified subjective judgments of whose situation is better or worse? In any case, it seems to me that the approach taken in your “Government” section is too simplistic to be useful.
One idea in my essay is that it’s easier to look at the structure, and see what type of relationship it’s compatible with, than to evaluate how exploitative the relationship is. Feudalism’s relationships were claimed to be mutually beneficial. You could spend a lot of time arguing whether that was the case; or you could just look at the structure, and say, “Hmm, evidence against.”
Evidence against what, exactly? My point is that compared to the typical conflicting relationships between living things studied by biologists, which can often be accurately described in terms of the standard patterns of predator/prey, parasite/host, etc., human relationships are usually too complex to make correct analogies with such simple patterns. To take a prominent example, simplistic biological analogies between human societies and non-human species have traditionally been a rich source of mind-killing political propaganda—just think of various occasions when some identifiable group was called “parasitic” by their political enemies.
Therefore, if you want to analyze feudalism or some other historical social order in terms of analogies with non-human species, you should explain why you believe that the analogies are applicable. I’m not dismissing your basic idea as fundamentally unsound—but I do believe that humans represent a very large evolutionary step over other species, enough to make many universal rules about non-human organisms inapplicable to humans, or applicable only under complex conditions and assumptions. In particular, it seems to me that while the notions of “exploitation” versus “mutual benefit” are fairly easy to define for (most?) non-human species, the way they should be generalized to human societies is not at all obvious.
Feudalism’s relationships were claimed to be mutually beneficial.
They did have benefits, and those benefits seem to fit in nicely with the model you presented. What the exploiter (lord, baron, earl, king, etc) gives to the subject is protection from other exploiters who may be worse or who at very least will be ‘more’. Even enforcing laws would just be modelled here as preventing exploitive relationships. If Y is exploited by X then X will benefit from killing potential exploiter Z. This is a ‘mutual benefit’ in the X-Y relationship but it does not suggest ‘mutualistic’, in the defined sense.
Thinking a bit more about your government-related examples, it seems like one problem is that you don’t specify how exactly the notion of “exploiting” translates from the animal world into human relations. Those forms of exploitation that are a clear analogy of animal predatory behavior (e.g. robbery and plunder) are normally illegal in any organized human society and done openly only by rogue criminals. When they’re done by organized and persistent structures, rather than outlaw individuals, they’re typically given a pretense of a mutually beneficial relationship (e.g. extortionists claiming to sell “protection”).
And, of course, ‘taxation’. It does seem that all the exploitive groups (such as the government and mobs) put a lot of work into preventing other groups from having similar relationships with their prey.
One simple heuristic i could think of is what would happen the “prey” agents in the system gained a small increase in intelligence/optimization power. Does the relationship increase in quantum or decrease? If its exploitative, it would decrease, if it is mutually beneficial, it would increase.
Thinking a bit more about your government-related examples, it seems like one problem is that you don’t specify how exactly the notion of “exploiting” translates from the animal world into human relations. Those forms of exploitation that are a clear analogy of animal predatory behavior (e.g. robbery and plunder) are normally illegal in any organized human society and done openly only by rogue criminals. When they’re done by organized and persistent structures, rather than outlaw individuals, they’re typically given a pretense of a mutually beneficial relationship (e.g. extortionists claiming to sell “protection”).
Now, the question is: since the social arrangements that appear exploitative by some criteria will normally be backed by at least some theoretical pretense of mutual benefit, how can we discern to what extent such pretenses are false in each particular case? Moreover, since it’s unlikely that any human relations will be purely exploitative or mutualistic in any meaningful sense, how to devise a reasonable measure by which we can rate concrete arrangements on this scale, without any unjustified subjective judgments of whose situation is better or worse? In any case, it seems to me that the approach taken in your “Government” section is too simplistic to be useful.
One idea in my essay is that it’s easier to look at the structure, and see what type of relationship it’s compatible with, than to evaluate how exploitative the relationship is. Feudalism’s relationships were claimed to be mutually beneficial. You could spend a lot of time arguing whether that was the case; or you could just look at the structure, and say, “Hmm, evidence against.”
Evidence against what, exactly? My point is that compared to the typical conflicting relationships between living things studied by biologists, which can often be accurately described in terms of the standard patterns of predator/prey, parasite/host, etc., human relationships are usually too complex to make correct analogies with such simple patterns. To take a prominent example, simplistic biological analogies between human societies and non-human species have traditionally been a rich source of mind-killing political propaganda—just think of various occasions when some identifiable group was called “parasitic” by their political enemies.
Therefore, if you want to analyze feudalism or some other historical social order in terms of analogies with non-human species, you should explain why you believe that the analogies are applicable. I’m not dismissing your basic idea as fundamentally unsound—but I do believe that humans represent a very large evolutionary step over other species, enough to make many universal rules about non-human organisms inapplicable to humans, or applicable only under complex conditions and assumptions. In particular, it seems to me that while the notions of “exploitation” versus “mutual benefit” are fairly easy to define for (most?) non-human species, the way they should be generalized to human societies is not at all obvious.
They did have benefits, and those benefits seem to fit in nicely with the model you presented. What the exploiter (lord, baron, earl, king, etc) gives to the subject is protection from other exploiters who may be worse or who at very least will be ‘more’. Even enforcing laws would just be modelled here as preventing exploitive relationships. If Y is exploited by X then X will benefit from killing potential exploiter Z. This is a ‘mutual benefit’ in the X-Y relationship but it does not suggest ‘mutualistic’, in the defined sense.
And, of course, ‘taxation’. It does seem that all the exploitive groups (such as the government and mobs) put a lot of work into preventing other groups from having similar relationships with their prey.
One simple heuristic i could think of is what would happen the “prey” agents in the system gained a small increase in intelligence/optimization power. Does the relationship increase in quantum or decrease? If its exploitative, it would decrease, if it is mutually beneficial, it would increase.