The Great Iceberg Roll

On The Grand Trajectory of Human History

Key Takeaways:

1. Over the course of human history, top-down decision-making structures have gradually been inverted into bottom-up structures.

2. This proliferation of democracy has had the effect of subjugating individual egos and creating a proto-superorganism.

3. The next logical step in this transformation is the conquest by democracy of the workplace, the last bastion of top-down decision-making.

The Great Iceberg Roll

Because it’s exposed to the blazing sun, the top of an iceberg melts much faster than the bottom, which is submerged in frigid seawater. This causes icebergs’ various faces to melt at substantially different rates, dramatically altering their geometry during the melting process. When their centers of gravity reach tipping points, icebergs can be observed spontaneously “rolling over” in the open ocean, exposing their underbellies to the sun.

Human history has been undergoing an analogous inversion.

In the aftermath of the Agricultural Revolution, human society was organized into rigid, top-down structures. God-kings, whose least word was law, sat atop those early political hierarchies. Whole civilizations existed almost exclusively to glorify the egos of these rulers.

But human society has been slowly changing since then. Much like an iceberg rolling over, we’ve gradually replaced top-down decision-making structures with bottom-up management strategies. Classical Greece and Rome were the first societies to extoll the virtues of democracy. In practice, however, they excluded huge swathes of their populations, such as their slaves.

Those slave economies eventually gave way to the feudal societies of the Middle Ages. Being a peasant was a considerable improvement over being a slave. But it was still an exploitative economic arrangement. Feudal lords owned all the land and demanded a substantial percentage of its produce from anyone who worked on it.

But in 1215, English nobles forced a begrudging King John to sign the Magna Carta. That landmark document ceded some of the monarch’s power to lesser nobles. Its signing marked the beginning of the long road from feudalism to modern capitalism. That road culminated in the American and French Revolutions of the late 1700s, and the replacement of monarchies with representative governments designed to reflect the will of the people.

At this point in human history, most citizens have come to expect representation in the decision-making processes that govern their societies. As in classical Greece and Rome, reality still falls short of the democratic ideal. Our iceberg has not yet completed its roll. But the historical pattern is clear: bottom-up decision-making is slowly but surely replacing the top-down management systems of yesteryear.

Superorganism

The term “superorganism” refers to a collection of individuals who, in evolutionary terms, function as a cohesive unit. Ants, bees, and termites, for example, compete over scarce resources as colonies, not as individuals.

Superorganisms evolve out of individual organisms who bind their Darwinian fates together by acting as collectives. The evolutionary theory of endosymbiosis is a classic example. According to that theory, a large, single-celled organism once swallowed a smaller bacterium, but did not digest it, somewhere far back in the mists of evolutionary time. Instead of being consumed, the swallowed bacterium gradually evolved into mitochondria, the power plant of the cell.

Mitochondria may once have been separate organisms. But the great armies of white blood cells that patrol our bloodstreams are STILL individual organisms and, simultaneously, integral parts of all of our bodies. That makes us, to some degree, superorganisms ourselves.

The existence of superorganisms vividly illustrates how the concept of the individual is an abstraction, or a conceptual overlay. Even though our physical bodies are composed of myriad life forms, we regard each other as if we’re individuals. It’s a useful fiction. The mental conception of self, or the ego, is not a concrete reality. It’s an economic convention for resource management that can be transcended.

Democracy at Work

The idea of democracy is encapsulated in the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei which means “voice of the people, voice of god”. It means that many hands on the steering wheel of a metaphorical “ship of state” yields superior outcomes than any one person doing all the steering themselves. In other words, the will of God is supposed to make itself known by averaging together as many minds as possible in the decision-making process.

Since no one person gets to have everything their own way, having many hands on the ship’s wheel is also a bulwark against economic exploitation. Accordingly, as our iceberg slowly rolls over, human society has become gradually less exploitative. Economic relations between the upper and lower classes have become far more equitable than they ever were under Bronze Age god-kings. And a good deal less exploitative than they were during the feudalism of the Middle Ages.

Modern democracy remains a far cry from the ideal of vox populi, vox dei. But extrapolating this historical trend into the future suggests that human society will continue getting more equitable over time. And an obvious way for our iceberg to continue its roll is the imposition of democracy in the workplace.

The specific nature of US history causes Americans to profess an allergy to “taxation without representation”. Most citizens of modern industrial democracies would agree with the sentiment. But, paradoxically, the same citizens remain oddly tolerant of autocratic, top-down decision-making structures at their workplaces.

Changing the capitalist ownership structure of business is a silver bullet that promises to alleviate our most chronic economic problems. The offshoring of our manufacturing capacity, for example, is a symptom of private ownership. Workers in a democratically-run factory would never vote to fire themselves and move their business overseas in a bid to boost profits.

Pollution of the environment and the underpayment of desperate workers are two other profitable strategies that collective decision-making would curtail. For collective business-owners, profits are broadly distributed, and only one variable among many to be carefully managed.

But for private business-owners, concentrated profit is the overarching raison d’être. The world’s biggest companies are run by shareholders who are totally divorced from the production process. Their involvement is limited to dispatching proxies to board meetings, with instructions to extract the maximum possible return on investment.

Conclusion

To view history through the lens of democracy is to see the grand trajectory of the human story as an ascension out of the prison of ego and into a superorganism with the “voice of God”. That voice is hidden from our individual minds, just as our minds are hidden from the individual white blood cells patrolling our bodies. Nonetheless, like white blood cells, we’re part of a larger whole. The transition from top-down, egoic decision-making to bottom-up democracy is part of a historical quest to graduate from the glorification of individual egos. Human destiny, therefore, lies in transcendence of the illusion of self.

Further Materials

A worker-coop based economy—where workers democratically run enterprises, deciding what, how and where to produce, and what to do with any profits—could, and likely would, put social needs and goals (like proper preparation for pandemics) ahead of profits. Workers are the majority in all capitalist societies; their interests are those of the majority. Employers are always a small minority; theirs are the “special interests” of that minority. Capitalism gives that minority the position, profits and power to determine how the society as a whole lives or dies. That’s why all employees now wonder and worry about how long our jobs, incomes, homes and bank accounts will last—if we still have them. A minority (employers) decides all those questions and excludes the majority (employees) from making those decisions, even though that majority must live with their results.
Professor Richard Wolff, Counterpunch Magazine, 2020