Shrink thinking: are countries really like people?
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
Particularly grating is the common parlance that countries X and Y are "friends" or "enemies". This may have made sense in the world of monarchical empires, but in modern nations it is at best a rough summary of the collective attitude of an elite. The bulk of the population in each country is unlikely to care at all about the other. And there is likely to be a significant dissent about whether friend or enemy should characterize the relationship.
Is it really that much harder to name the person who proposed the policy or who ordered the action?
When people think at that level of abstraction they don't care about the "will of the people" of the other country, they care about what the other country can do (does) to theirs, and that's mostly based on the will of its elite.
So it makes sense to ignore the "will of the people" when considering a country friendly or not.
>Is it really that much harder to name the person who proposed the policy or who ordered the action?
Well, the persons are often replaceable or insignificant the elite has people doing its work in politics etc, but it's not like some specific person is the embodiment of being the "enemy" of another country the elite wants to attack.
Not so long ago, the United States went to war: the state went to war. Iraq went to war: the country went to war.
Perhaps the bulk of the population in each country doesn't matter then, as far as the country's relation with other countries and friendly or enemy actions are concerned?
You say this made sense in the world of "monarchical empires" -- but then "the bulk of the population in each country" was even more unlikely to care at all about the other.
If anything, the bulk of the population in modern countries votes, and so, whatever their country's behaviour is to other countries, is more of their responsibility than it ever was in "monarchical empires".
I think the difference in sizes between the organizational groups of different countries goes a long way towards explaining the vast differences in political flavor. How many people are in the smallest political constituency you identify with? Dozens? Hundreds? Millions? This is the range of scales we're dealing with.
What would it look like if we layered government so that at no level was any group larger than tribal size (~150)? In the US you'd only need 4 levels to cover the entire population, roughly corresponding to: neighborhood (150 people), town (~20,000 people), city/state (3-4 million people), country (327 million people). At that scale, each representative can be on friendly personal terms with a) everyone in the constituency they represent and b) every other representative at their level. So the access to government ought to be much better with this system. In the US, local and federal governments are divided - there's not a lot of continuity between the town government and your friendly local congressperson.
Related the disturbing root of the problem has been historically been not just the leadership that is objectively terrible and accepts bad outcomes for the sake of hurting the other but that frankly the people and the values they hold dear. Storm Thurgood even admitted that he tried running on things which would actually help them and got no real interest but running on racism propelled him forward.
For the US Senate, N=100 and IQ = 50.
Do you have any rules for nested groups?
A nested model may be difficult because at N=10 or less, the IQ depends a lot on the selection of the individuals and their fit with the tasks to be undertaken.
A nested governmental organization would be a good idea, and that is my impression of how the US worked early in its history. The voters would elect town officials who would elect county officials who would elect state legislators and at least in the case of the Senate, the state legislators would elect US Senators. Ideally the electors at each level would be able to assess the abilities and character of candidates and the cream would rise to the top. This is sort of how the two political parties still work, although the modern methods of getting elected and penchant for direct democracy enable candidates to run for offices without working their way up the party, e.g. Bloomberg.
That kind of math led to the greatest financial collapse in world history.
When an emotional undercurrent or specific attitude is present in a population- be it the result of current events or of a longstanding cultural heritage, then it will reflect at state level. Thinking of interpreting history as the result of external conditions and the choices of few people in power is like trying to interpret the behaviour of a person as the combination of external events and individual neurons firing.
- where is the state kept, and
- where is the state mutated?
There is some state kept in objects like books and buildings and databases.
But the individual human brains are the greatness/shame of the nation.
There is a cognitive crutch "The American People" that is frequently leaned on, but the large the population symbolically aggregated for the assertion, the less meaningful it seems.
Hence my disagreement when someone says:
> I have very little doubt that countries are like their own people.
It gets really hard to make any point stick at scale.
Unless backed up with really good polling data, the phrase is total nonsense.
It's a flag indicating: "hogwash".
On the other hand, when politicians say "the people want it" it's almost always bs. What they mean is that, in the best case, they have a slight absolute majority- but often only a relative one. But that doesn't really count much- the issues they talk about are already within the frame of what is culturally possible in that country. Trump was elected with less than 50% of the votes, so he doesn't represent "the people"; however, he would have struggled to get 5% in Germany- so in some sense electing Trump does represent "the American people"- about as much as Hillary Clinton does.
There are more lines you could draw against the title, but the content of the article is so narrow I don't know which would be the most productive to add.
The culture and character of a nation is a useful guide stone for the beginning of any expectations one could have interacting with said country.