On page 306 of Scale, Geoffrey West discusses Dunbar’s Law and its implication for human social networks. To summarize this law: it claims that humans have multiple levels of bonding strength. At the lowest level a human will have around five connections of the strongest type of friendship and intimacy. Typically this would include some members of one’s family or a best friend. At the next level there are around fifteen connections that are not as strong as the first level, but are still firm. This would include close friends you might talk to on a daily or weekly basis. At the next level there are about fifty connections… and so on… The numbers of connections scales by tripling the connections at each higher level. In the book the levels are labeled as: 1) Kin, 2) Super-family 3) Clan, 4) Tribe, and 5) Strangers.

When I first read this in Scale, I was immediately reminded of David Graeber’s anthropological work regarding economic relationships among humans. In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber observes on page 99-100 that baseline communism (sharing) follows a similar structure. Thus, using the terminology from above: At the kin level Graeber notes that there is much sharing between members and the relationship is baseline communism. Thus, you can extend this and map these economic relationships with those of Dunbar’s Law: 1) Kin (~5 people) : Almost all sharing with very little debt or IOU, 2) Super-family (~15 people) : IOU with a good amount of sharing, 3) Clan (~ 50 people) : Mostly IOU and little sharing, and 4) Tribe (~150 people) : Almost entirely IOU with very little sharing. Anything outside the tribe would be exchange via a cash medium except in rare occasions, such as a child falling in front of an on-coming vehicle (a person would naturally share his strength to save the child’s life). Although I may not have followed Graeber’s observations exactly I find this train of thought to be interesting as it requires one to rethink the concept of currency, exchange, and economic relationships. Indeed, Graeber’s book challenges the entire paradigm of the historical development of currency and debt by analyzing the anthropological record.

I first ran across Hidden Forces while listening to the interview with Ray Monk about philosophical mathematics. Monk’s narration on the work of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Gödel is excellent – by far one of the clearest and easiest to grasp. It was learning about these paradigms and paradoxes of mathematics via Hofstadter’s famous book which led me to start this website.

I would agree with G. Edward Griffin that conspiracy is an important force in the formation of history and is critical to understanding why events progress in various ways. However, we must be careful with attributing full power of determination to such forces. We should qualify with Bismarck’s comment that: “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.”

It is humorous that most people on the far right recommend Quigley when he mentions several times in the book that he despises them and their motives. For instance on page 1244:

The second most numerous group in the United States is the petty bourgeoisie, including millions of persons who regard themselves as middle class and are under all the middle-class anxieties and pressures, but often earn less money than unionized laborers. As a results of these things, they are often very insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally the chief recruits for any Radical Right, Fascist, or hate campaigns against any group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle-class values. … They form the major portion of the Republican Party’s supporters in the towns of America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany…

This attitude is reflected in various forms throughout the book. On the other hand, Quigley greatly supports conservatism of an interesting type; on page 1232 he says:

… we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals.

He reflects on the underlying power relationships and how they function when he continues: “So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this.” The traditions of society cannot be conserved because the power held by special interests opposes unification.

Far right people are the first to tell you about grand conspiracies like the Trilateral Commission or the Round Table groups as mentioned by Quigley. In fact, it was from a clip of Alex Jones that I learned about Quigley’s book. In my own experience both the far right and far left maintain ridiculous and unrealistic outlooks and understandings of power.

The Western Tradition, which Quigley mentions extensively, exists in his mind, if not in the real world, as a basis for all the progress and success of the people who self-identify as “Western.” He states on page 1229 that Western Traditions consist of six core fundamental ideologies:

1. There is a truth, a reality.
2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth.
3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience.
4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.
5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.
6. Thus Western man’s picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.

However, Quigley is no idealist, and his thoughts help to provide a realistic understanding of the nature of power in the hierarchies which control and function on various levels in nation-states. And he does this through a narration and analysis of “history in our time.”

The approach of Prigogine lies in understanding the importance of Poincaré Resonances on dynamics and the construction/destruction of correlations at the microscopic level. How these resonances and these correlations behave leads to macroscopic features and the breaking of time symmetry. He deals with solving these Large Poincare Systems outside of the Hilbert Space; this is a concept which is important to biology and human social sciences. Because in these fields, we are always dealing with a system (human beings) which is far from equilibrium and behaves in novel and creative ways.

In other words, life, as  a non-equilibrium dissipative structure emerging from the non-living world, needs to be studied under the auspices of “The End of Certainty.” Irreversible processes and long range correlations are critical to understanding the development of self-organization and the novelty of life.

All social sciences deal with a biological organism (humans), which is a product of non-equilibrium processes. Even Prigogine and the book itself are correlated with the mass of knowledge produced by humanity in the 20th century. In other words, his ideas and those of all scientists are subject to the same non-equilibrium dynamics which Prigogine talks about in his book. Resonances and correlations in the social sphere can lead to amazing discoveries or a lack thereof.

One subject that I think could see development from Prigogine’s ideas is economics. Economics should be considered: “The study of non-equilibirum dissipative structures created by the self-organized social species known as homo sapiens, to reproduce and adapt in the biosphere called ‘Earth.'”

What I thought about the most was the concept of correlation creation and destruction. In terms of self-organizing systems and financial markets, perhaps crashes are correlation destruction events, while bubbles are correlations spreading through time. And after a crash occurs, correlations can be created which makes a crisis even worse.

The book (really an academic paper) is an analysis based on various data which have survived the ravages of time. It looks at cycles which occurred in various regions and times in the past, including Rome, France, England, and Russia. It shows how time after time humans progress, only to regress. And this “dis-integration” may be caused by either biological constraints and/or existing political structures. There also appears to be characteristic times which tend to correspond to successive generations or every other generation. And this wave or cyclical behavior is inherent in the complex system of homo-sapiens — being a social animal who spends 20+ years acquiring the knowledge and skills of ancestors.

I can only wish that more quantitative data were available to study ancient humans; ironically it is the “dis-integrative” phases of growth where data, observations, and history are destroyed and lost forever. Perhaps the next “integrative” phase of societal growth is a function of how much information is preserved from the previous “integrative” phase (think about Library of Alexandria). Formulaic conclusions based upon detailed and consistent data extending to the remote reaches of the past may forever be lost. Sometimes this data can be cleverly reconstructed (see here). Most of the time the data can not be obtained and this should serve to emphasize the importance of preserving the Noosphere for the sake of future societies.

Perhaps they don’t realize that most developed economies, including the United States, Europe and Japan are in dis-integrative secular cycles. Any global fighting will only accelerate the descent into local unrest and civil dissidence in the developed economies. It is important to remember that World World II began around ten years after the start of the Great Depression. The current global depression, yes depression (not recession), occurred about seven years ago. History does progress in cycles, not necessarily at periodic intervals, but the highest probability of global war is in the years following a global depression. Martin Armstrong has mentioned that November 20, 2014 was a critical date in his war cycle and that 2015 and 2016 are going to be volatile years.

Looking at The Bubble Index (10,080 and 20,160 days), shows that the DJIA and S&P 500 are both still in large scale decompression phases which started in 2008-9. Similar decompression phases in The Bubble Index occurred in the late 1960’s and lasted through the 1970’s. This marked a time of great civil unrest. And if you are an Elliott Wave follower, Daneric’s blog suggests the recent bull market is a “sucker’s rally” B wave off the 2009 lows, and that a C wave is about to unfold in the Wilshire 5000 (although there are other EW blogs, such as Caldaro, which predict different outcomes). If these predictions come true we are looking at a future in the next few years of political unrest and economic volatility. Only time will tell…