I’ve always been a libertarian, and so naturally take to the wisdom of designing government in such a way that it’s self-limiting, self-correcting, and so on.
And although I have some natural appreciation of the dangers of mass hysteria (as I discuss here), it simply never occurred to me before Covid hysteria hit us that government should primarily be structured to avoid mass hysteria per se.
We all have a good feel for how politicians, branches of government, provincial governments, or whatever, can end up striving for more power, and to line either their own or their powerful constituent’s pockets.
Government should obviously be structured to minimize the damage from these human tendencies. Governments should be avarice-robust.
But I don’t think it is nearly as intuitive to most of us that mass hysteria sweeping across government is an entirely different kind of threat, and a much more serious one (when it happens). Governments clearly therefore also need to be hysteria-robust.
A government optimized for avarice-robustness is almost certainly not optimized for hysteria-robustness, and vice versa. So, what we need to do is to find structural forms of government that are pretty well optimized for both (and preferably to the extent that either is a risk, a relative risk we don’t really know).
I don’t have any research to show you in this regard, but there’s one facet of mass hysteria that makes hysteria-robustness really hard to do. Part of the reason our standard separation-of-power notions work is because there’s at least a somewhat competitive relationship between different parts of government. They’ll tend to have views opposed to one another, or at least somewhat independent of one another, at least quite often. Those differing view and aims will help it all balance out.
But when a mass hysteria hits, the entire network of people is swept up into it, and they all end up on the same page all at once in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.
You can put a hundred layers of separated powers supposedly keeping check on one another, and it will mean nothing if they’re all in 100% agreement on the same super important righteous thing that “we all have to do right now or we’re totally evil like those unclean people we don’t want to be associated with.”
Whatever clever incentives and conflicting interests and firebreaks and oversight you put on it is all for naught. The whole system just begins to do as shown below…
So, forget about the more complicated question of how to simultaneously get avarice-robustness and hysteria-robustness.
Just figuring out how to get some degree of hysteria-robustness is the real question!
Ultimately, one minor suggestion I have is that governments meet more in person. Real social networks — i.e., with real people meeting in real life showing their real emotional expressions — don’t fail in the way that online social media networks utterly failed in March of 2020, which pushed us into this mass hysteria.
As I talk about in the Moment video below, our emotional expressions are our human way to negotiate our differences. Our emotional expressions amount to bets of reputation, which we then lose if we’re wrong. And it’s our reputation that makes us worth listening to. (This is also the topic of my upcoming, sixth, book, EXPRESSLY HUMAN, available for pre-order at Amazon.)
But that only works when our interactions have the full range of emotional expressions we evolved to possess. Social media is lacking them. I’d like to get social media “fixed” in this way, so that it doesn’t function in a “sick” fashion, but, instead, serves to track in a decentralized way our reputations, the way we evolved to do in real life social groups. That’s another story.
Here the point is that by having government leaders physically together, their full emotionally expressive machinery is in place, and the interactions occur leading to healthy social-network behavior, so to speak. And they’re less likely to fall into a hysteria in the first place.
That said, that won’t help if they fall into a mass hysteria at home on Facebook and watching CNN, in which case when they later do their government in-person meet-up, they’re all on the same page and it’s too late. (That’s why this suggestion I prefaced as “minor”.)
The real firebreak is that each politician individually commits himself or herself to
(1) being aloof, and
(2) having a firm commitment to civil liberties, rule of law, free expression, and informed consent.
Yes I agree we need to find hysteria-robust forms of government. The more I reflect and observe people the stranger it becomes. Just now I watched a chap saying "as soon as you appeal to loony bin Nazi comparisons you've lost any rational argument" (that's paraphrased but fair I think). And yet, in the 20th century we can find at least 3 events (Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Cultural Revolution) in which millions of people were caught up in *something* -we can call whatever we want; let's call it mass psychosis.
Now given that this happened, how in the world is it irrational to assume it might happen again? I think there's a hidden moral assumption, which is that the Nazis were sub-human - we in the modern, clever, technologically advanced liberal democracies are better people than the Nazis, we are inherently immune to behaving as they did, and as such it is in fact immoral and crazy to even compare us.
Which if course is precisely one of the underlying psycho-social conditions that led to the behaviour of past mass psychosis; othering another group of humans.
As soon as you rule out any hypothesis about the world a priori you've lost the rational argument.
Maybe we should look at it like this: "given the risk of mass psychosis and the difficulty of detecting a mass psychosis before it develops to the point where atrocities are committed, the burden of proof is on the person claiming we *aren't* in a mass psychosis at any point in time". It certainly can't be assumed at the outset that *we* would never turn into the monsters that *they* did.