How can an individual, possessing limited information and abilities, make a difference globally?

Strange as it may seem, one place to begin in answering this question is by looking to the behavior of ants. Science Daily reports on a study of utility maximization—basically making the most advantageous possible choice—among ants. This study finds that: “…researchers at Arizona State University and Princeton University show that ants can accomplish a task more rationally than our – multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed – selves. “ The study’s authors continue: "This paradoxical outcome is based on apparent constraint: most individual ants know of only a single option, and the colony's collective choice self-organizes from interactions among many poorly-informed ants…”

In an ant colony all individuals are members of an organized, integrated, highly interactive society. As such they continuously engage in collective decision making. A single ant is nearly mindless, and possesses little knowledge or information. However, rational decision-making emerges out of the constant interactions between many ants, sometimes at or above the human level.

I have already written extensively on the scientific miracle of emergence, so I will not go into detail here, other than to note that emergent properties are collective properties—they emerge out of the interactions of their constituent elements or members. Emergent properties cannot be reduced to the sum of their constituent parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We see this principle of emergence vividly illustrated by the powerful, rational, utility maximizing emergent group-mind of an ant colony.

Similarly, human individuals are members of an interlocking, nested set of groups ranging from family, and friend networks, through ever larger political and economic systems, until ultimately the nested aggregate of all of these smaller constituent systems produces our overall global political economy. One clear difference between human and ant systems lies in their degree of organization.

Ants, like humans do specialize to maximize emergence—some ants even engage in agriculture and raising livestock—for example, to say nothing of enslaving rival ants, and fighting wars for territory and resources. Ants possess a social order for each colony in which each individual member is constantly participating in collective decision-making. Each individual ant’s input is considered in making group decisions. Each ant is wholly bound by the colony’s ultimate collective decision. There is no individualism. Each ant effectively functions as an integral part of a collective organism.

This manifestation of organized complexity is clearly environmentally sustainable, since ants have existed for perhaps 160 million years. Unlike us, ants coexisted with dinosaurs for nearly a hundred million years.  And they are still here, which demonstrates that the high emergence arising from organized complexity provides immense survival value. Like humans, ants exist all around the world, and their long period of evolutionary success demonstrates the robustness of their emergent complexity as an organizational principle.

Ants work for the collective good of the entire group. They live within the energy and resource constraints imposed upon them by nature. Still, they demonstrate that high degrees of organized complexity, including large “urban” centers (ant nests), agriculture, specialization of labor, etc., are not inherently unsustainable.

Complex groupings succeed because they take full advantage of a fundamental property of nature: emergence. This is the source of their success. However, not all forms of complex society are necessarily viable. Those that prioritize short-term gain of the few at the expense of the many, in the long-term are non-viable—human society, for example.

Unlike ants, among human societies, most people are effectively shut out from meaningful participation in group decision-making. Human societies that maximize individual input into group decision-making—democracies—possess an edge over those which minimize it. However, due to factors such as capture of their political systems by non-democratic economic actors (corporations), meaningful input to group decision-making is limited to a very few individuals. Additionally, corporate control over the mass media means that most members of even democratic societies have little idea of what is actually going on. And of course humans are fragmented into numerous, often antagonistic, societies. These factors constrain our potential for true emergence, thereby stunting our potential mental growth, and limiting our options for effective action when crises arise.

Because humans, unlike ants, are individualistic, the loyalty of most humans usually lies with maximizing their own self-benefit. This is particularly true for corporations—which exist solely to create private gain. In theory, this is mitigated by government, which exercises a counterbalancing effect by providing public goods. However, around the world, as I’ve noted, governments have effectively been captured by global corporations.

Thus, human society from the global level down to the local one is predicated upon utility maximization for the few, and without much regard for the interests of the many. The planetary web of life within which this exploitative society is nested is taken for granted by subjective, corporate-generated reality consensus. If this essential planetary web of life is thought about at all, it is considered as an endless source of raw materials, and an infinite sink for manufactured waste products.

As we pollute our “nest” and use up our resources, human-organized complexity, unlike that of ants, is unquestionably unsustainable as it is presently organized.

Obviously humans are not ants. Ants’ selflessness arises from their near mindlessness—there’s little there to generate a sense of self. Conversely, human selfishness arises from our far more powerful minds which are quite effective at producing a vivid sense of self. It follows that an organized complexity composed of humans cannot be integrated together in the same way as that of the ants. What does not follow is that an organized complexity of humans cannot exist sustainably.

Sustainable human complexity requires several things:

1)       That we expand our consciousness to embrace all other humans and to see ourselves as existing within the Earth’s ecology, upon which we are dependent. We must change ourselves fundamentally in this regard. Infant humans assume that they are the center of the universe, but growing up entails learning that this is not so. What we must do is to grow up a bit more as a species. We must not only realize that there are others, but that we must act cooperatively with these others, and with nature. Further developing our powers of observation and abstraction can help considerably to facilitate this growth as I’ve recently written about in my essay “Consciousness and Complexity.”

2)      Ant colonies are interlinked by a web of pheromones which link all of its members together in an information sharing network. Global organization of humanity requires that we do the equivalent by linking humanity together in a truly worldwide web—a global internet. This web must allow for not only information sharing, but collective decision-making. Ultimate human decision-making must occur at the global level, though each individual’s input will necessarily be based upon local information available to that individual. Optimal decisions will emerge from the collective decision-making process.

3)      The energy base of global society must be sustainable. I believe that a fundamentally critical component of an energy system is that it must allow for the global distribution of renewably produced power. This will make the welfare of all humans dependent upon sharing with all other humans, in addition to allowing for the most efficient usage possible of energy. I believe that the most expedient method for setting up a planetary power-sharing grid is to place wire mesh microwave reflectors into geosynchronous orbit and relay power around the world via beamed microwaves. I’ve recently addressed this topic in my essay entitled “Pi in the Sky.”

How to make all of this happen? First, realize that today’s existing worldwide system of organized complexity (the global political economy) is self-doomed. Like Rome, it will fall, and it will cease to exist. No outside force need be brought to bear to cause this result—it is the now inevitable result of human selfishness and avariciousness becoming the fundamental and unsustainable organizing principle for humanity.

What we must do is to consciously change ourselves, while networking as densely and interactively as possible with others, to create linked, interactive nodes of organized complexity around the world, and arising from our local level organization.

As the old unsustainable order collapses of its own weight of built-in self-contradictions, all those who are aware enough to seek an alternative will be drawn into our counter-complexity. The collapse of the old society, terrible and destructive as it will be, will “inflate” the new one—but only if this alternative social complexity already exists.

That is where each of us comes in—each of us must create a local level node of alternative organization. This node should be interlinked with many others.

If we do nothing, tomorrow will be a nightmare that may forever end civilization as we know it. Even if we act, and act effectively, tomorrow may still be a nightmare—though perhaps less so than would otherwise have been the case. However, the day after tomorrow, might see the full emergence of a truly humane planetary organized complexity which is humane, personally fulfilling, and above all, environmentally sustainable, for ages to come.

One organizational advantage humans could potentially possess over ants is to become a conscious planetary species. All humans everywhere would be integral members of this globally organized human complexity.

As we were admonished by Proverbs 6:6, consider the ant: it has flourished for 160,000,000 years! Let us take that as a challenge to see whether we humans, with our large brains, can do as well or even better in the eons to come.