The Absurd Complexity of Society

Stories versus Systems

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The world we live in is a complicated place. Human society is the most insanely complicated system there is, and yet also the most vital to understand. Society can send rockets into space, or into its neighbour’s gardens; it can move you across the world to see sights undreamed-of by our ancestors, or move you across a dingy cell to face a short drop and a sudden stop. 

Getting on with society is such an important part of survival that one of our most primal fears is ‘social fear.’ This implies that those without fear of their tribe’s disapproval were filtered out of the gene-pool by evolutionary selection pressures.

Today, I’d like to propose a framework for understanding our complicated society. This is a meta-framework: a general way of framing the narratives that humans have used to understand each other and the world we inhabit. The ideas expressed below are not necessarily new ones — truly new ideas are rare, and often silly — but I think there is some originality in the framing, and we may argue whether it is correct or incorrect, oversimplified or overgeneralised, in the comments below.

We begin in the world of myths and legends, and take a quick tour through early Marxism, before exploring the concept of a system made up of lots of other systems. Finally, we ask what the moral implications are of a more accurate model of our complicated reality.

Heroic-Mythic Narratives

Throughout human history, we have understood the world through stories. As human society became more complicated, our stories became duly elaborate, giving rise to many intricate collections of myths and legends.

The importance of stories has been famously elaborated upon by Carl Jung (1912), whose life’s work attempted to unite stories with early psychology. Jung’s theories are largely discredited in academia, because they are not scientific. They are closer to literary analysis than psychology.

As one of Jung’s more recent exponents, the clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson explored the value of myths in his book Maps of Meaning (1999). He dichotomised human experience into the mythical and the scientific; scientific reasoning is there to understand the world as a place of things, while myths and stories are there to explain the world as a venue for action. These are the two fundamental modes of thinking by which we construe the world and ourselves, Peterson argues, into something that makes sense to us.

From this starting point, Peterson and Jung proceed to address concepts like order versus chaos, masculine versus feminine, and so on, forming increasingly speculative word-associations across the gamut of dichotomies that bisect human experience. Regardless of the many valid criticisms of Jungian psychology as an academic discipline, Jung provides a very useful idea space for authors and character ideas.

One evolutionary challenge of human progress has been the problem of uniting lots of people to participate in continued collective action: whether that be war, worship, or agriculture. I don’t believe it’s controversial to assert that the thing which has done this for millions of years is stories: heroic-mythic narratives.

In the category of heroic-mythic narratives, we can place nationalism, paganism, organised religion, the Great Man of History, and many other popular narratives. These have several features in common, for example:

• Characterisation of social forces 

Often, this takes the form of personification, such as the emergence of heroic characters like Uncle Sam, Britannia, and Helvetia. Conversely, villainous personifications have appeared in propaganda to represent peoples and nations, such as the Hun, or the Jap.

• Heroes and Villains

Story characters are important role models who show us how we should act in the world, and how we should not act. Stories generally reward heroes and punish villains, reinforcing our moral lessons — though there are exceptions.

• Origin stories for Us and Them 

Us and Them stories tend to orient groups of people in a moral universe, delineating clear boundaries between tribes and making clear distinctions about what each tribe is known for. For example, Yorkshiremen know from their origin stories that sheep on the Lancashire border will eat the grass in Yorkshire and defecate in Lancashire; people from Lancashire are thus “from wrong end of sheep.”

• Sublime good and sublime evil 

In different stories, sublime good could correspond to heaven, god, nation, or leader. Sublime evil would then correspond to hell, devil, enemy, or despot. The important thing is that there is no limit to the degree of good or evil represented, and nothing within the story that is more good or more evil.

Beyond Myth: The First Systems

Despite the power of stories, there is something which has existed with humans for almost as long: systems. A system is a set of rules and processes for organising people’s behaviour and resources.

The first examples of writing can be found in cuneiform tablets, keeping accounts of crop production and storage – a primitive but effective system. The Bronze Age societies which collapsed in circa 1200 BC were organised according to an apparently strict and rigid hierarchical system. The Roman Legion designed by Gaius Marius in 107 BC was a system for warfare, something which many of its barbarian enemies (who saw conflict as a heroic-mythic phenomenon) could not have innovated themselves.

Systems have always been with us, but when did the first meta-understanding of systems happen? In other words, when did we realise that this thing called ‘a system’ existed, and described everything from trade and taxes to laws and wars?

In Europe, that realisation may not have occurred before the Enlightenment. This attempt to wrestle our understanding of things away from God, and into the hands of Men of Reason, saw a great deal of general descriptions of natural phenomena. These included the Scientific Revolution (1543-1687) and early treatises on economics and trade. In earlier times, it took men of great cynicism, such as Machiavelli (1513), to even consider human affairs as something subject to rational study — let alone as an autonomous system.

The first to view human society as a rational phenomenon was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose concept of the ‘general will’ provided a foundation for totalitarian government on rational grounds. But the first to see society in its entirety as a totalised materialistic system was, regrettably, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx and ‘Capitalism’

Marx’s theories of capitalism and communism were revolutionary in many ways – not just literally. While many have studied the disastrous societies founded on his theories and thus deemed Marxism irredeemable, it remains a useful case study in human thought. For one thing, Marxism has captured the imagination of generations of academics and ‘elites’ in a way that heroic narratives have failed to achieve, since the early 20th Century. The catastrophe of World War One destroyed the credibility of self-contained heroic-mythic narratives in general, as far as most intellectuals are concerned.

Marx posits that the entirety of human history is rooted, scientifically, in class struggle. Class struggle is the inevitable consequence of wealth inequality, and therefore, economic forces dominate the human experience. A detailed description of the manifold evolutions of this basic principle is beyond the scope of this essay, and would require a comprehensive review of the vast, detailed theoretical frameworks that academic Marxists celebrate to this day.

We can recognise, without necessarily approving, that Marxism was a revolutionary school of thought in the 19th Century. For the first time, an apparently complete paradigm of human experience had been created outside the category of heroic-mythic narratives that had guided human endeavour for many thousands of years. The Marxist paradigm saw human experience as systemic.

Monosystemic Narratives

Scientifically speaking, the view of human activity as a system is a huge leap forward from the heroic-mythic conception. By the 19th Century, the world was dominated by imperial trade networks, with market forces determining much about the fate of individuals and nations. Even today, the global economy remains the single most important system guiding human affairs.

By understanding this economic system not on its own terms (the narratives and equations of economists) but as a social force with its own power distributions and emergent agency, Marxists sought to attain a transcendental understanding of the human world (through studying the movement of autonomous productive forces). This sort of quest is very attractive for an intellectual.

Unfortunately, the Marxist paradigm came bundled with some very problematic assumptions. One of these was the assumption that wealth inequality was fundamentally an aberration to be destroyed; another assumption was that market forces are fundamentally destructive, and that economic relations are irreducibly oppressive under a ‘capitalist system’. Combined, these created a paradigm that set its sights on the obliteration of the system: a destructive ideology that sought the ‘end of history’ within the end of capitalism.

The alternative paradigms of Socialism and Communism that Marx and his followers asserted as the inevitable, scientific response to capitalism proved even worse for the human condition than the system they sought to destroy.

A third, hidden assumption was even more fundamentally misguided. This was the reduction of all human activity to a monosystem: ‘market forces determine everything’. Even today, orthodox Marxists force themselves into contortions attempting to explain interpersonal relations in the context of capitalist economics and insidious market forces. The fact is that despite the importance of the economy, it is merely one of many systems that comprise the human experience.

Polysystems

Our world consists of many, many systems – increasingly automated by technology, rather than operated by humans. In order to launch this creative space, I’ve had to familiarise myself with lots of systems: video and audio editing software, performance metrics for cameras and lenses and microphones, Substack, the tax systems and VAT codes that apply to different types of freelance work, and so on.

Most systems are not economic in nature, even if they are affected by economic considerations: the code of manners in polite countries such as England and Japan is one such system, as is the Highway Code, or the penal code, or the telephone network, or the British Army. Each of these fits our basic definition, a set of rules and processes for organising people’s behaviour and resources.

We live, then, in a polysystem: a vast, complex hydra of rules and processes that’s comprised of many interrelated and interdependent subsystems.

Academia has in many places grown tired of orthodox Marxism, and moved on to a new moral fashion: intersectionality. At first glance, this seems like a paradigm evolution from monosystemic narratives. Intersectionalists do at least accept that there are many different systems by which one should understand the human world. However, while intersectionality is indeed a polysystemic analysis, it is a limited one, based on the same limiting principles which prevent Marxism from ever attaining an accurate picture of reality, for example:

• Human relations are power relations, revolving around victimhood and oppression

• Participating in direct action and political subversion (praxis) is essential to understand the polysystem, and to achieve ideological goals

• The assumptions of intersectionality create a class hierarchy of victims (with the ‘straight white male’ enjoying the role of primordial oppressor)

Due to these faulty assumptions, intersectionality cannot provide an accurate picture of our polysystemic world. Like all misguided ideologies, it is wilfully blind to the existence of systems which do not align with its ideological assumptions.

A proper polysystemic analysis must be self-aware when it comes to its initial assumptions. Intersectional polysystemic analysis discredits itself through ludicrous assumptions, as listed above: there is nothing insightful or academic about assuming that an entire race of people are de-facto problematic.

The Third Reich As A Polysystem

One thing you may have noticed is that as the narrative category evolves, it becomes more complicated, requiring more and more concentration to fully understand. We have moved from simple heroic stories, to an analysis of everything in terms of one system, to an analytical framework which requires the simultaneous evaluation of manifold interrelated systems. Clearly, this is no easy task.

I argue that to truly understand human society, one must recognise that we live in a polysystem. Attempting to understand global phenomena like the 2022 War in Ukraine or the 2008 Financial Crisis through a heroic-mythic narrative is futile, and monosystemic analyses like Marxist class struggle also provide little insight into these issues. One must simultaneously evaluate all the different systems at play, from political to economic to social and institutional.

The polysystemic analysis has also proven successful at evaluating problems in history, such as the question of the Third Reich. How did Hitler come to power, how did the Third Reich function, and how did both total war and genocide emerge as a result?

The simple heroic-mythic analysis, that ‘bad things happened because Nazis are bad’, is not satisfactory in explaining the scale and detail of ‘bad’, let alone linking them irreversibly to a particular moral character or personality type.

The crimes of the Third Reich took place on a colossal scale, requiring the co-operation and complicity of millions of people. The once popular view that Adolf Hitler personally presided over every crime of Nazi Germany has been largely discredited by historians, if only for the simple fact that there weren’t enough hours in Hitler’s day to account for the industrial scale of atrocities that his empire perpetrated. Historians have largely come to agreement that the guiding principle was something called ‘working towards the Führer’: soldiers and officials throughout the Third Reich were encouraged to anticipate and interpret Hitler’s wishes and act upon them, trusting that such actions would be legalised later if they weren’t already. This twisted German version of ‘what would Jesus do’ provided the guiding ideology of the Nazi state.

Nazi Germany is one of the best-studied polysystems in history, for an obvious reason: nobody wants it to happen again. The mid-century Germans kept meticulous records and notes which survived the war and provide ample material for historical analysis. By understanding how this polysystem was able to streamline industrial mass-murder, we can understand how the polysystem of modernity might also be used for evil ends.

Proliferation of Technology

One consequence of our technological revolution is the massive proliferation of different systems. This can be a benefit, allowing improved economies of scale and efficiency of action. But all this is predicated upon mass understanding of the new systems. Older generations are particularly afflicted by the need to understand new systems that replace the ones to which they have previously acclimatised – often increasing the complexity of interaction, or assuming proficiency with multiple other systems that the elderly have not yet learned.

If you want to experience this for yourself, try working out the bus or train system in a foreign country. Even where there are perfect translations, there’s a great deal of new information to get used to. When is it beneficial to buy a day ticket instead of a single journey? What about discount cards and season tickets? Or travelling at off-peak times, whenever the hell that is? Maybe it’s cheaper and faster to switch between trains and buses at one junction? How much time do you gain for the extra expense of an express ticket? Should you pay for a seat reservation, or is there likely to be space at this hour, on this route? And did I hear that announcement in German correctly – this train will no longer stop at my destination because it’s already running 40 minutes late, so please get off and change to a different train???

Taken all together, this unfamiliarity places the unwary traveller at a significant disadvantage compared to those brought up within these systems. That’s obvious, and not especially surprising. But when we consider the sheer amount of systems that comprise modern life, even a savvy customer might end up left behind. Perhaps the future’s dystopian hell turns out to be a German train network. (Again!)

The proliferation of systems is not a universal good: it is a double-edged sword. New systems can cut us out of society, as much as they cut us in – especially when the systems are badly designed. Good design should take into account the existence of the polysystem, and consider how one new process or set of rules affects the rest of the systems.

As technology increasingly erodes language barriers, system comprehension barriers are likely to become the most prominent differences between groups of people — especially when access to these systems is limited by a paid subscription model.

Disadvantages of Polysystemic Analysis

Ultimately, no matter how academic and enlightened we may wish to be, heroic-mythic narratives inevitably creep back in to our systemic frameworks for understanding the world. In orthodox Marxism, the demonisation of the bourgeoisie and sanctification of the workers’ utopia appealed to many who could not grapple with the systemic critique of capitalism. The intersectional polysystem is also predicated on the identification of heroes and villains: oppressor and victim classes.

Another disadvantage of systemic analysis is that it doesn’t provide meaning to those who use it. Heroic-mythic analyses are very good at articulating moral virtues and vices, sculpting archetypal role models for believers to emulate: they imbue the believer with a great sense of personal agency. Without some kind of heroic-mythic narrative, it is impossible to know the difference between good and evil. This is a key discovery of Friedrich Nietzsche, who even titled one of his famous works Beyond Good and Evil.

The human tragedy of modernity is that virtues are unrewarded, and vices unpunished, betraying those myths we use to orient ourselves. Rewards and punishments in a polysystem emerge from complicated interrelations of incomprehensible, antihuman systems, and might as well come out of nowhere (as far as the individual is concerned). The virtuous are struck down, and the vicious are exalted, almost at random. Our perception of individual agency and control of our own destiny turns out to be much more illusory than we might like.

Perhaps this was realised millennia ago by those religionists who emphasised success in the hereafter, recognising that the material world is callously indifferent to the morality of its inhabitants.

            “There is no good and evil, there is only Power, and those too weak to seek it.”

            — Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (by J. K. Rowling)

Conclusion: The Future of the Polysystem

As systems become more numerous, more automated, and more entrenched, the dislocation between moral virtue and life success will become more acute. It would not be surprising to see great resentment and social rancour as a result.

A polysystemic analysis will help us to understand what’s going on in the world – but it offers no moral answers as to how we should behave within it. We will need our irrational myths and problematic heroes for a long time yet.

In my own evolving polysystemic analysis of the world, I’ve come to appreciate the existence of an entity which I call ‘the New Leviathan’. This agglomeration of state, superstate, and corporate power comprises a polysystem whose tyrannical supremacy over the individual dwarfs that of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (the system of ultimate sovereign power in the ancien regime era). I hope to expand on this concept in subsequent writings.

By recognising that we live in a polysystem, and that reckless proliferation of systems is fundamentally alienating to the human experience, we can make ourselves aware of the great dangers that lie hidden within an increasingly technologised world. If we do not do this, we risk transforming our world into a horrific integrated system: a polysystem that simultaneously perpetrates, presides over, and exonerates itself of atrocities befitting the Third Reich.

While these dangers are very real, there is an enormous capacity in systematisation for the improvement of human wellbeing. There is also great potential for moral action, new myths, and future heroism. Treading this line will be an immense challenge for our generation, but with the sheer amount of human ingenuity arising from 8 billion souls, we have every chance of success.

Further Reading

In order of reference:

• Psychology of the Unconscious, by Carl Jung (1912)

• Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, by Jordan Peterson (1999)

• The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction, by John Robertson (2015)

• The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)

• The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)

• The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1842)

• Watching the English, by Kate Fox (2002)

• Working Towards the Führer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship, by Ian Kershaw (1993)

• Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling (1997)

• Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

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