Human Herd Dynamics

The fields of psychology, sociology, and political science should be fused into the field of human herd dynamics (with biology and engineering serving auxiliary roles).

"A riot is the language of the unheard." Martin Luther King Jr.




The chaos engulfing London currently would not come as a surprise to anybody looking at human (domesticated primate) migration patterns. Until recently England had a colonial release valve for the aggressive intuitive humans on the home islands. They simply picked up and left to escape the intolerable, stifling, and pretentious exploitation by depraved hereditary mafia.

The more "cooperative" breeds, those physiologically predisposed to conservative status quo mindset (SJs) thus became a bit more represented in the population as they bred. They remained behind and further fortified the societal structure. Social pressure within bottom castes of the herd hierarchy was effectively and continuously relieved.

That is until the adventurous ENTJs/ENTPs/ENFPs/ESTPs from former colonies began to migrate to England in the second half of the 20th century. They bred and produced a couple of generations of children that were radicalizing and destabilizing by their very existence (much like sending a team of dog breeds deemed "disloyal" by their masters into a group of "loyal" breeds).

[sidenote: It is very well possible that experiment-prone, novelty seeking, intuitive, and aggressive breeds leaving acted as a brain drain for the lower and middle classes of 1880s-1960s England. Drawing mostly from the "posh" semi-inbred higher society for scientists and theorists may have contributed to technological and ideological stagnation in 20th century England. Not mentioning the social mobility rankings that are even worse than in US and Mexico.]

Why Human Herd Dynamics (HHD)?

None of this analysis would be possible without interdisciplinary integration of social-psychology and other fields. It is 2011 AD. The time is ripe to:

1) Do a dissective and pragmatic "audit" of various major soft science fields to see which deserve to exist at all
2) Strip away the fluff from those that should exist to make them easier to relate to each other in an interdisciplinary manner, "modularize" them
3) Fuse the reformed stripped fields into one field where possible

Lets do an opening shot in this long overdue process.

The field of economics should not exist anymore and should be replaced by engineering completely (president or prime minister having a panel of engineering advisors instead of economic ones). Engineering IS real economics. Additionally, engineering deals with expanding the material power of the herd (unlike the obsolete 20th century pseudo-science of economics). Finally, lets kick this worthless discipline while its down one more time and say that "auditing" economics will do a lot more good than auditing entities like the federal reserve. We'd be treating the root of the problem rather than the symptoms.

This brings us to dealing with another economy, the economy of power within the multiplicity of the human herd. This means a) political science (the science of perception creation/management, a sister field to marketing as it is known in eastern Europe), b) sociology (the healthy kind that studies the entire herd with focus on movers and shakers rather than current sociology which serves as a spying apparatus for power elites) and c) psychology (positive psychology aided by biology rather than the current corporate quackery that is negative psychology).

Perhaps our old friend Nietzsche can help us somewhat with this since he was one of the first to describe the social world in a purely physical and biological way. A couple quotes naturally:

"All unity is unity only as organization and co-operation--just as a human community is a unity--as opposed to an atomistic anarchy, as a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity." 561 (1885-1886)

"In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination. In place of "society," the culture complex, as my chief interest (as a whole or in its parts)." 462 (Spring-Fall 1887)

We can see how sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science can be merged into one as they're all fused on their periphery already. What's left and doesn't fit is to be swallowed up by fields like history and marketing. Political Ponerology and Between Two Ages are good examples of how all encompassing disciplinary fusion can be done. HHD would naturally have a human as the smallest unit of analysis and total planetary population as the largest.

In essence HHD would look at:

1) How various breeds originate, develop, maintain, and expand clusters of force within the total herd
2) How these clusters of force interact with each other and the rest of humanity, what basic patterns of power arrangements occur
3) How clusters of force should be arranged within regional political units and the global unit as a whole. In this we would be guided by biology and engineering as they show us the needs of humans and the most efficient way to fulfill these needs via a 21st century version of utilitarianism (one which takes into account not just the individual's need for pleasure but also for personal autonomy and power)

HHD makes it harder to get volunteers for WW3

Before the reader accuses the Human Herd Dynamics study as something Aldous Huxley would dream up, it is key to know that our rulers already research and make practical use of HHD informally. Currently, the fusion of various fields is well on the way and we're just speeding up the existing processes via an organizational and linguistic streamlining. Of course it would also unleash mass popular dissemination of "forbidden" knowledge as key intuitive connections that scholars make will be sped up due to merging of the fields. In turn, we'll see healthy and major transformative ripple effects on society, political institutions, shared values, individual's self-appraisal, popular movements, etc. Considering the challenges and evolutionary leaps that await us in the decades ahead, the simplification, streamlining, holistic merging, popularization, and democratization of the soft sciences is a top priority for peacefully building the technocratic world of tomorrow. HHD can thus become a self referential discipline that affects and is affected, that illuminates yet evolves with us in a mutually enriching way.

Human Psychological Motivation as Will to Power?

Exploring the world where the primary motivation is desire to modify one's environment rather than the motivation to pursue pleasure. 



Part 1: An attempt to finally make practical use of Nietzsche in day to day life




Imagine if the greatest human motivation was not to move towards the ambiguous elusive goal of greater happiness, pleasure, physiological equilibrium, or contentness. How would the way we look at the world and ourselves change?

The building assumption in this series is that the most important motivation for a human being is to endlessly expand personal influence over conscious reality. This simple concept, most elegantly defended and argued by Nietzsche, has a surprisingly large ripple effect on day to day matters if it is taken seriously and if pursuit of happiness is subordinated to it. This is because most of the world's cultures have succumbed to the idea that all our resources and values should be geared towards reducing the frequency of unpleasant events happening to us on social and individual level. This notion is so ingrained in us that it almost seems absurd that something other than pain avoidance principle drives our bodies subconsciously. Many of popular economic and political systems are designed with the notion that human beings are but utility calculators that need a proper utility distribution arrangement. Pleasure and pain are just too obvious and immediate and have been so for thousands of years. However, pain avoidance does not sufficiently explain a large part of human social behavior as well as weakness avoidance does.

This is not some masochistic attempt to argue for embracing suffering but about re-prioritizing pleasure to secondary supporting role in pursuit of power so as to explore the world that results in a practical way. Nietzsche trailblazed in terms of revealing that historical events, notable celebrities, and social movements all thrive for power in creative ways such as sublimation. He never left any practical suggestions on how to live in a world where people just differ in their particular means of increasing strength. Recently, there has been some major understanding among researchers (such as those driving the field of positive psychology) that feeling of powerlessness is a major social as well as an individual trouble that needs to be addressed.

Human interactions begin to make a lot more sense and seem less irrational when we look at every human agent as being driven to greater and greater influence over his or her environment. Patterns of strategic behaviors emerge that are more enduring and predictable than ones emerging in quest of a new pleasure fix. This is due to the key difference between the two motivators.

The moment of happiness, once had, can't really be increased but only repeated whereas influence can be increased practically infinitely. Power builds on itself and a self reinforcing motivating loop is created pushing a person toward greater heights. Unlike pleasure, there isn't a relative ceiling (a meth addict can only experience so much in a moment of a high and an orgasm cannot be exponentially intensified). Once a person accumulates more influence, it doesn't paralyze but instinctively encourages the use of said influence for gain of more. Influence is thus constructive, creative, and the feel for it is internalized within a person long enough to lead to constant augmentation of the self.

A ready objection may await a reader's lips, "obviously some power is important to function but isn't it just one of the means towards happiness and its repetition?"

This question makes power just a tool towards some end which does not maintain primacy over the end regardless of the tool's importance. The objection has more weight than possible others in that it tries to eliminate debate on power being an alternate destination by making it one of the roads towards the only destination that matters (happiness). One motivation becomes consumed and absorbed by another. The ground is also set to prepare a counter-objection (in defense of power) for a tug of war.

The counter objection goes as follows: just like the joy of eating compels human bodies to survive and just like the joy of sex compels them to reproduce, the happiness achieved from power compels us to seek more power. The happiness we think we seek is just a possible side effect reaffirming our quest for influence. Just like survival and reproduction are more important physiologically than any fleeting joy, power is equally necessary especially considering it increases the chances of the two.

The tug of war of motivations created here is of course the chicken or the egg problem. We could argue endlessly which came first or if the feel of having power is pleasurable (making the two motivations one and the same or making power the subcategory of happiness).

Ultimately, the practical guide using the more correct motivational system would better predict, break down, and explain human interaction while taking into account the other motivation popping its head here and there.

Unlike other serious motivations such as pursuit of wealth (which is culturally agreed to aid in acquisition of happiness rather than being an end in itself), the feeling of influence over the world is internalized by a person a lot more than the feeling of being wealthy. Another lesser difference is that power is a lot more contextual than pleasure and thus can be more readily passed between individuals, lost, and gained. One needs others a lot more to create an interplay of resistance and competing influences.

Click to enlarge one mating aiding scheme

In later parts we'll explore how power flows among individuals and what we can do in our daily lives to feel more physiologically wholesome. There is no need to rehash or summarize Nietzsche as there are plenty of people who have done so marvelously. The time to bridge the abstract and the practical cannot come soon enough. Nietzschean thought (contrary to popular perception) offers the most tangible and practical day to day applications.


There is also the consideration to tackle the culturally ingrained negative perception of such a quest. Too much mud has been thrown on the notion of raising an individual's influence by institutions that rely on different motivational notions to maintain their own influence (such as organized clergy). Pursuit of shaping the world based on one's thoughts is natural, healthy, and personally inescapable and shared by all the people in the world regardless of their sociopolitical structures. Majority of the time desire for influence results in net benefit for society and contributes to its growth rather than resulting in use of force (robbery or violence on micro or marco scale). On the whole, individuals channel their power expanding energies safely into wealth generation, physiological improvement, the arts, etc.

In the modern world, acquisition of money is a much quicker and most socially acceptable way towards achievement of power and ways have been developed to accommodate it (ideological notions of enlightened self interest, free market economics, etc.). Although monetary practices, (especially as practiced by United States and England) have caused enormous amount of suffering internationally, the value of power on an individual level is not an automatic door to anarchy, fascism, or license to rudeness and cruelty. It is rather acceptance of ourselves and our motivations so we become more informed about how power flows in the world, become more efficient as people, and cut flows of power to those aspects of the world that unnecessarily weaken us in day to day life. The more influence an organism gets, the more alive and healthy it is.

to be continued..

The Future is Positive Psychology

Positive psychology focuses on strong healthy individuals and thus finds ways to improve everybody regardless of label

Current negative psychology studies and helps miserable people and thus creates a counterproductive black and white duality of  broken vs. healthy









Psychology is a very young science. It only began to blossom productively once the power of the field's 19th century founding fathers declined. It only really started integrating biology and the corresponding physicality of pharmaceuticals half a century ago. Nothing seems fundamentally more important than the study of our mental faculties and of constructs to better explain why we think or feel the way we do. That is the road to finding ways to modify ourselves more to our liking.

We've heard the ancient suggestion "know thyself" many times but we still treat psychology as the co-equal of other soft "sciences" like sociology, economics, or cultural anthropology. Surely all those are important, have connections with psychology, and should be studied alongside it in an integrated manner. However, as Nietzsche put it, psychology is the mother of the sciences and we need to prioritize study of ourselves over groups, rockets, and interest rates. We as humans and our thoughts and personalities are more important and more physically tangible than concepts of marginal tax rates, legislative structures, and cultural evolutions. Understanding how we think and feel, learning to augment and modify ourselves, and to think in new ways obviously has direct effect on how we approach and view other sciences.

So why the socio-cultural neglect of psychology? The answer, besides it being such a young science, is that being labeled crazy, dumb, and different often got you killed (often horribly) for most of human history. Psychology did a lot of classification of human behavior and has labeled much of that behavior maladaptive and in need of change. However, most humans have a difficult time thinking in shades of gray so anything different or maladaptive is viewed through the binary lens of normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, self reliant/dependent, good/bad, crazy/sane etc. Nobody wants to be on the other side of the absolutist fence. In most of the world, you either buck up and survive long enough to have kids or you might as well not live at all.

 Reality is much more complex. Human population varies greatly in how much personal power individuals have. Personal ability to influence the environment directly affects how many resources one will have, how one will be treated, how likely one is to combine one's genes with a really good mate, etc. The more power one has, the more one is happier, wealthier, and better treated by others. People give attention/support to expanding growing organisms and create a virtuous cycle for that organism. Powerlessness as we all know creates a vicious cycle.

Figure 1, which is just grafted onto an IQ bell curve chart for a rough example, shows that most of the population just has an average amount of personal influence that is physiologically possible. Personal power is determined by a multitude of factors (many of them roughly co-equal in importance) which can combine in various way and which all influence each other.

Some examples of many are:

1) Bodily health (getting up every morning and coughing blood or feeling pain is no way to live even if wealthy or attractive)
2) Wealth
3) Neural structure (psychological health. getting up every morning with panic attacks and phobia of the outside is also not a way to live even if famous and intelligent)
4) Attractiveness
5) Intelligence
6) Uniqueness/strength/attractiveness of personality
7) Social class
8) Race
9) Age
10) Ethnic background
11) Gender

The factors vary from culture to culture and contribute to personal influence in constantly changing ways. To illustrate with a simple mathematical example, say there are 10 factors and each can be measured on a scale of 1-10. We can easily see how 2 people can roughly have the same amount of power while having very different factor strengths. Such measurement is obviously impossible but is useful to keep in mind as a construct. Many of the factors can obviously be lumped together or further subdivided.

The socially determined nature of some of these factors can have a drastic effects on the individual. Lets say there is a very bigoted society and there are 5 people in the room. They are all roughly the same in intelligence/neural structure/attractiveness/forceful personality/health (these 5 come close to being universal in terms of being socially constructed internationally). If one of the people in the room is of the race/gender/ethnic group/age/social class that is being discriminated against, that person will not be given as much power through attention/support. That person can be level 70 while others around him/her are level 68-71 yet the discriminated person will not feel like an equal. A person discriminated against has to be stronger than nearby people just to be treated as an equal.

As soon as two people meet each other their brains do a very rapid unconscious appraisal of the other person's strength versus their own. Immediately, the person labels the other as either a weaker competitor in the world, roughly equal competitor, or a stronger competitor. Often the initial meeting is enough for such assessment but often it becomes distorted through being in an atypical state such as on some drug or being extremely tired. The above mentioned factors all give a person a sense of where he should rate the person he meets as well as himself in the larger social sphere. Obviously if a person is a recluse, his ability to self rank and rank others is greatly dulled since social intelligence is not as developed. The sense of one's influence in the world as determined by the natural biology and environment is fluid and can swing forward and backward on the Figure 1 bell curve. Every person on the planet wants to expand personal influence infinitely in all directions. It is a very useful genetic command since it allows more reproduction, nutrition, as well as adapting the environment to oneself rather than the other way around. Infinitely means just that.

Let's use an extreme silly example. The genetically hardwired desire for influence reaches for the stars by wanting to 1) control all the resources on the planetary surface, 2) having everybody else think exactly like him/her self by liking his/her ideas so much as to internalize them completely, 3) having every female utilize same donor sperm so one's genes are in all the world's population and thus "win" (or in case of female, have the finest genetic material from world's top men and then have her sons compete and the winner impregnate everybody). Such an extreme bodily goal obviously is ridiculous but it allows the person to never fully be satisfied with one's current position. Such a goal is the best motivator toward better quality of life since no matter how high one rises, there are always equals to overcome and struggle against. It might never create satisfaction or contentness but it gives an endless journey of improvement and feeling that one's influence is rising. Although all may be programmed to want that, everybody reaches a major obstacle as he/she comes across everybody else. That's when reality sinks in and various individuals find ways to expand their influence in creative ways that is based on their physiological predisposition. An emotional actor does it one way, a big hearted public speaker in another, an aggressive soldier in another, and a calm mathematician in another. Many even blatantly admit they want everybody on the planet to think and act like them (just ask people heavily into organic farming/veganism or religious missionary work).

What does this have to do with positive psychology?

For most of psychology's history, it was negative. That meant that psychologists looked at the statistically small amount of people on the weaker side of the power bell curve. Why the weaker side and not the other extreme? That is because powerless individuals are the most likely to have a lifestyle that is labeled "maladaptive". They are the most likely to not acquire basic things on Maslow's pyramid of needs such as shelter, self-esteem, love, nutrition, and sex. People want to have constant supply of these basic things so they can focus on self-actualizing or making the most of their physiology/social position to increase influence. They need all of them (obviously to various degrees) like one needs a constant supply of food/sleep to fully function. Not having love for example can be as detrimental as not having sex/self esteem/quality nutrients every once in a while.

Lack of sufficient influence over the environment creates a vicious cycle. Since people on the left of the bell curve are weak, they compete less effectively. Since they competitive skills are lacking, they are deprived of things they want and most others get. Since they are deprived, they stagnate in function or decline and demonstrate to the world that they are less successful than most of the population. Since they are less successful, they are treated as failures and the gap widens even more. They compare themselves to their competitors and see most people as stronger and more capable. They are forced to interact with people who are their equals or those even weaker than themselves so they can rank themselves better. Not struggling as often with those stronger than them (out of fear of failure) stagnates the competitive skills even more.

Then 20th century comes around and psychologists come along. They start studying the failures and labeling the weak by categories. Many of the weak come to the psychologists and offer them money to get help in acquiring things they know they want. Psychologists then see similar narratives and the categorization process is sharpened. Small amounts of powerful people on the right side of the bell curve are less likely to seek help. People in the middle would rather not even dabble with such things lest they be labeled by professionals or society. People on top of the bell curve want to be like the strong and so give them power through attention/support, and label the statistically abnormal (often very rare and abnormal) as successful.

Psychologists are stuck studying the weak population which they call unhealthy, sub-obptimal, "abnormal", or deficient. Since people in the middle of power bell curve make up the majority of the population, psychologists use them as a guide and call them "normal" and use them as a point of comparison when it comes to the weak. Since most people are numerically "normal", they are the ones who shape cultural perceptions. Thus everything left of the fatty bell curve or in need of psychological help is seen in horrid black and white terms. Even slight deviations are unconsciously associated with the worst extremes. A mildly depressed person can easily fall in society's eye into the same category as a suicidal person whereas there would be a vast gap between the two. Nobody wants to be labeled as below average in social functioning even when only a narrow aspect of life is affected. The historically ingrained connotation is too strong as it has to do with weakness, failure, lack of offspring, danger, foreignness, and unacceptable behavior.

Let's re-imagine Figure 1 and see the extent of the problem caused by negative psychology. Figure 2 shows that being born into certain conditions can mask certain neural structures that are causing the person to function below full capacity. A person with high attractiveness and intelligence factors can easily fit into statistically "normal" category even while having severe psychological disposition that would make a less attractive/intelligent person fail in many situations. Thus many people think they can wing it without help if they expand influence against the world with average intensity. A person further right on the power bell curve, is even less likely to understand that his/her thoughts/feelings can be enhanced (and thus corresponding influence/functioning).

click to enlarge

Now that neural science is rapidly expanding with better scanning technologies and techniques, a new pharmaceutical era is about to open. We are well aware that anti-depressants and mood stabilizers can do wonders to improve a person's standard of living and functioning. The people who are in deep enough of a hole to seek help from such drugs are those that repeatedly failed to improve in non-pharmaceutical ways. Most societies don't have pro-active testing of the population so the person has to be pro-active him or herself. That is often done when the person has already fallen below what is considered average functioning in some key life area. Most people getting pharmaceutical help these days have began their medication in an unnecessarily weakened state to begin with. A person who is a 45 on the power scale can become 55 with a drug. Similarly a person with similar neurology who is in the higher "normal' band of 65 can become a 75. A very successful powerful individual who is an 85 perhaps can even push up to 90.

Figure 3 shows the progress that can occur once psychology becomes positive and once statistically "normal" are encouraged to better themselves regardless of their current status. Once we figure out what neural structures are the most common in human populations (through constantly improving brain scan technology), we can begin to engineer precise mind enhancing drugs for vast majority of people. For that to happen and for the quality of life to rise for all we must get rid of the focus on the unhealthiest/weakest members of society and focus on the strongest and most successful.

Psychology must lose its negative association and develop a strong positive active one. Hopefully in 20-30 years one can be "doing" psychology like ones does yoga or exercise.