Ants communicate with one another with pheromones. Bees use dances to tell other bees where nectar is. How do humans coordinate their efforts and why has it gone off the rails?
I stepped on a red ant mound the other day, camping. If you have ever been bitten by red ants, you know how painful it can be. The little buggers bite you and leave these swollen marks that itch like crazy and pop like zits a day later. The scars can take weeks to heal.
Interesting how they work, though, ants. An ant colony has no place for libertarians or sovereign citizens. Rugged independence doesn't exist for ants, and indeed, even for humans, unless you want to revert to a cave-man level of existence. Even then, I suspect, you'd have to rely on the cooperation of other cave-men to survive.
We are not much different from ants or bees. We live in colonies or hives and work cooperatively to advance the interests of the group. Without such cooperation, we would have died out long ago. And despite this modern-day yearning for "simpler times" it is apparent that even back in those days, we relied on an intricate network of people and institutions in order to survive. The farmer may raise food, but without a market to sell it in, or a transportation network to deliver it, he has no way to raise money to buy a new plow. We are all cogs on a great machine, interacting with each other, whether we like it or not. We can't "go back" because even back then, we were interdependent on each other. We were ants and still are ants.
Of course, we don't communicate with pheromones, do we? Or do we? Because it is said that people do detect the pheromones of others and respond to them. You can smell fear, some say, metaphorically, but perhaps it is literally true. We may communicate via scent in scenarios other than mating.
But personal communication within sight distance, hearing distance, or indeed, smelling distance, is one thing, but no way to coordinate a modern human society. We need ways to communicate over distances - via writing at first, then the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and today, the Internet.
But what to communicate? Back in the early days of modern communications, there was an unstated agreement on what "society" thought was right and proper. People were expected to behave in certain ways, even if no one was looking. The disapprobation of society was often a stronger cudgel than our laws and legal system. Some things just weren't done!
As our communications technology advanced, personal communication became more impersonal. Social mores or normative cues became more relaxed and people, able to communicate with others outside of their home town, were exposed to new and disturbing (to some folks) ideas.
However, well into the television era, there was still a sense of society in our society. Television stations were limited in number and regulated by the government - or social pressures. You could not say "the seven dirty words" on the air. News divisions were loss-leaders and run by professionals with a sense of duty to society. Equal time provisions helped ensure that radical ideas were not presented, at least without counterpoint.
But all that seems to have gone by the wayside with the Internet. News divisions of networks are now part of the "entertainment" division and radical ideas are promoted with the unspoken idea that they are merely entertaining viewers and are not to be taken seriously. Sadly, most viewers fail to understand this concept.
On the Internet at large, however, radical ideas are held forth with the same seriousness as rational ideas. In the year 2024 we are having serious discussions as to whether the world is flat, vaccines are bad for you, the moon landing was faked, or Russia isn't the enemy. In a marketplace of ideas, where every idea has equal value, no idea has any value.
You could kill off an ant colony by messing with their pheromones. Poison the colony with a pheromone that makes them slack off or spend all day walking in circles, and eventually the colony would die. Somehow suppress the bees' wiggle dances - or better yet, get their message so garbled as to be nonsensical - and the hive dies from starvation.
I wonder, sometimes, whether that is what is happening to us - and whether this has happened before. I noted before that with each advance in communication (the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, etc.) came not only great improvements in our society, but increased chaos. The rise of fascism and dictators in the 1930s was accompanied by the popularization of broad-cast radio, which dictators used to deceive the masses.
Today, we are seeing the same thing - politicians admitting they are making up lies and fantastic stories ("They're eating the dogs!") and then saying, "what are you going to do about it, fact-check me?" And even when fact-checked and even when the liars admit they are lies, people still believe the lie. It defies logic.
If history is any guide, this can only go on for so long before reality rushes back in like the tide. Eventually, the disconnect between what is said in the media and what people personally experience becomes so vast that people turn away from the liars and new social norms are established.
After World War II, it wasn't funny to be a Nazi anymore. In Germany, such things were flatly outlawed. In other countries, you would face the scorn of society at large if you marched around with a Nazi armband, giving Hitler salutes. That lasted about 20 years until the ACLU decided that "free expression" should trump common sense, and that paved the way for the new generation of Nazis we see today. And certain demographics on the right welcome these new fascists to the fold.
The problem is, in the time it took our society to realize there was a problem and take action to solve it, a decade or more had gone by and millions of people had been killed and trillions of dollars of materials destroyed
This is a long way from stepping on an anthill, I know. But you wonder, does mankind really have to go through this nonsense every few decades, or is there another way? Because this time around, well, the destruction could be fatal to our society, or indeed all life on earth.
The flat earth, of course.
