MAIN IDEA:

This book proposes the unified growth theory that the author defines this way: “Unified growth theory captures the journey of humanity over the entire course of history, since the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa nearly 300,000 years ago. It identifies and traces the forces that governed the process of development during the Malthusian epoch, eventually triggering the phase transition in which the human species escaped from this poverty trap into an era of sustained economic growth. These insights are essential for understanding the growth process in its entirety, the hurdles faced by poorer economies today in their transition from stagnation to growth, the origins of the great divergence in the wealth of nations in the past centuries, and the fingerprints of the ancient past in the fate of nations.” The author also links it to the math theory describing processes in complex non-linear systems. The author describes it this way:” The conceptual framework I devised in the past few decades to address this conundrum was inspired by insights from the mathematical field of bifurcation theory, which demonstrate how, beyond a certain threshold, minor alterations in a single factor may generate a sudden and dramatic transformation in the behavior of complex dynamical systems (as is the case when heat crosses a threshold and transforms water from liquid to gas).[3] In particular, this research has focused on identifying the cogs that were whirring invisibly beneath the surface, wheels of change that were turning relentlessly throughout the epoch of the Malthusian equilibrium but which ultimately broke its hold and led to the emergence of modern growth – much like the rising temperatures in the kettle.” Finally, the “wheels of change”, defined as population size and population composition. The population composition here means the difference between resource allocation to the quantity of people in the next generation or the quality of these people. The author’s explanation of humanity’s and its resources explosive growth during the last few centuries is the switch from quantity to quality in this composition. The book describes in detail how this change occurred in the past and continues in the present. 

MY TAKE ON IT:

This review nicely presents the logic and history of human development. I agree that the transfer from quantity to quality in forming the next generation is the driver of the acquisition of new technology, which leads to increased productivity, eventually resulting in a massive increase in the quality and quantity of human lives. However, my own understanding of the overall development, past, present, and future of humanity is based on the notion of the duality of human nature. On the one hand, it is defined by the individual need to survive, while on the other hand, by the need to ensure the survival of the group this individual belongs to. Consequently, the struggle for resources, material and psychological, such as prestige, between individuals within a group and the battle between the groups drives all processes and the overall development of humanity. 

I see it as the sequence of five stages of humanity’s development:

1. The long process of biological evolution took a few million years and produced contemporary humans as creatures qualitatively different from all other animals. This difference comes from the human ability effectively obtain, accumulate, and transfer complex information not only between individuals but also between generations of individuals. This feature of humans allowed a cumulative increase of knowledge, skills, and processes, which put humans out of complete dependency on the environment. It also turned them into hunter-gatherers with languages, cultures, religions, and traditions.    
2. Starting some 200,000 years ago, humans began expanding throughout the planet. The process was driven by many small wars between groups for more productive land. The losing group would leave, searching for another place to settle. Since the process was slow, on average a fraction of a mile per year, there was enough time for a bit of biological evolutionary adjustments, such as skin color depending on the amount of sunlight and development of the multitude of different cultures and people. During this long process, there was no need for an increase in productivity, except for accommodation in a slightly different environment. This stage of development was mainly completed when human hunter-gatherers populated the whole planet.
3. The next stage started about 10,000 years ago. I would define it as Militaristic agriculture. Anthropological and archeological research shows that the switch to agriculture significantly decreased the quality of human lives. Unlike remnants of hunter-gatherers’ healthy bodies, agriculturalists’ remnants show signs of massive wear and tear, hard work, and diseases. However, agriculture provided a much higher population density and a larger, better-armed military. It also created the condition of using forced labor either as slavery or some process of limiting choice for people to either work under the control of others or get physically punished or deprived of resources. Generally, any military confrontation between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists ended with the defeat and retreat of hunter-gatherers. This stage is still ongoing in some places where leaders and populations are stuck in an ideological and cultural dead end, incapable of understanding the meaningless of territorial acquisition and subjugation of other people when technology and trade made land and manual labor into commodities. During this stage, humanity also developed two main methods of interaction and cooperation between people: Hierarchy and Ownership. The Hierarchy is based on concentrating resources in one place and controlling from the top down, usually using violence and deception on a mass scale. Ownership means distributing resources between owners with exchange and cooperation mainly voluntarily, albeit with a good portion of fraud.
4. The next stage – Industrialization started just a few hundred years ago. It led to the implementation of machines that significantly amplified human efforts in the process of generation and management of resources. Initially, this applied mainly to manual efforts and later to data management. This amplification produced a foundation for ideologies of freedom and democracy that supported a massive increase in owners’ productivity and created prosperity in societies where Ownership was, if not dominant, then at least significant. Due to the power of technology, societies with the dominance of Hierarchy mainly lost their ability to conduct profitable wars when victory could bring wealth, slaves, and moral satisfaction. WWI and WWII clearly demonstrated this. So contemporary Hierarchies are left with somewhat limited abilities to rob their own population via taxes and regulations. The current process features constant struggle in each country between Hierarchy and Owners. When the Owners win, the economy prospers, but because all humans are different, this prosperity is always unequal, causing unsatisfied individuals to explode the society with some kind of revolution. After that inevitably comes Hierarchy that concentrates resources, eliminates Owners, sometimes physically, which causes economic decline and general misery. Over time this misery causes the collapse of society with the restoration of some form of Ownership that once again produces prosperity and resentment from insufficiently prosperous people. Then cycle repeats in a somewhat different form.
5. We are now at the beginning of a new stage of human development when machines and computers are increasingly capable of completely substituting human efforts in all areas, including the effort of highly qualified professionals. This new situation would inevitably lead to the complete restructuring of human society. As during the previous 10,000 years, it could be built either on the dominance of Hierarchy or dominance of Ownership. I believe that the latter outcome is much better than the former, and I wrote and published on Amazon a small essay describing how it could be done: https://www.amazon.com/OWNERSHIP-versus-HIERARCHY-Choice-Dominant-ebook/dp/B09KMBP6JG/ref=sr_1_5?crid=3NYE5ONTXE27G  

MAIN IDEA:

The author is practically the founder of the new and powerful movement of National Conservatism, so the book explains what it is. The book also presents the author’s vision of how the new political paradigm of National Conservatism could substitute the currently dominant political paradigm of liberalism. Here is how the author presents the key points of these two paradigms:

MY TAKE ON IT:

I find both political paradigms presented by the author as alternatives not utterly consistent with reality. The Liberal paradigm is obviously unrealistic. First, individuals and even the same individual in different points of life have different objectives and abilities to achieve these objectives.   Also, nobody asked individual’s consent to existing norms and rules of any society ever existed. On the contrary, any society, even the most liberal, uses coercion to enforce individual compliance with these rules. The National Conservative paradigm seems more realistic, but it is so much looking back in time that it does not notice that all this changed. People are not born into some relatively isolated family, tribe, or nation. They are born into a world where information, ideas, cultural patterns, and symbols from multiple political and cultural environments surround an individual. From all this, an individual picks and chooses whatever seems to be most beneficial for this individual’s well-being, which to a significant extent, is defined by the approval of other individuals in a close group. This circumstance undermined previously existing hierarchies, and there is no way back. Humanity is moving to one unified society because technology removed old restrictions of distances, languages, and other walls that separated people into subgroups such as nations and tribes. However, such a unified society could exist within a wide range of arrangements. The range could be from one unified hierarchy with top-down totalitarian control to a society where individual freedom is limited only when it interferes with the freedom of others. The voluntary sorting of people into political, philosophical, and cultural groups of compatible individuals would resolve this limitation. Ironically, being the currently dominant group, the “Liberals” are pushing toward top-down hierarchical control, while the “Conservatives” promote individual freedom. I guess this struggle between paradigms will continue for a while, so the “interesting times” will probably last for a few decades more.     

MAIN IDEA:

This book is about the psychological foundation of totalitarianism that the author calls “Mass formation”. The author is looking:” to understand the shocking behaviors of a “totalitarized” population, including an exaggerated willingness of individuals to sacrifice their own personal interests out of solidarity with the collective (i.e., the masses), a profound intolerance of dissident voices, and pronounced susceptibility to pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda. Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically. This process is insidious in nature; populations fall prey to it unsuspectingly.” The author links this process to fear that creates a scary event like a pandemic when losing control over their lives prompts people to seek external force to remove this fear and restore control. Since gods, ancestors, and other supernatural powers disappeared from human beliefs and were substituted by reason, people expect possessors of such reason – experts and government to resolve all problems. The author sees the source of totalitarianism in this:” Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. In the final analysis, it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality. As such, totalitarianism is the defining feature of the Enlightenment tradition.” Here is the author’s recommendation for avoiding this outcome:” The fundamental task facing us as individuals and as a society is to construct a new view of man and the world, to find a new foundation for our identity, to formulate new principles for living together with others, and to reappraise a timely human capacity—speaking the truth.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

In my opinion, this approach makes a lot of sense, except for the spiritual part, the author’s attempt to link it all to quantum mechanics, and his rejection of human intellect as “the guiding principle in life and society.”. I do not think the enlightenment and its promotion of human reason have anything to do with totalitarianism. Totalitarianism comes from a completely different source. It is based on the rejection of human reason as an attribute of every human individual. It believes that only some humans, experts, and politicians, possess superior reason and, therefore, should have the power to coerce others to submit to their will.  The solution to the problem of mass formation and totalitarianism is in resource distribution between people as much as possible and elimination of coercion, including governmental force, from human lives. This solution would allow all individuals to build their lives as they wish, rather than being a subject of manipulation and coercion to be used to meet somebody’s objectives.

MAIN IDEA:

The main point that the author makes in this book is that humans do not really perceive the external world as an objective reality. Evolution formed human perception not based on the search for truth but on survival. The author even presents the formal definition of this idea:” “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.” After this very realistic and reasonable approach, the author deviates into the less reasonable discussion of the unreality of spacetime, the primacy of consciousness over matter, which he bases on some particulars of quantum mechanics and other fashionable stuff. Finally, the author presents the idea of conscious realism and defines its ambition and objectives this way:” Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents. To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

MY TAKE ON IT:

I wholeheartedly agree with the FBT theorem and find many examples of its application presented in this book quite interesting. However, in more complex situations that humanity encountered a few hundred years ago when it achieved limits of expansion within the natural environment, a more sophisticated approach had to be developed in order to overcome the Malthusian trap.  This approach is called science, and it allows for overcoming human perception faults by implementing multiple sensor technologies and automated analysis of results. Consequently, science allows indirect perception of objective reality by putting human subjective perception out of the processing loop. However, I think it is just a misnomer to seek the existence of consciousness outside of the human head, either at the quantum level or as a product of social networks. The quantum part is mainly a meaningless exercise in complex mathematical modeling. At the same time, social consciousness is just an expression of refusal to accept the complexity of interaction between a multitude of human individuals, each of which thinks and acts in some distinctive way and, therefore, cannot be managed without direct violence of force or indirect violence of resource denial. Finally, the author’s discussion of religion and science leads to a typical attempt to combine two separate and incompatible approaches to modeling human life and the universe around it in some kind of all-inclusive intellectual construct. I think that it is just not needed. Humans are pretty capable of living with two separate models in their heads at the same time, using whichever better fit to support their needs at the moment. So, there is no problem with scientists effectively working with materials dated in millions of years and believing in the Bible that defines the universe’s age as 6,000 years. It creates cognitive dissonance only if one needs consistency between models. However, if one looks at these models just as a tool of life, then he would use science to do what it is good at: predict what will happen in the future based on conditions observable now while using religion to connect with others, overcome life’s challenges, and obtain the support of a cohesive group of co-believers.             

MAIN IDEA:

This book is about DNA and its impact on who we are as persons. It goes beyond the usual discussion on nature vs. nurture, stressing an essential point of feedback between these two factors: our nurture, or, in other words, the process of interaction with the environment , is defined by our nature. It is demonstrated very nicely by research on twins. Another interesting point is that there is hardly such a thing as gene/feature direct correlation. Any particular feature of a person is defined by a multitude of minor variations in many, often thousands of genes.

Yet another point is that human features are varied within ranges, so it is hard to define what is normal and what is not. The other, somewhat surprising, point is that many identifiable parameters of the environment, such as parents, school, and so on, have minimal impact on a person’s development, so everything is defined by the combination of DNA and unpredictable peculiarities of the environment. The final and astonishing point is that the role of DNA is increasing with age rather than decreasing, which one would expect because of increased exposure to the environment over the years.

CONTENT:

MY TAKE ON IT:

I like the logic and presentation of this book. However, quite a few new research results and corresponding points are somewhat surprising to me, even if the moment I read about them these points become evident. One such point is the strong feedback connection between DNA and the environment. A simple example would be the naturally cautious person would never go into dangerous places where he would encounter a highly impactful experience that would become an essential part of the nurture of a less cautious person who went to such a place. In short, this book made me slightly change my understanding of DNA vs. Environment from 50/50 to something more like 70/30, but with high levels of non-linearity, making any such breakdown meaningless. In short,  human personality is complex and develops in a chaotic environment, so, despite the important or maybe even dominant role of DNA, it remains unpredictable and, quite possibly, will always remain so.