RETURN TO NATURE – How Today’s Lying Cops Fit Into Historical Patterns of Human Evolution

Thing are not as complicated as they seem at first.

The key feature of civilization which dictates the quality of the human experience is the topology of human thought and action. You don’t have to know anything about artificial intelligence, to understand that a neural network is a complex web of interconnected points. The greater the number of independent points and unique connections between them, the more complex visions of the world the network can store, the more information it can put to use, and the more problems it can solve. In contrast, the larger a social quorum is, the less it is a meritocracy of ideas refined by natural selection, and the more a synchronization of idiocy.

It is not hard to understand that any one neuron in your brain is not conscious of anything. It acts as part of a larger structure of which it cannot be aware. This is different from people living in a tribe or social group. They all see the world from the same vantage point – they have the same information – and they are conscious of their common values and purpose. Consider how an iron mine has properties of both. The people who work in the iron mine coordinate by constantly talking and watching each other, with a conscious purpose to produce as much iron as possible. But where the iron goes they have little idea. Like a neighboring neuron, the trucks just show up to collect the iron and carry it away.

The design and instinct of men is to act as a tribe, not a neuron. When men were hunter-gatherers there was no such thing as a trading partner. A neighboring tribe was a competitor for scarce resources. To limit population growth to what the land could support, men had reflexive impulses for war and sodomy that were turned on by environmental triggers. But when men became productive as farmers and craftsmen, they needed to learn to trade, not kill their neighbors. Religions developed to teach them these new habits which made increased populations and cities possible. Eventually even farm workers went from being mindless slaves to free individuals, traveling from place to place and responding to price signals like independent neurons.

The impulse of men is to join into social collectives, and attempt to gain knowledge of the surrounding world and consciously control it. Put simply, the instinct of men is to collapse the complex network into a simple social tribal topology. They want as few points as possible, and the largest collective social synchronization within each point. The purpose of all law and culture is to make men go against their impulses and act more like neurons and less like participants in a tribe. The true political debate is not what should be decided – what the collective values are – but who will decide what independently. The history of civilization is new communication paradigms connecting and collapsing the points, allowing men to indulge their tribal instincts and collapse the topology, leading to war and starvation.

Every time a new communication paradigm emerges, men rebel against existing laws and seek to overthrow and control existing institutions, to make the topology less complex. During the industrial revolution, populations exploded in cities which were larger than the populations on farms. Men in the cities were able to walk past neighboring factories and talk to each other and share common values. They learned to read and write. They wrote and disseminated a plan to take over all the factories, and control them through the decisions of a single social collective. They collapsed the multiple factory owners and managers, to a single central planner. The single central planner could not process information like independent local decision makers could, and millions starved.

Next came the advent of broadcast technology – audio amplification, radio, and television. This allowed leaders to synchronize men with a single enemy and purpose, toward action that appealed to their instincts rather than their moral programming. Their common goal and action – wiping out other races, world domination – was resonant with their instincts as more important to their prosperity than their local neuron role working in a shop or factory. The international trade topology largely consisted of Jews whose unique morals allowed them to engage in business and made them wandering outcasts. Individuals working to produce iron for unknown strangers were collapsed into a single tribal unit, with a goal to wipe out other tribes, and the spontaneous topology of private business and media.

One of the decision institutions that had evolved to process information independent of the dominant tribal quorum was the jury trial. In Germany juries were discarded in favor of judges who could enforce penalties not based on guilt of specific crimes, but as part of larger social plans. A jury processes local information to determine if a specific individual broke a specific law. A judge determines if incarcerating the individual advances some larger social goal, more generally is the individual popular, and will the judge’s decision be popular. By increasing the power and discretion of elected non-jury actors, and external rules limiting jury presentations, criminal justice decisions are relocated from a local decision node with true information based on scientific processes, to a collective tribal will based on general information produced by informal social processes.

“Legal positivism” in the 1900’s was a rebellion against evolved criminal justice processes. In the new legal positivism, individual actions were determined to be legal or illegal not by being measured against fixed laws, but by whether the quorum – the collective benefit as channeled through a judge or some other body – approved or disapproved of them. Whatever the quorum wanted – whatever survived the social beauty contest – became legal. Historical morals and laws were discarded in favor of popular social ideas, such as exterminating the Jews. The evolution of criminal justice reversed its long trend toward discovering and responding to individual crimes with just sentences, back to managing populations like a tribal war channeled through the courts. People got to mass murder their neighbors like in a tribe through a central planner, rather than have local juries make independent decisions in individual cases.

It is important to appreciate that throughout history, civilization has gone backwards when people joined together in social groups to do what they felt was right. The Magna Carta of 1225 said a sheriff could not just do what the mob wanted, but he needed an actual witness of a crime. 700 years later The US Supreme Court in Imbler v. Pachtman said it is appropriate for prosecutors to use dishonesty to circumvent the traditional requirements of law by straight manufacturing fake witnesses, to deprive individuals of liberty to serve the broader public interest. Under this paradigm, anyone from a mass murderer to a drug dealer to a person with a past drug arrest who was merely near the scene of a death, will get the same life sentence. Courts have become railroads and prisons have become concentration camps.

And so I do not say without analysis, that Twitter (as metaphor for the Internet and new social topologies) and Ron DeSantis (as as an example of popular values being channeled through a central authority) are the end not just of the Republican Party but possibly of our civilization. They manifest the rebellion of human instinct against the evolution of society, which rebellion has repeated throughout history in the presence of new mass communications.

Two self-styled “libertarians” Brad Polumbo and Hannah Cox recently said the following on Twitter about President Biden getting a criminal Brittney Griner or Julian Assange out of prison:

“If you defend or downplay the prospect of an AMERICAN being imprisoned by a tyrannical foreign government for 9 years over HASHISH OIL, I never want to hear the words ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty’ or ‘small government’ out of your mouth again.”

-Brad Polumbo

“Presidents actually have immense power to hand out pardons… this is an important check and balance in our justice system…”

-Hannah Cox

It is quite a development that people who imagine themselves defenders of individual liberties, advocate a system where who goes to prison is decided by a quorum of the popular or a powerful leader, rather than the rule of law in independent local processes. They don’t realize that by trying people on Twitter or deciding who goes to prison on Twitter, they are carrying the building materials of the next holocaust. The topology of a 51% majority telling a single leader who should go to prison is the simplest possible tribal topology of criminal justice, and replaces the complex topology of 1,000 local jury trials, which the public no longer has any interest in maintaining with rigorous integrity.

The appropriate matter for debate is not who goes to prison, but who should decide and how; what should the law be and who should decide and enforce the law under what incentives and constraints. Should Russia have milder laws, should the United States have some sort of a criminal-alien treaty, should there be a court with known rules to decide Brittney Griner’s fate? Or is “freedom” a mob on Twitter deciding who suffers what fate? Like “Conviction Integrity Units”, Presidential “pardons” are a way to avoid repairing the justice system but rather letting it continue to be misused to convict the innocent, but instead only exempting the popular, effectively substituting politicians for jurors.

Notice how Hannah Cox does not advocate a change in the law, which would make what Julian Assange did legal or free a whole category of so-called journalists. There is neither law nor freedom nor justice in the tribal processes Hannah advocates. But a government of men and not of laws gets you a lot of likes and followers on Twitter. When faced with laws they don’t like, people’s impulse is not to change the law. It is to go to war as a tribe, and enforce the result they want through collective majority will.

People’s impulse is to try to get what they want through social processes like pardons, and they have no interest whether jury trials which they have no control over are honest. They view jury trials as inevitably flawed specifically because they perceive no direct control over them.

Civilization advances when Hannah Cox and Brad Polumbo have no say in whether Brittney Griner goes to prison, and they can only slightly influence the evolution of the prescribed laws and processes that make that independent local decision with local information. But when people are unhappy with the local decisions – often because the local process has been corrupted by a collective such as racists of the local majority faction – the impulse is not to advocate reverting to the impersonal mechanics of the law as written, or changing the law when necessary. It is to usurp the power of the local collective with an even larger collective.

I have also seen 1,000 Twitter posts where people said vaccine mandates violate their rights. But I have seen zero Twitter posts advocating a Constitutional amendment prohibiting vaccine mandates, or some other way of changing how it is decided what will be mandated for whom, other than a Twitter quorum and vote. Instead of advocating an independent legal process for weighing each vaccine and virus and circumstance, they instead advocate electing Ron DeSantis, who will follow the shifting winds of popular will of whoever shouts the most and loudest. Ron DeSantis is now trying to set up a grand jury to prosecute the FDA for making independent vaccine decisions that go against the will of the mob on Twitter.

The question is not “Is the FDA right in this instance?” It is impossible for you or me to judge and post on Twitter whether every medicine is safe, or whether every jury is right. The question is “Should there be an FDA that is not controlled by Twitter and Ron DeSantis?” People don’t want to analyze the FDA’s process and reform it if necessary. They want to throw out the FDA and turn it over to Twitter and Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis has no problem with an FDA or court that is wrong, and controlled by him. You are never wrong, if you can manipulate 51% of people to agree with you, or simply implement whatever 51% of people want. Regardless of how right or wrong the FDA might be, it will always be possible for people to come together as a group and be uncomfortable with an institution outside their knowledge and control.

If DeSantis wants to tell us about flaws in the processes and incentives of the FDA and suggest reforms, he has listeners. But that would make him a commentator, not a dictator. DeSantis instead offers the simple (and worse than wrong) solution that an FDA which he controls is better than one which they control. Move the locus of decision making from the bad people to the good people. An FDA which DeSantis runs in response to Twitter, is better than one which they run based on elitists. California has its own warnings for product safety. But a diversity of state and federal institutions, is different from DeSantis threatening a grand jury to prosecute independent medical researchers in private industry, which is pure leftist demagoguery like Ralph Nader. It is a promise to turn it over to the people in exchange for power, not an effort to improve it.

Another self-imagined promoter of liberties Glenn Greenwald recently said on Twitter:

“I’d like to remind everyone: Twitter’s ban of Trump was widely condemned by world leaders, including those who dislike Trump, including Germany’s Merkel, France’s Macron, Mexico’s AMLO and EU officials. Only US liberal journalists — rogue actors as always — cheered it.”

-Glenn Greenwald

If you advocate deciding whom Twitter bans with a global quorum of pezzonovante rather than a private local business decision, you are a Marxist. Twitter is like the present day newspaper. They are free to associate with, quote, or endorse any politician they want, and to fire journalists they don’t want on their pages. Twitter has freedom of religion to only permit lies. The impulse for some sort of collective Marxist control of a single “The People’s Twitter” idea marketplace does not allow for a complex topology of different sites and brands and religions to evolve. Popular vote cannot refine a meritocracy of ideas. A “marketplace of ideas” requires something like a refrigerator to conserve and serve the purchased subset of ideas, whether that repository takes the form of a religion, university, or web site. Mob control encourages a descent to the least common denominator of child porn, snuff films, and bite-sized demagoguery.

“Just applied for Twitter Blue. I am happy to give @elonmusk and @twitter 2.0 my $8 since the platform has restored free speech as a guiding principle.”

-Jay Bhattacharya

It is often people with foreign names – recent immigrants – who don’t even know what free speech is, because they don’t understand the concept of private action not controlled by a social quorum. Bhattacharya was free to sue under USC 1983 if there really was government action when his medical information was edited, and try to change the case law if he lost. But Bhattacharya has no idea what the rule of law rather than popular will is, and thinks free speech is collective social control of private institutions. If you don’t know the difference between government and private or law and social quorum, you wont have private or law for long.

“According to Twitter Files 6, one FBI agent directing it to censor is named Elvis Chan. I thought a karate expert Elvis impersonator trampling our rights might make it more entertaining. While he appears to be Asian, I unfortunately see no Graceland influence or kung fuery.”

-Jack Hunter

The person whose speech is aggrieved would be Twitter, and they would have to sue. But despite having millions of dollars in lawyers and spokesmen – not exactly child sex-abuse victims – Twitter did not complain. Because IT companies like free information from law enforcement. If Jack Hunter thinks rights were “chilled”, he should sue under USC 1983. Either you have a case, or if you don’t then advocate for the law to be changed, or shut up. Don’t confuse a private policy or management or values disagreement, or free association within factions, with a matter of constitutional rights, if the court says your rights have not been violated. Rights don’t come from a social quorum, concentration camps do. Rights come from the law.

“I’m not going to be okay with banning journalists now that it’s happening to liberals. I didn’t want revenge. I wanted free speech. The rest of your principles is whether you’re willing to apply them to your opponents and antagonists. Elon Musk is failing that test.”

-Brad Polumbo

There is no collective “you”. Courts apply the law, private business managers apply judgment, religious leaders censor blasphemy. “Free speech” is a legal concept applying to government, agents thereof, and people acting in concert therewith. It is not a collective social policy. Using “banned” as a general term when someone has been barred from another person’s private property, is socialist agitation for the takeover of private business. Imagining a single vantage point from which all decisions are made with collective knowledge and values, is the same as utopian communists who thought the world could be controlled through science like in a lab.

This is hardly different from saying a poor person has been “banned” from housing or medicine, or a crime victim has been “banned” from justice by a jury. Using trigger words to evoke feelings rather than a literal rational analysis, is just demagoguery. It manifests a desire to live in a collective, and run it based on a religion, as a website user. There are literally people who want a consciously controlled world with a strong and responsive leader. They are begging Elon Musk to be dictator of a utopia. The idea of going to a court and suing for rights violations, rather than shouting in a crowd, never occurs to them. The new home of the human socialist impulse is Twitter and the Republican Party.

When you start by defining “free speech” not as law but as private local decisions monitored and regulated by a social quorum, you have given over to communist thought and lost all rights before the debate has begun. The “test” of “free speech” is a legal test. The term is already in use as a legal term. If you need a new term, how about “social speech tolerance”. Conflating autonomous legal or business processes with approval from the vantage point of a tribal quorum is socialism. The moment you say it is your business how Twitter editorializes, you have exited the classical liberal freedom paradigm. You are a religious missionary dreaming of a mountain enclave, wearing the false cloak of law.

In another example Ron DeSantis complained on Twitter about a juror going against the popular will for a murderer to get the death penalty.

“I just don’t think anything else is appropriate except the capital sentence in this case… He’s guilty, everybody knew that from the beginning… I think that we should do some reforms…”

-Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

You cannot stop the state from exterminating the unpopular, unless you add independent actors to stop them. And you cannot stop independent decision makers from not doing what the mob thinks is right. If DeSantis enacts the most popular reforms, the people who get the death penalty will not be who you want or I want, but the people whom the largest single mass of the worst of people on Earth want dead. The fact that there are not larger numbers of hung juries relative to guilty and not guilty, is evidence of people’s irresistible instinct to parrot the group.

DeSantis spoke about independent actors in general, at a conference in Miami:

“The United States is a nation that has an economy, not the other way around, and our economy should be geared towards helping our own people… This is an important issue because it raises the question of, you know, who governs society? Do we govern ourselves through our Constitution and through our elections or do we have these masters of the universe occupying these commanding heights of society?”

-Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

DeSantis’s “masters of the universe” are little different from the “media Jews” of pop promoter Kanye West, or the merchants and agitators of Hitler. When DeSantis says “through our Constitution and through our elections” he is just putting pretty words on the public demand to be an armed mob. If we don’t like the outcome of private business – if bakers are not feeding people, or if we simply don’t like what they do with their freedom – then government is right to override the process; not just adjust the process, the rules of the game, but directly control the outcome to fulfill the will of the mob. DeSantis is a Marxist who would take over corporations and courts as fast as Bill Clinton would take over healthcare, to endear himself to the people.

So how do you get to a system where “the people” decide who is bad for society, rather than juries deciding who is guilty of a crime? You lie to the papers about what happened while stonewalling private-party requests for actual evidence, you immunize publishers to recite your lies, judges reward witnesses who parrot those lies (often dangerous felons let out of prison for parroting lies), the local elected mayor, sheriff, judges, and prosecutors overlook and encourage police lying to fix the outcome of the trial to whatever is most popular and politically convenient, and the trial is fixed with evidence selectively admitted and blocked and manufactured to obtain the outcome chosen by the social quorum. So cops lie to get around a complex topology of laws and legal processes to achieve primitive tribal justice, seizing lives the same as businesses under communism.

A lying cop is not a mean person framing an innocent person. He is part of a process to move the locus of decision-making away from juries, to the mayor or sheriff who decides whether to reward or penalize the lying cop, who is actually the arm of the 51% that elect him. Cops lie, and the citizens overlook and celebrate cops and even felons lying, to replace complex evolved local legal processes with tribal justice, and put the powers of judges and jurors in individual cases into the hands of a single social collective. Cops lie and judges accept lying, to collapse the elaborate topology of our legal system into a mob. Cops lie to evade juries, and enact the will of the mob manipulated by demagogues on Twitter.

Why do cops lie? To overthrow the law in favor of the mob, the dominant social quorum. Cops lie to move decisions to the mob. Cops lie to evade and nullify the courts and settle things like a tribe, to satisfy the human impulse to have total control like camping in the wilderness, to return to nature.

Here is a felon lying to victimize the innocent and get a murderer out of prison. You would think this is some crazy ostracized behavior that would be punished if caught. But it is in fact a popular behavior approved of and paid for by elected officials. This might seem crazy and hard to believe, that society would approve of and reward a behavior of dangerous felons lying to courts to get out of prison and torture the innocent. But it is a device to move the locus of decision making to the social quorum, the tribe. Elected officials rewarding dangerous felons for lying makes perfect sense when you realize how it fits into a historical pattern. It is a device and one of many perversions and contortions, which enable the primitive tribal impulse to overcome evolved social institutions.