By John Cryan
~ September 3, 2023 ~

In The Chaonic Economy, the concept of effective body size was introduced. The same concept applies to politics. Politics, culture and economics are completely intertwined. Chaons rule them all.

The standard continuum of politics runs left-right. Instead of being a linear dualistic paradox, though, it runs in a circle. At the top of the circle is moderation, the quality so quietly exalted by the monks of Shangri-La, the key to wisdom and longevity of culture. At the bottom, where extreme left and right come together, is many-headed tyranny: dictatorship of the proletariat, fascism, totalitarianism – call it what you may – pure social evil. This makes the continuum of politics a moral compass.

Now swing from average effective body size, a measure of how badly our economies are harming the ecology, or biosphere, that supports them, to individual effective body size. The latter is the prime measure of inequality in a society. It is important to understand how this form of measurement scales.

A single naked human in the biosphere gathering fruit and nuts equals 1 individual effective body size. Scale-up begins and accelerates with the evolution of language and intense cooperation in ever-larger and more complex groups, the acquisition of fire, invention of tools, their conversion to weapons, and the advent of hunting. Clothing, footwear, ornament and decorative arts, furniture, and non-cave shelter – what we call personal possessions – follow, and increase individual effective body sizes by several orders of magnitude, as all comes out of the biosphere. The triple developments of trading, agriculture and permanent settlements jump it again by many more orders of magnitude, as the demand on, and displacement of, ‘virgin’ biosphere magnifies. Specialization, or division of labor, begins to cause noticeable divergence in individual effective body sizes. Once simple human, animal, wind- fire-and water-based transport and manufacture, or industry, develops, average body size jumps again, but individual diverges sharply, exaggerated by slavery and indenture. The invention of money formalizes these arrangements. It is now possible for one human to control many, through the invention of hierarchy. Politics has begun, and has started off on the wrong foot due to a combination of greed fueled by differences in temperament (the germ of morality, along with myth) and nodal bias.

Finally come fossil fuels and the myriad developments we call the ‘industrial revolution,’ crammed into the last few centuries. They send effective body sizes through the roof, in some places beyond the thousands and into the millions per living person, as we embed and surround ourselves in an ever- increasing panoply of, well, stuff – things made out of the biosphere, and which displace more and more of it. Of course, we, and our stuff, also decay, and recycle back into that biosphere, but more and more slowly and dangerously, due to all our invented chemicals, the likes of which the biosphere has never seen and cannot handle nearly as fast and efficiently as it does its own, ‘virgin’ ones.

Now return to the Circle of Politics. The Platonic ideal lies at the True North position, a form of geographic bias, but there you have it for this example. Self-rule through principles of moderation. How far can we deviate from it and still have functioning democracy?

The answer lies in the chaonic universe. Because that universe is the opposite of static, an expanding and accelerating universe, it is subject to the twin forces of time inflation and chaonic erasure. Chaonic erasure ensures there ultimately is nothing to conserve except the governing processes of the biosphere that supports us. Chief among them is Convolution. Convolution is a self-governing process that enables us to keep up with time inflation and chaonic erasure. That process is progressive by necessity. Without progressive change we, and the world we inhabit, will die. So the proper orientation to ensure our continuation is Progressive Conservatism, located at Magnetic North on the political compass.