Faith, War, And The “Purpose Machine”

“From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?”
-James 4:1

One of the problems with faith-driven efforts is the statement of James 4:1, above.

While James 4:2-3 shows the flaws in such efforts driven by faith, verse 4 is more interesting to me here:

“Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that friendship with the world is enmity with God?…”

And verse 5 seems to make exactly the point I was making earlier:

“Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, ‘The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy’? “

The problem, then, is how to avoid the “human nature” described by James above? The “purpose” of churches and religious organizations is to do “good” and avoid “evil”. But as Jesus might ask, can that which is evil by nature produce that which is good? “By their fruits ye shall know them”.

We know what our intended “purpose” is, generally, but the problem is all too often that we fail in our purpose when corruption is exposed in the ranks of the church or organization. This again leads us to Hoffer’s statement that it is not a cynical and power-hungry leadership, but the unification of the people that drives leaders toward corruption.

What Jesus seemed to be implying, and what science is now telling us, is that all systems tend to operate by a kind of standard model. If the constituent parts of the system are driven by certain flaws, those same flaws will be magnified by the efforts of the people, so that the most noble intentions will tend to result in corruption.

Hoffers statement points out that the exchange of individual freedom for the “corporateness” of a mass movement or group leads to another kind of freedom:

“Freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder, and betray without shame and without remorse….Thus hatred is not only a means of unification but also its product. Renan says that we have never, since the world began, heard of a merciful nation. Nor, one may add, have we heard of a merciful church or a merciful revolutionary party. The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness”.

It is when we “renounce the self” in favor of a larger group, the same flaws of a single human nature are multiplied, and only the most ruthless ad disciplined system can avoid the corruption that will ultimately result.
“Does a thorn produce figs?” asked Jesus.

Hoffer, Norbert Wiener, and Dawkins have combined to show us the function of a “purpose machine”. Hoffer points out that fanatical zeal will tend to increase when the contradiction is greater between reality and desired result, and Dawkins has pointed out that machines based on negative feedback will tend to work harder when the discrepancy between what is “real” and the desired result are greatest.

Norbert Wiener, in showing us how systems respond to negative feedback, has demonstrated an intimate association between information and purpose. “Any system–a person, a thermostat– must, in order to flexibly pursue a goal, employ negative feedback”(Robert Wright, Three Scientists And Their Gods).

Putting these things together, all systems that unite for such purposes must both assume that human nature, with it’s “shadow” tendencies, will not act according to “self interest”, and in fact generally ignores this tendency among humans.

Human organizations have goals. Those goals provide guidance within the system, the means to achieve a particular end. Within these guidelines, the “purpose machine” begins to work, and will measure its success according to its goals, increasing activity as discrepancies appear between desired reality and actual reality. The more specific the goal, the greater the chance of reaching it with minimum “noise” resulting from personal tendencies. The less specific and more “absolute” the goal, the greater the opportunity for human frailties to creep in, resulting in corruption. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

To assume that any mass movement, cult, or religion, or government, is “good” simply because its intentions are ‘good” is to be blinded to actual tendencies that multiply within the organization, and tend toward corruption. As the old saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

As Robert Wright puts it:

“The information flow in humans, like that in bacteria and toilets, is simply set up to yield behavior that is purposeful, whether or not you want to call it that”.

Hoffer yields yet another insight on this, when he points out that, no matter the “content’ of any holy cause or mass movement, the zealots generally die for the same thing. We must conclude that our “intended’ purpose, and the actual results occurring over time are often the opposite. No matter how disciplined, how severe the punishment for disobedience, the corruption somehow manages to flow upwards toward the top tier, driven by the very power of unity within the organization.

But why? If we conclude that intelligence is linked to the immune system, the strategies that operate to protect us from those “different” will begin to manifest themselves. Consequently, we might conclude that the greater the power of those at the top, the greater tendency toward paranoid behavior as they seek to protect themselves and their “differences’ from others. Not only do they protect the organization from destructive information, but they protect themselves from those who might challenge their authority. Since the immune system seeks to “identify” invaders” that threaten the integrity of the system, the leadership will be driven, over time and by its very success, to identify invaders from both “within” and “outside” the system. The leadership will increasingly seek to maintain the integrity of the system “as is”.

The more successful the system, the greater the perceived threat from change. As a consequence, if there arises a discrepancy between the desired goals of the system and the reality around them, they will intensify efforts to identify and neutralize flaws. This intensification will NOT occur as a result of the need to examine themselves, but from the assumption that it comes from lack of effort within the system itself. Having risen to the top by continually ignoring feedback that would have cost leadership, the leaders themselves will not seek to look at themselves as the possible cause, but will assume that the membership has become lazy, tolerant, and lost focus, something they would never admit of themselves, since it was their fanatical drive that got them to leadership on the first place. “Be more like the leader! See how he sacrifices himself diligently to the goal of (whatever)!”.

It is at this point that the evolutionary “purpose machine” has taken over, and will tend to ignore all negative feedback increasingly as “noise”, or “the devil” seeking to weaken our resolve to “serve God”. “We must have faith! We must believe!”

What occurs at this point is most interesting. As the desire and “faith” of the leader is pronounced by his acolytes and lieutenants, the people themselves begin to wonder if their personal sacrifice is really gaining anything. Their personal “purpose machine” begins to kick in, and they start resenting the constant need for prayer, denial, sacrifice, ignoring their own family and loved ones. The system will begin to splinter and “speciate”, but the members will first begin to define this splintering in terms of the very goals that caused the problem in the first place, and the evolutionary “purpose machine” starts building toward the same corruption again. More simply, we “go for what we know”, and what we know is that we believed “God” to be a part of the organization we once served, but the leader has somehow become corrupt. We simply put “God” at the top of the next successive organization, and work toward exactly the same process of corruption again.

But evolution has served its purpose. It has driven us toward individualization, almost against our will, and it has forced the continual diversity and speciation necessary for life and survival. The “software” of the goals we seek cannot “de-program” the “hardware” of our human nature that drives the system.

Next essay, I will be exploring this problem and its relation to computers and Artificial Intelligence.