Elephant seals have extraordinary sexual dimorphism where sexual competition has led to massive size and aggressive fighting between the males. Whilst the fighting between alpha elephant seals does not cause significant declines in their overall populations or life-support system, imagine if they had access to global finance and nuclear weapons.
Money as an extended phenotype
A phenotype is the genetic expression of a species, such as humans or beavers. An extended phenotype is where that phenotype carries an impact on the social or physical landscape. An example with beavers is that beavers build dams. Beavers don’t read and write, but humans do. Our writing is an extension of our phenotype. Another extension of our phenotype is money, which beavers also don’t use. Humans invented money, which comes from capitalisation of land and other things that once only used to be passed on to people and their descendants in a particular locality, and could only be taken in war.
Money has made transacting land something that can happen far away from the people and animals who live there. It has become possible for individual humans to get control of vast quantities of land and power by aggregating money.
Unfortunately, money has taken on a life of its own, and resisting the justification of financial profit – for a justice system as for a planning system or a corporation seeking growth – has become almost impossible.
Can more money be made from destroying the planet than from preserving it?
The relationship between economic trade, environmental protection, ecological systems, and local self-determination, involves major tensions and trade-offs. The trend seems to be disturbingly zero-sum.
Extractive industries, manufacturing, resource exploitation, and other human activities that go beyond hunter-gathering, generate significant short-term profits and increased economic activity, but they capture environmental resources on a new scale that disrupts the natural systems that all life, including human life, depends on. The pursuit of resource maximization has prioritized resource acquisition over life.
Powerful corporate interests, privileged at law, and political lobbies, pursue business models and policies that externalize environmental costs, and economic theory aids this illusion that economic activity is independent of the real world. In reality, while a few become wealthy and powerful, many go broke, and corporate activity requires a gambler's mentality or criminal certainty.
Resource extraction always comes at a thermodynamic cost, which can only be mitigated on the time-scale of complex natural systems and flow energies, including soils, but modern economic activity goes much faster than these living systems can cope with. Externalisation of environmental costs also means the exclusion of local populations from objecting to local disruption.
That is, of course, antithetical to self-determination and democracy.
The Addictive component to the accumulation of money/power in the ultra-rich that overwhelms reason with regards to consequences
The nature of money and power accumulation is especially addictive and self-reinforcing among the super-rich and powerful. This can overwhelm rational considerations of long-term consequences, including environmental destruction. As Sigmund Freud noted, much emotion is bound up in money. It is unrealistic to rely on the super-wealthy, whose financial condition personifies egocentricity, to think beyond their own persons, surroundings, and life-expectancies.
There is substantial evidence that the drive to amass ever-greater fortunes and consolidate power can become neurologically - addictive for some individuals and organizations, overriding social responsibility, and ordinary concerns.
The feedback loops created by wealth and power concentration - the ability to shape policies, regulations, public discourse, and economic incentives to further entrench one's position via mass media domination, monopoly, and lobbying - can form a self-perpetuating cycle. Those with the most money and influence are often the least inclined to limit their pursuit of greater riches and control.
The allure of greater wealth and power can blind decision-makers to the catastrophic risks their actions pose to the planet and humanity as a whole.
This points to a fundamental tension between the aims of individual self-interest and the collective good, or systemically, between the profit-motive and life itself.
Money and War: The Ultimate Risk
War as an investment industry and a money-laundering opportunity is conducted on an ever-greater scale, seemingly to dwarf all other activities. I cannot see any other extended phenotype that can combat this at the moment.
The fact that war and conflict have become such a lucrative business, with vast sums of money flowing through military spending, arms sales, reconstruction contracts, and illicit financial networks, is deeply disturbing. This war-as-investment dynamic creates perverse incentives for perpetuating and even instigating armed conflicts, regardless of the human and environmental toll.
This extended phenotype of militarized capitalism dwarfs and eclipses other potential counterweights, in the current global landscape. The sheer scale of the resources, political influence, and entrenched interests involved in the war industry, make it very difficult to constrain or redirect.
The need for more logic and safety in our economic, political, and security priorities on a global scale is as obvious as is the vested interest of the super-rich and powerful in maintaining this status quo. We are not just looking at a system, we are looking at an historical hypertrophy of human hierarchy based on the accumulation of fossil-fuel and other wealth and the expression of personality and power. In other words, alpha apes have more power than they ever had before, on an order of magnitude.
Some have called for dramatic reductions in military spending coupled with reinvestment in social/environmental programs, but we can see that this implies a kind of clumsy retrofitting of the naturally hypertrophied ape-order. And the profit-motive would skew and corrupt these.
Stronger international laws and enforcement mechanisms around arms trade and war profiteering would also be desirable, but the trend in increasingly corporate and oligarch-controlled governments has actually been to drastically weaken these (as in ending nuclear arms agreements etc.)
Divestment campaigns and shareholder activism to target defense corporations lack the magnitude, staying power, positioning – and of course profits - of the billionaire war-profiteers, who are bankrolled by governments using tax-payer money. Indeed, they seem to deploy governments and national armies as their servants or, lately, they hire out private armies to governments.
Empowering international institutions and civil society to hold war-profiteering elites accountable has increasingly been revealed to be toothless, as in the ICC’s attempts to stop genocide in Israel-Gaza. Many countries, notably the superpowers, avoid becoming signatories to any agreements likely to embarrass them, although they do use these to harass other countries and their rivals.
Sexual Selection and War: Elephant seals with nuclear weapons
Elephant seals have extraordinary sexual dimorphism where sexual competition has led to massive size and aggressive fighting between the males. These traits are so pronounced that there is high mortality among the big males, as they fight to the death for territory and females. If you consider that humans have developed more and more lethal weapons for the same sexually competitive reason, this helps explain the flimsy, repetitive, rationales of actual wars.
Framing money as an "extended phenotype" in the context of sexual selection is a compelling way to understand some of the seemingly maladaptive behaviours we see in modern economic and social systems.
The core idea is that the human tendency to obsessively pursue wealth and power may have evolutionary roots in sexual selection - where males who are able to demonstrate their fitness through the accumulation of resources and displays of wealth are more attractive to potential mates, similarly to the cases of the peacock's tail or the elephant seal’s bulk and aggression. This seems to have led to a situation where there is a growing preponderance of individuals who are biologically predisposed to prioritize wealth acquisition and risk-taking behaviors in order to gain a reproductive advantage.
Some evidence supports this hypothesis. Studies have shown that in both historical and contemporary societies, women tend to prefer wealthier or higher-status mates, and that men will go to great lengths to demonstrate their wealth and status as a way of attracting partners.
Money’s ability to extend individual power and dominance beyond the local seems to have magnified this tendency. The electronic-internationalisation of money, the global share-market, and the internet, have accelerated money-movement beyond human-speed conceptualisation.
The emergence of hyper-wealthy "alpha males" in modern capitalist economies could be viewed as an extreme expression of this sexual-selection dynamic. Think of the role of polygamy in establishing the domination of the modern Saudi dynasty. Think of Elon Musk’s multiple female associates and children.
Additionally, the concept of "gambling mentalities" among the super-wealthy aligns with the idea that these individuals may be willing to take on enormous risks in pursuit of ever-greater demonstrations of wealth and power. This echoes the kind of runaway sexual selection we see in traits like the peacock's tail, where the trait becomes increasingly exaggerated beyond what is actually functionally optimal.
Ultimately, this suggests that the profit motive and associated behaviours which seem to be driving us toward environmental and societal collapse have deep evolutionary roots in our innate drives for status, reproduction, and mate selection, and we have no defense against the disproportionate consequences our technology and resource capture have created.
The idea of framing money and wealth accumulation as an extended phenotype driven by sexual selection has been explored by some evolutionary psychologists and economists. [1]
Where hard-wiring overwhelms contextual proportionality: leaders that go to war despite nuclear magnified risks
Whilst the fighting between alpha elephant seals does not cause significant declines in their overall populations or life-support system, imagine if they had access to nuclear weapons.
Did Donald Trump abandon the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty because he wanted to impress women? Did Macron want a European army for the same reason? Did Hilary Clinton boast about being involved in Gadafi’s horrible death in order to boost her alpha male’s declining profile?
Perhaps we can draw a parallel between the aggressive, high-risk behaviours of male seals during mating season and the actions of political and military leaders who pursue war.
The basic idea would be that just as male seals engage in violent displays and combat to establish dominance and access to mates, human leaders may be driven by similar innate psychological and biological mechanisms when it comes to competition for power, resources and status on the geopolitical stage.
This line of inquiry provides a novel way to think about the root causes of some of humanity's most destructive behaviors.
So, what is the ratio of human capacity to reason vs human instinct?
There doesn't seem to be a simple, universal ratio - it likely varies considerably across individuals, cultures and contexts. It seems likely, however, that alpha-apes are big risk-takers whose risk-taking is rewarded by material success and emotional highs.
Fundamentally, human beings are products of millions of years of evolutionary development. Much of our neurological architecture and behavioral repertoire is shaped by ancient instincts, emotions and intuitions that emerged to help our ancestors survive and reproduce. Things like fear, aggression, status-seeking, in-group/out-group biases, etc. have deep evolutionary roots.
At the same time, the extraordinary development of the human prefrontal cortex and our capacity for abstract reasoning, planning, and conscious self-regulation set us apart from other animals. This potentially allows us to override immediate impulses, engage in long-term planning, and apply conscious, rational deliberation to our choices and actions.
However, even our most "rational" decision-making is often heavily influenced by unconscious biases, short-cuts, and emotional processing. Prospect theory in behavioural economics reveals how "rational" economic choices are often driven by intuitive, automatic (System 1 thinking) rather than conscious, careful reasoning.
So in a sense, human cognition and behaviour exists in a dynamic tension between instinctive, emotionally-driven impulses and our capacity for reasoned, analytical thought. In any given situation, the balance between the two can shift dramatically depending on context, individual differences, and the specific cognitive demands at hand.
Ultimately, the "ratio" of reason to instinct is not a fixed one, but rather a fluid, context-dependent interplay. Unfortunately, globalised instant money-movement now provides an omnipresent new context well beyond human-scale, which may have elevated a new, unfit kind of influential leader – the armchair oligarch – who would never have survived in a tribe that required a more local, charismatic, endogamous, and physically-based kind of fitness. Developing the self-awareness and cognitive tools to navigate this explosively-dynamic balance is a daunting problem for the human condition.
My thoughts are that atomic holocaust is pretty likely under the circumstances at the moment.
Satire as an antidote to war
The super-rich mega-gambler-humans who behave like immoderate elephant seals manufacture consent for their priorities through control of the public messaging apparatus, including mainstream news media and large internet platforms. This concentration of power allows them to shape narratives, influence public opinion, and prioritize their interests over the common good. Additionally, these elites exert control over critical societal institutions such as the financial system, prisons, and the military, further entrenching their dominance.
If small groups of humans could dismantle this dominant media landscape, there would be potential for a fundamental shift in societal values. By fostering connections with neighbours and family, people could prioritize local organization and mutual support, creating a viscously-based movement capable of challenging global-elite narratives. This local focus could help reclaim agency and empower communities to advocate for their needs and values.
Historically, the French Revolution serves as a poignant example of such a transformative movement. It dismantled a monarchy-theocracy that had long dictated the lives and beliefs of the populace. Activists of the time, operating in a context of pervasive surveillance by both church and state, devised innovative ways to communicate and organize. They relied on private gatherings to discuss revolutionary ideas and strategies, effectively evading the watchful eyes of their oppressors.
A hallmark of elite domination of the mass media is the redirection of laughter away from self-recognition, towards finger-pointing and social stigmatisation. Satire may be the antidote to this moralistic polarisation.
A pivotal aspect of the French revolutionary spirit was the reinvention of literature and ideas. (Popular use of birth control was a sign of this, with a sudden drop in family sizes and infant mortality from 1789.) Secret printing presses became instrumental in producing pamphlets that not only disseminated revolutionary thoughts but also employed humour to critique and undermine the dominant elites of the church and nobility. This satirical approach served as a mirror, reflecting the absurdities of the ruling class back to them, and sometimes even piercing their self-delusion. These movements were ultimately backed up by the French National Guard, which was then a citizen-manned army. The revolution actually took about 80 years, and required generations to inherit its values and carry on the fight.
Sheila Newman’s work, Land-tenure and the Revolution in Democracy and Birth Control in France, published by Countershock Press in 2023, explores these themes in depth, highlighting how the revolutionaries navigated societal constraints to forge a new path.
French humour has recently been silenced by a wave of political correctness, straight from the crucible of the United States. The French Government recently charged the owner of Telegram with a crime that carries a sentence of 20 years prison. Political absurdity has reached pre-revolutionary heights.
While the Human Rights that came into being in French law in 1789 may currently appear to be eclipsed by European Union dominance over French law, the situation is not entirely devoid of hope. The lessons from the French Revolution remind us that local organization, humor, and innovative communication strategies can still play crucial roles in challenging entrenched systems of power. By drawing inspiration from history, individuals and communities today could work towards reclaiming agency and redefining societal priorities.
NOTES
[1] See for instance, Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind, 2009 and Daniel Nettle and Robin Dunbar, on the role of sexual selection in shaping human economic and social behaviors.
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