Freeing Your Inner Amoeba

Why have personal liberty and freedom become the primary virtues of industrial society?

The history of life on earth involved the emergence of ever more complex forms as simple bacterial cells engulfed each other to become larger nucleated cells, which in turn clumped to form ever larger bodies. In the same way individual humans developed ever more elaborate systems of cooperation and specialisation, culminating in the planet spanning industrial civilisation we find ourselves part of today.

A free-living amoeba displays remarkable intelligence, proving that single cells sense their environment, process that information then make decisions about where to move and what to eat. When cells stick together, they first form undifferentiated blobs, chains, or sheets, giving up some of their individual autonomy. The simplest body plans are a repeating pattern that spreads across the environment, forming a colonial organism. Sea sponges and algal mats are good examples. The dramatic success of the first modern humans, spreading out of Africa and the near East around sixty thousand years ago likely depended on their capacity interconnect different tribes to form a colonial structure across great distances. Tribes of modern humans regularly interacted to swap young people for marriage, while Neanderthals and other older human lineages suffered high levels of inbreeding in their isolated tribes. Modern humans also traded goods such as ochre, obsidian and beads over vast distances. Thus, the network of human tribes spanning the planet resemble a coral, with the individual tribal polyps linked together into a continuous interconnected mass.

Over evolutionary time the first simple colonial organisms developed more specialised cell types and more elaborate tissue and organ structures. Roots got better at anchoring and mineral extraction. Leaves perfected energy capture. Stems streamlined transport between the two. Defences and reproduction also received dedicated tissues. Human societies underwent similar transformations. Slaves were sent to dig in the mines. Farmers spent their whole lives growing surplus grain, and traders moved food and materials along dedicated trade routes. Armies and harems served the power centres. Some cultures formalised these arrangements, such as the Indian caste system which saw society as a body with different groups of people serving as head, arms and legs.

The Industrial era saw an intensification of these trends. Empires which previously interconnected one corner of the world burst out across the open oceans for the first time. The British empire established “colonies” across a quarter of the world’s land area and population, though this structure had a distinct centre of power in London. The classical empires achieved mass coordination through tools such as religion, writing and commodity backed finance, tools the British empire refined to function over greater distances. These mechanisms are comparable to the hormones which the first multicellular organisms used to regulate their activities.

The early 20^th century saw a dramatic intensification of these trends, especially after WWII, even as the formal empires of the previous centuries vanished. Adam Curtis’ fascinating documentary “The Century of the Self” outlines how the emerging fields of psychoanalysis and psychology were repurposed to turbocharge the mass consumerism of the post war era. Advertisers discovered they could manipulate individual decisions by appealing to deep psychological motivations. I consider this development to be analogous to the evolution of dedicated endocrine glands, whose sole function is the production of hormones that coordinate the behaviour of countless individual cells. Through this period our mechanisms of governance shifted first to being driven by polling of the masses, and then finally the tools of psychological manipulation were refined into ever more subtle mechanisms to “nudge” the population in directions deemed desirable by those in power. The same tools which 1920s advertisers used to manipulate women into taking up cigarette smoking were later used by government bureaucracies to persuade us to quit the habit.

Electronic communication evolved from radio, to movies, to television, and finally to the internet. With each advance the local power structures used the new medium to devastating effect. Radio was a key component in Nazi propaganda, and the Hollywood culturally colonise the world with movies. The internet initially promised a space for individuals to freely communicate, but quickly became centrally manipulated. This system is analogous to the evolution of ever more complex and centralised nervous systems in multicellular organisms, which allow for more rapid coordination than hormones. The globally coordinated response to a novel coronavirus is a glimpse of the potential of this new power.

Most of us now live in a world where this vast global system supplies our water, food, shelter, security and entertainment at low, low prices. We have the freedom to travel wherever we wish, consume whatever resources we desire, take up occupations and form relationships apparently without restrictions. Our primary collective value is individual freedom to choose the life we wish to live. We make a collective past-time of pouring hatred on societies that restrict the freedom of individuals, be they past or present, real or imaginary. The cartoonish dictators from “1984” are the new target of our two minutes of hate.

The empires which once ruled the world with iron fists are nowhere to be seen. We believe the new collective body has no real head. If we are not yet perfectly equal then it is only a matter of time before all injustices will be erased. A perfect colonial future awaits us: smooth, undifferentiated and blameless. That is the ideal in the common culture at least.

The reality is that power (actual power, not just the ceremonial version once invested in emperors and kings) is more concentrated than ever before, but also more diffuse at the same time. The real power in industrial society today lies in the network of transnational corporations and financial institutions that no government can control. Governments themselves have become the public relations departments of this structure. Militaries have become their security wings.

The citizens who make up the bulk of the tissues of this vast organism are free, in a way. They are free to respond to the financial pressures placed upon them, free to try to resist or respond to the deluge of advertising and propaganda and public service nudge campaigns crafted to improve their miserable lives. They are free to fashion themselves into replaceable parts, cogs that neatly substitute when another burns out after a lifetime of service.

Human beings, descended from more autonomous ancestors, have a certain minimum daily requirement of various psychological vitamins: lust, status, hatred and of course freedom. The consumer economy supplies these needs in the form of pornography, fancy brand labels, collective mockery of unlucky individuals via mass media, fear and scorn for highly publicised enemies and an endless stream of meaningless consumer choices. Crosswalks and elevators feature buttons that connect to nothing, but they give us the illusion that we are exercising our freedom: a hamster wheel for the will, as it were.

When a large, complex multicellular organism dies the cells comprising its body cannot reclaim the freedom of their amoeboid ancestors. Long before the great beast dies, conditions deteriorate for its tissues as resources are shunted from the humble feet and guts to sustain the brain. In similar circumstances civilised humans might reclaim their independence, but most will cling on to the bitter end. Only the Romans who ran away to join the barbarians left descendants. According to recent genetic analyses, the loyal citizens of the eternal city were erased from evolutionary history.

Small organisms such as hardy tardigrades use a different body structure called eutely. In these animals a precise number of cells is found in every individual, with each cell dedicated to its own place in the whole. The roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, is a model organism known to contain exactly 959 body cells in females, and 1031 in males. Substructures in broader human society sometimes follow this pattern, such as sports teams, military units, chamber music groups and juries. The eutelic pattern is the polar opposite of the colonial blob. Perhaps there are opportunities to develop new social forms built around fixed numbers of participants, that can function like a smaller organism lodged in the tissues of the great beast. Preindustrial societies were more eutelic in construction, with dense networks of interpersonal dependencies locking people into place. Industrial humans celebrated the severing of these shackles, but now live lives of desperate isolation.

A battered lover will argue how deeply they are loved. The lowliest wretch believes God respects him more than any other. In the same way, people living in the most totalitarian society should be expected to obsess over their freedoms.

Recognising this fact is, unironically, liberating.

Unfortunately, deciding how to react, is terrifying.

Choose wisely. Your (sense of ) freedom depends on it.