In modern times, we don’t always get to do what we want to do. Fair enough. But there’s a case to be made that the further we remove ourselves from our passions, the less successful our social institutions will be.

One way we’ve done this is the pathological obsession with capital accumulation, without any reference to the costs of that accumulation. For example, the current system for CEO compensation shows very little correlation with either performance or market capitalization.

While this is a complex structural issue in corporate governance, Jenson and Meckling gave us a demonstration of what can happen when the various passions of stakeholders aren’t aligned:

In the finance literature, this view can be traced to a pioneering paper by Michael Jensen and William Meckling (1976), which demonstrated the incentives of risk-neutral top managers with less than 100% ownership of their companies to take actions that reduce firm value. To illustrate with a simple example, a manager with a 3% stake in a publicly traded company gets 100% of the benefits from consuming a dollar of perks but incurs only 3% of the costs.

Probably too deep to go into all the evolutionary factors which lead to tribal behavior, but here are a few:

• Our limbic system (emotional center) is much older than our forebrain (rational center). As the primate brain developed, so did the primate social institutions. Nonetheless, tribal behavior is deeply embedded in us.
• Well integrated and closely connected social groups tend to be far better off than individuals in terms of responding to external pressures. Ironically enough, social living grew out of self-preservation.
• Over hundreds of thousands of years, natural selection weeded out those individuals who could not function well in groups. This created a sort of fundamental pool of human experience, and resulted in the human propensity and need for storytelling as well as the law of reciprocity

If you look at the first websites that started to crop up back in the early 1990’s, you’ll see a pattern:

• Academics – The internet was created by academic institutions, so it’s not surprising they constituted most of the first web pages. More importantly, academics was one of the few institutions to maintain certain tribal behaviors from the beginning (ritualized peer-review).
• Media – Naturally, the next wave of websites were media-oriented. IMDB, Underground Music Archive, MTV, Art.net, etc.
• Porn – A ton of porn..clearly one of the most basic human instincts, so, no surprise here.

What’s incredible about all these websites were just how much they were driven by passion, not rational pursuits. Out of all the sites that could have been created, the first internet pioneers organized themselves around passionate investigation (science), storytelling (media), and sex (porn). These also happen to be some of the common denominators of human culture and civilization.

This is the most fundamental aspect of tribes. Outside of coercive tactics, humans naturally organize themselves based on their passions.

Modern institutions largely did away with this through market pressures and what not.

For example, the industrial revolution squeezed the small-time merchants out of business. These were folks who genuinely enjoyed carpentry, leather work, etc. but could not compete. As such, these occupational tribes were broken up and forced to travel to the nearest mill or factory in order to find pay and support their family.

This is still the case in a lot of ways, but technology has allowed those natural tribal tendencies to crop up again. RG is the perfect example of this sort of technology, and the subsequent communal space that develops.

Like I said, I’ve always had my suspicions, but I began to staunchly reject it over the past few months as I continued to research some of these concepts in network dynamics.

That’s the confusing stuff though..what really convinced me it was all a farce was some of this recent stuff on normative social behavior.

Anyway: just to be clear, I have not totally rejected leftist politics. I still consider Chomsky’s conception of anarcho-syndicalism to be a viable institutional design. Ultimately, what he (& especially Bakunin) espouse is the truest form of leadership, i.e. one who is driven by a purpose and pursues that purpose in a way that inspires those around him to follow, without the need for any manipulation or coercion and always in terms of free-association and “opting-in”. Not surprisingly, the methods in which Bakunin gained clout and instituted change back in the day, are now coming back in style. They call it open agile adoption.

Also, I didn’t mention this, but organizational culture is a huge issue and one in which OWS utterly failed to address (duh..). This is partly why none of the Occupyers could even express what it was they believed or what they wanted, and when they finally did express that in their list of demands it was all leftist rhetoric with absolutely no concision or sense of purpose. It was just a mess…

Ehh..somewhat. A few major points here:

1. They made a lot of noise and brought attention to the issue of wealth inequality. This was great. Also, the fact that it carried the emotional weight to be able to spread around the world is awesome.
2. They were somewhat diverse, in that their clever rhetoric (we are the 99%) and lack of cohesive political demands or affiliation, really brought them broad emotional support from the public. However, the actual demographics were – not surprisingly – pretty narrow. It was essentially a bunch of fairly young, well-educated/affluent, white people. Of course, the demographic surveys are of poor quality and I could only find one that had more than a couple thousand respondents.
3. For those who really paid attention, I think they also shed some light on issues of free speech.
4. It was a time of creativity and experimentation. Overall I think it definitely changed the climate of things, and for that, I commend those involved.