U we all want a better world. If we take a look at the world in which we live, we see some good things, we see some bad things. There is at any given time, a spectrum of good and bad, of healthy unhealthy, of love, hate. And our world does have a lot of beauty in it. But we know that there are things that could definitely be better. And at any given time, sometimes more than others. But you turn on the news or you go to social media, you hear people talk.
There are things going on in this world that are awful and just not the way things should be. And no matter what kind of evolutionary take you have about humans and biology, and just the way things are, the way things have always been, I think all of us know that the world could be a much better place. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, not the complete eradication of discrimination and prejudice.
I don't think utopian ideals have much of a place in the intellectually honest mindset of an individual or a society. But at the same time, even if the reach exceeds the grasp, I think most of us would agree the world could be a better place. And I don't think any of us are going to purport to have the solution to what that is. We've got ideas. Many of us have opinions. There might be certain social structures that we think are better than others.
There might be a focus on religion or spirituality, or maybe atheism that some people promote, maybe an increased objectivity or an increased foundation of science, or maybe it's none of those. Maybe it's anarchy for some. But everybody has some idea about maybe how the world might be better, probably based on their own experience and wherever opinions tend to naturally come from. But I think it's safe to say that pretty much every adult looks at the world and says, this could be better.
And we all want a better world. We want it for our children. If we have children, we want it for ourselves, right here and now, which would be nice, but just future generations and the legacy of humanity, however long that lasts. We want there to be good things in this world, and the more good there is, the better off we would all be. And we would make a more kind of genuine form of progress. I think we could say there's technological progress, which is definitely an important part of it.
But there's also the kind of progress of the human spirit, if you will, or intellect, or kind of the intangible version of human progress that is perhaps more important and ultimate, an ultimate form of humanity's progress. However, you want to frame that. We look at the world, there's good, there's bad, and it seems like the bad things that happen don't necessarily have to be that way, or at least the majority of it.
It's kind of like looking at a car accident and saying, that did not really have to happen. Either something went wrong with the traffic lights, or somebody wasn't paying attention or driving too fast. There's typically a reason or set of reasons that lead to a kind of disaster, and we can step back and look at that situation holistically and say, that did not need to be that way. And this is, of course, how a lot of improvement happens in the technologies and infrastructures that we build.
And I think you can say the same thing for the intangible side of humanity, right? Our intellect, our values or spirituality, whatever you want to call that, that kind of ongoing mindset and value system that humans have. We believe that we should also be able to continue to improve that over time. But I think it's been a lot less obvious how to make those improvements. In the tangible world of kind of engineering solutions, we can lock in the improvements.
Each generation can take what was learned and put that into a physical construct, and that becomes the new starting point for generations going forward. And so it kind of has this bootstrapping effect of working its way towards better things. But in the intangible side, in just kind of the spirit or the mindset or the intellect of humanity, how to bootstrap that forward is maybe less obvious.
It doesn't seem to be a way to lock that in because of the kind of ephemeral nature of thought and of values. And so what is the solution? Is there a solution? We all want a better world, but how do we make one? Well, there are attempts, obviously, that are made socially, and sometimes these attempts go too far as a kind of social engineering. And maybe sometimes they don't go far enough as maybe a type of rampant capitalism that has no guards on it, has no type of governance.
It seems to be something in between those extremes. That would be maybe the best solution, a certain dosage of structure. But systems like society cannot be forced into a specific governance or morality.
We know that effective group behavior requires both top down and bottom up dynamics in some sense, top down in the sense of kind of having targets that we collectively work towards and agree with, and then bottom up in terms of just a natural, organic kind of messy interaction that defines so much of humanity. And if you have too much, top down has a way of kind of fragilizing or weakening the system.
And if you have too much kind of unbridled bottom up dynamics, and that can have a way of getting out of control too. And it seems to be some mix of top down, bottom up. But that's only going to work. It only does work in systems, other systems outside, let's say, human behavior, human society, ones that we observe and measure in nature. It only works if there is something shared among all the individuals in terms of what is deemed useful or important.
And so what I want to argue in this episode is that when we look at our world and we notice that we want a better one, and we're kind of hard pressed for what that ultimate solution is, I'm going to argue that whatever we end up calling that solution, it needs to be about building our world from within. And what do I mean by that? Spend some time talking about that. Well, it has to do with this idea of the inner self, one's moral and intellectual integrity of the individual.
And this idea that if there is a possibility of making a better world kind of writ large, then that's only possible if it's a reflection of our inner world that we have as an individual. The sense of what is valuable, what is useful, what is ethical, what is moral, our kind of own personal intellectual integrity has to be the starting point.
If the individuals of a collective don't have that kind of proper value system or proper individual integrity in check, then anything that emerges from the collective behavior is not going to be a positive thing. It's not going to be something that is useful.
If that's how you want to define positive, it's not going to have the utility, it's not going to solve one or more important problems, or it's not going to be good or moral or ethical, or however you want to define the good thing that emerges, the good behavior that emerges. But however you define that, what is good will only emerge as a reflection of something that is being done correctly at the individual level.
And so when I say we need to build our world from within, I'm talking to us as individuals that instead of looking for so much external sources as a solution, whether that's external sources of happiness, or externally meeting the right people to make our lives better, or being in the right place for things to go the way they should, or accumulating the right things in our lives, or maybe it's recognition, maybe it's money, maybe it's respect.
Whatever it is, these things in and of themselves are not bad. They're not bad to have in your life. But we tend to think of that externally. If we look at society and something erupts and there's violence, we think of it as there is a system that isn't in place that should have been, or maybe it's not strong enough, or maybe that system was too overbearing.
We get into this kind of what top down things are in place and start to blame that, or we blame the individuals involved, or the groups more likely involved. This group thinks like this. This group thinks a different way. This group must be a better way to think. It's all kind of external. It's not looking back at an individual and saying, what does that individual think about what's important and what's useful in life?
The argument I want to make in this episode is that to create the world that we want. And when I say that, you might say, well, different people want different things. Yes. But at some level, I think we all do want a kind of peace, a kind of respect, a kind of ongoing interaction where people are not being hurt. Right. There are some universally true things, and I'll touch more on this later, that people generally do want and to get that world is not to impose certain structures or systems.
Not that that's all bad, but I think that at the beginning, the ultimate thing that needs to be there, above and beyond anything, is an internal moral and intellectual integrity of the individual. Because then the way that we interact ends up being a reflection of what we deem important and what we think is right and what we think is honorable.
We need to build our world from within as individuals in order to build together collectively, a better world that we can look at from a distance and say, this is going in a much better direction. And I think today, in our modern world, and maybe throughout all of history, to more or less extent, there is a severe lack of the inner self, the inner self being the mental discipline of an individual, the ability of an individual to focus on what is good, moral and correct.
Instead of having this strong sense of inner self and inner ability, it's external. People, places, things, recognition, money, respect, systems, governments, groups, ideologies. What matters truly is the quality of the inner self, the moral and intellectual integrity of the individual.
And the point is that I believe, I argue that if that becomes the paramount goal in life of any individual, to work on that inner self, the strength of that inner self, the mental discipline, the inner focus on what is good, moral and correct, that the world writ large will be a reflection of that inner world. And there might be a quick rebuttal by a lot of people to say, well, that's not really original. I mean, don't religions kind of think this?
And then the reason why it goes wrong is because every religion, or it doesn't have to be religion, any worldview, right? Atheism, anything, tends to think that they have what is good, moral and correct. Okay, but wait until the end, because I have what I think is a solution that is kind of ultimately agnostic or objective to any specific worldview that rises above any specific worldview and still is able to put of paramount importance the notion of building our world from within.
Let's take a look at kind of an analogy or example, a couple of them from nature. Let's step away from humanity for a second and look at systems and how they work in nature, which of course, as any listener of nontrivial knows, I think is so critical. Lots of examples of successful collective behavior. It's a big topic under complexity, but if you look at certain species of bees, you will see something called shimmering.
And it's this really kind of neat behavior that certain bees or beehives will collectively exhibit in nature as a kind of defense mechanism. Go look on videos, YouTube, put bee shimmering or beehive shimmer. And this phenomenon is really a fascinating display of collective behavior of many individuals getting together and producing something collectively that is very, very valuable. They use this behavior, bees, to defend themselves when predators threaten their hive. At least that's the belief.
The thing about evolution is we can take a guess as to why a certain behavior is exhibited, but you don't actually have to know why. You just know that things don't exist for random reasons. They survive because they work. Okay, but it's likely that the bees are doing this to kind of defend themselves from predators. And these predators are probably, or at least often going to be larger than an individual bee.
And so by working collectively to create this shimmer, which, by the way, if you haven't seen the video, is basically bees get together in a group and they kind of create this ripple effect where parts of it move in unison, almost like a wave that goes across the body of water. And so as a collection, you can imagine to another, let's say, animal, that the bees would appear much larger than an individual bee. They seem to be moving as one big superorganism.
And so the bees will flip their abdomens upward and in this collective fashion and create this kind of shimmering wave that ripples across the beehive. And it almost looks like a larger animal is moving. And so that unified movement is almost like what you would see in a stadium if you imagine people just raising their hands up, and it kind of starts on one end, and it moves as this big ripple throughout the stadium. Right.
And researchers believe that this really is an effective way for the bees to deter predators, and it would probably confuse them or maybe even scare them. It looks like a big animal. Let's think about that. Now, you might say, okay, so that's really good collective behavior. But the key thing to realize is this is not being governed. There's nobody really at the helm the way we would normally think of human systems being governed by specific top down rules or structures or individuals even.
This is a collective behavior that emerges. And the reason it works is because the individuals in that beehive are all doing something that is the same. Right. They're all kind of raising their abdomens or whatever kind of local rule they have. They're doing that. And when they all do that same kind of thing, you get an emergent behavior that is reflective of that individualism in a positive way. In this case, defending against predators. Right.
Doing something that solves a real problem, a nontrivial, hard problem. And so what is kind of the take home message here is that there is this kind of same individualism that's occurring. And that's just a term that I'm using, and it sounds a little bit oxymoronic, because if you think about human society, we tend to think of, well, there's kind of collectivism versus individualism, right?
You've got the individual doing what they're supposed to do or want to do, and they kind of almost invent their own kind of truth in life. And then you've got the collectivism was, well, what's best for the group? What's best for the group. And I think the way that human society gets this so wrong is they think about this very dualistically, and they think, well, if it's individualism, then just let the individual invent their own truth.
Or if it's about the collective, then let's put things in place that make sure people all do the same thing or at least gear themselves or are almost forced to kind of follow these kind of strict set of collective rules. But the reality is, the best collective behavior comes from individualism. As long as the individualism is not about kind of doing whatever you want, but by doing something that is agreed upon or that is shared as a set of values of what's important in the group.
In other words, each individual in the group is doing something quite similar to what other people are doing in the group, because they all have the same sense of what is important. So it's not individualism as every individual in the collective go do your own thing. It's every Individual in the collective has a shared sense of what's important, and that's what they collectively do. This is not how we treat individualism or collectivism in society.
We think of these as being very polar opposite things. Either we allow the individual to just do whatever they want, and now individuals are doing very different things, or we kind of enforce a kind of collectivism top down. And so no matter what people are doing, they get kind of funneled into this strict rule set of how society is supposed to work, and neither of those work particularly well. We have a lot of historical precedent for that. Right? Tyrannical collectivism falls apart.
Unbridled individualism just dissipates into a mess and doesn't have any kind of coherent structure for society. But if it's the same individualism, if it's a shared set of what is deemed important, those bees individually take actions, but those individual actions are very similar because they all, quote, unquote, know or have a sense of what is important. Let's take another example from nature. There are certain caterpillars that exhibit what's called a rolling swarm. This is also really cool.
And you can go check that out, some videos online. A rolling swarm. And what it is is that many individual caterpillars get together to create what looks like a single big caterpillar. And you might say, well, why would they do that? And again, we always have to kind of guess for evolution, but the speed of this single big caterpillar is actually faster than any individual caterpillar by itself. And of course, it appears so. So it moves faster, and it appears bigger.
Okay. And it's this really neat kind of example of nature using collective problem solving of individual caterpillars to create one big one that moves faster and probably is better for defense as well. But again, it's not individuals just doing their own thing, going, wandering off in different ways. It's individuals who are acting as individuals, but have the same sense of individualism as other people or other caterpillars in this case. Okay?
And there's all kinds of examples in nature about this kind of collective behavior. And again, I think the take home message here is it's not individualism as each individual does whatever they want. It's not collectivism as a group is being forced to adhere to a certain behavior. Again, there's no one at the helm in these systems. It's not being governed. It emerges naturally because the individualism that is there is a shared individualism.
Every caterpillar, every bee, every individual has a sense of what's important, and it's a shared sense of what's important. And therefore, what happens at the larger scale is a beautiful reflection, is a useful, working reflection of what is deemed important on the individual scale. So I said at the beginning, look, we all want a better world. We can see that there's a lot of things going on that are not great.
And we believe that it could be improved, just like we might think in terms of technology, if there are plane crashes, car crashes, crashes, we want to lock those improvements in. But it's much easier to bootstrap that forward when it's tangible, when it comes to human values and the mindset and the behavior of humans, it's not obvious how to bootstrap that in. Usually, we either try to kind of force that top down or kind of hope that unbridled bottom up will allow that to take place.
Neither of those seem to work. Systems cannot be forced into a specific governance or morality. We can't just throw caution to wind and hope for the best. Neither of those work. We need to build our world from within. And there is a severe lack of inner self in today's society and the individuals that make up today's societies. A lack of mental discipline, a lack of focus on what is good, moral, and correct for the individual in their life.
People tend to chase external sources of the happiness of the people, places, things of the recognition, money, respect, whatever it is they think they need to have, which by themselves are not bad, but they look for external sources of them. And what really matters is the quality of the inner self. It has to start with the individual. It's one's moral and intellectual integrity that matters, and from which all better things will emerge.
And if we can do this, then I would argue that a better world will be a reflection of that better inner world. Use bees as an example, caterpillars as an example. They create these collective behaviors, these almost superorganisms that work better than any individual, but it's a reflection of that same individualism. And so what do we do? I think to build a better world, we do need to collectively build a better world within.
And so one I mentioned earlier that you could say, well, hasn't this been tried? Isn't this what every kind of religion thinks? And then religions kind of disagree or whenever the worldview, atheism, secularism, we all just kind of disagree anyway. And so this is why there's two points. One, I think the solution has to be that only universal things can work, okay? Universal notions of what is true and what is good, not ones that belong to specific worldviews.
There has to be a universality to it. And two, we need to teach and instill this in young people and in upcoming generations to help individuals attain a sense of moral and intellectual integrity. And to put that as the paramount thing to strive for. Now, with respect to, number one, the universality of the things we're teaching, this has to be kind of agnostic or objective to any worldview.
And this does not mean people need to walk away from their religion or their atheism, or whatever their worldview may be, whatever label they want to use. It doesn't mean you have to walk away from that. It just means that what must be of paramount, what must supersede any specific worldview, has to be the truths that are most universal among many. And this is possible.
There are groups of people from different religions and different worldviews that have gotten together and had conversations and have promoted certain programs that are in some sense ultimately agnostic to any one of their worldviews. It doesn't mean they walk away from their worldview. Everyone has that freedom to choose. But there are shared, universally true aspects of morality and ethics and of good behavior that all worldviews do fundamentally agree on.
And those are the ones that have to be of paramount importance. Those have to be held up as the individual values that are deemed critical and that must be passed on. Which brings us to .2 that this is what we need to teach and instill in today's society. Not look what can be achieved now. You can go achieve that by making more money or aligning yourself with certain people, or putting this particular thing in place or moving to this part of the world.
And again, not that those are bad or not, but they are not the ultimate achievement. The ultimate achievement in any individual's life must be that moral and intellectual integrity that they can achieve within. And if they do that, not only will their lives go much better, but they will contribute to the collective behavior of a much more beautiful world. I argue that will be a reflection of many people having that internal world that they built for themselves.
It's got to be based on what is universally true among all worldviews, and we need to teach it and instill it to the younger generation as the greatest form of anyone's achievement, to have that moral and intellectual integrity within, to have that mental discipline that focus on what is good, moral and correct. We need to build our world from within in order to build a better world out there. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until the next one. Take care.