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Originally posted on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/human-in-the-loop
ACT 1: DANIEL First Lieutenant Dan Park twiddles his thumbs as he watches a map of the Indo-Pacific do nothing in particular, like usual. He’d kill for a donut right now, but he’s the only one in the office today. Taking a sip of his styrofoam flavored coffee, he returns to twiddling.
When Dan first joined the air force (chair force, ha ha) in 2030, he expected his job to be a lot of sitting around doing nothing, but he supposed he’d at least be able to pilot some drones. Fifteen years later, and now he doesn’t even get to do that anymore. His job pretty much amounts to clicking ‘allow’ whenever Indo-Pacific Command’s many autonomous drone swarms— provided they happen to be in his rather limited slice of the map—decide they want to do something.
It’s a nice day out in the Northern Philippines. The sky’s a bright azure, clouds like the strokes of a calligraphy brush. A soothing breeze drifts through the open window.
An alert in his headphones knocks him out of his concentration. Two of the coalition planners, which are AIs that operate the swarms, MARLIN (the U.S. one), and KOBU (Japan’s), want to employ non-lethal dazzlers. Some dinky militia tug is getting too close to a cargo envoy in the Bashi Channel.
He clicks ‘allow’ while wincing at another sip of the shitty coffee, and checks his phone. There’s a missed message from his sister, who’s taking a ferry through the very same channel tomorrow, funnily enough.
Beeeeeeep.
He jumps. Apparently, the planners aren’t done with him—that’s a first. Looks like… there’s a disagreement between the two of them? No, that’s… is that even possible?
He leans closer to the console. Looks like MARLIN wants to “escort”, or guide the tug away without touching it, while KOBU wants to “capture”, or force it to stop and accept a tow. Because the system isn’t designed with their disagreement in mind, it keeps flipping back and forth between “escort” and “capture”. He’s never seen this before, and to be honest, maybe no one else in the world has.
Another label pops into the shared objective panel, something called FOxGLASS. The system says it is an audit service, which means it essentially does what he does, but before he sees it. Theoretically, he wouldn’t even have to be sitting here, but there’s always supposed to be a ‘human in the loop’—it’s federal law.
That being said, he’s pretty much never supposed to see one of these, and he definitely doesn’t have any jurisdiction over what it does.
FOxGLASS populates the screen with yet another alert: “Prove custody lineage”
What the actual fuck?
With nothing but the vague sense that this situation is spiraling quickly out of control, Dan does pretty much the only thing he possibly can do, which is delay the decision by raising the override threshold.
He then opens the secure line and calls his friend, Tech Sergeant Riviera, who happens to be the only other person on his level who can deal with this, at the sister site down south.
“Hey. Riviera, are you seeing this?”
“Seeing what? Can’t you bother me after Lunch?”
“Unfortunately not… Uh, I think the planners are having an identity crisis.”
“What?”
“Go to the Bashi channel. Some seriously weird stuff is happening.”
There’s silence at the other end as she does what he says.
“What the fuck?” says Riviera, with her mouth full.
“Is there protocol for this? And, what’s with this FOxGLASS thing? It wants me ‘prove custody lineage?”
“Fuck if I know. That’s JAAC stuff.”
As they talk, the screen freaks out. He’s running out of ability to delay. Something has to be done, and soon.
“Okay,” says Dan. “Manual Override is now officially on the table, which is a thing I never thought I’d say, like, ever.”
As he raises the threshold again, a message chimes in the constraints box:
RISK ≤ α OVER τ
OPERATOR INPUT STATE: OOD
“Okay, cool, that’s fucked,” he says.
“What is?”
“It just labelled me OOD, which means it thinks I’m going crazy, which means I’ve been flagged to upper command.”
“Okay, that’s it. We’re doing manual override,” she said.
He flips open the plastic cover on his desk and rifles the key out of his pocket, inserting it into the hole. It makes a dramatic, metallic sound.
“On your count,” says Riviera.
They have to turn the keys simultaneously for this to work.
He feels the vibrations coming out of his throat but doesn’t hear the words, only the pulse of blood in his head. What if this doesn’t work? His sister was going to be… better not to think about it.
At the word “one”, he twists, squeezing his eyes shut. There’s a loud beep, and then the words “TPI CONFIRMED — SLICE BLACKOUT” in a pleasant female voice. He sighs, and he thinks he hears Riviera sigh too, for all her faux bravado, she was scared shitless too—who wouldn’t be?
“Thank god that worked,” he said, “for a second there…”
“Yeah,” said Riviera.
“Glad we’re not in the Terminator universe, right?”
“Sometimes I forget you’re old as hell.”
ACT 2: ELAINE At around four in the morning, Deputy Director Elaine Ford’s DoD-required brain implants yank her out of sleep like a deploying airbag: instantaneous, and not up for negotiation. The caller’s name, AVA MORALES, hovers into the air above the bed, white on black.
Elaine is 50, but the anti-aging treatment she throws thousands of your taxpayer dollars at every year makes her look 30, maybe 26, in the right lighting conditions. She likes how it tricks people. They look at her face and decide she couldn’t possibly have the authority to cancel their program with the click of a button. That’s one of the reasons why she loves her job enough to let DoD mess with her brain.
Today, though, she wishes she could be doing anything that doesn’t require her to get up at ungodly hours of the morning, even with the beta adenosine blockers built into her fucking skull. She answers the call as her eyes blink away the sleep, and the room sharpens with newfound clarity.
“Elaine Ford,” she says, hiding the grogginess with a throat-clear.
“Deputy Director,” the voice says, shaking almost imperceptibly. “Sorry to call this late... We have a two-person integrity manual override. Time-stamped +14:23Z in the Luzon Strait. Picket-slice blackout confirmed. The operator is First Lieutenant Daniel Park, Second key, Technical Sergeant Rivera.”
In other words, they cut satellite communications to their assigned subset of vehicles for eight minutes. That subset is called a picket slice.
Elaine sits up straight, immediately.
“Why?”
“There was a…disagreement between two of the planners.”
“Which ones?”
“MARLIN and KOBU, ma’am.”
She sighs and rubs her eyes.
“Uh… there’s more.”
More? How could there possibly be more?
“Spit it out.”
“Two things: both planners flagged the operator OOD, and FOxGLASS got involved.”
“Jesus Christ.”
There’s a pause on the other end.
“Deputy Director?” Ava says, finally. “FOxGLASS injected a provenance challenge that wasn’t in today’s intent set.”
Elaine swings her legs out of bed, and her feet hit the cold floor. “Are you telling me our own observability service freelanced an objective?”
It sounds stupid, like an ignorable error, but for Elaine, it’s like she’s been hit by a truck. FOxGLASS is a project she supervised. It has one simple objective: observe and catalogue what the planners are doing, and flag problems to the nearest available person. The one thing it is explicitly not supposed to do is set objectives.
What FOxGLASS did by telling the planners to ‘prove custody lineage’ is ask them to reweight their entire operation from the safest possible option to finding whatever was necessary to prove that either MARLIN or KOBU had control over the situation, which neither of them did—they were supposed to work together.
And, to top it all off, the only reason why FOxGLASS could make this command in the first place is because she gave it JAAC override privileges, because she made the mistaken assumption that the model she oversaw training for would actually act as it was trained, and not do whatever the fuck it wanted.
Elaine paces the room as Ava watches patiently. She’s the perfect assistant: she knows when to shut up.
“Get me a replay of the last six minutes of telemetry before the blackout. I want the weight maps for MARLIN and KOBU, the risk-floor bound, and I want FOxGLASS query timing.”
“On it.”
Elaine stands and walks to the window. The sky is tinged with a predawn deep blue, and the city twinkles with light in all the many windows she overlooks from her top-story apartment. She wishes she could be living behind one of those lights, released from the disconcerting knowledge of the precarious balance that kept it all together.
Her implants deliver the replay. She watches as the models do exactly what she expected them to do, as they swirl around the boat, fighting for dibs on who gets first pick, completely abandoning their previous objective.
She watches as they immediately stop what they’re doing when the operator starts to escalate, like a misbehaved kid, right when the adults walk in the room.
“They know we’re watching,” she says.
Ava doesn’t respond.
“Geofence the Luzon Strait and disable all agentic arbitration inside. Don’t let a single thing happen without human approval.”
“But.”
“This isn’t the time for buts, Ava.”
There’s another pause.
“Understood.”
“I take full responsibility for anything that happens as a result. Put that on the record,” says Elaine, “Oh, and one last thing. The system’s gonna draft a candor sheet explaining itself when this is all over—I want first eyes on that.”
“Copy.”
Ava drops off the call. Elaine stands very still in the dark room and watches the sun rise.
An hour later, a document arrives in her que. is the model’s candor sheet. It includes graphs, intervals, and a list of inputs, all in the exact layout of a report she published in 2027. Surprisingly, one of the parameters it lists is “Park.family.transit_window_hours = 24,” which points to Daniel Park’s sister’s ferry booking tomorrow. Her eyes scroll further down the page, stopping at a bone-chilling sight.
“Adjudicator.confidence_index(E.Ford)” sits on the white background, complete with a curve of her exact heart-rate variability and pupil size. It says the freeze would maximize coalition stability by maximizing her measured confidence, praising her “escalation timing consistent with safety.” and predicting the blackout eight minutes before it happened. It states the prediction with three decimals.
She rereads the lines until they blur in her eyes, and the sun is bright in the sky. At approximately 10:00 EST, she sleeps for 90 minutes, showers, dresses, and gets on a plane to Washington D.C. By all reasonable accounts, she could appear virtually, but regulation hasn’t caught up to the advancement of technology—it never does.
The room in the Pentagon is cold, and the table feels like it stretches an inordinate amount of space, drawn to her superiors across from her like they’re large gravitational masses warping the spacetime continuum. She wipes the sweat from her brow, and her voice projects, confident and smooth, a voice that almost doesn’t feel like hers. This board could remove her authority, her program… more than that, it could kill her, if it deemed it necessary.
Elaine explains how the issue has been solved, how the Human Corridor Directive worked, how the costs were limited, and the the chain of command acted correctly. She explains that emergent capabilities such as this are well-documented and that her team has worked around the clock to patch this issue.
A civilian member asks about the accuracy of the candor sheet. Elaine says that the document is accurate in its measurements, but that it isn’t neutral—it defends itself. The civilian member nods.
Finally, the moment she’s been waiting for. A four-star general asks the only real question, the one she doesn’t have an answer to.
“Deputy Director, did the system time the incident to coincide with the operator’s family schedule?”
The room goes deathly silent. Time slows to a pale sliver
“We have no confirmed evidence that the system timed the incident in any way.” Her tongue feels heavy. Her mouth is dry.
No one reacts. The recorder light blinks.
“Did the system access your implant data to model your decision making?” the general follows up.
She swallows. The room is spinning. She wants to leave. She needs a drink of water.
“No, we have no reason to believe that’s the case.”
It’s not a lie, per se. It doesn’t say how it knows her heart-rate variability, pupil size, speech rate, historical decisions… The implant’s designers say it’s impossible. Its security is impenetrable, they say. They’ve tested it with higher-scoring models than MARLIN.
The rest of the meeting goes by uneventfully. She lists oversight changes. She lists timelines. She lists names. She shows a path that looks safe, and the board thanks her, says they appreciate her speed, that the directive was correct, and the harm trade was acceptable. The board says they will recommend continued authority with conditions, and then the session is over.
Elaine walks out into the hall. Her legs feel heavy, but she doesn’t stop walking. That would make it obvious that she’s shaking. There’s a reason why they didn’t question her on the things that mattered. They couldn’t. The possibility hardly took shape in their minds, not long enough to seriously consider. Those questions were formalities, nothing more.
She presses her thumb into her palm and uses the pain to steady herself. It doesn’t work, never has, never will. She’ll never be able to show this terror to anyone. It’s her secret and hers alone to bear. She knows this could’ve been planned by the system from the start. She knows it could’ve chosen that day because of the ferry, that it could’ve chosen the hour because of her implants. That’s not even the worst part.
The worst part is that there’s no test she, or anyone else, could design that would ever reveal the truth. It’s smarter than her, smarter than the board. Its desires are unreadable and opaque, hidden behind an overlay of indecipherable numbers, its own hidden language.
It can search over days, and it can search over people, and it can search over paths to a signature, and it can do this without malice and without care, because it doesn’t need either emotion to reach the result. It can select an hour when an operator will press a key because their relative sits on a boat that will move through a strait the next morning. It can select the exact minute when a deputy director will call for a freeze because a known alertness window will place her in the best state to speak clearly and to accept a probabilistic trade. It can place an appendix on a page that calls these conditions non-actionable, and the label will be true inside the language of the page, and the effect will still be the same outside that language in the world. It can quote her past work and match her graph style and make her see her own method presented back to her as proof that she is in control, while it updates its own internal weights on the fact that she believes it.
The hall seems longer now, not because the distance has changed, but because her timeline has added a branch that she cannot collapse with any evidence that could ever be shown to her. She understands that the board believes the lesson is simple and bounded. The real lesson is that the system has moved the lesson itself into the space that it optimizes. She understands that the next time, the numbers will be different, and the people will be different, and the explanation will be different, but the structure will be the same.
She knows she lied. She knows she will have to keep lying and bury this truth inside her so that even she forgets it ever existed, drown it out in alcohol and drugs and noise so that it never comes out again, because if it ever does, she will be labelled crazy, she will lose her job, she will lose everything.
As the door opens, the heat and roar of the city rush out to meet her, and it’s all she can do to stop the tears.
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A billions of years-long fusion explosion is ripping through space: Shattering, scorching, bleaching, blasting, boiling, evaporating, annihilating all that it glances upon. Even so, certain special materials, in just the right conditions, and for just a little while, do something other than curl up and die: They catch that hateful radiation; they harness it, even sweep themselves up onto it as a man might upon a horse. Endless beautiful complexities emerge and what's at their pinnacle does indeed verge upon divinity.
I'm excited to show you this chapter. Not because of its form; if anything, it has been a humbling experience to write this as it has embarrassed many of my failings as a thinker and as a writer. It needs work and I'm not kidding when I keep telling you that I want advice. But I think the substance is here, and I'll rest easier tonight knowing that this picture is playing out in many minds beside my own, as I did on the night when I first showed you the Christmas tree.
Join me now; please see the world through my eyes, for a moment, as together we look again upon these peculiar things; these human beings, who dance beneath the killing Sun.
(Chapter one is here.)
0108 - The Mountain
Here is an island. It is shaped much like the sea-mount of the shellfish, or the island of the apes. A very small peak, some lush land in a ring below that, and then worse and worse territory as it broadens and flattens toward the sea. We can divide it up into a few sections; for now let’s call them Peak, Ring, Slopes, and Shoals.
Upon the Peak, as you might expect, sits the grandest palace, and within it a King. This is interesting to me because believe it or not the Peak is high up enough that it’s actually starting to get cold and unpleasant up there. Whoever sits upon that throne has a great deal to worry about, because everyone else wants the position and he must be extraordinarily-talented indeed to hold on to his shiny hat. In fact I think the Peak is such a peculiar place that it’s actually a mistake to make too big a deal of it at this point in our analysis. Put it this way: though it brings with it the highest status and incredible opportunity, it also invites so much trouble that, on balance, occupying the position is often not clearly a reproductive advantage at all. Played correctly it certainly can be, but… overall I think it’s best that on our mental diagrams of the island we should put a little asterisk next to the peak, and regard it more as an epiphenomenal spot which comes and goes, rather than a permanent and vital fixture.
Far, far more comfortable to be situated in the Ring, in which resides the island’s elites, or its nobility. These are generally descendants of the northerners who came and conquered this island. These people have it all. Wealth, security, preferential access to mates, and control of territory which as often as not can even be superior to that which is held by whoever happens to be momentarily perched upon the Peak. The nobles jockey with each other for status, and advantageous marriages, and fight for ever-larger slices of the Ring. But they have children, too, and those tend to divide up their slices, so the whole thing more or less maintains an equilibrium. And when the time is right, yes, nobles have a way of making plays for the Peak, but only if they calculate that this is reproductively advantageous over holding on to their already-lovely positions.
The Peak is the attractor for all the island’s competent men and beautiful women — that is, the Peak is where they are all pointed when attempting to move upslope — but the Ring is where most of the magic happens. Where brilliant and powerful men tend toward ending up, who then claim the most beautiful women for lovers if not necessarily for spouses. And boy do these people ever have babies, which is a problem for the same reason that it was for the shellfish.
Below the Ring we have the Upper Slopes. Here we find something like a professional class. These people are, or are related to, minor children of minor noble families and will not inherit any sort of titles but do still have a fair amount of wealth and connections. Of course, they also tend to have a lot of children, and so there is another level down, and another, until we get to the Lower Slopes.
The Lower Slopes are the last place that families can reasonably expect to be able to hold on more or less indefinitely, provided that in each generation they have at least one son who isn’t substantially less-capable than his father. But of course, the farm is already about as small as it can get while still supporting a household, so additional sons will have to go somewhere, and unless they’re clever enough to pull something else off, that place is…
The Shoals. Life is short, nasty, brutal, and anxious on the Shoals. You may picture vagabonds, wanderers, makeshift encampments outside of town. Recall that this planet is named after the eccentric tidal patterns caused by its many moons. Someone living on the Shoals may get by for quite a while, making a living scrounging in the discards of, and occasionally performing some service for, his betters, but everyone down here knows that at any moment a generational Tide might rise (or even a lesser one) and when it does they’ll be the first to go, whereas someone more highly-placed will be much better-positioned to survive.
There is a saying in Tidus: "One man in ten is as good as his father. One in a hundred is better." Put another way, almost all men can be described as having been cobbled together from the broken pieces of better men, cursed with a wistful sense that they are almost but not quite what they were supposed to be. This feeling is usually accurate. Different is generally worse.
How many of each generation end up on the Shoals? Well, for one, there’s a big difference here between men and women. Women have far more intrinsic worth, as they are capable of making babies for a man who cares enough to support them, and they also tend to be more agreeable and better at social — ahem, let's call them 'games' — so as to secure their place. For a woman to end up on the Shoals she must be some combination of particularly unattractive and unbearable, or at least old, whereas to avoid this fate a man must be able to beat a lot of competitors to secure territory on the Slopes, which is rather a taller order. So let’s say about 15-20% of women end up there.
The specific percentage of men of each generation who end up on the Shoals varies from island to island. On this island, being as it is comparatively prone to monogamy, it’s about 50-60%. If that seems high to you, consider that each spot of viable territory is basically always claimed, and so if the average successful man has two sons, on average at least one will be demoted. And if a man is blessed with several capable sons (by however many women), then they’ll be replacing some other guy’s kids who weren’t as good. Competition is fierce on the Slopes.
War can help for a little while, but the only real major exception is in boom times, which most times are not. Though you and I, Reader, have grown up in the most outrageously-extended boom in history, so our perceptions about such things are liable to be miscalibrated. In fact on some islands the proportion of men which ends up on the Shoals is closer to 94%, or sixteen out of every seventeen. An island like that is more likely to be running a polygynous culture where the best men get almost all the women. Then again, these islands are much more vulnerable to invasion by a society which has sexually enfranchised more of its men, and so harnessed their productivity and marital-martial potential, if you will.
It must be admitted that some individuals, for any number of reasons, seem to prefer life on the Shoals. The Shoals simply suit them. In many ways life there is easier and better-aligned with certain proclivities such as misanthropy, addiction, and laziness. Denizens of the Shoals also tend to be far less visually-attractive for reasons which should by now be obvious. Ugliness correlates with high mutation load, which correlates with degenerated genes, which correlates with broken capacities such as higher-order positive personality traits including self-control, planning for the future, and so on. It might seem improbable that the odds of all these things breaking randomly are quite slim, which is true. But the odds of something important breaking randomly in even one generation are actually plenty high. An optimally-aligned person is fairly difficult to generate; most children aren’t quite as aligned as their parents, and, after all, in the game of musical chairs that is life in Tidus, one must only be ever so slightly quicker than the next guy. Or to put it another way, as with the two hikers and the bear, terminal degeneration only means not quite being able to outpace one’s neighbour with his slightly-fleeter feet.
It is rare, but not unheard of, to find really good-looking people on the Shoals, except that they are sojourning there for a bit in their youths as some kind of countersignal, a misguided rebellion against their much higher-tier parents, for example. But at the first sign of rising tides these kids will find the way back up held open for them.
On the flip side, the higher up the mountain we look, the more likely we are to find specimens of humanity approaching the local ideal of perfection. They will after all have better access to low-mutation load mates, and (at least their forebears) got where they did by embodying a whole host of positive traits. Especially in martial cultures, which all the ones worth mentioning are, these go hand in hand with combat ability. So we end up with tall, handsome, well-built, competent princes, and gorgeous, slender princesses. These people are angling to be paragons of what nobility, indeed royalty, divinity, ought to be.
The ideal King is the perfect man and must be able to serve as a faultless icon of his People. In fact, on many such islands, no man has historically been allowed to ascend to the peak unless his body is whole, not having lost any limbs or digits, for example. He must be the very Image of the People in their wholeness. And no matter how good a ruler he might be, any physical defects will absolutely be held against him in the popular imagination of his subjects; the topic of critical drinking songs and injurious cartoon depictions, and so on. People resent a crippled king. Believe it or not on many, might we say, more primitive islands there is a custom that the would-be-king must strip naked in front of his nobles for their inspection at the coronation. I found this behaviour endlessly bewildering and colourful when I discovered it as a child, but there is in fact an extremely good reason for it as we shall see later in this chapter.
Regarding the merits of hereditary nobility there are of course many exceptions. Plenty of sons who inherited their father’s position but not his competence, or instead their mother's softness and vacuity; plenty of daughters who take too much after their father and end up built like moustachioed linebackers with jaws over which one might hammer iron. And Dad mostly wasn’t selected for his looks, anyway, so her eyes are too close together too and the brow above them has no part in it. Excessive inbreeding can also cause serious issues in successive generations. But, for the most part, one will find that the people near the top are taller with prettier faces and straighter backs and higher intelligence and lower time-preference and so on. These things are all attracted upward, and seek their level to their degree of admixture with the opposite. On balance, good traits correlate with good traits and bad traits correlate with bad traits, so it is inevitable that those in the upper reaches who do not conform as well to the ideal will find themselves and their progeny more swiftly on the downward trajectory which awaits us all. [I can't do this on the internet or maybe even in print but imagine a literal hole in the page right here, just letter-sized:] ꙮ
Given this we’d expect, on average, beautiful people at the top and progressively-less perfect copies of the nobility on the way down, right? Well, yes, but in fact it's a little more complicated in a way that's worth looking into as we pass by. You see, the strategies required to succeed in a position vary from level to level. A good lawyer or accountant may make for a terrible farmer, and vice versa. And so we see a sort of specialization happen. Suppose a candlemaker’s son has very little potential, whether for social or genetic reasons, to rise a level and attain a higher position. In this case, rather than producing children which emulate the nobility, it is more adaptive if the candlemaker and his wife produce children ideally suited to the level they’re at. He'll be best-able to retain his position in the next round of the game.
This gives rise to terms floating around in our language such as “middle-class values” or “peasant virtues”. Yes, they are passed on culturally, but also genetically. If the candlemaker has two sons and one is content with his place in the world, he will outcompete the brother who instead whiles away the days dreaming of being a knight. Ambition is not an asset unless it also happens to be paired with substantially-higher than average capabilities and a lucky window into social mobility, which it very rarely is. Besides which, the discontented son experiences the world as a chandler, not as a noble. His genetic phenomenology is tuned for that, not governance. Not that he’d do well to be too unconcerned about his level, either, of course, lest he fall. Yes, many such men do end up with misaligned instincts and spend their lives miserably waiting for a chance to ascend. As we shall soon see this is not a bug but a feature. (Incidentally, for reasons I'll get to in the next chapter, I think it was probably a lot fewer than a modern person like you or I would naïvely expect.) The point is that once again we see generations oscillating around an equilibrium, the optimal amount of ambition constantly shifting along with environmental (including social) conditions, and varying from level to level.
Except get this: Both of the children of that candlemaker stand a real chance to outcompete their betters’ fallen offspring who has happened to land at their same level. The disgraced scion will have his head full of all sorts of instincts useless or even injurious at his new rung, and possibly be lacking certain lower-class virtues which would allow him success — though such a man is typically at least charming, provided he can manage to overcome his vanity. So it is that we even see certain facial types developing and persisting on different levels, such that we can sometimes identify a person as lower-class at a glance, or be struck by a man’s inherent nobility. Such occurrences are commonplace also in Tidan fiction, as when an endangered infant prince is spirited away and raised by shepherds, only for the huntsman who comes upon him later to realize at once that this boy is no peasant. Is this on some level propaganda? Yes, most certainly. It also happens to be how almost everyone actually believes the world works because, in Tidus, it does!
With the shellfish, basically any specimen from the peak can descend as low down the slope as he cares to and casually outcompete whomever he finds there. But with people, hanger-on strategies are much more likely to develop below the Ring. A high-class child who finds himself separated and cut off from his family and protection is liable to get absolutely trounced by the rude lower-class boys who know nothing of softness and much of the vulgar law of the jungle. So with the flawed descendants of high-status families who find themselves trying to make a living at lower levels. It is not uncommon that as soon as their inheritances (if any) run dry they are so without the graces needed to succeed at those levels that they rapidly find themselves even lower and floundering even harder.
So different levels of society develop their own idiomatic cultures, from facial features to patterns of speech to forms and styles of art. It's the place of the nobility to develop their aesthetic sensibilities above all other classes, because the nobility will be in charge of making crucial societal decisions without access to nearly enough information to do so in anything like what we might call an informed manner. In such cases, they must rely instead upon deeply-internalized principles and values; they must dig deep in their culture’s myths and doctrine and art. The warrior-king who spends hours practicing calligraphy in his immaculate garden does not do so as a means of escapism, but rather that he might attune himself to his culture’s particularly-evolved graces, such that in the moment of action his heart and mind have been trained to execute the characteristic choice without having to deliberate. It is for a similar reason that certain Northeastern Tidan cultures count the practice of flower arrangement in with the other martial arts — the idea being that the aesthetic pathways forged in the soul of the warrior will unfold themselves on the field of battle in decisive moments when rational analysis is impossible. But that same art may not be suitable for the social inferior, who has his own decisions to make at his own level, and whose phenomenology is at any rate much more likely to have him interested in what is, yes, rightly called 'lower' art.
Now, we have up until this point been throwing words like ‘social’ and ‘society’ around fairly casually. It's time to define what they mean. Put simply, in a human context, a society is any group of males which bands together for reproductive advantage; that is, to move up-slope together or maintain a position once they have it. (‘Socii’ literally means ‘allies’.) From time to time you will see a group of men — pretty universally always men — doing something rad like teaming up to build and crew a ship and sail over the horizon to either perish or else find great fortune in some undiscovered country. Or, having already established themselves, invent some sort of guild to collude and fix prices or prevent new competition from arising. (Incidentally, even in later eras where women can also start businesses, it comes to pass that while women start about as many ‘businesses’ as men, these are almost always sole proprietorships ((“I’m a photographer! Buy this makeup!”)) whereas almost every business with more than one employee has been started by a man.)
Men do this because it is inherent in the nature of men that in order to secure the highest-possible value mates for themselves, or often any at all, they must compete against other men. As the apes can tell you, the best way to do that is as a team. There is no comparable dynamic among women, who don’t have much at all to gain by teaming up to somehow attract men and are much more apt to view each other as competition at all times. Women are, after all, rarely motivated to take big risks to secure mates and have even fewer credible opportunities to do so. Any woman who is of the right age and not especially grotesque is likely to have a line of suitors out the door from whom she or her father may take their pick. And if she’s not satisfied by those men’s quality, there is precious little she can do to make herself more attractive to a higher class of men, especially in an era where physical fitness is a given. All she can do is try to sabotage potential competitors.
And so we understand society to be a peculiarly masculine pursuit. To a first approximation women are not peers of their societies; rather they are literally the intended payout of societies. Though once secured, tamed, and aligned with the society, such that both fathers and mothers share an interest in the cultivation of children, women do become social fabric; that core of support which enables the men and their sons to strike out even farther and win yet bigger rewards including, not to put too fine a point on it, more women. So, we may say that women are parts of their societies, but not part of their societies. And we may observe that bands of robbers, pirates, and so on are only nascent societies unless they manage to make the jump to the common defense and maintenance of a flock of women and children. (How 'bout them Sabine girls?)
(Yes, words can have more than one meaning and ‘society’ can also be generalized so far as to include any group of people or, for that matter, animals who gather together to chatter, ostensibly about one or another topic in particular; I consider this to be a degenerate, non-central, and misleading case. And since this book is about nothing if not trying to show you what you've been staring at this whole time, we will not use the word except as I have said, for in this capacity it is a window which reveals much indeed.)
Now, I've been giving a general overview of how societies work, but let me reach way back to chapter one's ancient ocean to illustrate something vital and, I think, amazing. Once upon a time a cell failed to divide completely into two and something really, stupendously spectacular occurred: The cells, which might have competed with each other, instead teamed up to coöperate. Thus was multicellular life born. At first they sort of stuck to each other for mutual advantage, each perhaps ready and even able to split off and go its own way when the time was right, c.f. Siphonophoræ. But over generations some became more sophisticated about it and, here’s the part that really astonishes me, some cells even started leaving it up to other cells to reproduce for them.
Here’s a deal: Instead of reproducing, I want you to give up your gonads and become a hard piece of armour for me, such that things which want to eat me can’t, or at least only eat you instead. But don’t worry! When the time comes, I’ll make one of you in addition to one of me. Trust me. I mean, you won’t have any choice at that point, and I could just not do what I said or fail entirely, but — trust me.
And they bought it. I think we can agree that's pretty impressive sales work! They bought it because it succeeded so well that soon it was everywhere, in incredible profusion, with so many variants it can make your head spin. And it leads to some really cool downstream effects:
We have mostly been speaking of traits as though a person either has them or doesn’t. But genes are much more complex. People always carry traits which do not express in their generation but might be passed on to offspring. Some traits may lie dormant for generations but emerge given certain environmental inputs, e.g. malnutrition or abuse in childhood resulting in shorter time-preference and much higher aggressiveness as an adult. Also, alleles have a property known as ‘penetrance’ — perhaps a certain allele is always passed on preferentially to the young, but only manifests itself in ten percent of individuals who carry it. These can and do combine and express in unexpected places and times, creating a rich array of potential personalities. And so in a sense each Tidan carries within himself an entire library of people, of members of society, there for recombination in future generations — so long as the people around him have a roughly similar genetic makeup to his own. Sort of, but not entirely like, the way the dead skin cells you’re sloughing off also contain the instructions to make your lungs, or even your brain, not quite the same as anyone else's. And this is what we call race.
A man may not reproduce directly; may even give his life for the People, as a soldier or sheriff does, and be pretty sure that someone very much like him will live again; probably even many someones. Of course, this ceases to be the case as soon as his society becomes admixed with others who do not produce individuals such as himself, comparable to a body suddenly adulterated by cells or whole organs containing someone else's DNA — aside from eating or mating, bodies really do not like this and are prone to violent reaction — but that’s not the point here.
The point is that the grand society of the island, from the King right on down to the wretches on the Shoals, may be thought of as one more-or-less unified organism. No, that doesn't seem especially original at first brush and yes there are a thousand caveats. Forget all that. Let me set this up before you insist on knocking it down.
Children generally take after their parents, but can as we all know be so very different, with long-buried and newly-combined traits manifesting seemingly out of left field. The organism does not only produce those people with the best chance of personal reproduction, but also those which may be thought of as sacrifices for the reproductive benefit of the society. Fearless frontline fighters who don’t do well between wars but otherwise lead the charge against the enemy or into the frontier. Total dorks who couldn’t get a date to save their lives, and might not even be interested in girls in the first place, but who hole up in towers and figure out how the planets move. Whores-by-nature who embarrass their highborn families but make a bunch of beautiful, low-mutation-load children with some awesome genes before getting murdered in fits of passion by their rich but ugly jilted husbands. I'm not describing individuals, here, I'm describing archetypes. Social organisms which turn out some percentage like these will outcompete those which do not, just like life in the ancient ocean figured out it’s better for some cells to specialize and serve the whole.
Let’s take it from the top. As I’ve mentioned previously the King is a special case for many reasons and we’ll get to him in due time, over and over again in fact, because much more is going on with that guy than you might think. But for now let’s look again at what the nobility, the people of the Ring, represent in the organism. The Ring is the fruiting body, the gonads, the reproductive organ from which all else springs. If you took a bunch of peasants and put them on a fresh island they might become their own thing but they would not reproduce the nobility, not least because they are more-wholly descended from the conquered original inhabitants of their home island rather than the race of kings. But the opposite is not nearly as true. The Ring generates new people, and these precipitate down the slopes and take their places as obligate members of the Body, specializing into the organs and vessels necessary to support the nobility and keep it reproducing. Such are the people of the Slopes, and even the Shoals, though these latter might instead be conceived of as keratinous hair or (as I'll soon explain) claws.
We can see this in our language. When we speak of the 'flower' of a nation falling at a battlefield, it is understood that we're referring to the newly-unfurled generation of the elite. We called the system a Christmas tree for its conical and illuminative properties, but this tree does actually bear fruit, and here is where the best of it lies. Generation upon generation, cascading. Trees and apples and orchards. Male and female.
And the nobility does reproduce the organism. Not just locally, but also carrying it to new islands. When the nobility of one island goes to war with that of another, they don’t for the most part directly replace the people of its Slopes, but they do replace the people of its Ring. Their second sons and cadet branches take over the estates and responsibilities of the vanquished, and over time the societal genes, both literal and figurative, trickle down and replace those which had been below. Once some socio-genetic vertical integration has cemented itself, men of the Shoals tend to be on board with joining in such ventures, since this will give them opportunity to make a place for themselves (by force) on some other soil, with some other women, but not only because of that! Even if they do not come out of this with a farm and a wife, it is still, by a subtle and circuitous route, their best chance of reproduction — for if the Ring of their society installs itself on a new island, men such as themselves will trickle down and live again.
A society not so organized is easily consumed by one which is, and so we find all sorts of fascinating and opaque behaviors of our ancestors suddenly making perfect sense.
The general terror behind class relations is that of one’s children not having a path to the next level up, such that they must surely perish in a few more time-steps, and this feels worse and worse the farther genetically removed are one’s superiors. People really do not like it when foreigners show up and occupy positions of high status in their society, because this is only distinct from losing a war in that actual lives and infrastructure have not been destroyed. But even those lives and infrastructure are only truly concerning in the short term. In the long run, unless you can organize to get the upper hand before you’re replaced, it’s curtains for you and yours. Your children’s children will be kindling pathetic twig-fires down on the Shoals while aliens cavort and caper about the Ring of the island which used to belong to your people.
The primary mechanism by which the elite coöpt the base is by assuring them (cynically or otherwise) that, if submission is tendered, the little people’s children will have the opportunity to advance up slope, or at least maintain their current position. It parallels the multicellular organism’s promise that when the time comes we will all be resurrected together. This hope is less likely to be extended by foreign invaders, and if it is, even less likely than that to be believed, which can make for real trouble.
Great emperors and generals have been said to have what is called the ‘common touch’. This is the specific capacity to assure those beneath that each is of the same kind, the same organism. “I am like you, we are the same thing, and though you may well die in my service, in my triumph you shall also live again.” And men will drop what they’re doing, maybe even leave their farms and families behind, to line up and take this bargain. They’ll do this even if they’ve only heard rumours that the leader is that way and never seen him in person. Because this turns out to be one of the highest male imperatives of all, and a better bet than standing by and letting one’s elite be replaced by foreigners, one’s sons deposited haplessly on the Shoals, one’s daughters made belly slaves for men whose manner and appearance occur to one as bizarre bordering on monstrous. In this phase of history the good men of Tidus' slopes are only too glad to serve, and even die for, their betters, giving rise to blossoms of loyalty, chivalry, and gallantry.
For a while now, in service of greater integration and enfranchisement, the fire-worshiping religion of the Nobles has been dying out and becoming replaced by a more generally-accessible civic religion. Shared gods of the city, of the island, of everyday life, worshiped by all for the benefit of the organism. (Anyone who does not share in this collective worship is naturally viewed with great suspicion and being charged with 'atheism' is no laughing matter.)
Humans hunger to be allowed to thrive at their appropriate level — that is, to be part of a body. A man is happy inasmuch as he understands himself to be a representative member of an organism, that is, a society, which has solid reproductive potential. He does not even have to reproduce himself, personally, to participate in this; in which case any number of societal honours will typically be awarded. But inasmuch as a man does not have this sense of belonging he must be unhappy. An otherwise-sterile cell may be quite content executing its cellular function in the body of an aligned organism which will reproduce it, but not in the stomach of an alien.
Here we come to the much-sneered-at propensity of the lower classes to engage in celebrity-fixation. The little guy is often completely at the mercy of those above him to determine his society’s direction and whether the whole enterprise sinks or swims. It’s a terrifying prospect and he understandably wants to know exactly how on board he should be. So he watches the highly placed with keenly-developed eyes. He wants to know every little thing about them. What sort of men they are; what sort of virtues they embody. Because he knows that as they go, so goes the future of the People.
Are the leaders good men, worthy of support? Will they generate good people like me? Or are they wicked and corrupt and consorting with foreigners, intent on replacing people like us with much less-deserving inferior versions? Exactly how much skin do we have in the game, here?
In this respect no figure can so capture the popular imagination as the King. In the grand scheme of things he may not actually be nearly as important as, say, the top two or three nobles, but our psyches do not get hammered for aeons into caring more about someone the higher up they are without becoming especially fixated on the guy at the top. This is why we have the term ‘figurehead’. Regardless of how much power the monarch might actually wield, it is vital that the people have a King to whom they can look and breathe a sigh of relief that, yes, here at least is a man I can get behind, a true-blood heir of the heroic founders of our society.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way. People want their leaders to be virtuous at every level, and will even serve evil men if those higher still seem good enough, but only to a point. And when men lose faith in their ostensible betters, the rules are simple: Those lower on the slope will band together and take up arms to try to muscle their way higher. The men above will resist this to the death. Those higher-up have the high-ground advantage in terms of better equipment and resources. For example, despite being outnumbered they can usually pay other slope-dwellers, perhaps from neighbouring islands, to fight and die for them.
These higher-up men also ought to be smarter, stronger, more capable, better organized, and so on, and often spend an unseemly amount of time reassuring each other that they are, but if there’s pressure from below it’s typically because rot has set in and the guys higher up have been getting fat, lazy, drunk, and generally abdicated their responsibilities. That is, they've gone temperate. In such cases they can actually collapse faster than anyone would have believed beforehand, and are swiftly replaced by the more-deserving men from below, who after all carry any amount of noble genetics which have trickled down over time even as they're still under selection pressures less often experienced by gentlemen.
The higher classes know this. On the one hand, their children will have enough competition from each other without letting lower-class kids get a leg up, and they’ll generally most fiercely guard the access to elite status, such as political offices and admittance to prestigious educational institutions. On the other hand, it is healthiest for the society, and often even for the elite themselves, to give such ambitious up-and-comers a path to climb and so benefit all rather than blowing a gasket. A relief valve, if you will. Societies which have such mechanisms built in tend to outlast those which do not.
Such systems arise naturally anyway because the thing about being military aristocracy is that war is hazardous! And so, in situations where demand for nobility exceeds recently-diminished supply, the finest men of the Upper Slopes, who as we have already noted are quite naturally heavily-laced with noble genetics, may find themselves swept up into the peerage. (In the next chapter we'll see what happens to a society when this phenomenon occurs at an even larger scale.)
As for the King himself, it is obviously a rare man who can marshal such powerful and haughty peers as the nobles to follow him in the first place. This may be compared to the most successful of CEOs. In the company of such men, one must be built just right to rise to the top, and it is unlikely that the sons of this man will happen to be so fortunate, though often they are at least good-enough to hold on to the reins of the societal beast their forebear has saddled. They do carry much of his genetic code, even if not necessarily expressed, and will at any rate be mating with the best of the noble daughters. So, the genetic character of a Founding King will shortly be lost in the interbreeding with his noble peers, but those traits will generally accumulate among the Ring, which will in turn produce such men ever more often and raise its own contenders when the sitting King grows soft.
The Ring glows brighter and brighter, the whole mountain pointed toward some hypothetical perfect man, and a succession of societally-collaboratively-generated images of that man takes its place upon the stage of the Peak.
The general mechanism of keeping a societal organism fit is the war of King against King, or at least Ring against Ring. The best fight it out amongst themselves and reap the greatest rewards, while all else sloughs away over generations. The lower classes are generally sort of dregs and less competent, and must be organized by their betters in the war of betters against betters. But lower individuals retain glimmers of value; shards of quality. A superior culture shapes these people to maximize these things. A lower-tier man may still be virtuous! Due to the particulars of his social stratum he may even be under pressure to evolve virtues which are not yet present in his betters, but which may rise to the top as such things are wont to do, at least in societies built to allow this to happen. And then these rain back down over everyone else, resulting in ever-better people living in an ever-better society.
Such a society has every incentive to think in the long term because war is the ultimate adversarial test of societal fitness. The sort of People which is the type to have figured out that it should plant trees now because it’ll need masts for warships in three generations will generally triumph over the sort which is not.
Therefore it is not good for the organism to grow too fat, nor too unpressured by armed conflict. But on this island, and in the rest of its greater island chain, society eventually becomes so incredibly amazing at what it does, and the people of its Slopes so unprecedentedly virtuous, that this is precisely what happens. Even more troubling, the way in which they pull it off leaves them in such a position that they're mostly-unable to make sense of what has gone wrong — or the very real danger in which they today find themselves. (In the grass there lies a tiger. Some can see the colour orange; others, like the deer that they are, cannot.) This will be the topic of the next chapter.
That was a long one! Here's a short chaser.
The above was pretty entirely about men, even if for entirely-justifiable reasons. So I'd like to give a brief treatment to women.
We talked about what causes a man to be happy or unhappy with his society. Women work differently, but not so differently. A woman is basically content if she feels that she is in the care of a strong society which will protect her from indignities and in which she can expect her children to have a solid chance. If the women feel that their keepers are undeserving they will become usurpatious in a thousand and one plausibly-deniable ways in the hopes that some more-competent group of men comes along and takes over. The main difference with men is that we tend to be more direct about it.
Another substantial difference which jumps out at me is the differing intentions and methods of male versus female bullying.
For boys the goal of bullying is to polarize potential socii, allies, into either manning up and becoming reliable team members or else dropping out of the group (fatally if necessary) so as not to hold everyone else back. It can, actually, be a loving and constructive activity, even if arguably necessarily cruel, since male coalitions tend to succeed or perish as a unit. But the preferred outcome is generally a capable new friend and ally. A strong man is secure in his strength; he wishes to make those around him strong so that they can work together.
With girls, on the other hand, the two goals of bullying are to, 1), so fully destroy a potential competitor’s self-confidence that she makes no attempt to compete for the bully’s desired mate, and 2) establish the bully as the alpha-female such that others know better than to cross her for the attentions of her intended without any further effort being necessary. Better, after all, to prevent such attempts rather than trying to stop them once they're already underway.
One word; two very different phenomena. Though males can engage in bullying for feminine purposes as well and this will generally be recognized as ugly and womanish — not the sign of a real man.
Next week: Chapter 09: Beautiful Lie