On the Discworlds portrayal of human eusocialism (or) How to make a king magic
Please note that this rambling barely-an-essay is based on events and details of two Discworld books: Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms. The writer is currently working through Feet Of Clay but I feel like my current source material is sufficient to put together some significant thoughts. I would also like to point out before anyone comes at me about misspelling names that I have absorbed most of this series via audiobook and do apologize if I get them wrong.
Eusociality is most commonly seen amongst Bees, Ants and other species of insects. Using a strict social hierarchy and extensive pheromonal communication, every member of the eusocial colony is organized and directed based upon their ideal biological role (Although in some circumstances, should the need demand they may adapt and even undergo physiological changes to address imbalances of needs and resources). Typically we view this in the scope of a queen ant who is attended to by male drones, while female workers and (not always but often enough) soldiers handle expansion and food collection. Were we to ever get a chance to ask ants if they were happy about this arrangement, they would very likely praise their society for being so well ordered and thankful they know their place within it so clearly.
We now come to the actual topic of this speeding train of thought, Carrot Ironfounderson of the Discworld series. Carrot is the long-lost heir to the central city of the books, after the populace rose up and overthrew their monarchy (though it is often looked back on with an odd sense of regret by the populace). At the start of the book series, the city of Ankh-Morpork is effectively a hands-off dictatorship held together by a vast web of guilds that lay claim to the vast majority of the cities populace as members (Barring the wizards, royal remnants such as noble families and ‘royal’ bodies such as the post office as well as anyone who proactively refuses to join the guilds and works outside of their control).
This city management style is shockingly effective, as many newcomers and quite a few long-standing locals in Ankh-Morpork marvel at how the chaotic mess of inter-guild affairs, deathly fear of the cities tyrant and a generally comedic common-sense blindspot amongst the populace allows them to live day-to-day in relative stability. Despite this, the locals are often heard complaining about their distaste for the Patrician and their nostalgia for ‘a king’. Usually when this is brought up, a more level-headed character will point out the long list of atrocities committed by the last king before the populace finally had enough, but it becomes clear that the royalists are more infatuated with the general concept of a king rather than any particular man in particular. Which is a shame because Ankh-Morpork does in fact have a king and he is quite a likeable fellow.
Carrot refuses to take up the crown, of course. Rather than claiming his birthright and booting the Patrician out of the palace, the closest he ever gets is using his power of “charisma” to organize a big enough militia to peacefully stop the city from falling apart over a single night of speciesist-charged violence. Carrot goes so far as to destroy evidence that would prove his lineage, explaining in confidence to the current ruler that he doubts anyone would be able to exercise the power of kingliness to rule fairly, not even himself.
What becomes clear after all of this is that:
Royalty is genetic. Not in the sense of lineage trees and being able to trace your roots back to a certain person, but there is literally a 'kinglyness' gene which can be passed down in varying levels of strength. Carrot clearly has it in spades, while it's highly likely that the last king of the city was too weak to maintain his control.
Being a good king is not just about the near-eusocial level of control you can exude over people. Carrot makes it clear that he knows the city from the bottom up, recognizing the vast majority of the locals on sight and ravenously learning about the cities history as well as cultural landmarks.
Being a king and being a noble are absolutely unrelated. In a sense, nobles are mock kings, trying to compensate for their lack of natural control via more traditional methods of politicking, money and abuse. Often when people in the books talk about kings in a negative light, they are closer to describing nobles and their patterns.
With all this in mind, the crux of Carrots refusal to accept his birthright boils down to two things. Despite his initial distaste for it, he recognizes that the city does in fact work and there would be no guarantee that change he brings would be for the better. Furthermore, from his perspective, having people listen to you only because you are a king is effectively cheating. When people do as Carrot says, comply with his requests for lawful behavior and interact with him long enough, they will say and do things that contravene their own personal well-being simply because Carrot asks them to. When he does this, it is for the good of the city as a whole, but it is definitely a power that can be (and has been) mis-used for the sake of greed and personal gain.
Does eating more honey count as eusocialist praxis
wouldn’t that be neat…
unfortunately honey can only be a symbol for us. to elevate its consumption to praxis would be to turn eusocialism into… a marketing gimmick…
perhaps honey could be used as part of a campaign to spread awareness of eusocialism; but, awareness is a fickle thing; this will take us long.
a long road lies ahead of us… perhaps rituals to reinforce our bonds would not be out of place, given the enormity of our task; honey’s involvement in those would be fairly natural.
we must not forget, though, what our goal is: moving away fromm the mere parasoCIality of mankinnd to FULL EUSsOCIALITy
having read exactly one chapter of the dialectic of sex, i have concluded that radical feminism is indeed deeply compatible with the eusocialist project, which means i am totally 100% on the right track;
If it is not a bother, would you mind tagging future "humanity as a hive species" posts with something? I personally find them a bit unpleasant, though if it is inconvenient I can just deal and it is not a problem (I sincerely do mean that it is not a problem for me if you find it too inconvenient to do. Please do not worry about it.)
Oh. That’s alright, I can do that; The tag for this will now be “eusocialism”.
Thank you for telling me! If anyone needs anything tagged, remember: please tell me?
People have often noted the similarities between human societies and ant-hives and other eusocial insect societies, although we’re... not really like that.
An interesting thing to note is that Eusociality has actually evolved independently a bunch of different times in unrelated animals (mostly various bugs). Convergent evolution like this (it seems reasonable to suppose) suggests that this feature (of societies) is uniquely adaptive, which in principle will be important no matter what mechanism is there to cause the species’ social instincts to adapt.
My proposal is that (skipping a few steps) humanity is trying to be eusocial but we can’t because we’ve run out of environment to send swarms to form new colonies, and thus we must build a political program in which that’s What’s Wrong With Society.
Importantly, we’d want to publicly be supposing that we’re completing the end-bits of the evolution of eusociality using sociocultural adaption mechanisms, rather than plain evolution. The reasoning being that whatever mechanism of adaptation we’re using, it’s to be expected that we’d end up finding the same optima, so long as we’re adapting to the same function.
(That said, transhumanist eusocialism should be a long term goal.)
Now, I feel like this worldview can have appeal to many political groups (the compatibility of eusociality with socialism has been long remarked by biologists, liberals will probably enjoy theorizing about the social assignment of gynehood to individuals who will serve as new queens when we swarm, and fascists will find the hive-identity easier to make body-politic theories with)
Practically, these various groups would probably seek to rectify the Broken Hives Problem in different ways.
Eusocialist Communists would, well, note how decision-making is collectivized in a hive, and posit that the adaptiveness we are granted by us having these gigantic brains makes the whole caste-system thing completely unnecessary. Their methodology would be to spread the dream of swarming to the workers, so that they can together build up the resources necessary that they can one day swarm off to either space (if communism needs to be global) or a new commune somewhere (if communism can be restricted to a self-sufficient-ish commune),
Liberal Eusocialists, being individualists, would probably focus on the Gyne Instinct (the supposed instinct some individuals have to leave with a swarm and start a new hive) and try to focus on identifying these gynes (e.g. Musk, Bezos) and allowing them to accomplish their “ingrained biological instinct” to lead a swarm off to space;
National Eusocialists (Neuzis?) would... uh... well I guess try to reinforce national boundaries and form nations into proper hives? And take the whole “queen” metaphor way too far; the whole gynes-not-being-allowed-to-become-queens thing becomes very easy to adapt into a modern-society-suppressing-our-biological-urge-towards-monarchy thing...
Anyways, I feel like this is a productive thing to aim future discourse towards, and therefore would like to encourage elaboration, theorizing, and spreading of these ideas. I hope you all agree.
alternate universe where employment is conceived of as polyamorous love between employees
songs about pining for a job with a company you love, songs about being happily employed, songs about the current employees pining for fresh new graduates, songs about being fired (in the tone of songs about being rejected)
magazines about 100 WAYS TO PLEASE YOUR COWORKERS, daytime talkshows watching fascinated the ugly aftermath of dysfunctional companies collapsing, no theoretical distance between “the bachelor” and “the apprentice”
labor law but in the tone of family law, shipping discourse but it’s about who ends up with what collective, mergers as controversial or exotic, child labor taboos... extended
companies collectively raising the children of their employees
