Let us consider the following two truths about the human condition and examine their implications. These truths are self explanatory as you shall see and can qualify as axioms.
- The world around us is extremely vast and complex.
- Any person’s cognitive resource is limited.
The world manifests itself in different forms; many of these manifestations are dangerous and life threatening. As people interact with the world around them, they have to differentiate the dangerous manifestations of the world from non-dangerous. This differentiation process has an associated cognitive burden. Since our cognitive resource is limited, we have to be able to recognize important information from noise, prioritize tasks, and simplify the world in order to be able to optimally operate in it. This tendency to simplify the surrounding world is natural in human. As biological systems perfected the simplification-accuracy trade-off throughout generations of interacting with the world, they persisted over time and left more of their copies.
Rules of inter-human interactions are one of the ways of such simplification. They are established through negotiation processes within a greater community. These negotiated rules are then locally passed down within a culture, exported to other groups, imported from other groups, and re-negotiated by the new generation. Rule negotiation process is forever ongoing. The negotiation tactics lie in a range between peaceful discussions of ideas and physical conflict. As a result of this process, the predominant protocols of interactions are born. They can be manifested either as formal laws and enforced by institutions, or they can be manifested as informal protocols such as tradition, customs, and etiquette.
These established protocols and institutions greatly simplify ones’ life. Societies outsource some of their cognitive burden to these institutions and mutually agreed protocols. Some important remarks are due here, however. This is an organic process that can either take an instrumental form and provide value by allowing one to better operate in the world, or they can take a detrimental form where people live by heedless superstitions and make poor decisions. This process requires cultivation and care, where cultivation consists primarily of fostering individual thinking, constructive negotiation process, and helping establish a common vision.
