3.

THE
DYNAMICS
OF IDEAS

What we have found out so far? First, there is the resources-versus-transactions consideration, where we saw that original differences in human intelligence or natural resources such as climate, soil, minerals or natural flora and fauna were not very important for long-term success. Instead, it was primarily our ability to expand social networks and stimulate creativity that counted.

Early societies were mainly what we may call “extractors”, and when they made their first institutions, these would easily become extractive too. However, over time, some civilizations became more “combiners” instead – they focused more on trade – and in order to do that they would eventually develop more inclusive institutions. Some people may have become good at growing potatoes, and that is a good skill. But others learned to trade them and, as the Swedish economist Johann Norberg, explained: “Trade is like a machine that turns potatoes into computers, or anything into anything: who would not want to have such a machine at their disposal?” While the potato growers grow their food from soil and water, the traders grow their creative design spaces from people and ideas, and that is how creativity and prosperity grows big, and it also how self-domestication gets stimulated.

In the previous chapter we noted that the human age of creative transaction was kicked off by the invention of trade, which included depersonalization of interaction whereby we could co-operate within our total social space rather than only within our personal network. Such trade created ideas and products and this became part of an expanding creative design space. Once that expanded, it increased the number of previous inventions that could be recombined, and so on, forever and ever. So it was a self-feeding loop.

Meanwhile another self-feeding loop started. When people undertook more voluntary win-win transactions with one another, they became more trusting and co-operative. This was surely a cultural phenomenon, but almost certainly also genetic. In either case, we managed self-domestication, which increased our talent for co-operation, which again fostered more diversity in our products and transactions, which expanded the creative design space, and because people found that attractive, they also build ever bigger creative social spaces.

We have also touched upon the fact that, as described by Adam Smith in 1776, it was the pursuit of self-interest combined with trade that made everything grow. When Darwin, 83 years later, published On the Origin of Species, it was actually a kind of rediscovery of the same principles in nature. Nature was selfish, like business people are, and the most effective also gained market share here.

As we have seen in previous chapters, Dawkins brought a new perspective to both theories by explaining how genes and memes managed to wander from one carrier to another in rather selfish ways; Wright contributed the idea that both nature and civilization predominantly found success by improving ability for co-operation. The striking aspect is, of course, that nature and culture follow some identical rules. Being selfish is rather natural in both systems, as in the selfish gene, the selfish meme and the selfish baker, and this selfishness could lead to great results even if it doesn’t sound sympathetic or welcome.

As Wright also described, everything that grows and thrives ultimately comprises co-operative networks. An organelle in a human body cell is an ecosystem of co-operating molecules. The cell itself is an ecosystem of organelles. The body is an ecosystem of co-operating cells and bacteria. The early farming culture expanded ecosystems to animals and plants in our environment that we farmed, planted, used and modified. Civilisation binds tribes and cultures together in even larger ecosystems through the use of rules and memes. Free trade agreements, airports and the internet expand it even further. That’s what the creative design space does to us, and it’s rather natural.

That is roughly how far we came within the preceding chapters, so let’s now take it on a stage and try to make a general rule:

SUCCESSFUL CIVILIZATIONS COME ABOUT DUE TO SPONTANEOUS, CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT, WHICH HAPPENS WHEN FIVE ELEMENTS ARE ALL PRESENT IN A SYSTEM: 1) SMALL UNITS 2) CHANGE AGENTS, 3) NETWORKS, 4) SHARED MEMORY SYSTEMS, AND 5) COMPETITION.

Let’s start with the units:

1. Small units. Small units are best at dreaming up new ideas, and the smaller the average unit in a network is, the more of them there are, which create better basis for creativity.

In nature, mutations happen in tiny units - they are the small shifts in the strands of DNA which often involve but a single atom. When the ape-men mutated quickly towards becoming human, it was because they frequently got isolated into small units, which then reconnected.

Within human communities, a change is typically derived from a single idea in the head of a single person. The person is typically inspired by others, but it still happens in just one person. While development is all about co-operation, a “collective idea” doesn’t really exist.

Human beings are generally herd animals and adapt to each other - so if decisions are taken collectively, they are rarely innovative. In addition, people in large organizations are typically risk-averse – it is safer to swim with the tide than to go against it. Thus, the best way to create maximum creativity is to have a community divided into many small, autonomous groups or individuals.

Next, we need to have:

2. Change agents. Progress requires spontaneous change, even if most of this is negative.

The hominins evolved quickly because of frequent climate change, including frequent local climate shifts and a long over-all trend towards more dry and open landscape. So the climate was a change agent.

In isolated, tribal communities or in countries with censorship and travel restrictions, there are a few change agents, which is why they stagnate or collapse. On the other hand, in open societies with free trade, travel, migrations, media, scientific research and social interaction through urbanization, ideas flourish; mainly through recombination.

So now we have many small units that tend to change and thus become innovative. But we need them to do voluntary win-win transactions with each other, which require:

3. Networks. Units must be connected so that transactions occur, and the more connected they are, the greater and faster the progress. The internet is more effective than a number of small, isolated networks, and a large free trade area is more successful than many self-sufficient regions. In nature, organisms are similarly connected via sex and ecosystems.

Network effects within trade are fascinating. Let us, as a purely arithmetical example, assume that the overall Stone Age population in an area consists of 100 clans, each with 25 people, where each clan has no interaction with other clans. Any person in the whole population will now be associated with 24 others. But let’s now imagine that, because of the introduction of trade, there are now a couple of people in every clan who know a member of another clan. This probably means that every person in society is indirectly connected with more than 2,499 people instead of 24!

This means that the use of the social space expands massively, and such a change may be called a “phase shift” by a mathematician, a “community” by a sociologist and an “ecosystem” by a biologist or network economist. And it is a significant business opportunity if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the Facebook network.

Networks enable transactions, exchanges of goods, services and ideas, and movement of people. But they also instantly increase everyone’s creative design space massively because when you interact with more people, you also interact with more products and ideas. Once people are changing and have started transacting, they need a means a storing value and exchanging information:

4. Shared memory systems. We need standardized codes to “write down” and memorize the results of successful experiments. The data needs to be in formats that can be shared between the participants in a network. Some of the data can be temporary, like the daily price of a kilo of potatoes, but whenever an experiment has gone well, the information about it should be stored so that the success can be 1) replicated and 2) rewarded. In life, temporary code is chemical transactions between proteins, for example, but the permanent code is the DNA, which replicate and thereby reward successful experiments. In human interaction, we need civilization and many of its institutions to ensure that memory systems are shared and respected.

People who trade a lot tend to become good at making such codes. To study that, the psychologist Peter Gordon of Columbia University made a series of experiments with Pitrahã people. In some of these, he drew a line on the ground between himself and one of the Indians and asked them to put the same number of objects on his side of the line as Gordon did on his. The Indians did this fairly well, placing up to three objects on the line, or more if they could place an object directly next to Gordon’s. However, if, for example, they placed their objects orthogonal to his, only 30 - 60% managed to get it right when dealing with between four and eight objects, and no one could count nine objects correctly.³¹

But again, good traders are good code-makers, and their shared memory systems may include property deeds, patents, copyrights, literature, trademarks, accounting systems, measuring units and more. All of these are only of value if they are understood and recognized by all participants.

One of the most important common languages is money. In prehistoric times money didn’t exist, but it was developed as soon as people started to trade: amber, seashells, camels, gold - almost anything was used as currency in primitive trade-based economies.

Money is often described as “a unit of accounting, a store of value and a medium of exchange”, but is also an essential information technology which describes to us the value of a voluntary win-win transaction. Win-win, yes. But win-win how much? The money provides the answer in a simple, common code. Two camels. 20 seashells. One million dollars. Any blabbermouth can fantasize about how much he did for others, but if he does it in a marketplace, we can make a decent estimate of its value by counting the money people gave him for his effort (of course, there are exceptions to that).

So now we have the small units, the change agents, the network and the shared memory systems, and this creates self-organizing systems which are constantly experimenting and which will spontaneously write down the results of successful experiments in its memory systems and replicate and reward them, just like nature does in its DNA. We should be set for progress.

Great, but remember most mutations are, in fact negative, whether in biology, business or society as a whole. The natural tendency for human organisations is to become increasingly decadent, bureaucratic, self-serving and lazy, and thus stuck-in-a-rut; often to such an extent that they eventually fail completely. This well-known phenomenon reminds somewhat of inbreeding in small, isolated populations in nature, and it applies to private companies with monopoly status as well as to government agencies and charitable and religious institutions; in the book’s fifth section we will study in more detail how it can happen.

However, there is a solution to this which is Darwin’s competitive pressure, such as in business or natural eco systems, and this shows that our self-organizing creative system absolutely requires its fifth element:

5. Competition. This will usually prevent bad permutations from spreading, whereas the good becomes more widespread. Societies without competitive pressure will eventually (or quite quickly) experience an overall decline, because most changes are actually negative.

So now we have listed the five elements required for spontaneous creativity in a system. When all of these are combined, something truly magical occurs: we start expanding our social networks and co-operating within our entire social space while we also achieve exponential growth in our creative design space.

The people who start such a process are not likely to comprehend the magnitude of what will follow as a consequence of their actions. When a few humans started trading with each other tens of thousands years ago, they could never have known they had set in motion a process that would lead to space travel and discotheques, and nor would they ever understand that what they had started would inevitably evolve exponentially.

This is because exponential processes are very deceptive. IT professionals often tell a short story which illustrates the power of exponential growth. The story is about an artist who performs a play for a Chinese emperor, which the emperor enjoys so much that he asks the artist to state how he would like to be rewarded. “With rice,”, the artist answers. “The amount should be calculated so that I receive a grain of rice for the first of the 64 squares on a chessboard, and then the number should double for each of the successive fields.”

The emperor is happy with that, because it sounds like nothing, and so they begin to count: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. However, when they get to field number 15, they get a bit concerned, because this one alone needs 24,576 grains of rice. In field 32, which is in the centre of the chessboard, they have reached 3,221,225,472 grains of rice, at which point the emperor gives an order for the artist to be decapitated. They could never have given him what he asked for, which was 13,835,058,055,282,200,000 grains of rice, equivalent to a rice mountain larger than Mount Everest. That’s how exponetiality works.

We don’t know exactly when humans started trading, but their creative design space at the time was probably not much more than around 15 things; perhaps controlled fire, stone axes, tents of skin, wooden skewers, cut stones, knives, ropes, serrated blades, domesticated wolves, bone needles, clothing, herbal medicine, boats, flutes and bone spearheads. So the accumulated innovation was tiny, but by trading and exchanging information and products, they had started the exponential process towards evermore diversity, and given around 15 innovations, they would already have recombined previous innovations. Boats, tents and clothes, for instance, would have required recombining elements of previous inventions, and we can easily see that there we quite a few other potential innovations to be developed out of what they had, such as bow and arrow, sails for their boats or fishing equipment.

They were on their way to something spectacular, but we can ask again: if Homo sapiens had existed 200,000 years, and trading started some 40,000 years ago (or even 10,000 or 20,000 thousend years earlier), why did they only start civilization 5,000 years ago?

The answers lies in our chess board story and, to see why, just think about the history of life. After the first self-replicating DNA (and sister molecule RNA) came bacteria. These may seem primitive to us, yet one bacterium may contain some 150 million atoms organized in a non-random structure, and is able to make a perfect copy of itself in, perhaps, 15 minutes – that is almost 17,000 atoms copied into an identical structure per second!

No wonder it took nature several billion years to get that sorted out. But afterwards, progress began to accelerate since nature possessed the red-hot combination of small units, change agents, networks, shared memory systems and competition. The creative design space started growing exponentially.

When seen in this light, it is not surprising that the human race spent approx. 120,000 years at pure Stone Age-level, then some 35,000 years creating the precursors of civilization, but took only 5,000 years to reach the industrial revolution and a further 300 years to reach the space age, with the biotech age arriving just 50 years later.

The story with the Chinese emperor assumes simply doubling on every square of the chess board but, in reality, the rate of growth will change periodically. This happens because of phase shifts, where we develop new meta-ideas (the aforementioned ideas about how to get ideas) or significant meta-technologies (technologies for making technologies). Trade was easily - as we have seen - the biggest meta-idea ever to have been conceived, but we have since come up with countless others, such as postal services or the internet.

Aren’t there saturation points in this? For instance, with modern social media, we can each connect with millions, but the day only has 24 hours, so we run out of personal bandwith at some point, don we?

Of course there are, but systems that fulfil our five criteria for creativity get around this as follows: self-organizing, creative systems foster new systems that follow the same simple rules, and this happens in endless cascades. For example, genes made proteins and enabled life, which created organisms which created ecosystems, which created intelligent beings, which created trade, which created culture, which created civilization, which created artificial intelligence. The next in line may include robotic communities and creative computers that can interact spontaneously over the internet.

The gist of this is truly fascinating: At some point in the very distant past, some amino acids linked up in a pattern that could serve as a replicator and then - voila! - started an endless cascade of mutations that created bacteria, dinosaurs, orchids and us. Later, two Stone Age men began to trade with each other and it led to the Roman Empire, Titanic and Pink Floyd. A man invents a transistor, and we end up with the smartphone, satellite TV and robot planes. Another man invents the internet protocol and we now have Facebook, Google and YouTube.

It is fascinating that such simple, basic principles can create such complex results, but this is exactly how creative, self-organizing systems evolve, and we cannot understand the possibilities and the problems of our own civilization if we do not get this phenomenon completely under the skin: our primary resource is the creative design space, which we need to nourish and grow. It is not iron, in the ground or plants on the land. It is primarily the dynamics of creative transaction that make us rich, not natural resources, and we need a very deep understanding of how that works.

Two more things: Intuitively we feel that simple systems are very robust, and that can certainly be true in some cases. However, generally, complex self-organizing systems are far more robust than the simple ones, because the more diverse and de-centralized a system is, the more options it has for adapting to change through new combinations and backup solutions. Its creative design space is larger and it mutates more. That’s why the internet is so robust, and why the Soviet Union wasn’t. Also, intuitively we may feel that self-sufficiency is most safe. It isn’t. After tree generations promoting self-sufficiency, North Korea had several million starved to death, whereas South Korea, which embraced openness to global trade, had none.

Here comes a question: We saw that money is an information technology that informs us about the value of experiments and rewards those who performed them. So, if someone has a good idea, it is obvious that others will copy it, so who gets the spoils? The answer is that the spoils come in two forms, which economists may call “Schumpeter profit” or “alchemist’s fallacy”.³²

The former may, for instance, be the profits a pharmaceutical company obtains by inventing and patenting a new product (please note that the patenting is an example of our shared memory system). Any patent expires, however, and then come all the copy-cats who make very cheap, generic versions of the product at razor thin margins. From this point on, the invention is predominantly to the benefit of society as a whole rather than the original inventors.

The reason the second phase is called the Alchemist’s fallacy is that something similar would have happened had the medieval alchemists actually found a way to transform lead into gold: the price of gold would quickly have plunged so the alchemist’s gains would have swiftly disappeared.

Let’s ask again: who gets what? How are the spoils divided up according to this Schumpeter/alchemist dichotomy? According to studies conducted by Yale economist William Nordhaus, entrepreneurs keep, on average, 4% of the added value they generate – the remaining 96% is shared by society as a whole.³³ These numbers are only averages, of course, and there are cases where the inventor gains more than the 4%, and cases where he or she gains less than that or even nothing or a loss. For example, Johannes Gutenberg, who changed history by inventing the printing press, went bankrupt while society benefitted enormously.

Speaking of money; where does the value come from? When our creative design space was tiny, it surely came largely from ideas. For instance, once a Stone Age man had the idea to combine the bone spearhead and string he had into a bow and arrow, it can’t have taken much work to make the first prototype – perhaps a few hours. However, as our technologies grew more complex the time lapse between having the idea and putting it into production must have increased steadily. Before Thomas Edison could file his patent application for the light bulb, he had tested 1,600 different materials - including fibres’ from coconuts, fishing line and hair from a friend’s beard – and had written 40,000 pages of testing notes. No wonder he later remarked that a “genius consists of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” As the creative design space expands, implementation of ideas becomes a greater limiting factor than having ideas in the first place.

We have now covered the core principles of self-organizing creativity and, with this in mind, we just need to address a few other basic concepts to be used in subsequent chapters. Let’s start with the fact that we are all born with our genes and a variety of instincts, which give us characteristics:

Action patterns

One can also tame a dog to have action patterns, so they are not unique to humans. However, we are much better than animals at transmitting learning from person-to-person, and when that happens, we develop:

Memes

As good parents will know, it requires a lot of memes to enable a child to function reasonably well in society. If groups of people have roughly the same memes, then we say that they have in common:

Culture

Memes are the yarns with which we knit culture. However, a power-structure will always evolve and the traditional core unit in this is:

Tribes

We have already discussed tribes, but they can be defined as face-to-face social networks organized around genetic relationships and often also religion affiliation. As with tribes among apes, they are typically patrilocal (men stay put; women are exchanged).

Tribal societies may be stable but are rarely creative, and if there is more than one tribe in a tribal nation, you either need a very brutal dictator to keep it together, or there tends to be trouble. Also, tribes often lapse into violent conflict when a leader dies unless there is a son who takes over swiftly, and they tend to suffer from inbreeding. If tribalism occurs within a civilization, it is called nepotism, which goes to say that a tribal society is a nepotistic society.

Much of human history over the past 2,000 years has revolved around attempts to scale back tribal structures and replace them with:

Civilizations

A beehive or an anthill is not a civilization, because we define civilizations as formal systems that have been conceived consciously and are based on devised rules and orders. An anthill or a beehive is based on action patterns and memes, but not on culture or civilization.

Today, many historians agree there are eight major civilizations: Western civilization, Orthodox Christian, Islam, Confucius area, Hindu, Buddhist, non-Islamic Africa and the Indian Latin America, but in reality, many live in the reality of a mixture of Western civilization and something else.³⁴

Western civilization is essentially what developed out of Western Europe. Today it clearly includes Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. You can also include parts of Israel, Eastern Europe and Latin America that have an ethnic majority of European immigrants and a Western-oriented culture, i.e. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica. Most people from these countries have cultures that are relatively compatible with Western civilization - they share a number of memes and a good deal of culture with other Westerners.

It should be noted that whenever a civilization has formed, the process has involved long, hard struggles to move allegiences from tribes to states. For example, you cannot have a functioning civilization if politicians, policemen, tax collectors or judges favour people from their own tribe over others.

Civilizations require high levels of mutual trust between their inhabitants, high levels of honesty, strong institutions and low levels of tribalism – otherwise they break down.

The concept of civilizations comes with a charming aura of ancient philosophy, elegant oratorical brilliance and deep thinking. The work of philosopher John Locke is one example. He wrote a series of sensational publications in the 17th century; for instance, in 1689, he argued for an emphasis on the individual because it was a natural instinct for people to make their own choices and feel free. The state should therefore respect and protect individual freedom, equality and sovereignty, he said, and, if laws were made correctly, they would protect people’s liberty against such violations as criminal action. This, he believed, would increase people’s freedom rather than restrict it. Moreover, he argued that it was practically impossible to impose a belief on people against their will, and as this would also be an infringement of their personal sovereignty, all states should practise religious freedom.

Some years earlier - in 1642 - 1651 - England’s population had been involved in a nightmare spate of win-lose activity - there was actually a civil war. In the last year of this war, another philosopher named Thomas Hobbes published a book called Leviathan after the monster of biblical legend Leviathan. This book proposed that the state (the Leviathan) was needed to prevent people from hurting one another. This compromise required a “social contract”, he said, because otherwise people would often abuse each other. In order to prevent such abuse, the Leviathan should, if necessary, use violence and, in consideration for this security, every citizen would have to give up some of his freedom – thus the social contract. Without it, you would have a war of all against all - “bellum omnium contra omnes” as he put it. In such a society, he observed, “there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain” and, as a consequence, he thought that life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

That sounds unpleasant, but which kind of Leviathan do you need? The traditional sort is what the Chinese call (wáng), which means “king” or “monarch”, and virtually every community has started with such a powerful man as their first Leviathan. Anthropologists sometimes refer to his kind as a “Big Man”.

In very small clans, such a Big Man was often subject to inherent limitations, in that he could easily be killed or chased away if behaved too badly. As communities expanded, their Big Men, however, were no longer able to cope with it all, and were forced to recruit henchmen. This modified the dynamics, since these sidekicks demanded shares in the Big Man’s privileges, in return for acting as his blood brothers and protectors. This was the foundation stone of the aristocratic form of government, but also of the state.

The early states were typically not too pretty, because their Big Men and their henchmen would, in many cases, systematically plunder normal citizens. In other words, the Leviathan was kleptocrat, as we call it today - an institutionalized bandit.

However, in 1748 came an outline for an alternative model of society in a book called The Spirit of the Laws from a Frenchman with the pompous name: Charles - Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu. Fortunately today we just call him Montesquieu and, besides, when he first published the book, it was under an assumed name for fear of reprisals. The most important section of his book dealt with how to prevent abuse of power by separating various state bodies so they could keep each other in check.

The combined ideas of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Montesquieu give us a pretty good introduction to what the creation of civilization really is all about. It is about 1) individual rights, such as freedom of speech or equality in the eyes of the law and 2) a social contract bringing with it the obligation upon citizens to pay tax and to obey laws and the right of governments to to enforce this. And 3) it is about the division of powers. Interestingly, the way to put these three arrangements in place comes down to just two processes: promoting the win-win concept and separating things.

First, you set rules that promote win-win transactions and inhibit or forbid win-lose or lose-lose transactions. Tribal societies do the same but, in a civilization, these rules are formalized and equally valid for all, no matter which tribe they come from – they are written down and made public.

Second, you separate functions and identities to avoid tribalism, nepotism, discrimination and power abuse, which could hinder the creative social space. We already saw that trade was an example of de-personalization, which separated it from the limitations of sympathy, family or friendship, making it much bigger. However, as we build civilizations, we separate much, much more. In an advanced civilization, the judicial, legislative and executive branches are separated. The press, the church and the Central Bank are also separated from the state. Personal ties and networks are separated from status under the law. Rights are kept separate from gender, sexuality, religion and race. Boards are separated from directors and shareholders. Auditing is separated from accounting. Food quality control is separated from food production. And so it goes, on and on; separate, separate, separate, and you will have small units and a better civilization. The purpose of all this is to create an ecosystem of entities which act predictably and according to their mandates, so that they have reduced ability to abuse power and whose rights are universally respected.

Although civilizations are formal, they are, curiously, far more open to newcomers than cultures. A German can move to Dubai and function very well in its civilization just as an Emirati can easily integrate into German civilization. But ask the German to adopt Dubain culture and mindsets, and vice versa, and it becomes a lot more challenging.

In order to acquire a culture - or to switch to a new culture - a person must make a great personal effort. They will have to change thousands of memes that they learned as a child or young, and this can be near impossible - they were hardwired into the brain at early age. Even if we want to move from one Western sub-culture to another, it may require much work or be impossible.

The reality is that, because civilizations write down and formalize their rules, you can enjoy the fruits of other people’s knowledge and memes without acquiring these yourself and you can transfer aspects of given civilizations to new societies. The Japanese, Chinese and South Koreans, for example, have applied many aspects of Western civilization – and to great effect! - without dropping too much of their own culture.

In fact, Western civilization could eventually be adopted by all those who have a compatible culture at the very time it falls apart in the Western nations that first developed it. For instance, in principle, the Western civilization might, 50 years from now, flourish in China, while disintegrating in parts of Europe. That is not a forecast but it could happen, because memes are not tied to genes.

Perhaps we got a bit sidetracked here, because we were in the process of making definitions, so let’s just finish that task with:

International organizations

Empires and supranational organizations, such as the UN or mega religions

We have an empire when a civilization manages other civilizations that are weaker. As mentioned, empires have come and gone over the years, but it seems likely that their era is now largely over; as Adam Smith predicted, voluntary winwin transactions are more economical than enforced centralization. Empires appear to have decreasing marginal returns as they expand. Heads of states, who want an empire of their own, are typically interested in the power and grandeur it can provide for them, but for the empires’ citizens, the disadvantages often outweigh the benefits. As already mentioned, this argument was made by Adam Smith as Britain was in the process of building up its empire in the 18th century. What Smith favoured instead was simply to “rule the waves”, as the British say; to lead in trade, because that is where the money is.

TO SUMMARIZE WHAT WE HAVE COVERED SO FAR – ALL OF IT:

Spontaneous creativity happens in any system that has a combination of small units, change agents, networks, shared memory systems and competition.

This creates a creative design space, which feeds on itself in an exponential way.

The attraction of the creative design space compels people to expand their social networks and co-operate with strangers within their entire social space.

A creative society (or any creative system such as nature) will spontaneously develop increased diversity, and creative systems will foster new such creative systems

The process of forming a civilization is largely about 1) formalizing rules to promote and protect win-win and 2) separating functions to inhibit tribalism, nepotism, discrimination and power abuse.

Societies that are successful in the very long run are generally not characterized by having many resources, but by being good at nourishing their creative design spaces. They are predominantly idea-based, in other words.

Ideas created by individual units are shared with society at large which, because of the “Alchemist Fallacy”, on average, obtain approximately 96% of the benefit.

As the creative design space expands, ideas people have tend to require complex implementation, which means that implementation of ideas becomes a greater limiting factor than having ideas in the first place.

An ideas-based society requires intellectual and financial property rights as well as win-win transaction to be protected by a state.

A civilization based mainly on voluntary win-win transactions will create a more trusting, honest and creative culture and it will also change our genes to become “nicer”.

Most spontaneous changes in societies, as well as in nature, are negative, and all systems will therefore decay due to in-breeding or similar processes, unless there is competitive pressure.

That’s roughly it, and this should shape our basic mindset in a few ways. First, we should typically focus our minds harder on voluntary facilitating transactions than on extracting resources. Second, beware the dangers of centralisation - small and decentralized is more creative than big and centralized. Third, keep culture in mind. A good civilization provides incentives for creation of a good culture, and the two should be compatible. Fourth: creative systems create diversity. It has been a frequent theme in movies and books that, in future, wewill be dominated by a single dictator with media monopoly and a giant mainframe, but that is not the way creative societies develop. Finally, ensure the results of successful experiments are recorded, rewarded and duplicated. That, after all, is the DNA of creativity.

With these thoughts in mind, we shall now proceed to the second section of the book, which considers how the first civilizations developed and why the West became so big and dominant. We shall also dwell on the interactions between cultures and civilizations.