Published by
Yun Family Foundation
Copyright (c) 2019 Joon Yun, Eric Yun & Conrad Yun.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-949709-84-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-949709-85-8
All rights reserved.
Foreword
Brief and Incomplete History of the World
First Principle of Humanity:
The Principle of Inclusive Stakeholding
The Inevitability of Religion, the Kardashians, and Larry Harvey
The Story of Our Nature and the Nature of Our Stories
Kin Diaspora, Social Entropy, and Relationship Liquidity
Solidarity to “Solitarity”
Exclusive Stakeholding
The Race to the Middle
Byzantine Reflex
On the Emergence of Language
On the Emergence of Math
Memetic Parallax
Mob Mentality in the Technology Age
Neutron Bomb of Human Sociality
Duality Is the Reality
Revolutionary Thinking
The Ouroboros
Independence and Interdependence
Psychology 2.0
Why Do We Adore Familiar Music?
Attention Inequality
To the Humans and Machines Reading This in 2019, Thank You
Mom Bot
In the Beginning
Welcome Home
The Tree of Life
Related Essays
A Riff on Tariffs
A Future with Fewer Features
Chairlift
Concession Stand
Food for Thought
Domestic Imperialism
One Fish, Red Fish, Two Fish, Blue Fish
The Domestication of the Environmental Movement
Interdependence and Longevity
Domesticating Cancer through
Reestablishing Intercellular Interdependence
The Remission
Stewarding Future Leaders
Multidimensional Selection as an Evolutionary Framework
About the Authors
One thing we can do is leave stories. Many of us also leave our genes, which is nature’s way of leaving better versions of ourselves. Stories shape how we do that, not only through our lives, but across space and time. Stories live a life of their own.
The essays in this anthology, Inclusive Stakeholding, are just that. They aren’t meant to serve a particular purpose. They were written to exist for as long as they are meant to, for as long as they do.
That’s not to say a reader might not take away some meaning or purpose from these stories. A person putting their story down in the year 2019 might mean it one way, while a person reading it in the year 9102 might read it another way. These stories might even provide a sense of clarity about the world or inspire action.
But above all, these stories were written to make the same sense before and after all the revolutions, all the transformations, all future comings and goings. They were written to outlast all the jubilation and all the tears.
These stories were written to live a life of their own.
A speech delivered at the United Nations headquarters
in New York City on the 50th anniversary of the lunar
landing on July 20, 2019
Hi everyone. I’m Eric Yun, and I am honored to be here with all of you at the United Nations on this 50th anniversary of the fulfillment of President Kennedy’s lunar mission. I’m here to tell you a new story, a story about history and about a new kind of mission to bring the world together.
Once upon a time, “home” was our kin village. There was mom, dad, siblings, as well as cousins, aunts, and uncles. Kin is the root of kindness, and we took care of each other according to our degrees of relatedness—a trait biologists call inclusive fitness. We were fed, informed, and governed by those who had our best interests at heart. Genetically speaking, people own 50% founder’s stock in their children, 25% in their grandkids and cousins, and so on.
Today, we rely much more on strangers who have an incentive to put their own interests ahead of ours. When those entrusted to serve us don’t have kin skin in the game, unfortunate things can happen. Fake news, fake foods, fake politicians all result from the same underlying cause: low genetic alignment.
Furthermore, when this malalignment is combined with competition, a “race to the bottom line” ensues. If we force one media company to use less clickbait, for example, another will use more to gain market share. If we force one food company to use less sugar, another will use more to fill the void. In a way, the Kardashian culture and high-fructose corn syrup are the same phenomenon—the inevitable outcome of a race to the bottom line, where malalignment meets capitalism.
But it’s not just institutions versus people. It’s also people against each other. Deep fractures seem to appear daily along every tribal element of human identity. As in some apocalyptic action movies, we hardly know where to step in our day-to-day conversations for fear of falling into some crevasse of bubbling hate that has just opened up.
The tragedy is that these tribal hurrahs might prove as phony as SPAM when it first appeared as a poor replacement for meat, and later, as an even worse replacement for a friend’s handwritten letter. If loyalty is a fleeting and tradable commodity, is it still loyalty? Without the kin skin in the game that existed in our original tribes, true loyalty within today’s “tribes” will remain as elusive as it has been since the beginning of the human diaspora a hundred thousand years ago. Rather than healing the wounds of alienation, today’s tribalism throws salt in them. That’s hardly the type of future anyone would dream of, yet an everyone-for-themselves nightmare is exactly what looms as the sun sets on this brief and remarkable interlude known as human history.
This alienation has been going on far longer than you might think. Looking back, world history as we know it has largely been a story of how family values failed to scale as humans globalized. When kingship replaced kinship, sovereigns began ruling over instead of on behalf of their people. Ancient republics created to counter these abuses also collapsed, usually due to self-dealing. As republics and empires everywhere collapsed under the burden of self-interested corruption, it was perhaps inevitable that the story of a deity who gave his only son to the world emerged to counter the story of kings who gave the world to their sons. But this story also gave way to the same old story of institutional corruption until Martin Luther’s revolution in 1517.
Around that time, the idea of a joint-stock company was born. This powerful idea aligned stakeholders the way genes once did for kin tribes. But these companies did not include their workers or people in distant lands as stakeholders, which led to imperialism, colonialism, and the exacerbation of abusive working conditions brought on by the industrial revolution. Against this backdrop, firms that gave stock to their workers was a stunning innovation that made Silicon Valley the entrepreneurial juggernaut it is today. On the other hand, Silicon Valley did not include users as stakeholders, which is resulting in yet another round of upheavals today.
These examples demonstrate a recurring theme: unless first-order alignment issues are addressed, whack-a-mole solutions to second-order problems will only create new ones. Pete Townshend anthemized this Sisyphean hell of revolutions in “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: the new boss is often the same old boss.
A group of excluded stakeholders has been paying the price ever since we left the kin-skin-in-the-game era of human evolution—the price of tyranny, slavery, nepotism, nationalism, nativism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, pollution, extractive capitalism, corruption, alienation, loneliness, and inequality. The good news is that the solution is hiding in plain sight. We’re at that “tap your heels together three times”, when we finally realize that we’ve had the power to change our story all along. Humanity’s natural condition is not independence but interdependence, and the arc of human history has been nothing more than our failure to replace the inclusive fitness of the kin village with the inclusive stakeholding of the global village. The struggle for inclusive stakeholding is the First Principle of Humanity, from which can be derived not only historical understanding but a path to building a better future for everyone. This is very doable.
To begin doing this, our family is launching the Grand Challenge on Inclusive Stakeholding, a social innovation competition intended to nurture new types of social, political, and economic institutions in which all people win as all stakeholders win—including those who don’t have a voice, such as the children of the future. I will offer some examples.
Imagine health insurers being rewarded based on people’s healthcare savings ten years down the road. If a proportion of the health savings of that patient over ten years accrues to the original insurer, then the insurer becomes an investor-stakeholder in the client’s health, which motivates them to encourage preventive health measures. Or, imagine teachers being rewarded in token amounts on the blockchain that are based on their students’ contributions to the world ten years down the road. The pupils’ success would lift up all their prior teachers. Instead of universal basic income, imagine universal basic stakeholding, where we all have a stake in one another’s future.
In the olden days, warring kingdoms would make peace by marrying off their kids to create interdependence and kin skin in the game. Today we can build networks of interdependent stakeholders to create a social economy, as Facebook did for social media but much, much bigger. I’m sure each of you can think of many more possibilities, and we are all aligned with the success of one another’s ideas. Whereas malalignment with competition is a race to the bottom, alignment with competition is a race to the top.
The stakes have never been higher. We live today in a highly interconnected world and our futures are irrevocably intertwined as never before, both as individuals and as nations. From ecological impact to humanitarian crises to space exploration, we all have a stake in the risks and opportunities arising across the planet. Embracing inclusive stakeholding is our final frontier, and our future depends on it.
Like Captain Neil Armstrong, I dream of things that fly and fly far. Instead of a world where history is written by the victors, I dream of a world where history is made by helping others win. If we succeed in this vision for humanity, our transformative journey from the kin village to the global village will be complete. I know that sounds crazy, but if President Kennedy were here today, he would ask us to aim beyond the moon. He would ask us to aim for the stars. I hope you will join me in this new mission. I wish you all good luck, and Godspeed.
The First Principle of Humanity is Inclusive Stakeholding: assigning a stake to others in the widest sense, including those who currently don’t have a voice, and our future children. From this First Principle, large-scale human history can be derived and a better future for all can be imagined.
Evolution selected our social instincts to align with kin tribes. For the longest time, it probably was difficult for early humans to avoid living in kin tribes. The benefit of kin-based living was too high, as was the cost of avoiding it. That was our Eden—our social nirvana of time immemorial.
In that cradle of human evolution, there was less need for consciousness. Follow your instincts and things worked out. It might be no accident, then, that the kin tribe era left us no record. Perhaps life for them just was.
But somewhere along the way, humans harnessed the Promethean Fire and learned to make tools. That knowledge uprooted humans from their kin tribes and the era of social entropy began. As lineages arborized, kinship thinned. The hive became a house divided. Descendants battled and were banished to a life of wandering. The dispersion and diasporas hit their planetary limits and merged into melting pots.
Looking back, the journey to now has been mostly a beautiful one. But the human experience over the past ten thousand years has also brought an ever-increasing awareness of the existence of good and bad, expressed through the service or disservice of others, either according to, or in spite of, Hamilton’s rule.
The battle between these forces has been as dramatic as the prehistoric kin tribe era was undramatic. Every collision between kin-based societies and societies built on competition—for example when the Native Americans met Europeans—resulted in the annihilation of the former due to advanced weaponry possessed by cultures with commodification. But over longer cycle times, even the latter category of cultures built on commodification also imploded. Thus, as per Ibn Khaldun’s Asabiyyah, all civilizations began to rise and fall. Strange things started to happen regularly. It began to be worthwhile to observe, contemplate, and act in profoundly new ways.
But by and large, we’ve had to learn by trial and error. Ideas that seemed good to the parade of conquerors, revolutionaries, and social reformers that have disproportionately shaped our collective history delivered disappointing—if not downright destructive—results. Yet, we were never quite sure why. Even though we’ve made great progress in improving our material existence, the rising tide that has buoyed us materially has also unmoored us spiritually. Too many parts of the human experience feel soulless. For the vast majority of people alive today, the price of progress has been a loss of a sense of belonging that were the anchors of human experience for most of the history of our species. This cost has been significant—and, even more to the point, one we’ve not even begun to seriously recognize or address.
We are genetically wired for the kin tribe era, but we no longer live as such. That’s a first-order problem that continues to spawn second- and third-order issues in a degenerating cascade. So, the time has come to return to our roots. It’s time to restart at year zero.
Just as Caesar had no idea that future historians would count the calendar years of his reign in a backwards regression to zero, just as every person basking in the sunlight a thousand years ago was unaware that Petrarch would later label their era the Dark Ages, and just as everyone once thought the earth was bigger than the sun, we today are blind to the possibility that our journey forward has been a journey homeward.
We left our kin village. We envisioned our role as the hero that would slay the beast. We instead got cast in the role of the villain by an unconditionally loving hero. It turned out that these stock archetypes are the farthest things from the truth. There never was a beast to slay or a hero to worship. The same actor has been behind all the roles. Us.
The story we are telling is that our lives—all of our lives—are best served by encompassing some mix of both modes of living. Enlightened self-interest as a social code works best when we also have greater alignment and vested interest in each other’s lives. The change that will matter most is to update the bioalgorithms of inclusive fitness in the tribal era with the social algorithms of inclusive stakeholding in the global era.
That’s because, seen through a wider lens, human history is a story of how kin skin in the game has scaled poorly as the operating algorithm of human sociality in the global era. That is an evolutionary lag error of epic proportions—but one that is eminently addressable. The Grand Challenge on Inclusive Stakeholding, a social innovation competition intended to reimagine our social, political, and economic institutions through alignment of interests and goal congruence, is part of a larger roadmap to help us find our way home. If we succeed, our transformative journey from the kin village to the global village will be complete. It turns out that our hero’s journey was not to pursue our own, but to steward each other’s journey homeward. We will return not as heroes, nor as the prodigal sons and daughters, but as both. The two sets of footprints we leave in the wilderness will be one set, not because one is carrying the other, but because we’re headed home together again.
Picture this. In the historical drama film Gladiator, which depicted the Roman Empire as it was heading toward collapse, Maximus, the blood sport’s rising star who was challenging the corruption of a philistine society, does a product endorsement.
Between death matches.
For olive oil.
If you think that sounds too absurd, even for a movie about a circus-like era of human history, so did the movie’s producers. They deleted this scene from the script because they thought the idea of a gladiator doing commercial endorsements detracted from the realistic feel of the story.1
Yet the reality is that gladiators in Ancient Rome did, in fact, use their celebrity to endorse products.2 The frescos and graffiti of the gladiator era suggest that people back then trusted the purchase advice of their superstar heroes just as they do today.
There is a powerful scene in the movie when young Lucius approaches Maximus as the latter is about to enter the arena.3 The poignant moment portrays the influence celebrity athletes wield over children who idolize them. The scene is not dissimilar to that depicted in one of the most successful product endorsements of all-time: Coke’s campaign in which a wounded Mean Joe Greene is offered a Coke in the tunnel of an arena by a wide-eyed young fanboy, who is thanked with a smile.4
In the prehistoric kin tribe era, our larger-than-life role models would have been our aunts and uncles or even our parents. This familial sense is evoked in the Lucius-Maximus scene in Gladiator, as Lucius is fatherless, and Maximus’s own son has been murdered. From an inclusive fitness perspective, idolizing and modeling our lives after the celebrities in our prehistoric kin tribe and trusting the ideas and products they endorsed would have served us well. In other words, evolution selected for an innate tendency to trust the endorsements of our avuncular (uncle) and materteral (aunt) heroes.
The authors of this book are members of a kin tribe. We live within five minutes of each other. The avuncular and materteral influences of our tribal past have disappeared from our daily lives and been replaced by stand-in pseudo-uncles and pseudo-aunts who don’t have kin skin in the game. Modern day celebrities and so-called heroes have an incentive to self-deal and exploit their worshipers for personal gain through extractive capitalism.
Just as Coke made a lot of money at the expense of children who reflexively and almost unavoidably followed their genetic scripting, trusting the ideas and products that modern celebrities endorse is an evolutionary maladaptation.
Seen from a higher perch, this dynamic is nefarious. Once upon a time, our mother—or other kin with a vested in interest in our success—nurtured us. Now we interface with counterparties with no kin skin in the game—the ever-present self-dealing archetype in Cinderella, Snow White, and other folklore tales: the evil stepmother.5
In Interdependent Capitalism, our previous volume, we explored how, without kin skin in the game to deter self-dealing, natural inclinations and free markets inevitably precipitate a race to the bottom line that maximizes commodification (i.e., creating things for their trading value). This mass production of nothing-is-quite-what-it-seems outcomes is what makes touristy destinations feel alienating, spec homes feel cheap, and, frankly, virtually every frontier of human experience feel soulless.
Earlier we mentioned that religion and the Kardashians were inevitable consequences of extractive governance and extractive capitalism, which emerged when kin skin in the game failed to scale during globalization. The same process inevitably also produced Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man—a rebellion against cultural commodification—no matter how many times we rerun this simulation called civilization.
Seen through a wider lens—without kin skin in the game to deter individual self-dealing—the evolutionary race to commodify selects extractive behaviors over good behaviors until only the former survive as self-expanding, self-serving institutions. By treating the symptoms but not the causes of aging, for example, our health system creates old people who need more healthcare, creating a vicious cycle. Food, media, and tech industries are growing through cycles of addiction. Big banks and big government have already become too big to fail.
The bottom line is this. When there’s alignment of interest, competition selects what’s best for the group. When there isn’t goal congruence, competition selects for power. Here we are in 2019 at the feet of self-expanding beasts everywhere that seem as undefeatable as cancer.
1. See Griffin, Joshua, “Not Such a Wonderful Life: A Look at History in Gladiator,” IGN, January 13, 2019, https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/02/10/not-such-a-wonderful-life-a-look-at-history-in-gladiator.
2. See Cyrino, Monica S. “Gladiator and Contemporary American Society,” in Gladiator: Film and History, ed. Martin M. Winkler (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), 124-49, http://faculty.uml.edu/ethan_spanier/teaching/documents/cyrinogaldiator.pdf.
3. See https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/20e01580-7afe-4eb5-8fef-5f6e61e65ba0.
4. See “Mean” Joe Greene Coca-Cola Classic ad, 1979, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xffOCZYX6F8.
5. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepmother.
Humanity is trapped in a cycle.
The institutions we built to attack self-expanding beasts in one era became the self-expanding beasts of the next. Along the way, we have made great strides in the collective quality of life on the planet, yet there is growing dread about where the world is headed.
To step out of this cycle, we’ve made the case that the change that will matter most is rebuilding our institutions through the Principle of Inclusive Stakeholding, where people win as others win.
But we can do even better.
Whether through kin skin in the game or inclusive stakeholding, kindness can be induced through secondary gain—that’s just the story of our nature. Yet humans also display kindness for kindness’ sake, even in the absence of incentives.
In the battle to overcome our default programming of following incentives—and to inspire us to show more kindness as agents of mercy rather than as mercenaries—there is a powerful secret weapon: stories.
Picture the difference between someone holding the door for another person for a tip versus someone holding the door for the sake of holding the door. The former is the commodification of kindness—done for the trading value. The latter is the decommodification of kindness—kindness for itself. One might argue that the outcome is the same either way and that only the experience differs. On the other hand, one might argue that the difference in experience is everything.
We know that people are more than capable of doing the right thing even without incentives, if they are acculturated to do so. We also know that people do the right thing even in the absence of such acculturation.
This is where stories—through acculturation—can make a difference.
