Does the Social Contract needs a rewrite?

At years end, we reflect on the past. What has been achieved? What and who has been lost? And more pertinently, what do we anticipate and plan for in the coming year? The Holiday Season, even with all its commercial hype and hypocrisy, does bring family and community into focus. With this latest journey around the sun, whether for better or worse, change is on the horizon. Despite the undertow of reality one can still strive for positive change. A healthy relationship with family and community, is a good place to start. Then there is everybody else!

As humans we rely on each other to survive and thrive, our entire social structure is based on building a complex structure of interaction. The Social Contract that ties us together is based on our mutual understanding and common interests, and yet, from petty misunderstanding to outright intentional misdirection, conflict seems inevitable. Conflict that contradicts our most basic aspirations: harmony and accord in our relations with our fellow humans.

The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 8.1 billion in 2024. There are too many disparate priorities in the world to conform to the ever smaller print of our social contact. Beyond our sylvan bubble, too many are leveraged towards a life that requires daily traffic jams, soul killing work, nerve jangling time pressures, and economic anxiety, while wading through the dense flood of expectations and desires that define our consumer culture. Forces that conspire to deaden compassion, callous emotions, breed contempt, and deny connections. Leaving a vast population reduced to finding solace only in sporadic convivial moments, casual banter, and bonhomie that can make our shared lives tolerable. This minimum daily allowance of human interaction is the common civility that the social contract requires. Sustained engagement, social progress, and universal humanity require more effort. Efforts that rely on a relatively benign governmental power structure, all imperiled when conflict erupts into open warfare.

A failure of ethics?

Philosopher Karl Popper first described the Paradox of Tolerance:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. 

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary …(note: here is where it gets dicey, hence the paradox) …even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

Faced with the looming intentional chaos of a national agenda that aims to manipulate and control ideology, it is rather a lot to ask, that rational argument and public opinion will restrain a group of true believers, wedded to false beliefs or assumptions. More conflict seems inevitable.

War and rumors of war

More than 45 armed conflicts are currently taking place throughout the Middle East and North Africa in: Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and Western Sahara, involving a multitude of armed non-state actors and foreign interventions by Western powers, Russia, and neighboring countries. There are more than 35 armed conflicts in Africa, in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan, with armed groups fighting against government forces and/or against each other’s.

In Asia 19 conflicts involving 19 armed groups are ongoing in Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan and The Philippines. Two international armed conflicts – between India and Pakistan, and between India and China are also taking place in the region.

The majority of armed conflicts taking place in Europe are occupations: Russia is currently occupying Crimea (Ukraine), Transniestria (Moldova), as well as South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgia), while Armenia is occupying parts of Nagorno Karabakh (Azerbaijan). In addition to the war between Ukraine and Russia, there are two armed conflicts in Ukraine opposing governmental forces with the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. 6 armed conflicts are taking place in Latin America split evenly between Mexico and Colombia.

The chaos and displacement, the destruction and pain of war is an unbearable burden. We fortunate citizens for whom war is just a news update can easily compartmentalize the spectrum of human suffering that war engenders: There are the dutiful killers, those deserving of killing, the incidental killed, the unfortunate innocents killed, and the just plain dead.

The secondary spectrum of war stems from the consequences of those deaths on the families and communities of those killed. The survivors must then deal with the tertiary spectrum of war, the destruction and displacement of the infrastructure, and mechanisms of their civil life.

War as a business does quite well, the supreme example of planned obsolescence. What a product! It gets the job done for government and industry – causing massive destruction for political ends, and contractors delight, supplying weapons and the inevitable rebuilding to reset civility. And also creates demand for more product. Using weapons not only destroys targets, but also consumes the weapon, or at least the ‘consumables’ known as ammunition. And God forbid fighters be left ammo-less, then they might have to mount bayonets and go old school, Mano a Mano, nobody, well hardly anybody, relishes the wet-work of war. Much better, more palatable, and more marketable is advancing the tech of warfare. Super weapons are sexy, always a good selling point.

How do we allow this? 

Apparently no one has the ability to end madness. The only option we have is to make it known we disagree with the insanity of war- BIG WHOOP! – Who the hell cares what we think? Not governments, not volunteer soldiers or paid mercenaries, not the true believer of the righteousness of killing and destruction. 

A horrific illustration of where we are headed, is a cautionary tale of an increasingly achievable evil. A short film from 2017 “Slaughterbots” begins with a fictional defense contractor representative demonstrating a new product: A palm-sized, explosive carrying drone with artificial-intelligence that allows it to target, and kill with a precise detonation to the head. “You can target an evil ideology, right where it starts,” the rep says, pointing to his head amid a massive round of applause. The short film was a joint project between UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to explaining the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. Researchers, CEOs, and high-profile individuals like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking signed an open letter years ago calling for the banning of military AI, and warning of its dangers to humanity. As tech companies embrace AI as the future of everything, AI weapons development is ongoing,. The world’s three largest arms exporters, the US, Russia, and China, have all shown signs of interest in unmanned weapons systems. Fueling an arms race to create a fully autonomous militarized AI, to avert a dreaded killer-robot gap.

Last year the U.S. began implementing a new foreign policy to govern the responsible military use of such technologies. The policy, first unveiled in the Hague in February and endorsed by 45 other countries, is an effort to keep the military use of AI and autonomous systems within the international law of war. Neither Israel nor Ukraine, both implementing AI technology in their respective conflicts are signatories, leaving a growing hole in the young effort to keep high-tech weapons operating within agreed-upon lines. Israel is using self-piloting drones for close-quarters indoor combat, Ukraine, has been a proving ground for new AI-powered defense technology, much of it ordered by the Ukrainian government directly from U.S. tech companies.

In a UN General Assembly resolution adopted Dec. 2, the assembly said informal talks among member states and nongovernmental organizations should be held in New York in 2025 to consider the dangers posed by autonomous weapons systems, often called “killer robots” by critics, and possible measures for their control.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an umbrella organization for other civil society activists on this issue, described the resolution as a “small step” forward. It expressed disappointment that “the resolution does not reflect the clear desire of the majority of the international community to urgently launch negotiations on a legal binding instrument on autonomous weapons systems.”

Enough is enough, right? stop the killing already, right? 

Oh Hell…that didn’t get it done. It is hard to imagine what can. Any suggestions? 

As a child, before all the wars in the last 50+ years, a sort of running joke around this time of year was the top priority on of my letter to Santa: ‘World Peace’- because after all, how would that ever happen? 

As “You have to be cruel to be kind” rock star Nick Lowe once put it:

“What’s so funny ’bout peace love and understanding?”  

Joshua Golden-