The Paradox Of Knowing Social Systems

By Leo Gura - October 4, 2024

I study and try to understand many social systems. But I noticed the following devilish paradox at the heart of this endeavor: Any social system you try to understand will happen from either inside or outside the system. Either you are an intimate participant in the system or you are an alien outsider looking in. If you’re looking from inside, you have a lot of direct experience and intimate detail, you know its workings much better, but at the cost of being co-opted by the system. Just to be in the system you must be part of the system, which means part of the system’s survival. Your survival gets interlinked with the system, infecting your mind with bias, blinding you just by virtue of being too close. But if you’re looking from outside you lose that all-important direct experience of the system, but you gain objectivity. Your survival is no longer tied with the system so you can’t get infected by the bias and group-think of all the insiders.

This is true of all social systems like: the CIA, the military, the Catholic church, science, academia, the Senate, the Israeli government, a terrorist organization, a cult like Scientology, a corporation, a marriage, voodoo, etc. (Try to think of more examples where this applies.)

For example, I can’t know as much about Israel as a native born Israeli who was raised there for 20 years, who went through the Israeli education system, who spent 3 years in the army, who consumed 20 years of Israeli media. So I’m missing that direct experience vital for grounding my understanding. However, since I’m looking at the Israel situation from the outside I can be more objective because I have no horse in the race. My survival isn’t at stake. I don’t have to be loyal to the system. I don’t have friends who will ostracize me. I don’t have 20 years of pro-Israel self-bias to work through. This allows me to see Israel in a more objective way than a native born Israeli.

However, the trickery doesn’t end there. The paradox gets even deeper because detachment from a situation creates its own kind of bias, a bias that comes from taking the imperatives of survival in the Middle East for granted. It’s easy for me to sit securely in America and criticize Israelis who have to endure rocket attacks on a regular basis. It’s easy to fool oneself by turning survival into an abstraction while sitting in a position of comfort where one’s survival is handled thanks to one’s excellent government infrastructure or just good fortune, like having rich parents. I see scientists make this mistake in assuming that they have the best handle on reality because they are seemingly so detached from the human condition. But are they really? Maybe they aren’t as detached as they think. Or maybe their detachment and so-called “rationality” and “objectivity” is precisely their blind-spot.

So you’re damned whether you study such systems from the inside or the outside. Each vantage point presents unique biases that are difficult to correct for. When studying such systems try to notice which vantage point you’re looking from, inside or outside, and try to anticipate the biases and blind-spots that correspond to each. It’s easy to misunderstand social systems as an outsider. But its also easy to misunderstand them as an insider! For example, as a teenager it was easy for me to see that a war in Iraq was a bad idea, even though I didn’t have any government or military experience. Actually, it’s precisely because I didn’t have that experience and I wasn’t an American citizen filled with patriotic outrage post 9/11. But many highly experienced government and military people couldn’t see it because they were too close to the system, they were insiders. But at the same time this doesn’t mean that I was qualified to speak on or handle foreign policy matters.

Here’s another way to look at this: Consider the epic task of trying to understand mankind as a whole, as a system. How would you do it? You could do it from inside, as a human living on planet Earth who went through the entire human education and enculturation system. Or you could do it from outside, as an alien looking down at Earth through a telescope. Now, here’s the interesting question: Which view would give you a better understanding of mankind? The alien would have a much more objective view of mankind, free of all the petty human biases, dogmas, assumptions, tribalism, and ideology. But would this alien really appreciate what its like to be a human and why humans behave as they do? Can you really know what being a human means unless you’ve lived through all the human biases and had to survive as a human, under all the limited social and political conditions of Earth? That’s a very hairy sort of thing that no self-respecting alien would want to dirty himself with. But then again, if you really wanted to understand the human condition you’d have to expose yourself to it a lot more than through a telescope. But if you did, you might end up like one of those dirty biased dogmatic humans.

Sometimes I wish I had more of an inside view of systems like academia, science, Scientology, Al Qaeda, the CIA, the Israeli government, etc. Then again, if I did I would be so corrupted and co-opted by those systems that I could not do the work I do with Actualized.org. Could you imagine understanding Nazi Germany from inside vs outside? That’s tough. But wait, it gets worse. Could you imagine understanding the Holocaust from the inside vs the outside? Ahhh, there’s the rub! Now you see the problem. Does anyone really understand the Holocaust from the outside? Then again, how much would you have understood it from the inside?

So add this to the heap of all the other epistemic challenges you face.

How is it possible to understand a system without intimately participating in it? And yet, how is it possible to understand a system by participating in it when participation distorts your view of it? The entanglement problem strikes again!

And finally, consider this interesting possibility: This is such a deep existential problem that God himself cannot know what terrorism is without becoming a terrorist. In order for God to be Omniscient he would need to experience terrorism from the inside, because outside would not be good enough. How could God be All-Knowing if he didn’t know the interiority of terrorism? And that’s why terrorists exist! Contemplate that.

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