The jungle and the zoo

In the show "the gentlemen", old aristocracy of the UK are exploited by a sophisticated network of drug dealers. One of the main antagonists and leaders of a methamphetamine empire draws a distinction between them and old aristocracy. He says "people either survive in the jungle, or exist in the zoo."

This idea is worth exploring.

Human beings domesticate. We did it to plants and animals for food and companionship. Curiously, we do it to ourselves. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors existed in the jungle. They lived in small functional units that performed a small domesticating function on the environment around them. We can express this mathematically.

The smallest group of humans that can perform a domesticating function on the environment can be called H, and the set of enviroments H interacts with is E. H is a function that maps \(E_x\) to \(E_y\).

\[ H: E_x \mapsto E_y \]

The thing is, as groups of humans scale up the size of H doesn't really change. That means for any given H, the environment, E, actually starts to contains humans. H begins to recursively domesticate humans not captured in an equivalent H.

The earliest form of recursive domestication that emerged as humans reached city-state and civilizational scale was slavery. Humans didn't evolve to be domesticated though and systems of true slavery are unstable. In order to domesticate humans, they need to believe they aren't domesticated.

The domesticated aside, in this recursive cesspool of civilization, who are the people living in the jungle? In a completely human environment where we have no predators and relative abundance, there are two main threats. Physical violence from other humans and economic deprivation - leading to poverty and starvation. It's actually not easy to draw a firm line and say that someone is definitely "wild" and living in a "jungle". To reason on this topic, it helps to consider the roles and properties of a farmer and the beast of burden.

The beast of burden's main existential risk is that of the farmer. If the farmer dies, so does the beast. If the farmer needs food, the beast is eaten. By contrast, the farmer's existential risks arise from the weather, and the ability to sell their produce (economic risk). There is a clear hierarchical flow where the complex system (environment) acts on the farmer who acts on the beast. The more exposed an individual is to the turbulence of the physical and human worlds, the less domesticated. The farmer survives in the jungle, but the beast exists in the zoo.

To give contemporary examples, the entrepreneur is living in the jungle. Their existential risks are tied to their ability to build a functioning business. A doctor working in a public healthcare system (like me) is domesticated. My existential risk is tied to the government continuing to pay me, or a health system firing me.