I began thinking about the selective nature of certain communities in terms of my “panidealist” philosophy this morning, only to come to a shocking conclusion:

Any community that enforces a single set of common beliefs through selection or coercion reduces itself to the strength of a single free-thinking individual.

Recall that my philosophy states that reality is itself an expression of various combinations of ideas. Mathematically, it is the image of a basis of ideas represented as a matrix. I’ve been told that this aspect of my philosophy is also the philosophical view of Bertrand Russel (though I’ve never read his philosophy and don’t really read philosophy in general, preferring to keep my own worldview untainted by the philosophies of others). However, what I am about to propose extends beyond his philosophy.

We can define the rank of a matrix as the number of linearly independent columns. Because the ideas underlying reality form a basis, they are, by definition, full rank. Their expression is the image of this basis, thus it is not full-rank. In other words, redundant ideas are expressed in various facets of reality (which is fine; the idea of sentience is not independent from the idea of humanity, for example).

Now let us take a community that selects for a shared set of ideas. Such selections include “fit”, personality, interests, etc.

Because all members of this community share these ideas in common, the size (and thus rank) of the basis is reduced. The more ideas are shared, the more the community’s basis approaches the size of a single individual.

Now it gets interesting: what if we define intelligence, or “cognitive power” (to differentiate it from the psychometric concept of intelligence), as the number of ideas one is simultaneously capable of expressing or creating?

We discover that an community consisting entirely of shared values is as intelligent as a single person. A community with completely independent ideas or values (deliberately selecting for people who do not match the existing basis would be the only way I can see of approaching one; actually attaining this is impossible) is full rank, and operates optimally save for the fact that any individual idea may not have enough momentum within the community to become fully expressed (a major problem). As this community introduces more redundancy, the size of the basis does not scale with the number of members, and the rank of the community remains the same despite an increasing size. Thus the average cognitive power of the community drops despite increasing membership. Negative returns.

This results in the satisfying conclusion (if the premises are correct, which is a philosophical matter) that any society that continuously expands its membership while selecting for particular ideas will ultimately run itself into the ground, possibly to be overcome by the thought of a single individual.

As Ayn Rand puts it at the end of Anthem, “For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.”