Hierarchies, Rituals, Ideologies, Bureaucracies and Habits - Means to escape limits

I am taken with this post because it harmonizes with my thinking and discussions over the past several years.  I reasoned my way from an economics background which essentially the study of scarcity and trade-offs.  As Thomas Sowell says:

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.

He also mentions the second order effect which is also a constraint issue:

The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

When economics meet the Dunbar Number, you are beginning to see a pattern of overlapping constraints.  Finally, marry that with the history of science and technology (and the effect Moore's Law has had) and you begin to understand how rich is the mesh of interwoven constraints and how determinative they can be in an emergent order fashion.  

Via Divia Eden:

I just asked ChatGPT if it had any pet theories about how the world works that it hadn’t seen much elsewhere and I liked one of its responses! (I got two and was asked to pick which I preferred)

“Absolutely, here’s one I find compelling and haven’t seen widely discussed:…

— Divia Eden 🔍 (@diviacaroline) April 9, 2025

Extracted:

I just asked ChatGPT if it had any pet theories about how the world works that it hadn’t seen much elsewhere and I liked one of its responses! (I got two and was asked to pick which I preferred)

“Absolutely, here’s one I find compelling and haven’t seen widely discussed:

“Bandwidth economics” as a driver of social structure.

We usually talk about economics in terms of money, resources, or incentives. But what if a major limiting factor in how societies develop—especially in group size, complexity, and norms—is cognitive and emotional bandwidth?

Basically: humans only have so much attention, working memory, and emotional capacity to track others’ motivations, resolve ambiguity, and maintain shared understandings. Many social patterns—like hierarchy, taboo, bureaucratic ritual, or even ideologies—can be seen as compression strategies to make social life cognitively manageable. It’s like lossy JPEGs of messy reality.

So:

•Hierarchies = reduce the number of people you need to track carefully

•Rituals = outsource behavioral decisions to shared scripts

•Ideologies = heuristics for moral/emotional allocation without constant rethinking

•Bureaucracies = attempt to systematize social interactions into predictable formats to minimize cognitive load

In this view, many modern failures (e.g., political polarization, burnout in online activism, collapse of shared reality) are driven by bandwidth overflow. We’re exposed to way more people, data, and decisions than our brains evolved to handle.

What’s cool about this is it frames social dysfunction not as malice or stupidity, but as compression artifacts from trying to fit a big, messy world into narrow channels.

What about you—do you have any favorite underappreciated theories or frameworks?”

Which makes clear the connection to my other preferred idea - that culture, class, tradition, and religion are all mechanisms of cultural coding which supplement whatever benefit we derive from our genetic coding.   Coding transmitted via stories (spoken and observed) instead of via genes.  

They are all mechanisms to reduce the individual's learning curve (and enhance survival).  Donald Kingsbury:

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

Missing from ChatGPTs list of Hierarchies, Rituals, Ideologies, and Bureaucracies is Habits.  The one thing we have the greatest control over.  From our culture, class, tradition, and religion, via stories, we can derive our own lessons from there habitualize those elements which we believe can make a positive difference to our survival and well-being.  

All because we are profoundly limited.  As wondrous as is the human body and mind, we are a mere speck in an effectively limitless reality which we only barely comprehend.  How we leverage our limited capabilities to better fit the uncertainty of limitless reality is an ever shifting challenge.

Call it bandwidth economics or cultural coding or Dunbar Number - they are all aspects of the effort to recognize and address profound human limits.