"An elective despotism
was not the government we fought for..."
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia,
1784
"The possibility of an
increase in the real liberty of the subject depends not in a continual
compromise between individual rights, but in a continual attempt to remove
limitations which are non-automatic, that is to say, do not proceed from what
we call the laws of nature."
Clifford Hugh Douglas, Social Credit, 1933
One of the findings from
the study of self-organizing systems is that maximum benefit
comes from de-centralisation, the ability of the parts to do their own thing
without overall control. This has major political implications for business and
society and here we will look into the ramifications of this on the conflict
between state or company interests and those of the individuals making it up.
Many countries around the
world pride themselves on their democratic systems, yet we will show that in
practice the world still operates under the assumption that control from the
top must over-ride the interests of all the individuals. The apparent anarchy
of uncontrolled society will be contrasted with the self-organized stability of
complex systems and we will see that self-organization, not governmental
control, is the most effective way of establishing a true democracy.
Animal life is free (at
least in the absence of predators) and primitive man, as perhaps the highest
link in the food chain, must be regarded as the freest of all.
Hunter-gatherers, given the necessities of life, had no restrictions on where
they went or what they could do. Over time of course they tended to organize
into communities, and agriculture was born. We can see the advantages of this
in the ease of gathering crops, and likewise in keeping livestock. Work on food
essentials was thus reduced and more time was left for play or other
activities.
But every gain has its
loss, and here freedom was exchanged for time. No longer could groups occupy
the same territory, planted fields had value and needed protecting against
intruders (animal or human). No longer could people wander anywhere they
wanted, they needed to return home occasionally, they had a fixed base. Yet
such homesteading was largely self sufficient, each group performed the same
tasks and had the same primal needs - survival.
Further down the line
towards civilisation the groups grew and specialised. Carpenters, Smiths,
Warriors and others appeared, and trade was born. Again this gave fitness
benefits, a professional specialist can produce goods cheaper than an amateur,
and trading scarce products is mutually beneficial. The concentration on such
specialisms led to villages and towns, to communities in which individuals now
relied on each other for the essentials of life. Again freedom was traded off
for time and a better standard of living.
Given diverse skills it is
necessary to plan ahead, to ensure that enough resources of the various types
exist for the whole community. This leads to control, to a chief or leader
empowered (by the community or dominating by force) to organize people's lives.
A trend that has sadly grown inexorably throughout the world, until today we
have many levels of control over our lives. This hierarchy of control
(government, corporate, society, family ) means that most people now have
little control over their own lives, a far cry from the freedoms of the past.
We can ask, must it be thus ?
Most rules are about
conformity, doing what you are told and not something different. They are the
props of static systems, attempts to maintain a fixed organization. If this
system is the best possible one then such constraints can be reasonable, but
clearly our world is very far from that state. We must ask therefore why follow
the rules - if by breaking them we can do better ? In complexity thinking this
is very much a valid question in that our available options or state space
contains multiple optima, some better than others. Escaping a local optimum
needs a perturbation to the system, a rule breaking innovation that explores
new possibilities, new improved areas of state space, new attractors.
This is true regardless of the type of system, so applies to governments,
companies and families in exactly the same way.
Innovations come from
individuals, so one way to obtain the necessary improvements is to remove all
the constraining rules from the individuals. Yet change isn't always beneficial
and too much can force a system into total chaos. We also need to take account
of the co-evolutionary effects of change, whereby my improvement can be your
loss. In the interlinked world system we have today we can wish for our own
total freedom, but will still desire others to follow the 'rules' and provide
us with food, so a globally available freedom doesn't seem possible without anarchy
and a descent into more primitive conditions - as we have seen far too often
recently with the disintegrations of infrastructures following conflicts.
The forms of democracy we
have around the world today produce little more than elected dictators. Once a party has power it is impossible for
the electorate to replace them peaceably, until their term is up. This sort of
discrete and static accountability is very far removed from the sort of ongoing
control of legislature that a truly democratic system in the ancient Greek
style gave (despite its faults). It seems clear that 'representing the people'
is little more than a euphemism for 'controlling the people' - as the undemocratic
antics of many current 'control freak' leaders testifies (political and
business).
Corruption in politics
seems to be endemic around the world. This self-interest over community
interest seems generated by the dynamically unaccountable nature of our
political systems. This state of affairs is as much to the politicians benefit
as it is to the elaborate bureaucracies that they create to exercise that
hierarchical control - so change will always be resisted. The introduction of
supposedly local democracy has done nothing to change this unaccountability -
simply created a set of conflicting power bases whose squabbles waste even more
time and energy, and take away even what little local autonomy people had
before - by allowing external interference in increasingly trivial personal
matters.
It is rather strange that
whilst there has been a general move towards political democracy around the
world over the last century (supported extensively by United States views),
there has been a corresponding move away from democracy in business practice
(again supported by the Americans !). Modern multinationals are no longer
controllable by any state or local government (if one tries they simply
threaten to move their operations elsewhere - a form of legalised blackmail
with thousands of employee victims). They are, in effect, un-elected
dictatorships (whose shareholders collude in this arrogant self-interest).
Yet such corporate
activities often have much more effect on local populations than do elected
governments, thus it is quite illogical that they should be free to adopt
anarchic laissez-faire policies that impact negatively on everybody but the
board members and shareholders. Control, in any area of society, should relate
to the power wielded and its potential to affect the lives
of others and their environment - those affected must have an effective say, if
not a veto power. The single dimension of profit is totally inadequate to serve
as a valid check on the activities of these exploitative and socially
destructive company structures.
In essence it is a form of synergy. A collective arrangement that benefits (in
various ways) the individual members. If this was not the case then we would
simply stop associating with each other - civilisation as we know it would
never have arisen. We of course are born into society, so find it 'ready made'
as it were, but this should not lead us to believe that it is 'competitive' as
is so often stated. This simply cannot be the case, since competition in effect
trades benefits between groups and does not create them.
The creative aspect of
social systems however is very evident, the collective benefits of cooperation surround us, none of us now
needs to provide all our survival needs (indeed most of us are no longer
capable of doing so !). In similar manner all the real achievements of
civilisation have been in the increase in our personal options, the choices we
have available in our lives and we know from complexity studies that the
greater the area of state space we have to search, the greater the personal and
social fitness optima we can reach. The restrictions we place on our social
behaviour, the social 'rules', reduce however these options, sometimes for our
overall benefit (e.g. in proscribing murder) but sometimes not, many of the
shackles we retain are arbitrary historical impositions from long dead
societies.
It is the people who
collectively made their own chains, so only they can break them. Even in
today's information rich world (or perhaps because of it) people generally do
not want to be bothered with politics. Indeed none of us can attend to every
possible issue, so even using electronics to enable us to conduct referendums
at will would not remove the apathy that has gripped our nations. But we do
need to change the balance of power from a centralised (uniformity based)
domination culture to a system that recognises the benefits of our diversity
and our right to control it ourselves.
Here we stumble over a
major obstacle, and that is the view that power in itself is good, and that it
is an acceptable thing for one person to impose their views on the many. This
mode of thought is a highly selfish one, where the fitness of the many is
sacrificed to the fitness of the few. Yet it is so deeply embedded in our history
and culture that it is almost impossible to eradicate. It is a view based on
superiority, the idea that the 'ruler' is better than the 'ruled' and has some
right to dominate (whether divine, military, intellectual or economic makes no
difference - all are excuses).
In self-organizing systems
however this idea of centralised control is discarded. Instead, we allow each
individual to interact locally with selected others, in order to maximise their
fitness. When this is allowed the system will self-organise to achieve a
balance or attractor. It can be shown that this can improve fitness overall and
results in the system automatically establishing a balance ('edge of chaos')
between a static (dictatorial) state and a chaotic (anarchic) one.
These systems become
modular, generating their own multi-sided hierarchies (heterarchy) in a way
that does not need centralised control. We can see this in the social
activities that arise outside politics and business, the hobby organisations,
the sporting organisations and so on. In these systems the membership is
directly involved in controlling the structure and development of the
organisation (despite many trappings of the power structure mentality of course
being present). This 'proof of concept' opens the way to dissolving those top
heavy control structures that have so many side effects on our lives, and that
take so much human time and effort to democratically monitor and troubleshoot.
Politics is about social
arrangements, but what is it for ? Firstly to provide security, to prevent
individuals being harmed, a collective protection from hazards that we cannot
individually resist. Secondly to provide those services necessary in community
life that cannot be provided or sold individually, e.g health, public goods,
justice, defence, education. The commercialisation of these (often seen today)
means that they are only available to those that can pay - excluding much of
society. Preventing the opportunity to choose is however fitness reducing, so
we must ensure that the synergistic improvements possible from cooperation are
not prevented by excluding accepted society members from
participating.
The development of our
potential could be said to be the main reason for having a political system of
any sort. In a free-for-all (control or anarchic) system many casualties
result, and each of these is a fitness loss to society. So prevention of the
have-nots is a crucial task in a just society and a justification for communal
regulation of some sort. How this is done is however contentious, but we will
say that a relativistic, incremental view of change is a good principle by
which to work. This means that we can compare two political possibilities for
relative fitness and adopt the one that achieves the best overall result.
In a complexity based body
politic however we must transcend any idea of fixed mechanical systems, there
is no system (of any persuasion) that holds in an absolute way, for all
peoples, for all times. It is the attempt to impose such a system that has
generated the confrontational political scene, leading to the contempt in which
politicians are held by thinking people today. Such systems are little more
than modern enactions of the oscillating religious persecutions of the
Reformation, each group destroying the work of the other in turn. That is not a
fitness enhancing strategy, and therefore not an effective political
arrangement.
In a dynamic, organic
style, political system toleration is paramount. A mix of policies and
strategies can coexist (as does a mix of niches in an ecosystem). The choice
between these is not imposed (as in first-past-the-post political systems) nor
is it an impotent compromise (as in coalitions). Both these are all or nothing
schemes. What is required is a localised system that can meet the needs and
wishes of locally interacting individuals. A politics is needed that treats
context as the important organizing factor, and relegates static
one-dimensional dogmas to the historical dustbin where they belong.
But creating such free
format and liberating structures is not without its own problems. How do we
then prevent them from reverting to dictatorial type (as often is evident) or
from degenerating into an 'anything goes' selfish form of parasitism, where
nobody pulls their social weight ? In complexity studies this requirement comes
down to appropriate response. We engage in constant transactions with each
other and so come to know whether another person is likely to act in a mutually
beneficial or in a way harmful to us. We can therefore treat them accordingly.
This is, in simplistic terms, the strategy known as Tit-For-Tat in Game Theory
(Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma), the idea that niceness is reciprocated with
niceness and vice-versa.
In more distributed
societies, where we do not know everyone, we must rely on sharing information,
thus 'reputation' becomes a guide to expected behaviour and we can socially
monitor the behaviour of those whose behaviour affects us. This requires of
course an open society, and the free availability of behavioural information
about strangers. Privacy and social acceptability therefore are mutually
exclusive states and we must arrange a compromise that gives us mutual trust
but without compromising our individual freedom.
But what about those who
will not play ball ? Those who despite our trust consistently break it ? As we
said, the benefits of society arise by synergy, so those not prepared to behave
in a socially acceptable way simply exclude themselves from those benefits. How
we deal with this rejection of group membership depends upon the extent of the
transgressions against society. We can simply throw them out to fend for
themselves (total exclusion), eradicate them (execution), prevent their
activities by force (by army or jail), try to re-educate them and so on.
We have a difficulty here,
in complex systems terms, in that non-conformance does not necessarily mean
wrong. Many alternative behaviours are perfectly valid in many situations. This
means that we must distinguish actions that are actually damaging to society
from those that are only changes, new options. Our societies must grow, they
are dynamic organizations not static machines, thus each case must be examined
on its merits. Nethertheless it is often easy to distinguish those actions that
actively hurt other society members and reduce overall fitness (negative-sum)
from those that are simply alternative optima or even fitness enhancing overall
(positive-sum).
A politics for everyone
must have cultural diversity, it must not discriminate on any dimension. These
dimensions or values are very much a personal thing - although we have many in
common and it is this that allows us to bring scientific objectivity to bear on this problem. What interests us
varies from time to time, as we grow or become bored, so static measures of
worth are not a politically valid way of making decisions, we need the
flexibility to alter decisions to track our changing needs as a group. This
dynamic decision making is very different than the '5 year plans' on which
current politics are grounded - the "we will do it at all costs" form
of imposed control.
Balancing needs at multiple
levels (planet, wildlife, survival, social and metaneeds) is a difficult task, and not one reducible to
single dimensions of evaluation (whether monetary or not). Sometimes claims are made that this
cannot be 'rationally' done, but this requires a view of 'rationality' that is
itself irrational and dualist - since we do balance fuzzy needs all the time, the either/or logic used
is a myth. We need to find (rationally) forms of optimisation that cater for
multiple conflicting goals, not only our own but those of other groups. This
requires a niched approach, so that we can generate an organizational structure
that can accommodate diverse groups with different balances between their
desires. Techniques for such multidimensional niched optimisation are still in
their infancy, but with computer assistance hopefully can be developed
sufficiently to assist in our attempts.
Most of us view society as
a local phenomenon, we are either British or French or whatever. Yet the rise
of the global village can cause us to question that assumption. Many of us now
have more interactions with people outside our locality than we do with our
physical neighbours. If communications are said to define society, then we
already have distributed societies, academic, business, personal (e.g. Usenet
newsgroups). Political science has lagged behind this development, with a
emphasis still on the physical. This is required in some sense (we are physical
beings and must have certain tangible resources), but we can question the
extent.
Why should a borderless
society not exist ? In fact, from a complexity viewpoint, we may ask can it be
stopped ? We are all members of many sub-societies nowadays, virtual
communities of diverse wishes and structures. We thus need a political
arrangement that can support this structure in an appropriate way. But when we
ask how it is already structured, we find that it has actually self-organized
over the years - and it works ! Perhaps it really is time that we discarded
those control based ideas of yesteryear and embraced in politics what has
already happened elsewhere in modern society ?
A good society will enhance
all aspects of a person's creativity, and it must thus create tolerance since
we are all different. This requires taking into account the dynamic aspects of
our being and our world, so the old static political systems of the past will
be inadequate. Instead we can learn from complex systems thinking how to
integrate diverse parts into a whole, how to use self-organization to
automatically generate our political system - an adaptive organic system
suitable to enable our distributed, multicultural and multivalue society.
This isn't a easy task to
achieve, it need better techniques for fitness evaluation and compromise than
those currently available, but study in these areas of multiobjective optimisation are underway and we can be hopeful. Our lives develop by a form of
trial and error, and we have developed considerable wisdom over the centuries
as a species - but this has yet to filter through to our animal behaviour
patterns. The new teleological acceptance, resulting from the
complex systems view of us as dynamic organic systems (and not passive
mechanical ones), allows us to recognise that individual diversity matters to
group fitness. Maximising the benefits of society requires that our politics
takes into account both individual opportunities for growth and the need to
adopt values that integrate the whole. We need approaches
to society that do not stir up conflicts but use these alternatives to
gradually reach a better social optimum,
benefiting all.