"Government is not
reason; it is not eloquence; it is force !
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
George Washington (1732-1799)
"A breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences."
William Shakespeare, Measure for
Measure, 1604-1605, Act: III
Perhaps more than any other
social concept explicit discussion of personal power and its actual
(rather than assumed) effects on others is rare. Yet wherever we look in our
society the use and abuse of power is evident. In a complex interconnected
world the causal effects of these actions do not restrict themselves linearly
to just local issues but have nonlinear ramifications throughout the globe.
Here we will examine the effects of power on overall social fitness, and look
at how our power behaviours could be changed by complexity thinking to generate
fitter political and economic structures.
We must distinguish between
explicit power of the type we give to government and law enforcement (which is
nominally under our control as a collective) and implicit power of the sort
wielded invisibly (the unmonitored changes made to our social environment, and
the structures erected and maintained to prevent or drive change to the status
quo). These latter sorts of influence can relate to secrecy, to cronyism, to
prejudices and hidden agendas of all sorts, and it is in understanding these
constraints that allows us to evaluate the possibility of improving society by
the self-organization of diverse adaptive agents.
There are three types of
power or force that can be applied. The first, 'coercive', relates to physical
or brute force, and is seen in conflict scenarios around the world. This is a
totally destructive or negative-sum force since both sides lose widely in the
conflict (all things taken into account), and it often results in the breaking
down of one or both social infrastructures. Thus generally the second type of
force, 'economic', is preferred by commercial interests. Here
the opposition is controlled instead by denying them some of the material goods
of life (by embargoes or trade wars) or they are forced out of competition
(bankrupted or taken over), but this also has some cost for the aggressor (in
short term losses of profit).
The third force is more
subversive, and that is the use of ideology or beliefs, 'psychological' force.
It is far better to persuade a group to do what you want by
making them believe it is what they want (i.e. that there are no
better options) than to try to force it upon them by external means. Such
internal motivation or brainwashing comes in many forms, we have seen some of
these manipulative techniques already, but others are
far more sophisticated and target whole societies or social groups rather than
just individual viewpoints. It should be noted that all three types of power
are usually aimed at preventing others doing what they want, the use of
power to enable others to succeed on their own terms (synergic power) is much rarer in our societies.
In any complex system we
have a large number of interconnections. This means that there are multiple
paths between any two points, and thus multiple ways of one part influencing
another. Some of these influences are direct, with explicit wiring or
interfaces between the parts (sometimes needing a long chain or web of intermediaries),
but there are also more subtle influences evident due to the canalization of
state space (our options) produced by 'downward causation'.
This idea relates to the emergent
whole (resulting from the interaction of the parts) then in turn affecting the
degrees of freedom of the parts, for example a government elected as an
emergent feature of individual votes then proceeds to lay down national laws
that affect every individual. These constraints (or boundary conditions) of our
society are rarely made explicit, since it is the whole package that determines
how we can act and not just the individual laws viewed in isolation (these may
be individually sensible but prove collectively stupid and contradictory).
However this package will also include other elements, influences relating to
factors not openly visible as legal (or documented) restraints.
When we act (individually
and collectively) we lay down precedents which influence later actions (to
repeat the act if it was successful or to avoid it if it wasn't - trial and
error learning). These social trails are akin to the pheromone trails laid down
by ants, which constrain the insects to always follow the same (tested) paths.
Our social paths may be more diverse and include such ideas as fashions, yet
they still exhibit this self-reinforcing partitioning or canalization of our
behaviours. If we fail to recognise these self-imposed barriers (created by
Hebbian or reinforcement learning) then we too behave little different than
ants. Human progress involves creativity and escaping the relative safety of
repetitive behaviours to explore new options.
Questioning why we act as
we do raises issues to do with the overall influences on our behaviour. These
are many, including genetic, developmental and experiential as well as
cultural. But here we will concentrate on cultural issues, the network of
national or global controls that provides a bias on the actions of whole
populations. These enforce a form of equilibria (the status quo), and generally
can only be maintained by force (of some sort) since the options made available
are often not those appropriate to maximising individual agent fitness. In
complexity terms the agent's transition table or rules are biased towards an
ordered or canalized state - we can then be externally controlled.
Our choices however are not totally closed ones, we can step outside any social
norm if we so choose (overcome the bias), yet this is rather a hard thing to do
since many of the influences on us are not made explicit - they are invisible
forces.
Most of us see little
further than the ends of our nose, our narrow minded viewpoint is insensitive
to the wider picture. Due to this we are caught in a view of the world as
subject only to local (or proximal) influences. If something happens to us it
must therefore be the fault of either ourselves or those near to us, and we
naturally look to compensating for the change by actions directed at the same
local level. Yet, in complex systems, influences pervade the whole system, we
are influenced by people and groups right across the globe, people we have
never met and will never meet - people that often know nothing of our existence
or are quite indifferent to it.
Their decisions, whether
political or commercial, set up remote (or distal) chains of events that
ultimately affect all of us. These ideas (made explicit by David Smail in
"The Origins of Unhappiness") relate to events occurring
beyond our ability to understand. This depends in part on our education and
position, since the wider our knowledge then the wider will be our
understanding of how other people affect us, and of course the higher our
position in the social hierarchy the more people our individual decisions will
immediately affect. But this works both ways, as we also fail to realise just
how far our own decisions affect others, or worst we don't care either -
regardless of the eventual coevolutionary repercussions on us !
Bullying, by people with
power, is a common occurrence. The threat of the sack is the main power card
wielded by big business (and political leaders). The threat to close down
entire plants (and often local economies), at any perceived threat to profit by
dissenting workers or locals, is so commonplace as to be generally ignored by
the popular press. Yet such insensitivity is self-defeating and not only due to
the hidden costs of relocation. People that are insecure, that work under
constant fear, are not productive, they are not creative, thus stress is not
(as often imagined) a problem for 'top managers' but actually for their staff,
and inefficient staff point to inefficient managers - if the managers are
stressed also then that is simply a result of their own, conflict based,
management techniques !
Such mental violence by
companies or politicians (and that is what it is) is as much anti-social as is the
physical variety, and is just as fitness reducing for society. These negative
influences bias our entire approach to life, they affect (even if only
slightly) all our behaviours and these affect those people with whom we
interact and so on. Thus small influences can escalate around the globe -
creating massive collective repercussions (by the 'butterfly'
effect) of what are often trivial instinctive animal actions. Power can be used or abused, when used
creatively as an enabler for social enhancement it is positive-sum, but when
used in a narrow and selfish way it proves only to reduce the quality of life of the whole - and that includes the world of the offending 'managers'.
One of the best ways of
controlling large groups is to make them think that they are individually
isolated (to avoid free exchange of information and awareness of commonality).
Thus controlling communications and information flow is crucial to the
preservation of social power structures. If you have no choice of information,
no way to query what you are told, then control is easy. We see this form of
control in closed societies everywhere, from Beijing to Baghdad, from Tehran to
Rangoon. But this is not only a feature of less 'enlightened' world views, it
is also endemic in Western, so called, 'free' society, widely seen in the
blinkered 'bottom line' reductionism so loved by accountants (where all
information other than monetary is ignored). All these narrow views are
examples of the one-dimensional paradox afflicting the fitness balance of our
societies.
We have seen how 'norms' can be used to terrorise people into
compliance with a mythical belief system, and this is an aspect of a wider
ideological attempt to canalize choice, to close down the options we have, to
hide just how wide our social options really are. And they are vast. Given a
country of say 50 Million people we would expect on average (from complex
systems theory) that there would be over 7000 stable attractors
or ways of socially doing things - how many of these can you choose from
? And for a brain with 1014 connections we could expect some 10
Million alternative concepts or states to be possible per person.
Many of the problems of
limited choice that we have, stem (in some form) from the idea that certain
people are superior to others, therefore you cannot be given their
options. Most academic and professional societies (and many lesser ones) go to
great lengths to ensure this exclusivity, this compartmentalising of knowledge
- more akin to secret societies than to an open educated society. In a 'free'
society all information must be available to all, whether they choose to use it
or not, and whether they are currently capable of using it or not. The options
should be theirs.
People at birth
(potentially at least) are all the same, there is no 'blue blood', no racial
superiority, no 'privilege'. What we do after that point of course rapidly
changes that situation, our early learning experience biases our viewpoint and
abilities in accordance with our social situation (the nurture aspect). But even given this imbalance, this
does not mean that we cannot have choices, it just makes it more
difficult for us to choose to follow them. It is the options open to us at each
stage that determines how we can improve our fitness and by implication the
overall fitness of society - closing off any options is potentially
negative-sum behaviour - those fitness peaks are then made unavailable.
When we look at our social
institutions we often find that these are closed shops in terms of flexibility.
Hospitals, for example, are run for one thing only - to cure. We take the view
that each function in our society is a one-dimensional specialism and totally
divorced from all others. Thus we treat patients as 'symptoms' not people and
ignore (as far as possible) other human values or needs. If we are a doctor
(say) this simplification is done for our convenience, to make our
lives easier. Yet such actions have many negative effects on the patients, and
those effects are self-defeating to the purpose of the whole institution ! This
sort of power myopia is common right across our social groupings.
Loosing the point of our
social organisations (that they are there to serve people and not the other way
around) allows us to start regarding the static structure as being the
important thing, rather then the dynamic function it is supposed to facilitate.
We thus unknowingly hide behind imagined mental rules and system-serving static
procedures, dictates over our behaviour that prevent us from considering any
better way of behaving. Our thought patterns are reinforced by these
institutional pressures all the time, keeping us locked into cells of our own
making, prisons from which escape is easily possible - because the door was
never locked. The idea of 'ownership' is one such pattern and when applied to
people becomes especially pernicious.
Most people regard slavery
as a thing of the past, a concept from a past age of barbarism, thankfully no
longer practised. Yet it would be true to say that in its essence slavery is
still very much part of our modern world, and the number of effective 'slaves'
may now be a higher proportion of the population than at any time in the
history of human 'civilisation'. A 'free' man can choose any option, thus where
these options are forcibly restricted by other people (directly or indirectly)
we can reasonably claim that they are subjected to a form of slavery.
"Slavery is a
societal institution based on ownership, dominance, and exploitation of one
human being by another and a reciprocal submission on the part of the person
owned. The owner may exact work or other services without agreement and
virtually without restriction, and can deny the slave freedom of activity and
mobility. Generally the owner is responsible only for providing the minimal
necessities for the functioning of their slaves (and that only on the basis of
self-interest)... A slave is commonly regarded as an article of property, or
chattel, and therefore can be sold or discarded." We can see here how
the behaviour of corporate boss and worker map onto this definition, especially
in the cavalier way in which the worker services are discarded or transferred
amongst 'owners' at will, and conclude that the essential dehumanising elements
of slavery still apply to most of today's business institutions.
Let us now consider local
barriers to change in this area, concentrating on jobs. In no sense are these
'free', the worker is restricted in his or her work locality, attendance times,
durations and procedures. Often their personal dress and behaviour are
restricted and they are expected to travel away from home on company orders.
The idea that they have flexibility of employment is nonsense, this package is
a 'warts and all' multidimensional 'contract', if they don't like any particular
part then they can only lose all of it - and that means their basic survival
needs as humans in many cases. In a free society we would have incremental
packages, where each aspect could be adjusted independently to maximise both
worker and manager flexibility and fitness.
Moving on to the invisible
barriers, we have both the arrogance of remote leaders, who make decisions
regardless of the wider consequences, and the social and political disinterest
in things out of sight. We tend to view power as an abstraction, divorced from
local feeling and reality, something that acts outside our control, that we
cannot affect and must accept without question. This of course is not true, all
forms of influence are under our control if we care to cast our collective eye
on them. It is once again ignorance (often deliberately imposed) that allows
negative influences on our lives to persist. Yet in today's internet society
there is no longer any justification for ignorance, we can and should question
the sources of all the influences on the decisions that affect our well being -
the information to do so is already out there.
Taking control of our social institutions, whether to move
them towards the sort of organization suggested by complexity ideas or not,
requires that we target the invisible power structures that so shape the
options within our current societies. Without democratic control of these we
are unlikely to be able to make effective changes to the way our societies run.
Widespread action to remove unaccountable powers from unelected people will of
course face strong opposition, that is the nature of the beast. In a world
where power over others is worshipped for its own sake we will be unlikely to
find that it is given up easily, and while we choose to link social status to
such destructive power this may yet prove impossible.
However, in any society,
the wishes of the majority must ultimately prevail, and the key to enabling
change would seem to lie in better education.
As long as the majority still imagine that selfishness and competition gives
'fitness' we cannot change. But despite the extremely limited experimental study
of epistatic or synergistic effects (even in the complexity science fields) it
seems clear that creativity, growth and better fitnesses are linked to mutual aid and not to mutual
opposition (the difference between measuring global absolute fitness versus
just local relative fitness). Publicity about the difference between
positive-sum cooperative and negative-sum competitive fitnesses may help
educate the public, encouraging them to take the necessary democratic action
with which to better enable their own inherent powers - but it is likely to be
an uphill and vicious struggle, people rarely act based on rational knowledge !
On a more positive tack, no
gardener would dream of planting their crops or flowers in a poor soil. To
obtain the best results, no amount of tinkering with the variety (or genetics)
of the plant will match the effects of attention given to the external
environment - the climate or setting. The same of course is true for humans. To
obtain a good crop of 'humans' requires that we give them an appropriate
environment, in other words we provide the necessary nutrients (primal needs) and cultivation (social needs). This much should be obvious, and relates to
removing the barriers to personal growth previously outlined.
But for humans something
more is needed, and that is to enable them to exercise power in appropriate
ways. To do this we need to become aware of the consequences of our choices,
not just the local or proximal effects but those effects that will occur at
distant places in both space and time. This requires us to be aware of the
connectivity networks within our society and the ways that these information
flows affect the barriers and options that exist in our collective lives. These
are the hardest types of constraints to evaluate and we need some help if we
are to do this, a form of help still rare today in a world that concentrates on
'things' and ignores 'processes'.
If is often assumed in our
society that power is a fixed or conserved commodity. This relates to the
zero-sum approach often taken to 'things' - either I have it or you do. But
this style of thinking does not relate to processes, and power is not a 'thing'
but a potential to drive processes. These do not operate in a zero-sum manner
(they would achieve nothing if they did) but either as positive-sum or
negative-sum. Thus there is a bifurcation
point and the system can diverge (or escalate) either in a destructive
direction (e.g. in a 'take' culture - where nothing is created) or in a creative
direction (e.g. in a 'give' culture where synergy enhances overall value). It is in the bringing
together of people and options that 'value-add' occurs, and this benefit
requires that the people can freely re-associate and can permutate amongst the
maximum number of available options.
Human systems can be
divided into three types [Boulding "Ecodynamics"], these are the threat, the
exchange and the integrative system. The first tries to neutralise power (i.e.
is negative-sum), the second to trade it (assumed zero-sum) whilst the third
creates new power by mutual benefit (positive-sum). We live now in a world
where the first type of system is gradually giving way to the second, mental
violence is replacing the physical kind, but we have yet to take the next step
- to reject violence altogether. The best way to gain power is in fact to
create more of it, and this means mutually enabling each other to generate
extra options or opportunities with which to instigate new processes. Just as
we nowadays are far more efficient in food production (thus food power has
increased), our modern information society allows us to increase brain power
and this added flexibility can remove the need to fight over physical power -
virtual power is infinite and human society (being an abstract creation) is
actually a form of virtual world.
There are many ways in
which cooperation can improve the fitness of both parties, and much of
civilisation (and nature) implicitly operates on this basis. Making explicit
the use of power to enable others rather than to restrict them, is simply
putting into perspective the real effects of competition, which is to instigate
downward escalations of fitness - conflict cancels out power. Growing our
societies involves creating upward escalations instead - mutually assisting
feedback loops that can bootstrap our lives up to new heights, higher coevolutionary
fitness optima.
As in the Iterated
Prisoners Dilemma, this is as much a matter of attitude as of options. We need
to view life on a broader basis, to widen our horizons to include those
circular feedback processes that instigate the escalation effects of power. The
conservative nature of our societies often relates to fear it seems. Power is
used to maintain a state rather than to change it for the better. It is the
lack of imagination endemic in such traditional thinking (based as it is on a view
of society as static) that leads it to continually act to oppose change and to
try to impose homeostasis - a first-order cybernetic methodology, rather than taking the
second-order cybernetic view of being part of an evolving complex adaptive system and using power instead to positively steer society to fitter optima.
Another insight that we can
employ relates to the combinatorial states available, which form a space of
different possible options so vast in any real system as to be unimaginable.
This allows us to transcend our limited vision of local options and consider
global ones instead. Additionally we can recognise the nonlinearity of complex
systems, the idea that combining the actions of many people will not lead to
the same result as just adding up their individual actions - feedback processes
and interdependencies lead instead to emergent results that cannot be predicted
ahead of time, surprise or novelty is to be expected.
In complex systems thinking
we study the effects of various forms of interconnection on organization. Given
sufficient connectivity (and social networks certainly have this) we find that
'free' systems self-organize overall to a state called 'edge of chaos'.
At this point the system breaks up (or modularises) into a power-law
distribution of static barriers (shown here in black) and interconnected
regions of adaptive activity (these two elements often change places over time
- i.e. old barriers become 'opportunities' and previous dynamics become frozen
or die out). This form of organization is the dynamic non-equilibrium
equivalent of the historical barriers and fixed equilibrium activities of
current societies.
Before transferring this
concept to our human power structures however we must recognise that retaining
stability means that we do not wish to destroy all the present barriers, that
may lead to anarchy and criminal replacement (widely seen around the world
following the decline of authoritarian control), but we do wish to gradually
replace them with better self-organized ones. In order to do this we need to decide
which changes to make, and to advise lawmakers, shareholders, power factions of
all sorts on how to make changes that are in the interests of everyone,
including themselves. This requires that we look at the world in a rather wider
sense than that generally employed in such matters.
In complexity thought we
consider (in genetic algorithms) the entirety of state space, in
other words we look at all the possible options or optima that we can have for
our system. This contrasts with normal life where we concentrate only on where
we are today (the local fitness hill or optimum) and where we can directly go
from there. By widening our viewpoint in the complexity sense we allow ourselves
to discover many other optima, some better than our present state, some worst.
Evaluating these in actual human situations is of course much harder than in
our standardised simulations, but the same principles apply (although we must
add that no method is known to quickly locate a global optimum - the problem is
what is called NP-hard). In practical terms, searching state space is most
efficiently done by using populations of searchers, in other words each
searcher searches a separate area (we have diversity). The idea that every
member of the population searches the same point (i.e. a normalised society) is
very obviously sub-optimal.
To attempt to find a good
peak however we need to know how the various elements (that comprise our
situations) associate, in other words we need to quantify (at least to a first
approximation) their interdependence or epistasis.
Having this allows us to generate a collective subjectivism, a fitness viewpoint that
integrates the fitnesses of each of the parts and the emergent features of
their interactions into an overall compromise result (i.e. a multi-level
approach). Then we can rate all the available options, identifying the good and
the bad, before making the choice that best leads to an optimum social fitness.
This takes into account that humans can communicate and exchange data on the
pros and cons of the states they have experienced. In other words we can develop
wisdom about the options available across the whole of state space and their
respective global effects.
If we attempt to maximise
fitness in just a system wide (global) way it can be shown usually to lead only
to a low static fitness - a poor local optimum, thus we can be almost certain
that state controlled systems (rigid communist societies) that aim to improve
only the state's fitness with every action will be highly unfit.
Similarly those systems that let every individual maximise their own fitness
regardless (free market societies) can be shown to lead to situations that
never settle, all fitnesses are only transient
and soon are lost. To optimise both holistic level and individual level (and
those in between) we can use a patch procedure. In this we divide up the system
into smaller groupings which then try to maximise their local group fitness
(ignoring that of neighbouring groups). In this method a change to an
individual is only accepted if it benefits the whole group of which they are a
part (the group is internally cooperative but externally selfish).
Thus each group, following
their own needs, may perturb the needs of neighbouring groups and this forces
coevolution. It is this perturbed coevolution that allows the system to escape
local optima and search the space of possible alternatives in a way that
quickly settles on a compromise that is better for all the groups. This
idea of ignoring the wider picture (and this includes any global laws !) yet
paying attention to local neighbours (group thinking) allows the system to
evolve to the edge of chaos, a state where the higher fitness peaks are
accessible - but only if the groups are free to adapt (i.e. they are not
externally controlled). In political terms this implies that neither massive
states or centralised bureaucracies, nor market led individual free-for-alls
are efficient ways to run our societies, we need instead local autonomy and
diversity at many levels - together with the tolerance to accept that
perturbations (or disagreements) are a good thing in the long term, and not
problems to be immediately destroyed by force !
One effect of downsizing
control structures within our societies would be to move decisions closer to
the actual situation needing to be controlled, both in time and space. In our
private lives we would think it rather silly if someone phoned us up and tried
to talk us through moving around our own house. It would be clear to us that
our local knowledge (sight) allows us to move far more efficiently than any
instructions from a (blind) external source. Yet this inefficient control from
afar is built into almost all our social structures - in the ubiquitous idea of
centralised leadership !
Planning in advance is only
possible in a static world - in which we must assume that the data on which we
base our plans remains constant over time. Today's world however is anything
but static, thus all plans will fail (at least in part) and have to be reworked
in order to take account of dynamic coevolutionary feedbacks that change the
expected outcome. This inefficiency or fitness loss can be avoided by
delegation of power to those in the best position to utilise it - and that is
those actually affected by the decisions. Imposed decisions must always be made
from a position of relative ignorance, and as we have seen ignorance means that
the better options are not visible. To maximise the fitness of our society and
our people we must remove the concentrations of power that generate bad
decisions, unforeseen consequences and negative-sum abuses of that power;
replacing them (but only if we must) by open constraints that specify the 'what',
but leave the 'how', 'where' and 'when' to local
judgement.
We have seen how our lives
are constantly under many influences. These emanate from a web of activities,
interconnections and choices that originate all over the world. Clearly we
cannot be expected individually to take account of all these in our day to day
workings, yet societies do have the resources to collectively look at such
things, and if we do this (even superficially as here) we find that the fitness
of our society is being held back overall by many of the in-built prejudices
and power structures that collectively act to constrain our options. Replacing
these static barriers with more dynamic ones (local self-organizing
sub-groups), created with our collective agreement and under democratic
control, may allow a quantum jump in our social fitness. This may be especially
likely if we incorporate synergistic associations (both) into our
fitness models, rather than the either/or assumption usually employed.
Key enablers to such a 21st
Century form of civilisation are the insights from the complexity sciences,
both in term of self-organization itself and in searches of the fitness
landscape. Understanding the attractors that make up our social options, and
being able to change these to reach better optima, is also a crucial benefit of
the complex systems approach. To do this effectively however in a multi-valued
society we need to adopt a multiobjective
perspective, and incorporate in a rigorous way all the conflicting values that will allow us to transcend that animal
behavioural world so evident from our recent past and to behave as aware humans. Transforming our global power structures is
not an easy task, yet the benefits of redirecting power - away from the fitness
reducing forms currently seen (negative-sum) and towards mutually beneficial
(positive-sum) forms - is so great as to justify a massive intellectual and
social investment in this task.