Fractal Governance

Ancestry

Fractal Governance: Organizing Society like Nature

by Brent Pottenger, healthcare epistemocrat, @epistemocrat (*BP)
by G, The Daily G, not-on-Twitter! (*G)


It's supremely challenging; this whole business of governing; of leading.

BP: The problem with inventing something that doesn't exist is simply that: it doesn't exist. Thus, conceptualizing a new system of governance, for instance, can only be that: conceptualizing. It can only reach this semi-abstract level initially via essay mythologizing because of the reality that we cannot predict a priori what a system will ultimately look like when it finally takes (its Levy) flight. However, we can focus on principles; we can construct micro-scale blueprints; we can try to paint a picture locally--in hopes that this foundational thinkering creates some form of a platform for novel growth and development going forward. Then, at some point, we can try to institute these principles in our own communities by leading institution responsibly.

From the ashes they will rise, institutions that we newly derive.

BP: Human beings needs institutions. Institutions seem to coalesce spontaneously when human beings operate in supportive environments. Why? At some minimal level, we're social animals. At some other level, we benefit from combining our unique talents and abilities in synergy; that is, working in teams is a net positive for society. Too often, though, we tend to criticize and deride existing institutions without taking the next steps; the hard steps; the baby steps: steps to create new robust institutions to displace fragile ones. As Nassim Taleb says, "The best way to cut a diamond is with a diamond," and this is the case with institutional change as well: the best way to transform society for the better is to help shape institutions--both existing (carrying on tradition) and newly-derived (building a new tradition)--into structures embodying the core values deemed necessary for people to survive and thrive collectively as a result of underlying poise individually.

Integrating collectivism and individualism

Clearly, whenever we think institutionally, we must confront an apparent dichotomy: individuality vs. collectivity.

G: For me, the intention in offering some model of an 'organic' society is to completely obviate the sterile conflict between 'collectivism' and 'individualism'. Because an organism is neither and both. A cell does its thing with no thought of itself but neither does it work to some vision of the whole--that is beyond the capabilities of a cell. A cell's business is to think of its immediate environment. I would be wary of being fundamentalist about this though: humans are bigger than cells and in my opinion should have some awareness and concern about the whole. But the daily business of living should be mainly focused on people I know and problems I can solve at my own scale of effectiveness.

BP: And here is where human physiology and human governance collide: the human body is an organically organized system of governance that evolved over billions of years, benefitting from countless mistakes to reach its current state. In this way, the human body embodies fractal governance: its an organized society like nature in which the boundaries between individualism and collectivism are blurred but still observed, paradoxically. Personally, I view hyper-localism and place-ism as fractal manifestations of how cell live in the human body effectively. Opacity is a termed that Nassim Taleb created to refer to imperfect knowledge, to limited wisdom. In any given situation, what appears to be random may actually emerge from an underlying pattern; yet, given the limitations of our perceptions, our insights, and our information filtering devices, we cannot comprehend the mathematics driving the information-generating function. We don't know what is really going on. When it comes to the mathematics of Mother Nature, luckily, we are blessed with an important concept as a result of Benoit Mandelbrot's work: the patterns of nature are fractals. Fractals are self-similar structures that appear the same at all scales. That is, the feedback loops established at the most basic level scale up in an organized manner to produce infinite complexity. For instance, a leaf resembles a branch, and a branch resembles a tree. The larger structure--the tree--is simply a manifestation of the dynamics that created the smaller structure. In simple terms, big things got big because small things interacted to create them. And it's the small things we are after when we attempt to apply insights from the mathematical structure of nature to the question of how best to organize social systems. Because, as far as we know, opacity abounds in the domains charged with the mission of leading people: economics, politics, academics, and philosophy. Perhaps, then, a bit of respect for how other organisms interact in nature could enhance our approaches to governance in the 21st century. Perhaps Fractal Governance could emerge as a new paradigm for organizing our lives.

In this spirit, currently, I suspect that lifestyle re-design is happening actively, is going to continue indefinitely, and is going to, hopefully, force people to re-connect with localism, place-ism, and family/friends, ultimately.

"Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!"
("Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself!")

"Pas trop gouverner" ("Govern not too much")

G: "The world goes on by itself" sounds like mysticism. I mean the good kind, rather than hokey magic. The Daoists talk of 'wei-wu-wei', which means 'doing-non-doing'. This is a kind of 'in the zone' state that an athlete or artist may experience a few times in his life--when performing with total absorption--and the sage lives in permanently. However, I understand that there is some quality to the state of the sage that is absent in the fortunate layperson; I won't go into that now.

Advaita Hinduism, as expressed by people like Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj, is also ripe in 'there is no doer' ideas. Actions do not originate from human agents but from the true Self, which lies behind psychology and is trans-personal and universal. Such religion conceives of the problem of the human condition as that of a puppet (the personality) believing that it controls its own destiny.

Perhaps here we can discover this crucial difference between the absorbed athlete and the sage. The athlete has temporarily become a perfect puppet through the suspension of personality, identity; the sage has discovered the silent puppeteer within himself and takes this as his only 'identity'.

When the puppet tries to control itself, it only gets tangled up in its own strings: it can will nothing, but the attempt is analogous to a puppet that has been poorly made (evolved - made by circumstance) and is not good at translating the puppeteer's will into action. What is the nature of the puppeteer's will--this is a naturally arising question that I think no one can answer, though if you can understand 'An Inquiry into the Good' by Kitaro Nishida, you may find the answer in there, I suspect.

Christianity has a fair few mystics also, including JC himself, depending on which bit of the Bible you read. Whenever you hear a Christian saying something about being controlled by God and having no will of one's own--that is mysticism, so long as the speaker doesn't have any narrow idea of what 'God' is.

I think that folly has the power to undo any system, but some systems incubate folly more than others. This is really something for us to consider. We would like to develop a wise system, but where are the wise people to people it?

For this reason, I imagine it might be best to start of with some catchy trend, like co-op housing 'villages' within the pre-existing political-civic structures. But such things may not work everywhere, which is fine.

Though having said that, there is a real value in talking absolute ideals. It's just that I think that the individual is primary. The right individual can probably make the best of a system so effectively that one can't necessarily see its flaws. Every now and then one has a great boss and thinks, "So why were all my other bosses horrible/incompetent?" The exceptional boss made the best of it. He probably drinks a lot though, and wishes he could change the system.

I wish I could remember where I read this so I could quote it, but in one paper scientists observing schoolyard play noted that among the different group activities going on there was one girl skipping around all over the place, apparently in a world of her own and unconnected to anything else going on. When the scientists looked more closely at the scene, they realised that the little girl acted like a conductor, nudging the groups as a whole toward certain tempos and moods.

This is the most flexible, unauthoritative version of someone who might be called a 'leader'--a leader has a volitional (though unpremeditated) global effect without dictating specific actions or occupying a top place in a hierarchy (in the usual sense of the word). It is also, of course, very organic and dynamic. It is also ephemeral: as soon as the kids lose interest, or there is some, perhaps unaccountable change, the conductor will have no power over them. What is impressive in this case (if the scientists were right) is the global control over disparate groups who were not aware (or barely aware) of being conducted.

There are probably more cite-able examples of the above form of 'leadership'. Ants, for example, are kind of like this because the queen ant absolutely does not have the neural power to direct every activity even if she tried and possessed some omniscient radiocommunications apparatus. The ants obviously take some subtle cues from the queen, because they lose cohesion the second the queen dies, even if she is isolated in a sealed chamber and no other ants see her die, but she is clearly no dictator. But ants, unlike humans, are simple and almost entirely socially constituted and oriented; humans are (perhaps) more selfish by nature, so we do have dictators. Humans are also not, like an ant, as predetermined in form and purpose as an acorn. Ants can do things the way they do because their systems change by evolution rather than thought. Though the ant system itself has built-in flexibility, paradigm-shifts will occur (and persist) by evolutionary accident rather than design.

The human Natural Society has not only to avoid tyranny and dissolution; it must also cope with individual and social change that can happen at the speed of thought. An ant-nest is like a bundle of little neurons that make up a small, limited brain; a human society is a conglomeration of individuals who are each far more complex and varied than an ant-nest. Each mind is like a city-state, so governing a village or company is going to be like leading the United Nations.

The conductor of an orchestra represents a small step towards a controlling, dominant leader. He is an artist, like the players, rather than a manager. He is concerned with the activity itself, rather than numbers and targets. One may say that as a leader he has it easy because he is in charge of very professional people with a shared purpose, but think of a school conductor--he will make players work hard even when they wouldn't otherwise. A conductor is not only flexible--he is in fact likely to be at the forefront of change and creative thinking within the group. In an orchestra, there is the right balance of leadership and freedom. An orchestra can not only get things done; it can get them done well, without cramping anyone's style overmuch. This is my assessment, at any rate--I have never played in an orchestra!

But an orchestra does not scale to a nation--an orchestra is a squad, and the conductor is the sergeant. A nation/city/company is a tree of squads (cities/departments), and even some of the squads themselves will be unmanageably large. A tree can flex a certain amount and no more or it will snap. In a squad of individuals, that measure of freedom will probably suffice (a dog likes a certain amount of order and a certain amount of freedom; humans are the same, though the distribution changes as we age). In our 'tree of squads' model, the freedom, the flex, is apportioned between squads, not individuals, so if you are in a department of 50 workers (or citizens), averaged out, the workers each experience 1/50th of the freedom of one who works in an autonomous squad!

But it gets worse still: the freedom is not equally distributed among squad-members. There are hierarchies within hierarchies, and I think that the more this happens, the more rigidly controlling the whole edifice becomes. This is because the bandwidth of communications shrinks from touch, body-language, shared histories and emotions, down to depersonalised reports and stilted meetings. What this means is that squads in a squad-tree have less freedom than individual members of an autonomous squad, and that diminished power will be disproportionately in the hands of the sergeant, because the company/city/nation can have more of a sense of keeping some kind of track of one departmental sergeant, but not of 50 individuals.

Any thoughtful person seeking to be useful and to express himself will have experienced this powerlessness as a citizen and as a member of any large department. Even national leaders complain that their hands are tied.

Gandhi had a vision of a 'village republic', and I find that when starting from scratch I work back to this vision, which I found appealing from the very first. What we need are small communities who live and work together but still account for and take some direction from the larger spheres of organisation.

And the governing touch should be lighter as the hierarchy scales up. Lao Tzu said:

"Governing a country is like frying a small fish--you ruin it with too much poking."

He didn't say that there should be no leaders; he said that leaders should have a light touch. I think he was absolutely right, at least where nations and large companies are concerned. I can see why leaders want to micromanage: the society itself is not organically or intelligently organised so it is always on the verge of collapse and apparently in need of some strong visionary to pound it into shape. But the visionaries only defer and deepen the crisis by making people dependent on them. This is not, by the way, a question of ordinary people being lazy and deficient: the possibilities have actually been reduced, and people are too conditioned into passivity to take up those original, creative possibilities that remain. To the average person, ambition is limited to pre-formed career-paths. This is disastrous; people have become ants, and not even adept ants at that!

I see an organic society scaled by accountability: in measures that one person can account for, like the pieces on a chess-board, or like a circle of friends one genuinely knows and cares about. Perhaps 100 individuals in a village (it does not of course have to be isolated from its neighbours, just distinct), 100 villages come under one administration, 100 of those units come under a bigger one, and so on until you have a team looking after the planet. The villagers are asking themselves "how can we be happier?" and coming up with answers like "let's try farming insects" while the global leaders are asking themselves "how can we be happier?" and coming up with answers like "coordinate the space-programmes of the world to produce solar energy" (both plans would only be realised by consultation and consensus). The villager may send suggestions up to the global leader and the leader may offer suggestions to the villager about insect-farming, but there's no question of one telling the other what to do.

In terms of physical labour, there might be projects at different scales of organisation, but nothing compulsory as such, I think, and most of the work would ideally be at 'village' level so that people maintain an intimate connection to it while being mindful of the 'whole'.

I think that because everyone is working in a state of interdependence, goodwill will prevail and there will be no question of rogue squads. At any rate, there would not be the oppressive apparatus in place to protect rogues from reprisal (even the rulers of our current democracies can be caught committing crimes yet stay in power, or you might get a meaningless change of faces). I doubt such a system would even need much in the way of laws or police, just like a good parent has natural authority and does not need to punish or be punished on an everyday basis; for the most part, a dynamically tense harmony will prevail.

Representatively visualising what I've described, it actually is like a picture of a fractal. The large-scale squads are doing the same as the small-scale squads but on a larger scale; they have similar structures; the same number of units that they have to get to know reasonably intimately to work 'with', as opposed to 'control'.

There will always be a limit to how well a leader can know his squad, but this structure mirrors itself at every level and allows much more intimacy at every level than the depersonalising bureaucracy we have at present. This structure means that if you do good locally, you do good globally, for the whole of the fractal society.

BP: Nearly two years ago, in my essay, "Stretched too Thin," I wrote the following:

We've lost our way.

Don't get me wrong; there have no doubt been many benefits along the way.

But, we've moved too far away; far too far away. Like talented students heading off to college, we have "gone away" (and, perhaps, gone astray?).

The computing and internet revolution has transformed what it means to be human in so many ways, but human beings have interacted with each other under the real (gravitational) constraints of space and time for centuries and centuries; Facebook, Twitter, GMail, et al. are only brief glimmers along the human history timeline of social behaviors. Profoundly, the digitization of social interactions has warped space and time, pulling our relationships into realms we have never experienced before (chat boxes, Facebook wall posts, etc.). And, just because it exists, does not mean it is (entirely) good for us--tools are tools and we must constantly re-assess their value and use.

A return to localism, place-ism, and authentic social relationships is in order. In the blink of an eye, on an evolutionary time scale, we have changed the social textures of our world dramatically, moving us further and further into foreign territories for interpersonal relationships. On one hand, technology connects us with others and improves communication; yet, on the other hand, we have interacted with each other using these tools for so little time that, like the foods we eat, our minds and bodies do not know how to process them (very well, yet).

From a nation state (an arbitrary / historical line drawn in the sand that carries no validity in a globalized economic world) and government complexes that have grown to astronomical sizes to banks and automakers that are also far too big to succeed, we have endangered our health levels and relationships by stretching ourselves too thin; we have leveraged our energy levels, resources, and time far too far, and we pay the direct price as a result (obesity, chronic disease, exhaustion, unbalanced lives, etc. -- all which carry tremendous $ price tags that offset the economic value they create).

So, what do we do?

We need to de-leverage in every sense of the word: one, reduce personal, corporate, and government debt; two, balance our lifestyle choices with limits; and, three, localize our social spheres (some modern-day tech tools can assist in this way too). In an increasing global world, our minds, bodies, and spirits suffer when we pull ourselves in so many directions; at some point, we must stop and ask ourselves a simple question: "Why are we doing all of this again?"

It's a question that demands that we reflect.

The American government started as a self-limiting social contract, but somewhere along the way, we stretched the limits of that contract to the point where it no longer carried much weight, unleashing an unrelenting spiral of spending, empire-building, and police-state-enforced interventions. We've lost our way; the founding American way. It's the way of localism, placeism, and tribalism; of setting limits and boundaries; of recognizing human nature and constructing minimal yet effective social and cultural rules and expectations that 'protect us from ourselves'. United, Aetna, GM, JP Morgan, et al. represent monstrosities that are, quite simply, far, far too big for anyone to operate authentically and humanly within (we can't 'wrap our heads around them'). We need to return to our ancestral roots (respectfully); and, anthropologists, like Margaret Mead, represent one group of people who study these roots and try to deconstruct their implications for how we socialize today. It's a scientific inquiry.

Dunbar's number is an anthropology concept that rises to the surface as constructive in understanding how best to respond to the 'stretched too thin' phenomenon through a return to localism (*see Mark Sisson's essay here). Other scholars have integrated this notion as well (such as Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Putnam), and Wikipedia provides this introduction:

Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.

Dunbar's number is not a concrete reality; it's an effort to capture the real social limitations that we face as humans: remember, we are (only) human beings. Each of us only has so much energy, so many talents, and so much cognitive and emotional bandwidth to pursue our jobs, maintain our living conditions, and enjoy our family members and friends. Amidst the current economic conditions, embracing the humility that Dunbar's number suggests seems more than reasonable (and could be quite helpful in pulling us out of this mess by restoring and enhancing social cohesion, stability, and innovation).

Just as the entropy of the universe is always increasing and we, as biological organisms, must work constantly to maintain and keep our body systems in check, we must respond to our increasingly global world with diligent local searching and acting patterns in order to achieve stable social relationships with the people we interact with, cherishing our times together along the way. As the big and global giants continue to fall, I suspect, those who embrace localism will be in prime positions to emerge from the ashes and flourish.

Bloom where you are planted.

Lead by example.

To good health,

Brent