Recapping: democracy, even the representative form, requires citizens to be sufficiently cognizant of the nature of the issues that they can meaningfully participate in decisions regarding policy and who will represent them. The American experiment has proven something less than successful in that the modern citizen seems unable to cope with the immensity of the problems facing humanity. Citizens are under-educated and over-self-indulgent. Failing to understand the deeper significance of most of the issues facing them, they elect whoever 'looks' the best rather than who 'thinks' the best.
So is this a strictly American outcome? Is this due to a uniquely American psyche rather than a fault of democracy? That, of course, is a little harder to answer. Many European democracies have fared reasonably well. But I think even they have begun to show signs of weakness. As the American propensity to get caught up in the consumption and debt debacle seems to spread to other countries and cultures, we see signs of fabric rending there as well. It may be that democratic principles, while understandably better than historical autocratic rule, are still not completely adapted to provide an optimal organizing principle for humanity. Might there be some other form of organizational structure and decision process that better suits us?
It turns out that there is a natural form of organizational control for aggregates of purposive agents (you know like people) that evolves in systems that operate in highly dynamic and uncertain environments. We see its outline in human organizations like corporations and parliamentarian or legislative governments. It is hierarchical but not autocratic in its full form. The best model of this form of government is actually rattling around inside your head! It is called a hierarchical cybernetic system (HCS) — a control system — as you will see.
The HCS is divided into three layers or levels based on time scales and decision types. You will recognize the latter categorization immediately. It corresponds with the operational, tactical/logistical, and strategic decision-making in most organizations. Operational decisions are made roughly in real-time, the here and now. These are the decisions that keep the organization (and organism) running and responding to immediate environmental influences. In biology this is the level of physiology and homeostasis.
Logistical decisions are those designed to optimize the cooperation between operating sub-systems so that the system makes best overall use of resources and produces the best final product possible given constraints on availability of those resources. These decisions must be made over a somewhat longer time scale than operational decisions in that they are part of what conditions the latter. Logistical decision-making is associated with budgeting resources to the various components of a whole system.
Tactical decisions are involved with coordination between the whole system and its environment. Tactical generally refers to positioning ones self with respect to other agents in the environment in order to gain an advantage, or at least not loose an advantage. Most people are familiar with the military concept of tactics having to do with positioning troops for battle. This type of decision is also made over longer time scales than operational level decisions. It covers a broader scale in space and requires the decision-makers to have a good model of the environment and be in a position to anticipate other agents' movements (like a game plan).
Logistical and tactical decisions have to be made in cooperation. The logistics process has to provision operational units to meet tactical objectives. Hence they are at the same general level in terms of resources (allocated to making those decisions) and time domains.
Strategic decisions go far beyond tactical and logistical decisions in scales of both time and space. If tactics are about winning the battle, or raising sales, or capturing the prey, then strategics is about choosing which war to fight, which products and markets, and which prey and where to hunt. Strategic knowledge pushes farther into the future and looks farther afield in an overall planning effort to achieve some grander purpose.
Figure 1 shows the hierarchical structure of this cybernetic system.
Figure 1. The basic plan of a hierarchical cybernetic system.
Note a particular difference between this structure and more typical organizational structures that are shaped more like pyramids with single or few autocratic rulers at the top. In this diagram the more general form, in which strategic decisions are made by a much broader mechanism, shows that this kind of control system more closely resembles our democratic government structure. The strategic layer could easily be thought of as the federal government with its three branches making legislative, executive, and judicial kinds of decisions. So our government isn't that far away from the notion of a hierarchical control system. I'll be coming back to this observation in a bit.
But first I want to also show you that your brain is actually a hierarchical control system that evolved to allow you as an agent to act in an environment that includes (indeed is largely comprised of) other conspecific agents. The brain is sometimes viewed as composed of three basic and evolutionarily accreted parts. This is the Triune Brain theory. The core of the brain evolved in early reptiles. It takes care of all the operational level controls such as contracting the right muscles for motion, maintaining heart rates and blood chemistry, and interacting with the hormonal systems to regulate basic body functions (an early form of logistical control). Wrapped around this core, and having evolved in the early mammals and birds is the limbic system. This system provides for more elaborate tactical controls for mating, hunting, and offspring rearing, etc. More recent evolution of the limbic system includes emotions that couple tactical and logistical controls for better coordination between internal body states and external environment states.
Finally, the neocortex in the most recently evolved mammals and particularly in primates provides for a system that allows learning and adaptation based on highly changeable conditions in the environment. More elaborate behavior and more choices require strategic, e.g. longer-term planning. For most mammals, including our primate cousins, long-term means days, or possibly seasons (when the fruit ripens or migrations). The cerebral brain builds larger, more elaborate models of the world and uses those models to anticipate events and changes in a larger space-time framework.
In humans, the neocortex is most highly developed overall, but especially in the frontal lobes, which expanded greatly relative to the rest of the brain between 100k and 200k years ago. The frontal lobes are involved in what are called executive functions with respect to managing working memory and modulating emotions. In humans, not only did the frontal lobes expand tremendously, but the prefrontal cortex, the bulge of tissue right behind the eyebrows, expanded most of all. And this portion of brain is what is involved in the personal self. The self-aware self. It is also involved in our understanding of other selves, i.e. other people. This patch of neurons, etc. computes the most elaborate version of strategic control we know of.
Now, back to government. Your brain is the government of your person. You have autonomy because your strategic control system gives you a much wider view of the world and understanding of motives and feelings of other people. It is what makes you understand how the world works and what you need to do to work in that world to advantage. What if our social government were more like such an elaborate hierarchical control system with a well-developed strategic control layer?
Our current governance consists of a government that is attempting to provide strategic control but has not been constituted well to achieve that end. The reason is that we as individuals are not wise enough to elect the right representatives to do the strategic decision making. In other words, the real problem with our kind of government is that democracy as practiced is like choosing incompetent neurons to run our prefrontal cortex. In fact this is exactly what is going on in teenage and early adult development when the frontal lobes are still maturing. Judgment isn't the strong suit of people in this age bracket because their neurons are still incompetent (still developing).
The other major component of our governance approach is the so-called free market, or market mechanisms to arbitrate logistical (distribution of wealth) and tactical (foreign trade) decisions. Free(ish) markets allow agents to negotiate exchanges of value such that each agent receives what is dearer to her and, in a world of expanding opportunities, both can, in principle, walk away happy. But it really isn't a form of coordination. It is more of a cooperation based on goodwill. Early in the origin of life when molecules of varying kinds entered into autocatalytic cycles and formed the precursors of cellular metabolism some of those molecules found a kind of symbiotic cooperation with each other led to stability and a chance to replicate. Again when single celled eukaryotes began to form colonies (e.g. Euglena the control structure was strictly a chance cooperation between agents. Ecosystems today are another model of economy where market-like exchanges take place (usually not to the liking of the prey). So a phase of evolution in which cooperation between operational units is the major form of control is clear.
Coordination is the next phase in systems evolution. Coordination exists when one or more operational processes evolves a capability of processing information about other cooperating processes and provides a control feedback signal to those processes to enhance the cooperation. For example, nerve networks (no brains) in sponges is an example of this kind of early specialization (germ cell specialization was evolving at about the same time) of cells to help coordinate an otherwise merely cooperating mass of cells. Such examples of specialization for information and control processing are myriad in biology.
Thus, market economies are OK for cooperation-level control, but are insufficient for coordination control and totally useless for strategic control. Unfortunately for libertarians and other free-market advocates, this is a very primitive and ineffective mechanism for maintaining long life and stability in complex systems. Among other deficiencies it is simply too slow to provide fast, appropriate response to shocks. The market does play a role in small-scale, local transactions that merely involve trade of real value (no speculative instruments please).
But that is where we are today. We have a primitive version of strategic control based on immature decision processors (and a little too autocratic, it turns out, with unitary executive privileges!) We have a very primitive version of logistical control with markets alone (and note that we have moved steadily toward increasing market coordination controls up to the Reagan administration). And with democracy as practiced we have no good way of letting the system evolve to a more natural and effective structure, namely a true hierarchical control system similar in competency as the human brain.
This is just the beginning of exploration of this subject. It is obviously a big topic. If you have stayed with me this far you might be able to guess at the next question. How can we organize our political and governance systems to become more strategic and purposeful? Stay tuned.
Comments