Is the status-quo model of what a powerful civil society should look like — mostly a set of large, democratic membership organisations now wrong?

Gathrer
Gathrer
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

This reminds me of Locke vs Hobbes and (Emile Durkheim, Attachment to Social Groups) — I think the problem boils down to the ‘golden mean’. You need a degree of centralisation so progress can be made in a co-ordinated way. You also need a degree of decentralisation so risk is dispersed and a wide-range of views are represented. Dimensions of centralisation and decentralisation are fractal.

By centralisation or decentralisation I mean of anything: information, decision making, wealth, geographical or communicative dispersion. You name it.

As an illustration, under the context of decisions, effective choice isn’t all that matters. There is the paradox of choice. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice) We also need stability and limited choice. So on the fractal layer of say, the household, your proposition would seem quite stable. On the fractal layer of the nation or globe, your proposition would seem quite unstable.

In my view, an alternative is possible: The system encounters errors or fragility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile), when the continuity of prospective resource switching between centralised and decentralised fails at one fractal layer, thus leading to contagion at other fractal layers. Especially referring to demand/supply elasticity in not just good markets, but markets where ‘price’ and product might be more abstract.

Key point: That lack of elasticity disrupts the system, leading to periods of no progress and thus paralysis. That’s the paradox. Less choice, leading to a period of chaos and too much choice, leading to choice paralysis ad infinitum.

A muscle’s more likely to fail if it hasn’t been stretched. The issue is, the muscles of our economy and democracy stretch, then get stiff for too long.

People ought to have the choice to remove dictators, Bill Gates or oppresive Facebook group admins, it doesn’t matter That mitigates excessive stability and limited choice. (Nassim Taleb would agree here). But also the choice to appoint, or transfer their rights or other resources to central points. That mitigates excessive choice and limited stability. (This is where I differ from Nassim Taleb).

Therefore this might be predetermined by my answer’s methodology (golden mean), but cycles are inevitable. We just have to have the means to intervene when swings get out of hand.

The solution in my view is to increase flexibility of democratic reform, not just in the political dimension, but also the corporate, local, household level. That flexibility can work either way, towards centralisation of democracy or decentralisation.

We need an economy, democracy, households, groups that have the ability to learn. Organic. Like an organism.

So far its implied by previous thinkers that ‘flexibility of democratic reform’ means more decentralisation. But in my view it’d work either way.

An example of a system that does that is Tezos, with its token. Its a system of reinvented governance, though I question how easily that governance will gravitate towards dictatorship without being able to return (referencing the Leviathan here).

Gathrer

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Gathrer

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