Self-organisation and political systems
The purpose of a system is what it does. Stafford Beer said, with a twinkle, that the purpose of the Jaguar spares department was to keep his vehicle off the road. With a bit less twinkle and a bit more angst, we want to explore why we should acknowledge that what system does is just an important set of facts and insights to set alongside and against what anyone’s intentions might be, or what they say their intentions are.
The political discussion and debate seem to be largely about facts. About whether some statement or number is correct or not. Let’s put this discussion to one side by just saying Warm Data. You don’t get a clear picture by simplifying, you get it by building a sense of the entire context in many, many dimensions.
Building a context means understanding complex processes. When we want to know whether something is true or not, we imply understanding how it got there. The unedifying political debate consists of finding facts that people assume got there in some obvious way — “HE did it”. Most of the time we cannot get to the bottom of processes in the social domain because the levels of deliberate obfuscation are just too high.
The reason why we want to go to POSIWID is that systems have a way of conserving certain “invariants”. The facts that we might be interested are there because the system is doing what it does. If we want to understand properly, we will need to understand the operation of the system in systemic terms.
Let’s rehearse a simple example of misattribution. A supermarket branch makes a certain level of profit. Its manager is judged to have performed worse than a similar branch that makes more profit. Where is the “fact”? The two profit levels are certainly numbers in the world that can be consistently calculated. How those numbers are arrived at is a function of head office accounting rules and there we see the processes coming to view. We can regard each branch as a system in its own right, and when we do so we can ask what the manager’s levers are to influence the profits made?
All of the top levers to change the level of sales and the profits made on those sales are made by head office staff — the merchandising and pricing, the product range and the special offers. The manager’s job is to recruit staff and keep the store clean. The profitability of a store is misattributed to the manager, and this rather deep-seated mistake has many consequences in accountability across the company. Now how does that “fact” look?
Vexing examples
We have spent much ink on this blog talking about our food system. The issue is in the news and the food police are massing to tell us to eat less meat. We desperately need to understand what the POSIWID of the food system is. We need to understand that the advice is part of the problem.
The food system makes us ill. The large majority of whole populations suffer from metabolic syndrome: they are exposed to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer. All the major killer conditions. It is the system that makes us ill. It is not gluttony or idleness or genes or germs or bad parenting or lack of funding for the NHS. It is the food system’s POSIWID. It is simply what it does, without a shadow of a doubt, over at least the last half century.
Because this is a systemic effect, we can go looking for how it reinforces itself. People who are made ill by food are less well-resourced to make good choices about what they eat. Even without a wall of bad diet advice from the industry and their puppet food standards bodies. Even without the vast “diet” industry that undermines people’s sense of what good food is. People who have been made ill will compulsively make themselves even more ill.
There is of course a pharmaceutical industry with a related POSIWID. They need to have a population whose long-term conditions indicate medication, more and more medication over time until they die. They need to have a population that believes that the answer to food induced sickness is not better food but pills to treat the symptoms. The pills contribute to the ill health that the food produced, reinforcing both cycles.
When I talk this way, people say “oh, another conspiracy theory”. Conspiracy theory is a term invented by the CIA in the sixties to discredit people who could see through their games destabilising governments around the world. No conspiracy there, or only bona fide official ones. This is the piece we really need to understand.
When a system is created the designers mostly do not have malign intentions. But once a system qua system is in place it self-organises. The seeds that have been sown with good or ill intentions get caught up in creating pressures for people to behave in a certain way. The mafia started out as a protection racket picking lemons in Sicily and became something quite other. A mafia boss is not free to reform the mafia no matter how much he might want to.
It is when a system self-organises it can be said to have a purpose, a POSIWID, quite distinct from the purposes of the “leaders” of groups within that system. For those outside the system, trying to reason with or negotiate with those senior managers or whatever can be intensely frustrating. Society believes in holding these people accountable but in this sense they are not. The only thing that we might want to say is that they have a public duty to understand the various POSIWIDs of the interlocking systems they work within.
Human purpose, leadership, and POSIWID
By definition, human purposes and the function of leaders is already factored into a system POSIWID. The system does not work, malevolently or otherwise, in a vacuum. It works via the pieces of the system and especially through the way they are connected. A leader works in the context set by the system and by the way that other players in the system react and respond to their moves. There can be no leadership that sits outside this, looking down as it were on the system from the outside. How could there be?
This can be horrifying. When we see the way that Trump’s mental illness acts to allow delusion in half the US population to form a white supremacist system, we can glimpse self-organising. The “democratic” system finds a way to co-opt all the rules and checks and balances. We can see that the way Americans venerate their president allows unprecedented violence to infect the whole system. “Facts” become tribal war cries.
Lots of pundits say that this disease is not Trump’s doing and will outlast him. True. But the question is the POSIWID of the US political system and what it will do to the world. The behaviour of the clowns in the news has never been the issue, but we don’t have a way of thinking about systems in runaway that will destroy us all. We want, still, for there to be an authority to appeal to, to get it all sorted out. Well, it was never sorted out, and the appeal to an authority like the Supreme Court simply leads to the destruction of the Supreme Court’s authority. By definition there is nothing outside the system that can control the system.
Why would we surprised that a system in which the currency of communication is hubris and delusion acquires a president who is deranged? And that the derangement feeds on itself to become more and more extreme? It’s only hard to understand if we want to hang onto the idea of leaders who act to control the system.
And if you wanted to implement a scheme that makes no political or economic sense like Brexit, it is likely that you will end up with a leader who is lazy and incompetent. That is what the system will self-organise around.
Neither am I appealing to some sort of realpolitik. The system does what the system does through the actions of well-meaning players and of crooks, of saints and of sinners. With hindsight I moved out of the system as best I could. I retired from consultancy, I self-isolated from the food system, I no longer watch or listen to any news programmes. I taught myself as best I could about the real basis of life, in the soil. It would be equally true to say I was spat out, or I failed. And my understanding of the POSIWID of the key systems come from where I am. I am a product of a dramatic change in lifestyle and context as much as I made choices that set a ball rolling.
Statements of intent
What is the context for a politician or a supreme court judge or a national broadcaster saying: my purpose is this? Or indeed that they will carry out some programme of action?
The cynical view is that mostly they are denying that they are doing something else and need a smokescreen to buy them time. They are allowing people to believe in them and their power, maybe for good reasons, to allow some battle to be fought.
If they say they are doing something because it will limit the spread of a virus, or the protect the economy from the effects of a virus, then we can clearly see the edges. If there is a programme of action put forward, then pretty soon we will see whether that set of actions was consistent with the stated intent.
The POSIWID is nowhere to be seen in this. As we wrote many months ago, the virus is enabled by the metabolic ill-health of the populations around the world. This is not an act of the Chinese, of the CIA, or of God. In all the frenetic capitalist dog-fight over who has a working vaccine, the fact that the best thing populations can do is to improve their metabolic health gets elided because no-one can make money if populations are no longer sick. The statements of intent don’t even bear on the problem, only on a narrative. Without a view of how the system works, nothing will happen as planned. The myriad of save-the-world food plans being promoted at vast expense will likely further undermine population health!
Stafford Beer
There was a man who tried to intervene in these self-organising systems. He had a valid way of understanding them in cybernetic terms. Imagine someone saying today that the way the US political system works needed a different set of connections so that it could deliver what the population wanted from it!
He developed a set of such connections for the Allende government in Chile to get the economy to work robustly. His string and Sellotape solution (they were not permitted US computers!) worked sufficiently well to frustrate the CIA efforts at subversion. So the government had to go, of course. We can’t have people locating control away from spies and spooks now, can we?
I think the thinking classes understand even less of this now than they did then. People reject the idea that the systems that largely control our lives are self-organising and largely destructive of health and happiness. In failing to locate ways in which these systems can be steered at all, they end up thinking that human purpose and management must contain the solution somehow. The right person with the right agenda!
To get any control you have to give up control. Democracy is hobbled by all the institutions who don’t trust it to give the right result. The UK is doing even worse than the US at understanding what happened in the last election and what there was a popular mandate for. The assumption of a fair vote is like money laundering: you put in criminal intent and come out with legitimacy. Better I think to look at what was an unacceptable outcome for whom and to follow the money: that gives you the actual connections around which the self-organisation of the system works. Who actually wants to know what the UK population might think given a truthful press?
