Everything is a System of Flow
To understand reality, forget the individual and try to understand patterns of how things flow.
Today, the world is primarily transformed by human systems. That is to say that on a material level, natural systems maintain a level of relative stasis relative to the rapid rate of material change caused by human systems. When natural systems change rapidly (as with climate change) it’s now largely a result of the relatively rapid rate of material change caused human systems.
So to understand how the world is shaped, it is crucial to understand the key principles of how human systems operate and how they are shaped.
And it seems that all human systems are systems of flow. For instance, the food system is a system of caloric and energy flows, mostly leading back to flows of capturing and transforming solar energy. Other human systems include flows of thermal energy, electrical flows, information flows, mineral and material flows, chemical flows, water flows, flows of vehicles and groups of people — and of course all the flows of money that incentivize and disincentivize how people create, alter, and behave within these systems.
So to understand the workings of how humans — as an agglomerate — rapidly reshape our experienced reality, there must be a core set of models that would allow us to analyze the ways in which these systems self-generate and transform. I’d guess that most of the models in this core set will be ones that have demonstrably helped people to understand and tweak flows of other systems.
So these would include complex agent-based models, multi-agent models, fluid dynamic models, and other systems models. (Netlogo is a free multi-agent programmable modeling environment with lots of included models to play with, for those interested in this.)
In my perspective, focusing on fields that dig deep into this particular person or that particular event are somewhat trivial, in the long run. It’s like trying to understand how canyons were carved by analyzing or shaping individual drops of water and small containers filled with air instead of zooming out to see the mighty rivers and howling winds — forces made up of countless and uncountable instances of the things we’re likely to want to analyze.
In a recent podcast I listened to where Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews Ezra Klein’s on his new book Why We’re Polarized, this understanding was made concrete and explained quite elegantly. Explaining that he thinks about political decisions as being made in systems by people rationalizing what’s best for them under a set of incentive structures, Klein explains (around 4 minutes in) why Senator Chuck Grassley did a complete 180 on a specific part of Obamacare:
“I don’t really believe in people having the choices that we think they do… on some level, I believe Chuck Grassley when he says he sincerely changed his mind. It’s just not true in the way that we think of that being true.
It was sincerely in his interest to change his mind, and so he rationalized changing his mind. And he’s not the only one who does that. At some point, when you see that happening enough, you have to stop listening to everything everybody is telling you, not because it is not illuminating into how they are rationalizing their actions, but because it is not ultimately what is driving their actions.” (emphasis added)
This is precisely what I believe about the vast majority of decisions, political and otherwise.
I think that we are coming into an understanding of this systemic thinking now, though many still fixate on specific instances — the individual drop rather than the river.
If you are a drop, borne of snow melt in the mountains, chances are that you will end up in the ocean or a pond or a puddle and not in someone’s glass of water.
Yet the prevalent thinking style of today does not attempt to accept the reality of this water system. Rather, it looks at the set of drops in a glass of water and then analyzes all the phenomena that caused the drops to get there. After that, it speaks to all the other drops and advises them on how to behave so that they, too, can end up in glasses of water, willfully blind to the reality that the water system itself determines that the vast majority of droplets make their way back to oceans and lakes, ponds and puddles.
So then what? Is it hubris to try to find small interventions resulting in compounding effects which reshape the rivers? I wonder about this. Many of the most enormous acts of destruction and what we would call ‘evil’ occurred because the arrogant believed that they were changing the world for the better.
Yet there is something qualitatively different for those who understand complex systems and try to change them. Complex systems have no centralized point of control and more importantly, specific outcomes can never be predicted. Only general patterns of behavior for the entire system can be predicted — as in, will the system settle to a single equilibrium? Osculate between multiple equilibria because of changing conditions? Bounce around between multiple attractors? Or will it behave chaotically? And then if the system does move between one or more equilibria or attractor, then what’s the nature of those points? Can those points be shifted?
These types of interventions are not the totalitarian-style top-down interventions that lead to mass-scale destruction. Instead of the Christian conception of a God-made universe, where there is autocratic controller at the top of a hierarchy, these interventions accept a more Taoist nature of the universe — The Lathe of Heaven. In this conception of reality it is not the doer, or an intention-having God that is at the root of all things, but the inherent, perhaps latent essence of what is done — the Tao, the way — which governs all things.
And then there is the question: if this essence is latent, then how does one detect it and create the conditions for it to emerge? That is, if it is not hubris, in itself, to even ask this.
