We Need a Grassroots Movement

Dear Diary:
I hope people are not frightened by my words. I don’t see myself as Henrietta calling, “the sky is falling”. I’m not the Boy Who Cried Wolf! I don’t see myself as a Doomsday Prophet.

I am a social scientist with a Master of Arts in Community Development who wrote a thesis on “Community Systems Science: A Paradigm for Development“. I worked in business development, community economic development, studied adult education, life skills, and business analysis. I taught business planning at the college level, and practiced cognitive coaching for new entrepreneurs.

I discovered that the patterns of intelligence run like threads throughout Nature, from the subatomic to galaxy clusters. The patterns of intelligence run counter to entropy, the tendency towards disorder. Intelligence uses feedback correction, or circular causation, to hone in on valued goals to create and preserve order.

But, all systems have constraints, limits, thresholds, and boundaries. They have minimum and maximum size and complexity (patterns of interdependence). They must follow logic and laws of Nature. The laws of Requisite Variety and Scale are universal and apply to human civilization.

We can see throughout history a cyclical pattern of civil collapse. We see the abandoned ruins, the tales of Babylon, Rome, the Maya, the Incas, and so on. All became too complex to manage. Civil complexity can grow faster and bigger than our intelligence can manage.

Enter the traditional Strong Man, long the hero of our tribal ancestors, the one who promises order in exchange for your loyalty. The pack is formed. The herd gathers. We make ourselves bigger. The Strong Man confidently consults, plans, delegates, coordinates, and executes order. Efficient and effective. Right?

But what worked in tribal defence against attackers fails utterly against the invisible villain of civil complexity. Our brains were designed by evolutionary intelligence to serve in small communities in local ecosystems. We have not scaled up our social order appropriately to manage a thousand, a million, or a billion people.

Not only that, but the role of the Strong Man’s hierarchy was always supposed to be temporary. Once the external threat was dealt with and dispensed, the life of community-as-network would resume. Small teams of men hunted. Small groups of women foraged with children in tow. Campfire circles showcased elder wisdom. Crafters contributed according to their talents and interests.

Enter the Holy Man. He tries to decode Nature and morality to offer an eternal universal moral code, extrapolating from empathy. He draws from traditional tales, fables, myths, and parables, from revered ancestors to lay out the essence of the Code. Intuitively following the biology of predators and prey, approach and avoidance, He encodes a morality for insiders and a different one for outsiders. He is right to think the Code is eternal and universal, but, unfortunately, our knowledge keeps growing and refining. That moral code needs to evolve as we learn more about human nature through psychology and the social sciences.

Not only this, but the Code needs to be enforced. Beyond the force of empathy itself, we need an authority and a social contract with consequences. But this, too, makes a permanent hierarchy that divides us by class. Order is imposed and we are born into that order.

Call up the Man of Science. He knows the way to truth. He prepares hypotheses concerning the way of Nature. He tests those hypotheses in the lab or by careful scrutiny. If successful, he writes a universal law. If not, he can falsify and eliminate the hypothesis and move on.

But the Man of Science is only human, not a titan or demigod. His nature, like ours, is prone to arrogance when given a chance and too many kudos. He takes his professor’s teachings as gospel and preserves the intellectual order in a paradigm. It is The Radical, the Outcast Man of Science, who enters to disrupt the legacy paradigm and present an alternative model of reality. He knows “the map is not the territory”. While the territory stands firm, the map is continuously rewritten.

So, when I forecast a civil entropy and collapse, it is a call to attention. We need a new social order that matches our inherent social intelligence. We need to see our leaders eye-to-eye to read their body language, their intentions. We need to recognize that morality is based on our limited capacity for empathy and that we have a different morality for outsiders. Clinical studies in social psychology of affinity clearly show this.

Unlike our polarized political ideologies of hierarchies and networks, the reality of our human nature is to exploit both hierarchy and network as appropriate to our requirements. We instinctively gather into hierarchies for defense. Normally we organize into families, clans, and teams or groups to get things done. Today we recognize that in management span of control (up to six members to supervise). In economics we also recognize diseconomies of scale and negative network effects, but we are yet to learn how these rules apply.

I know my prognostications can be depressing. That depression can lead to withdrawal and cognitive fatigue. But I try to end my rants with a solution. I do believe we need a new social order that is based on getting back to our inherent human nature, a subset of the Code of Nature. We are breaking the Scaling Law with reckless abandon. We are breaking the law of Requisite Variety by failing to manage the civil complexity.

The Strong Man tries to reduce complexity by imposing uniformity and conformity, failing to exploit our inherent diversities. The Holy Man tries to align us with the goodness of Nature but fails to stay current with our growing knowledge. The Man of Science, like the Holy One, stagnates entrenched in yesterday’s map.

I’m not saying that we have to leave behind modern technologies. We just have to make social order a higher priority. We need an accounting and accountability for all human values.

In my 1982 thesis I showed that a community is an intelligent system. We form collective intelligence so naturally we don’t even notice it. Community collective intelligence is a natural extension of personal and group intelligence. We should go with the flow of Nature and stop building giant organizations that have economic scale but not proportional social scale.

Giant corporations and governments lose their humanity and fail to manage the diversity of our human requirements and capacities. They feel no empathy or moral commitments to their staff, clients, or other stakeholders. It’s a diseconomy of scale.
To do this phase transition, this paradigm shift, we need to develop our our personal leadership potentials. We need to stop putting our confidence and trust in influencers, elected politicians, and corporate leaders. They are invested in the legacy civil order which is clearly failing.

We need a grassroots movement!