"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force !
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."George Washington (1732-1799)
"A breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences."William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1604-1605, Act: III
Perhaps more than any other social concept explicit discussion of personal power and its actual (rather than assumed) effects on others is rare. Yet wherever we look in our society the use and abuse of power is evident. In a complex interconnected world the causal effects of these actions do not restrict themselves linearly to just local issues but have nonlinear ramifications throughout the globe. Here we will examine the effects of power on overall social fitness, and look at how our power behaviours could be changed by complexity thinking to generate fitter political and economic structures.
We must distinguish between explicit power of the type we give to government and law enforcement (which is nominally under our control as a collective) and implicit power of the sort wielded invisibly (the unmonitored changes made to our social environment, and the structures erected and maintained to prevent or drive change to the status quo). These latter sorts of influence can relate to secrecy, to cronyism, to prejudices and hidden agendas of all sorts, and it is in understanding these constraints that allows us to evaluate the possibility of improving society by the self-organization of diverse adaptive agents.
There are three types of power or force that can be applied. The first, 'coercive', relates to physical or brute force, and is seen in conflict scenarios around the world. This is a totally destructive or negative-sum force since both sides lose widely in the conflict (all things taken into account), and it often results in the breaking down of one or both social infrastructures. Thus generally the second type of force, 'economic', is preferred by commercial interests. Here the opposition is controlled instead by denying them some of the material goods of life (by embargoes or trade wars) or they are forced out of competition (bankrupted or taken over), but this also has some cost for the aggressor (in short term losses of profit).
The third force is more subversive, and that is the use of ideology or beliefs, 'psychological' force. It is far better to persuade a group to do what you want by making them believe it is what they want (i.e. that there are no better options) than to try to force it upon them by external means. Such internal motivation or brainwashing comes in many forms, we have seen some of these manipulative techniques already, but others are far more sophisticated and target whole societies or social groups rather than just individual viewpoints. It should be noted that all three types of power are usually aimed at preventing others doing what they want, the use of power to enable others to succeed on their own terms (synergic power) is much rarer in our societies.
In any complex system we have a large number of interconnections. This means that there are multiple paths between any two points, and thus multiple ways of one part influencing another. Some of these influences are direct, with explicit wiring or interfaces between the parts (sometimes needing a long chain or web of intermediaries), but there are also more subtle influences evident due to the canalization of state space (our options) produced by 'downward causation'.
This idea relates to the emergent whole (resulting from the interaction of the parts) then in turn affecting the degrees of freedom of the parts, for example a government elected as an emergent feature of individual votes then proceeds to lay down national laws that affect every individual. These constraints (or boundary conditions) of our society are rarely made explicit, since it is the whole package that determines how we can act and not just the individual laws viewed in isolation (these may be individually sensible but prove collectively stupid and contradictory). However this package will also include other elements, influences relating to factors not openly visible as legal (or documented) restraints.
When we act (individually and collectively) we lay down precedents which influence later actions (to repeat the act if it was successful or to avoid it if it wasn't - trial and error learning). These social trails are akin to the pheromone trails laid down by ants, which constrain the insects to always follow the same (tested) paths. Our social paths may be more diverse and include such ideas as fashions, yet they still exhibit this self-reinforcing partitioning or canalization of our behaviours. If we fail to recognise these self-imposed barriers (created by Hebbian or reinforcement learning) then we too behave little different than ants. Human progress involves creativity and escaping the relative safety of repetitive behaviours to explore new options.
Questioning why we act as we do raises issues to do with the overall influences on our behaviour. These are many, including genetic, developmental and experiential as well as cultural. But here we will concentrate on cultural issues, the network of national or global controls that provides a bias on the actions of whole populations. These enforce a form of equilibria (the status quo), and generally can only be maintained by force (of some sort) since the options made available are often not those appropriate to maximising individual agent fitness. In complexity terms the agent's transition table or rules are biased towards an ordered or canalized state - we can then be externally controlled. Our choices however are not totally closed ones, we can step outside any social norm if we so choose (overcome the bias), yet this is rather a hard thing to do since many of the influences on us are not made explicit - they are invisible forces.
Most of us see little further than the ends of our nose, our narrow minded viewpoint is insensitive to the wider picture. Due to this we are caught in a view of the world as subject only to local (or proximal) influences. If something happens to us it must therefore be the fault of either ourselves or those near to us, and we naturally look to compensating for the change by actions directed at the same local level. Yet, in complex systems, influences pervade the whole system, we are influenced by people and groups right across the globe, people we have never met and will never meet - people that often know nothing of our existence or are quite indifferent to it.
Their decisions, whether political or commercial, set up remote (or distal) chains of events that ultimately affect all of us. These ideas (made explicit by David Smail in "The Origins of Unhappiness") relate to events occurring beyond our ability to understand. This depends in part on our education and position, since the wider our knowledge then the wider will be our understanding of how other people affect us, and of course the higher our position in the social hierarchy the more people our individual decisions will immediately affect. But this works both ways, as we also fail to realise just how far our own decisions affect others, or worst we don't care either - regardless of the eventual coevolutionary repercussions on us !
Bullying, by people with power, is a common occurrence. The threat of the sack is the main power card wielded by big business (and political leaders). The threat to close down entire plants (and often local economies), at any perceived threat to profit by dissenting workers or locals, is so commonplace as to be generally ignored by the popular press. Yet such insensitivity is self-defeating and not only due to the hidden costs of relocation. People that are insecure, that work under constant fear, are not productive, they are not creative, thus stress is not (as often imagined) a problem for 'top managers' but actually for their staff, and inefficient staff point to inefficient managers - if the managers are stressed also then that is simply a result of their own, conflict based, management techniques !
Such mental violence by companies or politicians (and that is what it is) is as much anti-social as is the physical variety, and is just as fitness reducing for society. These negative influences bias our entire approach to life, they affect (even if only slightly) all our behaviours and these affect those people with whom we interact and so on. Thus small influences can escalate around the globe - creating massive collective repercussions (by the 'butterfly' effect) of what are often trivial instinctive animal actions. Power can be used or abused, when used creatively as an enabler for social enhancement it is positive-sum, but when used in a narrow and selfish way it proves only to reduce the quality of life of the whole - and that includes the world of the offending 'managers'.
One of the best ways of controlling large groups is to make them think that they are individually isolated (to avoid free exchange of information and awareness of commonality). Thus controlling communications and information flow is crucial to the preservation of social power structures. If you have no choice of information, no way to query what you are told, then control is easy. We see this form of control in closed societies everywhere, from Beijing to Baghdad, from Tehran to Rangoon. But this is not only a feature of less 'enlightened' world views, it is also endemic in Western, so called, 'free' society, widely seen in the blinkered 'bottom line' reductionism so loved by accountants (where all information other than monetary is ignored). All these narrow views are examples of the one-dimensional paradox afflicting the fitness balance of our societies.
We have seen how 'norms' can be used to terrorise people into compliance with a mythical belief system, and this is an aspect of a wider ideological attempt to canalize choice, to close down the options we have, to hide just how wide our social options really are. And they are vast. Given a country of say 50 Million people we would expect on average (from complex systems theory) that there would be over 7000 stable attractors or ways of socially doing things - how many of these can you choose from ? And for a brain with 1014 connections we could expect some 10 Million alternative concepts or states to be possible per person.
Many of the problems of limited choice that we have, stem (in some form) from the idea that certain people are superior to others, therefore you cannot be given their options. Most academic and professional societies (and many lesser ones) go to great lengths to ensure this exclusivity, this compartmentalising of knowledge - more akin to secret societies than to an open educated society. In a 'free' society all information must be available to all, whether they choose to use it or not, and whether they are currently capable of using it or not. The options should be theirs.
People at birth (potentially at least) are all the same, there is no 'blue blood', no racial superiority, no 'privilege'. What we do after that point of course rapidly changes that situation, our early learning experience biases our viewpoint and abilities in accordance with our social situation (the nurture aspect). But even given this imbalance, this does not mean that we cannot have choices, it just makes it more difficult for us to choose to follow them. It is the options open to us at each stage that determines how we can improve our fitness and by implication the overall fitness of society - closing off any options is potentially negative-sum behaviour - those fitness peaks are then made unavailable.
When we look at our social institutions we often find that these are closed shops in terms of flexibility. Hospitals, for example, are run for one thing only - to cure. We take the view that each function in our society is a one-dimensional specialism and totally divorced from all others. Thus we treat patients as 'symptoms' not people and ignore (as far as possible) other human values or needs. If we are a doctor (say) this simplification is done for our convenience, to make our lives easier. Yet such actions have many negative effects on the patients, and those effects are self-defeating to the purpose of the whole institution ! This sort of power myopia is common right across our social groupings.
Loosing the point of our social organisations (that they are there to serve people and not the other way around) allows us to start regarding the static structure as being the important thing, rather then the dynamic function it is supposed to facilitate. We thus unknowingly hide behind imagined mental rules and system-serving static procedures, dictates over our behaviour that prevent us from considering any better way of behaving. Our thought patterns are reinforced by these institutional pressures all the time, keeping us locked into cells of our own making, prisons from which escape is easily possible - because the door was never locked. The idea of 'ownership' is one such pattern and when applied to people becomes especially pernicious.
Most people regard slavery as a thing of the past, a concept from a past age of barbarism, thankfully no longer practised. Yet it would be true to say that in its essence slavery is still very much part of our modern world, and the number of effective 'slaves' may now be a higher proportion of the population than at any time in the history of human 'civilisation'. A 'free' man can choose any option, thus where these options are forcibly restricted by other people (directly or indirectly) we can reasonably claim that they are subjected to a form of slavery.
"Slavery is a societal institution based on ownership, dominance, and exploitation of one human being by another and a reciprocal submission on the part of the person owned. The owner may exact work or other services without agreement and virtually without restriction, and can deny the slave freedom of activity and mobility. Generally the owner is responsible only for providing the minimal necessities for the functioning of their slaves (and that only on the basis of self-interest)... A slave is commonly regarded as an article of property, or chattel, and therefore can be sold or discarded." We can see here how the behaviour of corporate boss and worker map onto this definition, especially in the cavalier way in which the worker services are discarded or transferred amongst 'owners' at will, and conclude that the essential dehumanising elements of slavery still apply to most of today's business institutions.
Let us now consider local barriers to change in this area, concentrating on jobs. In no sense are these 'free', the worker is restricted in his or her work locality, attendance times, durations and procedures. Often their personal dress and behaviour are restricted and they are expected to travel away from home on company orders. The idea that they have flexibility of employment is nonsense, this package is a 'warts and all' multidimensional 'contract', if they don't like any particular part then they can only lose all of it - and that means their basic survival needs as humans in many cases. In a free society we would have incremental packages, where each aspect could be adjusted independently to maximise both worker and manager flexibility and fitness.
Moving on to the invisible barriers, we have both the arrogance of remote leaders, who make decisions regardless of the wider consequences, and the social and political disinterest in things out of sight. We tend to view power as an abstraction, divorced from local feeling and reality, something that acts outside our control, that we cannot affect and must accept without question. This of course is not true, all forms of influence are under our control if we care to cast our collective eye on them. It is once again ignorance (often deliberately imposed) that allows negative influences on our lives to persist. Yet in today's internet society there is no longer any justification for ignorance, we can and should question the sources of all the influences on the decisions that affect our well being - the information to do so is already out there.
Taking control of our social institutions, whether to move them towards the sort of organization suggested by complexity ideas or not, requires that we target the invisible power structures that so shape the options within our current societies. Without democratic control of these we are unlikely to be able to make effective changes to the way our societies run. Widespread action to remove unaccountable powers from unelected people will of course face strong opposition, that is the nature of the beast. In a world where power over others is worshipped for its own sake we will be unlikely to find that it is given up easily, and while we choose to link social status to such destructive power this may yet prove impossible.
However, in any society, the wishes of the majority must ultimately prevail, and the key to enabling change would seem to lie in better education. As long as the majority still imagine that selfishness and competition gives 'fitness' we cannot change. But despite the extremely limited experimental study of epistatic or synergistic effects (even in the complexity science fields) it seems clear that creativity, growth and better fitnesses are linked to mutual aid and not to mutual opposition (the difference between measuring global absolute fitness versus just local relative fitness). Publicity about the difference between positive-sum cooperative and negative-sum competitive fitnesses may help educate the public, encouraging them to take the necessary democratic action with which to better enable their own inherent powers - but it is likely to be an uphill and vicious struggle, people rarely act based on rational knowledge !
On a more positive tack, no gardener would dream of planting their crops or flowers in a poor soil. To obtain the best results, no amount of tinkering with the variety (or genetics) of the plant will match the effects of attention given to the external environment - the climate or setting. The same of course is true for humans. To obtain a good crop of 'humans' requires that we give them an appropriate environment, in other words we provide the necessary nutrients (primal needs) and cultivation (social needs). This much should be obvious, and relates to removing the barriers to personal growth previously outlined.
But for humans something more is needed, and that is to enable them to exercise power in appropriate ways. To do this we need to become aware of the consequences of our choices, not just the local or proximal effects but those effects that will occur at distant places in both space and time. This requires us to be aware of the connectivity networks within our society and the ways that these information flows affect the barriers and options that exist in our collective lives. These are the hardest types of constraints to evaluate and we need some help if we are to do this, a form of help still rare today in a world that concentrates on 'things' and ignores 'processes'.
If is often assumed in our society that power is a fixed or conserved commodity. This relates to the zero-sum approach often taken to 'things' - either I have it or you do. But this style of thinking does not relate to processes, and power is not a 'thing' but a potential to drive processes. These do not operate in a zero-sum manner (they would achieve nothing if they did) but either as positive-sum or negative-sum. Thus there is a bifurcation point and the system can diverge (or escalate) either in a destructive direction (e.g. in a 'take' culture - where nothing is created) or in a creative direction (e.g. in a 'give' culture where synergy enhances overall value). It is in the bringing together of people and options that 'value-add' occurs, and this benefit requires that the people can freely re-associate and can permutate amongst the maximum number of available options.
Human systems can be divided into three types [Boulding "Ecodynamics"], these are the threat, the exchange and the integrative system. The first tries to neutralise power (i.e. is negative-sum), the second to trade it (assumed zero-sum) whilst the third creates new power by mutual benefit (positive-sum). We live now in a world where the first type of system is gradually giving way to the second, mental violence is replacing the physical kind, but we have yet to take the next step - to reject violence altogether. The best way to gain power is in fact to create more of it, and this means mutually enabling each other to generate extra options or opportunities with which to instigate new processes. Just as we nowadays are far more efficient in food production (thus food power has increased), our modern information society allows us to increase brain power and this added flexibility can remove the need to fight over physical power - virtual power is infinite and human society (being an abstract creation) is actually a form of virtual world.
There are many ways in which cooperation can improve the fitness of both parties, and much of civilisation (and nature) implicitly operates on this basis. Making explicit the use of power to enable others rather than to restrict them, is simply putting into perspective the real effects of competition, which is to instigate downward escalations of fitness - conflict cancels out power. Growing our societies involves creating upward escalations instead - mutually assisting feedback loops that can bootstrap our lives up to new heights, higher coevolutionary fitness optima.
As in the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma, this is as much a matter of attitude as of options. We need to view life on a broader basis, to widen our horizons to include those circular feedback processes that instigate the escalation effects of power. The conservative nature of our societies often relates to fear it seems. Power is used to maintain a state rather than to change it for the better. It is the lack of imagination endemic in such traditional thinking (based as it is on a view of society as static) that leads it to continually act to oppose change and to try to impose homeostasis - a first-order cybernetic methodology, rather than taking the second-order cybernetic view of being part of an evolving complex adaptive system and using power instead to positively steer society to fitter optima.
Although the philosophy of complex systems science is now well understood, it must be said that the models used to test these ideas are still some orders of magnitude less complex than the human situations we consider here. We must be wary therefore of extrapolating from simple simulations to real world issues. Nethertheless, there are some complexity ideas which intuitively seem universally valid. One of these is the idea that systems can be in three states, static (resistant to change), chaotic (overcome by change) and adaptive (able to respond to change in appropriate ways).
Another insight that we can employ relates to the combinatorial states available, which form a space of different possible options so vast in any real system as to be unimaginable. This allows us to transcend our limited vision of local options and consider global ones instead. Additionally we can recognise the nonlinearity of complex systems, the idea that combining the actions of many people will not lead to the same result as just adding up their individual actions - feedback processes and interdependencies lead instead to emergent results that cannot be predicted ahead of time, surprise or novelty is to be expected.
In complex systems thinking we study the effects of various forms of interconnection
on organization. Given sufficient connectivity (and social networks certainly have this)
we find that 'free' systems overall to a
state called 'edge of chaos'. At this point the system breaks
up (or modularises) into a power-law distribution of static barriers (shown here in black) and interconnected
regions of adaptive activity (these two elements often change places over time - i.e.
old barriers become 'opportunities' and previous dynamics become frozen or die out). This form of organization is the dynamic non-equilibrium equivalent of the historical barriers and
fixed equilibrium activities of current societies.
Before transferring this concept to our human power structures however we must recognise that retaining stability means that we do not wish to destroy all the present barriers, that may lead to anarchy and criminal replacement (widely seen around the world following the decline of authoritarian control), but we do wish to gradually replace them with better self-organized ones. In order to do this we need to decide which changes to make, and to advise lawmakers, shareholders, power factions of all sorts on how to make changes that are in the interests of everyone, including themselves. This requires that we look at the world in a rather wider sense than that generally employed in such matters.
In complexity thought we consider (in genetic algorithms) the entirety of state space, in other words we look at all the possible options or optima that we can have for our system. This contrasts with normal life where we concentrate only on where we are today (the local fitness hill or optimum) and where we can directly go from there. By widening our viewpoint in the complexity sense we allow ourselves to discover many other optima, some better than our present state, some worst. Evaluating these in actual human situations is of course much harder than in our standardised simulations, but the same principles apply (although we must add that no method is known to quickly locate a global optimum - the problem is what is called NP-hard). In practical terms, searching state space is most efficiently done by using populations of searchers, in other words each searcher searches a separate area (we have diversity). The idea that every member of the population searches the same point (i.e. a normalised society) is very obviously sub-optimal.
To attempt to find a good peak however we need to know how the various elements (that comprise our situations) associate, in other words we need to quantify (at least to a first approximation) their interdependence or epistasis. Having this allows us to generate a collective subjectivism, a fitness viewpoint that integrates the fitnesses of each of the parts and the emergent features of their interactions into an overall compromise result (i.e. a multi-level approach). Then we can rate all the available options, identifying the good and the bad, before making the choice that best leads to an optimum social fitness. This takes into account that humans can communicate and exchange data on the pros and cons of the states they have experienced. In other words we can develop wisdom about the options available across the whole of state space and their respective global effects.
If we attempt to maximise fitness in just a system wide (global) way it can be shown usually to lead only to a low static fitness - a poor local optimum, thus we can be almost certain that state controlled systems (rigid communist societies) that aim to improve only the state's fitness with every action will be highly unfit. Similarly those systems that let every individual maximise their own fitness regardless (free market societies) can be shown to lead to situations that never settle, all fitnesses are only transient and soon are lost. To optimise both holistic level and individual level (and those in between) we can use a patch procedure. In this we divide up the system into smaller groupings which then try to maximise their local group fitness (ignoring that of neighbouring groups). In this method a change to an individual is only accepted if it benefits the whole group of which they are a part (the group is internally cooperative but externally selfish).
Thus each group, following their own needs, may perturb the needs of neighbouring groups and this forces coevolution. It is this perturbed coevolution that allows the system to escape local optima and search the space of possible alternatives in a way that quickly settles on a compromise that is better for all the groups. This idea of ignoring the wider picture (and this includes any global laws !) yet paying attention to local neighbours (group thinking) allows the system to evolve to the edge of chaos, a state where the higher fitness peaks are accessible - but only if the groups are free to adapt (i.e. they are not externally controlled). In political terms this implies that neither massive states or centralised bureaucracies, nor market led individual free-for-alls are efficient ways to run our societies, we need instead local autonomy and diversity at many levels - together with the tolerance to accept that perturbations (or disagreements) are a good thing in the long term, and not problems to be immediately destroyed by force !
One effect of downsizing control structures within our societies would be to move decisions closer to the actual situation needing to be controlled, both in time and space. In our private lives we would think it rather silly if someone phoned us up and tried to talk us through moving around our own house. It would be clear to us that our local knowledge (sight) allows us to move far more efficiently than any instructions from a (blind) external source. Yet this inefficient control from afar is built into almost all our social structures - in the ubiquitous idea of centralised leadership !
Planning in advance is only possible in a static world - in which we must assume that the data on which we base our plans remains constant over time. Today's world however is anything but static, thus all plans will fail (at least in part) and have to be reworked in order to take account of dynamic coevolutionary feedbacks that change the expected outcome. This inefficiency or fitness loss can be avoided by delegation of power to those in the best position to utilise it - and that is those actually affected by the decisions. Imposed decisions must always be made from a position of relative ignorance, and as we have seen ignorance means that the better options are not visible. To maximise the fitness of our society and our people we must remove the concentrations of power that generate bad decisions, unforeseen consequences and negative-sum abuses of that power; replacing them (but only if we must) by open constraints that specify the 'what', but leave the 'how', 'where' and 'when' to local judgement.
We have seen how our lives are constantly under many influences. These emanate from a web of activities, interconnections and choices that originate all over the world. Clearly we cannot be expected individually to take account of all these in our day to day workings, yet societies do have the resources to collectively look at such things, and if we do this (even superficially as here) we find that the fitness of our society is being held back overall by many of the in-built prejudices and power structures that collectively act to constrain our options. Replacing these static barriers with more dynamic ones (local self-organizing sub-groups), created with our collective agreement and under democratic control, may allow a quantum jump in our social fitness. This may be especially likely if we incorporate synergistic associations (both) into our fitness models, rather than the either/or assumption usually employed.
Key enablers to such a 21st Century form of civilisation are the insights from the complexity sciences, both in term of self-organization itself and in searches of the fitness landscape. Understanding the attractors that make up our social options, and being able to change these to reach better optima, is also a crucial benefit of the complex systems approach. To do this effectively however in a multi-valued society we need to adopt a multiobjective perspective, and incorporate in a rigorous way all the conflicting values that will allow us to transcend that animal behavioural world so evident from our recent past and to behave as aware humans. Transforming our global power structures is not an easy task, yet the benefits of redirecting power - away from the fitness reducing forms currently seen (negative-sum) and towards mutually beneficial (positive-sum) forms - is so great as to justify a massive intellectual and social investment in this task.