Caveat: This is a long
article, even by this blog's standards. Find a comfy chair, or bookmark
it and come back later. I think it's important, and I need your
contribution to make its core argument more compelling.
Illustration: My imagining of how a self-organized and self-managed natural intentional community might evolve its roles and core capacities. The Only Life We Know is my in-progress novel.
Several readers like what I've
been saying about significant change having to come from the bottom-up,
but are skeptical that intentional communities, natural enterprises,
and peer-to-peer information, education and action groups can scale
sufficiently to have an impact on all the damage that big,
top-down-organized governments and corporations are doing, and to solve
the world's most intractable problems. I want to explore that concern
in this article.
Top-down organizations are (generally) hierarchically organized. That
means the power to make decisions on actions rests with one, or a very
few people in the organization. It also means that those people have
the authority to force those lower down in the hierarchy to carry out
those decisions. The reality is that while those people will pay lip
service to the instructions they receive, they will often not do what
they're told, either because (a) they don't understand what they're
being told to do, or (b) they don't agree with what they've been told
(it doesn't make sense, or it's too much work) and they're sufficiently
buffered by the bureaucracy of the organization that they can get away
with not doing it.
The consequence is that these (usually) large, hierarchical
organizations are utterly dysfunctional. The people at the top have the
illusion (because no one dares tell them differently) that their
instructions are understood and being effectively followed. The people
at the bottom are (usually) just struggling to do their (usually)
unique jobs the best way they can, despite ill-conceived, ill-informed,
poorly-communicated and often foolish instructions from above. The
customers/citizens that the organization is intended to serve are
completely divorced from the top-down communication and decision-making
process. If they don't like the decisions they can buy from/vote for
the other 'choice' in the political or economic oligopoly. That is the customer's/citizen's only input into the system.
The reality is that the expensive and elaborate mission statements,
strategic plans, statements of core values and principles, vision
documents, and other 'change' programs usually have no effect on the
organization at all. The achievements of the organization are simply
the aggregate of the collective efforts of the employees, and success
depends on an infinite number of factors, few of which the employees
(let alone the people at the top) have any control over. What gets
rewarded gets done, however, and what is rewarded in hierarchical
organizations is finding ways to sell more products at higher prices to
more customers while simultaneously hollowing out the organization to
reduce costs (and hence, ironically, reduce capacity). This is
euphemistically called 'productivity', and as I've reported before there are six main ways to do it:
- Charge customers more for the same stuff
- Get government subsidies
- Charge customers the same price for inferior stuff
- Reduce wages
- Reduce material costs
- Reduce regulatory costs
Almost all activity of hierarchical organizations is currently devoted
to these six tasks. Oligopolies enable this by eliminating competition.
Massive deceptive advertising and PR campaigns are used to con the
customer. Intensive lobbying buys politicians, who in turn provide
subsidies, deregulation, corporate indemnification from litigation, and
protectionist intellectual property laws. Outsourcing, offshoring,
union-busting and benefit-stripping reduce labour costs. Egregious and
environmentally ruinous 'free' trade agreements and one-sided contracts
with struggling nations extract cheap materials. Collectively this is
called 'globalization', and it is promoted as something that is good
for all of us.
The hierarchical organization is only doing what is rewarded. There is
ferocious internal competition to take credit for the organization's
collective success and shift the blame for its collective failure. This
adds to the dysfunction, preventing people from sharing ideas and
information, and rewarding deceptive credit-taking, scapegoating and
exploitation of other people and the environment (reducing costs by
'externalizing' them, i.e. making them someone else's cost and problem,
usually future generations'). This destructive dysfunction is papered
over with absurd talk about the importance of teamwork and
collaboration. Employees learn (by reward or punishment lessons) that
the real objective is to use the team to produce what you can take disproportionate credit for.
This behaviour is not unique to the private sector. Governments and
government organizations are pursuing the same six 'productivity' goals
bulleted above, via user fees, obfuscation of benefits,
'centralization' schemes, takeover of other government entities,
reducing services, deceptive advertising and PR, and privatization.
Politicians play up the myth that public organizations are less
'efficient' than private organizations of the same size (Ralston Saul
and others have thoroughly debunked this myth, but it is immensely
popular among a wide swath of simple-minded conservatives and
libertarians who are easy to convince that, except for waging war,
government-run organizations are inherently evil and incompetent).
This, despite overwhelming evidence that the defence and 'security'
functions of government are much less competently and 'efficiently' run than 'privatizable' functions like public health care and public education.
Hierarchies scale well in one respect: They concentrate power and
wealth in a few hands, where it can be used to acquire even more of it,
using the techniques described above. This is known as 'leverage'
(financial and political) and, like the overweight kid on the
teeter-totter, they have a lot of it. This leverage compensates for the
inherent lack of effective communication, lack of information-sharing,
inertia, vulnerability (in the face of sudden catastrophe), destructive
politics, and unresponsiveness and indifference to the needs and
well-being of people, that renders hierarchies so dysfunctional. In the
wake of hierarchies' leverage, innovators, entrepreneurs, and
imaginative alternative ways of doing things are crushed. Choose
Tweedledum or Tweedledee, or drop out of the system. As citizen, as
customer, as employee, that is the only choice you have.
Enough about hierarchies. Let's look now at networked systems, what Jon Husband
calls 'wirearchies'. The power in networked systems is decentralized,
or as Searls & Weinberger put it 'at the ends'. The obvious
advantages of this are responsiveness
(power distributed more broadly to people in touch with citizens,
customers and employees are more aware of and more capable of
responding to these constituencies' needs) and resilience (when part of a networked system 'goes down', it is relatively simple to 'work around' it).
The purpose of networked systems is, like the systems in nature, not 'efficiency' or 'productivity' but effectiveness.
Look at the seeds of a tree, or the redundancy in any ecosystem, and
you see how well it gets the job done, no matter what eventuality may
occur, but in an extremely 'inefficient' manner.
So imagine we
were to evolve a new social, political and economic system, bottom-up,
networked and non-hierarchical. Could it contend with the existing
hierarchical system? And could it solve some of the intractable
'wicked' problems that the hierarchical system contends with now, and
would have us believe it is coping with as well as is possible? In
other words, can a Networked Society scale to do what it must to out-perform and replace our Hierarchical Society in dealing with the world's intractable problems?
I think there is broad dissatisfaction with the existing hierarchical
system, but great skepticism about whether there is any alternative.
Communal and socialistic societies don't have a very good track record,
even though there may be some argument that the hierarchical societies
deliberately crushed them because they represented a threat. The
reality is that people, as citizens, customers and employees, do not
buy into theories or ideals. They want to see evidence that some
alternative system actually works. They believe their peers, not pundits (whether those pundits be at the top of a hierarchy or out on the Edge).
We do what we must. People will be inspired to stop voting for, buying
from, and working for Tweedledum or Tweedledee only when they perceive
they have no other choice, when the pain begins to considerably exceed
the comfort that comes from the status quo. What's more, they need to have
some other choice presented to them, not just the idea of creating one.
As I've said before, we need to start with local experiments of
intentional communities (alternatives to the hierarchical political
system), natural enterprises (alternatives to the hierarchical economic
system) and peer-to-peer information, education and action groups
(alternatives to the hierarchical social system). Just as the first
life on our planet needed to brew in the primordial soup for a long
time (probably with lots of false starts), we need to monitor and learn
from these experiments, and let them evolve naturally.
We cannot be concerned with whether we have the luxury of time for this
to happen -- one cannot invent a new Networked Society overnight, and
evolution takes time.
The Internet (so long as it remains free from hierarchical tolls) will
allow these experiments to be watched more effectively and by more
people, and will allow us to share ideas, experiences and learnings
more effectively with other people on the Edge. This could accelerate
the evolutionary process of the Networked Society somewhat. The way I
see it evolving is more and more people slowly weaning themselves off
the Hierarchical Society as real alternatives become available to them regarding:
- where to live (in a true community, not a subdivision),
- who to live with (most likely a clan of several dozen people, not a nuclear family),
- how to make a living (in responsible partnership with people you love, in service rather than in servitude),
- who to buy from (natural, sustainable, caring enterprises, not Tweedledum or Tweedledee),
- how to live more responsibly (knowledge and choices that
give you a genuine ability to walk lighter on the Earth, not just buy a
slightly less irresponsible product),
- how to live more self-sufficiently (knowledge and choices that free you from dependence on the Hierarchical Society), and
- who to support politically (with your votes and your tax dollars)
These are the most important decisions most of us make in our lives, so
the emergence of alternatives is likely to attract a lot of public
interest. The powers in the Hierarchical Society are aware of this, and
are trying to offer us some easy (for them and for us) alternatives
(like houses with solar panels and organic products) to keep us from
abandoning them. They don't understand that this is far deeper than a
fleeting yen for counter-culture or a new form of consumerism.
There are, of course, many experiments in all these areas going on now.
Should we be concerned that none of them have 'caught on' yet? I would
be more concerned if some of these experiments had caught on. There is not yet a broad sense of urgency -- we do what we must,
and there is not yet that kind of imperative for the majority of people
that they must do something other than what they're already doing.
What will precipitate this sense of urgency? Not likely a political or
economic or environmental event -- terrorist fear-mongering aside,
these events just don't get at us where we live. Unless you live(d) in
New Orleans, it's doubtful that global warming has yet changed your
life-style or even made you wake up every day thinking you must, soon.
Remember, this movement is bottom-up. What will precipitate this sense
of urgency will be small successes communicated peer-to-peer.
Peer-to-peer alternative music sharing shook an industry to its roots
(and that industry reacted in the prototypical, hostile, hierarchical
organization way). Imagine if we start sharing alternative ways to live,
that require purchase of much less, and then nothing at all, from
multinational corporations. That allow us to live comfortably,
joyfully, with 90% less income and 90% less consumption of
standardized, packaged, imported commercial products -- and 90% less
consumption of energy. That make starting your own business easier and
more pleasurable than working for The Man. That eliminate your
dependence on outside suppliers of good and services, and your
dependence on 'experts'. That are more fun.
As I've mentioned before,
these alternatives and changes could essentially starve the
Hierarchical Society to death. That society depends utterly on our
'consumerism', on our tax dollars, on our Learned Helplessness, and on
our psychological addiction and financial indebtedness to it. Show
people that there is an alternative to that addiction and helplessness,
one that is healthier and happier, and you need not do any selling. It
will happen, growing slowly (too agonizingly slowly to suit most of
us!), until people opt out of the Hierarchical Society and opt into the
Networked Society, not out of political or ideological conviction, but
simply because it's easy and because that's what their friends are all doing.
So imagine that happens, and the starved Hierarchical Society crumbles.
No more globalization and big multinational corporations. No more
standardized, centralized systems for anything: health, education,
utilities. All replaced with local, community-based, self-managed
alternatives. How will this transitioning new world of self-sufficient
communities deal with global warming, with terrorist threats, with
foreign despots, with world poverty and hunger, with pandemic diseases,
with natural disasters, with the End of Oil, with social security, with
immigration, with national transportation? The
(federal) government won't be able to help -- it won't have enough
revenue to do these things. Of course, we could argue that they've been
useless at addressing these problems anyway, making
the situation worse, if anything, with every intervention. But surely
someone has to at least put on a brave face and try, lest these
problems get away from us entirely and our countries be overrun with
unwanted foreigners and fundamentalist crazies? Who's going to
negotiate for, and between, and coordinate and represent these little
communities in situations of larger-scale conflict and catastrophe?
We will still have a world in which most of humanity lives a marginal,
dependent life in lands desolated by short-term, ill-considered
economic and political activity. It is only we privileged few, a subset
of the inhabitants of affluent nations, with substantial access to
knowledge, resources, and collective organizational processes, who can
hope to build and show off the experiments and models of a Networked
Society. So how can we hope to not only scale these models to
accommodate most humans in our own countries, but show them and
introduce them to people who have none of the ingredients on which
these models are built? How will a fledgling Networked Society 'play'
in Darfur, in Tajikistan, in the South Bronx?
Well, perhaps better than we might think. The people in ignored and
devastated areas of the world (and within our own countries) have
learned that community is everything, that if they don't look after
themselves no one will. All we need to do is help them remove the obstacles
(poverty, pollution, corruption, warlords etc.) to making intentional
communities, natural enterprises, and peer-to-peer information,
education and action groups work for them, in their own way. How do we do that, in a bottom-up, peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical way?
As I suggested the other day, if we can find ways to 'solve' poverty,
pollution, corruption and crime in our own disenfranchised
neighbourhoods, where these problems have defied all top-down
approaches to alleviate, we should be able to apply the same
'solutions' to solve problems on a global scale: global poverty, global warming, despotism, terrorism etc. After all, neighbourhoods are complex systems.
In a previous article
I suggested a four-step methodology for doing this, built on Open Space
and a group of other methods that seem best-suited to addressing
complex system problems. The four steps were:
- Invite: Invite all the people with an interest in solving the problem, without limit or restriction, to come together.
- Provide Tools:
Give them methodologies, tools, frameworks, ideas, possible strategies
and information that equip them better to address the problem.
- Provide Training in How to Use the Tools: Teach them (or rather, help them relearn -- we once knew how to do this instinctively!) the practices and capacities
(some of these capacities are listed on the right side of the
illustration above) they need to apply in order to use the
methodologies, tools, strategies and information effectively.
- Trust in the Outcome:
Trust in the group's personal will and collective ability to solve the
problem better than experts and outsiders who lack the context of what
can and cannot work, and trust in the group's acceptance of the
responsibility to do what, as a result of what they have learned and
discovered together, they must.
Pretty idealistic, huh?
A few years ago the people of our neighbourhood got together and
rebuilt a barn (actually a large garage for one of the neighbours, but
it was originally a barn), which was close to falling down, and pretty
sad to look at. No one in the neighbourhood is an expert in
construction, but between us we knew a fair bit about different aspects
of the job, and we had access to the Internet, and to others in our collective networks.
We did an exemplary job, using precisely the four-step methodology
noted above. We taught each other, we learned what we needed to learn,
the invitation was so compelling and delightful we had a huge turnout
(the only thing we ran out of was food, and that was quickly solved by self-organization),
and the outcome was extraordinary. We did that!
This methodology is all about facilitating self-organization around a
problem that the group is passionate about, and, collectively, pretty
well informed about. I'll tell you on Saturday about how astonishingly
well this type of self-organized, self-managed process is working in
the South Bronx. I'll also tell you about an amazing community-based
success story in a desertified, salt-drenched corner of Jordan. If this
kind of process can work in those places, why not in Darfur and
Tajikistan? And if it can transform a neighbourhood of hundreds or even
tens of
thousands of people, why, by repeating the process over and over,
virally, using the enthusiasts and champions from each community where
it works to 'seed' the process in ten or a hundred others, couldn't it
transform a whole nation, a whole world, one community at a time?
I am, as you probably know, a great believer in The Wisdom of Crowds.
It makes enormous intuitive sense to me. This methodology is merely a
facilitated application of that wisdom.
You're concerned about the places it doesn't work -- the places where
the concentration of power and the abuse of that power is so extreme
that bottom-up processes can't overcome them. And so, they breed
despots or terrorists or economy-wreckers and then we have a global
threat to all of our communities and neither the time nor the ability
to mobilize community-by-community to address that threat. Or you're
concerned about the surprises, like pandemic disease or tsunamis that
wreak havoc before there is any chance to get together to work out an
approach to them. Or you're concerned about the cumulative effect of
millions of communities, each by themselves not contributing much to
global warming or The End of Oil but collectively threatening the survival of the planet and our civilization. Don't we need some top-down powerful 'force' that can focus on just
those problems? After all, even a radical communitarianist like Peter
Singer says, advocating a 'lite' world government in his book One World:
It is widely believed that a
world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth
that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At
worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable.
These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies
becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies,
and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose
lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best
minds in the fields of political science and public administration.
I'd love to know what you think about this. Personally, I don't think
it's possible. It requires an altruism and a resistance to the
temptation of power that is simply not in our nature.
How does nature deal with such catastrophes that overwhelm its
inherently self-organizing balancing mechanisms? It lets them happen,
and shrugs them off. Or it adapts to them. These catastrophes, in the
face of an enormously resilient ecosystem, are (except for the odd
extinction event every 50 million years or so) ultimately limited in
their impact, and unsustainable long-term. They burn themselves out. Indeed, that is precisely what nature is doing now, in the advanced stages of the Sixth Extinction in the planet's known history, the first caused by the actions of a single species, us.
We are, I suspect, too arrogant to just allow these things to happen,
to wait for them to pass and 'solve' themselves. We couldn't sit back
and just allow Iraq to invade Kuwait, even though the reasons for that
invasion were vastly more complex than the simple act of megalomania
our politicians and press would have us believe was behind it. We can't
sit back and allow the Bush ideology to catapult the world into the
Second Great Depression, even though the fuse is already lit and, if we
turf him out of power and catch it, it will blow up in our face anyway.
We can't allow the wretched prisoners at Guantanamo to kill themselves,
even if that means force feeding them until we concoct some excuse to
execute them. We can't shrug off 9/11 even though the trillions of
dollars we've spent on 'security' and retribution in response to it
have done nothing but make us less secure and have increased the
popularity of the (surviving) perpetrators. We can't accept that the
solutions to global warming and the End of Oil that aren't conceived and implemented in each
local community according to its unique situation and needs, will never
be acceptable enough to be implemented in any widespread way at all.
We do what we must, but to the humanist in all of us, that is never enough. Foolish or futile as it may be, we have to do more. Try something. Do something. Anything. Make someone responsible. Appoint a committee. Draw up a plan. Get revenge, even though it changes nothing. Hang someone. Stop it from happening again.
I'm not entirely satisfied with this 'if you can't do anything objectively useful, shrug off your grief and your outrage and get on with your life'
answer. Not so much because it doesn't make some intuitive sense to me
that sometimes bad things happen, and last a while, and that attempting
to either prevent or avenge them simply compounds (complexifies?) the
problem. My dissatisfaction with this answer is more because I can't
sell this answer to people who might find the rest of the Networked
Society elegant and compelling, but will find this sticking point intolerable.
I'd welcome your thoughts.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
