Chart of group satisfaction by size, from Life With Alacrity
Elisabet Sahtouris wrote an article in 2005 called The Biology of Business,
which began with a dubious recapitulation of Darwin's model and
explanation of evolution, and then attempted to apply this model to
business 'ecosystems'.
Like many others who adhere to the myth of 'progress', she describes
the first half of evolution of all-life-on-Earth as competitive and the
second half (with us as the crown of creation) as cooperative. Stephen
Jay Gould effectively demolished this romantic myth in his book Full House, and I won't revisit that argument here, except to say that we are evidently not
the crown on creation (merely one incidental and not particularly
special node on an evolutionary tableau that has no 'higher' or
'progressive' levels), and that the 'purpose' of evolution is
diversity, resilience (best served through complexity), and punctuated
equilibrium -- not knowledge,
self-knowledge or 'progress'. I know many people find Gould's
scientific explanation cold and deflating, but, not being of spiritual
bent, I find it refreshing, humbling and completely intuitive.
At any rate, she goes on in her article to lament the dysfunction of
our current economic system, which she blames largely on its inability
to stick to the evolutionary principles of biological systems which
were, presumably, its initial inspiration as a 'social' system. These
principles are:
- Self-creation (autopoiesis)
- Complexity (diversity of parts)
- Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them (holarchy)
- Self-reflexivity (autognosis—self-knowledge)
- Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics)
- Response ability—to internal and external stress or other change
- Input/output exchange of matter/energy/information with other holons
- Transformation of matter/energy/information
- Empowerment/employment of all component parts
- Communications among all parts
- Coordination of parts and functions
- Balance of Interests negotiated among parts, whole, and embedding holarchy
- Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance
- Conservation of what works well
- Creative change of what does not work well
For those not familiar with the jargon, holons are 'layers' of life,
from cell to organ to body to community to Gaia, the community of
all-life-on-Earth. These are, in effect, principles of collective self-management.
Elisabet goes on to lament that principles 9, 10, 12 and 13 in
particular are currently not applied in much of our economic system,
and describes a rather naive 'eightfold path to excellence' written by
Tachi Kiuchi to correct these 'flaws' in the system.
The question is, is our economic system, currently or possibly, a
collectively self-managing system? I think it is neither, for a simple
reason: No species is capable of 'creating' collectively self-managing
systems, or in fact any kind of complex system. By their nature complex
systems are not fully knowable, and so they cannot be invented. They
evolve by the collective cooperation and effort of all their
constituent parts.
By contrast, economic systems consider most of their constituent parts
as 'resources', externalities to be used for the benefit of a small and
hierarchical group of preferred interests. They are dumbed-down, merely
complicated systems, not complex systems at all. While they may aspire
to imitate some of the principles of complex systems described above,
they cannot possibly hope to embody any of them, any more than a robot
can be designed to fully emulate the operating principles of a body, or
a computer the operating principles of a brain. Constructed artifacts
are merely that, and they are merely complicated. The principles by
which they operate are limited by their construction, and vastly
different from those of a complex system.
So what can we do to make our economic system more response-able, more
like a true collectively self-managing, evolving system? The best we
can do, I think, is to acknowledge its frailties, that stem from its
fundamental complicatedness. Complex systems scale very well, and
increasing complexity increases the resilience of these systems.
Complicated systems, however, scale very poorly -- they need hierarchy,
brutal and rough intervention, and bureaucracy to function as they get
larger. When it comes to complicated systems, small is beautiful.
Complicated systems are only self-manageable when there are very few
components. That is why human social constructs seem to work better
when the number of people involved is close to six, or fifty (see chart
above).
Rather than Tachi Kiuchi's naive 'eightfold path to excellence' our
business and economic systems would be better advised to break
themselves down into very small, local, community-based units of
human-manageable size, let their members operate them as the
high-maintenance human constructs they are, and stop pretending that
they are, or can ever be, what they are not.
I'm doubtful we can relearn the humility to do so, but I think there is no other workable way.
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