the only message the channel can carry is a scream
my diagnosis
Rather than speculate in the absence of even a completed vote count, I thought I’d send out this edited excerpt from the penultimate chapter of “The Unaccountability Machine”, the point at which I start winding up digressions into 1970s management science and start explaining how this is going to turn into an answer to the big political questions asked at the start of the book.
[I’ve turned comments off on the website version of this post. If you want to make a comment to me I think the email works, but my experience is that in the aftermath of political shock events, people often get into online arguments which they wouldn’t otherwise have done. Look after yourselves and each other.]
[…] When Stafford Beer was making his initial presentation to President Allende, he drew his diagrams and built up the components of the Viable Systems Model, showing how basic operational systems were embedded in larger blocks for the purpose of coordinating the national economic plan. The plan was itself a bargain, struck between the systems responsible for optimisation of current production and those which looked out to the future. And, as we’ve seen, balancing those two systems and managing the development of the bargain between them was the responsibility of the highest-level function of the model. As Beer tells the story:
I drew the square on the piece of paper… [the President] threw himself back in his chair: ‘at last’, he said, ‘el pueblo’. This remark, as I have previously attested, had a profound effect on me.
The people. It’s hard to know to what extent this was a rhetorical flourish on the part of Salvador Allende, but one of the most underestimated techniques of political and social analysis is to look at people’s jokes and metaphors, and take them literally.
El pueblo. The system closes itself – or at least, it does in any non-totalitarian society – by the fact that the highest-level decision-making system operates by consent of the decided-upon. Even in a dictatorship, there is a collective veto capable of being exercised if the situation becomes intolerable to the individuals who make it up. Even the abstract, high-level, unthinkably complex decision making entities we’ve been thinking about – slow moving artificial intelligences like “global capitalism” – are embedded in an even slower, even more abstract collective decision-making system of the whole population. We just don’t notice its existence, for two reasons.
First, it hardly ever does anything. The purpose of a top-level system – System Five – is to be the last resort absorber of information. If the system is working correctly, all parameters are balanced and there is no excess variety to absorb. When things are going well, you don’t notice el pueblo as a collective decision-making entity.
And second, el pueblo doesn’t have a postal address, let alone a Telex link to the Presidential palace. In general, not much effort is expended on considering what kinds of communication channels should be maintained to allow the population to express its views to the government, let alone how they should change to keep up with events. It seems quite clear that different arrangements might have different characteristics – a proportional election system should be capable of carrying slightly more information than a first-past-the-post one, a monthly opinion poll has a shorter lag than an annual one, and so on. But this isn’t how they’re thought of; elections are simply horse races with executive power as the prize, and opinion polls are rarely used as more than a sort of racing form to predict the winners of the next race. The channels seem to be designed to carry very few bits of information.
The only kind of information that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream. Populist politics acts as a signalling system for a population which wants to convey a single bit of information; the message that translates as “HELP! THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS IS INTOLERABLE TO ME”.
[…]
One of the longest-running pieces of research in medicine is called the “Whitehall Studies”. From 1967 to 1977, 17,500 British civil servants had their general health outcomes recorded; there’s been another group studied in 1985 (which included women), and both cohorts have been followed up and re-examined over the years.
Michael Marmot, the lead researcher on the original study, made an extremely interesting discovery. One of the strongest predictors of serious mortality outcomes – heart attacks, strokes, cancer – was the civil service grade that someone occupied. And social status (as represented by the civil service grade) is itself highly correlated with unhealthy behaviours, in a way that doesn’t appear to be related to education, intelligence or any other variables that might be associated with self-control.
This “social gradient” seems to be there in data from other countries, too. Marmot ended up concluding that the psychic feeling of being in control of your life is extremely important as a source of well-being, and that conversely, being out of control is physiologically harmful as well as emotionally intolerable.
At various points in this book, we’ve noted that you can tell when a cybernetic system is overloaded because it breaks down and becomes unregulated. Marmot’s main conclusion from his research was that inequality in society was a major driver of public health risks, but this could be given a cybernetic interpretation instead. The connection that he found looks like the result of a variety mismatch; people are, increasingly, unable to regulate the input from their immediate environment, and they correctly perceive this as a threat to health and life.
And what’s true at one level of a system can be true of others. The breakdown in the economic and political system reflects the same imbalance that causes the “deaths of despair”. People are overloaded with information that they can’t process; the world requires more decisions from them than they’re capable of making, and the systems that are meant to shield them from that volatility have stopped doing the job.
And so the nature of the crisis is …
It’s not a crisis per se; it’s part of the way that the system achieves long-term stability. The world isn’t going to stop growing, so it will only get more complex. That means that systems have to be built that absorb the volatility and variety at the appropriate levels. The overall system is always looking for some organising principle of identity, which tells it what to ignore and how to balance the present and the future.
For fifty years, the free market played that role; the underlying guarantee that all decisions would get taken care of, even if nobody made them. When that fell apart, the ultimate basis of the system – el pueblo, so to speak – sounded the alarm. Ever since then, we’ve been looking for a new organising principle.
I think this is what explains the common thread between MAGA, Brexit, Five-Star, Hindutva and all the rest. The populist movements of the 2010s all promised a simpler world; they were, in the words of JK Galbraith, taking on the great anxiety of their people and addressing it. They were also promising to restore the broken communication channels – to make voices heard, to force the managerial class to listen.
But the same analysis tells us that they’re fake solutions. You can’t promise a simpler world – that’s equivalent to claiming to be able to reverse the direction of time. […]