A theory of how to fix the world:
We don't intend to debate the liberal ideal here -
we believe in it. We think it's the only sane
ideal among all choices, because it doesn't
expect the individual or the society to do the
same things over and over again only to get the
same undesirable results; it expects the
individual to grow on her own terms. What we
intend, is to frame a scientific perspective that
allows both believers in democracy, and the
opposition, to coexist and prosper in the
inevitable transition to a democratic world. For
if this transition is not inevitable, extinction of
the species is all we can look forward to.
We are trying not to write a political tractate -
facts are as they are, and we offer to explore a
fact-based scientific, not political, solution.
Politics, nevertheless, can as easily pave the way
for science as for special interests that pay for
their privileges with expensive lobbying of
legislators.
We may see a particular structural model, then,
as a mode of communication by which individuals, and cultural/political organizations of
individuals, can freely contribute to the
common well and drink from it, without being drowned in some doctrine of forced behavior.9
The motivation for Lim, et al, derives from Bar- Yam's extensive research in complex systems,
culminating in the theory of multi-scale variety. This theory generalizes the principle that
lateral, rather than hierarchical, distribution of activity and information drives system
effectiveness: "In considering the requirements of multi-scale variety more generally, we can state
that for a system to be effective, it must be able to coordinate the right number of components to
serve each task, while allowing the independence of other sets of components to perform their
respective tasks without binding the actions of
one such set to another." 10
Underlying is a hidden assumption we wish to make obvious: human free will transcends cultural and
political boundaries; if the means to cooperate is available, the will follows.
The means to guarantee entitlements - food, clothing, shelter, education and mobility - is a
logistics problem.
We want to explore how high-tech logistics
management of many small and redundant
systems, linked in a robust global network,
makes it possible to guarantee equal global
sharing of resources without depriving
individuals of personal access and use of as
much property as they can acquire, in unequal
measure. The idea of ownership in this model
shifts from control of people to control of real
property in a distributed system:
Bar-Yam introduced multi-scale variety, the idea
that independent subsystems allowed to organize
around task coordination at different times on
different scales, makes the larger system
effective. One can summarize: locally efficient
use of resources assures global effectiveness in
the creative growth of resource availability -
with the caveat that local subsystems remain
independent, because otherwise the drain on
local resources will reduce subsystem
effectiveness and cause an undesirable positive
feedback loop by lack of sufficiently varied
resources to sustain required tasks.
A remarkable 2006 result of Dan Braha and
Yaneer Bar-Yam 17 demonstrated that in a selforganized
communication network, a
continuously shifting hub of distributed activity
causes the map to sometimes vary quickly and
radically on local scales over short time
intervals, even while the map itself shows little
global change aggregated over long time
intervals.
This abstract model would mirror complex
military movements and communications, if we
considered the map as a theater of operations thesize of the globe. That is, each communicator in
the network has at their workstation all the
necessary resources to deliver a message and
coordinate events, sometimes acting as the hub
of activity, sometimes as the beneficiary of
information and sometimes as provider of
information. Point is, the metastability of the
system over time suggests that a continually
shifting range of activity represented by
changing hub configurations is self limiting; as a
result, the global domain is largely protected
from the danger of positive feedback - i.e., a loss
of system control and potential widespread selfreinforcing
destruction.
Etc.
