The invisible hand has finally vanished
Yesterday evening I took part in a wide-ranging discussion in London that included a number of senior civil servants. Although I need to respect the anonymity of the participants, I do have permission to mention one fairly abstract point that caught my interest.
A view was expressed that rising complexity in an instantaneously interconnected and interdependent world has reached the point where governments can no longer exert control. Now, without debating the point about whether governments were ever really in control, I would agree that the complexity of what they deal with is certainly increasing.
However, for the last couple of decades or so, governments have had a meta-narrative that absolved them from any need for overall control. This story asserted that the invisible hand of the market would automatically organize all the complexity of the world. Unfortunately this belief is one of the casualties of the financial crisis, along with the efficient market hypothesis. Not only did the markets not manage complexity, they actively created disorder.
There is now a narrative vacuum: no new big story to explain where control will come from next. Trust in government is waning and this can only make things worse. None of the major political parties, in the UK at least, has anything to offer on this front, so if credible control is important to our sense of government competence, we have a problem. As it says in Proverbs, without a big story the people perish.
Here’s a big story narrative from Buckminster Fuller (Grunch of Giants -1983) that sheds light on this unprecedented evolutionary transition. Given what has has happened in the ensuing 25 years with the advent of the Internet and its host of social networking tools, what Fuller was pointing too seems all the more true and in urgent need of recognition.
“The new human networks’ emergence represents the natural evolutionary expansion into the just completed, thirty-years-in-its-building-world-embracing, physical communications network. The new reorienting of human networking constitutes the heart-and-mind-pumped flow of life and intellect into the world arteries…
“The world-integrating networking self-multiplies and accelerates”…”As the networking accelerates humanity into a spherically embracing, spontaneous union, yesterday’s locally autonomous, self-preoccupied governments are left in the exclusive control of yesterday’s most selfishly successful and entrenched minorities. The present U.S.A. 1982 administration was elected by the votes of only one-seventh of the U.S. population and it spent $170 million-more than five times the money raised by their opponents-to buy their victory. The networks’ people, aware that a U.S. presidency costs $50 million, a senatorship $10 million, and a representative’s seat $5 million, observe that the TV era governments are corrupt, wherefore they spontaneously abhor and abstain from further voting.
Gradually discovering that the networking abandonment of the voting booth was the true cause of their claimed “overwhelming majority,” the incumbent administration, fearful of a potential rejective voting tidal wave of the inter-networked world people, will probably try in vain to block networking. Because networking is apolitical and amorphous, it has no “cells” to be attacked, as did the communism of former decades. The fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the ocean.
As elucidated in Critical Path, the net resultant developmental patterning of human affairs is always the progressively integrating product of:
(1) cosmic evolution;
(2) the integrated evolution of myriads of individual human fear-and-longing-motivated initiatives.
Both number one evolution and number two evolution conform strictly to cosmic laws such as those governing gravity, radiation, and DNA-RNA’s biological, species and individual, formation-and-growth design governance.
Number one evolution directly follows the cosmic laws.
The individuals of number two evolution are generally unaware of the cosmic laws and bumble their myriads of individually different ways into progressively more complex scenarios, all of which are ultimately and all-unknowingly both intercomplementary and governed by the same cosmic laws controlling evolution number one’s two interweaving components, i.e. its certainties and its trial-anderror-conducted experimental initiatives.
Humanity is an experimental initiative of Universe. The experiment is to discover whether the complex of cosmic laws can maintain the integrity of eternal regeneration while allowing the mind of the species homo sapiens on the little planet Earth to discover and use some of the mathematical laws governing the design of Universe, whereby those humans can by trial and error develop subjectively from initial ignorance into satisfactorily informed, successful local-Universe monitors of all physically and metaphysically critical information and thereby serve objectively as satisfactory local-Universe problem-solvers in sustaining the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.
Trial-and-error-evolved steering wisdom does not accrue to shifting the rudder angle violently leftward from an equally violent rightward-course-steering error. Evolutionary advance in trial-and-error steering systems is accomplished by successively more delicate leftward-rightward correcting of swing-over error. This progressive reduction of mechanical momentum must however be preceded by forthright acknowledgment of the error and thereby of the truth which was being hidden by the erroneous assumptions of yesterday’s false self-pride rationalizing.”
The Full text of Grunch of Giants by Buckminster Fuller is available at:
http://www.bfi.org/?q=node/406