George Rebane
[This contribution is a periodic review of a major stave of Rebane Doctrine. It attempts to explain to the intelligent reader why collectivist governance and policies are doomed to failure. The punchline is that they violate the fundamental laws of nature (i.e. our universe) which, of course, includes certain evolved and long established behaviors that make up human nature. Collectivists’ rebuttals are sincerely invited.]
Fundamental Law from Systems Sciences – The more complex is a system’s transfer function (inputs-to-outputs relationship from control theory), the more rapid and comprehensive must be its feedbacks required for stable operation. Collectivist systems of governance violate this law by enforcing ever more comprehensive centralized control over large/complex socio-economic systems the transfer functions for which are unknown, and in which feedback loops are lacking, faulty, and operate with grossly large delays (i.e. large time-late).
Corollary of Fundamental Law – You can control only what you can measure in a timely manner. An added deficit in the human governance of large socio-economic systems is that we still don’t know exactly what needs to be measured or when or how. As witnessed by the continual miscalculations of economists and other elite experts, the best we can do is obtain time-late data from processes that we know are at best pitiful proxies for what we really want to know when.
The Disfunction of Organizational Feedback. Timely and accurate feedback to correct operational errors is lacking in poorly structured and managed organizations. In such organizations agents at all levels overwhelmingly seek to secure their own position and futures, rather than serve the overarching mission of the organization that employs them. They do this by focusing their efforts to please their supervisors, rather than to benefit the organization’s customers/clients. Government bureaus, agencies, and departments exhibit the quintessence of such organizational deficits (e.g. ‘the deep state’). Non-profit institutions and for-profit corporations are not immune, especially those that have forsaken competitive capitalism for corporatism – partnering with corrupt government to obtain favors that only government can bestow, assure, and deliver.
Comprehensive centralized control is profoundly unnatural in the sense that it is not found in any aspect of ‘nature’. Nature stabilizes its required complexities by operating in modes of highly distributed knowledge and control. Control is always hierarchical in that the higher levels in any given natural system impose ever coarser, infrequent, and generalized control signals on their immediate subsystems, which iteratively then repeat the process to their lower-level subsystems. The same is affected with feedback which also gets coarser and more abstract as it is passed to the higher levels of the system’s structure – higher levels don’t need to know the details of lower-level operations.
This is especially true in living systems that range from individual cells to human beings – they ALL function with a hierarchy of distributed control and maximally localized knowledge. And natural social orders from hives to herds function similarly without need for central controllers and planners. It is the recently evolved perversion in humankind which has begun using its advanced communication skills in attempts to establish and govern centrally controlled societies.
Centrally controlled systems and systems with little or no feedback to the controller require perfect/accurate knowledge, not only of the system’s transfer function (input-to-output relationships), but also an accurate prediction of the system’s environment over the desired future control horizon. This is clearly difficult to impossible for socio-economic systems, and immediately explains away the failure of centralized control policies that remain in force and be sustainable over extended periods.
In governance, a policy is sustainable only to the extent that its implementation does not require an ever-increasing share of the nation’s ongoing wealth generation. Collectivist (e.g. socialist) governments hide/disguise unsustainable policies by reducing the amount/quality of deliverables of a policy as they attempt to keep the cost of such policies from increasing faster than their supporting economies. However, this approach works only for a limited time as the people become aware of poorer services, more futile regulatory controls, and inevitably higher taxes. Depending on the compliance of their dominant cultures, governments often forego the former, and immediately revert to higher taxation and other means of wealth extraction and redistribution. For almost a century now, America has subscribed to the latter approach.
Nature’s answer to such systemic failures has always been evolution to more distributed knowledge and control with short responsive feedback paths. This is why natural systems have no ‘central controllers’ per se, and achieve stable operation over indefinite intervals over which they can adapt to changing environments. Humans have copied nature to develop and operate their manufactured systems, from the simple to the large and complex, using distributed control and knowledge, and robust, rapid feedbacks. For reasons explored elsewhere, collectivists do not connect the dots between human and machine behaviors. No child knows the transfer function of a bicycle, yet they learn to ride it by implementing a simple control law (continually turn toward the tip-over side) made possible by continuous feedback simply of the bike’s dynamic attitude (i.e. tip-over angle and rate). Hierarchies of such simple control laws applied at various levels of a complex system assure its stability (i.e. sustainable satisfactory operation). In governance, this translates into maximizing local control, or what our Founders implemented as constitutional federalism.
Collectivist governance (socialist, fascist, communist) is intrinsically not sustainable. The power elite must continually extend the control of government over the nation’s faltering socio-economic institutions and processes. This is achieved by ever more comprehensive regulatory controls, the implementation and enforcement of which require ever higher taxes (draining a nation’s productive wealth) as the state enlarges its participation in and control of the nation’s economy. Of such examples, history is replete.
Ignoring these fundamental principles of governance as translated from the laws of system sciences has always reduced the wealth generating capacity of societies and its members’ quality of life. History has witnessed the end of collectivist policies over the millennia, and more visibly and frequently since the French revolution at the end of the 18th century. The latest evidence of it has been the collapse of the USSR and the Chinese Communist Party relaxing its grip on China’s economy to allow distributed and local efforts to devise their own ways of generating wealth. The conglomeration of such relaxed central control policies has made China into the second largest economy with untold increase in its citizens’ quality of life. However, such economic freedoms inevitably begin reducing the power of the central controllers. Today’s reversal of such policies by China’s fearful collectivist elites is predictably causing a reversal of the country’s economic performance and prospects as centralized control is intensified.
American and European socialists understand none of these fundamental processes, and continue their fruitless efforts to over-manipulate economies the policy responses (i.e. transfer functions) of which they are ignorant. Today the citizenry of these western developed countries have been ‘educated’ to believe that collectivist policies – disarmingly simple to explain and for simple people to understand – will result in the greatest good for the greatest number. And all this proceeds even though there is no supporting evidence that any such policies have ever delivered sustainable benefits to the people.
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