Coping Strategies

Governance--like theories--should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Is it possible to analyze the Trump victory from outside partisan political viewpoints? Being a disinterested Canadian, I’ll give it a shot.

In my post on Backcasting, I mentioned Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. Simply put, this law states that there are two ways for one system to control another: it can increase its own internal diversity to match the complexity of what it’s trying to control; or, it can decrease the diversity of what it’s trying to govern to match its own internal diversity, or ‘degrees of freedom.’

Take the example of stop lights. Say we have a stop light at an intersection. The light has three states: red, yellow, and green. The controller that cycles through these states must contain a switch for each light. It has three degrees of freedom; in Ashby’s terminology, a ‘variety’ of 3.

Now, if we find that we’re having trouble with people making left turns at the intersection, we could add a left-turn arrow as a fourth light; but the existing controller only has three settings. Its internal diversity has to be increased to manage the turn signal.

If we don’t want to upgrade the light, we have another option: simplify the intersection. We could simply put up a “no left turns” sign at the corner. This simplifies the actions available to drivers. We could go even further, by removing the light and controller entirely and replacing the intersection with a traffic circle. (Doing this replaces control with constraint—the Swiss Army Knife of governance tactics, which I’ve talked about before. We no longer have to direct the drivers; the physical structure of the traffic circle constrains how they can drive around it without needing a control system.)

This is cybernetics 101—but people rarely talk about cybernetics these days. Information processing has taken its place as the reigning metaphor when we think about calculation and control, but cybernetics is not the same as information processing. Trying to express both concepts of the stop light and traffic circle in algorithmic terms gets awkward fast, because the first deals with states while the second simply introduces a real-world constraint.

Simplifying isn’t always bad, nor does it always involve eliminating the actual complexity of the world. Supermarkets simplify the otherwise overwhelming choice of products by arranging them in labeled aisles. In fact, categorizing is one of our main tools for navigating an increasingly complex world.

Governing Styles in Light of Ashby’s Law

If you consider a government as a system that is trying to control certain behaviours of a second system (the people, geophysical and ecological resources of a region), then Ashby’s law gives it two options: internalize the full complexity of its jurisdiction, or reduce that complexity to match its own.

In recent years, a debate has been raging, not only in the United States but also in Canada, Europe, South America and elsewhere, over which of the two governing strategies will work best in our current situation. People don’t realize that this is the choice they’re arguing over, but it is.

An oversimplification of the choice would run as follows:

• The ‘liberal left’ is just those people who think the internal variety of current institutions and bureaucracies is equal to the diversity of stakeholders, constituencies, cultures, ethnic groups, religious sects, and gender identities among the population. The number of switches in the stoplight is equal to the number of lights. For the US, for example, it is practical and possible to accommodate the whole bewildering complexity of American identies without intervening in them. Each element of American society—say, trans people—is recognized, and coupled to a policy and executive tailored specifically to it. Or, if it isn’t yet, it could be.

• The ‘radical right’ are those who believe the government doesn’t, can’t, or shouldn’t have an internal diversity equivalent to the country’s. Rather, the government needs to be set up like a supermarket—as a template or simplified model of how the country should be organized. By putting different groups into fewer categories, they can all be dealt with using the same policies, which greatly streamlines things. For example, treating illegal immigrants as criminals makes it much easier to deal with them. In the old days, gay and trans people were lumped together under the category of ‘perverts’ which simplified moral, ethical, and legal choices of how to treat them. (You can violently disagree with these particular categorizations, but still agree with the general strategy.)

This pair of choices is an unfair characterization of the situation. If you’ve been following along, you’ll realize that the above division is me taking the second option and reducing the complexity of the subject matter to match my own limited worldview. It’s my own logic turning to bite me on the ass.

Also, a little thought will reveal that both of the above options have politically opposite counterparts. For example, the Chinese government seems to have an internal variety equal to the vast complexity of Chinese society. It is using modeling, tracking, predictive algorithms and AI to match policy and action to every group in the country. This level of customization might ultimately extend down to the level of individuals. But if the aim of the institutions is to make each group and person conform to an ideological model of how things should be, then we have an Orwellian nightmare rather than a liberal state.

Conversely, there’s an argument to be made that by treating the country like a supermarket, with a simplified set of legal and jurisdictional categories and leaner laws and bureauracies to deal with them, people will be freer. If the categories are broad enough, there will be great latitude in what individuals and groups can do within them. Rather than targeting policies at ever more finely-differentiated categories such as LGBTQ, just have a governmental category of ‘gay’ as a broad and inclusive umbrella. Having such an umbrella actually makes navigating relationships and policies easier, because a certain level of misunderstanding is assumed: “I know you self-identify as trans, but I don’t know how that works and don’t have time to learn, so forgive me if I just treat as gay for now.” I’m not saying that’s the strategy I use, but I am saying that it’s a strategy that is not necessarily malignant in intent. Also, the fewer categories there are, the less the government is able to single out, or target, specific groups.

How Cooler Heads Can Prevail

At this moment in history, the United States government has been hijacked by fascists. The people now in charge are concerned solely with personal power and driven by deep prejudice, backed by an unconstrained billionaire class. Obviously this isn’t a good thing, and has to change. But it doesn’t mean that the people who voted them in are also fascists.

It’s possible to imagine this same situation, but with virtuous people at the helm. I’m going to suggest that Americans as a whole are good people, with good intentions. The people who voted for Harris shared a vision of governance similar to the first option I described above; those who voted for Trump didn’t all want the country to descend into anocracy or fascism. They just believe that a simplification of the intersection is better than upgrading the traffic light. Simplifying the country is preferable to what they see as an internal complexifcation of government that is spiraling out of control. They believe they are being commanded, not asked, to treat trans people differently than gay or straight people, and that this is an obvious case of increasingly fine-grained control over their personal ideological choices.

I think they’re wrong, because America is too complicated to be governed by people who don’t internalize its diversity. What they’ve done is attach a 3-state controller to a 3-lights-plus-left-turn-signal stoplight. It’s not going to work. When systems like this inevitably fail—because they are simpler than poossible—rulers who demand that the country un-complicate often brutalize their own people to make them conform. This kind of thinking leads to pogroms, and as a governing principle it’s ultimately unsustainable because the country’s complexity is irreducible. Gays, trans people, leftists etc. will always be with us; you can kill them when you find them, but there will always be more, out there or in your own home. The alternative is you accept them and live beside them without feeling threatened by them. Ultimately, we will have to, because otherwise the future is one of endless brutality.

Ashby’s framing, even if it is an oversimplification, sidesteps current partisan language. At this point, it is vitally important for us to have a neutral language for our governance options that can be used by everyone to debate where to go from here.

Remember that reframing is Step One in taking an unapocalyptic approach to seemingly intractable problems. In this case, couching our alternatives in terms of Ashby’s Law when we argue with people on the other side of the ideological divide may give us a common language with which to understand one another. This approach doesn’t frame the divide in terms of left vs. right, but as a question of how to manage complexity.

It’s also not naive; I recognize that there are people out there that are straight-out malignant sociopaths who intend to wipe out any group they don’t like. Fascists shouldn’t be debated with; we have no moral reason to increase our internal diversity to accommodate people whose goal is to destroy us. For them, we take the supermarket option: we shelve them in the Criminals aisle.

So should it be stoplights, or supermarkets?

—K

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