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| Dmitry Orlov |
Part 1
Once upon a time there
lived a prince. Not a fairytale prince, but a real one, his bloodline
extending back to the founder of Russia's first dynasty. It was his bad
luck that his mother died when he was young and his father, a military
officer who paid little attention to his children, remarried a woman who
also took no interest in him or his brother. And so our prince was
brought up by the peasants attached to his father's estate (he was born
20 years before Russia abolished serfdom). The peasants were the only
ones who took an interest in him or showed him affection, and so he
bonded with them as with his family. And so our prince became a traitor
to his own class.
Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin is our prince's name,
and he eventually became a renowned scientist who advanced the
understanding of the history of glaciers, an historian of revolutionary
movements, foremost theoretician of anarchism, and, because of his
lifelong burning desire to do something to help the plight of the common
man, something of a revolutionary himself. His memory has not fared
well over the 90 years that have passed since his death. On the one
hand, he suffered from being associated with the Bolsheviks, although he
never spoke out in favor of state communism or dictatorship of the
proletariat.
On the other hand, a major effort has been made by Western
capitalist régimes to denigrate anarchism and equate it with terrorism.
I would like to rehabilitate both Kropotkin and
anarchy. People who bother to read Kropotkin's lucid and unpretentious
writings quickly realize that he is first of all a natural scientist,
who approached the study of both nature and human nature using the same
scientific method. He was also a great humanist, and chose the path of
anarchy because, as a scientist, he saw it as the best way to improve
society based on successful patterns of cooperation he observed in
nature. He had no use at all for the vague metaphysics of Hegel, Kant or
Marx. He also had no use at all for the imperial state, be it communist
or capitalist.
Kropotkin was an advocate of communism at the level
of the commune, and based his advocacy on its demonstrated superior
effectiveness in organizing both production and consumption. His
examples of communist production were the numerous communist communities
that were all the rage in the United States at the time, where the
numbers showed that they produced far better results with less effort
and in less time than individuals or family farms. His examples of
communist consumption included various clubs, all-inclusive resorts and
hotels and various other formal and informal associations where a single
admission or membership fee gave you full access to whatever was on
offer to everyone. Again, the numbers showed that such communist
patterns of organization produced far better results at a much lower
overall expense than various capitalist pay-as-you-go schemes.
Kropotkin, in his usual data-driven way, was
definitely in favor of grass roots communism, but I could not find any
statements that he had made in favor of communist governance. He spoke
of the revolutionary change—change that required a break with the
past—as necessary in order to improve society, but he wished that it
would be a spontaneous process that unleashed the creative energies of
the people at the local level, not a process that could be controlled
from the top. He wrote: “The rebuilding [perestroïka] of society
requires the collective wisdom of multitudes of people working on
specific things: a cultivated field, an inhabited house, a running
factory, a railroad, a ship, and so on.” Another of his more memorable
quotes is: “The future cannot be legislated. All that can be done is to
anticipate its most important movements and to clear the path for them.
That is exactly what we try to do.” (Here and elsewhere the translations
from Russian are my own.)
Kropotkin's approach to the approaching revolution
was also as a scientist, similar to that of a seismologist predicting an
earthquake based on tremors: “Hundreds of revolts preceded each
revolution... There are limits to all patience.” Participating in the
many revolutionary movements in Western Europe during his long exile, he
monitored the increasing incidence of such tremors. (He spent a long
time living in Switzerland, before the Swiss government asked him to
leave, during which time he radicalized a large number of Swiss
watchmakers, turning them into anarchists who, we must assume, practiced
their anarchy with great precision.) Based on his observations, he came
to see revolution as rather likely. Again, he wished for it to be an
anarchic phenomenon: “We... understand revolution as a popular movement
which will become widespread, and during which in each town and in each
village within a rebellious region multitudes of people will themselves
take up the task of rebuilding [perestroïka again] society.” But he put
absolutely no faith in revolutionary governance: “As far as the
government, whether it seized power by force or through elections... we
pin absolutely no hopes on it.
We say that it will be unable to do
anything, not because these are our sympathies, but because our entire
history tells us that never have the people whom a revolutionary wave
pushed into government turned out to be up to the task.”
Based on this, I feel it safe to conclude that
Kropotkin was not exactly a revolutionary but more of a scientific
observer and predictor of revolutions who saw them as increasingly
likely (and in this he was not wrong) and kept hoping for the best as
long as he could. It also bears noting that he declined to accept every
leadership role that was ever offered to him, and that his participation
in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was nil: he returned to Russia
from exile as soon as he could, after the revolution of February 1917,
but quickly removed himself to his home town of Dmitrov, north of
Moscow, where he died in 1921. He wasn't exactly popular with the
Bolshevik leadership, but they could not touch him because he was so
popular with the common people.
Leaving aside the notion that Kropotkin was a
Communist with a captal ‘C’ it remains for us to show that he was not an
Anarchist with a capital ‘A’ either. My own personal working definition
of anarchy, which has served me well, is “absence of hierarchy.” The
etymology of the word is ἀν (not, without) + ἀρχός (ruler). Kropotkin's
own definition is as follows: “Anarchy represents an attempt to apply
results achieved using the scientific method within the natural sciences
to the evaluation of human institutions.”
You see, there are no Commie
subversives here, no bomb-throwing Anarchists with a capital ‘A’—just
some scientists doing some science and then attempting to apply their
very interesting results to the scientific study of human social
institutions.
Next week I will attempt to elucidate the principles
of anarchy that Kropotkin observed operating throughout nature, which
allowed him to make the dramatic leap forward and apply them to the
analysis of human institutions. And the week after, in Part III of this
series, I will attempt to show how Kropotkin's conclusions are fully
vindicated in light of recent research into complexity theory. And,
since stress is such a killer nowadays, and since anticipation has been
demonstrated to raise stress levels in laboratory humans, here is what I
will conclude, based on the work of Kropotkin in light of the latest
stunning results from research into complexity theory. I will conclude
that we have two choices moving forward: I. collapse, or II. anarchy.
Pick either one, they are both very nice. Stay tuned.
Part 2
When confronted with an
increasingly despotic régime, the good people of almost any nation will
cower in their homes and, once they are flushed out, will allow
themselves to be herded like domesticated animals. They will gladly take
orders from whoever gives them, because their worst fear is not
despotism—it is anarchy. Anarchy! Are you afraid of anarchy? Or are you
more afraid of hierarchy?
Color me strange, but I am much more afraid of
being subjected to a chain of command than of anarchy (which is a lack
of hierarchy).
Mind you, this is not an irrational fear, but comes
from a lifetime of studying nature, human as well as the regular kind,
and of working within hierarchically organized organizations as well as
some anarchically organized ones. The anarchically organized ones work
better. I have worked in a number of start-up companies, which were
quite anarchic, in a good way, and were therefore able to invent and to
innovate. I have also worked in a number of big, established companies,
with many hierarchies of management, and a laborious approval process
for any new proposal. These companies couldn't invent or innovate worth a
damn, and only continue to exist because the system favors big
companies. When faced with the need to do something new, they always
tried to buy a smaller, innovative company. This is because in a
hierarchical organization people who know more are inevitably forced to
take orders from people who know less, and often know nothing at all
beyond knowing how to get promoted. The result is that in hierarchical
organizations—and I have seen this over and over again—the smart people
sit around and do nothing (or as little as possible) because following
stupid orders is a waste of time, while the stupid people run around
like chickens trying to get themselves promoted. This is not a matter of
scale, but of organization: I have worked in just one (but it was quite
educational) start-up that was organized as a rigid hierarchy and had a
laborious approval process for any new proposal. This abnormal,
dysfunctional situation came about because one of the founders was
cognitively impaired, and the company did not get very far at all.
Thus, I may be persuaded to accede to the specific
and temporary authority of a superior (superior at a given task) but I
find it problematic to blindly accept the authority of my superior's
superior. It does happen that a competent person gets kicked upstairs
into management. This has happened to the best of us, and has even
happened to me. But to keep climbing up the hierarchy after that is to
prove that the promotion wasn't an error, and that the person in
question really is management material, i.e., a bit dumb, not
particularly scrupulous, but very obedient. I am definitely not
management material: I seem to be missing a gene that allows
middle-management types to automatically look up to their superiors and
look down on their inferiors. I could never get past the thought that
this hierarchy thing is all a big mistake. If anarchy works so well for
the birds, the bees, the dolphins and the wildebeest—why can't it work
for us? There are many things that deserve be feared in the world, but a
pleasantly, congenially, efficiently organized lack of hierarchy is
definitely not one of them.
But before we go any further, we need to address
this irrational fear of anarchy that has been whipped up in the general
public by the propaganda arms of various hierarchical organizations
(governments, churches, universities and so forth). The term “anarchy”
is commonly used as a slur against things that are thought to be
disorganized because it is incorrectly thought to imply a lack of
organization.
Anarchists are also confused with communist
revolutionaries, and the typical anarchist is imagined to be an
antisocial and violent terrorist who wishes for the violent overthrow of
the established order. Anarchy is also incorrectly conceived to
represent the embodiment of a coherent ideology of Anarchism, making the
argument against anarchy is a straw man argument based on a false
choice between an implied yet manifestly nonexistent system and a very
real oppressively huge hierarchically organized régime. The only grain
of truth visible in all of this is that Anarchism as a political
ideology or a political movement is, and has been for centuries now,
rather beside the point.
Glimmers of anarchism could be discerned going as
far back as the Reformation, in movements seeking autonomy,
decentralization, and independence from central governments. But
eventually virtually all of them were drowned out by socialist and
communist revolutionary movements, which strove to renegotiate the
social contract so as to distribute the fruits of industrial production
more equitably among the working class. In all the developed countries,
the working class was eventually able to secure gains such as the right
to unionize, strike and bargain collectively, public education, a
regulated work-week, government-guaranteed pensions and disability
compensation schemes, government-provided health care and so on—all in
exchange for submitting to the hierarchical control system of a
centralized industrial state. Anarchist thought could gain no purchase
within such a political climate, where the rewards of submitting to an
official hierarchy were so compelling. But now the industrial experiment
is nearing its end: trade union participation is falling; companies
routinely practice labor arbitrage, exporting work to lowest-wage
countries; retirement schemes are failing everywhere; public education
fails to educate and even a college degree is no longer any sort of
guarantee of gainful employment; health care costs are out of control
(in the US especially).
We can only hope that, with the waning of the
industrial age, anarchism is poised for a rebirth, gaining relevance and
acceptance among those wishing to opt out of the industrial scheme
ahead of time instead of finding themselves pinned down under its
wreckage. From the point of view of a young person seeking to join the
labor force but facing a decrepit and dysfunctional system of industrial
employment that holds scant promise of a prosperous future, opting out
of the industrialized scheme and embracing the anarchic approach seems
like a rational choice. Why toil at some specific, circumscribed set of
repetitive tasks within a job if that job, and the entire career path it
is part of, could disappear out from under you at any moment? Why not
enter into informal associations with friends and neighbors and divide
your time between growing food, making and mending things and helping
others within the immediate community, with the balance of free time
spent on art, music, reading and other cultural and intellectual
pursuits? Why bend to the will of self-interested strangers who have so
little to offer when you can do better by freely cooperating with your
equals? Why submit to an arbitrary external authority when a
sufficiently cohesive and egalitarian community can be self-governing?
All of these questions demand accurate and reasoned answers. If we find
ourselves unable to provide these answers, but nevertheless demand that
our young people participate in the failing program of industrial
employment, then we won't have them as friends for very long.
The best angle from which to approach the subject of
anarchy is from the vantage point of a student of nature. Observe that,
in nature, anarchy is the prevalent form of cooperation among animals,
whereas hierarchical organization is relatively rare and limited in
scope and duration. Kropotkin wrote convincingly on this subject. He was
a scientist, and having a scientist's eye for hard data allowed him to
make a series of key observations. First, he observed the vast majority
of animal species, and virtually all of the more successful animals, are
social. There are animals that lead solitary lives, but they are the
exception rather than the rule, which is to live as cooperating groups.
It is the degree and the success of cooperation that is the most
important determinant of the success of any given species; the
gregarious, cooperative animals thrive while the selfish loners are left
behind. The striking success of the human species has everything to do
with our superior abilities to communicate, cooperate, organize
spontaneously and act creatively in concert, while the equally glaring,
horrific, monstrous failures of our species have everything to do with
our unwelcome ability to submit to authority, to tolerate class
distinctions and to blindly follow orders and rigid systems of rules.
Which leads us to Kropotkin's second observation,
which is that animal societies can be quite highly and intricately
organized, but their organization is anarchic, lacking any deep
hierarchy: there are no privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants,
captains, majors or generals among any of the species that evolved on
planet Earth with the exception of the gun-toting jackbooted baboon
(whenever you see an animal wearing jackboots and carrying a
rifle—run!). When animals organize, they organize for a purpose: birds
form up to fly north or south, and spontaneously come together in
colonies to rear their chicks; grazing animals gather together to ford
rivers; prairie dogs post sentries that whistle their alarms for the
entire town whenever any one of them spots a predator; even birds of
different species cooperate to repel and harass predators, with the
biggest birds taking the lead while the smaller ones assist. Some groups
of animals do explicitly sort themselves out into an order, such as a
pecking order among chickens or an eating order in a pride of lions, but
these are sorting orders that do not create entire privileged classes
or ranks or a chain of command.
Consequently, animal societies are egalitarian. Even
the queen bee or the termite queen does not hold a position of command:
she is simply the reproductive organ of the colony and neither gives
orders nor follows anyone else's. Because animal societies are
egalitarian, they do not require any explicit code of justice or process
of adjudication to maintain peace, since among equals the simple golden
rule—do unto others as you want others to do unto you—corresponding to
the innate, instinctual sense of fairness, provides sufficient guidance
in most situations. A second instict, of putting the interests of the
group before one's own, assures group cohesion and provides a source of
immense power. We humans have this instinct in abundance, perhaps to a
fault: other animals follow it as a matter of course and do not decorate
those who follow it with medals or cast them in bronze and put them on
pedestals.
This clear understanding of cooperation, peace and
justice springing forth through instinct in egalitarian, anarchic
societies that are found throughout nature casts an unflattering light
on written law. Kropotkin observes that systems of written law always
start out as gratuitous, self-important exercises in writing down the
unwritten rules that everyone follows anyway, but then sneak in a new
element or two for the benefit of the emerging ruling class that is
doing the writing. He singles out the Tenth Commandment of Moses. The
commandment states: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, wife,
manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.”
Now, pre-literate societies, with their systems of unwritten, oral law,
may vary, but all of them recognize that a wife is not at all like an
ox, and all of them would recognize someone who tries to treat them as
being the same before the law as a subversive or an imbecile.
Recognizing that a wife and an ox are different,
some societies may choose to let oxen wander about the community grazing
where they may, so that they can be pressed into service as need by
anyone who wishes to do so, while stealing someone's wife may be a
life-ending event for both the thief and the wife, causing the rest of
the society to look away in shame. Other societies may regard borrowing
an ox without permission as grand larceny, and borrowing someone's wife
as legitimate love sport as long as the wife consents, but the jealous
husband who then kills the two is charged with two counts of
second-degree murder. The Tenth Commandment erases such distinctions and
treats both the wife and the ox as individual property. Furthermore, it
makes it a sin to regard the property of another with anything other
than indifference, enshrining the right to own abstract individual
property without limitation as a key moral principle. This, in turn,
makes it antithetical to maintaining an egalitarian society of a sort
that can remain anarchic and self-governing, making it necessary to
introduce police, the courts and jails in order to keep the peace in a
society characterized by inequality and class conflict. Moses smashed
the tablets once when he saw the Israelites worshiping the golden calf;
he should have smashed them a second time when he saw them worshiping
the idol of private property.
Kropotkin's third, and perhaps most significant
observation addresses a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution.
You see, when most people say “Darwinian” it turns out that they
actually mean to say “Hobbesian.” Kropotkin pointed out that the term
“survival of the fittest” has been misinterpreted to mean that animals
compete against other animals of their own species, whereas that just
happens to be the shortest path to extinction. This misinterpretation of
facts directly observable from nature has led to the faulty Hobbsian
justification of the economic appetite as something natural and evolved,
and therefore inevitable, giving rise to the conjectured laws of the
marketplace, which in turn favor nonempathic, exclusionary, brutal,
possessive individualists. The result has been to enshrine mental
illness—primitive, pathological, degenerate narcissism—as the ultimate
evolutionary adaptation and the basis of the laws of economics. Thus, an
entire edifice of economic theory has been erected atop a foundation of
delusion borne of a misunderstanding of the patterns present in nature.
Kropotkin provides numerous examples of what allows
animal societies to survive and thrive, and it is almost always
cooperation with their own species, and sometimes with other species as
well, but there is almost never any overt competition. He mentions that
wild Siberian horses, which usually graze in small herds, overcome their
natural aloofness to gather in large numbers and crowd together into
gulleys to share bodily warmth when facing a blizzard; those who do not
do so often freeze to death. Animals do fight for survival, but their
fight is against forces of nature: inclement weather and climactic
fluctuations that cause floods, droughts, cold spells and heat waves,
and diseases and predators that reduce their numbers. They do not
compete against members of their own species except in one respect:
those who win the genetic lottery by generating or inheriting a lucky
genetic mutation are more likely to survive and to reproduce. Thus, it
is possible to say that genomes compete, but this use of the term
“competition” is purely metaphorical, while the dominant pattern, and
the greatest determinant of success of a species as a whole, is its
ability to communicate and to cooperate.
Thus, all living, biological systems are
anarchically organized. They are highly scalable—from a single-celled
amoeba to the blue whale—but the organizational principle remains the
same: an anarchically organized cooperating group of cells. Biological
systems exhibit a fractal-like property: you can zoom in on a detail and
observe that its organization is similar to what you saw when looking
at the whole. They are sustainable, each organism exhibiting bounded
growth up to an optimum size. (Yes, yeast can't handle vats of
concentrated sugar-water without a population explosion followed by
collapse, but then vats of concentrated sugar-water are not their natual
habitat—or anyone else's!) Biological systems exhibit all sorts of
complex behaviors, sometimes leading us to believe that they possess
intelligence and free will.
But there is no command structure to
intelligence or free will. Even consciousness has no specific command
structure; the complex behaviors that make us think that there are such
things as consciousness and free will are emergent behaviors of
cooperating brain cells; nobody is actually in charge. As I sit here
concentrating on this, my right hand picks up a cup of tea and raises it
to my lips without the rest of me having to pay any attention; another
part of me thinks that I should take a break and visit the shops before
it starts raining. If I do, then the decision will have been reached
cooperatively because there is nobody to give the order and nobody to
give the order to.
If all life on Earth follows this pattern, then what
about our current socioeconomic systems? What about huge nation-states
and giant megacities? What about the global economy? The short answer is
that they are all hierarchically organized systems, and that this makes
them scale badly: the increase in their metabolic cost always outpaces
their growth rate, plus their growth is unbounded, so they always
collapse. Next week we will take a brief look at contemporary complexity
theory, which will take us beyond what Prof. Geoffrey West of the Santa
Fe Institute, an authority on complexity theory, likes to call
“qualitative bullshit.” There is some fairly simple math that
characterizes both biological and socioeconomic systems, makes
stunningly accurate predictions, and explains why it is that biological
systems go on and on while socioeconomic systems go pop. Thanks to the
work of Prof. West and his associates, we have an actual theorem that
predicts collapse, taking the study of collapse beyond a hand-waving
exercise and into the realm of hard science.
Part 3
Kropotkin worked within the framework of 19th century
natural science, but his results are just as relevant today as they were then.
Moreover, the accuracy of his insights is vindicated by the latest research
into complexity theory. Geoffrey West, who was a practicing particle physicist
for forty years and is now distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute,
has achieved some stunning breakthroughs in complexity theory and the
mathematical characterization of scaling of biological systems. Looking at
animals big and small, from the tiny shrew to the gigantic blue whale, he and
his collaborators were able to determine that all these animals obey a certain
power law: their metabolic cost scales with their mass, and the scaling factor
is less than one, meaning that the larger the animal, the more effective its
resource use and, in essence, the more effective the animal—up to a certain
optimum size for each animal. The growth of every animal is characterized by a
bounded, sigmoidal curve: growth accelerates at first, then slows down,
reaching a steady state as the animal matures.
What Prof. West was able to discover is a small set of general laws—formulated as algebraic equations about as simple and general as the laws of Newtonian mechanics—that have been validated using data on trees, animals, colonies of bacteria—all manner of living things, and that provide amazingly precise predictions. As the size of the organism increases, its metabolic cost, heart rate and so on scales asm-1/4 while its lifetime scales as m1/4 (where m is the animal's mass). The ¼-power comes from the three dimensions plus a third fractal dimension. This is because all living systems are fractal-like, and all networks, from the nervous system to the circulatory system, to the system of tunnels in a termite colony, exhibit fractal-like properties where a similarly organized subsystem can be found by zooming in to a smaller scale. That is, within any fractal network there are four degrees of freedom: up/down, left/right, forward/back and zoom in/zoom out.
Prof. West then turned his attention to cities, and discovered that they can be characterized by similar power laws by which they too accrue greater benefits from increased size, through increased economies of scale, up to a point, but with two very important caveats. First, whereas with living systems an increase in size causes the internal clock to slow down—the larger the size the slower the metabolism, the slower the heart rate and the longer the lifespan—with cities the effect of greater size is the opposite: the larger the city, the larger is the metabolic cost and the energy expenditure per unit size, and the more hectic is the pace of life. To keep pace with the metabolic requirements of a growing socioeconomic system, socioeconomic time must continuously accelerate.
Second, whereas all living systems exhibit bounded growth up to an optimum size, socioeconomic systems such as cities exhibit unbounded, superexponential growth. These two differences added together imply that cities must reach a point where they must move infinitely fast in order to maintain their homeostatic equilibrium: a singularity. But it is inevitable that they reach natural limits well before they reach the singularity, and collapse. In short, large-scale socioeconomic systems are not sustainable. There is a crisp difference between natural, biological, anarchic systems that exhibit bounded growth up to a steady state and artificial, hierarchical, socioeconomic systems that show superexponential growth almost up to a singularity and then collapse. Prof. West was able to formalize this difference using a single parameter, β. In biology, β is less than 1, resulting in bounded growth; in socioeconomics, β is greater than 1, resulting in explosive growth almost up to a singularity, followed by collapse.
The key difference between a living organism and a city is that while a living organism is organized anarchically, a city is organized hierarchically. A living organism is a sustainable, egalitarian community of cooperating cells, which leverages the economies of scale of a larger size to let it move more slowly and to live longer. A socioeconomic system is organized into various classes, some more privileged than others, and is controlled through formal systems of governance based on written law and explicit chains of command. The larger it becomes, the greater becomes the relative burden of police, the courts, regulation and bureaucracy, and other systems of overt monitoring, surveillance and control. Faced with these ever increasing internal maintenance requirements, it can only achieve economies of scale by moving faster and faster, and eventually it has to collapse.
There are many conclusions that can be drawn from all this, but perhaps the most important is that collapse is not an accident; collapse is an engineered product. It is being engineered by those who think that a higher level of authority, coordination, harmonization and unity is always a net benefit at any scale. The engineers of collapse include political scientists, who seek universal peace, through ever-greater military expenditure and dominance, in place of many small-scale, limited wars, but drive the world toward world wars and a global conflagration. It includes economists who pursue stability and growth at all costs instead of allowing for natural fluctuations, including a natural leveling-off of growth at an optimum level, first creating a global economy, then driving it into a black hole of debt. It includes financiers, who seek uniformity and transparency of global finance and universal mobility of capital instead of allowing pyramid schemes to collapse as they always do and allowing productive capital to settle where it should—in communities and in human relationships based on personal trust. Last but not least, collapse is being engineered by theologians who have fixed and absolute notions of morality based on long-obsolete written texts which ignore known facts about human nature. All of these people are hopeless utopians attempting to base society on idealistic principles. Such utopian societies inevitably fail, while those that are cognizant of human weakness and are able to compensate for it can go on for ages. The greatest weakness we have in our nature is our propensity for forming hierarchies, for following formal systems of rules and laws that attempt to defy natural laws, and for listening to utopians.
What Prof. West was able to discover is a small set of general laws—formulated as algebraic equations about as simple and general as the laws of Newtonian mechanics—that have been validated using data on trees, animals, colonies of bacteria—all manner of living things, and that provide amazingly precise predictions. As the size of the organism increases, its metabolic cost, heart rate and so on scales asm-1/4 while its lifetime scales as m1/4 (where m is the animal's mass). The ¼-power comes from the three dimensions plus a third fractal dimension. This is because all living systems are fractal-like, and all networks, from the nervous system to the circulatory system, to the system of tunnels in a termite colony, exhibit fractal-like properties where a similarly organized subsystem can be found by zooming in to a smaller scale. That is, within any fractal network there are four degrees of freedom: up/down, left/right, forward/back and zoom in/zoom out.
Prof. West then turned his attention to cities, and discovered that they can be characterized by similar power laws by which they too accrue greater benefits from increased size, through increased economies of scale, up to a point, but with two very important caveats. First, whereas with living systems an increase in size causes the internal clock to slow down—the larger the size the slower the metabolism, the slower the heart rate and the longer the lifespan—with cities the effect of greater size is the opposite: the larger the city, the larger is the metabolic cost and the energy expenditure per unit size, and the more hectic is the pace of life. To keep pace with the metabolic requirements of a growing socioeconomic system, socioeconomic time must continuously accelerate.
Second, whereas all living systems exhibit bounded growth up to an optimum size, socioeconomic systems such as cities exhibit unbounded, superexponential growth. These two differences added together imply that cities must reach a point where they must move infinitely fast in order to maintain their homeostatic equilibrium: a singularity. But it is inevitable that they reach natural limits well before they reach the singularity, and collapse. In short, large-scale socioeconomic systems are not sustainable. There is a crisp difference between natural, biological, anarchic systems that exhibit bounded growth up to a steady state and artificial, hierarchical, socioeconomic systems that show superexponential growth almost up to a singularity and then collapse. Prof. West was able to formalize this difference using a single parameter, β. In biology, β is less than 1, resulting in bounded growth; in socioeconomics, β is greater than 1, resulting in explosive growth almost up to a singularity, followed by collapse.
The key difference between a living organism and a city is that while a living organism is organized anarchically, a city is organized hierarchically. A living organism is a sustainable, egalitarian community of cooperating cells, which leverages the economies of scale of a larger size to let it move more slowly and to live longer. A socioeconomic system is organized into various classes, some more privileged than others, and is controlled through formal systems of governance based on written law and explicit chains of command. The larger it becomes, the greater becomes the relative burden of police, the courts, regulation and bureaucracy, and other systems of overt monitoring, surveillance and control. Faced with these ever increasing internal maintenance requirements, it can only achieve economies of scale by moving faster and faster, and eventually it has to collapse.
There are many conclusions that can be drawn from all this, but perhaps the most important is that collapse is not an accident; collapse is an engineered product. It is being engineered by those who think that a higher level of authority, coordination, harmonization and unity is always a net benefit at any scale. The engineers of collapse include political scientists, who seek universal peace, through ever-greater military expenditure and dominance, in place of many small-scale, limited wars, but drive the world toward world wars and a global conflagration. It includes economists who pursue stability and growth at all costs instead of allowing for natural fluctuations, including a natural leveling-off of growth at an optimum level, first creating a global economy, then driving it into a black hole of debt. It includes financiers, who seek uniformity and transparency of global finance and universal mobility of capital instead of allowing pyramid schemes to collapse as they always do and allowing productive capital to settle where it should—in communities and in human relationships based on personal trust. Last but not least, collapse is being engineered by theologians who have fixed and absolute notions of morality based on long-obsolete written texts which ignore known facts about human nature. All of these people are hopeless utopians attempting to base society on idealistic principles. Such utopian societies inevitably fail, while those that are cognizant of human weakness and are able to compensate for it can go on for ages. The greatest weakness we have in our nature is our propensity for forming hierarchies, for following formal systems of rules and laws that attempt to defy natural laws, and for listening to utopians.
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Dmitry Orlov is a Russian engineer and a writer on subjects related to "potential economic, ecological and political decline and collapse in the United States," something he has called “permanent crisis”.
Orlov believes collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system and declining oil production. He blogs at http://cluborlov.blogspot.com
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