Episode 25
Transcript:
Jay Forrester:
It has been suggested to me that these lectures are more a personal statement than they are a concentrated scientific lecture. I'm going to follow that advice and try to present a mixture of philosophy. Some details, so you know what the field is like. Applications, purpose, and the goals of I see coming up in the future. This is a brief outline of today's lecture that leads into the subject of social systems and their dynamic behavior that we're discussing today. It is primarily a feedback loop viewpoint, or a viewpoint of the endogenous behavior of systems. What is it about their structure and their internal policies that produce their successes and failures?
Now why should we be concerned about any of this? I think we take our motivation right out of the newspaper headlines. We're not very happy with the world we see around us, the political world and the social and economic world. It is filled with various kinds of problems and difficulties. And there's been not much improvement over the last 1,000 years, 2,000 years, in the understanding of such systems. As someone, I think maybe it was BF Skinner pointed out, that if the ancient Greeks could come back now and walk among us, they would not understand anything about our technology and our science. They wouldn't understand the reasons, the philosophy, the details, the techniques, it would all be totally foreign. But they would be quite at home in our social problems.
And I'm reminded when we visited that great set of castles, built by the Moors in Spain, above Granada. Some 700-800 years ago. The guide who was taking us around, pointed out one particular room. And he said, this is where they met to discuss their problems of inflation and the unfavorable balance of trade, which suggests that very little has happened in our ability to both understand and to deal with these kinds of social and economic difficulties. I think it need not be that way.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, and good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 25, June 30th, 2021. The opening audio was from a lecture done years ago by the late Jay Forrester, in many ways considered the father of system dynamics. He is part of the school of systems thinkers that emerged in the early 20th century upon the dawn of electrical and computer engineering, and other advancements in science and technology that began to bring into focus what the endogenous nature of systems is, not only in the context of natural phenomenon, but by extension our so-called man-made systems: our social system, and its institutions.
He states, and I quote, "Feedback control systems started as a technical application, engineering devices like the Watts governor. They were not seen as a part of nature or human affairs. Truth is, feedback control systems are fundamental to anything that changes through time, including all the world in which we are embedded, and all the processes that we take part in". The term feedback means outputs coming from a system that then turn into inputs going back into the system, creating a circular non-linear flow, as opposed to a linear flow of simple cause and effect.
Aside from the Watts governor example he poses which anyone can look up, perhaps the most relatable example of a balancing feedback loop is the common thermostat. The room temperature falls, it hits a threshold, the heater comes on raising the temperature to a target level, and the thermostat then turns off. It then repeats as needed, balancing. In contrast, there are reinforcing feedback loops, like money in a bank account and interest that accrues. So the more money in, the more interest gained, the more money that can then grow more interest, et cetera: infinite growth.
Now, for those that aren't familiar with the term endogenous, it means inherent to, or properties of; originating from within. And all systems we know of, of course a system defined as a relationship of two or more connected, essential parts that produce novel outcomes as a whole, have universal shared properties. The same for natural systems such as physical science, and so-called man-made systems such as economic systems. And as an important clarification, I say so-called man-made systems because one way or another, everything comes from something rooted in a natural unfolding, linked to our environment. It's literally impossible from a holistic systems perspective in the natural world to differentiate any kind of absolute origin, even though there are paradigm shifts of great relevance, such as the neolithic revolution.
And yes, I'm sure someone witty out there is going to say, "Well, what about the big bang?" Well, that gets us into the infinite regress. Obviously something existed before the big bang, but amuse yourself as much as you like. And I point this out about a man-made system, because it sounds exclusive or novel to our creative minds, as opposed to being a systemic outcome of broader environmental influence on our minds, through inference, incentive, punishment, bio-social survival pressures, and so on.
So I'm not trying to be pedantic here. It's an important consideration, both from the standpoint of understanding real world causality and how we fit, and by extension philosophy. As we live, for example, in a culture that has become so commodified; everyone seems to think that they own things, or they are singularly responsible for things. Somebody "invents" something, it's "my idea", and the neurotic, separatist, commercial, property, egoism that pollutes our lives as our emotionally insecure society strives for credit, status, and reward. And it's not just physical property and intellectual property, we have extended this to owning people, as in the case of actual slaves to the longstanding paternalistic and patriarchal resonance; the use of marriage as an institution of ownership, and so on, and so on, and so on. All of that baggage that once again, we have cultivated since the dawn of agriculture. Characteristics, mind you, that do not exist and haven't existed in hunter gatherer societies.
As Nikola Tesla once stated, speaking more specifically about motivation for investigation in science in his purest sense, to his great credit, even though he died an extremely bitter man, but you can see why if you look at his history. He says open quote, "The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come and point the way." The implication of this quote is the same point in regard to the serial nature and hence systemic nature of all development. Like Newton's "standing on the shoulder of giants" quote. It's something we know, we hear these things, but we don't really fully digest what they mean, or the intuitions inherent.
The ongoing, overlapping, non-linear series of serially unfolding influences upon our mind, processed and output in the interest to create. Or back to the social context, the mass collective behavior of the same kind of dynamics, evolving traditions, belief systems, processes, industries, cultures, institutions, and whatever. So put in more simplified and humble terms, we humans can only be throughputs. Meaning information comes in, we process it, and with our prior information, along with our behavioral biological propensities, as linked to eons of biological evolution; forming mental frameworks or models about the world, and ultimately making decisions upon those mental models, hence the thoughts, beliefs, and behavioral outputs that we of course confuse - with the feeling of free will.
And hence a great dilemma. We are not exactly conscious of the bio-psychosocial input or feedback loops happening, guiding our behavior, so we pretend they don't exist. As if we are the starting point, and that is unfortunately a dangerous general social disposition. It's a dangerous intellectual disposition, because it intuitively fights the vulnerability required to really think in terms of systems, understanding system dynamics, because of how oddly counter-intuitive the idea is. And in some cases, people feel diminished by such an idea. Hence to reiterate the problem of the false duality of a natural system versus a man-made system. There is no duality.
And as a general program note, when I finally have this talk that I've been planning that's been repeatedly postponed, which is bothering me, I'm going to touch upon this thoroughly regarding the reinforcing feedback loops that are keeping us paralyzed, many of which I don't think people are aware of. It's unfortunate to say, and I don't like to reduce hope for people, but the probability of getting out of this kind of system before an epic crash where it makes it that much harder is actually very low, unless you really understand the challenges we're up against in the reinforcing nature of behavior, not just divisionary issues like power and so forth.
Now more broadly returning to the subject of system dynamics and the structuralist approach, the natural focus is on problem solving. And within that, hence approaching the achievement of a sustainable, steady state, post-scarcity society. And please allow me to reiterate that a steady state, meaning equilibrium focused, hence sustainable, post-scarcity society, meaning far more egalitarian and an abundance generating relativity where people get their needs fundamentally met, is not an ideal and certainly not utopian. It is in fact, a rational requirement for species sustainability over generational time.
This isn't my opinion. It's the opinion of public health research aggregated along with all forms of sustainable environmental science. It's not about what's right in a social justice sense, it's about what is actually going to work to avoid self destruction of civilization. And when it comes to problem solving, we don't seek it by way of resolution on a per case basis, as you see today. Or even a categorical basis, per se, but by "dis-solving" the problem itself, in the words of Russell Ackoff, a prominent systems theorist.
Meaning changing the nature and hence structure of our society, so such problems don't even arise to begin with. That's what this structuralist conversation is all about. The pursuit of sustainability, both socially and environmentally, because they're interconnected, by way of changing the nature of the social system, specifically its foundation: the economic mode. To void the emergence of major social and ecological problems we face, which are built in to that economic mode. Just as an engine might propel you in a car to go forward, it also may shoot toxic pollution out the back. In modern society today, we ignore the pollution that shoots out the back and call it a market externality. Unfortunately, the pollution we're shooting out the back of our economic system is actually more powerful in its negative, detrimental effects, overriding, whatever positivity we're creating as the car propels forward.
In other words, free markets and the advancement of new products and technology, no matter how resolving they may seem, are not going to keep up with the destruction we're creating simultaneously. Which is precisely the delusion that persists to this day. People that think more investment, and more gaming in industry will create problem solving technology such as removing carbon (dioxide) out of the atmosphere. Yeah, we might do that, but we're not actually solving a problem, we're just creating more patches.
Very quickly as a less obvious real-world, long-term example of this same kind of phenomenon, consider global poverty. Remember poverty is a market externality. Where did global poverty come from? People use this phrase, "Oh, they were left behind. We just have to get more markets there." That's not true at all. They weren't left behind, they were robbed by colonialism. Most of the rich land masses that have great resources, such as in Africa and Latin America, they should be the wealthiest groups on the planet today because of their innate wealth built into it, their innate capital, so to speak. But they're not. Why? Because they had been manipulated and robbed by the north.
So colonialism, which is grounded in resource and labor exploitation, which is also the root socioeconomic orientation of the entire system we have today, systemically manifested poverty in these same regions as a post-colonial result. And of course, colonialism morphed into neo-liberalism. And hence, now we have the spider web of the world through the World Bank, and IMF, and the transnational corporations that don't tolerate anything but so-called free markets, continuing the pattern in many complex ways which I'm not going to go into. All of this is to say that the framework and structural dynamics of it are lost, and then someone comes along and says, "Hey, look, we've resolved extreme poverty by this huge percentage over the past 70 years. Isn't that great? It must be because markets and capitalism work!"
First, not understanding that it was a variation of that system that put those people in poverty to begin with. And second, that it was only upon the industrial revolution moving forward into the 20th century where the efficiency increased so much, that it "floated more boats" as a result of mass, unsustainable, mind you, production that enabled people to have more that once did not. Not actually resolving the structural problem at all. And hence the poor rose up just a little bit more. They went from $1.50 a day to a $1.75 a day and so forth in this nonsensical statistical game that is more or less completely full of shit.
And mark my words, as the market system continues to destroy the environment, all those poor people are going to be increasingly poor once again soon enough, finally removing the optical illusion, as the climate and environmental crisis continues and power systems start to segregate once again, as crises and scarcity re-emerge in ways we haven't seen in hundreds of years. As in fact, we are already statistically seeing in many vulnerable regions today. Things are reversing already.
Now back on track on the subject of problem solving, there are a lot of other myths out there that pollute the general activist conversation. You know the drill, there's a whole class of folks out there that think that the problems we face are really the result of a single willed, selfish human nature. Or perhaps some secret society, or grand conspiracy, or some rogue corrupted legal policy, or some bought off institution, or by extension, perhaps a lack of ethical or moral fortitude and the culture in and of itself. These ideas are very common to the activist industrial complex, quickly accomplishing nothing. Including the corollary idea that the incentives and procedural dynamics, the system dynamics of our structure, really don't matter in the feedback loops. Only the personal wisdom, discipline, empathy, your good psychological factors, guiding people to do the right thing regardless is all that matters, as I've kind of touched upon before.
Furthermore, the major problems we face are not to be seen as an anomalous or side effects. Side effects of a poorly operating system that simply needs improvement in certain areas or parts, like swapping out a damaged radiator in a car. That's not the way system level behavior works, which is very, very hard for people to come to terms with, continuing to propagate the idea that regulation, policy, and democracy, a representative democracy, no doubt captured by the economic systems inherent self-preserving gravitation by default, will somehow magically allow for an infrastructure to facilitate true needed change for the better. More specifically, in the broadest scheme of things. And I'll emphasize that again, in the broadest scheme of things, not in the short term, it doesn't matter who you elect president. Doesn't matter who you elect to Congress. It doesn't matter how moral a CEO or company is, or what kind of governance laws, or institutional management, or regulation you install to counter major social and ecological problems seen today.
The system does what the system is going to do as a kind of collective consciousness on its own, regardless of the actors or cogs, we move around in human and institutional form. Regardless of the regulatory laws and policies in place. Now to make sure I don't mislead anybody here, I'm not saying that it's pointless to care about what leaders and institutions do, and not fight any of those actions or personalities. I'm talking about actual system level change in a positive direction that's required, as per the stipulations in this podcast. I'm not referring to the need to fight back the inherent sickness, and despotism, and fascism that will continue to rise. So that's important to note. There is a fundamental difference between trying to progress things in the proper way, through restructuring for a longterm improved outcome, and fighting back consistent, cyclical, systemic negative propensities of the system that if completely left unchecked will simply accelerate decline, and fascism, and authoritarianism and so forth.
When you hear people say things like, "Oh, I have to vote for the lesser of two evils." That's what's built into their intuition, because in the current democracy, that's all the choice you have. Because of the nature of how the system clamps down and restricts any kind of new ideas, and new approaches, and personalities that foster new ideas that are counter to the system. In other words, if you're to look at political constituencies, there's only one real metric you have to consider, one variable. Are they going with the current of the economic systems mode, or are they trying to buck it and moving against it? Is it Donald Trump who is like a cereal box cover for capitalism in the most extreme, and fundamental, and competitive, and corrupt way in the sense of mafia? Or is it Bernie Sanders, who's trying to do practical, simple social safety net stuff to actually improve people's lives and create more equality?
In the first case, the current is with the candidate. In the second case, which is a very rare case, mind you, because both Republicans, and the Democrats, and most duality parties across the world are all fundamentally conservative, which means they all fundamentally presuppose that the economic system is untouchable, right? But in the Sanders case, he is distinctly moving against the grain, moving against the current, which means that the whole system stands up like a giant monster and through great complexity of value systems, and culture, and incentives, and of course the institution of business, and lobbyists, and insiders, and political campaigns, they all simultaneously, almost through a kind of osmosis, stand up to move against that character and shut him down, like he has been shut down multiple times.
All of this is to say that the human and institutional cogs we shift around may have different names, political identities, moral codes, gender identities, crees, disciplines, loyalties. They may have different colors, sounds, reflections and sheens. But the systemic machine by which they inevitably submit to, and do not challenge as a whole, will slowly conform that cog to function based upon the system's core gravitational laws, if you will, overall. It pulls all collective action in the direction that supports the system's preservation, its structure, its mechanics. And of course the values and loyalties needed to support those mechanics and dynamics and so forth.
As Jay Forrester mentioned, once again, you're dealing with a giant feedback loop that has a particular perspective and attraction. Some may remember the notion of a strange attractor in chaos theory. In systems theory there's the concept of an attractor. It is symbolic in a certain sense, but not symbolic at all. Everything moves around a certain configuration, and you can't escape that configuration as long as the system is maintained.
Obviously it's not impossible, I wouldn't be talking about these things. But the people that come into the political establishment, or institutional establishment, or regulatory establishment, with all of this general idealism, and forward thinking, and sustainability interests and beyond - they are constantly fighting the system itself, not understanding that it's the system function that is the problem, not the internal institutions and the cogs as it were around them. So excuse me for running this into the ground, but I think it's an important thing to really get out there and hopefully plant some seeds in people's minds because this delusion is ubiquitous. And one assumption within all of this is that the origin of this self-preserving gravitation to keep things the same is simply power itself. Groups of corrupted, self-interested people who work to guide policy, influence people, influence institutional behavior through lobbyists, all for their own benefit.
That has actually been the cliché causality, which again returns to a kind of moral group versus group conception of change once again. "How dare these people be so immoral to behave this way?" But such human power systems don't come out of nowhere. Hence the influences of the complex feedback system that create, enable, and support them exist far outside the realm of those groups. They are manifest. They are a systemic consequence, a symptom of something broader that finds its root once again in the very nature of the economy itself. Not only do they have masses of people below them that support them and their value systems, if you listen to interviews with, again, people like Trump or the Koch brothers, or a lot of these kind of hated folks by the so-called left because they are not in favor of sustainability, they seem to live on a different planet - if you actually listen to them speak and listen to their psychology, they are absolute archetypes of agents of the kind of system we have. Of what is required to operate successfully in a scarcity leveraging, competitive, dominance-oriented, vanity and materialist oriented socio-economic model. Of course, you're going to have people like this; of course you're going to have the extremes. They embody the social pathology in their own psychology in an amplified way, that just is a little bit more atypical than the average empathic person.
Now moving on, similar in this context of traditional assumptions out there, you have a slightly less common one, but it's out there in the general kind of more radical activist community, and that's the idea of leveraging large scale crises, as opposed to the more incremental approach that is inherent to general political activism. So you have a crisis, everything is destabilized to whatever degree, you see a door open, you get your foot in the door because there's vulnerability. You try to leverage the crisis in some way to rapidly move forward with whatever your agenda is. And it's logical if there's actually a solid, serious system level plan to get something done. And what I mean by this is I'm not trying to say that the angle isn't good, I'm trying to say that almost every single approach we have seen when it comes to trying to leverage a crisis has failed miserably, so it makes me wonder why people haven't tried to look at this pattern and understand why it keeps miserably failing.
And of course the answer, as you already predicted, is because the focus is wrong. In fact, not only does the focus tend to be very in system when these things occur, meaning trying to develop policy or shift politicians around, as I've already touched upon - for when you do that, even if you do win the battle and you hit that leverage point and you do create some kind of policy or personnel change, it is generally just a matter of time before the system influence returns, and changes that policy back, or removes that individual or corrupts that individual, either ideologically or financially.
And if you don't believe that, go down the list of the past, say half century and look at the spontaneous outbreaks, and that's what I mean by leverage point. The protest movements that came out of nowhere because of some type of national crisis, Occupy Wall Street; the Arab Spring. There were positive elements and incremental elements that were built from these movements and events, but if you look at the actual moments and what they lead to, it's a whole lot of energy, a whole lot of hope, that gets squashed ultimately in the end. And the reason for that is not only the lack of a structural focus, focusing far too much on internal policy, and the movement of people around. It's also the fact that no single leverage point is going to actually create systemic change, which is what people hope for deep down intuitively, even though they don't have the vocabulary for it, I dare to say.
In other words, you can't just go after one particular event, you have to have a strategy, and this is what I'm going to talk about in my lecture in part, where focused people look at particular opportunities in multiple areas of the system, cultural, social, economic, to try and influence things simultaneously. Because that's the only way you're going to bring a complex, adaptive system down. And transition it, ultimately using what is good in that system, taking it with you into the new system, which of course is another conversation, and extremely important as well. But that's me jumping way ahead off the cuff here. I don't want to go into all that, and I'm slowly running out of time here so I want to reinforce this concept of singular leverage points, and why they don't work with a few more examples.
As a topical one, how about COVID-19 and what we learned about our economy, at least those that weren't paying attention before. One popular assumption that floated around here in the US is that maybe it would finally motivate the administration to support basic universal health care for all, as a social safety net putting us on par with Europe. Especially given the tension of disproportional effects on minorities and the lower class. There was a certain outrage that seemed to be palpable for a little while there that you thought would maybe spark something rare in the minds of our empathic leaders. Well, no. Absolutely nothing has changed except the US government and its privilege as an empire running the printing presses and simply spewing out as much money as possible, which actually as an aside, they love because all that money has gone back into the economy, and back into Wall Street fundamentally, which is the only reason by the way, it keeps rising. And that is where we end up almost universally every time any kind of crisis happens.
That is the system level preserving response. But what about the litany of other veil lifting economic awareness that COVID brought, such as the overall crash of our consumption-based, infinite growth, labor for income economy? That network that got shut down. It was a pretty dramatic global shock, was it not? With GDP tanking across the world as people stop working and consuming? Would that not have sparked some kind of revelation? Well, internally there was definitely more awareness in the public consciousness, but no one did a damn thing. And hence nothing relevant has changed in the structure or institutional nature of our economy, both in the face of the cyclical consumption crisis presented by COVID's economic collapse, which emphasized how deeply unstable this system actually is, not to mention other pre-existing and related issues such as the obvious climate and environmental crisis, along with the grossly destabilizing socioeconomic inequality crisis, born from the exact systemic attributes, but I won't go into all of that.
And my extended point here is that these should have been cataclysmic leverage points, awareness points. Where people rose up and said, "Wait a minute, there is something very wrong here when our system is this fragile, and all you're going to do is pump infinite money into it when it gets this way." Which is also kind of a little unnerving at the same time, since people are still sleeping on the street. "So you can pump money into the system to bail it out, but you refused to actually give people what they need?" And so on, and so on as the internal moral dialogue of people that aren't entirely corrupted moves forward.
And as a final point here, as I'm going to go over a little bit, because I want to make this clear, what does all of this feedback, all of this response information or lack thereof from the economic system mean? What does it show you? It gives you information about the system's resilience. When I say resilience, it is not a good thing. In systems science, in system dynamics, resilience has to do with the system adapting for its own benefit. Its own benefit, meaning preserving the essential organization, and hence structure that defines it. If any of those essential characteristics were changed, the system's nature would change as it would no longer have the same structure, of course. It would be a different system producing different outcomes.
Put another way, resilience is the process of adapting behavior within the structure, not challenging structure. And that translates into a kind of emergence that does not necessarily benefit human beings or our ecosystem as a whole, to say the least. When you think of the word adaptive, you generally think of for the better, right? At least I do. But it depends of course on context. For example, if an economic system is inherently exacerbating a resource overshoot crisis, or a pollution crisis, or the perpetuation of poverty, it would seem logical that humans, our agency, would become aware of the issue would adapt the system's structure to change such outcomes, hence not exacerbate or even create those negative externalities to begin with.
But therein lies the fundamental conflict, hence why we are all producing outcomes on this planet and in society that no single person, group, or organization really intends. There are a lot of sick people out there, but on the whole, most people don't intend to want to see people suffer in poverty, in destitution, or destroy the planet. The system, and I hate to sound like I'm anthropomorphizing something so abstract, but it's actually quite applicable, the system is adapting for the benefit of its own structure and perpetuation. It's not adapting for the sake of you or human wellbeing, as paradoxical and bizarre as that sounds. Are you in control of the system, is humanity pulling the levers of the system, or is the system so entrenched that your behavior is actually representative of it?
Now I'm going to stop here and continue the discussion of adaptive resilience next podcast, particularly focusing on what David Graber calls "bullshit jobs", which is a direct response to the increase of efficiency creating meaningless occupation roles to keep cyclical consumption going, along with the rise of advertising and the birth of consumer society, which is also a resilient adaptation. Thanks again, everybody. I appreciate everybody's time. I hope this has been helpful. Again, if you want to suggest something, you can email me or go to the subreddit. This program is brought to you by my Patreon, and I'll have more information about the lecture coming up soon, and I apologize for that delay. Take care out there.