Episode 46
[Stafford Beer:]
And yet the concept of a force which affects everything on the planet regardless of what that thing is and affects it to the same extent so that a pound of feathers behaves just like a pound of lead for equal air resistance is a very difficult concept indeed. How can there be a force which affects everything that you cannot directly experience that finds expression only in mathematical terms and that counter to all intuition treats feathers and lead the same. I'm trying to display the problem that we face in thinking about institutions.
The culture doesn't accept that it is possible to make general scientific statements about them. Therefore, it's extremely difficult for individuals, however well-intentioned, to admit that there are laws, and let's call them, that govern institutional behavior, regardless of the institution. People know that there's a science of physics. You won't be burned at the stake for saying that the Earth moves around the Sun, or even be disbarred by physicists for proposing a theory in which it's mathematically convenient to display the Earth as the center of the universe after all. That's because people in general and physicists in particular can handle such propositions with ease, but people do not know that there is a science of effective organization, and you are likely to be disbarred by those who run institutions for proposing any theory at all.
[Peter Joseph]
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody, this is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now episode 46. The opening audio was from Stafford Beers, CBC Massey Lectures, also known as Designing Freedom which was published in book form in 1993. In this particular excerpt, he's addressing the fact that people do accept generalized laws of nature and universally applied aspects or rules to governing phenomenon. And yet when it comes to social organization and institutions, we seem to reject that.
In fact, as I'll touch upon later, it's kind of associated to scientific authoritarianism or technocracy or some kind of totalitarianism to try and impose or assume any kind of rule set when it comes to how we organize society, even though there's very fundamental elements to consider such as sustainability protocols, public health statistics and measures where you can organize around improving it, not to mention Stafford Beer’s “viable system model” as he called it, which created a generalized infrastructure that can help diagnose and create efficiency in system organization regardless of the system.
Which segues us into a topic that I think many have heard about before, but I've been working on a section for the new film on it, called Project Cybersyn which Stafford Beer was a part of in Chile, which I'll talk about in in detail in a moment, at least in terms of the story. It's a very notable historical event in regard to progressive economic thought through systems thinking. And it's also very tragic when you learn the details of what happened to this highly ambitious project, which could have really changed the world if it was allowed to persist.
In fact, I'd say it's a case study in not only rare attempts to do something different in this world, particularly when it comes the social organization and economics, but also a case study on just how distorted and sick power is and has become and remains rooted no doubt in the competitive market precondition based around domination and fear. A precondition which remains the foundational force of most tribal and hegemonic violence we see, even though such patterns of dominance do go back long before the formal adaptation of the capitalist system as we know it, but I say as we know it, because what we're dealing with, of course, runs deeper than any generalized academic institutional framework in the categorization that we limitedly put together to try and organize our thoughts and reality.
While it's accurate to use the word capitalism or market economics as a general descriptor, regarding causality for much social distortion we see, it's important to remember that it really comes down to the systemic effects of scarcity, the condition of scarcity upon which the market economy is based, derived, and propelled.
And as an historical footnote, I'm sure many are familiar with this idea called social dominance theory, which I wrote about in my 2017 book, The New Human Rights Movement, which attempts to link causally the rise of hierarchy and power domination and inequity to not the presence of scarcity, but the introduction of surplus upon the Neolithic Revolution. And it's pretty widely condemned at this point, but it goes to show the strange mental gymnastics. Not only is it counterintuitive to say that surplus, which is an alleviation force- abundance- would lead to more stratification. It completely disregards all of the geographical determinism and procedural determinism that arose when agriculture came about, and the patterns of trading started to solidify in a competitive environment.
In other words, it's like arguing that greed is the root of social stratification when that's just preposterous. There is an element of greed. There's a cultural neuroses of greed present today, which I'll talk about more so in a moment as well, that has been an adaptation because of the acclaim and social status related to having more and all the neurotic unsustainable mental problems and effectively mental illness that couples with that, leading to more selfish interests. But greed itself actually is a form of scarcity, a form of scarcity fear. It's about fearing that you're never going to have enough for whatever reason, so you constantly seek more. That is a fear orientation, which is a scarcity orientation. And the cultural adaptation is no doubt complex. In our modern age, after thousands of years of this scarcity precondition, we have engineered literally a culture of “infinite wants.” This is driven by status fundamentally once again, which breeds into hedonism and addiction.
Perhaps the most definitive work on the sociological neuroses and by extension psychological neuroses, was a book by Thorsten Veblie called Theory of the Leisure Class of 1899, if I remember correctly. This idea of conspicuous consumption was introduced by Veblen and the book highlights the rise of basically pretentious lifestyles of the upper class, and with that kind of of status seeking feedback between people in society, it's easy to see how the social element or social validation actually takes a back seat through the lens of society that they have, even though no one may see it.
In other words, what I'm trying to say is it's not just the recognition process, it's also the internalization of the symbology or the image, kind of like a woman that gets up and puts on a bunch of makeup and dresses up in a particular way, when no one's going to see her and the question becomes, is it part of the way she sees herself organically that she simply likes to look this way? And that's fine. Or is because she's been so indoctrinated into an image that's acceptable by a society that she can't let it go and has to always fit that image even when no one is around. Social status internalization. We are judging ourselves without the need of the judgment of others because we've already basically absorbed that kind of energy, if you will, and therefore we become the audience.
When, say, Jeff Bezos goes out and buys a $500 million yacht, he does so mostly in the realm of mental illness, I'm sure, including perhaps a completely neurotic sense of dissatisfaction. That's the endless infinite hedonistic treadmill stair climbing. “Oh, I can't be satisfied with something simple. I have to keep raising the bar, and the more I am exposed to that new level of experience, I can never go back.” That is the definition of sickness and addiction. I know I'm a broken record here, but I think it's important to reiterate some things I've touched upon before, particularly the fact that if this idea of infinite wants was the case, and humans were wired to just want more and more excess material experience on whatever level, into infinity, and we have to battle ourselves to fight back everyone else's infinite wants, because clearly it's impossible, then what we're saying is that we are wired to self-destruct as a species. We are not cancer cells. We have tremendous human variability and we show examples of living very differently in different parts of time.
But it is interesting throughout much of mainstream philosophy: The notion of minimalism seems to only be relegated to things like Buddhism, right? For reasons that are not really linked to technical sustainability or public health. More of a spiritual pursuit to shed your materialism and so on. But it shouldn't be that esoteric. It should be a fundamentally accepted philosophical moral disposition. That minimalism and simplicity living with the least amount of a footprint on this finite planet, within reason, of course, in regard to health, comfort and social inclusion should be the focus.
That's what kids should be taught at the earliest age. And if we're going to play the game of social status, the highest status should go to those with the most minimal lifestyles; that are actually satisfied in their maturity not to require anything like a 50-room mansion or a yacht and beyond. Happy with less. That is the definition of positive mental health by comparison to what we're doing today and the hedonistic infinite wants nightmare where everyone is basically berserk when you look carefully and we highlight and we praise all the wrong people. So it's all backwards from a truly workable, societal philosophy of personal success.
And obviously it's not just a failure of education and morality. It's also a psychological imposition coming from the very structure of our economy that requires infinite growth. We are slaves to our economic system, a cancerous economic system. And the best thing that can happen to a population susceptible to the needs of the system is by convincing everybody or having them manifest the idea that they all need infinite wants because if everyone thinks that way, then they will support infinite growth.
Infinite growth being a core fundamental requirement of the market economy, endogenously, as I have run into the ground before. But continuing this tangent on scarcity, more broadly, it's important to point out that the very notion of value is fundamentally distorted by the market system as well. Think about the language we use. Does water have value when it's abundant? Actually, no, it doesn't. Not in the eyes of the system. There's no price tag. Value only comes through trade in this lexicon. And if something doesn't have a price tag, that means it doesn't have worth.
It's only when things become problematic and hence scarce. Value is introduced as an idea, in the system. We all know that water of course is the foundation of life and it has a general value, but when it comes to the market economy, abundant water supplies have no economic utility in the structure of the system. Abundant water is technically worthless in this context. It's only when it becomes scarce and has to be traded. That capitalist value utility arises. And while that may seem like it's just a benign semantic observation, it's really quite profound as it permeates the way people think. We have overlaid a completely backwards value orientation associated to our economic existence.
Hence, in fact, why there is no incentive for abundance in general because abundance is worthless. It stops trade. In reality, however, abundance and the loss of scarcity is the most critical public health-improving phenomenon civilization could foster, assuming it could ever side-step the neuroses of deeply unequal distribution, which again goes back to the structure of capitalism as well. We have created enormous abundance already on this planet, but distribution is completely lopsided because of the fostering of social stratification, which is of course again endogenous to the structure; to the system.
This overlaid system also explains why anything that has to do with resource preservation or habitat preservation continuously fails. Why? Because preservation does not allow for trade. And trade is the only energy that the system knows. There really hasn't been a shred of progress when it comes to habitat preservation over the past 100 years, as the neoliberal economic order is coming for everything.
There is no structural incentive to preserve any of it, even though there is a general incentive for sanity and clear sustainability interests. But that's not the focus, right? That's not the focus. That's completely secondary. Nothing in our economic organization recognizes habitat sustainability at all. The system can't recognize that kind of value, which is again why the system is a system of human death. It's a death spiral. The goal of the system is to kill us off.
But let's imagine hypothetically, we weren't bound by the system's endogenous barriers, and we were actually developing technology and abundance in a step-by-step way, expanding our efficiency. If we were behaving in that kind of sane process in human evolution; in civilization's unfolding, the fruits of surplus would be producing technology and scientific efficiency that would have made, say, for example, half of everything that we need already free. At a minimum, I'm being very general and abstract here. All food would be free by now. All transport would be free by now. All energy usage would be free by now, seeking abundance as a natural, intelligent species evolution. But no, you can't do that. That's not what the system does. The system can't create worthlessness, which is exactly what abundance is.
Which is also why the techno-capitalist apologists, as I've always referred to them, like Peter Diamondis and Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk, they all seem to think that capitalism will achieve some kind of abundance that will end poverty and so on, and they source the “lifting all boats” of the very, very minor poverty alleviation we've seen on this planet, which is actually completely coincidental and unintentional, and it's going to reverse. These guys are completely delusional and dangerous in what they continue to propagate.
In fact, let's talk about poverty for a second, something that will never, ever, ever be resolved on this planet in the current architecture. There are so many systemic forces within the system that keep low socioeconomic status constant. I'm sure some have heard this incredibly misleading statement, even though it's well-intentioned in the progressive community, that poverty is a political decision. It's a decision. And we just have to get our leaders to think correctly about solving it because we can, through redistribution of monetary wealth or perhaps the introduction of more money, such as universal basic income, it all seems very plausible, superficially.
The problem is that such actions are interventions: An intervention of system function to achieve ends the system cannot perform on its own. And the problem is that all the interventions that we see and have seen are constantly attacked as the system simply doesn't like interference. Even if you introduced a total poverty alleviation model with, say, universal basic income, the moment it's introduced, the conservative factions will go after it and try to destroy it because the conservative factions are the true agents of the system's identity. You can't fundamentally change the course of a flowing river. You can only manipulate it to a very limited degree. And that's the fundamental problem and why intervention isn't a solution. You have to dissolve the problem, not try to regulate it.
If there is any fundamental framework, I wish people would begin to understand is that political policy that moves against the inherent nature of the economic system will always falter in the long run. In other words, the system itself has to want to generate the end of poverty endogenously. If it doesn't, it's not going to happen. Does that mean you don't try? No, of course you try: intervention through political avenues and legislation, as usual.
Just like we still try to stop the rampant biodiversity loss on this planet, we still want to try to alleviate poverty through whatever measure we can, but that's only one part of the equation. The most important thing to recognize as an activist, as I've tried to communicate, and I'm sure everyone listening knows, it's a minor part of the equation. Activism must be focused on system change at this point, not just trying to regulate it through intervention.
Object poverty will never be resolved until the system ends, not to mention relative poverty will continue on a whole different level of public health distortion and illness, as noted extensively by epidemiologists in the study of socioeconomic inequality itself. Social stratification is a toxic environment. In fact, the subject of relative poverty warrants another extensive tangent because it feeds back into the value system disorder I mentioned prior as it relates to our hyper stratified society.
Once you move past basic necessities like food, water, and shelter and reconcile a basic, decent standard of living, everything on top of that, abstractly speaking, is just this snowballing derangement of elitist social relations and elitist inclusion, or lack thereof.
In fact, relative poverty is kind of a misnomer because it's subjective once you could pass the absolute poverty qualification, you know, lack of nutrients and so on. Strange as it sounds, it's correct to say that a person that can only afford to fly coach is in relative poverty compared to someone that can fly first class, or if we go deeper, let's assume someone can't fly at all, they simply can't afford it, and that's another tier down of relative poverty, since it's all, again, relative to a seemingly infinite spectrum of access.
Of course, when people say things like, 'Well, the poor of the United States, the glorious United States, they live better than the poor of the third world, so there.' And what they're doing is they're trying to negate the fact that the vast majority of destructive so-called poverty is entirely relative, bringing the relevance of social stratification itself, of class itself, not just the level of this relative stratification, in terms of difference, into the argument.
The problem is the class condition, not the absolute numbers, and this isn't conjecture. We all know that social stratification is not a positive social condition. Does that mean somehow everything is equal and balanced and perfect and stuff like that? Well, obviously not, but there's a great deal of difference between what we have today and what we could call an egalitarian society.
And of course, you know, people love to say that they say, 'Oh, well, nobody's equal. So we can't obviously have an equal, non-stratified economic distribution.' They negate egalitarianism on the premise that we're not carbon copies of each other, which is silly. It has nothing to do with humans being equal on that level. That's about diversity. Diversity is a powerful, positive thing. Just because we're diverse doesn't mean we're unequal. Hence the ongoing civil and human rights struggles we still face to this day on multiple levels.
In the end, when it comes to relative poverty, it's really about social inclusion.
Social inclusion is critical and is ultimately the true issue when it comes to low socioeconomic status or lower socioeconomic status, I should say. The lack of options of some relatively poor people serves as a kind of segregation and oppression. If you can't afford to send your kid to college so they can get the proper education and credentials to fit the income requirements of business in society, really that kid might as well be racially biased against. It's discrimination by systemic force because of income and wealth.
Alright, now shifting gears here. It's time to tell the story of Project Cybersyn, Stafford Beer, and Salvador Allende. Going back to what Mr. Beer said at the very opening of this podcast, he talks about how you can be disbarred for proposing any theory at all about how to run institutions. And it speaks to a very common propaganda that has to do with a preference for basically anarchy as opposed to organization.
Have you ever noticed how people today still literally can't handle that apparently evil socialist word “planning” when it comes to anything economically contextualized? That old phrase, “central planning just doesn't work.” Think about the absurdity of that generalization. If planning didn't work, meaning design, then there would be no computer in front of you. You wouldn't have a car, you wouldn't even have a house, if planning didn't work. Pretty incredible that somehow this idea of designing something and literally organizing and hence incorporating some kind of plan is considered anathema to human liberty on the economic front. And propaganda really is the associated term here. Totalitarianism, technocracy, as Stafford Beer was often accused of, is right there with anything related to planning, and it's completely bizarre.
And by the way, since I mentioned technocracy, I'm referring to the pejorative, not the organization associated with geophysicist M. King Hubbard. Technocracy (critics) has been kind of an anti-science, anti-communist science kind of thing invented in the 20th century amongst many other things and it's associated even with Nazism; brave new world stuff. While of course, as everyone shuns any kind of design or planning, capitalism remains the most inefficient and destructive system of resource management and distribution ever conceived of.
And since I've brought up this issue, what we're really dealing with, when it comes to people's objections to any kind of actual design or planning, is the assumption of a lack of “requisite variety.” Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety is a fundamental systems law that says in order to understand a system you have to understand all of its states and you have to have management processes that can respond to all of the possible states. Only variety can regulate variety. And that's kind of the intuition of those that have used this 'central planning doesn't work' thing. They assume that it's a human bureaucracy with manual decision making in a hierarchy, and naturally the complexity of a true economy cannot be managed that way. That's why computer involvement is so important.
The thing about the market economy is it does have built-in feedback processes, for the worst, but they do exist, which allow for a kind of self-regulation within the system. This is why, you know, going back to that sub-stack article I wrote, socialism/communism is not a system. Markets are a system. You can declare anything a system but when it comes to having certain properties of a system that allow it to be self-generating and allow it to have feedback and some kind of self-regulation.
I'm not saying that it is a good form of self-regulation because in market economics it is not. But something that keeps the system involved in itself, as opposed to an abstracted system that's based simply on bureaucracy, simply upon administration, in a custom design that has no other autonomous properties, if you will. That's the difference, and that's the intuition that people have when they say central planning doesn't work.
Besides all of the propaganda, of course. You know, all that kind of Ayn Rand stuff where you envision a world where everyone has some little plate of gruel and they have one little TV and they're all exactly the same and they all drive or ride in the same vehicle and everything's very homogenous because it's assumed that any kind of planning once again could only result in a minimalistic form of material existence with no variety; with no variance in human interest and so on. We can't meet the diversity.
That is again a propagandized notion, which does have a kernel seed of truth to it in the abstraction of it, about reducing variety to meet more needs. When it comes to standardization and other processes in industry and industrial design, those of course are critical components, but that does not translate into some idea that there's no variance amongst different products: goods, services, and so on.
So now we're going to take a trip to Chile leading to the election of 1970. Cue music. Salvador Allende, a medical doctor, is running for the presidency affiliated with what's called the Popular Unity Coalition party. His opponents in the race were generally free-market, pro-business advocates that favored what had been persisting in Chile for years prior, which was Western corporate economic dominance.
As some historians have put it, Chile was basically an unofficial colony of the United States. And as is also well-documented, profit and capital flows were simply moving out of Chile far more than they were remaining in the country to actually help the poverty-riddled people. Standard operating procedure, basic international capitalist exploitation and dominance, once again, where through trade structure and private property, a basic colonialism reminiscent of Britain's East India Company persists.
And so Allende, understanding this, running on a so-called socialist platform, which is another way of simply saying an anti-capitalist platform. And by the way, I did write a Sub-stack article on this last week describing the absurdity of the idea that socialism is a system when really it's a moral philosophy and an anti-capitalist platform. A very big difference from the way it's pitched in common pop culture. It's called 'Why Socialism Sucks and It's Not Why You Think.' And again, anyone can read that on my Sub-stack through the article's link on the Revolution Now podcast website.
So Allende sought to nationalize the major industries, which were under U.S. control; private property, corporate control, and of course, reinvest that wealth back into its citizenry, along with redistribution and some other ideas to help alleviate the suffering of the Chilean people. And if anyone knows this kind of history with these Latin American countries, the U.S. can't handle stuff like that. I may even remember John Perkins and Zeitgeist Addendum where he talks about the many leaders that were overthrown basically because of nationalization of industries and throwing out U.S. corporations. All under the pretext of course of this “communist” threat. Probably the greatest psychological operation against Western society we've ever seen since it's completely misunderstood.
So the US State Department, and by extension the CIA, made it their hobby to ensure that US “national security” was preserved. National security being code, of course, for making sure the US can continue exploiting and profiting off of poorer countries, extracting those countries' wealth in order to enrich itself and maintain, of course, geopolitical dominance, as it does today through the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other neoliberal institutions.
And by the way, remember, the only reason the United States is deemed the richest country in the world is not because of some romantic notion of work ethic or organization or Christianity or democracy, it's because of colonial theft and exploitation of the global South. It's exhausting to hear this constant buttressing of the United States as some success story. Well, yeah, actually it is a capitalist success story in the purest understanding of capitalism, which is a rape and pillage system. So keep that in mind and throw that back in people's faces when they say things like, "Well, capitalism has one of the highest standards of living in the world." Yeah, built on theft and destruction.
Remember Stokely Carmichael when he referred to the “internal colonized” people of the United States? Of course, the early African slave trade in America, and it's worth recognizing that the cotton trade was so profitable in America that it probably wouldn't be the empire it is now with all of its tentacles everywhere if it wasn't for that early stage of exploiting millions and millions of people for free labor. In other words, Americans have the highest standard of living in the world because of exploitation and theft, which are integral components of the competitive capitalist mindset.
And back to our story. Now everything I'm going to describe here is proven through declassified information, along with the release of government commissions, such as the Church Committee of 1975, which investigated covert activities conducted by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, with a good deal of attention to this coup, this coup d'etat in Chile that eventually overthrew Allende, resulting in his death. So this isn't conspiracy theory, this is conspiracy fact.
So once US power got wind that there was potential for Allende to be democratically elected to the presidency, with his so-called socialist policies such as nationalization of industry, he became a top threat and action was taken, even before his election, mind you, to try and stop him.
The first set of programs that carried through were called Track 1 and Track 2. Under Track 1, the CIA did some basic things like give financial support to Allende's political opponents, while Track 2 involved more covert actions to undermine his campaign through propaganda, disinformation, conducting psychological operations, and further mobilizing opposition. Hence, they worked with the Chilean media, business groups, and conservative organizations to discredit Allende and his party, and so on. Likewise, they created economic difficulties in Chile during the campaign, restricting credit and foreign aid, designed in concert with the propaganda to sway voters away from supporting Allende's policies as if his so-called "socialist policies" would just make everything worse, right?
But amazingly, despite such efforts, Allende won the 1970 election, and he did so legitimately with a clean, pro-social public image. Allende was always active in presenting himself in support of the free press and democratic will, with really nothing to indicate that he was another power-obsessed despot being manipulative for the sake of control. And of course, there was indeed political strife and division within Chile's population. Political loyalties were varied, but one was still hard-pressed to question his legitimacy as President-elect, following the rules of this new custom of democracy, the same process, mind you, that was used by the United States. And that, in and of itself, was a major problem for US interests.
Richard Nixon, who was president at the time, along with his secretary of state, the infamous Henry Kissinger, the mastermind, really, behind the entire overthrow of the Allende government, are recorded in audio, talking about the problem of Allende's legitimacy. Unlike many so-called Marxists or socialist leaders at the time, it was actually quite uncommon for such figures to go through a very traditional electoral process in a high-integrity way, which made him more difficult to attack.
And again, you can go back and listen to these recordings with Kissinger and Nixon talking about this very issue in disappointment. Throwing a wrench once again into the myth that the US establishment actually cares about spreading freedom and democracy in the world. Like any empire, all they care about is perpetuating the system into the world that best supports their domestic and business interests.
Moving forward after Allende won the election, but before his inauguration, the CIA set in motion a right-wing group of extremists seeking to interfere and basically stop the inauguration by kidnapping the then commander-in-chief of the Chilean military, General Rene Schneider. Schneider showed firm support for the democratic process and made sure if Allende was elected, everything would flow smoothly. Well, that's not in the US interest. And the general actually died in the kidnapping confrontation, which ironically generated public upheaval, actually increasing support for Allende, and things moved forward as planned.
And so on May 3rd, 1970, Allende became president and began doing what he set out to do with nationalization, wealth redistribution, and other promises, while creating a cabinet of some very young, ambitious people who believed in a new kind of economic democracy; a kind of so-called socialism that, in fact, did not mirror the Soviet Union, which Allende did not agree with. Allende spoke about a path to so-called socialism that had nothing to do with pre-existing institutions or state patterns.
He took a ground-up approach to ask the question, "How do I develop an economy with efficiency and economic democracy, consequently side-stepping all the oppressive and problematic factors inherent to capitalism? How do we make it work?" without being a top-down bureaucracy, which was the cliché dogma back then. And of course, this is the question we all should be asking ourselves today, which is why this event in Chile was so important to modern history.
But in terms of Western demonization, it didn't matter. He was just another evil socialist leader, no different than Mao or Stalin. And this was at the root of the US mobilization and propaganda campaign, which of course is alive and well today, even though we have far fewer attempts in national governments to do something different outside of capitalism, unlike prior periods where there is at least some kind of push and pull. If you look at, say, Venezuela or Cuba, naturally, any of these countries are still looked upon as the worst of the worst because of their “dictatorial communism” and whatnot, regardless of the truth of what's happening inside those societies.
Not to mention negating the incredible pressure externally and internally because most of these places are very poor by force of global oppression. And it's just this buildup of strife, so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that power corrupts and that leaders are overthrown or that there's great public upheaval. And once again, that's how you destabilize a country. You mess up its economy, and everything triggers from there. And that's precisely what happened in Chile, as I'm going to describe more so in a moment.
But now first, let's go into the nitty-gritty of Project Cybersyn. In Allende's cabinet was a man named Fernando Flores, and Flores read Stafford Beer's work on management cybernetics and contacted him, seeking his help to redesign the Chilean economy with what was called in Beer's work, the “viable system model.” And if anyone wants to read more about this model specifically, I recommend the 1975 book, "Platform for Change."
Now, Beer was very surprised to get such a request, as he admits in his interviews. Up until then, his work was limited basically to commercial organizations. From his perspective, the science of organization was universal, and in the pockets of certain constraints, such as the preexisting structure of capitalism, he could work with it, but as he indicates, it was not ideal. And while Beer had entertained the idea of using his model to address actual social systems; national economies, he never had a chance to do such a thing, of course, until he was contacted by Fernando.
And please note, Beer was never and is not a Marxist. He's a systems engineer. He thinks about organization as a scientific issue. A scientist that understood the lens of system dynamics, that first of all and foremost, as he recognized this in his writings, capitalism was not viable. And of course, not viable as an ideology for moral reasons, rather, it's not viable as an actual system. It doesn't work right to achieve the functional goals that we expect. Scientific, not ideological, and I really wish people could get that notion under their belts when it comes to modern social system debate.
Systems change is not about ideology, it's about what works and what doesn't, adapting accordingly. The false duality of socialism versus capitalism, which plagues, goddamn - it plagues everything today, needs to be destroyed and buried. That is not the proper lens. It doesn't matter what has happened in history, nor what the ideologies are surrounding human relations. When you put survival issues in play and social stability issues in play and epidemiological issues in play, an entirely new logic is built. The only thing that matters from that perspective is what works and what doesn't.
And so, an arrangement was made where Stafford Beer went to Chile to work on this concept of viable economic management, I think over the course of about two years, alongside this group of young technicians, including, of course, President Salvador Allende, who was a medical doctor, and if you actually read the theory of Beer's work, it links back to the human body, which makes sense that Salvador Allende could understand.
It was about strategic real-time economic management, reducing complexity or variety, as it's called, to understand the most important information in each area, creating dynamic interaction between the nodes, in the same way the brain and the human body controls different aspects of the body, but yet each part of the body also remains semi-autonomous. It's a perfect analogy.
Key ideas of the model are autonomy, coordination, and adaptability.
More specifically, Cybersyn had three main components: a decision support system, which collected and analyzed data from various sectors of the economy; an operations room or physical space that brought this information to people, allowing for rapid response for emergencies; and the Cybernet, which long predating the internet, which, along with coordination, was the software that was built upon his viable system model that allowed simulation and prediction of different scenarios.
The goal was decentralization, where autonomous activity occurred in different economic subsystems or local conditions combined with feedback and control for real-time analysis to make macro adjustments if need be, along with adaptability that could counter emergencies. Coupled with democratic participation to involve workers and citizens, ensuring their voices were heard in the context of economic management, making the system itself adaptable to not only economic feedback but social feedback.
Now, think about that. It's not just about numbers, it's about the feedback of actual human interaction and ideas, which is by far the most complicated thing that you can engineer into such a structure.
Not to mention, for 1970 in a country that was fundamentally poor, this was a massive technological feat, to say the least. They had one main computer in the control room, which processed the data, with everything connected to TELEX machines, which were basically near-instantaneous text-type things, very primitive by today's standards, but they relayed information in real-time through standard cable lines.
Which, by the way, is in great contrast to economic reporting of the time in the private enterprise model, which suffers great latency as we see today. Even with our modern technology today, if you look at reporting of industries, it's all very, very late. And it doesn't have much use. It's more of just a historical record than it is information you can act upon.
And that's the pivotal thing to take away from Project Cybersyn because even though there are lots of extremely technical elements that deal with how data flow is managed and how variety is reduced and how levels of recursion are organized and so forth, the idea, holistically, is about having a connected nervous system, so to speak, for the entire country's economy, where there's always an understanding of what's happening, holistically. Not for the sake of dictatorship and control as the anti-communist/technocracy proponents love to assume, but for the clean sake of management and true control, control in a system's theory context, meaning generating stability, not domineering.
That noted, let's now go back to the broader issue of Allende's perception from the Western world. As he nationalizes the copper industry, the finance industry, mining, natural resource sectors, along with manufacturing, and so on-- all big no-nos in the interest of Western hegemony. And Kissinger and Nixon are not taking this lightly. In fact, they talked about setting an example by overthrowing Allende to make sure other Latin countries, Latin American countries, and really any other country that's paying attention - would stay in line, basically saying as a mafia threat, "You know, it's a nice country to have there. Don't go out of line or we will make an example of you like we did with Salvador Allende."
And of course, there's complex to do that too because there's also a disposition that people in Latin America are primitive, as has been consistent with this north versus south dynamic. Well, that actually sounds balanced. This north dominating south dynamic, where basically brown and black people have historically been considered inferior to white Europeans. And, you know, you just have to control them.
Richard Nixon actually had this notion that people in Latin America, like in Africa, were primitive people. And they required more control, which explains a moral justification for the economic hegemony where dictators were instituted and supported in different countries because not only did it benefit the United States, but it also justified this idea: “Well, they don't know any better.” Like the early theorists of American slavery and the black African slaves, ‘they were too primitive. They needed to be slaves. They don't know anything else. You know, it's natural. It's okay. It's just natural. The hierarchy is natural.’ Yes, those things are real in American and global history.
And back to our story, in 1972, a seemingly organic trucking strike arose in Chile, where managers of the trucking industry got together and simply decided to stop the flow of basically everything, generating, of course, instability and anger: perfect for a pending coup d'état.
Imagine living where you are right now with transport vehicles that bring produce and packages and mail, capital machinery and goods, and all of a sudden, it stops. What does that translate to? It means the economy is completely shut down. And guess who was behind that? That's right, the CIA. And it's not conjecture. The journalist who broke the initial story was a guy named Jack Anderson, an investigative journalist published in the New York Post on October 26th, 1972, revealing that the CIA had provided financial support and assistance to facilitate the trucking strike of 1972. Anderson's article exposed the agency's involvement in funding and organizing the strike as part of a larger, broader effort to continue destabilizing the economy and hence the government of Allende.
However, it didn't work, and it's very, very interesting too because the operators of Project Cybersyn, who were experiencing this incredible uprising and instability where they couldn't get goods moving, and they're hearing from all of their sectors and nodes about the problems they're experiencing, they used Cybersyn. They actually used Cybersyn to sidestep the strike and get materials and goods flowing again, which led to reducing the unrest.
They were actually able, through Project Cybersyn, to deal with this emergency to keep the economy going, relieve the pressure, and avoid what the CIA wanted, which was a coup d'état. Now you could say there's some speculation to that. But from the perspective of Cybersyn, it was just an emergency process, and they were able to intervene, quelling the unrest. And the trucking strike was eventually resolved in total, and normalcy resumed.
Years later, Stafford Beer is recorded on tape describing the success of this very issue, and he generalizes it. I'm going to play the recording for you, where he sadly attributes this success to thwart the initial uprising from the trucking strike to the death of Allende and a deeper oppression of the Chilean state.
[Stafford Beer:] I'm glad to repeat this story because there's a new generation growing up who believe what they're told by history books, I suppose. And it wasn't at all like that. Allende was very successful. And of course, the machinery he was using, which we provided, was part of that success. The CIA acted and moved in and destroyed the government and killed Allende. And I often felt that if we hadn't been so successful, Allende would still be alive, and the democratic government of Chile wouldn't have gone into decline for all those years. By a very strange quirk of fate, I think that the very success of what we did in Chile was instrumental in bringing down the government.
[Peter Joseph:] And on September 11, 1973, a coup led by Pinochet, who became the dictator of 17 years after Allende's death, which is disputed as either murder or suicide, we don't really know - commenced - and many of the technicians of Project Cybersyn were sent into exile. Some of them lived with Stafford Beer in England, while others were imprisoned and so on and so on and so on.
So I'm going to stop here. I'm going to resume this conversation and talk more about the viable system model and system dynamics associated with it in the next podcast, and we will go from there. My name is Peter Joseph. This is Revolution Now. It's brought to you by the kind folks that donate through my Patreon, which I very much appreciate, and I will be back very soon to talk about more of these issues so we can change all of this because it's so offensive and ridiculous.
Take care out there.