Institutions as living entities.

This week there have been a lot of discussions about defunding the police and what would take their place. All of the discussions tend to be based on certain assumptions, and so it's difficult to talk about that one issue in isolation. In fact, it might be counter productive.

One very interesting article published on Medium took an even more radical position:

Defund (and redesign) everything.

Broadly speaking, “policing” in the United States has become a bad combination of corrupt and obsolete. This is not, however, a problem that is either exclusive or unique to policing. Quite the opposite.

When I say corrupt here, I do not necessarily mean things like bribery, brutality and self dealing (though to be sure these are widely present). Corruption at its most fundamental is the simple consequence of time and entropy working at things. An old rubber hose left out in the sun becomes corrupt and unable to hold water. Our vascular system becomes caked with plaque. Our institutions become self-serving, bloated, out of touch, and inhumane. Time is corrosive and the forces that tend to push all institutions into corruption have been hard at work across every aspect of our social field for decades.

At the same time, the context in which those institutions were born is also far in our past. Both the problems and possibilities of 2020 are very different to those of 1960. What was a good car, phone or computer in 1960 is now a relic. Our social institutions are likewise relics of a past remembered by only the eldest among us. Designed by and for a different age.

It is not stretching the truth to say that effectively all of our social institutions are a bad combination of corrupt and obsolete. Our education system. Our healthcare system. Our food production systems. Our banking and finance systems. Our journalism and science systems. Our political systems.

They are all beyond the pale and they all should be defunded and redesigned.

You can read the full article here. There are some great ideas, and a very interesting proposal.

I agree with what the author is saying, but at the same time, I don't.

Those institutions didn't become corrupt just because someone left them out in the rain. They didn't just get old.

There's a temptation to believe that something has "gone wrong" with the police. But to an extent, they are functioning exactly as designed.

Every generation, upon finding itself in adulthood looks at the world and feels that all the institutions have suddenly failed and the only solution is to sweep it away and start over fresh. It's normal to feel that way, but it can also be unhelpful in the context of fixing things.

The damage has been done over decades or even centuries. It was already broken when our parents inherited it, and if the damaging forces aren't corrected, the new institutions will be just as useless as the old.

Institutions aren't monuments. They are living systems.

Institutions are supposed to be in a permanent state of being built. They should always be in the middle of reform and regeneration. If you build a complex system, you can't pretend that it's finished and need never be worried about again. Institutions and infrastructure are not a one time deal.

How do effective institutions get built?

The battle for influence in how they should be re-designed ideally takes the form of a system of conflict and compromise. The conflict is just as important as the resulting compromise.

All the people involved should have a voice in how the institution is to be run in the coming stage of development. That way it can adapt to changing needs, and react to damaging problems. It can self repair and mutate to deal with situations which have never been experienced before, without having to fall in to a state of total failure first. In an ideal society, an effective institution can grow a longer neck.

Neo-liberalism and the ideology of total control.

Unfortunately, we became enamored with an ideology that promised to do all that for us, running our systems automagically. By embedding the levers of power in "the market" we thought that our institutions would be self regulating forever. We wouldn't need to go through all the problems of conflict and compromise, because the people running things would automatically know what was best. Who better to put in charge of society than the people who own it. Won't they always do what's best for their property?

No. They won't.

Without fully effective demand markets can't function.

The markets themselves are the problem in this case.
If I'm hungry, but I don't have any money for food, as far as the markets are concerned, my hunger doesn't exist. This is a variation on Keynes' theory of "effective demand".

Although from what I've read  on the subject, he didn't really anticipate this mechanism would be leveraged for a specific purpose. His model was mostly about how suppressed demand would reduce growth below potential upper limits, not about how it would be used to exclude whole sections of the population from the economy.

Millions of people have been expelled from the markets this way, so that their needs don't exist. The market, with its system of supply and demand doesn't care about them, and operates essentially as if they had never been born. (Incidentally why government welfare must constantly increase to take over the role of providing for those who have been ignored by private markets).

There's no feedback and no way for the institution to adapt to real world circumstances. It has become virtualized and while its real world aspects still exist, they are simply a vestigial remnant, meaningless to the more important task of making more and more money.

Failures of the market and market failures.

PG&E is an excellent bad example of this. It essentially destroyed itself for the short term benefit of its owners and shareholders, who had no real interest in it as an institution except as a cash cow.

It's a failure replicated across all our societies. Money isn't real and the stock market isn't the economy. The owners of our society are only interested in our institutions for as long as they continue generating a profit.

Efficient systems are not always the perfect solution.

America's democratic apparatus is a related example. By pursuing efficiency, the corporate funded, two party system became the easiest way for the owners to rubber stamp their own personal policy decisions. It is an excellent tool for the super-wealthy to further enrich themselves and to manage their disagreements. But it is useless for managing the wider systems and institutions of society, since the complaints and pain felt by those outside the market are ignored by the policy making apparatus.

Politics becomes a means of managing public perception and "optics" with no real interest in the substance behind the headlines.

Even worse, the focus on efficiency has made the system incredibly fragile. Ordinary people have no redundancy. There's no plan B for dealing with events which the markets are not able to adapt to (ex. Coronavirus).

The numb establishment.

There are a number of diseases and conditions where the human body loses the ability to feel. The flesh loses sensation as nerves are deadened or limbs are paralyzed.

Any injury has the potential for terrible harm, because it may go unexamined for a long time in the absence of pain signals. Eventually you end up with gangrene, or septic shock, or other forms of systemic collapse, as the localized damage reaches a threshold where it poses a danger to the whole body.

Systemic failure.

Right now, we're seeing some of those excluded elements of the system trying to make enough noise to be heard. But the body of our society doesn't have any way to receive that feedback or make any proposed changes except through the medium of the markets.

The only time it acknowledges the protests is if they cause significant economic impact, either through disruption or damage. Or if they cause severe enough damage to international public perception of the state, so that it risks economic repercussions.

Worst case outcomes.

Despite all the enthusiasm, the establishment is simply waiting for the current protests to die down. The police will only be defunded if the cost of keeping them on the streets exceeds their value to the elites as enforcers of obedience.

If that happens, they will likely be replaced with a private police force. This is something that has been proposed for at least the last ten years in other countries. And if you think the current institution is bad, wait until your local service provider is a privately owned corporation.

What we should build instead.

We should abandon the idea that markets are the only way for a society to self regulate. Especially when the markets themselves are corrupt and virtualized.

But we also need to see that any top-down designed system solution runs the same risk. Any total control economy, whether run by oligarchs, bureaucrats or artificial intelligence, contains the risk of becoming insensate. Once it loses feedback from its individual elements, it is no longer able to adapt or self regulate and its institutions inevitably fail.

We need to set the conditions for new systems to evolve from the bottom up. There need to be multi-level interactions, and multiple redundant feedback systems. A system can't be too reliant on any one metric for measuring progress, or any single set of goals.

We need to see protests of all sorts and secondary social structures like Unions and other collective movements as being as important as direct party political democracy.

Democracy isn't only about voting in a contest of choose your favorite oligarch.

To step towards a future where our institutions again become living systems we need to understand that "victory" won't come from any one group "gaining control". A benevolent dictator isn't going to come to our rescue.

It's the ongoing struggle that generates the forces that are needed for functional institutions to flourish.

The article that I linked at first has some good ideas about specifics, but unless that general concept is understood, the specifics won't matter. You can't design a system from the top down. It has to develop through feedback and mass participation.