Dear Believer in Global Solutions,
Human cultural evolution, and I include here economy, technology, science, social relations and arts, is based on countless and immensely complex interactions between billions of intelligent individuals, each continually making judgments based on individual goals and values, taking into consideration the specifics of time and place, of local social compatibility, weighing and balancing short term and long term preferences, needs and consequences, risks and chances, benefits and costs. Together, all these small independent decisions and voluntary consequent actions over time add up to an immensely intelligent and adaptive system of self-organization, the intelligence of which can never be represented in a single “collectivized” mind or several single minds in a group. A single mind can principally only represent a single mind, and a committee can only agree on what the single minds that form it can compromise on – which is usually not more, but rather less than each of its single minds would propose.
So what we could call “collective intelligence” is purely an emergent phenomenon, it is not the result of collective representation. It arises from spontaneous self-organization, from a process of purposeful interaction and intentional cooperation. The less restricted, controlled and disturbed by human interference or coercion this process can unfold, the more intelligence it will produce, because every participant can employ and contribute his full knowledge, experience and skills. In other words, optimal social intelligence requires a free market of ideas and actions. So when we approach problems, the best chance is indeed to rely on free markets as the best and biggest source of collective intelligence. The more complex, global and difficult the problems are, the more intelligence is required and consequently more freedom to let this intelligence emerge. Collective intelligence is the “invisible brain” that guides a society and allows it to survive, evolve and prosper.
Why is such a simple principle so hard to understand? We are all convinced that the best knowledge is always local: nobody knows more about our own affairs than we, each of us, ourselves. It should not be too difficult to see that this principle applies at any scale. There is no line where you could say: from here on knowledge must come from 'above'.
Yet politicians, scientists, journalists, preachers and artists do not seem to get tired demanding the replacement of our most efficient mechanism for finding intelligent solutions with coercive measures backed up by the threat of laws and regulations. When the diversity of individual fine tuning skills of billions of brains are required most to achieve the maximum of collective intelligence, they demand collective uniformity instead:
Bring in the tanks! Call in the Air Force! Let’s go for the big solution! We need big government now! We need Manhattan projects, global Marshal plans and any other plan as long as it is a central, global plan!
Anyone dissenting? Shut up and get in line! Enough talk, we need action! Mankind in crisis must act as one single mind! This is a war! You either follow or you are foe! Anyone having doubts? This is not the hour of doubts, this is the hour of individual obedience and collective action!
Oil too expensive and possibly running out? We have a solution:Tax the consumers! The markets cannot handle scarcities like that, a stronger force is needed! If alternative energies are too expensive we will force them on you! Biofuel laws are hiking the price of bread for the poor? Let them eat cake! The climate will change anyway because that’s what climate does? This might well be. But then at least we have taught them a lesson in government: if everyone puts aside his little private ego and individual claim to intelligence and freedom, we can do great things together! They might turn out wrong in the end, they might kill millions, they might waste the resources of several generations and even throw us back into poverty – never mind! Historians of a later age will admire the ruins of our giant solar power plants and vast windmill forests like they admired the pyramids: as grandiose monuments of human discipline and absolute political power!
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An inspiring piece of writing to be sure, and the highest view for human potential, IMHO.
If there were possible a truly free market, GLOBALLY, the chances for implementing this vision wide-scale would be immeasurably increased. But a truly free market would require that there not be monopolistic practices, that wages were more or less the same everywhere, that speculators weren't distorting the "true value" of goods and services, etc. And who would assign what "free market value" to the commons? The commons include, among other things, the air, water (oceans and cross-regional rivers, water tables, et. al.), common land (like parks, recreational areas, at least).
In a purely self-organizing collective intelligence, would there be any standards? How would standards be set for things such as coinage, weights and measures (including standard grades of "quality" of materials), gauge of railroad tracks, machine parts & fittings, internet protocols (including coding languages), some standard for computer platform interoperability, to name a few I can think of off the bat. A very savvy historian friend, by the initials of CS, had pointed out to me that, "...In the 1880s everyone and his uncle was minting money, even private companies made money, literally. The "dollar" came in many sizes and was often of dubious value. Drove railroads crazy. They were the first companies to cross state borders, and they were huge by comparison to any other companies."
I imagine Krieg might say the collective intelligence could come up with good solutions, whether on a national scale or appropriately local. Maybe he would not exclude there being committees to come up with appropriate standards, agreeable to all. Not to make too big a deal of standardization, for I think it's the lesser of the issues I see here.
I would dub Mr. Krieg a true utopian, which is a good thing, in my view. His understanding of the ideal, fully actualized, state of humanity, one consciously operating with full collective intelligence, certainly needs to be articulated, and he does a fine job thus far. And without the vision of possible utopias, what have people to strive toward?
As a psychologist I believe profoundly in the self-organizing systems people naturally create when their creativity is untrammeled, and I have seen countless examples. When this happens, nothing gives me greater joy. But what we have among the human race is quite a mix of levels of consciousness. Fear and ignorance fuel greed and powerlust and all the other anti-social acts we see everywhere, pervasively. Among anti-social acts I include acting out of narrow self-interest to the detriment of the greater whole (corporate monopolistic practices being an example of self-organizing systems based on narrow self-interest). Failure to see the good of the individual self as being inseparably tied to the good of the whole is one of the chief failings of probably the bigger part of the human population. I have seen so many people with so much to overcome in their consciousness, in terms of trauma, ignorance, neurosis, fear, that I am sadly aware of the tremendous amount of work it takes to get people tapped in to their own font of (necessarily unique) creativity and contributions springing therefrom. (In fact, my first focus in one of my early careers as a psythotherapist was in helping people "unblock" their creativity, 1980, way before this became a trendy idea, picked up by every new would-be workshop leader, and watered down and superficialized). Full time job.
Anyway, thank you Peter Krieg for continuing in the best tradition of Libertarianism, qua open, self-organizing systems.
~KMcC - A believer in global solutions.
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