commentary by Roger Erickson
"In his seminal study Science of Coercion, Christopher Simpson observed that communication might be understood as both the conduit for and the actual substance of human culture and consciousness."Ya think?
Group intelligence in every organized system, neural network, social species, tribe and human culture is always and only held in the body of group discourse. Further, it's achievements are expressed through coordinated group activities. That's the definition of a social species, culture, or any organized system where components operate out of physical contact with one another. Actually, it's true even if the components ARE in physical contact. They still have to communicate.
In continuously evolving nations, overly centralized control of newly emerging communication methods is always a brief worry, but one that is self-correcting in surviving nations, as we'll see. It's really our national survival that always under selective pressure, not just inadequately distributed ownership of communication methods.
The first link above leads to a singularly bitter and disillusioned post that mingles multiple topics, and decries "domestication" of some people by others. Given the source - surviving tribal groups - the bitterness & disillusionment are easily understood, even to those of us that lost our own tribal affiliations and identity a thousand or more years ago. Nevertheless, the post remains germane to currency operation topics discussed here at MNE
There are links between all of the following inter-dependent - NOT fully independent - processes ... including
unit cohesion,
ability to accelerate return on coordination,
currency operations, and
methods for resisting the dis-coordinating propaganda of self-defeating Class Warfare.
We all know that increasingly agile and scalable group activities require sophisticated and unpredictably dynamic transaction chains. And growing the agility of those transaction chains has inescapably led to existing, fiat currencies as notation for many [but not all] of the dynamic activities within a cohesive nation. Those not fully committed to either cohesion or return on coordination naturally resist this, but offer no alternate form of social evolution - at least not any capable of producing anywhere near the adaptive rate we already need.
It's always true that social evolution involves domesticating members of a social species. Necessary diversity in the continuous, halting steps of any growing culture will always bring up kabuki theater about who is domesticating whom. Such kabuki noise is unavoidable and a necessary part of the diverse processes evaluated in our selection markets. It will always feature delusions of grandeur among some members of all social species - regardless of whether that false grandeur is labeled phenotypic strength, royalty or the 1% elite.
The fact remains that domestication in an evolving social species will either involve everyone domesticated by one another - serving net return on coordination - or that culture or species will soon be replaced. In the long run, we will either all hang together, or we will certainly hang separately.
The only thing separating a multi-tribal nation from a cohesive tribe are emerging methods for
increasing the quality of distributed decision-making. Without such methods, return on coordination cannot outstrip the cost of coordination, and the nation that fails to develop such methods will not endure. From that perspective, distribution of a fiat currency should be an automatic stabilizer, incidental to the diverse inventions of an entire populace. Anything less grows our Output Gap, not our capabilities.
Variance in any process is never the root of our problems. Rather, failure to accelerate search for yet another layer of indirection is always our root problem. The only way to continuously leverage increasing options is to exquisitely tune more of our old processes - using increasingly diverse and indirect feedback to tune more appropriate tolerance limits on our growing number of activities.
Therefore, some degree of confusion in any and all governments and NGOs will always be present. Rather than complain that we're still alive in this changing world, our only choice is to continue looking for new levels of indirection. That's the only way we can continue shaping our own coordination practices, in order to achieve the outcomes we aim for.
