Bureaucracy and Mercantilism – the Spreading Tentacles of Social Boredom

commentary by Roger Erickson

In an interesting essay, Bill Mitchell examines his own experiences exploring the seamy underbelly of Sport and doping – the spreading tentacles of capital.

Like all good essays, it raises more questions than it answers. So, in response, I've written a public letter to Bill, to specifically ask and try to answer at least a few of the follow-on questions implied in his essay, about 'why' all this happens so predictably.

Bill,
The phenomenon you saw has been seen repeatedly. It's basically what Wallace & Darwin wrote about.

You used the phrase: "... the [cycling news] site I started lost its meaning. It created a new meaning, which is more consistent with the dominant paradigm in the sport – corporatism and profit ..." That phrase can be perfectly well re-summed as follows.

Evolution of .. we the people .. tracks recombination rate.

Seems to me that there is a simple cycle at work here (pardon the pun). If communities don't stay busy setting goals commensurate with their exploding capabilities, and coincidentally reinvent their institutions in the process, then they're soon left with institutional bureaucracies with rapidly declining purpose. Such meaningless institutions always regress to rule by merchants, as the default. So it's our own rate of change, our Adaptive Rate, which is our primary method for controlling our own merchant, would-be rulers.

Once a community loses purpose and lacks bigger goals, it starts pouring it's spiraling capabilities into feeding everything from house plants to public temples and sporting associations. It's not so different from small children building forts, damming creeks, making mud pies or organizing neighborhood teams - just finding ways to express and satisfy their innate drive to cooperate. People of all ages are happy when they do that. No one minds, because children very quickly go on to new games and goals, and along the way continually master new tools and practices.

What if you placed children in a prison, where all they could do is continue making mud pies, even as they grew up and aged? The mud & water merchants would soon rule the stalled prison society.

When adults do the same, there's a danger if they don't change their goals, tools and group practices fast enough. In that case, their bureaucracies become simply another icon to feed, until even the adults lose interest. However, once a bureaucracy is being fed, and - out of boredom - isn't being replaced by new goals, then there are merchants involved who inevitably dominate the social process - precisely by default, because of the lack of change. In most communities worldwide, today, the merchants have won. All our communities and humans are bored, lack goals, and are on the verge of becoming bureaucracies themselves. That could conceivably be fatal. Increasingly, the most visible remaining option seems to be war, and the merchants even run that too as a MICC bureaucracy. It helps to take a step back and ask why all this occurs.

Neolithic people, before agriculture, could organize in huge numbers and construct astounding static, physical achievements such as Stonehenge and the many similar megalithic, physical constructions since rediscovered. Then they got bored & abandoned them for new and better challenges. People will inevitably abandon all of our current, merchant-run organizations too, including our nation states ... UNLESS we set audacious goals commensurate with our spiraling group capabilities. A busy society is a happy society. A bored society, not changing fast enough, is quickly ruled by it's attendent merchants.

What did the neolithic mega builders move on to, in general? Note that megalomaniacal physical construction sites are static value efforts that coincidentally trigger dynamic value practice. After they were built, all megalomaniacal construction efforts seemed to have spawned human diversion into further recognition and capture of the distributed methods delivering dynamic value. When that happens, return-on-coordination favors selection of new and better goals. Vast distributions of subtle and more diverse techniques ensue. Farming. Organized irrigation systems? The list is endless and continuing.

Today, little experiments such as flash-mobs can be viewed as examples of such spontaneous, distributed self-organization. Increasingly organized civil disobedience, whistleblowing and volunteer oversight are also signs of dynamic value being expressed, again allowing people to satisfy their innate drive to cooperate on new and improved goals. People are still happiest when they do something that has greater meaning than what they were doing yesterday.

We could just abandon both bicycle racing and war, and invest in exploring our massively recombinant options ... instead of reverting into mercantilism, and rule by merchants? If we're going to invest in doping, why not dope our imagineers and leaders, so they can imagine greater goals and lead in exploring them? We'll see how long it takes for enough people to become bored with our current ritual of megalomaniacal merchant feeding, and turn to better options.

It seems that human populations are still in a process of exploring how to perfect methods for achieving dynamic value, and how to select dynamic value goals worthy of our capabilities. More than anything else, we need suggestions for what to apply our collective imagination to, instead of to bureaucracies - simply so we can practice, as groups, working on more fulfilling things to do. We need to generate a higher rate of introducing mega-challenges in more dynamic rather than static dimensions. Othewise, what's our choice? To regress and be consumed by our own merchants? Why? Clearly, many people hate and fear change, but we can't go back, and we can't stay here. So what's our choice?

Pick things to change, many things, and then charge into selecting from all the recombinant options that change triggers? That could be unpredictably interesting. You never know. Meanwhile, instead of worrying about the merchants, just leave the merchants behind, so that they are scrambling to serve us, not rule us out of boredom.