We Need Public Trust (And Scalable Verification Methods), Not Just Public Institutions

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In ongoing discussion with friends at the Public Banking Institute, we often return to a state of talking past one another.

It's obviously my fault. Trying to think ahead always seems to come across as opposition - especially if articulated clumsily. At least initially.

Guess I really do need more practice at saying "Yes, And" instead of "No, But."

It's not enough to think .... one needs to constantly PRACTICE all the arbitrary hand-shaking protocols too, just to effectively communicate with all parts of your own, diversifying electorate.

Does the following help?

Some of my PBI friends (not all) get so involved in local projects that they tend to forget about the implications of national policy.

I am NOT dismissing anything about Public Banking. In fact, I couldn't agree more. There should be many more Public Banks, at every level. Nationalize TBTJ mega-banks. "State-alize" many regional banks, and "County-ize" & "City-ize" many local banks. It's necessary.

That still won't be enough to restore our cultural agility. Not now, and not ever.

I am trying to think ahead, and consider why Public Banking will always be necessary but not sufficient. There are further issues that must be included in the mix. That's why I keep bringing up the "3i's" of contingency management.

Impact;
In-Flight;
Instigators.
...If you don't address all 3, simultaneously, you can't win (excepting luck).

That advice applies not just to current frictions, but also to our own future actions, and selves.

So one obvious implication sticks in my mind. No amount of practice at local tactics (or regional strategy) replaces interleaved attention to national policy. That's just common sense. The inverse is also true, of course. We need both, not either in isolation.

You cannot tell from the presence of public banks alone whether a public is ceding national policy space to NeoLiberal ideologues.

The archetypical Public Bank, the state Bank of North Dakota has had zero impact opposing the slow return of NeoLiberal national fiscal policy the past 80 years. There's no evidence that they even tried!

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, for example, is a Public Bank. Heck, Congress is a Public Institution too. 

None of that means that any public institution is immune to being co-opted by Control Frauds. 

Foxes will always seek to be appointed to head local, regional and national Hen Houses. Our need isn't just for more hen houses - which we always need. We ALSO need continuously evolving methods for keeping our own foxes under control.

Plus, those new methods must be more scalable than previous and current methods.

So I'm always thinking of ways to have our public banks AND our national policy too. To me, that's the minimal challenge worth pursuing. Otherwise, you're saying "No class war or Control Frauds in local politics, but they are ok in national government." Lots of luck with that approach.

That is not setting our sights high enough.

The root issue is trust (AND to verify).

If we can't trust private enterprise to run all banks, what can we trust private enterprise to run? Garbage collection? Police Departments? Our MICC?

If we want institutions we can trust, regulate the damn industries!

The root solution is regulatory methods.

What we really want is evolving methods for maintaining Public Regulation ... of all industry sectors, and all components, private or public. That timeless logic is the only way I see how to tackle our exponentially rising organizational tasks.

"More is Different" - it sure is. So how do growing human populations manage more of themselves?

By always bridging FROM current-scale methods TO our emerging, larger-scale behaviors, with NEW METHODS ... that's how. In plain words, that means by ALWAYS thinking ahead, and NOT just on what we're already working on today.

Every 50 years or less, we have a wholly new scale of organizational issues. Issues that today's methods and institutions won't adequately address.

How will we regulate all our emerging, scale-dependent activities?

Not by micromanaging every discipline, but by instilling subtle, new methods allowing us to continuously regulate distributed TRUST, and thereby cultural resiliency. The key issue is to constantly improve the quality (including tempo) of decision-making that is always increasingly distributed.

We can't do that by scaling up committees, or micromanaging existing processes.

Take the ancient example of siRNA allowing micro-regulation of massively larger genomes, and thereby eventually enabling massively multi-cellular species, eventually called Eukaryotes (e.g., humans). We couldn't have evolved just by having more "public" proteins. That's like expecting to put enough police cars on the streets to enforce all traffic laws. That approach - regulating self with more self - just won't scale.

Similarly, stages of larger-scale human culture were possible only after invention of language, writing and other miniaturized, "scalable" technologies.

Again. Self-regulation of more self, by micro-management WITH more self, just doesn't scale.

Replacing self-regulation with ingenious micro-regulation technology allows us to have our "more" and organize it too. All we need from our growing population is their feedback, not distributed-regulation with their actual selves.

Take the same principle applied to Blue Collar policing. The breakthrough method for retaining trust in police is public verification, i.e., not only adding more layers of "Public Policing" but adding miniature lapel-cameras to every cop on the beat.

Face it. We'll never trust enough of our accountants and bankers - public or private - until they wear lapel-cameras too, or something analogous.

What we're doing now is never enough, because there'll be more of everything tomorrow, and more is always different, because interdependencies that are insignificant at one scale eventually become significant - or overwhelming - at another scale.

Ancient cathedral builders learned that, the hard way. So do all people in all professions, ... but never fast enough.

Achieving Public Regulation comes down to inventing subtle new methods for monitoring key portions of increasingly distributed decision-making, so that we can maintain alignment across our growing electorate, and retain trust in ourselves.

There are always more insanely great things our aggregate can achieve .. but only if we invent ways to trust and verify the aggregate utility of our own, distributed actions.

Or regulate.

No Wonder Fed Bankers Wear Dark Suits ....

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

So no one will bother looking for the splatters .... while Fed guys claim that they're valiantly pissing into the wind? (On demand? Following whose demand? Not aggregate, that's for sure.)

A top regulator threatens to hold his breath until the evil culture on Wall Street changes.

:(

They doth protest too much?

While getting rich in the process?

(What do we pay Fed "regulators" for anyway? To just LOOK like regulators?)

How To Usefully Interact With Conservatives .... And Progressives Too

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Systems do not work in isolation, and the well-being of a person - or a culture of citizens - depends upon the well-being of all the interacting body & cultural systems.

Ya think? So why do we constantly hear liberals/progressives saying that "Conservatives" are at odds with evolution because nothing ever stays the same, while "Progressives" understand we live in a constantly evolving world?

And, why do we constantly hear conservatives saying that "Progressives" are dangerous fools because they don't understand how things work, and want to change everything?

The reality is that there are no unitary Conservatives and Progressives. That is a myth, which too many of us accept as fact, about ourselves. We should know better.

Rather than this myth, the reality is that there is, in every organized system, a continuous spectrum, between those components acting as foundation material, and those components taking the risk of testing what has to start changing as context changes - call them physiological StemCell characteristics, or cultural StemHuman characteristics. Arbitrarily DIVIDING a continuous, undivisible spectrum of complex_component characteristics is senseless and impossible to start with. As Lincoln so aptly noted, a house divided cannot stand.

So why do so many cultures - who are composed of continuous spectra of personality characteristics - so often find themselves pushed and pulled into two, mindlessly opposing and artificial groupings, and then prodded to make civil war, not culture?

Perhaps cultural Civil War is most commonly the result of a 3rd grouping, of cultural parasites, which recruit host components into a cycle of being confused, distracted, divided, and conquered? There are endless tomes written on the topic of social parasites, aka, the "British Strategy" (or simply "politics"), that I'll leave readers to research it on their own.

For now, in the USA, take our conservative/progressive Civil War ... PLEASE!

Have you ever considered simply declining to participate? Instead of being drafted, or volunteering, in yet another senseless war - that benefits no one except various forms of "conflict-industrial-Congressional-complex" social parasites - JUST SAY NO?

The CICC social parasites are the only ones who benefit when you do participate in conflict. Yet we needn't hate them either. Social parasites are simply the consultants that social species hire to search out "bugs" in their social strategies. Cultural evolution is dramatically accelerated by simply regulating resilient defenses against the operational hijacking opportunities that parasites expose. Our job is to simply apply routine patches to our democracy & culture, through timely re-regulation of our own CICC parasites. They don't own us. We own them. We just have to act like owners.

How do we NOT take sides and be drafted into a grouping that breaks up & parasitizes the very affinity that builds Democracy and culture? 

Change your perspective. Once you look at our own situation as though a different context, you can then re-interpret ALL of the same data, differently. Don't accept the paradigm of the CICC parasites.

Here's one alternative to retain affinity and culture, and be able to say ... "I never met a [citizen] I didn't like."

Simply look at the range of the ~320million US citizens, diverse disciplines and many public/private institutions the same way you look at the ~30Trillion cells, ~300cell-types and ~70organs in your own body. None of these grouping need EVER be at civil war! In fact, both aggregates will quite obviously sink or swim together, with the "co-citizens" of their aggregate. The highest return, by far, is the return-on-coordination (teamwork), so all other returns simply don't matter in the long run.

Once you throw off the CICC parasite propaganda, and recover your natural perspective on your own aggregate, a simpler context emerges.

Individual humans are all mosaics displaying both conservative and progressive tendencies as given characteristics in given contexts. If you tally the "yea" or "nay" of an aggregate, on 10,001 topics, you'll find that no two people are equally conservative or progressive on every single topic, nor even consistent on the same topics across different contexts! We are NOT consistent. Instead, we are incredibly diverse. Further, we use that diversity to build the very resiliency that makes both our individual behavior complex and our culture resilient, wealthy and capable. It's an inescapable fact that coordinated diversity drives the success of all social species - whether the social-cells making up  your body, or the social-humans making up your culture.

In may help many people to re-visualize citizens as displaying either Foundation-human or Stem-human characteristics, ON EVERY TOPIC INDEPENDENTLY, not as citizens consistently for or against change on every topic equally.

Once our instantaneous behaviors on every topic are re-described in terms of variable, context-dependent, Foundation-human or Stem-human characteristics, we can picture everyone standing on everyone else's shoulders, ala Isaac Newton - just in interleaved fashion, on all topics simultaneously. That, in a nutshell, is what social species do. ESPECIALLY humans! Human citizens have multifaceted behaviors, personalities and skills, and we all interleave our complex behavioral characteristics together in complex patterns, in real time.

It would surprise no one overmuch to find, say, a religious conservative who plays evenings in a progressive jazz band. Or a social progressive who strictly adheres to conservative diet and lifestyle habits. No single example of mixed conservative/progressive traits would surprise us, for given topics in a given context. We are all mosaics, and change our characteristics to fit context, once altered context is recognized.

Try declining to participate in social frictions urged by CICC social parasites?

So do we EVER need to argue over details? Instead, simply interleave your instantaneous duties, and always help drive Adaptive Social Selection. That's easier if a little patience is applied. Just remember that conservative-tendencies and progressive-tendencies on every instantaneous topic boil down to a simple selection task. For us to thrive as a culture, all our interleaved conservative tendencies on a given subject must simply help select what to keep, from all the progressive inventions offered up by our progressive tendencies.

The Progressive characteristics in all of us take on the risk of standing on the shoulders of Conservatives. Meanwhile, the Conservative characteristics in all of us need only sit back and help select from Progressive inventions. To interleave many selections simultaneously, we invariably practice multi-variate evolution, socially as well as physiologically.*

What could be simpler? Conservatives & Progressives arguing on given topics is pretty much a case of grandparents & grandchildren arguing. It's pointless, and always completely out of context.

###

* There's a simple message - for us as citizens - from all thinking about systems. Namely, that multi-variate adaptation in human aggregates tracks development of diverse perspectives in the electorate. When it comes to developing good citizens, hopefully even our own conservative characteristics can always appreciate the value of a traditional Liberal education.

An electorate can't optimally review data without juggling contexts as well. That's a simple rule of, say, combinatorial chemistry, and multi-variate analysis as well.

If an electorate can't visualize it's own complexity and diversity, it can't leverage it, to explore expanding group options.

Are WE Ready to Let This Make a Difference This Time?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Attention couch potato nation. Here's another reason to git yer arse off the couch. Are you game for an effort that actually matters?

Winslow Wheeler: Treason They Name is F-35A — We Expect Hagel to “Do A Cheney”

Have we seen this all before? Sure.

It Was 30 Years Ago Today. And that wasn't the first, or even the last time.

The best way to rob any institution is to own it, regardless of whether it's a bank, priesthood, arms contractor, DoD, hospital, insurer, pharmaceutical, Congress, POTUS or SCOTUS. Comically, WE, collectively, own all those institutions! With a minimal effort, we could rob the robbers right back, so fast they'd never know what hit 'em. How? We'd invent a secret process, code named "REGU".
REGU is too secret to divulge here. However, to use it, we simply need to start acting like an owner. Do you prefer to regu early, regu now, or regu-late? If you prefer an ounce of prevention over a pound of cure, then it's simply a matter of preparation.

Where do YOU start?Are you ticked off by the arrogance of the Mil-Industrial-Congressional-Complex?

Do you realize that dominance of the MICC simply means that there isn't any viable CICC? (Citizen's Industrial Congressional Complex, aka Democracy - to care for the general welfare of the people.)

What'cha gonna do about that? Just settle back with more Bud & Cheetos and wait for diabetes to kick in?

There are ~3140 counties in the USA. To make a CICC a viable complex, we can't tell anyone what to do in their local county. We can only point out that we need a citizen's alternative to the GOP/DNP duopoly owned by the 1%. Instead of telling each other what to do, let's instead set some consensus outcome targets, and then amaze ourselves with our distributed ingenuity. If every eligible voter in the USA bribes one another with $1, that's ~140 million in campaign donations right off the bat, and collectively it won't cost us a single penny! Just talk to each other, and quit funneling organizational fees to the uber-merchant class.

Let's keep in touch daily, and compare notes on how our nationwide CICC is shaping up.