rigidity due to momentum and age
Did World War 1 start off because of the assassination of Archduke Franz in Sarajevo? Did Arap Spring start off because of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid? What about the current chaos in US? Did it start off because of the death of George Lloyd in Minneapolis?
Yes and no. In all of these cases, the underlying reasons were all structural and went far beyond the trigger events themselves.
What is strange in the case of US is the chronicity of the problems. True, without Covid-19 building up frustration among various fault lines and unleashing an acute unemployment shockwave among the low-skilled workers, the death of George Lloyd would not have escalated to this level. However, the underlying issues like racism and inequality have always been there, and have repeatedly caused similar social tensions before.
So why can not US solve these issues and get over with it? The real problem is neither racism nor inequality, it is the rigidity of a system that is refusing to evolve. There are several structural reasons behind this problem.
Momentum. Social systems have memories. Whatever changes you implement can get quickly washed away by the massive currents traveling from the past. As in physics, the momentum of these waves is a function of both size and speed.
Size. Larger systems are harder to change.
Speed. Faster systems are harder to change.
Age. Social systems become more complex and robust as they age and mature. In a sense, they become too adapted for whatever purposes they have served, and this advantage suddenly turns into a disadvantage when the time comes for a significant change.
Complexity. Complex systems are harder to change. (They exhibit so many interdependencies that fixing something often entails messing something else. Systems growing at “unnatural” speeds tend to exhibit more fragilities due to building up various kinds of “debts” as in “technical debt” of software development.)
Robustness. Robust systems are harder to change. (They try maintain their integrity and refuse to morph into new forms. You push in, they flex back.)
Notice that all these factors - great size and speed, high complexity and robustness - happen to be exactly the things that US is proud of. But now they also happen to be the factors that are stunting the country. This dichotomy is not surprising. In fact, it is a structural feature of evolution that has repeatedly manifested itself in history.
The social history of mankind exhibits great organizations in their alternating functions of conditions for progress, and of contrivances for stunting humanity. The history of the Mediterranean lands, and of western Europe, is the history of the blessing and the curse of political organizations, of religious organizations, of schemes of thought, of social agencies for large purposes. The moment of dominance, prayed for, worked for, sacrificed for, by generations of the noblest spirits, marks the turning point where the blessing passes into the curse. Some new principle of refreshment is required. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
Alfred North Whitehead - Process and Reality (Page 339)
Can organizations willingly cut the fat and slow down for the sake of increased longevity? Can they rejuvenate themselves and undo some of their existing adaptations to restore a youthful plasticity? These are possible, but heroically hard tasks to pull off, for the following two reasons.
Hard Reason. Competition never stops. The moment you stop growing, you risk losing your leadership position and being bullied into even further contraction.
Soft Reason. Power tends to blind and bring a false sense of immortality. This in turn leads to sudden and disorderly failures, rather than orderly and extended periods of dissolution.
Is there no hope? Of course there is. But first and foremost, you need solidarity and perseverance.
Solidarity. Look how little Obama has achieved. Tone down your belief in heroic individualism. Even if you become the president, it is extremely hard to change the system. Cooperate and act as a whole.
Perseverance. Look how little Occupy Wall Street has achieved. It could not reform itself into a more structured form and the energy eventually petered out. Expect no quick fixes and do not give up.
Below are two suggestions. I realize that they are both very hard to implement, and that has precisely been the point of my argument so far. (In fact, the second suggestion kind of contradicts with the first one!)
Increase Social Fluidity by Creating More Trust and Less Rules
It may sound ridiculously naive, but you need to fight the downward spiral of distrust and skepticism, and restore love and trust. A cop may have abused the responsibility given to him, but robbing all decision makers of freedom and creating more rules only exacerbates the problem in the long run, by increasing the size and complexity of the system and thereby decreasing its adaptability.
Ethics and codes of conduct are brilliant mechanisms that societies have come up with for implementing decentralized, low-touch forms of governance through self-regulation. Of course, ethics can only work in a high-trust environment. That is why when no one trusts each other, the system starts to bloat. Bureaucracy becomes increasing inflexible. (Remember how patients in New York could not be moved to a Navy medical ship.) Culture becomes increasingly litigious. (US is famous for this. No need for any examples.)
Generally speaking, the less autonomy the individuals have, the more autonomy the system exerts. (Autonomy in total remains fixed.) Remember, institutions and corporations have their own vested interests. These abstract entities are literally alive. They display a will to survive and fulfill a purpose. We like to personalize oppression, but most cases of it are actually conducted by the abstract system via its servants, which include all CEOs, governors and even the president. That is why being a protestor can feel so frustrating. The actual enemy is faceless, and literally everywhere. (It makes less and less of a difference who is running an organization as the organization matures and scales over time. Same principle applies to both companies and countries.)
Meritocracy too is a form of outsourcing judgment to the system. Rather than letting individuals make free calls about who gets promoted to where, the system radically constrains the decision space. This in turn causes the promoted people running the system to become more conservative. They stick to the book even in crisis situations because they know that the system is watching and evaluating them against its standards, which by the way change very slowly, often with significant lag periods. This is how leaders like the openly LGBTQ and Black female mayor of Chicago end up doing exactly what the system expects from them, by taking some of the most draconian actions against the protestors. (Imagine how much she strived to reach that position. Of course she will not take any risks. You would not neither.) So, extreme meritocracy too is actually a bad thing in the long run. It increases the system’s growth potential but also decreases its adaptability.
Interestingly, “backward” societies with little to no institutions tend to cope better with acute crises. They adapt amazingly fast since decision makers have so much more autonomy and the system itself remains so weak. Such societies can not become very prosperous, but they tend to stick around for much longer, before being gobbled up by high-growth “progressive” societies. And while the big and the prosperous die eventually of similar structural causes, the small and the poor die because of unique non-structural causes.
Reverse the Effects of Discrimination with Positive Discrimination
You can not undo the accumulated damage of years of discrimination by simply eliminating the sources of discrimination, and expect the system to cure itself on its own. Remember, there is so much built-in momentum and memory. You need to apply massive doses of positive discrimination and sacrifice efficiency in the short run for the sake of establishing equality (and prosperity) in the long run.
Without such radical action you can not close the income gap, which did not change for decades, despite so many neutralizing social reforms.
Family Net Worth (2016 Dollars) - The Economist
For instance, meritocracy just propagates the status quo and amplifies the existing biases in the lower echelons to the upper echelons. In order to close the skills gap, governments should subsidize private schools, universities and companies for significantly lowering their hiring and admission criteria.
