Breakdown to Lockdown
Our traditional societal decision making systems are breaking down, and networked tribalism is accelerating it.
The strategist John Boyd saw warfare as a contest between minds.
General vs. General
Army vs. Army
Nation vs. Nation
He reasoned, correctly, that the side that is the most likely to win would be the side with the most effective decision-making system.
Damage, Disruption, and Crisis
His focus on decision-making systems is a helpful framework for making sense of our current decline. Using this lens, we can boil down our current situation to the following dynamic:
The complexity of globalization and networking has severely damaged our societal decision-making systems.
Newly emergent societal decision-making systems are actively disrupting, degrading, and delegitimizing our legacy system.
Our legacy decision-making system has overreacted to this damage and subsequent network attacks by turning each new challenge into a crisis (the Permacrisis).
With this framework in place, let’s dig in.
Societal Decision Making
At the end of the last Century, our societal decision-making system was composed of the following layers (no, it isn’t just politics, see David Ronfeldt for more):
Tribal. The ancient layer. Tribal systems use positive stories to create fictive kinship between people, not blood-related. It gives our society the cohesion and trust required for coherent public discussions, mutual defense, and societal harmony. Without it, every action at every level would encounter unsustainable burdens of friction. Our primary tribal layer is currently the nation-state (often synonymous with culture, organized religion, and a belief in the free market in many countries).
Bureaucratic. The early modern layer (made possible by the print press). Bureaucracy uses hierarchy and processes to build organizations that can repeatedly and reliably accomplish tasks at both small and large scales. Without it, every task or process of discovery we undertook would be a disorganized, ad hoc, free for all. Our bureaucratic layer comprises the government, corporations, academia/science, and other institutions.
Market-based. The late modern layer. Competitive markets use competition between private interests and fair rule sets to solve complex problems. They provide us with a way to balance socioeconomic interactions, unearth hidden information (demand, potential uses, innovation), and rapidly respond to new events. Our market-based decision-making comprises financial markets, goods/services markets, and elections.
This evolved, multi-layered decision-making system started to decline with the onset of globalization and networking, but it began to fall apart with the emergence of a new decision-making layer:
Networked.
Examples
Let’s explore how networked decision-making, in the form of networked tribes, disrupts, delegitimizes, and replaces our legacy system.
Tribal
Networked tribalism has damaged our existing tribal layer and is actively replacing it.
Networked tribes (organized to oppose a common enemy) have actively damaged the stories underlying nation-state tribalization. In the US, attacks on the historical narrative, the founders, the fairness of the system, the prevalent culture, etc., have led to a negative narrative that is insufficient to support national cohesion.