[1]Principia Cybernetica Web

                     The superorganism: a totalitarian collective?

   The emerging global super-organism will neither lead to a totalitarian political
   system, nor to a "Borg-like" collective that suppresses individual freedom and
   diversity.
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   The most common objection to the [2]super-organism view of societyis that people
   tend to interpret it as a thinly disguised way of promoting a totalitarian,
   collectivist system. Especially the use of words such as "control" and
   "collective" evokes immediate associations with stalinism, and the brutal
   oppression of individual liberties. These negative associations may be
   understandable, but they are wholly misdirected. The evolution towards a
   superorganism is mostly an extrapolation of [3]existing trends, and these show an
   on-going increase in freedom, individualism, democracy and decentralization
   rather than a decrease. These trends can be explained straightforwardly by the
   mechanism of differentiation, which opens ever more possibilites for an
   individual to choose an education or occupation, and of reduced friction, which
   increases the general freedom of movement, of expression and of consumption.

   The complementary mechanism of [4]integration could be seen as a source of new
   constraints or limitations, but these are likely to restrict the freedom of
   powerful individuals--such as a Stalin-like dictator or a robber baron--and
   organizations to abuse the system for their own ends, rather than the freedom of
   ordinary people to realize their individual ambitions. Global integration means
   an increasing mutual dependency of various organizations, and therefore an
   increasing difficulty for any one organization to dominate the others. This is
   understandably resented by those who have most power to lose, but should be
   welcomed by the less powerful. (This may explain the general distrust of global
   institutions, such as the United Nations, in the presently most powerful nation,
   the USA.)

Totalitarian systems

   Historically, totalitarian regimes, such as Hitler's Germany, Saddam Hussain's
   Iraq, or Stalin's Soviet Union, were the result of an individual or select
   group's desire to gain and maintain power and privileges at the expense of the
   larger population, by suppressing their freedom to question those privileges. The
   underlying mechanism is simply individual selfishness augmented by social power
   structures. There is nothing particularly modern about such social systems: apart
   from more sophisticated methods for propaganda and control, the same type of
   ruthless, centralized organization can be found in the kingdoms and empires of
   Antiquity and the period before the French revolution.

   Insofar that totalitarian societies were based on an ideology or political
   system, such as Soviet communism, this system was very different from the
   self-organizing, cybernetic, "organism-like" system that this paper proposes. The
   Soviet system lacked the most crucial component of cybernetic [5]control:
   [6]feedback. Instead of a distributed feedback loop, constantly adapting to the
   changing circumstances, the Soviet economy was based on a rigid, mechanical,
   top-down command structure, with little regard for the effect of those commands
   in the real world. This led to the well-known "calculation problem", where the
   central planning agency would find it impossible to determine exactly how many
   left shoes would need to be produced to satisfy the needs of a given population.
   The resulting economic inefficiency contributed to the eventual collapse of the
   Soviet system.

Collectivism and the Borg

   The absence of centralization is at the base of another nightmare vision
   associated with the super-organism model: the true "collective", where everybody
   thinks the same and does the same, and where there is no room for individual
   initiative or decision-making. This vision is more inspired by[7] insect
   societies, such as beehives or ant nests, than by existing political systems. Its
   most popular recent instantiation is the "Borg", the race of cyborgs imagined by
   the creators of the science fiction series "Star Trek". Again, from a cybernetic
   point of view a Borg-like organization would be most inefficient. Ashby's [8]law
   of requisite variety implies that the global organism, in order to maximize its
   own control over its environment and its chances for survival, should maximize
   the capacity for autonomous decision-making among its components. Moreover, it
   should maximize the diversity or variety of the strategies used by its
   components. This can only be achieved by stimulating individuals to develop
   themselves freely, and as much as possible choose their own path, rather than
   merely conform to the collective point of view.

   Even for ants, it can be shown that the colony will be most efficient in finding
   food if individual ants do not merely follow the paths laid down by their fellow
   ants, but regularly deviate and create a path of their own. If people
   understandably dislike the analogy between human societies and insect societies,
   it is not so much because insect societies are organized in an intrinsically more
   totalitarian or collectivistic manner, but because insects are simply very dumb,
   characterless creatures compared to individual humans. An isolated insect, whose
   behavior is governed by a few simple and rigid rules, is not intrinsically more
   free or more creative than an insect living in a colony. If you would have to
   choose, would you rather be a (social) termite, or its individually living
   cousin, a cockroach? Would you rather be a "collectivist" bee, or an
   "individualist" fly? Neither of these alternatives seems particularly attractive.
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   [9]Copyright© 2000 Principia Cybernetica - [10]Referencing this page

   Author
   F. [11]Heylighen,

   Date
   Mar 3, 2000

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                                    [18]Discussion
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     * [19]a fascist ideology is implicit in the "brain" metaphor, Refutation by
       Craig Hubley

                                  [20]Add comment...

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References

   1. LYNXIMGMAP:http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOTALFRE.html#PCP-header
   2. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUPORGLI.html
   3. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PROGRESS.html
   4. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/INTFREE.html
   5. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CONTROL.html
   6. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FEEDBACK.html
   7. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/INSECSOC.html
   8. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html
   9. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COPYR.html
  10. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REFERPCP.html
  11. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
  12. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html
  13. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MSTT.html
  14. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FUTEVOL.html
  15. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUPORGLI.html
  16. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COMPTABL.html
  17. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUP-META.html
  18. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MAKANNOT.html
  19. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/TOTALFRE.0.html
  20. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/hypercard.acgi$annotform?

[USEMAP]
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOTALFRE.html#PCP-header
   1. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html
   2. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HOWWEB.html
   3. http://pcp.lanl.gov/TOTALFRE.html
   4. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOTALFRE.html
   5. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SERVER.html
   6. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/hypercard.acgi$randomlink?searchstring=.html
   7. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/RECENT.html
   8. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOC.html#TOTALFRE
   9. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEARCH.html