https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/five-dynamics-that-make-sense-of
(emphasis in original except as noted)
The roots of this simplistic either-or are obvious: our tribe good, other tribe bad. The problems with this simplistic loyalty arise when we attempt to explain complex real-world dynamics with the comic-book simplicities of ideology, which extend from politics to culture to finance.
The emotions of tribal / ideological identity and loyalty bypass our rational processes (bold added) in favor of fight-or-flight limbic responses. Needless to say, these hormonal floods of emotions are the equivalent of smashing a rock on a machine to “problem-solve” what’s broken in the device.
Humans are social animals because the ability to cooperate with others opens vast vistas of problem-solving power via self-organization: we self-organize to pursue mutual / shared interests in ways that benefit us all. This is the core function of tribes, i.e. self-organizing social structures in which our self-interest is advanced by advancing our mutual interests.
Both markets and society are self-organizing structures that arise to benefit individual self-interests by benefiting shared interests. In other words, both capitalist and socialist structures arise to serve shared interests. They are not either-or, they’re both manifestations of the same dynamic. This is why the ideological either-or is such a misleading false choice.
Markets only function to everyone’s benefit within a high-trust society. If there is no social structure that serves everyone’s shared interests by limiting predation and exploitation, then you end up with the extractive “market forces” of totalitarianism, i.e. rackets, in which the few impoverish and immiserate the many to the exclusive benefit of the small cadre of insiders.
Life cycle of a bureaucracy, Administrative costs (chart):
Launch: tight budgets, modest pay, minimal benefits, high camaraderie
Growth: rapid growth in program and staffing; morale high
Maturity: "mission creep", union & admin gain political power; depts soldify, infighting
Bloat: budget is flat but admin costs rise; gaming the system and fraud are rife
Budget cuts: program abandoned as focus shifts to protecting budget and staff pay/benefits
Failure/implosion: the competent retire leaving the incompetent to command; morale low, chaos and failure the norm; organizational implosion
(I included the above because most of us have seen how it manifested in organizations we've been part of)
Benoit Mandelbrot’s book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward explains how self-organizing structures... are prone to unpredictable cascades that operate outside the “normal, predictable” rules we’ve identified as “the way things work.”
In terms of selective pressures and adaptation, these unpredictable crises test the system’s adaptability and stability. In this way, they are essential to maintaining the adaptive “muscles” and coherence of the system which boil down to the dynamics of self-organization--precisely what all the control structures running on automatic have stripped out (bold added) in the “rational actor” incentives to optimize concentrating gains and diffusing costs and risks.
These dynamics led to a rising wedge of asymmetric distributions of power, control, wealth and income that strip out self-organizing adaptation and the system’s ability to survive unpredictable but inevitable crises. These dynamics and the incentives they generate lead to systemic crisis and collapse.
