Assessment of the 2008 US Presidential race from a systems theory perspective.

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Will contributing time and money to the Obama campaign, or just voting for Obama make any meaningful difference as to how the future unfolds? Conversely, does time and energy spent working for an Obama victory simply detract from applying these assets towards working for real societal transformation? I believe that evaluating these questions from a systems theory perspective provides insight on their resolution.

Global society constitutes a complex adaptive system. All systems possess three fundamental attributes:

1)      Interconnectedness. A set of units or elements are interconnected so that changes in any element or elements produce changes in all. A change in any part of such a system causes rippling changes throughout every part of a system.

2)      Emergence. The system as a whole possesses collective properties which are qualitatively different from, and not reducible to, the properties of its constituent elements. The wetness of a water molecule is not reducible to the properties of its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Similarly, consciousness is not reducible to the properties of individual neurons.

3)      Boundedness. All systems possess a definite boundary between system and not system. This boundary may be closed or open. For complex systems, it is open.

Complex systems have unpredictable outputs. They process information and transform themselves in accordance with the results of their information processing. This is particularly true for complex systems composed of conscious elements such as human beings.

Because global human society is a complex adaptive system, its configuration is determined by the results of its information processing. All such systems may be said to evolve along a fitness landscape. As such they possess trajectories through this landscape or, as I usually call it, through learning space.

Above, I’ve included examples for a fitness landscape and its associated trajectory for human civilization from a paper I presented in 1997 at a conference on sociocybernetics at the University of Amsterdam. Once a complex system such as human civilization is reduced to a computer simulation, its fitness landscape and trajectory become readily apparent. The full text of the paper is available at: http://www.michaelpbyron.com/SystemicaArt.htm for anyone interested in following this topic up in more depth. [Note: If these images do not appear above, they can be found at: http://www.michaelpbyron.com/image022.gif and at: http://www.michaelpbyron.com/image023.gif .]

Because people learn and have goals, society as a whole has goals and attempts to “learn” its way towards the attainment of these goals. Security, comfort of life, and health are fundamental goals for all humans. Attempts at ordering society through law, fairly and impartially enforced by a government, which is responsive to the citizenry, represent one such goal. Another goal has been the provisioning of public goods. Basically, we have sought both to develop ever greater organizational “software” for governance, in conjunction with ever more powerful “hardware” for the provision of material goods. 

In a system everything that happens causes rippling changes throughout the system. Consider our present day world: We have had limited success with developing the “software” needed to create what we would intuitively recognize as a just and humane society. We have recently been somewhat more successful at the provisioning of material goods, thanks primarily to cheap hydrocarbon energy. This material success has led us to the point where nearly seven billion humans are artificially sustained by the rapid release of chemical energy stored in oil and other hydrocarbons. However, availability of these resources must begin to decline ever more precipitously, and beginning soon.

Further, this decline of availability of cheap fuel is triggering ever more rapid use of the “dirtiest” of these energy sources because it exists in the greatest abundance: coal. This is triggering increasingly rapid climate change. Record setting droughts in some areas, record floods in others. As I write, a hundred blocks of Cedar City Iowa are under water due to historically unprecedented flooding.

The net effect of these climatic changes is to decrease agricultural production; and this is occurring at a time when world food reserves are already at an all time low for modern times. However, expensive oil, due to nearly flat production in the context of rising global demand, leads to increasing conversion of food crops to ethanol production, further lowering food reserves.

Global industrialized agriculture is almost completely dependent upon petroleum. Fertilizers are derived from natural gas. Pesticides are derived from petroleum. The entire agricultural production, processing and distribution system depends upon petroleum. The industrialization of agriculture across the planet had led to the majority of humanity becoming, for the first time, city dwellers. More than ever before in history, people are dependent upon the system of industrialized agriculture for their food.

As far as our governmental “software” is concerned, political power is fragmented into numerous nation states of varying power and affluence. Wealth and opportunity are inequitably distributed in all of them. Two thirds of the planet’s remaining petroleum reserves, along with forty percent of its natural gas, are located in the Persian Gulf. The United States is the only nation on the planet with the capability to project large amounts of military power globally. It is bogged down in the Persian Gulf nation of Iraq, in the sixth year of a war to control these resources.

As the energy situation becomes ever more desperate, what will the US and other major powers do, knowing that most of the remaining oil and gas are located in this small portion of the planet?

Consider that this region is roughly contiguous with the “Holy Land.” Also consider that the Middle East is the confluence of geostrategic interests with religious beliefs of the monotheistic religions, particularly the apocalyptic-oriented fundamentalist version of Christianity that is so prominent in the USA at present. Consider the near stranglehold of multinational corporations over the government, information dissemination system (the mass media), and economy, of the USA, the West, indeed, most of the planet.

Now ask yourself: Can it make any meaningful difference who becomes president of the USA at this point?

From a systems theory perspective we have acquired a trajectory through learning space, or alternately, have moved to a position on our fitness landscape from which we are now inevitably locked into movement towards what is called a “strange attractor.” The effect is like what happens when a marble rolls over the lip of a depression—it is inevitably forced to roll down hill into the depression. We are at such a point now.

I want to stress that we are, so to speak, already rolling “downhill” to whatever fate awaits us. Moving “uphill” away from the peak oil-climate change-corporatized government attractor is no longer possible. We are locked in for massive climate change now. Because we failed to transition away from hydrocarbon energy when there was sufficient time to do so—back in the 1970’s—it is now too late. Peak oil is upon us. Anyway governments—ours in the USA in particular—are largely subject to the will of multinational corporations. The interests of these soulless corporate entities—which possess the legal right of “persons”—center on short term profits. Planning for the long term is not good for short-term profit making.

So the bottom line is, we’re heading towards our crisis attractor no matter what we do now, and neither Obama nor McCain can change that reality.

Still, we do have some control over our trajectory as we move towards this self-inflicted crisis-attractor. We could “crash” head on into it—an outcome corresponding to the total collapse of civilization worldwide and the deaths of billions. Or we could rapidly reconfigure ourselves so that our trajectory moves past the attractor with its “momentum” carrying it through and out of the basin of attraction towards, a new zone of stability—corresponding to level ground in our fitness landscape. This “level ground” represents a new stability corresponding to a reconfigured human system which is sustainable with respect to energy and environment.

So does the choice of Obama versus McCain represent any meaningful difference with respect to our finessing our systemic trajectory towards the level ground and away from the smash-up outcome?

Possibly it does. Consider that Obama has made it clear that he will not authorize the national government to prosecute medical marijuana users in states which have passed medical marijuana statutes. [See: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/05/12/18498714.php] This is indicative of a greater emphasis on federalism, on decentralization of power away from the national government on the part of an Obama administration. As the crises come upon us this decentralization is exactly what is needed.

Similarly, Obama would not be likely to nominate a fifth vote on the Supreme Court for a unitary presidency. On the other hand the only probable vacancies all come from the Court’s elderly “liberal” wing” so the status quo would be unchanged—the continued existence of Constitutional government in the USA hangs on the whims of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

A McCain administration would represent continued corporatist consolidation over our political system. It would herald the consolidation of the imperial presidency, ratified by a solid five, or even six, vote majority on the US Supreme Court. This is because elderly “liberal” justices would be replaced by Federalist Society vetted hard right Scalia clones. Such an administration would inaugurate corporatist designed programs to address energy and climate change. These corporate welfare programs would be worse than doing nothing, as these programs would waste resources while preventing effective local and regional efforts from even occurring. The overall effect of a McCain presidency would be to accelerate the crash while “steering” us at the crisis attractor dead-on. This as I’ve noted, could end global civilization and kill most of humanity.

Still, the net difference between the possible effects on our overall trajectory caused by the election of one or the other candidate at this late date would likely be quite small. Also McCain’s agenda would likely lead more rapidly to the collapse of national government, thereby perhaps freeing up local areas and regions to act in a somewhat timely manner.

We also have to consider the possibility that rhetoric aside, Obama might not fundamentally alter existing policies. This is because, here in the USA at least, we the people do not rule. Rather we are ruled by multi-national corporations. In this scenario, supporting Obama would definitively represent a waste of time and energy.

So what to do?

All in all, it is an individual decision each of us needs to make. Is a possible slight gain in political decentralization and the corresponding possibility of adjusting our systemic trajectory very slightly worth the cost of investing time and effort into an Obama campaign, or is this time and energy better spent organizing at the state, local, and interpersonal level? Would the latter strategy facilitate a more effective trajectory adjustment? It is hard to say.

As for me, I think that my time and energy as far as campaign ’08 is concerned, will go into local campaigns, particularly City Council campaigns, in conjunction with writing, permacultural experimentation, and working towards the consolidation of a movement for change that is not beholden to any particular political party, or to the corporatocracy. 

That said, I will vote for Obama.

Authors Website: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/3979729587610286911

Authors Bio:

Michael P Byron is the author of The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad. This book is a manual for taking effective action to deal with the crises of our age including global climate change, peak oil, and political failure to deal with these and other problems.

His previous book is Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization.

Byron-has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine.--He teaches all aspects of Political Science and Political Economy in local colleges in the San Diego area.- He was the Democratic Party's candidate for United States Congress in California's 49th Congressional District in 2004. In 2002,-he- ran as a write-in candidate upon discovering that the Republican incumbent, Darrell Issa, had no major-party challenger.

Mike lives in Oceanside, CA with his wife, Ramona Byron. Both are Navy veterans.