Amerika

The enormous pain our society is going through while in the process of dying requires some explanation. We can view it as an expression of limitations: human beings are focused on the immediate, and oblivious to how their ideas will play out over time, so they ignore this dimension of their world.

Sometimes we can exceed our limitations by becoming aware of them and planning around them. For example, a man knows that he will be tired in the late afternoon, so schedules everything important earlier than then. Or we know that concrete has a certain tolerance and so write into our laws a legal necessity to replace the infrastructure made of it when its time has expired.

Exceeding limits in engineering is a bad thing because specifications are structured with the understanding that dimensions will be given with maximum and minimum tolerances to account for natural variation. Those go into the legal contract and if you exceed those dimensions and the limits of those tolerances, you can go to jail.

In politics, we normally thinking of exceeding limits according to the Leftist paradigm by which we expect people to overcome the limitations imposed by normal human character and behavior. The Leftist regime relies on people “exceeding” those limitations on a regular basis. The failure of this idea can be seen in practice through the declining intelligence of the French people, the first group to adopt Leftism.

Returning to the engineering view, at first glance human limitations seem to consist of characteristics such as health, security, institutions, constitutions, and defense. Looking more deeply, using the dimension of time, we see that the risk is the increase in tolerances within the social organizations we have designed, leading to an entropy which promotes dark organization.

Over time, history and life experiences reveal that we need to take red pills — denial of what our own natures want to believe is true — in order to survive this entropy wave. We survive by managing risks, but we cannot do so through a snapshot of risks at one particular time, because risks evolve as humans and organizations do.

Allow me to introduce a new schema in order to frame this: the 4-40-400 year schema.

• The four year cycle relates to the typical time it takes to effect change. Examples are the establishment of a new patent, the restructuring of a company, the American election cycle, the development cycle of a Japanese car model and of course the democratization of South Africa (1990 – 1994). What may be interesting with this time frame is that it resembles the typical establishment or “construction” phase for an organization to iron out is internal differences and optimize towards its own goals effectively. An organization (team, group, company) can be very effective, but may already start to decline after four years, if not succumbing to the “seven year itch” and most do not make it past fourteen years. Corporations today routinely fake their books to align with share-price expectations. Just like airports are driving CNN traffic, in the same way we can say that stock exchanges determine organizational outcomes. Humans and organizations are side-stepped externally and this can already be seen in the four year cycle.
• The forty year cycle relates to how long a certain dispensation (or cultural mindset) will last such as Communism or Apartheid. Even the Mafia suffered after anti-racketeering laws were enacted in 1970. What should be noted here is that forty years is the typical work-life of most individuals and thus represents the demise of their knowledge in the organization. It used to be a chip on your shoulder if you could say “I worked for that company for forty years and will now go on a well-deserved pension.” The guys in charge have the same thing but it appears to create a problem if the same leader does the same job for too long. A nice example here is CNN which was founded in 1980 and now, after 37 years it is going to be merged with Amazon. Last but not least, the American liberal Empire which started in the 1970s began its decline during the Obama years following in the footsteps of their brothers across Bering Sea. Even if Trump succeeds, it will never be the same again, meaning we are going back to the four year cycles.
• The 400 year cycle relates to civilizations or cultural group survival. These periods have tolerances too, because Rome lasted about 500 years, the Viking group in Greenland 400 years while the English Empire lasted about 360 years. This cycle may relate to generations, which would be 12-20 during a 400 year cycle, and how institutional and cultural memory is lost, so that future generations emulate the past, not knowing that the snapshot of risks has changed enough that they are now fighting scapegoats and phantoms and ignoring actual problems. In the same way that individuals can possess and use knowledge in forty-year cycles, the 400 year cycle indicates cultural memory, and its loss through imitation by those who understand what must be done, but not why.

Essentially these time-based cycles are enduring risks for human organization, and institutions cannot exceed this time horizon. There is nothing to be done about it, other than to accommodate it.

Humans do have this wonderful ability to make a features from bad traits. By recognizing where our natures tend to be wrong about the invisible mathematical operations of reality, we can design around our natures and instead utilize them.

For example, we could change stock exchanges to project exchanges. The original “stock” in Amsterdam related to time-limited ship “projects” fetching spices, gold and resources from foreign lands. Why not industrialize that? That may just change our world for the better because of innate improved risk management.

Even more, we can recognize that the things which we fear cannot be fought, only incorporated. People fear inequality; the way to handle this is to ensure that inequality is harnessed for the benefit of all by promoting the more competent over the less competent. People fear war, but without waging war to maintain order, future more extreme wars are guaranteed.

All of this points to a central human struggle: the need to retain knowledge over time, while realizing that knowledge is the domain of exceptional individuals and not groups. When passed to the group, the knowledge becomes dogma and then procedure, and in doing so, the ability to understand that knowledge is lost.

Let us return to the idea of dimensions versus tolerances. To our human minds, the dimensions seem like the big story; over time, however, the tolerances rule the show. Over time, tolerances increase, and so the original dimensions change from clear definitions to approximations to an almost mystical or superstitious symbolism lost under layers of confusion.

With this in mind, we can see the paradox of human organizations. We tend to focus on the organization itself, and not the organic substrates that enable it, like individuals — who are a product of genetics — and culture, which is similarly vested in genetics. We cannot beat Mother Nature, and only by accepting her rules can we make organizations which endure the shifting surface of time.

Tags: organizations, risk, time