The ability to fall apart a little bit at a time

From Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, page 1.

In the 1720's, London was busy getting drunk. Really drunk. The city was in the grips of a gin-drinking binge, largely driven by new arrivals from the countryside in search of work. The characteristics of gin were attractive: fermented with grain that could be bought locally, packing a kick greater than that of beer, and considerably less expensive than imported wine, gin became a kind of anesthetic for the burgeoning population enduring profound new stresses of urban life. These stresses generated new behaviors, including what came to be called the Gin Craze.

Gin pushcarts plied the streets of London; if you couldn't afford a whole glass, you could buy a gin-soaked rag, and flophouses did brisk business renting straw pallets by the hour if you needed to sleep off the effects. It was a kind of social lubricant for people suddenly tipped into an unfamiliar and often unforgiving life, keeping them from falling apart. Gin offered its consumer the ability to fall apart a little bit at a time. It was a collective bender, at civic scale.

I want to join that observation with two others. The first, also via Clay Shirky; a quotation attributed to Yitzhak Rabin "If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it is a fact."

The third observation arose from a conversation I was having with my neighbor Jeff. We were talking about examples where incremental adjustments are necessary and are desirable versus periodic disruptive adjustments. Specifically we discussed the terrible forest fires occurring this summer, a product of a decades long policy of constant fire suppression. The consequence of that fire suppression policy has been that there is now an atypical accumulation of biofuel which makes each new fire a potential firestorm. Other examples that came up in the conversation were earthquakes; would you prefer thousands of microquakes each with just a little bit of damage or would you prefer (supposing you had the choice) a single massive earthquake where all the consequences of plate slippage are concentrated at once? Another example that came up was Gould and Elderedge's theory of punctuated equlibrium in evolution.

It is similar in business. If you pursue a strategy of six sigma in manufacturing and production, driving out all variance and ensuring uniformity, you achieve high consistency for some period of time. However, variance and inconsistencies, while reducing your short term efficiency, are often the source of new changes and innovation that facilitate long term effectiveness.

Mixing these observations together I might propose: Change (biological, economic, technological, etc.) is not a problem but an unavoidable fact. Change can sometimes be accomodated in increments but inevitably, over a long enough time frame, it is massively disruptive. Usually there is a continuum where all variables can be controlled for a short period of time when planned outcomes can be efficiently optimized. If fortunate, eventually change will have to be accomodated at least in increments. Over long time periods, change will always lead to massive disruption.

The measure of the success of any system then is threefold: 1) The capacity to manage processes in the short term with accuracy and predictability in order to achieve higher levels of productivity; 2) The capacity to tolerate and indeed foster variance at least in the medium term in order to allow the system to adjust to accumulating stress; and 3) the cohesiveness and resilience of a system to sustain and recover from massive disruption.

Consequently, any social system can be assessed based on its capacity to simultaneously optimize short term productivity, plan and implement incremental change and finally its capacity to endure massive physical disruption and yet return to a new level of productivity. That is a pretty high performance bar. It puts a premium on a a range of attributes or consequences of the Enlightenment - agency, individualism, checks and balances, pluralism, tolerance, trust, connectedness, knowledge distribution and transfer, etc.

Most political/cultural systems can achieve one of these three attributes for at least some period of time but there are very few that can and have achieved all three.