The "Evolving Aggregate's Task"

How fast is the USA dissolving, from the inside out, as the ratio of engagement to disengagement declines? And what can we not just do, but BEST DO about it?

For quick, situational awareness, let's consider a recent, mini case-report.

Vallejo, Calif., once bankrupt, is now a model for cities in an age of austerity

If this is a model experience & response, then American cities - and states - are still in shockingly deep trouble. Vallejo, CA's unfolding story reminds me more of a pathetic Lord of the Flies than a stirring story of insanely impressive innovation & evolution. The thrust of the Vallejo article is that this is one model for how to re-organize in an "age of austerity." A more audacious response would be to refute the defeatist strategy of austerity, and instead commit to shaping the supposed "age" that our dispirited aggregate seems to be resigning itself to.

The pattern I see is:

1) dismal context awareness of US citizens and aggregates (the whole world is always changing, but most of us, individually & collectively, are woefully out of paradigm - and ongoing "paradigms" are not static, but continue to change)

2) initial consequence is that far too many not only didn't see it coming, but didn't even get the license # of the SituationDeliveryVan (SDV) that just ran over them.

3) given the still-lagging situational awareness, many are still sitting listlessly in the same road, vulnerable to the same and new SDVans & their increasingly frequent "stocking" runs. (SD, Inc. is accelerating expansion of their fleet, if you hadn't yet noticed.)

What are we NOT seeing? Why AREN'T we seeing these things, soon enough?

Where are the scouts contributing the info required to build civic, situational awareness (SA)?

Where are the local command & review teams, staff, councils & delegated officers RAPIDLY summarizing SA from that info?  When our kids are resorting to spontaneous attempts at reorganization - through gangs - you know we're too disengaged.  If we don't take  our kids to work, or elsewhere, soon enough, they'll look for secondary options.

Where are the agile, strategic responses - that should have been initiated 30 years ago?

What the hell happened to American ingenuity & distributed resilience?

And above all else, where is the will, initiative & automatic instinct to act locally without letting communities dissolve?  Prevention is a lot easier than - repeatedly - reconstituting losses.

Martial law from above is a last gasp ploy when civic law isn't self-organizing from below.

So why isn't bottom-up civic-law self-organizing, in more places, sooner?

It's hard to put one's finger on what critical step is missing when a previously self-aggregating aggregate fails to continue organizing - or why it even started slowing it's rate of mobilization.

Ecologists, biologists, historians, military-strategists and system-scientists have long studied this general issue - how aggregates alter rates of adaptive mobilization at any scale - and there are some obvious, if initial, clues as to what's lagging.

Aggregate Instrumentation
Every growing aggregate can generate many combinations of more components and higher component transaction-rates. To preserve aggregate agility in any new organizational pattern, a rapidly increasing amount of situational awareness information must be passed through existing and/or new inter-component, communication channels. In short, a growing aggregate must scale aggregate self-instrumentation much faster than it's actual organic growth. In general, if the size of an aggregate doubles, to maintain similar agility, the amount of info-passing across all components may have to initially increase by a multiple of n-factorial.

That's why brain-size grows faster than body size as one compares different sized animals with similar agility. And if you want increasing agility simultaneously with aggregate growth, then even further, genius-level innovation is required. In the USA, civic-coordination services have to grow at a rate faster, not slower than population and/or economic growth. If they don't, the USA will regress, not prosper.

Aggregate Selective Tuning
To re-adapt to changing situations, a growing aggregate must be constantly re-tuned, very cleverly. The general pattern seen in all model systems that succeed is 2-step re-iteration. Surviving systems periodically re-connect everything to everything, then relax to the minimum connectivity patterns needed for that particular situation. Then they do it all over again. That's the basic pattern seen in the dramatic sexual recombination of genes, in the chemical gradients generated as an embryo grows from one to billions of organized cells, and in the development of neural organization in the developing brain. It's also what happens in tribes, armies, neighborhoods, markets, nations and international markets. New components (i.e., kids/students) go out and meet many peers, then briefly settle into defined adult roles before making room for a succeeding wave of adaptive components able to re-connect & re-tune into novel patterns. Explore, tune in, re-spawn & bow out.

There are too many sub-steps involved to possibly list & review in this article, but even these two, simple observations above allow us to ask further, pertinent questions.

Why are our systems failing?  Why is our adaptive rate declining?
Why are we not adequately scouting all the emerging data lines affecting our aggregate? There are many headlights coming down all roads converging on our unfolding situations. What distributed incentives are we failing to adjust, thereby allowing diverse SDVans to slip through more often, to run over parts of our aggregate with increasing frequency?

Why aren't we adequately reviewing & summarizing our own, distributed knowledge, fast enough? Why, as situations, our size, and our complexity change, are we not re-connecting everything to everything ... frequently enough & quickly enough? Why should an aggregate with our aggregate knowledge ever be in a position of effectively saying "no one could have predicted we wouldn't listen to some of our own people" - or even not knowing that such diverse scouting reports exist?

Institutional hubris simply reflects lack of situational practice, which in turn follows failure to review scaling data. In short, we have too many people over-analyzing insufficient data, when we already know that all data is meaningless without context, and that most data is irrelevant even with context. 

Simple conclusion is that we're spawning options faster than we're exploring them, and are getting distracted in the process. That's inherently a failure to rank options and prioritize pursuit of the largest returns. We're failing to cross our own chasm!

This is a recurring, general problem which I've previously named the "Traveling Entrepreneur's Task." Seeing as how the task scales up to be a rate-limiting task for all evolving aggregates, this task may be better named the "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task."

 The general expression of this task is to select the optimal path through a dynamic "space" where options constantly expand or shrink  as a consequence of any action taken. The general solution is to painstakingly map and take that path which continually grows the number of available, aggregate options. In a separate post I'll lay out some of the task parameters that have emerged, from multiple fields.

As Warren Mosler astutely asks, "How do you get people to explore their options?"   Why aren't we even adequately aware of the relative returns on all our spiraling options? Or that there are many, and that the number increases every day?  Heck, if an aggregate is not familiar with it's various options, it seems inescapable that, as a start, they're not exploring enough of them before choosing which to spend time digging in to.

Why aren't we at least reporting, listing, evaluating and ranking all our aggregate options? Tribal groups throughout history have faced this question, and it seems to have limited any & all colony sizes, from termites to humans. 

One answer is that we're simply not discussing our aggregate options widely, deeply or quickly enough. Why not? Perhaps we're simply not allowing ourselves enough time for group discussion. In all prior tribal systems, inordinate amounts of time were spent discussing aggregate options, precisely so that they could be ranked & pursued wisely, not randomly. Natural selection strongly favored those aggregates that measured & considered not just twice, but many times, before cutting into emerging situations. The same lesson is echoed in much business literature, as "slow down, and choose wisely, not randomly." If not, your aggregate never crosses the chasm to achieve its full Output potential.

Why do growing aggregates cycle in & out of optimally organized, aggregate behavior patterns? One obvious answer involves the ratio between distributed methods and emerging success rates. Aggregate strategy is, of necessity, the sum of an aggregate's distributed tactics or methods. Distributed incentive structures work adequately only if not saturated, or unduly frustrated. Obviously, an aggregate may fail to scale due to too much success, leading to distributed apathy & component "obesity."  Or, it may fail to scale due to a "systemic shock" response, where something triggers too much hoarding of resources in some model of the "central" organs of culture. The obvious problem is that reduced circulation of any sort of resource, from commodities to information, reduces aggregate agility.  In either case, the underlying causality is that the distributed methods - & incentives for using them - weren't adjusted with enough systemic agility.

In that case, the solution, if one even appears, occurs in an indirect, nested system response.  Some previously non-existent or seemingly negligible aggregate component becomes part of newly significant aggregate tuning instrumentation.

When a systemic shock reflex kicks in - for whatever reason - it's a sign of a overwhelmed system's desperate attempt to use outmoded reflexes to solve situations it has failed to adequately scout, consider, probe, surf and prepare for.

Sometimes a shock reflex may work, and sometimes it may lead to a self-induced death spiral not absolutely dictated by context. The overall lesson is that an ounce of adaptive prevention prevents multiples of pain, cure & lost output. It's far better to never fall into a systemic shock reflex, because it reveals a system already in a state of confusion, randomly falling back on old vs emerging strategies.

That's the absolutely last behavior an agile aggregate EVER wants to find itself expressing in a novel situation.

Systemic shock - i.e., rising disparity - is a graphic admission that an aggregate has been dozing on the watch, and has no idea whether another SituationDeliveryVan may be about to arrive, with or without it's headlights on.

Slow change in our distributed incentive systems may thus lead us to cycles of accelerating or declining aggregate growth rates.  The question is what to do about it?  How do we continually add protective sub-loops preemptively protecting us from such system bugs? 

Again, answers are already apparent from previously studied model systems. Every known process in biology or biochemistry seems to be simultaneously expressed in at least triplicate, affected by short, medium and long-term feedback mechanisms - call them checks & balances if you will.  This critical lesson, apparent in densely engineered, prior systems, may be exactly what we're failing to pay enough attention to as our aggregate explores it's own, new frontiers of scale.

Parallel system feedback systems with diverse time constants provide a general framework for smoothing out adaptive responses over multiple situations.  An aggregate employing this strategy is less likely to fall into the trap of over-adapting to any one situation while reducing it's chances of transitioning to the next, inevitably different situation.  Other evolved aggregates have shown us that survival of Entrepreneurial Aggregates means taking a middle path, where minimally-adequate adaptation to each situation allows adequate preparation for the next situation.

Is our culture adequately instrumented, from local to national levels?

In our nation, states, counties, cities, towns, schools, neighborhoods and families - do we have enough, different feedback systems with adequately differing time-constants? 

Are we letting the signal strength from those feedback channels scale automatically?   

Do we prepare our citizens - through actual practice - to listen and respond to that multiple and changing signal spectrum?  

As our aggregate size and complexity grows rapidly, are we spawning enough feedback systems with enough different time constants to keep our aggregate agile? 

To even achieve that last step, are we modeling our combined map of aggregate-feedback-methods-to-context, so that we can adequately FOCUS on aggregate tuning, which always delivers the highest return? 

It seems certain that we can always do that, but if we only remind ourselves that the highest return in any organized aggregate is ALWAYS the return-on-coordination.

In fact, to survive, we need to move on to a more powerful version of that message.  The highest return in any organized aggregate is ALWAYS the return-on-rate-of-coordination.

Seems obvious that success follows adaptive rate.  It's not sufficient to adapt, if your aggregate always finds that another aggregate has already done so a decade before, has moved on, and is already out of sight, disappeared into a future your aggregate won't share.

Methods for recursively tuning rate-of-return-on-coordination therefore offer themselves as the general, dynamic solution to the continually scaling "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task" or, more directly, the Evolving Aggregate's Task.

As promised, a follow-on post will begin to list the diverse parameters subtly affecting the "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task." There's no way that such a listing task will ever end. No one person or component of any system can ever know them all, at any one time ... and our list will never stop growing .. unless the USA dies.

Needed, investment in info-channels to tune return-on-coordination.

Sanjeev Kulkarni emailed some comments about viewing multiple nations as an organized eco-system.  That, of course, weakly implies that each given nation is an organized eco-system.  How organized is our nation?  Are we being everything we could be?  Or are we fat, sick, drunk & passed out on the curb?  If we're somewhere in between those tolerance limits, which are we closer to? These questions open up a bigger can of worms, and unleash queries which span bacteria, amoeba, social insects, and humans.  No worthwhile question is easily answered, so, I'm going to query multiple disciplines for some perspective.

Why fuse input from different disciplines?  Because too much of academia has become academic, and the potential relevance of channel-specific insights is no longer propagating quickly enough to the cultural power zones where our moment-of-adaptation is actually held hostage.  Those power zones include lobbies, industrial & business centers, and our Fed/state/local congresses.  Outside those zones, we have backlogs of both data and knowledge building up, in info-channels choked by sclerosis.  Luckily, we have other adaptive power zones, being held in reserve.  Why are we waiting to access our adaptive reserves?  And what, exactly, could we be doing to unleash them sooner rather than later?

The core task is to drive organization on a larger scale, and mobilization rates as well.  Solving that task depends on key methods, not just desire.  For us, most roads affecting this outcome quickly lead to the practice, training & education our electorate receives, so let's just jump to that part.

So far, efforts to improve modern education inevitably push too much, overly fragmented, information into increasingly uncoordinated info-channels.

We've known this for a long time.  And that sentiment led us to define the "liberal arts" education.  Unfortunately, our methodology hasn't scaled up very well, and is now a rather neglected topic.  Our own educators school graduates are no longer palpably aware of the following insight.

"There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live."    John Adams

Or, just fuse the diverse, education channels, sooner?   That necessity of that fusion is implicit in all prior aggregates, from before bacteria evolved all the way up to human tribal cultures.  In prior examples, info-channel fusion is mediated through direct, inter-component or inter-personal connectivity methods.

How do other, model systems, eventually coordinate the increasing scale of emerging behaviors spawned by their own adaptation rates?   That process eventually creates new species, but since methods drive results, it's the adaptive methods we're interested in, so that we can use those examples to re-examine our own adaptive methods, or lack of.

To scale up larger populations, any aggregate has to constantly titrate how little key info must be distributed in interleaved channels, in order to reap return on coordination.  The complexity of that map-reduce fusion task quickly scales up to, and beyond, the complexity of thermodynamic statistics within & between channels in an organized aggregate.  It's awesome to imagine, yet we have to tune it even further.

Any ideas? :)

Adaptive tuning of complex systems obviously happens, yet mostly by distributed trial & error.  We can't personally tune our national outcome in realtime, but we can tinker with all the channel processes, wait for the distributed feedback, and then parse it.

To analyze & use that trial & delayed error reporting, no matter how distributed, one suggestion is that we need a core matrix of aggregate "Welfare of the People" signals.   A background hum, so to speak, that unsettles us when it dwindles.   It equates to maintaining homeostasis.  In your own body, for example, no part can survive without the others, and a spectrum of signals are used - in any combination - to trigger homeostasis-preserving behaviors.  Yet in a scaling national culture, we're never completely free from the idea that some subgroup can strike out on their own as a colony somewhere else.  That's fine, but we've let that dissociated thinking get out of hand, expressed as rampant social disparity.  The outcome is a sum acting as less, rather than more than the sum of it's parts, and an astoundingly large Output Gap.

Is aggregate awareness of our Output Gap just another info-channel to manage?  Is that awareness very different from whatever is internally perceived when a honeybee colony reaches a crescendo and decides to swarm?  Point is that bee colonies do this in a reserved, organized way.  If they all go their own way too soon, they all die.

In honeybee colonies, there are subtle sub-processes which drive worker-behavior to compete with queen-behavior.  In good times, the workers induce & nurture new queen larvae & let 'em hatch.  They may even let the old queen kill most of them (how selectively?) but not all.    What subtle process titrates the workers to scale queen protection until the ONE colonist-queen (or a few competitors) is chosen & kept alive?   They may also quit feeding the old queen, so she slims down enough to fly.  (Is that the core reason the "ruler" leaves?  Just to escape starvation?)

In what at first seems a surprise twist to us, it's the old queen & experienced workers that set out to form a colony somewhere else.   That leaves an inheritance to the inexperienced young'uns, in a method that works well for bees.  Back in the original hive, there may or may not be a succession-fight.  How much input do the workers exert on who becomes the next queen?  Do they have a strong union, called the Wobblies? :)

Researchers like Tom Seeley may be able to tell us something about the molecular or hormonal substrates that allow different bees species to manage the particular info-channels that sum to trigger swarm behavior.  It would be particularly interesting to know the degrees of freedom governing interactions between info-channels.  What varies across the bee species which can support markedly different maximum hive sizes yet still express colonizing swarm behavior?  Much is context-specific, but there's also inter-species variance.

  Meanwhile, the way Americans scale up exploration of our own, emerging options is largely based upon completely different methods, although the outcome is recognizably similar.  Even the US Constitution does not deliver the tight organization of a bee colony, where there are few, if any, analogies to unemployment and/or economic disparity.  As with honeybees, much of our organizational state is highly context-specific, but there are obviously extreme differences in the methods supporting organization in bees & humans.  As far as I know, disparity in native bee populations is expressed largely between hives, not within.  Also, I've never heard of immigration/emigration between hives, other than total war (are foreign drones allowed into other hives to feed?).  Mammals generally allow more degrees of freedom in how Romeo & Juliet find one another.

Far as I know, there's no example of diverse bee colonies fusing to create empires.   That level of organization is beyond them, so far.   Humans are organizing on a greater scale, but we're still VERY inefficient at it, and obviously still working out the kinks.

The social amoeba Dichtyostelia provide a remarkably pertinent analogy for fusing & dissolving human lineages into and out of culture.

Nevertheless, we don't seem to have any human institutions capable of accelerating adequately distributed awareness of lessons from other model species as warning examples, or at least not fast enough.

The main point is that we don't need answers to these questions to ONLY be published for academic credit.  We need emerging methodological options to be practiced & explored - at faster tempo - in our state & federal Congresses, or in indirect practices which bypass our existing Congresses.

We need academia to be more relevant, and less academic.  That's obvious.

How?  Why don't we have more academics studying how to be less academic?  Or more entrepreneurs providing that service to academics, faster?

We may need to spawn more info-coordinating channels, ones that cross all existing channels, akin to agile standards groups.   An interesting prototype was the German General Staff, which was remarkably effective - and an early prototype for Open Source as a cultural method, not an abstract philosophy.  Ironically, the concept of a novel, "General Staff" parallel to existing info-channels, was first undermined by the 1919 Economic Consequences of the Peace, then later destroyed by the Nazis, and finally ostracized by the winning Allies, simply by association with the losing "Germans" triggered by the allies as an Economic Consequences of the Peace.  Go figure.   Why does it often seem that a highly adaptive emerging regulatory option is universally opposed - via a mal-adaptive selection process - by the very institutions which would thereby be saved from themselves?    The Economic Consequences of the Peace occurred precisely because an aggregate was not listening to it's own, emerging info-channels!

It seems that every example of organizing on a larger scale requires an emerging information channel specifically for selecting from the emerging, indirect options being spawned.    That task is palpable in, say, software programming.  It's recognized that every insurmountable programming task has a solution, and that the solution always involves another level of indirection.

Yet individual or even team programming doesn't compare to the complexity of market or cultural adaptive rate.   Our nation spawns indirect options at a rate at least exponential to our population growth.   How do we create - quickly enough - specific info-coordinating channels allowing us to select net-adaptation from all the emerging options being explored?   That sounds like a tongue twister, and it is.  We've been solving this problem for 3.5 billion years, at least.  How do we accelerate that process, from our current context?

Anything less is pathetically boring in comparison.

We can obviously do this.  First step is to describe the spectrum of emerging tasks in existing hieroglyphics.  Next step is to crowd-source efficient expression of the leanest, adaptive re-statement of that task, by a process of distributed trial & error.

To love your kids, you have to first love the future.   If you love the future, you have to let it go be distributed, by indirect paths.   Then you have to accelerate it's distribution, with a nudge out the door.

To paraphrase Darwin and Boltzmann, as well as the USMC:
Adaptive survival follows the quality and pace of distributed decision-making.
and ...
"We generate pace by decentralizing decision-making."
To which I'll add:
To prepare for the future, openly accelerate our distribution of adaptive preparations.
To have co-citizens, you have to be one.   To help tune, you have to be tuned.

To help tune an aggregate, faster/cheaper/better, you have to invest in tuning instrumentation.  Right now, the moment of aggregate tuning in our nation appears to be hovering over Open Source methods.  We need to extend those methods faster/cheaper/better, to more info-channels.   To reap the insanely large margins from return on coordination, we have to write off the relatively negligible cost of coordination.

A call for more experimentation in early education.

In keeping with the need to identify and articulate challenges, the Open Operations Forum is now formally calling for participants in a nationwide process of accelerating EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTATION.  Early success will presumably be achieved by networks of existing home-schoolers.


We NEED hyper-mutation at the level of elementary school education, and throughout K-12 schools - and ways to regulate selection from it's output.

Why?

Because we do not have an adequate cultural-equivalent to a modern immune system.  A culture exists of immense entanglements of densely-engineered transaction chains.  Discriminating which parts of our own, randomly emerging variation harms vs helps ... is a parsing task that gets harder every day.

Not only are we slow to generate options and solicit change, we don't have adequate mechanisms to adaptively regulate & select early rudiments of emerging cultural immune processes.  Statistics alone dictate that most attempts at cultural protection will produce auto-immune stresses.  Experimentation goes nowhere without parallel improvements in the selection process.

Our present cycle is that some changes occur despite all efforts.  Some complain that the change is bad, and that change itself must be regulated.  Then we go off on a tangent about whether to change or not, and how fast or slow.  All irrelevant. We must always tune to changing context.  We need appeal to no higher authority, process or pace.

If sexual recombination generates the stem-cells (new humans) of any culture, then we can make a case that schools are analogous to the spleen or thymus. Education & training  develops the ability of kids to parse cultural-immunity (discriminating sense from non-sense) plus the ability to regulate tolerance limits - so that we actively generate adaptive cultural change, but don't shoot ourselves in the foot en mass.

Therefore, the key challenge for all evolving cultures is rate of developing methods for discriminating emerging variants [most of which are nonsense :) excuse the pun].  Parallel to system evolution, nested selection of "grading metrics" occurs apace - as value metrics & parsing catalysts.  We're always using old grading methods in attempts to select novel innovations.  How do we discover cheaper/faster/better ways to parse emerging group-variance for emerging adaptive value?  Answer, in the end, "we" can't change faster than our grading methods do.  And it starts in elementary, dear Watson.

Reacting to external change with {internal changes plus selections from internal changes} constitutes two, continuously emerging, parallel re-MAPPING tasks.  We're always remapping our selection criteria in order to remap ourselves to context, fast enough.  That involves co-optimizing two co-factor sets simultaneously in one polynomial.  


In short, we need education & training systems to turn out citizens who are increasingly prepared to quickly adapt to evolving demands - i.e., kids able to tune their traditions to context, as fast as needed, not just argue over the absolute need for change vs tradition.

Anyone who's discussed perturbation of & settling in analog computing networks is not surprised - but this core task is completely foreign to the bulk of our existing electorate, who will heatedly argue for hours based on personal allegiance to CONSERVING traditional, completely un-examined - & always partially obsolete - value maps, rating systems & grading systems!  Our net electorate is actually convinced that we mustn't change, and we're busy perfecting our ability to churn out more students of the same mindset!

Tradition can be a delicate, even taboo subject, just like national suicide.

Only in ritualized sports, orchestra, dance, theater, construction, etc do students routinely learn that, to succeed, everything has to continually change.  

Ironically, attention-seeking toddlers & adult Control Frauds both learn that the only way to personally "win" is willingness to break any & all rules [for personal, not group, benefit].  By actively selecting for the confluence of {personal success + group tradition}, we unwittingly select for increasing cultural fraud as the ONLY possible outcome.  This Catch-22 insanity starts in schools, and is most easily prevented there.

The best way to change that may to continually change the education system at a faster pace, so that "components" in our electoral analog-computing-network become increasingly more flexible, adaptive & thereby resilient.  Not too much, but enough to meet emerging demands of group context.  We need neither too little nor too much change, but we always need change tuned to both the magnitude & pace of changing context demands.


Return-on-coordination trumps all other returns, by far.  It's why evolution works, and social-species dominate.


Therefore, the goal is to continually re-map growing sets of dynamic tolerance limits to dynamic context.  To manage the exponentially growing inter-dependencies that come with cultural growth, students must be comfortable constantly & quickly trading SOME local options for SOME group options that produce net benefit.  That means being less fixated on personal success, less wary of group change, and hence better able to pursue emerging return-on-coordination.  We need to change, in order to actively select for more, not less, cultural resilience.  We ALWAYS need to change how we train our kids, so they're even more resilient than we were.  To do that, we need to explore & select from training options - faster.

Below is just ONE of endless examples why:

Roger Erickson, May 2012; mmt-discuss

Subject:  re: painful to watch - Ron Paul vs Paul Krugman video debate 

 it's like a re-enacted debate between Ptolomeic vs pre-Copernican physicists. 

Americans shouldn't let Americans settle for archaic philosophies OR operations!
   ...
Ok, I'll extend my original statement. RP doesn't understand fiat monetary systems, PK doesn't understand banking operations, and OUR ELECTORATES DON'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE!!!

This is a sad commentary on complex, human cultures. How much complexity can be constrained by remarkably pinheaded constraints? Every system has it's bugs. We've identified one permutation. It's not the only one that emerges entirely as a cultural phenomenon, "in the cloud" so to speak. Something has to be recursively placed in our educational system to provide future generations a bit more immunity to this form of cultural auto-immune disease.