How? Just keep doing what we've been doing, when we bother. What, exactly, you ask? Answer: practicing molecular, sexual & cultural recombination AND selection, of course. Everything else is just noise in the system.
Can we do it? Of course we can. Someone or something always does, eventually. Why not us?
Let me explain. Someone just wrote to me, saying that the Supreme Court shares blame for Wall Street’s (and Congress') drastic descent into pervasive fraud.
Yes, but the roots of Judicial corruption go back to politics of appellate appointments, which goes back to campaigning, which goes back to ethics & education ... which has it's own roots & control functions, in regional & local culture.
The best place to fix any outcome is at the prevention stage. Repairs are affordable only briefly, as stop-gap emergency efforts.
If you fix fundamentals, the fix soon sweeps through all symptoms, at all levels.
Yet without top-down support, it takes much martyrdom to slowly recruit momentum in whole aggregates. The bigger the aggregate, the more - & more protracted - the distributed, self-martyrdom.
If we're LUCKY, another Hoover-FDR or Marshall-Patton will come along & quickly, temporarily patch things up without our aggregate fully understanding how or why. Yet that would most likely be short term lucky & long term unlucky, because we just put ourselves at greater risk, while still not understanding how to manage mounting risks.
If we're not even short-term lucky? Then it's civil war, between classes, until our own governance is more permanently reconquered, and reshaped into less obsolete forms. Isn't that what the American Revolution was all about? Didn't the founders advise is to keep up continuous revolution, or at least continuous cultural evolution? There's nothing going on now that didn't occur in the lead-up to 1776, or to the Magna Carta, or to Athens first citizens revolt, 2300 years ago - or in any tribal council throughout the last 60,000 years.
The most fundamental change is the scale of our aggregate, which we are NOT handling well.
It's a pity that across the entire sub-discipline of exception-handling, we're loathe to handle our own aggregate growth as the most constant "exception" to be continuously handled! Go figure!
For our evolutionary path to extend, EVERYTHING has to undergo recombination and subsequent selection. Even literature majors eventually grasp that timeless reality.
What evolving, adapting cultures always need are rapid, enabling adaptations to SELECTION MARKETS. Not just capital markets.
What is a Selection Market? So far, our most common term for it is "evolution," but only because the process is so infrequently discussed.
What things are bartered, recombined & selected in Selection Markets? A widening range of disappearing, existing & emerging sub-components, components and super-aggregates of existing aggregates (e.g., colonial "states" transitioning to the United States of America, or, more pathetically so far, European States TRYING to transition to the United States of Europe).
Are capital markets robust enough to mediate the SELECTION already going on within ad hoc Selection Markets? Of course not. Just start listing for yourself the things which we normally don't (or, for some things, ever) try to list for sale or purchase on capital markets. For example, dynamic & intangible essentials, from trust, motivation, affinity (love) & spouses to understanding ... and on to generalized forms of return-on-coordination, like family, friendship, tribes & supra-tribal culture (aka, teamwork & solidarity & democracy).
Yet Selection-Markets for all those things DO exist, and exert a far more dominant effect on our personal, national and cultural outcomes than mere capital markets do.
So why aren't we more actively investing our human & social & cultural capital in improving what matters most, our real Selection Markets? We clearly possess the native intelligence, since we've been discussing the elements of Selection Markets since before recorded human history - just never quite pervasively enough to keep up with escalating demand, by right-sizing our selection efforts.*
Is that lag simply for lack of putting our heads together, and trying? In our recent feudalism/"economics" textbooks, "capitalists" demean historical natives for trading away lands & other resources for "blankets & beads," and yet here we are, hundreds of years later, trading our own aggregate future for our own trinkets. It's as though we've traded lazing about with a jug of wine & a loaf of bread .... for lazing about with designer drugs and video games.
Really, should not every discipline include practice in contributing to evolution of national strategy & net, cultural outcomes. ow to be relevant, not just specialized.
Most of us here in the USA may think that nothing's changed, but that just means that another aggregate less distracted with designer drugs & video games is about to loot our resources, en route to exploring insanely great new aggregate options, a future whole which will literally leave the sum of our personal options behind, in the dustbin of history.
Are we that easily distracted? So far, yes. We're raising yet another generation of students beaten into hoarding data and ignoring the changing context that applies meaning to data.
Aunt Samantha says it's up to YOU to either start re-inventing American ingenuity, or jump ship with the other rats.
The only other choice is to head back where we came from, with the other Luddites, who never see either direction of causality coming down the pike.
* How to right-size selection efforts? The efforts involved in architecture, molecular biology & engineering in general are good examples. More is always different, and with more of anything, then some previously negligible inter-dependencies always become critically important, requiring feedback-triggered catalysts to separate tuned from un-tuned system-engines. In short, to invest in Selection Markets, invest in right-sizing aggregate regulation, neither too much, nor too little, but always just enough, just as needed and just in time to respond to changing context. This is a drop-dead fundamental corollary of all system logic. It's amazing that so many capitalists want their bodies and bankers to be agile, while simultaneously missing the overriding need to keep their aggregate culture agile.
Not too long ago, this was simply called providing citizens with a "Liberal Education" - as in a broad education. That term has proven to be too amorphous. New terms are always needed, as tools helping aggregates self-recruit, in order to tune their growing selves with tempo adequate to the accelerating demands of context_times_"more."
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