We Need Professionally Licensed Cultural Engineers, Not Just Fly-By-Night Profiteers Masquerading As Politicians - And Informed Voters.

If teamwork works, why don't we do even more of it ... at all levels?

"It is necessary to have [civil] organization if we are to have effective and efficient government. The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization, and the only difference between a disorganized country and one that has the advantage of a wise and sound government is fundamentally a question of [citizen] organization." Calvin Coolidge

Yet here we are, unnecessarily waging a great civil war worldwide, between business concerns and the people whom merchants serve.

TTIP will outlaw any renationalization, once your power, water, trains etc. get privatized!

When a servant says to his customer: "Restrict your exploration of options, so I may serve you better" - he's forgetting that the horse doesn't direct the cart. Nor does the car direct the driver, or the Public Servant the public.

When servants mis-lead customers, we call it false-advertising. When servants usurp and enslave customers, we call it an evolutionary dead-end, and death spiral.

"Mass demand [for things we don't need] has been created almost entirely through .. advertising." Calvin Coolidge

Yet don't forget that we eventually discard - sometimes quickly - all that we don't need. Don't forget what happened the last time we allowed too much false-advertising to lead us off a cliff, right after Calving Coolidge left office in March, 1929.

Do we the people really need TTIP and other "trade" frameworks, any more than India "needed" the East India Company (EIC)?  Who is the benefactor? Who provides which benefits? And who reaps any claimed benefits, for how long? And finally, at what cost to the aggregate?

"This [TTIP] is a transnational corporate takeover similar to the takeover of India by the East India Company in 1757. That's the Neo-Liberal plan for globalization. 

This effectively shuts down democracy and neuters the nation state. It will lead to revolution unless enforced by police states in which the transnationals control the security forces, as the EIC did in India. 

It's not just a matter of stopping TPP and TTIP but of ending neoliberal globalization. The Right gets this. The Left not so much. So watch for a resurgence of the Right in the EZ."    Tom Hickey

What are YOUR thoughts?

Personally, I suspect that prospects for the feudal approach of right wing fat cats & gangsters - trying to emulate aristocrats - is alive and kicking, but on the tail-end of a 2-thousand year cycle.

Populations everywhere are being SLOWLY transitioning to professionally-run democracies, with hiccoughs.

It'll get a bit worse, but then things have to get better - or else.

This is cultural evolution in action; fascinating!

Imagine how long it took for human physiology to "settle" into a workable package of 40Trillion cells, ~300 Cell Types, and ~65 Organs. That adaptive tuning didn't happen overnight. Nor will cultural evolution at our current population levels.

It takes a super-village of established methods ... to grow an adaptive culture.

The core challenge is establishing AND MAINTAINING key sub-methods, for inventing & installing new cultural methods, as needed. That's way harder than, say, all the refinements made to the internal combustion engine the last 100 years.

We need professionally licensed cultural engineers, not just fly-by-night profiteers masquerading as politicians.

Until then, we're closer to disorganized crime than cultural teamwork.

Summary Fusion of OBT&E, OBCE, Credit, Currency, Criminology & Policy

OBCE distilled to 4 points:

1) Aggregate progress means local habits have to give way to emerging, aggregate habits.
2) The habit of coordinating Cultural Recombination is mightier than competition.
3) Public Discourse defines Desired Outcomes and drives coordination.
4) Practice drives agile Public Discourse.
[Any comments? Feedback is absolutely required, as you'll see, below. :) ]

Let's start with a challenging axiom.

There is no distinction between leading, policy, economics, and operations ... there is only staging, linking & sequencing of distributed actions, to explore emerging options.

Next, let's jump right in by noting that aggregate success, and Output Gaps are gated primarily by outmoded, persistent local habits of dominance & subjugation, ... with no aggregate goal in mind.

The real kicker here is that the vast majority of self-defrauding behaviors, from Innocent Frauds to Control Frauds, are expressed as insufficiently examined habits, among people who are not are not getting enough practice at thinking anywhere hard enough to sense the aggregate outcome of their personal compulsions.

In short, frictions and output gaps are manifestations of lagging coordination.

And the frauds that supposedly sap coordination? Frauds are just random agents following random actions - SANS ADEQUATE PATTERNS OF AGGREGATE FEEDBACK!!!

There is a better way. We can call it Evolution, and it's core methods are coordinating on a greater scale.

How does coordination grow? Via inevitable autocatalysis. If it can, it eventually will, simply due to statistics. So if it can happen, why not sooner rather than later ... which may be too late?

How does a human aggregate catalyze it's own coordination? First, by adequate preparation. Group Intelligence is always held in the BODY OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE. We have to generate an adequate sampling of aggregate discourse, before we can tune and leverage it to fit a given context (aggregate regulation). So the key, underlying process always requires practiced familiarity at changing methods for continuously generating & re-shaping adequate patterns of distributed feedback. That requires agile Public Discourse in it's broadest sense.

That's what Walter Shewhart, 80 years ago, called the "Cost of Coordination." Any biologist, ecologist, physicist, chemist or statistician would agree with Shewhart's statement.

"In all .. systems, the highest cost, by far, is the cost of coordination." W. Shewhart

Shewhart, and later students of his PDSA cycle, such as Deming & Boyd, considered the immediate corollary so obvious that they never bothered to state it in print. However it's useful to state it for beginners, simply to prime their learning curve. "The highest return, therefore, is always the return-on-coordination."

Jumping ahead, one can readily see from this that It really does ALWAYS come down to saving aggregates (not just frauds) from themselves. And saving our nation along the way. How? By indirectly tricking any and every size aggregate into actually exploring coordination on a larger scale. Humans are inherently exquisitely cooperative, but coordinating their constantly emerging diversity creates a continuously growing need for NEW coordination triggers, moderators and practice methods.

Call it Cultural Recombination, or something else, depending upon who's listening, and why. :)

Cultural Recombination is an extension of the same process that occurs during Sexual Recombination and embryology. We need social catalysts that drive and shape Cultural Recombination as much as we need the proteins and nucleic acids that catalyze sexual recombination.

Just adequately reconnect everything to everything to master context, and then - for resiliency - relax to what's minimally needed for a given context. Aggregate resiliency means actually keeping enough in adequately distributed reserve, to enable re-mobilization for changing contexts.

Cultures just do that continuously, in interleaved, asynchronous patterns. That always makes me think of Combinatorial Chemistry. In "Combinatorial Culturary," we're throwing more stuff together all the time, whether we will or won't. Our task is to select an aggregate adaptive signal from the changing aggregate noise. Luckily, that's all we have to do, and we're very good at it, when we bother to try.

Have analog computing system, must use it.

The only analog computing system more massively parallel than the human CNS is the human culture. Both are terrible things to waste.

ps: There's also one, undeniably inevitable "economic" corollary to all this. Growing aggregates must devote higher proportions of their time to aggregate coordination. The ratio of "dedicated work" to "dedicated coordination" is a function of aggregate size. Simply put, that means that the AVERAGE hourly work week should be continuously declining variable, co-yoked to population size and aggregate agility. If we're to maintain a functioning democracy, then our hours of work per week absolutely cannot be a fixed constant. To reap the insane return on coordination, we have to dedicate increasing proportions of our time to distributing, analyzing and testing the implications of our own, distributed feedback - instead of just working harder at what we're already doing wrong. It's that simple. Less work, more discussion & coordination.

How to best help shape aggregate success? NEVER tell an aggregate HOW to do things? Instead, help RECRUIT its members both to an enticing aggregate CHALLENGE, and then also to grant itself distributed PERMISSION to surprise all members with its distributed ingenuity?

There always seem to be endless discussions going on, about countless proposed ideas and suggestions, for all policies, not just fiscal and tax policies.

Perhaps there's no problem with that, except that there is not enough discussion? Also, there are not yet enough methods for convincing our aggregate to quickly test and assess enough of our present ideas?

So let's take another approach. Let's connect all such policy discussion to more ancient lessons, by trying to stand back and look at our situation from the outside in, as if some alien visitor were observing planet Earth & the USA.

"When you see a planet full of humans, digging themselves into a hole, and you offer to help ..... they'll invariably ask you to jump in and help them dig."

So of course it's no wonder that our SETI isn't succeeding yet. :)  Maybe ETI is waiting for us to grow up and express a "Saii" - the Search for Additional, Intra-Aggregate Intelligence?

Why would alien visitors abstain from any of our ongoing arguments? Maybe because they'd quickly recognize - or already be universally familiar with - a universal reference for evaluating our efforts?

What is that reference? The members of all aggregates VOLUNTARILY swap SOME local degrees of freedom, for SOME uniquely aggregate degrees of freedom, exactly because of the net BENEFIT of that exchange. That's what we call a SOCIAL species.

Recognizing, staging, linking & sequencing the (distributed) behavior of an aggregate, in order to take ADVANTAGE of that exchange is obviously quite complicated. It has to evolve by trial and error. We have tangible records of that occurring in seemingly countless species, and certainly also in the history of our own human, cultural aggregates.

Hence, at this time, maybe we need to something parallel to all of our discussion details, just to make our next decision. Why? When viewing any social species anywhere, or any aggregate anywhere ..... an overriding ratio always stands out, separating adaptive aggregate-signal from ongoing aggregate-noise. Maybe we're simply not allowing ourselves to see it?

If there is not a net, distributed gradient of detectable success vs failure, the components of all aggregates cannot and do not make that voluntary exchange in enough proportions to continue tuning the aggregation process. 

If a growing aggregate is not actively tuning itself to organize & aggregate on a greater scale - i.e., "TO MAKE A MORE PERFECT UNION" .... then it is, by definition, turning to inter-component competition instead, and wavering on the cusp of dissociation and dis-aggregation, instead of further aggregation.

Without a steady sequence of adequately enticing, aggregate challenges, it is mathematically improbable to even maintain, let alone improve aggregation, i.e., teamwork, aka "union".

The political process of all human cultures has always revolved around this fact.

Further, those humans involved in the politics of human culture have always HAD to employ an endless series of invented, often diversionary, challenges, in a desperate attempt to keep enough team members motivated. We've known this very clearly, ever since Themistocles tricked the citizens of Athens into investing public wealth on a bigger/better state navy - around ~483BC!

Today, however, it seems rather clear that the art of politics may have reached it's limit?

Adaptive politics is classically defined as the art of having supposedly gifted individuals attempt to trick an aggregate into adaptive, aggregate action sooner than it would have otherwise acted - or in other words, the pursuit of successful, Central Planning.

Yet we already know that Central Planning cannot scale as fast as aggregate demands. Hence, politics as is DOES NOT SCALE! Well Duh!

I only bother stating all this so indirectly so as to drive home the point that WE, as a growing aggregate, will ALWAYS face this task. How do we keep our changing team motivated, no matter how big, successful & complacent we get? That organizational task COMPOUNDS, as a function of both population numbers and citizen capabilities.

It always comes back to the mathematics of distributed motivation among the aggregate of citizens?

If there isn't a palpable distinction between more/less enticement (or survival/failure), then there is no net maintenance & growth of democracy - which we can call further aggregation of the binding ties of a social species? So far, we just connecting already well-known dots.

So it is always necessary to invent new methods for recruiting citizens to keep organizing, to continue making an even more perfect union, and to continue exploring novel opportunities to voluntarily swap less enticing local options, for more enticing aggregate options?

Isn't that why straw men arguments and false flag operations are so common in history? An adequate enemy always helps? Yet we're simply running out of them - in a tragecomedic sense - to the point that a melting pot is trying to convince itself that all contributors to the pot now harbor enemies. That process is degenerating to worldwide fratricide. Surely that pond is nearly all fished out, and we have to look elsewhere, just to keep feeding ourselves?

What will become of this growing population of humans? All prior examples of other social species either die out, stall or invade yet untapped niches. Sci-fi writers have explored this domain for decades - although a bit haphazardly.

Those social species that DO manage to aggregate on a larger scale, all seem to do so by an analogous process, regardless of the specific details. 

They permanently capture a new state of aggregation ONLY when they add something subtle to their aggregate-regeneration process. 

That "subtle something" is always some completely unpredictable pattern of distributed influences that somehow BIASES the entire aggregate to further aggregation, i.e., organization on a greater scale.

Absolutely nothing that an existing aggregate does guarantees this or makes it inevitable!

It only occurs as the result of increasingly distributed trial and error. However, the process actually seems to accelerate, since a growing aggregate always spawns it's own selection machinery as a function of the very diversity that it spawns. To select it's own next step, it needs only to stumble into also listening to the added parts of it's growing self. Simply hearing and using all of the constantly expanding feedback always seems to allow self selection.

Humans are already remarkably, FANTASTICALLY biased by physiological nature to aggregate and pursue return-on-coordination. 

Worldwide, we've resorted to actively trying to beat that innovative spirit out of kids, through "education," to the point that active tensions between our existing physiological and cultural biases are rising, worldwide. Our obvious options are piling up faster than our willingness to explore them!

It is NOT AT ALL CLEAR how to further grow our historic bias to further return-on-coordination!!!

a) endless warfare?
b) endless random political diversions, tricking us into lemming-like mass manias?
c) instilling a cultural bias, through subtle tweaks to our education system?

Perhaps we do NOT need to over-argue the details, other than to use them to orient to the big picture, and recognize our aggregate context.

We DO need new methods for adequately biasing our millions and billions of citizens to pursue return-on-coordination as a Desired Outcome that is more enticing than competitive dis-aggregation.

As always, methods drive results, but ONLY after net motivation or enticement is established.

In our case, that ALWAYS comes back to methods for increasing the distributed motivation of our existing aggregate.

We already have mathematical proof that our survival path requires methods for increasing our cultural bias to further return-on-coordination. You can look that proven premise up in the established literature of multiple disciplines.

UNFORTUNATELY, NOT ENOUGH CITIZENS KNOW THAT, and certainly haven't learned it early enough in life to help their aggregates fully leverage the potential impact. [Sadly, 40% or more are currently actively opposed to that conclusion, and are indoctrinating their children to do so as well. Hence, our union isn't as perfect as it once was.]

In summary, we are facing an aggregate tuning task, one that is conceptually rather simple in theory, and even in practice. 

Perhaps the greatest hurdle is our existing bias to RESIST being tuned by others.

Rather than trying to beat our aggregate self into submission ..... it might be easier to join our growing, aggregate self?

Hence, one - very old - suggestion is to task all teammates with equal responsibility for aggregate self tuning. No surprise there.

Historically, we've called that either tribal membership, or democracy. Whatever it's called, we now need to do it - EVEN MORE EFFICIENTLY - on an even bigger scale.

When will that happen? Perhaps exactly WHEN an adequate majority agree on it as a consensus goal? When we do have agreement, then all individuals can sit back and let their aggregate impress themselves with IT'S distributed ingenuity.

To paraphrase General Patton, 

"To help shape aggregate success, NEVER tell an aggregate HOW to do things? Instead, help RECRUIT it's members both TO a consensus Desired Outcome, and then also to ALLOW itself distributed permission to surprise all members with it's distributed ingenuity?"

Patton had the beginnings of a generalized idea, but he didn't extend it to a 2-stage optimization process for an entire national culture.

Methods for recruiting citizens to continuously select their own enticing, new, Desired Outcomes, worthy of their aggregate capabilities. 

Methods for recruiting citizens to allow themselves to succeed more through aggregate hoarding (of coordination skills as dynamic assets) vs individual hoarding (of crude static assets).

And, ultimately, to a 3-stage optimization process, adding one more step.

Methods for adding a developmental bias, so that all three steps become an ingrained habit.

These 3 steps conform pretty well to the steps in both Shewhart's PDSA cycle, and Boyd's altered, extrapolated version, the OODA loop, and also to the general tenets of OBT&E - or "Outcomes Based Training & Education."

More Evidence That The Entirety Of Orthodox Economics Is Simply An Extension Of Class Hegemony - Maintained As A Cultural Habit

Consider the latest missive from the Congressional Budget Office.

The Long-Run Effects of Federal Budget Deficits on National Saving and Private Domestic Investment

After reading this several times over, a simple question has to be posed.

If [someone] starts with a big enough myth, can they get whole populations and disciplines to go along with nonsense? The answer throughout history is .... "sure!"

Yet where does that leave us? Before even considering the CBO's data, please consider the following questions, to establish and orient to context. After all, without context, data is meaningless.

Questions:

1) Is the entirety of orthodox economics simply an extension of class hegemony - maintained as a cultural habit?

2) Is it actually a generally agreed upon cultural taboo to question the nonsensical axioms of orthodox economics?

3) Is orthodox economics inseparable from "court" management theory, used by aristocrats to manage "their" assets?

While pondering that context, consider the reality that there is a gulf between fiat currency operations (e.g., MMT) and orthodox economics, simply because any aggregate, operational approach, by definition, is tuned to SOME stated purpose - aka, group policy.

Orthodox economics, on the other hand, steadfastly refuses to accept national policy as a reference axiom - maintaining that it is merely a set of tools, or methods. Yet no tool users set down their tools at the end of the day without considering what they were using them for, and why.

That claim of being a method divorced from purpose ought to set off warning bells. "Danger Will Robinson. Danger Will Robinson. Control Frauds are running loose in our Policy Staff!"

Orthodox economics is Machiavelli's Economics, by any other name?

All functional diversions of patterns of tool-use from consensus purpose, constitute - by default - various shades of Control Fraud. Simply because special interests will always fill a policy void left dangling, lacking aggregate purpose.

The result? Innocent Frauds may practice only Innocent Control Fraud (ICF) by default, but it is control fraud nonetheless. The concept holds, even if you prefer to call it incompetence.

Is there any resistance to this widespread lack of aggregate purpose for economic theory? Perhaps. See the following article.

CBO’s scoring system holds U.S. government back on long-term programs

However, this text is so long-winded that it's difficult to fully discern whether the author's Context Awareness is consistently rooted in allegiance to public purpose, fraud or incompetence. Maybe a bewildering mix of all three? :(

Back to the CBO article. Let's now get to their treatment of data.

They soon get right to their beginning myth, then base all economic modeling around this assumption.

'Deficits thus “crowd out” private domestic investment in the long run.'

And how do they get their conclusions to support their premise? With the rudderless tool of "orthodox economic theory" of course! Starting with a definition connected to no context whatsoever:

"The sum S + (T – G) equals national saving"

They're referring to a common, presumed notation. I = S + (T – G) – NFI

Rearranging, we get:  S + (T – G) = I + NFI

So for the CBO, "national saving" = (priv+biz saving) + (taxes - total spending). In other words, "national saving" = (Public Investment) + NetForeignInvestment.

Just as an aside, how does a growing nation "save" Public Initiative? Beats me. For the sake of the CBO's lunatic ramblings, however, let's ignore that functonal sanity test, and go back to considering the form of their policy delusion.

Next, note that I + NFI = trade balance (pos or neg), in econ jargon.

So far, so close.

Yet one implicit point becomes clear, though unstated! Managing the trade deficit is their implied control variable? Their "objective?"

(For Pete's sake! That is gold-std thinking. It's like the CBO office is staffed by blondes listening to a variant of the "breathe-in, breathe-out" tapes.)

First off, they're treating the sum of pub+priv savings as a static asset. There's no presence nor discussion of sinks and sources in their model?

What is the reality? 

* return-on-coordination = a net source of real + nominal dynamic assets;

(which counts more than the possession of any static assets)
(and don't forget compounding; 
some teamwork really is more useful than other teamwork)

* conversely, net stupidity or net ignorance easily produce a net sink of both dynamic and static assets;

We have a key problem in using macro-economic theory to shape national policy. Regardless of all the definitions & rhetoric, there is no formal acknowledgement of Public Purpose in orthodox macro economics!

What is our national objective? Our Public Purpose?

..Which economic model variable TRACKS that objective? 

..Which methods drive variables to push economic models in the direction of that objective?

Orthodox macro economists can't answer those questions because asking them is NOT allowed in the framework of orthodox macro economic modeling! It's a theoretical accounting method that refuses to acknowledge any purpose OTHER than ex post, static asset accounting.

At the same time, economic theory studiously ignores the evolution of banking operations!

You couldn't make this up. A management theory that refuses to consider aggregate purpose and also ignores evolving operations. What could go wrong?

Again, merely for the sake of tempo in this comedy routine, let's continue anyway.

Does anyone see a National Assessment System at work in any of this?

I'm getting the feeling that it's all implicitly biased to make & keep key political constituents rich, no matter what happens to our country. Smells like teenage aristocratic philosophy? The CBO really is advising us to manage currency_issuer finances just like currency_user finances? We need an electorate which knows the difference, so we can maintain a policy staff which knows it.

Let's reconsider something that is implicit in our National Policy Guide: "Assume some myth or propaganda, then see what our macro economic models mean ... relative to that myth." [Alrighty then! Werks fur mi!]

That's no way to run a family, a company, an army, or a nation - all of which set AGGREGATE objectives first, and then explore all options for achieving them.

Our curreny National Policy Guide is, however, how royalty look at the serfs in their various "possessions." If citizens and aggregate don't matter, then of course orthodox macro economics works. Just treat humanity as another variable to manipulate [without their will]. The simple question is "who does it work FOR?"

To me, the CBO's logic is NOT a model for managing national development.

It IS, however, a model for managing who privately owns any and all declared static assets (or thinks they own them).

We need an electorate, Congress & CBO that puts out a yearly report entitled:

"The Long-Run Effects of
Federal Thinking Deficits
on Adaptive Rate Of The USA"

The Unexpected Effect of Monnet on Money

Monnet's Brandy and Europe's Fate

For most citizens of the Western Hemisphere, this is a fascinating essay on the legacy of Jean Monnet.

It is certainly curious that the convictions of a person whose personality was set before WWI, would come to dominate European events 2 world wars and 100 years later.

This is all so foreign to US citizens - and various of the many details are both unsettling and enlightening.

Compare Monnet to Marriner Eccles. You have to wonder whether they ever met.

Monnet & Europe saddled with so much baggage?

While Eccles, FDR & the USA were so innocently free to get on with pragmatic responses to changing context?

The bigger issue seems to be how both zones are adapting, at what Adaptive Rate, and why the Adaptive Rates of both zones are fluctuating differently.

For comparison, one can't help but ask how many Australian citizens know much of, or care about, the cultural dynamics on the European mainland?

And, this brings up a question about Aggregate Tempo.

How much do any of us need to know about the spurious history of one another ... versus just learning - and then KEEPING - the habit of QUICKLY seeing how to coordinate new success, in any new, unpredictably varying context?

"Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore SELDOM ADOPTED FROM PREVIOUS WISDOM, but forced by the occasion."  Benjamin Franklin

Maybe FutureShock shows that we tend, in practice, to non-selectively over-weight ALL input from elders, in our currently accelerated cultural settings. Don't we need to be just as selective about which bits of elder-advice to keep, as we are about selecting which inventions to keep?

Since methods drive results, which methods might allow us to enter every new context with a fresh, unbiased approach to sampling both our emerging options plus the optional feedback/analysis/test methods we may use to achieve our next desired outcome?

Although it might seem harsh, perhaps Europe, and the whole world, would have been far better off if Monnet had retired earlier, or had been more quickly forgotten? :) Or are efforts such as Monnet's the historical norm, rather than the exception?

Or is Monnet simply unfairly remembered?  For example, was his regret of the unfair reparations against Germany following WWI mistakenly repressed? If Monnet were still here, would he be insisting that the MiddleClass be treated more fairly, across all of Europe, and especially in southern Europe?

There is no way to tell for sure? Yet it doesn't hurt to ask those questions.

It seems that Monnet's "Action Committee for the United States of Europe" and the later European Parliament reconstituted everything about USA democracy except Ben Franklin's famous "Table talks" - i.e., the crucial method which actually delivered the beneficial function, not just the constraining form.

"When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint. In like manner here, BOTH sides must part with some of their demands."

So far, most people in southern Europe feel that only one side, the Middle Class, is parting with anything. There will be no progress without fairness, regardless of which methods are employed?

Have we merely distracted ourselves with the topic of "money," while failing to adopt adequate responses to the demands of an occasion that is still ongoing, largely unchanged, since Monnet's youth?

"Urban Planning" is NOT Cultural Planning - Which Deserves A Far Richer Toolkit If We Are To Steer Our Cultural Growth More Productively

London street growth from 1786 to 2010.



From a study of physical infrastructure growth patterns.

This is an interesting map, of course, yet it misses the more important question of Cultural Planning, not just Urban Planning.

To steer our own, zooming growth of both population and citizen capabilities, it would sure be nice to have some visual maps of Cultural Organization. Not physical infrastructure maps, but maps of all the emerging inter-dependencies between all of our truly novel, emerging inventions.

Such "regulatory" maps or "Interactomes" are everywhere in the life sciences, but seem, perversely, to be largely banned from most policy and political practices (except where they are misused). With better, and more widely distributed Cultural Organization maps, our MiddleClass electorate might be less confused, distracted, divided and conquered by their own bevy of cultural parasites.

An interactome, with genes represented by text in boxes and interactions noted by lines between the genes.

We certainly need many more maps of Cultural Infrastructure, as a visual assessment tool.

Analogy?

Street growth & other changes in physical infrastructure represent the incidental noise broadcast by a growing culture, and do not map the inner infrastructure of the culture itself - at all.

In the 1830's, de Tocqueville supposedly noted with surprise - during his American travels - that US towns everywhere averaged ~6 civic organizations that literally everyone belonged to one or the other of (Farming networks weren't far behind, with their granges, co-ops, fellowships and various church-based and other initiatives). Participation in multiple such organizations served to bind the affinity & coordination, of communities, and both preserve and grow the agility and maneuverability of American populations.

European populations of the day had long since gotten used to remote, aristocrat "authorities" doing their thinking for them. Early American populations had to think for themselves, and thrived because of it. Not any more?

Many citizens have a vague sense that much of our Cultural Infrastructure declines as physical infrastructure grows - yet we lack visual feedback tools such as maps, to graphically convey that degradation of inter-dependency management so that we're more easily motivated to develop needed checks & balances. Without rapid, pervasive feedback and assessment methods, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage a culture that is both growing and diversifying rapidly.

As self-governance methods tends towards leaner, more brittle & less distributed "Central Planning," it is our quality of distributed decision-making that declines. In the process, the very nature of lean, Central Planning defeats it's avowed purpose, and steadily degrades the maneuverability of a democracy, and the agility of electorates.

We need culture maps and other assessment tools, to monitor and manage Cultural Infrastructure, not just physical infrastructure.

Surely some fledgling examples already exist? Are there any Cultural Infrastructure maps, similar to the street maps and bio-regulatory maps above?

Has anyone already visualized our Cultural Interactome? Or has that been banned by the Koch Brothers?

Continuously Newer Methods For Increasing AND Tuning Key Communication Throughput - The Key To All Development.

An interesting campaign poster appeared on twitter recently, indicating that 100 yrs ago, we as a people had a better grasp of return-on-coordination?





There are tangible benefits to organizing and coordinating?

Why do we have to be reminded of this?

Obviously, we've known this ever since the first proto-humans bagged a mammoth or other large prey, or organized their first camp.

Even chimpanzees and baboons know this implicitly

Every pack, herd or band animal does, to some degree.

So it's extraordinary that modern humans express an oxymoron as profound as the following.

All people implicitly grasp the benefit of small team behavior, and ... too many also DISPUTE the benefit of successfully organizing on a national scale.

If one national effort doesn't quite work, too many tend to say it can't be done or is too difficult, instead of just deciding to adjust existing methods?

THAT BEHAVIOR OF GIVING UP IS NOT NATURAL!

Or at least it's only a part of our nature.

If resisting growth was all we did, we wouldn't be here today in nation-states, after a million+ years of human evolution. You have to presume that a constant level of failed context awareness, aka parasitic self fraud, aka Control Fraud supplies the bulk of our actual selective pressure? What seems to divert us from our own evolution is the same pressure that drives us to further evolve human culture? Namely, our internal frictions.

We've all heard or expressed the following thoughts, at different stages of our development. They're familiar refrains, which both limit and drive our development of new mobilization methods.

"We have too much government!"

"It can't be done!"

"In theory, but not in practice."

True, or not true? It's very difficult to even have this discussion with most people, since most aren't comfortable separating required methods from emerging options. Yet there's a fundamental truth that cuts across this irrelevant, student argument.

FOR OUR GROWTH RATE TO STAY THE SAME, 

WE MUST CONSTANTLY CHANGE EVERYTHING ABOUT OURSELVES?

Ya think?

So why do we see so much friction over such an ancient topic? Today, everyone can discuss small-group teamwork as an implicit or natural behavior, yet too many refute the obvious corollary, that larger scale teamwork can also be "natural" or implicitly achievable.

We all laugh at "Cargo Cults" in simpler settings, yet nearly all of us are still Cargo Cult Cultural Scientists ... who actually believe that we have to GET our dynamic fiat and our static assets FROM something other than our own teamwork.

Here's one significant conclusion. It's one that all students should learn by age 10?

The sensory instrumentation of small groups of people wield communication throughput that allows them to easily accommodate iterative trials & errors, until they find what works. Our 5 senses alone give us enough leeway to do a lot, and our various tools and methods provide additional "force-extension."

Those capabilities allow us to:
.....gather much information;
.....recognize inter-dependency patterns (aka, make context models);
.....test behaviors (generate trials);
.....assess outcomes (before going back to review other context changes).

If we both make enough mistakes and forgive ourselves for them - quickly enough - then we call it learning, and find sustainable success as what's left over.

Sure, we always have to select how little data or communication throughput is needed to be efficient at a given task. Yet to achieve group efficiency, we ALWAYS need enough communication throughput to explore constantly changing group options, by iterative trial & error.

Once achieved, the same new methods that allowed new achievement also allow selective TUNING. Selecting to relax into efficient habits for transient contexts? That requires enough computational power to drive the selection of which transient habits to fall into, and then to re-gear everything as contexts change. To survive, we gradually toggle between fully activated vs relaxed organizational states.

However, at the end of every relaxed period, we usually have MORE PEOPLE to activate or mobilize. So there's a double task.

First, re-activate the prior level of organization, by re-asserting and increasing the active, non-relaxed level of communication throughput across a LARGER TEAM!

Second, tune the communication throughput to actually make this larger team even more organized than competing teams, in a given context. Most data is usually irrelevant to context, but it takes considerable practice to sort that out.

Imagine you're a sports coach. It takes months of practice for a given team to get better at a given game.

What happens if periodically the team and coach are told that the league has changed the rules, and there are more people on every team - say, 7 on 7 basketball, instead of 5 on  5. Worse, imagine that the field size or shape has changed, and that the equipment changed.

All teams would struggle to adapt, and get good at exploiting all the new options! Organizing on a larger scale is difficult. It requires readjust ALL interdependencies, and finding new tolerance limits for every one of them.

Yet would it take even more time and effort than the original training did - or less?

Those growing teams that excelled would be those who adjusted their entire training methods, and got good at learning itself, not just excelling at one, defined iteration of one sport. If the changes occurred too quickly, many would spend time complaining, or just give up and quit.

Only the most agile groups would survive.

Sports are obviously a very pale comparison of life, war, or cultural evolution.

To drive group learning, faster/better/leaner, large groups struggle to field and quickly tune the variable communication throughput required to sustain group trial & error without excessive group frictions.

Simply put, that's why so many individuals and subgroups are always PURSUING MAL-ADAPTIVE OPTIONS FOR TOO LONG, before receiving adequate, full-group, feedback. We call it fraud, yet fraud is itself just a symptom of failed group maintenance or self-regulation, resulting in isolated people lacking adequate, timely group feedback.

Spectacular examples of task-specific or context-specific communication throughput occur repeatedly (campaigns, wars, environmental impact statements, FDA clinical trials, banking regulations, Automatic Economic Stabilizers, etc).

Yet such examples are usually either local or temporary achievements that face considerable frictions, and constant resistance to their retention.

Cultural evolution works on yet another level, beyond the comprehension of most component citizens.

Hence, most adaptive cultural adjustments are not immediately MAINTAINED, even those that were seemingly demonstrated to all. 

THAT, IN A NUTSHELL, IS WHY SO MANY GRANDCHILDREN HAVE TO RE-LEARN DIFFICULT LESSONS WHICH THEIR GRANDPARENTS LEARNED THE HARD WAY, AND THEIR PARENTS EITHER FORGOT, OR NEVER LEARNED TO IMPLICITLY APPRECIATE.

So there's a 2nd step to cultural evolution.

To MAINTAIN organization on a larger scale, we have to first develop the full, group-wide communication throughput that allows the original achievement.

Subsequently, we must then institute some 2nd order changes in citizen development (i.e.,. upbringing, education & training) to permanently capture and retain both the new achievements AND the newly elevated threshold of communication throughput that allows them.

This cycle repeats, so there is a 3rd step in accelerating adaptive rate, or autocatalysis, that is scale dependent. Once a human group fields enough communication throughput to start taking on "larger prey" or bigger challenges, it also fields enough computational power - in the form of agile public discourse - to actively observe and tune it's own developmental methods.

Once we can adjust our upbringing, education and training methods at will, we can accelerate our cultural achievement-&-retention cycle. Then we can chase context change faster/cheaper/better.

This brings up an interesting question. HOW MANY GENERATIONS DOES IT TAKE FOR A GIVEN CULTURE, TO PERMANENTLY RETAIN NEWLY DISCOVERED, ADAPTIVE METHODS?

If you follow the old advertising adage, you might suggest that it once took Neanderthal or ancient Cro Magnon humans, say, 12 generations of observable trial and error before a new group trait was clearly separated as an adaptive signal, from all the competing cultural noise. That's presumably how cults, clans and bands form - through behavioral recruitment and meme flow, not just gene flow. The adjusted methods can be physiological or purely behavioral.

To answer the behavioral part of the question, how soon a culture retains new behaviors is always some selective function of how early each new generation is exposed to a newly practiced behavior, so that kids start practicing it during development, by emulating emerging adult tasks. That's a inescapable reality, given the known developmental "windows" for all forms of human developmental plasticity. To foster results, all groups recruit children to start practicing required individual or group skills at an earlier age.

SO IF WE AREN'T CONSTANTLY PUSHING POLICY DILEMMAS OF THE DAY FURTHER BACK DOWN OUR EDUCATION PROCESS, WE'RE SLOWING OUR CULTURAL ADAPTIVE RATE?

So what must we do? Change everything? How much? Without assessing the impact of everything, how do we selectively change everything?

We have a significant industry evaluating HOW children learn. Yet we don't invest nearly as much effort into constantly reevaluating WHAT they start emulating, how soon, or how to ASSESS THE IMPACT on our desired, national outcomes. If we diverted more of our existing NSA and other MICC budgets to assessing how well our developmental, education and training methods track our emerging national challenges, we'd be far more secure.

National security is a function of what we as a people become, and how quickly we achieve and retain newly adaptive traits? No surprise there. Wallace & Darwin would have said they told us so?

National security tracks our Cultural Adaptive Rate, which tracks our development and assessment of new methods, not just diversion of MICC profits into private hands.

CULTURAL METHODS DRIVE CULTURAL RESULTS.

And rate of changing cultural methods drives our rate of cultural development.

Our rate of retaining new cultural methods, in turn, tracks our effort at rapidly adjusting our development, education and training methods to fit our emerging, national Desired Outcomes.

Yet what good does it do to let children emulate the national tasks of the day, if we're not setting new national goals for ourselves? So we end with yet another link in a cascading cycle of cultural development. If we don't keep setting national goals worthy of our expanding audacity, then we can't keep ourselves employed, or become all that we as a people can become.

To end, here's an updated set of tuning memes for our cultural situation.

Full group interactions drive group awareness.
 Group awareness exposes group options.
  Group options demand adaptive, group exploration activity.
   Adaptive group exploration demands increasing group coordination skills.
    Increasing group coordination requires new group assessment methods.
     Group assessment drives group interactions (restarting the cycle, on yet another level).

Please get busy making sure that our culture becomes more than the one we were capable of making. Give ALL of our descendents new cultural options, not just hoarded fiat currency. Fiat they can always make, by fiat.

What is Homo Sapiens going to DO with itself? Rates of Exploring Local-vs-Aggregate Options ... and the Fate of Nations.

To answer that, let's first look at a seemingly unlikely context.

Amsterdam Gives Alcoholics Beer to Clean City Streets

And then range up to analogies, such as "USA gives sociopaths power ... to "clean up" social interdependencies."

Before delving too deep, too quickly into taboo subjects, lets practice on the one with less implications. Beer.

I don't know how widely this particular issue was discussed in Holland, but it opens a small, useful window exposing a view of group policy-development methods. Isn't that a window all citizens should look through more often?

It's a bubbling, boiling topic. In the particular case of beer, we've come full circle in the past 100 years, first to Prohibition, then to the opposite extreme. We bounced all the way from tolerance limit to the other. Is there a way to spend more time near whatever intermediate zone is safer?

You have to immediately wonder just how many times throughout history this - and similar - social experiments have been conducted, the results noted - or not - and eventually completely forgotten all over again!

Does that sound familiar, or what? 

It's largely a number problem. Lets say that ~24 grandparents had to learn some lessons the hard way, and that to many of the ~48 or more parents either forget, or never learned those lessons. Can we minimize how many of the ~100 or more grandchildren have to relearn too many of those painful lessons - starting from scratch? With growing numbers of grandchildren involved, maintaining adequate affinity, motivation, interactions, coordination and Group Intelligence becomes a increasingly distributed task, with no simple policy fix possible. It can get ugly ever 3 generations or less, if there's no brewmaster tending the fermenting brew. If we are both brew and brewmaster, how do we tend ourselves to get a better brew, and not keep losing whole batches?

At heart, the sweeping Amsterdam beer policy, is an extension of what EVERY merchant lobby drifts into working towards. That is: merchants lobby to get policy tilted toward favoring THEIR product. And electorates look for ways to accommodate the endless sea of wheels squeaking to different extents.

Why do merchant sectors lobby? Why do electorates accommodate given patterns of merchants, to given extents, at different times?

Merchants lobby because bureaucratizing access to their product, as a policy ... inevitably opens options for shifting (& stabilizing) the spectrum of it's REAL price point (i.e., relative to other current & emerging static/dynamic assets).
Thereby, anyone in that and dependent industry sectors tend to ASSESS that policy development as "improvement" (for them).

That is the temptation that creates the phenomenon of Control Frauds, as the culmination of unchecked, Innocent Fraud.

Yet what does it mean for net Adaptive Rate of the "more perfect union" all citizens are supposedly pursuing? Electorates end up accommodating troublesome Control Frauds too long, precisely because of confusion. Re-tuning a complex system is far more difficult than the simple, local acts that can screw them up!

Is a group's NET development rate decreased, stalled, or increased by enshrining certain decisions in bureaucracy policy? By simple statistics, degradation is dramatically the norm, and required investment in CAREFUL regulation is always increasing, never stabilizing or decreasing. 

National self -regulation is rarely, if ever, a significant problem. Lack of self-regulation is the perennial, #1 problem keeping us from reaping the insane return-on-coordination.

How can we re-tune our changing system? Well, that always depends entirely upon context first of all, ultimately including how well the NET impact of the chosen context-response is ASSESSED by that electorate. Hoard, horde, lord knows we've all seen disastrous policies maintained for decades ... by squeaky wheel "elites," or even because of our own ignorance, in the person or the aggregate. Often we can't generate successful responses, or can't do so soon enough even once we realize what the solution is. There are many processes which sometimes seem at odds, not just the heart and the mind.

If you sample feedback from additional sectors, and plot them into a response spectrum ... how many lobbyist sectors or individuals approve or disapprove of a given policy change, how vehemently, and for what reasons?

Hmm, this example looms as one reflection of a bigger, more systemic need. How DO we the people actually assess where our policies are leading us?

Our reality is that we have to find solutions to that complex question.

There is no point of seeming stability that is not a dynamic equilibrium between conflicting forces. Get over it.

Further, there are no adaptive paths in the natural world that are not maintained as dynamic equilibria between an endless history of opposing factions! Get over that too!

There's always at least two, even bigger questions. Where are WE going from here? And HOW are we gonna get enough of us there, soon enough to matter?

The second question we've already answered. Rather haphazardly, obviously!

The answer to the first question is a neverending, and unpredictable. Simply put, there is always an even better way. If we don't find it. Some other nation will.

Meanwhile, we are ALWAYS putting far too much policy power in far too few hands.

Then we haphazardly select "leaders" to wield that delegated power.

Then we haphazardly select methods for developing, training and assessing criteria that define leaders. Any sociopath in a nice suit, with an expensive hairdoo?

They may be sociopaths, but they're OUR sociopaths?

All of them? When do their very numbers get in the way of OUR net progress?

Is zero tolerance for ALL frictions a viable option? No. We adequately documented, millennia ago, that recombination outstrips isolation or active reduction. Cultural recombination builds on sexual recombination. It's messy, but leaves all other methods in the dust.

Is accommodating ALL frictions a viable option? Also no. There's a huge gulf between too much selection (over-adaptation to one, fleeting context) and no selection at all. Those extremes have been documented as survival tolerance limits.

Natural selection is the survival path through that gulf. Finding the most adaptive balance between those two tolerance limits - over time & contexts - defines ongoing success. Obviously, it demands massively parallel, combinatorial sociology.

That sounds daunting, but truly amazingly, we can do this. Damn. We are GOOD! It's just that we can do even better, and must. Yet ONLY if we embrace the audacity of having the insane amounts of fun it involves, to commit to working on that together. Valhalla exists. It's just that we don't go there just to fight. Rather, we send our offspring as delegates, to emulate AND THEN EXTEND the fun we keep building. You got a better idea? If not, then ramp up the party!

So just how far down the path the Dutch have taken, can we all go, and in which combinations, nay ongoing permutations?

Now that we're all drunk on audacity, let's just jump right over some prior taboos.

Shall we just give all our sociopaths nice suits to pontificate in? Civilian as well as military? With hordes of trainee journalists to hang on their every word, and take photos?

Wow! To do that, we'd clearly need to reassign our best choreographers, to help stage, link and sequence presentable ways to work - just well enough - WITH a just-adequate sampling of our own squeaky wheels.

Why would we want to do that? In order to accommodate their addictions with cheap prevention instead of expensive repair of the NET mistakes they "lead" us into?

How far could we take this process? It will ALWAYS remain a group art .... until some new permutation of art becomes unpredictably enshrined as a documented principle of scalable science. We'd be going from analogous "givens" like selective chemo-taxis, to selective resource-taxis. The same behavioral principle, just expressed on a different scale, with uniquely scale-dependent methods.

Forget par-allel evolution. We're witnessing scale-allel evolution. Analogous principle, but expressed on a completely different scale. Personally, I doubt we'll progress as a nation, until every student learns such perspectives by age 10, so that they can move onward from their parent's obsolete contexts, not just over-study details irrelevant to our emerging resource-taxis demands.

How far can we go with more scalable versions of the Dutch approach? Right now, only as far as our un-coordinated, industry-sector lobbyists, and their paymasters? Remember that the commonly expressed goal of capitalism is blindly sequestering real resources from your growing community, by constantly promoting a higher real-price-level for your particular product. "Hey re-source. Hey re-source. Hey re-source." The mating call of the rank capitalist.

The part they miss is that there's a hidden refrain, detected only by those with an ear for their groups NET or aggregate refrain. Net or Group Capitalism, like other subsets of biology and thermodynamics, simultaneously reflects the ADAPTIVE SUM of all individual and aggregate drives to explore ever more options. The aggregate result, over time, is that our growing chorus line drifts into organizing on an even greater scale. By the statistics of accumulation alone.

It's true that at any time, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. That happens right up to the occasional point where rich and poor once again trip over the fact that they can all get richer than any imagined ... by working together, insteading of stealing from one another. After a round of cooperation, they set about looting the perceived excesses from one another. The better way is to fully invest that excess in ALL of our offspring. That's how we got it in the first place!

Obviously, local competition is not all that's happened in history - although the typical, under-educated capitalist will deny it. By hook or crook (pun intended), even the most narrow-minded pirates eventually work together to pursue a greater return-on-coordination. Usually only after they trip over it once too many times.

So - jumping ahead - perhaps at the present time, our best challenge to tackle might be getting the entire spectrum of political lobbyists to put their heads together, in order to provide their best ASSESSMENT of how random policies will ripple out through all the inter-dependencies currently carefully tuned to code in our complex democracy.

Obviously, they'd rather not have to face that responsibility! To survive, however, we have to make enough of both them, and us, face that truth. If the question of responsibility isn't asked, it's far easier for them to rationalize, and to take the money and run, and for us to let them do so. Whether Active Frauds or Innocent Frauds, do we EVER need people that run from all duty to nation?

So how DO we get all industry sectors, and the lobbyists they mob Congress with, to actually use their heads, collectively, rather than ONLY in mock isolation?

The implications cascade all the way back to Kindergarten, to pre-natal care, and to EPA and all other policy functions. Human culture is a frog that can easily boil itself, before it knows which direction it's net options are heading.

Like General Patton, I am NOT going to prejudice anyone - or constrain their thinking - by trying to suggest HOW this will be done. I'm just suggesting this as a plausible, Desired Outcome. We need all of us to participate, uninhibited, if we're to act smarter than any subset of us.

What I will suggest is that we need more recruitment platforms. Many more of them. So that we can quickly recruit an adequate fraction of citizens to provide patient feedback, and engage in adaptive POLICY, not just tactical discussions. If we want to get away from "Ready, Fire, Aim," then we need to find ways to get people together, so that they can at least start hearing everyone's ideas on how to aim first.

Meanwhile, all populations grow, and spawn MORE sectors, with each spawning it's LOCAL assessment system. Our aggregate task gets MORE complicated daily, even while we sit still, slowly boiling and growing into a dissociated mob instead of a coordinated whole that is more, not less, than the sum of it's parts. Like it or not. We are distilling ourselves. What fraction are we selecting to distil? And why? If we get enough people to address those two questions, the "how" always follows their consensus, incidentally, as Patton noticed, and many before him.

Key Problem:
With increasing numbers, how do we constantly reconstruct a newer, AGGREGATE ASSESSMENT method, to chase the rate of spawning new factors which complicate our net assessment task?

Fast enough to matter?

In other words, how do we Scale Democracy, including it's Minimal Adaptive Tempo?

That's a tough problem to start with, and it's made harder by neglect. It's usually the LAST thing discussed, and then usually rejected on the grounds of obsolete tradition. The Aggregate can't do that because some components would have to adjust ... what they've "always?" done ... since the last time they made adjustments? Past experience suggests that we first approach these taboo subjects through patience and humor, since it involves goading people we like into actions they don't yet see the need for. Humor helps.

Even among the Dutch, is this particular step - in this case, mitigating mundane alcohol addiction - viewed as anything less than damage control within fractions of an otherwise frustrated, bored population who'd rather have access to bigger net options worth assessing? You'd have to be there to know for sure, and to assess the emerging options.

Our big issue, quite frankly, is "What is Homo Sapiens going to slowly DO with itself?"

Are we going to FIND & succeed at new challenges worthy of applying our exponentially increasing talents to?

And, even given consensus Desired Outcomes, how vigorously are we going to try to SELECT success, by optimally trimming the differences between LOCAL ASSESSMENTS and NET ASSESSMENTS? How will we know if we as a people are making progress, or not?

If past biology is any indication, those questions will be explored in regional enclaves (call 'em nations or not).

The first enclave that figures out a faster/leaner/better way to explore more options per-unit-time than the rest of us are doing ... will cull the rest of what was Homo Sapiens. Just like we culled Neanderthal, Denisovans, chimps, gorillas .. and all other competing primates.

Surviving The Bureaucratic Complexities We Create? That's A Good Way To Describe Our Challenge

At the present, we're repeating an endless debate, and questioning The Folly of [Every System?]

Won't it be better if our grandchildren can have a different debate, rather than repeating one we leave unsolved? So, can we make our debate different than the one OUR grandparents had?

Why not? Let's put it this way. Complex societies disintegrate when they cannot sustain the bureaucratic complexities they've created? So how DO they survive as long as they do, and how DO the components pick up the pieces after failing to escape traps they're not yet ready for?

One answer is abundantly documented throughout evolutionary history. Systems grow by building up methods that work, and when they hit dead-ends, the components dis-associate and start over again, from a regressed state. Then they try again. The interesting part is how long it takes 'em, and how far they back up before taking another run at it.

In short, net survival continuously tracks PARTIAL undoing, redoing, overlaying and repurposing of existing bureaucracies, families, corporations, species, phenotypes, cultures or "systems" - whatever you want to call them. They all have a lot in common, and it's useful to examine those commonalities.

In some instances, we refer to repurposing as "shaping" individual or even small group behavior patterns, through initially indirect paths that use existing momentum to get started, before re-directing it to pursuit of emerging options. The methods used to shape any situation are unique to that situation. Such changing methods have to be lived and practiced, not assumed to be fixed or in "equilibrium."

Now we have the challenge of reshaping our own, entire culture, either gracefully, or by letting it die and be reformed in another guise that allows growth on yet another scale.

This is what we do! It's what we've always done. When young, we all took things apart. Most can never be put back together again - but with enough trial and error, some useful recombination occurs. It used to be clothes, then watches, then cars, then computers. As adults, we mostly settle into bureaucracies, but inventors throughout history have always insisted on "making snowmobiles" from cannibilized components. The biggest "snowmobile" construction challenge is remaking our own, entire democracy more frequently, as Tom Jefferson suggested.

As a guide, the known processes of speciation and embryology offer some very useful, orienting lessons for everything we're going through. They serve as axioms, or basic principles to keep in mind and tie all emerging details to.

First, 3.5 billion years of species differentiation has left traces documenting the slow transformation of new forms from prior ones. Next, it is the incredibly infrequent, adaptive changes in embryology steps that reflect the growing toolkit of methods that drive speciation.

During embryological development, random hints of a historical pattern are observed, namely that some parts of ontogeny always reflect some parts of phylogeny. Parts of a developing fetus clearly START to make structures found in the adult stage of ancestral species, only to halt, undo or re-purpose the budding structures in an astoundingly long sequence of "shaping" steps that (normally, in humans) leads to birth of current humans as we know them. This net, shaping process in embryology is recognizably similar to concepts expressed in military science. All mobilization - of any system - comes down to "staging, linking and sequencing" existing and emerging components and processes on increasingly larger scales.

So, while dabbling in "nation building" elsewhere, why are we struggling to continuously rebuild our own, obviously changing, developing and evolving nation?

What about cultural embryology? Cultural embryology proceeds rather analogously to all other known evolution processes. The details at every new scale are completely different, of course, but the basic challenge remains. How do we continuously "shape" a process that starts more things every year and continuously creates ever more "institutions" that - while integral steps in the core "shaping" process - have to themselves be continuously interrupted, partially or completely undone and ultimately repurposed, bypassed or overlaid with newly emerging institutions? That's a LOT to keep up with, let alone improve. Nevertheless, it will improve, with or without our participation. The only question is whether we in the USA want to step up and lead, or follow, or even cede the path.

We've already been doing such development, of course. The USA is itself the outcome of such a recombinant process, seen in a bigger scale. Even within the USA we've been adding, ending and re-purposing institutions, and amending our Constitution.

So the real question is how to do even more of all that, more quickly? And, do it with less waste of time and resources? In short, how do we help increase the adaptive agility of our own electorate as a whole? It comes back to increasing the Adaptive Rate of the US electorate. Instead of gridlock and shutting down our democracy, how do we "stage, link and sequence" our own bureaucratic complexities faster/better/more-focused? What happened to American ingenuity?

Finally, we know from experience that the vast majority of changes we try simply won't work. Only an incredibly few changes will be adaptive. So we ought to be TRYING new things faster all the time, in small simulations, in controlled settings. Plus, we ought to be incredibly careful in considering what key things to change on a larger scale. Finally, we ought to be even more incredibly careful about assessing what is and isn't adaptive for the whole nation, when we DO test it on a large scale.

Step one is focus? On what? How about accelerated analysis of national self-awareness? That brings us directly to evaluation of what can and can't be pared from a continuous, cultural-embryology process.

At this point, evolutionary hindsight offers only some key principles. How do we actually SELECT which interaction patterns among our current, national culture to keep vs discard? That is an entirely context-dependent, trial and error process which has to be discovered rather than predicted. That means living the details, not describing past outcomes. We have zero predictive power, but seemingly unlimited Selective Power - yet ONLY if we practice selecting fast enough. Other events might easily overtake us, as has been the norm throughout history. Our biggest challenge is to keep making the USA more different, fast enough, so that it CAN survive the bureaucratic complexities which we, ourselves are continuously creating.

So our task comes down to an endlessly iterative process, one only superficially discussed here - as a suggested view for all to consider. One perspective on this is the classic paradigm for describing all "living" species:

Context Goals (or niche; no system evolves in a vacuum),
Sensory System (sampling available feedback),
Interacting Sensory Flows (cross-discipline Pattern Analysis),
Motor System (probing context, exploring options),
Natural Selection (an Assessment System).

Lets call a nation or culture an emerging species, and take another look at ourselves, and what our tasks are.

1) Do we have enough context awareness, and enough group goals? Adequate group awareness of context and challenge. Whoa! To achieve that, don't we need continuously distributed, developmental briefings on where WE as a nation are, and where WE as a nation can be and are going? Do we even have enough platforms where people CAN discuss that? Are we paying ourselves enough to leave enough time to even have those discussions? Recent, "lean" industrial models somehow converged to the idea that 2-3% of net resources should be spent on "M&E" - measurement & evaluation. That flies in the face of historical patterns in RESILIENT systems, where 30-40% of time can easily be spent on analysis of context.  Can we really afford to be lean, i.e., over-adapted to a transient context, rather than resilient and always ready for the next context? Without a sense of options worth exploring, all roads look the same? A modern nation needs awareness of options, and outcome goals, as much as any previously evolved species.*

2) Do we have an adequately diverse, national sensory system? More instrumentation is just the start. Don't we need distributed self-training all on methods for generating diversity, so that citizens are familiar with that core mission, and comfortable deploying it where needed? More civics, so WE as a people can collectively hoard coordination skills, not just personally hoard static assets?
(Has universal pursuit of "lean" gone too far in too many places, thereby reducing resiliency everywhere, including places where we diversity is critically needed?)

3) Do we need more practice generating the actual diversity needed in key places, so that we have more feedback to analyze? Shouldn't we be diversifying deployment of many new sub-methods, thereby generating distributed, bureaucratic diversity to select from?

4) Do we have enough interdisciplinary cross-talk to drive pattern analysis ACROSS disciplines? Do we need MORE cross-instrumentation, information-sharing methods, for sensing and analyzing all bureaucratic diversity? So that we can self model all available feedback patterns? Forget the NSA and idiot savant advertisers, shouldn't our electorate be evaluating ITSELF and where WE are going? How much distributed civics discussion and involvement do we need, just to maintain our current adaptive rate? How much to survive? How about to exceed our own, lagging expectations? “I’ll let you write the substance. ... You let me write the procedure, and I‘ll screw you every time.” Is that anywhere near good enough for us to survive as a nation?

5) Finally, do we need to instill and practice constant re-development of more "net" ASSESSMENT methods and systems? If WE aren't selecting where WE are going, someone else - or outside events - will be doing that selecting? Why cede Natural Selection entirely to others, or to chance? Who's driving this democracy bus anyway, it's citizens, or something less? That boils down to practice using the platforms, instrumentation, information-sharing and analysis mentioned above.

Folks, we as a people have some distributed boundaries to push, before they push us.


* The very concept of speciation is inseparable from the concept of population. All evolving species arise from interactions among a prior confederation, initially built via budding clones, then by increasingly diverse transformation events - including symbiosis, and eventually by some accelerated form of "recombination" between population members, enabled by emerging methods that create new steps, ones that previously didn't occur at all.

It's not clear what view is optimal, nation-states as competing clones, or confederations participating in interleaved "cultural-recombination" events. We still have to find out.

The same question holds within each nation. Can growing "confederations" practicing "Distributed Planning" be kept more agile, and thereby adapt faster, than Central Governments, with their innate tendency to one-size-fits-all "Central Planning?" We still have to find out. It all comes down to the NET agility of the methods that can be deployed, by either, or by some audacious combination of both, or more. The future's so bright that we can't see it. However, that's no reason to look away precisely as it's unfolding.