Breaking the Thirty Year Deadlock:
Essay 2 - The Return of the Virtuous Politician
Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, was the last of the Five Good Emperors. He saw the life of a politician as one of service and duty. He is best remembered for his Meditations, a series of writings he wrote while on campaign for his own development. According to Wikipedia, "His stoic ideas often revolve around the denial of emotion, a skill which, he says, will free a man from the pains and pleasures of the material world. He claims that the only way a man can be harmed by others is to allow his reaction to overpower him. He shows no particular religious faith in his writings, but seems to believe that some sort of logical, benevolent force organizes the universe in such a way that even 'bad' occurrences happen for the good of the whole."
August 2006
The First Part of the Problem
The first part of the problem to be solved is How to break the deadlock of change resistance. A social structure called The Dueling Loops pinpoints the root cause of the deadlock. It is the inherent structural advantage of the race to the bottom over the race to the top. The model also shows that presently problem solvers are pushing on the low leverage point of "more of the truth." This fails, because the system pushes back just as hard, causing perpetual deadlock. Better would be breaking the stalemate by finding the right high leverage points and pushing there. This would cause the race to the top to go dominant, which would quickly lead to the return of the virtuous politician.
How We Can Change the System So
Virtuous Politicians Are the Norm,
Rather Than the Exception
A virtuous politician is one whose political goal is to optimize the benefits available to society as a whole and to treat everyone equitably, rather than to do whatever it takes to get elected and stay elected. A virtuous politician is thus much more likely to give problems like sustainability the priority they deserve, which would overcome the system's strong change resistance to solving the problem. If your goal is to elect virtuous politicians, then Thwink.org can help you achieve that mission.
The analysis at Thwink.org has uncovered a fundamental social structure called The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace. This consists of the race to the bottom pitted against the race to the top. Whichever loop gains the most supporters wins.
In the race to the bottom, corrupt politicians compete for supporters on the basis of deception and favoritism. But in the race to the top, virtuous politicians compete for supporters on the basis of who can provide the greatest good to the greatest number in a manner fair to all, without resorting to deception or favoritism.
Using a simulation model, the analysis shows that the race to the bottom has an inherent structural advantage over the race to the top. This causes the race to the bottom to attract the most politicians, and thus be dominant most of the time. Because the race to the bottom requires generous amounts of falsehood and favoritism to work, that is what characterizes politics today.
Might there be a better way?
Thwink.org thinks there is. Because we have taken the time to construct the social structure involved so clearly, the high leverage points we need to push on to solve the problem nearly leap off the page. What is most surprising about these points is they have never been pushed in a unified, prolonged, correct manner.
One high leverage point in particular exhibits behavior that makes it the highest leverage point of them all. This is general ability to detect political deception. But no one is pushing there. Instead, the simulation model scenarios show how environmentalists are currently pushing on an intuitively attractive low leverage point called more of the truth. This will not work, because the environmental movement simply does not have the force (numbers, influence, and wealth) necessary to make that a viable solution. The result is perpetual deadlock, because the force is so easily countered indefinitely.
In a complex social system, solution intervention consists of two key decisions: where to apply a force, and what force to apply. The first is by far the most important, because location determines leverage, and the greater the leverage the less force needed to solve the problem.
If problem solvers would unite and push on this high leverage point, the model shows that the race to the top would go dominant, causing the race to the bottom to collapse and the deadlock to be broken, as voters change their allegiance from corrupt to virtuous politicians. Finally, like The Return of the King in Lord of the Rings, civilization would at last see a triumphant, long overdue transformation that all virtuous citizens have dreamed of, but no one knew how to cause: The Return of the Virtuous Politician.
The dominance of the race to the bottom, in which corrupt politicians control the system, is the chief structural cause of the tremendous change resistance to solving the sustainability problem. Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change, even when a large amount of force is applied. Like any other system behavior, change resistance has a distinct cause. If the cause is known, then candidate solution hypotheses can be intelligently created, tested, and refined until one emerges that is good enough to solve the problem.
But if the cause of change resistance is not known, then problem solvers are forced to guess at what solutions will work. Because thousands of solutions are possible this cannot work, unless you have a very long time to try each of them or get very lucky.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
Luck is unreliable. Guessing takes too long. But luck and guessing is precisely what classic activists have been using to solve the sustainability problem. Like Plato's prisoners in the cave, they cannot see the true reality of the situation. Classic Activism is the problem solving process used by most who are working on the sustainability problem, including those in grassroots organizations, academia, business, and government.
Classic activists around the world remain unaware of the importance of the social side of the problem. Instead, they view it is a simple technical problem. Their thinking goes about like this: All you have to do is find the proper technical practices for living sustainably, tell the people the truth about the proper practices, and that should solve the problem. If it doesn't, then all you have to do is exhort and inspire people to adopt the proper practices or else. And if that doesn't work, then all you have to do is... well, Classic Activism has no other options, so they are stuck.
They are as stuck in their mindset as Plato's prisoners were in the cave. In this allegory, found in book seven of The Republic, Plato presents a story and then interprets it. He asks the reader to imagine there is a colony of prisoners who have been chained for all their lives deep inside a dark cave. They are so immobilized by their chains they can only look at a wall. Behind them, which they cannot see, is a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners is a walkway on which various shapes and puppets are carried. The shadows cast on the wall are seen vividly by the prisoners, who spend their lives interpreting them, because that is all they can see. It is the only reality they know.
Then Plato shifts the story. Suppose a prisoner is freed of his chains and compelled to stand up and turn around. What will happen?
He will be blinded by the firelight, and the true shapes will seem less real than the shadows he has grown accustomed to. Similarly, if he is forcibly dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, he will be blinded by the intense light and will be unable to see the true reality, though it is all around him, and always has been.
But eventually his eyes will adjust, and given enough time to overcome his long exposure to the shadows of the cave, he will come to accept the new true reality. He becomes enlightened.
And then, if he goes back to his fellow prisoners to tell them of the wondrous new world he has found, what will be the reaction of his former bondsmen? As he approaches them from behind he would cast a shadow, and appear to be coming to do something harmful to them. No matter what he said, they would not trust him, because he came out of a shadow. His stories about sunlight and physical forms would fall on insensible minds, because such ideas are inconceivable. The others would view him as an offender, as a violator of their views, and would put him to death.
Plato then interprets the story, to bring light into his fellow countrymen. We will do the same.
The prisoners are those who have labored long and hard under the chains of Classic Activism, and have never seen another way. The shadows are the process steps used to solve the sustainability problem, their own actions, and the results. It is their world. It is the only world. Because there is no greater world, there cannot be any other way of solving the problem. There is no other reality.
But there is. Now suppose one of these classic activists bursts free of his chains one day, climbs out of the cave, and staggers forth into the sunlight of the real world. At first he will be blinded. And then he will not believe what he sees. But because he can touch it, it must be real. Over time he will come to accept this new world and explore it. And it will not take him long to see that there is another way to solve complex social system problems. In fact, there are many other ways.
Out of these many ways he will select the best, and bring it back to the classic activists still laboring in the darkness of their cave. He will attempt to describe this wondrous new way of solving the problem. Will they listen? Or will they too turn on him and shoot the messenger?
I know from personal experience that most will shoot the messenger, because it has happened to me more often than not. It is painful. And it is discouraging.
But there are a few prisoners who, when told that their way is not the only way, behave differently. They listen. And then they change.
Someday they will all change, and an army of enlightened activists will march up out of that cave into the real world. And they will turn to new ways of thinking about the problem, new ways of analyzing it, and new ways of adroitly manipulating the structure of the system so that it shifts into an entirely new and proper mode.
Like The Return of the King, The Return of the Virtuous Politician can happen. It can be a predictable part of the reengineering of the human system, using the same tried and true techniques used by science, business, engineers, and academia. But it can happen only if an analytical approach is taken, by the newly enlightened prime movers of the modern environmental movement.
Perhaps by now you are one of them.
Here is the third essay in
this series. 
For more on The Allegory of the Cave, see this insightful brief introduction, along with the key part of the story.
Image Credits - The image of Marcus Aurelius is from the Wikipedia entry on Marcus Aurelius. The quote in the caption is from the Wikipedia entry on his Meditations. The material on the Allegory of the Cave is from the Wikipedia entry and other readings. The image of the cave is from here.
-
-
Analysis is the breaking down of a problem into smaller easier to solve problems. Exactly how this is done determines the strength of your analysis.
You will see powerful techniques used in this analysis that are missing from what mainstream environmentalism has tried. This explains why a different outcome can be expected.
The key techniques are proper subproblem decomposition and root cause analysis.
The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:
Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.
This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.
Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.
In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow. Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.
First the analysis divided the sustainability problem into four subproblems. Then each subproblem was individually analyzed. For an overview see The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.
This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.
For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.
Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.
Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.
The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.
The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.
Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.
In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.
The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?
The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.
Solution model drift occurs when a problem evolves and its solution model doesn’t keep up. The model “drifts” away from what’s needed to keep the problem solved.
The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.
The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.
This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.
In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.
This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.
The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.
The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.
-
There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.
Given the principle that all causal problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.
This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.
Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:
Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.
The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.
Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.
Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.
The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.
This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.
In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.
Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.
Solution element: Corporation 2.0
What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.
The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.
The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.
Solution element: Politician Decision Ratings
Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.
This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.
Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.
Solution element: Common Property Rights
-
This presents our research results, including SIP, analysis of the environmental sustainability problem, and twelve sample solution elements.
This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.
-
The Democracy in Crisis Film Series
Introduction to the WorldChange Model, 27 min
Adding Change Resistance to IGMs, 29 min
Part 1. Introduction to Common Property Rights, 15 min
Part 2. The 7 Components of Common Property Rights, 23 min
Truth or Deception, 10 min
The Progressive Paradox Film, 123 min
Introduction to Analytical Activism, 48 min
-
One way to get started is The Common Property Rights Project.
This can be done by switching to Root Cause Analysis, which will lead to Environmentalism 2.0.
