So I'm told in the military there is a "need to know" system in operation which they call compartmentalisation. It means that no one has an over view of the whole organisation, and each ant never sees the full significance of what they are doing. I guess this has some advantages. It means that the enemy cannot find out from the ants either cos they don't know, the ants are more efficient, and the ants will not interfere with the master plan as designed by their commanders. It rather suggests that at the top of the pyramid there is a master commander who does see the whole picture. A God so to speak.
But is this really the case. Does the commander in charge of a nations forces really get the whole picture. In the old days standing on a hilltop overlooking the battle and seeing it unfold. The problem for the over view attitude is that in reality an army is like a clockwork mechanism. You train and teach the army, but in the heat of battle all that comes together as the battle and the outcome will be quite unpredictable. Indeed if every battle was predictably why have a battle. Just surrender if you can calculate you will lose, and keep surrendering until such time as you think you will win. The problem is when two armies face each other and the commanders don't know what will happen. Then like game of poker with high hands players throw it all into the battle and this is when winners and losers emerge.
Donald Rumsfeld headed up a reorganisation of the US military to bring it into the 21st Century with a focus on I.T. The idea was for all parts of the military in a battle to be connected so they could work in unison. It would mean faster response times and quicker changes of plan as things unfolded. Unlike battles of old with runners carrying messages across the battlefield, in the 21st Century a message can be sent instantly and plans changed instantly. But of course this then leads to the handling of the huge amounts of information so created. Invariably I bet computers have been deployed now on battle fields to process that huge amounts of data and simplify what is going on so commanders can get access to important info quickly so as to make decisions. But as can be seen "what is really happening" even in a battlefield of the 21st Century is a seriously complex issue and to say that any one person knows is a simplification.
So much for compartmentalisation then. But perhaps at the very top of the tree there is an Emperor who just says like a robot "destroy anyone who opposes my will". But we know in reality this will become compromise and negotiation and even that Emperor will become embroiled in complex networks of information and need to assess a constantly changing situation. They may have the final word, but they do not know "what is going on" and when their "word" is dispatched they do not know whether it will be a success in advance.
The world is a lot more fluid.
Compartmentalisation is a kind of Schrodinger's Cat, but instead of a box waiting to be opened there is all the knowledge we don't know yet. And that gets into the nature of existence. Now if no one anywhere knows the big picture is there actually a big picture to know! Do Historians discover History or do they create it? What kind of History would for example a Churchill supporter write? So think like most things it’s a mixture. Was thinking about this the other day. Buddhism says that for something to “occur” you need both the thing and the viewer. So you can’t have History without an Historian and same then for contemporary issues too. What you get will depend upon who you ask. So the civil servant will get one view, and the politicians another. It makes you wonder what the Queen knew from the perspective of 70 years meeting more high profile people than anyone on Earth. But her role means she never wrote it down and so it all died with her and so actually no longer exists. This is where conspiracy theories get lift off because people think there is some “fixed truth” that is waiting to be discovered and they will invariably see what they want to see, but then confuse that with reality. In actual fact what isn’t known has no reality! I wonder on this analysis whether there is a central plan? What looks like a joined up plan to conquer the world may actually just be an emergent property of a militarised capitalist society like ours whose fundamental principle is ownership and so naturally it leads the ants to work together to own everything without any particular ant planning that.
This very much supports the idea that there is no top ant to take out, instead if we change just 1% of each ant's behaviour them the whole system changes. Property is a good example. In fact no one enforces property, it’s a Nash equilibrium and is a spontaneous equilibrium state for the ants. We all agree to property because we all benefit from it. The laws are almost epiphenomenal and added after the agreement. How could you sign off a law if you didn't already know what it was about? Property happened spontaneously, and the Laws just got adopted as a result. In a Wittgenstein way they got enveloped in the change of society that they are about. It’s Nash. We all lose because we don’t own everything, but everyone loses the same, and in place we all get a bit of the whole. There are other equilibriums, this is just our one. But suppose for whatever reason society found a new equilibrium state, it would probably actually be just a tiny change in each ant behaviour but would end up with a completely different society perhaps with no wars or international conquest and no apparent grand plan to control the world. We would all look for the “peacemaker” who created this new status quo, but actually that is the wrong way around. Society changed first.
This might explain the paradox of why the poor join the wars of the rich and vote for parties like the Tory whose only loyalty is to the rich. Why do the poor always support the rich? Wrong way around. The cellular automata of this society have some simple Capitalist rules that end up creating rich and poor and what looks like the poor supporting the rich is actually just emergent property. No one actually planned it like this, it’s just with all the ants thinking in terms of private profit the society changes into rich and poor. And again that makes sense of religious attitudes. With all the ants being just 1% more generous and selfless the whole society can change to be better.
So in conclusion the egocentric idea of individuals being the core nodes of the network of reality misses out much. Its much more like the incomplete nodes coming together in unpredictable ways and producing through their interactions the patterns we see in society.
I criticise Capitalism thoroughly in this blog but perhaps the criticism should not be levelled at "Capitalism" like that were a plan by someone. Rather "Capitalism" is just what becomes of a society with belief in property and profit. Its not like Adam Smith created the "Pin Factory" it was already there, he just analysed it. Likewise its not like Karl Marx invented the "Workers Revolution" it has already happened in the French Revolution. And its not like his predecessor Georg Hegel invented the "World Spirit" Napoleon was already riding across Europe. In all cases the writers were just documenting what was already happening, and now I'm guessing those happenings arose from tiny changes in people's behaviour across whole societies. If Napoleon wanted to know why he rose to power he should not look inside, but rather in the changes all around him that created the opportunity for someone to shine. In fact it was when Napoleon did think this was all because of himself and he crowned himself Emperor then the dream died and people's behaviour recoiled and changed again. When Egos subsume reality for their own, that is when they kill it.
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