Beyond (this) democracy (V): New parameters for societal self-organisation
The political left is obsessed with bottom-up innovation. But what we urgently need is the political redefinition of systemic parameters – something that takes both intent and centralised power. Only meaningful new parameters will influence societal self-organisation into a sustainable direction. This is the fifth of five sketches on a new democratic purpose. These thoughts are drawn from a paper I wrote for Das Progressive Zentrum, and they will be part of a book I am currently writing.
Self-organisation as democratic future potential
The true democratic challenge is to focus all radical reform on a sustainable purpose, while at the same time preserving the immaterial gains of the post-War democratic order, like pluralism, accessible education, and a high degree of innovation. These immaterial gains are a product of societal self-organisation — patterns that are product of both decentral, self-organised decision-making and systemic parameters that incentivise their emergence.
In comparison to autocratic systems, democracy grants a high degree of self-organisation, individually as well as collectively. Society is seen as something that ultimately regulates itself, bound and steered by the constitutive rules of the constitution, the more interchangeable regulations written as laws, and the more implicit set of norms we call culture. In contrast to authoritarian systems, Western democracy explicitly holds the potential for the self-organised formation of new patterns that express and shape society. For instance, the principle of subsidiarity, as laid down in the basic laws of the European Union and countries like Germany,[1] explicitly furthers decision-making of local communities, and thus diversity in the overall system. The independent judiciary, most importantly constitutional justice, furthers and deepens this dynamic by keeping the fear of executive abuse of power at bay. Such systemic incentives to differentiate (and thus self-organise), and to alter the direction of political decision-making, increase the innovative potentials of democratic societies.
The importance of meaningful systemic parameters
As in every system, democratic self-organisation happens within parameters that are set, be it explicitly (constitution, laws) or implicitly (tradition, norms). These parameters constitute a frame. Within this frame, society self-organises, constituting a highly complex system of interdependence that no one could possibly steer centrally. As the post-War decades showed, democracy was successful because it combined civil freedom and self-organisation with a self-organised market. As argued above, some outcomes of this civil and economic self-organisation were highly positive (pluralism, innovation, etc.), while others were negative (environmental destruction, global economic polarisation). The challenge for democratic transformation thus lies in establishing systemic parameters that incentivise societal self-organisation that helps in turn to alter our course towards societal sustainability. Referring back to democracy’s future purpose (see Part IV), the challenge of radical reform lies in designing parameters that channel societal self-organisation towards the re-integration into the eco-system’s boundaries.
Today’s systemic potentials for self-organisation, and thus a high potential for responsiveness and adaptability, thus will be key for mastering rising degrees of complexity within and around today’s societal systems. Not centralised control, but a deepened competence of society to self-organise that takes into account higher systemic needs will be key to successfully adapt to the heightened interdependence of our increasingly complex environment. Whoever wants to strengthen society’s collective ability to co-create meaningful solutions for today’s complex challenges, in other words, must relinquish the misguided hope that authoritarian power structures will be able to centrally organise lasting solutions. At the same time, the hope that bottom-up dynamics will come up with solutions under current conditions is naïve. There will be no bottom-up solutions, as long as they are bound within today’s systemic parameters.
21st-century Democracy: here to facilitate meaning beyond economic status
As importantly, we need to deepen our understanding of how we can use the democratic system to further the individual ability to successfully and meaningfully self-organise and develop as part of society. Arguably, a key challenge is to realise that democracy is there not only for providing a life in material dignity, but also for creating and holding structures that facilitate lifelong development and learning beyond the needs of the job market. The basic ethical duty of politics in the 21st century will be the structural facilitation of identity and purpose beyond economic status and paid jobs, while at the same time, keeping the destructive potentials of collective individual decision-making at bay. The challenge lies in building institutional structures that facilitate the development of individual consciousness towards a level of maturity that includes the well-being of higher systems into the individual pursuit of happiness.
This goal transcends the traditional state functions of measuring and controlling and requires the willingness to more radically develop specific ideas of how our institutions can be redesigned, and thus taken towards serving and catalysing more meaningful paradigms than those we accept as hegemonic today.
The human capacity to evolve in consciousness
Considering the disastrous outcomes the self-organised capitalist market has created over the last decades, it seems fair to ask if laying so much emphasis on the potentials of self-organisation is naïve. I believe it is not. We live on a hitherto unseen level of self-organisation, as global society as well as in the inner-European and national boundaries. Human systems today master a degree of internal complexity that is a lot higher than ever before in human history. We have successively improved our ability to successfully manage ever higher levels of collaboration, and thus to organise a civilised life. Higher degrees of self-organisation have brought increased individual and collective ability to navigate our social system’s internal complexity, and to quickly adapt to (internal or environmental) changes.[2] Amazingly, humans managed to do so without changing their “hardware” over the last millennia. Human brains and bodies today are the same they were 500, 1000 or 2000 years ago. What has changed is the “software”, or consciousness: how we organise our perception and thus interpretation of the world we live in, and how, accordingly, we structure our thoughts and actions.[3]
The challenge today lies in evolving our collective consciousness regarding the purpose we are self-organising for. In today’s Western societies, we are focused on individual material well-being, and structure our decision-making accordingly. While many individuals take the well-being of others and the higher system into account, we collectively do not seem willing to do so. At the same time, past advancements of collective consciousness remind us that we may be able to do so. Western societies have reached a level of diversity and equality that would have been unthinkable to most a century ago. In historic comparison, we have established a remarkable degree of global peace since the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of what we see as given today results from past changes in how humans collectively see reality, and thus of changes in how we collectively self-organise. We are so used to certain parameters of our social systems that we have to make a conscious effort to remind ourselves that they are man-made, that these are results of past transformations: that there is a state; that we use money; that the state has a power monopoly. All this is the result of time-bound historic processes, which are re-created and reinforced by dynamics of self-organisation every day. Only in times of fundamental reorientation do we remember that all these “normal” parameters of our everyday lives are man-made (and thus more fragile than previously hoped or feared).
Breaking with the illusion of separateness
Today, we are in the process of collective (re-)realisation that it is the quality of and the dynamic in human relationships that shapes shared systemic properties (culture; peace; solidarity), not primarily the state of its single parts (individual material welfare).[4] In a world that seems increasingly fragile, we more than ever experience very tangibly what once was nothing more than a spiritual idea: as humanity, we are one self-organising system with many sub-entities, embedded into a larger self-organising whole we call the world or the universe. We are enmeshed into a tightly knitted web of interconnectedness that, ultimately, binds all human beings together, embedded into a web of life that connects all life — human and non-human — into a self-regulating whole.[5] The harder the shock events that collectively shake us, the more we realise it is not globalisation that has linked us together, but the world we share. This realisation breaks fundamentally with the illusion of separateness we learn to culturally re-create on an everyday basis.
The ecosystem is per se global — economic globalization is a mere interpretation of an interrelatedness that exists on a very fundamental level, an interdependency that binds together everything with everything, and thus everyone with everyone. In that sense, economic globalisation can be interpreted as one step towards a shared global consciousness. Human consciousness now consciously includes the hitherto invisible web of interdependency as an explicit part of the economic view on current reality. This global perspective can be a vital prerequisite for collective action to influence the human-generated qualities of universal interdependency as productively as possible. Globalization can never be undone; what can (and should) be done is the rewriting of the constitutive rules of how we collaborate in a global market, and those systemic parameters of today’s democracy that limit the potentials of meaningful collective development.[6]
One thing we can individually do for this goal is the reflection on what constitutes and maintains life. It is not our brain, our soul, our heart, our lungs or our muscles that give us life. It is the self-organised, highly complex interplay between these and many other parts — an interplay that creates our individual life as emergent property. Beyond this microcosm, individual life can only exist in the self-organised and infinitely complex life web we as humans create together, and as humans with the ecosystem we are part of. We mirror the bigger whole of the planet: living, self-organising systems whose regulation emerges as inherent property of the complex system of interrelatedness within the system. Embracing the infinite — and never fully to be understood — beauty of this may help to inspire a politics of life: a politics that, by rooting in the incomprehensibility of the complexity that produces us, creates an awareness we as humans need to re-create systems that productively embed us in an ecosystem we are on a course to destroy.
Check out The End of Centrist Politics, the first part of this five-part-series, and Part II, Making Sense of Illiberalism. Part III focuses on the confusion of democratic structures and processes with its purpose. Part IV looks at our misconception of liberty. Part V explores on the future potentials of self-organisation and our individual lever to drive systemic progress.
[1] Treaty on European Union, Article 5; German Grundgesetz, Article 23.
[2] See Björkman, Tomas: The world we create (forthcoming, 2018), esp. Part I.
[3] Robert Kegan, one of the most renowned adult development psychologists, speaks of five stages human consciousness is organised in. Consciousness signifies the way in which we give meaning to the world in and around us. Rising levels of societal complexity are balanced with increased levels of consciousness that enable individuals to navigate their environment successfully. In Kegan’s model, stages three to five describe evolutionary stages that go beyond biologically determined development, and thus are closely bound to the cultural environment humans live in. For an overview see Kegan, Robert/Lahey, Lisa: Immunity to Change. How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organisation, 2009, Ch. 1.
[4] As Norbert Elias put it, civilization is ultimately created by the increasingly differentiated and interconnected level of interdependency in society. Elias, Norbert. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Volumes 1&2.
[5] See the atmospheric chemist’s James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, first published in 1972, today a highly respected theory. It describes the ecosystem as a highly complex network of feedback loops, which, by linking together living and non-living systems, regulate the planetary system. Regulation is an emergent property in that system. See Capra/Luisi (2014), pp. 163 ff.
[6] See Björkman, Thomas: The Market Myth, 2016, esp. Ch. 7.
Check out The End of Centrist Politics, the first part of this five-part-series, and Part II, Making Sense of Illiberalism. Part III focuses on the confusion of democratic structures and processes with its purpose. Part IV looks at our misconception of liberty, and asks how ideological mental models keep us stuck in the road to disaster.
