The Quagmire Default

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

-Albert Einstein

A series of unfortunate, recent events have made me think about our (human) default operating procedures. Our minds are the products of millions of years of evolution. This means that the structure by which they currently operate more represents the challenges humanity had to overcome through that lineage than the travails of the modern world.

I will not argue that this same brain structure has allowed us to achieve the largest human population the planet has ever known. This achievement has been brought about by human innovations that have lengthened life expectancy, lowered infant mortality and reduced the per capita fatalities due to human on human violence. However, many of these innovations are easily and frequently turned against progress by the deeper default instructions.

Hierarchy is part of our most primitive cooperative tools. We know this because it is evidenced in the anthropological data of our ancestors and present throughout the animal kingdom—particularly within mammals. In Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson describes a variety of cooperative mechanisms employed by all types of animals, primates in particular, that are mysteriously similar to ours.

What does a tendency toward hierarchy have to do with our current global situation? Everything. Hierarchy makes sense in very particular environments (otherwise it wouldn’t be recurrent in the biological world). A few of those benefits include:

• The fewer acceptable opinions, the fewer reasons to conflict.
• Between individuals much time and energy can be spent arguing and conflicting. A recognized hierarchy stops this by asserting that only one opinion is valid, eliminating many reasons for internal conflict.

• The greater the amplification of behavior, the greater the magnitude of the effect
• A hierarchy is like any tool, it amplifies an individual’s behavior to achieve something he or she could not normally do on their own. To make a reasonable impact in some situations one must multiply his or her effectiveness.

These, of course, operate under a few caveats

• The fewer opinions only work when few options actually exist. Otherwise the fewer opinions available, the lower the chance of success
• In the pure numbers game of finding the right answer by guessing (which we do quite often), the more ideas we consider to fix a problem the greater the chance we come up with finding the most effective solution. In the animal kingdom this isn’t such a big deal because the hierarchy comes from generations of relatively consistent environments meaning that the actual options to make a decision are fairly limited.

• The greater the magnitude of the effect, the more critical the decision maker
• The quality of a leader is as good as the luck of the draw for most hierarchies. For animals, however, there is more equivalency in the capabilities of the leadership and the lead. This equivalency increases the chance of having a good leader since turnover is easier to achieve. Primates and many mammals that operate in hierarchy have roughly equivalent strength. Only slight physical edges make a leader the top dog. . .or chimp. This means that it doesn’t take too much to take down the leader, and that when push comes to shove (particularly in tough times) the leader can be shoved out. This also implies that the more equivalent the capabilities of leadership and lead,the more chance of instability and ineffectiveness.

The ability to participate in the cooperative acts that define a hierarchy requires only that the individuals recognize the individual who has acquired dominance and operate in a mode that corresponds to this relationship. The reason why they are recognized as leaders is normally based on the observation of a struggle and, as in tribal human rituals, markings of the leader. Loyalty to a leader is the closest human approximation of this biological programming. Loyalty disregards objective reasoning, based more on emotional associations. Loyalty is based upon trust normally earned in the animal world and our interpersonal lives through established and repeated interactions which build within each of our minds the personal cooperative score of those which we are most involved. These biologically programmed tools from our prehistoric ancestors can lead us to disaster as they have become easier to manipulate.

The founding fathers had an inherent mistrust for traditional hierarchy. They structured the Constitution with the base assumption that no man in power ought to be trusted. Power throughout the world was beginning to diversify in their time. Adam Smith had recently written On the Wealth of Nations which described the machinery of the new marketplace. The power of swords and guns was being divested into monetary exchanges for goods, service and slaves on a global scale. The power of the media was also growing at the time. The idea of the free press had exploded the notions of what was going on in the world, as well as what was true. The challenge to truth amplified the requirements for our mechanisms of trust so long as there was no objective way to recognize the reality of the situation. The lack of objective measures for leaders and organizations had always thrown open the gate to guessing who is right. Recognizing this, the founding fathers had come up with an electoral system that forced each person in power to be reconsidered, but they had no idea the complexity of the modern world.

In our modern, complex and highly intertwining world, our default to hierarchy thrust us into large scale catastrophes and long term self-destruction. Hitler, Hirohito, Lenin, and Stalin all have demonstrated the highway to hell was paved with unquestioned loyalty. The late communist regime dragged the Russian people into the mire, eventually ending its communist rule. Economically, antitrust laws were enacted in the United States to take apart monoliths of industry which stifled progress for the gain of those few on top. This enforced diversity ensured the stability of free markets. After the great depression, the instruments of the economy were also divided in their capacity by strict laws that created walls so that no risk transcended all institutions, allowing risk taking in specific areas while preserving reliable, sustainable growth in other sectors. These laws decreased the magnitude of the effect of individual decision makers by distributing power among specific sectors and defining measurable means of observing their behavior.

Recently, we have seen many of the steps to prevent the natural decay being undone. As I wrote about in previous articles, the overzealous liquidity of the housing market, it’s collapse, and the blast radius which is still engulfing high level financial institutions came about because the segmentation which had previously existed were taken away, assuming and trusting that we would not repeat the same mistakes. Not surprisingly, as the institutions mixed, the risk spread, and the collapse occurred. The new proposals by Paulson and the current administration do little to correct this as they suggest the merger of financial regulator agencies under a federal instrument which is answerable to no branch of our government—a step more characteristic of our default programming than the founding fathers’ inherent mistrust. But this is not the only place we can see our collapse back to the default programming.

For decades there have been multiple large aircraft manufacturers building aircraft with a diversity of capabilities. Over time they had been allowed to merge one by one, until there remained only one United States based aircraft manufacturer capable of building the “big iron.” As the air force looked to replace their decades old aircraft, they had no choice but to look outside of their own country. Patriots, politicians and unions protested as Northrop Grumman and European-based EADs were awarded the fuel tanker program even though they technically had the superior aircraft. Should we sacrifice technical capability for loyalty? This misleading question masks the real discussion. “Should we have gotten into this situation?” The idea of a national aircraft company has circulated since WWII, and was defeated time and again. Many thought an aerospace monolith would be a competitive advantage against other nations, but it is turning out to be a risk. Their monolithic decision making is failing technically, affecting the economic and strategic well-being of the country.

The reasons the mergers were allowed to occur is at its base, one of our default programming. We have begun to trust people and institutions to perform properly in situations in which they had failed before. Why? Hadn't we learned that too much trust was given to too few people who ended up with too much power? No, that was the lesson of a previous generation, and their replacement had failed to learn from history. We replaced the objective definitions of the roles of people and organizations with the inherent default to trust they will operate correctly when the rules are removed. Without those definitions we're unable to see beyond our trust to see the flashing warnings and the imminent collapse. Unless the definition returns we will not find a way out.