LOYAL MINISTERS APPEAR

role for governance in massively decentralized futures

"When the great Tao is forgotten,

Kindness and morality arise.

When there is no peace within the family,

Filial piety and devotion arise.

When the country is confused and in chaos,

Loyal ministers appear."

New technologies effect our thinking in new ways. The appearance in the 20th century of distributed electronic networks has impressed us with new suppositions regarding the most effective and righteous methods of running a society. And in the process we have come to see the enormous role that decentralized networks have played through human history.

The view through this new lens is provocative but also tells a cautionary tale -- in which organic networks of individuals have contributed to the creation of surplus vital and cultural energies, only to have circumstance and corruption set us back into tension, depression & savagery. Too often we have seen toxic and small-minded social forces generate the oppression and dissolution of humanity's achievements.

Many good people have dwelled upon this historical problem, and many more still suffer today in diseased, calcified and starving cultural zones. It has become a very significant problem to envision a better tomorrow but our philosophies have revealed only the general contours and abstract necessities of what must come to pass for the good of all people. The specific steps that will bridge our contemporary world with its best possible outcomes are still obscured. We know that the production and exchange of cultural intelligence is critical in order to move forward but we still need to establish the specific steps involved in social transformation.

The example set by the Communist reformers of the early 20th century should impress us with the need for caution. The far-reaching insights of Karl Marx and his affiliates brought about cultural catastrophes when they attempted to embody the emergent patterns of the new socius. One of their greatest failings was the inability to distinguish between regressive & progressive networks of human relationships.

In order to promote any forms of social activism we need to be able to provide a framework for the ethical validation of benevolent activism, and for the sake of coherence we must derive this from the principles of distributed intelligence itself. The ethical validity of these modes of engagement must emerge from their integrity to a form of human cultural exchange which is intrinsically ethical -- and this must be demonstrated and announced in order that it might become a tool for the Heart.

We have too often seen the example of primitive culturopathic forces destablizing and capturing social networks while expropriating their functional aspects. Today's world is innundated with a plague of flexible, intelligence-sharing networks of politically activated individuals taking moralizing action to re-pattern society but who are nonetheless agents of evil & decay.

From the vile al Qaeda networks, to the perverse webs of individuals who promote the criminal slaughter of abortion doctors, to the anarchic destruction of excited mobs, we know that high-level decentralized intelligence systems are readily hijacked by shared simplicities of structure and common emotional and biological pathologies. A network IS only as good as its inputs and outputs but the same goes for its communication hardware (human architecture) and its replicable protocols for the exchange of data & verification of data.

This is where true politics continues to have a role -- not of proxy "rulers" who take the place of intelligence-compiling networks but as a the capable guardians whose constant effort is to enable positive group functioing and disable corrupt group functioning.

Individuals who function as hubs for the other nodes of a given net are the political entities -- philosophers, leaders, civil servants. Many social systems have failed due to the eerie fascination that the status and power of leadership exerts upon individuals who are not otherwise temperamentally inclined to the intellectual and moral tasks of a leader. Even when -- not too far off -- much of the direct organizing is done at mega speeds by socially facillitating softward there will continue to be a call for individuals who are moved to the task of duplicating the sytem within themselves and assisting in the orchestration of its behaviour.

Regulations must be created such that repression, restriction and rules are creatively minimized without the anti-cultural effects of political non-intervention which so dramatically decrease people's collective capacity to deal with arising circumstances. Those who take on the challenge of this dance between old and new world are the authentic political agents who are currently needed.

As the great historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, "Globalization" is a fact in commerce, science, art and virtually all domains with one glaring exception - politics. The nation-state model, the minimalized successor to the mass system of Colonial Imperialism already outdate and proving itself daily to be inadequate to the needs of human survival and thrival. Ethnic insurgencies of every kind are evidence of the broadly felt impulse to break down the nation-state. However there must be no return to a gangland world of supersitious and predatory tribalism. Instead we must modify the decentralization of power, technology and culture by laying the social safety nets to accomodate precisely these events. As the number of pixels per square centimeter increases, our eye is drawn more sharply to the images which cross the entire screen. To prevent culturopathy there must be efforts by individuals to produce the trans-group systems which will be the social glue between freely networked individuals in a global future.

This, then, is the political task that stands before us -- to observe the unwinding techno-psychic context of tomorrow, to understand and communicate it, to differentiate between its vital and nihilistic elements and to be its defenders and promoters within the world that currently dominates this Earth.