The Grand Katinka Game

First Published in Horizons of Significance 3/7/2010

Complex systems evolve to deal with entropy. The why for this is unclear, but all great complex systems slow down the effects of entropy within them and this provides the opportunity for Life and the only stage on which life can be lived. In a simple system, or the part of a simple system that can be warped into a Linearity, entropy is maximized. Energy flows through the system as quickly as possible and we, as human observers, characterize this as either “work” or “waste.” We even put great efforts into developing efficiencies that are meant to skew the proportion of work to waste. In actuality most, if not all these efforts do more to increase the rate of overreach.

Seen in this way, a Linear approach is like a grand Katinka Game. We have in front of us a great complexity that has evolved to keep the ball-bearings trembling across the entire span of the board from top to bottom, buttressing any falls so they don’t become catastrophic releases that decimate the entire system. Along comes someone with the idea of Linearity, and the maximization of efficiencies, and Katinka! The balls all start to fall fast and furious. That human actor then accumulates ball-bearings at the bottom and feels rich! He’s accumulated Capital! But it is a fossil remnant of the wealth that was there in the first place.

Granted that wealth might not have been in a form that would have met any of his needs, either perceived or actual. Actually, much of that wealth was doing precisely that, it was maintaining a great complexity that not only created this human actor but sustained his most basic needs for air, water, and some potential for finding the fulfillment of his other needs. The gap between that perception of value and its actuality is precisely where we are today when we try to cope with our current situation. We think we are doing things in our self-interest and within mechanisms that will reward effective behavior, when in fact we are confused about our true self-interest and operating in a system that rewards the most short-sighted and destructive behaviors while providing us with a myriad of self-justifications, rationalizations, and outright delusions about what is actually occurring.

Concepts like Linearity, Newtonian Physics, Capitalism; are not in themselves bad. They are powerful conceptual tools that can be part of our greater toolkit, but only if we learn how to use them properly and avoid their seductive traps. The difficulties are external and internal. These constructs appear to be very powerful, but their actual benefits may end up being much more modest than we are lead to believe by their early successes and the ways in which their failures have been hidden by their unfortunate interactions with our own processes of assessment and judgment.

We tend to laugh at examples of naive behavior that fail to take complexity into account. We find the results immature or foolish. In part we are more sophisticated than the childish rube, but are we wiser? Sophistication: the aggregation of ever more nuanced rules to attempt to take every variable into consideration and give us a way to maintain a sense of control over things that are essentially beyond us; is only a partial remedy. Wisdom comes from choosing our battles and deciding that some things are truly beyond us, outside our control.

Sophistication leads to a tinkering that eventually uses up all the available attention and energy on its own maintenance, while the release achieved by a wise choice leaves us in a position to make mature decisions and work at correlating what we find valuable with what we can actually accomplish to forward those values.

This task is called living. It is a maximal effort that is constantly being impinged on by external limitations. To compound those limitations by adding the blinders of a linear viewpoint just seems self-defeating.

This brings us to asking ourselves, "What is life here for?" "How do I give my life meaning?" "What do I value when it really matters?" These are questions Capitalism is ill-suited to answer. To expect this rather high-level conceptual tool to give us meaningful answers to any of these questions is truly ridiculous. We realize this at some level, but we are blinded by the way its short-term efficacies fit our own distraction patterns so well. It is great at diverting us and complicating our lives.

Complication is our reaction to the piling up of seemingly random elements in a way that distracts and does not enlighten us, while complexity is the state of fine-grained embeddedness of the myriad of elements that make up existence.

Policy, strategy, tactics. We use this cascade of methodologies of interaction at varying points in our engagement with the world. Policy assigns value after making certain judgments. Strategy maps out an overall approach defining points of contact that are amenable to modification in ways that will benefit that Policy. Tactics is the realm of fine-grained real-time engagement that attempts to carry out the Strategy that it is hoped will achieve the aims of our Policy. Stir and repeat. As John Boyd has laid this out in his OODA Loop, this is an endless dynamic that provides the best mechanism for coming to grips with complex conditions over time.

Where does Capitalism fit into this? I don’t think it will be at the Policy level. It may have things to say that benefit us Strategically, but I tend to expect it is mostly a Tactical tool once its true nature has been understood. Even there, the ways in which it tends to hide its feedback from us make it problematic. It obscures as much if not more than it enlightens. This assessment turns the current approach on its head.

These are overall broad strokes of the way the situation could be approached. Dig into Capitalism’s fundamentals and clarify its strengths and weaknesses from the broadest perspective of our best sense of where our true self-interest lies and look for ways to be more sophisticated about its application while being wary of its abilities to send us off-track by its seductions both individual and institutional. Beyond this basically Systems Theory approach, there needs to be a broader inquiry into the nature of value itself and the limits of our interventions into what are ultimately mysteries and forces that are beyond our total comprehension and outside of which we cannot exist.

Capitalism is a tool. Its inputs need to be well understood. Its limitations and its side-effects also. As with any tool, misapplication leads to self-injury and general destruction; and, in the end, no tool or toolkit will bring us what is beyond our grasp. Effort, attention, energy and yearning expended on the impossible severely detracts from our ability to accomplish what can be done and can be recognized to be of value.

This process is continual, ending only with exhaustion and death. Capitalism, and the pragmatic stance it comes out of, needs to be removed from its current god-like position and recognized as a human invention like any other. It has certain benefits, although these have been severely oversold based on its ability to hide its costs so far. As we approach the time when these costs can no longer be swept under the rug, it will require a thorough examination of all its assumptions and a nuanced, and hopefully wise assessment of its usefulness going forward. Just as the Earth is suffering from the actions Capitalism has made possible, we are suffering from a great indigestion caused by its skewing of our sense of what it is to be human. This complicates our task, but does nothing to lessen the necessity for our attempt.

11/26/2023

I’m re-publishing this piece today as we witness the results of so much winning….

At the time it seemed radical to bring Capitalism into question in this way. To be clear, this goes beyond the binary of Capitalist/Communist. That binary didn’t question Capitalism. It assumed Capitalism as a precondition. We are witnessing the total bankruptcy of all ideology. The end of the road for putting mental constructs ahead of an engagement with what-is.

The phrase, The Right Side of History, is tainted by an expectation that Progress!™ is a given; but the underlying sentiment that there are views that are inherently destructive and inimical to life holds true. We are at this moment in our time of revelations when it is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the fatal inconsistencies that are being propped-up at all costs by those who claim to be our leaders. We are watching all the marbles drop.

Reifying Fear, as we are constantly propagandized to do, to place our wishes for comfort and a false sense of security over everything; pushes us further and further into doubling-down on failures that have reached and exceeded epidemic levels. We are surrounded, hounded, by siren calls to maintain our allegiance to slogans that we can now see with our own eyes were never meant to be taken seriously but were only pushed as means to keep us in thrall.

The first step is not to vainly insist on a fully-fledged certainty that must somehow replace our false sense of security with a new one. We need to trust that when we begin to feel a revulsion at what our beliefs demand of us it is time to abandon those beliefs. It is only as we do so, and in the difficult, especially because it is unfamiliar to us, engagement with what we actually encounter, instead of relying and falling into reacting to projections growing out of our weaponized fears, that we can begin to find a new compass.

Navigating Uncertainty is unfamiliar to most of us, but it is what we need to learn how to do if we are to stop being complicit in our own destruction and the destruction of the Living World. If we fail to take these revelations seriously we risk falling back into the same old patterns. Simply replacing one false certainty with another. Reacting out of fear as we remain locked in projection, perpetrating yet more violence in the name of wanting change. Starting yet another War in the pathetic delirium that it will be “for Peace.”

We are witnessing the total bankruptcy of the ways we are accustomed to make sense of the world and act in what we euphemistically call, a reasonable fashion.

The only way out of the musical chairs of switching one insane certainty with another is to enter into inquiry. To replace the expectation that what coddles our fears will gain us anything but destruction and beginning to find our own strength as we open and live with questions that have no simple answers. Clarity is not the monocular vision we expect it to be. Clarity begins to appear when we reject the over simplifications of our linear habits of thought. Coherence is not the same as certainty.

What our time gives us that was not available before is a gift that is intimately tangled in the depths of Our Predicament. We cannot continue to believe the lies we are fed and maintain any innocence of our own complicity. Following the trail of our complicity, from the history we are heirs to to the habits of Thought that have imprisoned us, we can begin to find another way….