Month: September 2018

(P1): Evolution is not about creating the perfect species

15 slightly different sea shell patterns, different colors, different line patterns
Examples of shell variation for the same species

Resources:

Mostly, we think about evolution as though it is trying to create the perfect organism.  I suppose this reflects the importance that we humans place on reputation, social status, and power in our society. But evolution doesn’t care about our social values. Evolution is about continuing to evolve, and the key to that is creating variation. As much variation as possible.

Selection (what we tend to think is the important part of evolution because it is important to us) is automatic anywhere there is a scarcity of any kind of resource.

It is the variation that “drives” evolution. Selection works locally, variation works throughout the complex system of life.

Evolution is about continuing on despite uncertainty (the universe is a very uncertain place), and variation is the best way to be ready for what you just can’t predict.

Since the two most consistent forces in evolution on this planet have been gravity (a fulcrum for all movement that shifts in its impact with every movement) and the day/night cycle (framing the cycling of all processes in every complex system), change is constant.

Part 1 (P1): Basic Ideas

Color picture of underwater kelp bed with a variety of fish schools.
Our Society Is Not a Machine

Resources:

Complex Systems Are Not Machines

If I were to ask most people if they thought their pet dog or cat was a machine, they would likely say “no”.  I certainly agree with this having had, now, 5 dogs over the years. Most people get that the larger world does not consist of a bunch of machines.

But….We continue to try to solve problems by using models that are based on machines. We describe the problem we are trying to change as though it were isolated, like a broken part in a machine. Our problem solutions are all of the sorts, “This is what is broken; we can put a new part in place of the broken part. That will take care of the problem”.

This approach doesn’t work for complex systems like our society any better than it works for your pet. Every time we replace the “broken” part with a new one, we create new problems over time, called “unintended consequences”.

The unintended consequences are experienced as new problems, entirely separate from the one we “solved” earlier, so we try to replace those new broken parts as well. And so on……..

Because we focus on fixing parts, we keep making new problems for ourselves. Worst of all, we think we are actually improving the system by fixing the part.

Future Strategy: The Struggle for Disability Rights in an Era of Decline and Constraint

A large number of ADAPT members discussing strategy for their Action in Washington, D.C.
ADAPT Members Preparing for Active Resistance

I believe that the core of life is the creation and sharing of meaning. It is easy to forget this core when things are going along smoothly and we can ignore most of what passes before us without any great risk.

That time is past.

We live in a period of intense volatility, and we not only lack tools for dealing with such rapid and unpredictable change, we carry with us a set of assumptions about how our society works that might have been useful as rules-of-thumb in the past, but are no longer so.

In fact, these assumptions drive us to make poor choices, triggering changes and consequences we can’t predict, and forcing more poor choices on us.

The only way to manage this astounding level of uncertainty is to craft a strategy that will provide us with a framework for making difficult and tentative decisions over and over.

Nowhere is this change in how we make choices more important than in the disability community.

As all of you are aware, our struggles to build access, inclusion, and choice into our society have stalled and retreated at the Federal level because of the actions of the current administration. But, our progress has always been incremental and hard-fought, requiring persistence and a relentless commitment to our values over decades.

Now, while persistence and relentless commitment will still be very important, there are many forces that will actively work to undermine and destroy the progress we have made.

I want to talk to you about our struggle for rights in the larger context of long-term changes in our society that are now and will be constricting our community’s social and political capacity to innovate and expand freedom and choice for ourselves. The legislative and regulatory frameworks we have used for progress in past decades are currently eroding, and it isn’t clear that we can stop that erosion, much less reverse it.

In addition, there are large social forces that will make those legislative and regulatory frameworks less effective even as we succeed in defending them against attack.

In the future, it will not be enough for us to demand our rights. We will also have to create the social frameworks within which our rights will have real meaning and through which we can live fulfilling lives of choice.

We will not be able to depend on others for the success of these efforts.

Overview Over: On To the Feature Presentation!

Big Screens of young man showing his software in a Serbian competition.
On To the Deep Framework

I’ve made my last post in the FutureStrategy Overview. Obviously, the posts from the Overview will remain available for review if the going gets tough with the deep framework posts coming next.

The full presentation of the deep framework is 56 slides long and each slide is packed with notes, resource links, quotes and what have you. I’ll be reformating the slides so they work better in a blog post. If you have questions, you can put them into the comments and I’ll answer them.

Although I would be happy to do presentations on the ideas in this deep framework, the reality is that it is a long slog as a whole, and I divided it into a number of parts, each being a presentation in itself and running about two hours per part.

I hope some of what follows will prove useful to you and our community in the years ahead.

What Do We Do Next?

Sign on a computer that says, This machine is a Server! Do Not Power Down!
Don’t Turn Off the Server!

Some ways to think about how we might create useful change:

  • Within the Shell of the Old: We don’t have the option of either taking over control of the levers of society or starting from scratch to assure our survival as a community. The disability community’s dependence on the health care system and our sensitivity to small changes in our ability to access our community mean that whatever we do, we will need stability in supports every second of every day for the near term. We must build what we need within the current system of supports.
  • Getting Good at Change: We can get good at change by practicing change in small ways as an ongoing part of our self-support and advocacy. Often, it is so tiresome to simply get through the day, that we default to dependence on systems of support even though we know those systems can and will change without notice. This habit means, though, that we will not be able to respond to the truly unpredictable because we will have no experience of creating successful change on the fly. This means that we must build our general ability to accept and act on the necessity of change long before all hell breaks loose.
  • The Commanding Beliefs of the American People: These beliefs were a part of the assumptions that Americans made about what change could mean. In many ways, we no longer believe them, and the erosion of these assumptions increases a little every day:
    • Everything is Possible.
    • Vast problems can be solved if broken up into pieces and addressed one by one.
    • Ordinary men and women contain within themselves, individually and collectively, the constructive genius with which to craft such solutions.
  • Personalism: For at least the last 7,000 years, we have lived with the good and the bad of the institution of states that control the creation and distribution of those resources we need to live. Over the millennia, there has been an ongoing battle at every level of society between the value of each person in themselves and the use of each person by the elites in the various states.

    Personalism is the philosophy (sometimes religious, sometimes not) that society should support the freedom and choice of each individual to craft their unique lives. We don’t actually need a philosophy or ideology of personalism (in fact, I think that would be a repetition of the errors mentioned earlier), but we do need to internalize in ourselves and build into the future we create, the values that the disability community has discovered to be the basis for freedom and choice. This model is the idea of using accommodation to each of our individual characteristics to expand the possibilities of our futures.

We Need A Strategy!

What is a Strategy? It is hard to show your skill as a sailor when there is no wind. ― Richard P. Rumelt
We Need a Strategy!

Our community’s struggle in regard to the larger society is very much like the situation described in the quote. Constant efforts at resistance, while necessary, and unavoidable, will not resolve those large forces that are gradually degrading the foundation of our current forms of personal and community support.

We need more than a set of advocacy and resistance techniques, and we need much more than any savior or ideology that might exist in the larger complex system could offer.

Our usual approach to big-picture barriers is an operational plan, with tasks and measurable outcomes. But an operational plan is not nearly enough. An operational plan simplifies and reduces potential outcomes by its very nature, and ignores available resources in the pursuit of apparent predictability.

We need an approach that actually fits our community, that values our freedom and choice in support of the unique dreams of each of us.

We need a Strategy.

A strategy is a way to organize our change efforts around two unavoidable realities:

  • The unpredictability of the future.
  • The relentless scarcity of resources (in all the forms those resources might take).

Aligning our change efforts means that we match all our available resources to all of the outcomes we dream of achieving and is called a Grand Strategy.

The Fundamental Force of Decline

Gray rock with a complete fossil of an ancient small crocodile-like reptile
Why Do We Keep Making the Same Mistakes?

There is a deep similarity between the way we have used fossil fuels and debt to drive our political and financial economies. And the results of this use are also very similar:

  • There are unavoidable limits to both. These limits are not just an amount (quantity in fuels and bubble size in debt), but that both become increasingly difficult to extract as their use increases.
  • The habit of their use also makes it increasingly difficult to change their use. This is a kind of addiction.
  • Their use is always to allow short-term success and a parallel ignoring of long-term consequences.
  • When the consequences become too great to ignore, very significant costs are required to alleviate these consequences.
  • In turn, the costs of dealing with the consequences of short-term, non-strategic use further undermines the original advantage of their use.

This cycle of short-term planning in use of resources and the lack of attention to consequences is fractal. That is, the mistake occurs systemically at every level. It is a characteristic of our complex adaptive system, and it has as much to do with the momentum of our ongoing lost control over our future as anything else that we currently believe to be wrong in our society.

We can’t use the way we created and maintain the degradation of our society to change that degradation in anything other than small ways, ways that over time will wash out in the same way that ripples from the splash of a small stone wash out in a river.

We need a strategy, not more short-term operational planning.

How Complex Systems Age

elderly couple dancing in vaguely European Clothing
Everything Gets Old in the Same Way

How do Complex Systems Age?

Think of how a forest grows after a fire removes the previous forest. The cycle has 4 phases:

  • Fast Reorganization (Pioneer Exploration-First Weeds)
  • Fast Exploitation (Entrepreneurial Expansion-Most Successful Weeds)
  • Slow Conservation (The Evolving Ecosystem-The Forest Developing).
  • Slow Degradation Followed by Fast Release (Collapse due to brittleness, the end result of ever-increasing complexity).

This final phase of collapse creates the circumstances for the next complex system, whatever that collapse might specifically be.

These cycles are not entirely predictable. But the larger phases can be recognized if not foretold by simple observation. At least if you are looking for them.

Some Problems of an Aging Complex System

As complex systems age, they produce other problems for a community like ours:

  • A General Corruption of individuals, and more importantly, corruption of the original purpose of the complex support system.
  • A Civil War between the original purpose and maintaining the system.
  • Functional Psychopathy which values human beings less and less over time as a direct result of the aging of the complex system.
  • A kind of Compounding Error as poorly made fixes create unintended consequences, which become new problems.

The fact that all complex systems age doesn’t mean that we can’t improve parts of the system. If I have arthritis in my hip and it gets bad enough, my pain and reduced mobility may seriously interfere with my normal activity. Perhaps I choose to have hip replacement surgery. If the surgery is successful, my ability to engage in my activities can be dramatically improved.

But, I’m still aging.

The same is true for all complex systems.