Month: February 2022

We all have a learned bias that the purpose of an insurgency is to overthrow an existing political process or governance entity. Certainly, that is the focus of real-world, leadership-driven insurgent action. But it is not their purpose.

Their purpose, as examples of CAS, is what they do, not what they say they do.

And what do they do?

They sabotage the particular system that is their focus (SOF). Because of the entanglement, they also sabotage the other systems which they ignore.

While some insurgencies try to do much more, it is the purpose of sabotage, in all its many dimensions, that maintains an insurgency over long periods of time, and allows it to recover from defeats. Sabotage is the core of insurgent resilience.

How does this sabotage-based resilience express itself?

• Insurgencies are fractal
• Insurgencies are micro-diverse
• Insurgencies are entangled
• Insurgencies are possibility-spaces

Fractal

A fractal system, such as an insurgency, has roughly the same amount of agency and complexity at every level of the system, even though it seems that the lower the level, the less the scope of sabotage. This principle violates the ordinary assumptions we use in understanding the nature of social reality. With the advent of global social media, we have discovered this principle in the reality that our local social communication has no boundaries, reaching far beyond what we intended or what we believe is safe.

Our notions of scope are also subject to this fractal principle. Think of looking out over, or listening to, a vast field in the distant parts of a visual or auditory scene. They will be lacking in detail. If you use binoculars, you will be able to see greater detail. If you use a hearing device, you will be able to identify the nature of the sounds you are hearing. If you move closer, more understanding is apparent.

An insurgency is like this idea of scope, distance, and detail. As you get closer to the “lower” levels of the insurgent system, you will see greater detail and a more nuanced impact from the insurgent activity than you could see at the so-called “higher” level.

As an example of how fractal models operate, think of the current pandemic, often described as a single event or process (with identifiable surges, for example), but actually consisting of an extremely large number of local epidemics that start, rise and fall off with a lot of foggy independence and boundaries, and an only apparent overall coherence.

It is an illusion to think that an insurgency can be defeated by focusing effort on the highest levels of leadership, their orchestrated violent acts, their methods for funding themselves, their ideologies. As the repeated elite success in accomplishing the defeat of these highest levels shows, any insurgency continues to boil below, and will break out again with a new set of leaders, ideologies, and violent acts when enough energy to do so has built up. This energy can simmer through very local, very granular sabotage by individuals and small groups that are not immediately controlled by any hierarchy.

The centrist elite CAS (whose job it is to preserve the elite CAS by defeating the large-scale insurgent action) believes, as it does in so many other areas, that defeating the management of the insurgency (their leadership, ideology, and large-scale acts) is the same as defeating the insurgency. Elites must believe this, or face very difficult questions about their ability to gain and hold wealth, power, and reputation. See “How tech’s richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse”.

But any action (like the ones described above) that doesn’t directly undermine the resilience of an insurgency will only solve some immediate short term political problem. It won’t affect the continuing small incremental changes in the elite CAS and other insurgencies that result from the relentless sabotage arising at every level and across the insurgent universe.

There is simply no way to eliminate sabotage, which is the unstated impossible goal of the relentless search for more control that has been the implicit mission of social elites (along with the explicit missions of ever-increasing wealth, fame, and power). This is the deep weakness of the goal of “managing” insurgencies.

Micro-Diverse

All CAS that function in the real world are micro-diverse. For our purposes, this means that they create many small variations as part of their CAS dynamic, and they auto-create more variation over time without explicit plan or external control.

Variation and micro-diversity are not only unavoidable, but are an important part of any CAS’s resilience. This clearly apparent in the resilience of insurgencies.

For example, “Lone-wolf terrorism” is one weak, appallingly limited, recognition by the elite CAS that micro-diversity in insurgencies is a real and difficult problem. For the elite CAS, micro-variations must always be cognitively and politically washed out by one another, so that only the problems important to elites remain and, thus, can be “managed”.

The trend of incrementally increasing CAS disruption through this uncontrolled variation has no place in such an elite strategy. Supposedly, important variation can’t happen at low level, or at least not very often, only ignorable or controllable variation.

Entangled

Micro-diversity means that neither the insurgencies nor the elite CAS can be pure, in any meaning of that word. For example, each member of an insurgency has a partially overlapping but different set of beliefs and a different background-basically, a huge and ever-growing micro-diversity that includes various beliefs from the centrist elites’ and the other insurgencies’ lexicons. Management of this unavoidable and continuing variation is part of the leadership challenge in the elite CAS and in the right and left insurgencies. But the variation will continue to spread, no matter how leadership tries (say, for example, through annual webinars, codes of conduct, office posters, and marketing the importance of alignment, or cultish, downward control over belief) to eliminate it.

If you follow social media accounts of actual people (not bots), you will find posts that do not track their current matrix of troll-triggering tropes, but that contain actions and values from the centrist and the various insurgencies. If we could follow these individuals more carefully, we would find that the variation is a lot more than appears on the surface, and that it is constantly shifting in small ways. Variation doesn’t need explanation; rather, the effort and energy unavoidably necessary to assure ideological, financial, and consistency of control is what needs to be explained.

So, for example, an election result, requiring as it does a forced choice, is not an indicator of the actual variation in the system of focus. Everyone knows this, but the temptation to “eliminate” the real variation by projecting a category on all those who pick one of the forced choices seems unavoidable. I blame elites for this illusion, and the illusion is becoming less and less usable as a tool of control.

Evolving in a Possibility-Space

Every intention by individuals, groups, or collectives, like insurgencies, creates a possibility space for its realization. This space does not contain simple causal link paths from intention to realization (like a logic model), but rather is a kind of disposition possibility space in which many choices are “superimposed” as it were. We feel for some direction from initial intention to realization through a unique path (See Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System by Alicia Juarrero for a wonderful and deep dive into this).

In any apparently collective intention, the possibility-space will also include flows that go against the apparent intention. For example, insurgencies create their own antitheses through their current members. But they also create a large variety of other active enabling and disruptive paths from the original intention. The thing to understand about this evolution is that it can’t be predicted in any detail, and not being able to grasp this results in surprising and unintended consequences.

All four of these dimensions interact with one another as well, producing together an evolving Macro-CAS whose path is very uncertain. However, this CAS can be embraced as a disposition of its evolution in an entangled Web of Meaning.

Part One
Part Two

Part Four: The Macro-CAS as a Turbulent Web of Meaning

People often believe that models can be made more useful by increasing their complexity, so that the model better imitates the “real” thing.

Untrue. Making a model more complex will lead to it being increasingly useless as a tool for understanding, or a guide to changing the real thing.

So, here is a deliberately simple model:

Imagine a core of social, political, and financial communities that populate our elites, their entourages, and the centrist organizations and subcommunities of our society. (The Macro-CAS or Complex Adaptive System).

Now imagine two insurgencies, one on the right and one on the left, that struggle with the centrist core and each other.

Taken together, these various communities are The Macro-CAS or Complex Adaptive System.

This is the base model. It is different from other models of political/social insurgency in that it points to a variety of interacting insurgencies, rather than the simpler version of a centrist social state and various specific politically motivated insurgencies.

But it is still pretty simple. Here are a few deeper notions:

1. There are financial, social, and political insurgents in the core elites. Sometimes they tie themselves to the right and left insurgencies, and sometimes they just sabotage their elite competitors. And sometimes they switch back and forth as their operational plans for supremacy confront the uncertainty of the future.
2. Obviously, there are diverse sub-insurgencies within both the right and left insurgencies, and they too evolve.
3. This variety of insurgencies and elites most resembles the endlessly diverse evolution of single-celled organisms, and the ecosystem of viruses, chunks of DNA and RNA, proteins, hormones, and other various forms of biological detritus that was the energetic and volatile soup of ocean life 3 billion years ago.
4. So, as was the case in the primordial soup, all of us have within us bits and pieces from many of the regions/possibilities of the basic model. Because our environment elevates, in a more or less chaotic way, different trends which resonate with these different bits and pieces, we might seem to see that “members” of one insurgency have suddenly moved to or from another. This is one of the meanings of the word “entanglement” in this post series title.
5. We try to make it easier to understand the dynamics of the simple model through the use of traditional simplifications of reality, such as “you are only a member of one part of the model”. Doing this only means we will be constantly surprised by the actual dynamic evolution of the entangled reality.
6. “Surprised” doesn’t just mean that we are wowed or scared (the social media definition). It also means that, as much as we relentlessly try, we are ineffective in meaningfully altering the dynamic, and we may make the dynamic even more surprising by our efforts to control it.
7. Our attempts to alter the CAS produce unintended consequences reliably, some of which make what we are trying to change worse than it is now.
8. While I’m focusing on the last half-century, the basic model has been operating at least since the first states, with growing complexity. (Maybe 7,000 years ago?)

In the past, we treated the unintended consequences of our efforts to improve the common challenges of our Macro-CAS as “new” problems popping up out of “nowhere”, and we would then come up with ways to solve the “new” problems. That approach is no longer tenable because of the acceleration and expansion of both novelty and disruption in The Macro-CAS. We no longer have the time to delude ourselves with our solutions. They become failures much faster than they used to. They become myths to believe rather than guides to effective change.

Well, if we can’t use past problem-solving techniques, and we can’t even count on the consistency of the struggling parties in our model, what do we do?

Part Three: First, We Have to Understand why Insurgencies are so Effective in Disruption…

Read Part One in the Series

First in a multi-part series about the complex flow deep in our entangled society…

---

“There is no such thing as security for any nation — or any individual — in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism.” – President Franklin Roosevelt, in a “fireside chat” to the nation after the Pearl Harbor attacks, and a first take on insurgency.

In my senior year in high school (1964–65), I got my first glimpse of our common entangled insurgencies, though I didn’t know it at the time. Our local John Birch Society gave a copy of “None Dare Call It Treason” to every member of my senior class. This amounted to somewhere around 650 copies.

I suspect I was one of the few Social Justice Catholics in our class to read it. Most copies of it had been tossed everywhere around the school campus and in various places on the many routes to our family homes.

I asked a classmate who was more familiar with right politics than me what this distribution was about. He told me that local JBS members had decided that they needed to begin advancing their beliefs in a more organized way after the much earlier collapse of McCarthy, and the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater in the presidential campaign, through what were viewed as the lies and manipulations of political advertising (isn’t all political advertising manipulative?). This book was published so that it could be distributed widely during the 1964 presidential campaign.

All I thought at the time: “All our parents are weird”, with the typical adolescent roll-of-the-eyes.

Looking back, if you changed the core villain from the communists to the various yellow, brown, and black enemies that are now the targets of right hate, and updated the names of the villains to the current ones in roughly similar jobs and social classes, you could republish it today with a few other changes. To me, that means the framework of NDCIT is mythic in its meaning, and can and will be applied to whatever is going on currently by those who are entangled in the myth.

But back then, I used the balm of young obliviousness to the outside world to dismiss the idea, and it faded from my consciousness.

Something must have stuck though. I began to notice stuff from the right that I had never paid attention to before.  My deepest ignorance was my lack of understanding of insurgencies, and how they operate as flows of meaning.

My ignorance had two dimensions:

• I didn’t see my catholic social justice value system, socially just action, and our larger social justice community as an insurgency. I thought it was a nice way to be a human being.
• I couldn’t see the birth of a much larger right-wing insurgency in the  expanding number of similar local organizing initiatives going on across roughly all rural areas and college campuses of the US, because I was simply unaware of them, or I consigned them to some dustbin of irrelevance.

---

Over the decades since then, I’ve tried to resolve my ignorance as best I could, and I have deepened my understanding of insurgencies.

I experienced insurgency first hand as a combat soldier in Vietnam, known people who participated in our American cultural entangled insurgencies and those who fought insurgencies in our overseas wars and our home-spun revolutionary movements, learned the history of insurgency through reading, board games, and video games, and, most critically, learned about systems theory, especially the theory of, and change in, complex adaptive systems (CAS).

These experiences and learnings helped me see the dynamic of our entangled insurgencies as a flowing shifting evolution with a broad disposition, if not a game plan. I want to pass on something of that observed flow in the stories in this series.

Part Two: So, How are We to Understand what Our Long- Entangled Insurgencies are?