“We had allowed the system to race ahead of our ability to protect it.”
Brooksley Born, 2007-09 Financial Crisis Inquiry Report1
Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history, a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave.”
H.A.L. Fisher2
“…in politics, in corporate or governmental organization…a wholly new society…yesterday’s rules [are becoming] obsolete…something revolutionary is happening…not merely in the birth of new organizational forms but in the birth of a new civilization. A new code book is taking form.”
Alvin Toffler 3
Quick Take…
Wild Globalization (“WG”)…Ecology-DEMOGRAPHIC-Tech-Economy WAVES…moves ahead of civilization and its governance.
Formal (“big”) governance attempts to arrange human “orders” (e.g., polis, legal, societal, monetary, the formal economy, the “academy” of universities and “higher education”) and so integrate “values” (social-economic-political philosophies, faith-traditions, egalitarian concerns) into formal arrangements and conventions (institutions). Nations are instituted, or “constituted,” into executive, legislative, and legal systems. As well, public corporations are run by “boards of directors” and “bylaws.” And apex faith traditions, exemplified by the Catholic Church, can have formal and highly complex governance, including their own political “state” (the Vatican). Even Paris’ great Louvre Museum or New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art stand as permanent “institutions” of the arts.
And yet, rising spontaneously from day-to-day “street” interplay, we observe humans shaping themselves into less formal, private (“small”), even “counter-cultural” arrangements (the arts, social media, closely held business, independent intellectuals, entrepreneurs and inventors, spiritual societies). Your local hardware store or family-owned restaurant, the Doors or Rolling Stones or Beatles “rock’n’roll” bands, brilliant and original intellects like Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Benoit Mandelbrot, genius inventors like Thomas Edison, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Steven Jobs, or artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude who built the spectacularly yet ephemeral 1976 24-mile Running Fence through the northern California hill country – and then tore it down. And in the ever-wilder 21st century’s global marketplace, we observe over 1 million souls per week spilling into urban centers, often forming hyper-local neighborhood governances, and overwhemling, even defying formal bureacracies, in fact, the shocking “street-up” overflow of entirely unpredictable new social “orders.”
Tracking our wild cairn-logic, these “big” and “small” momentums pressure one another and inter-play in a “state” of incessant, unstable, and hyper-natural evolution.
WG tries to re-read, even re-imagine, governance. Why? Well, can we really claim we understand even the most recent 20th century, which reads like a Janus-faced collision of peril (1900-1945 world wars and Holocaust; Fisher’s (above) “one emergency following upon another”) and prosperity (1945-2000 globalization re-set and “convergence”)? And then there’s Toffler’s prescient observation of a “new civilization…a new code…” emerging under our feet. Either way, civilization’s “orders,” whether we like it or not, are being re-grounded and re-defined in the wild spaces and interstices of global life.
Longer Take…
Wild Governance needs a longer take because it’s really the result of how we presume we can “govern” this Ecos-Sex-Tech-Econ black box, which incessantly inter-and over-flows, which is deceptively unstable, and therefore which, as we contend here, defies easy or simple definition or precise quantification.
So, on a lighter side, might governance be better viewed from the angle of “play” or “game” theory? For example, might we observe that our “democratic” governance, at least its day-to-day Washington D.C. version, looks more like a modern game of American tackle football:
- Start with a modern sports stadium (a formal edifice, a marbled “structure”…think the Roman “Forum”…or, on its other face, the Roman Coliseum…?)
- Next, there’s an official “Rulebook,” the game’s legal structure…the rulebook “sets” the field and bureaucracy of play…“referees” and “judges” govern the play or at least that’s what we’re supposed think.
- Fans fill the stadium, some “war-painted” and “fanatic,” yet still ordered like a “body-politic.”
- Opposing teams “huddle” in bureaucratic (gov/corp”) “meetings”…
- The team (“gov-corp”) leaders, the “O” offense’s “QB” (“Quarterback”) and the “D” defenses “MLB” (“Middle-linebacker”) get the “play,” like a pre-planned “program or policy” charted out with “X’s” and “O’s” to bring specific “intended consequences” – the play-call comes down from the “boards of directors-coaches.”
- Teams meet at the “line of scrimmage” (“Mainstreet…”)…the “O” and “D” are set in bureaucratic “formations” (lineman, linebackers, corner-quarter-half-full-backs, safeties, split-tight-ends, wideouts, like various gov-corp “departments”)…things look organized, “set” in place – the QB even yells “SET!” to get the play going…
- Next, the QB gazes over the “D” and the MLB tries to guess what the “O” will do…the various departmental players jump around; the players brace for action while the crowd tenses with anticipation…
- Initially, the “play” may look like it’s working…but then, uh-oh! all hell can break loose…! The linebackers “blitz” the QB, the “protection” breaks down, so the QB scrambles and un-intended consequences ensue – the QB avoids the LB’s annihilating tackle and spots the wide receiver, and, Voila, an innovated pass over the middle…and…wait, uh-oh again…INTERCEPTION! and the game reverses…
- So first we see intentional “order” or “governance,” then opposing forces collide to produce the exciting order of “play,” and finally a new “order” (intended and unintended) emerges and the line of scrimmage either advances or retreats. The whole scene is “wild” yet there is an order, an order of play. Why do the fans show up? Why is tackle football the new iconic game of America? Is it because, first, the game epitomizes all the nuances of modern culture – bureaucratically and technologically organized play and power? It’s also because football is war. It’s about power. It celebrates primordial human behavior and skills – teamwork, passing “spears” on the hunt, even “sudden death” conclusions. It’s a virtual and violent battlefield, with an “air” and a “ground” game. Coliseum entertainment. And like any game, fans show up for the sheer excitement to witness and celebrate unknowable and unpredictable outcomes. Play starts with the expectation that outcomes are unpredictable – from the start any arrogance of order is humbled by the play of forces. Finally, football is relatively transparent and so practical – the “best” team wins; fans accept the outcome – games celebrate what works practically and spontaneously in the field of play. There is a “wild order” to play.
Examining how we play can tell us a lot about how we think we can act with each other and how we think we can govern ourselves and our world-space. Intelligently and ethically – or not – skills that carried us out of the original wild. Football is curious because its field of play and fanatic spectating shows us how wild and violent we can be and yet how the “order…through…seeming chaos…to…new order” play “sets” and then “re-sets” the spectacle that is us.
21st century governance is playing out like a game between, on one side of play, modern totalitarian states that put government power and control first (for example, China, North Korea, Russia, Iran) and, on the other side, the less steady examples of elected “representative” self-governance or “democracy,” so arrangements that supposedly place the freedom and rights of citizens first (highly imperfect examples include European countries, the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand).
Clearly, the totalitarians believe they have a point – a small, elite ruling class (for example, @2% governed the failed U.S.S.R.; @5% now comprise the ruling Chinese Communist Party or “CCP,”; indeed, many view the massive 2 million worker strong U.S. federal government as an elite and at times quasi-totalitarian bureaucracy) appears more efficient on the surface and may seem to respond more quickly than the awkward, less centralized “democratic” systems. That’s why this is the 21st century’s really big game, it’s the Super Bowl of governance. How to “govern” the wild Eco-Sex-Tech-Econ field of play?
“Civilization” perpetually tries to convince itself, and us, that its governance has things “under control,” that it is “orderly and organized,” that the trains and planes will run on time. Or that its debt will be repaid.
Wild governance simply observes that, if the recent 20th and now 21st centuries’ perils and prosperities are witness, then minimally we need to re-think how we have come to call this “civilization,” and maximally we need to confront how these “wild” flows, which have hyper-evolved and are now expressed with exponential scale and effect, may nonetheless also carry equally evolved and unique human skills: on the one hand practical intelligence (“Science”), and on the other the subtle, less obvious, but essential wisdoms to act under ultimate, ethical concerns (“Ethos”).
And as Toffler and many others observe, the “codes” are changing; both sides’ rulebooks are in play.
Examples of “Wild Governance”
In the U.S., for example, when the Federal Reserve “adjusts” interest rates, as Alan Greenspan did by lowering rates in the 1980’s (soon after Toffler’s comment), it’s like the ref’s coming out for the 2nd half of a 1980s-vintage Denver Broncos/Oakland Raiders football game, and saying, “OK, in the 2nd half the field is now 120 yards long, there’s five downs instead of four, and we will no longer call unnecessary roughness – you can break legs and beat head’s in to your heart’s (and the crowd’s) delight…!”
>>> RESULT: Today, partly inspired by Greenspan’s “active” Fed policy, the U.S. Federal Reserve has exploded both its balance sheet and the market’s money supply, which in turn has triggered very high and “wildly” unpredictable inflation and market bubbles. Add to that massive and bi-partisan over-spending and the U.S. government now carries $30+ TRILLION in short-term debt (borrowed annual budget spending) and perhaps another $60-90 TRILLION in “unfunded liabilities” (future estimatted obligations of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid that the Federal government has no idea how it will pay ). In a word, DEBT.
In China, across the line of scrimmage, errant totalitarian governance may be working even harder. Under China’s CCP, citizen-owned real estate can easily become “open game.” The CCP provincial governments can move in and move out farmers and individual landowners with small pay-offs – it then turns around and sells leases at high profit to large corporate developers for urban apartment complexes, malls, etc. With this practice, and in just one recent decade, the CCP has displaced as many as 65 million citizens, the population of the U.K.
>>> RESULT: China has also amassed yet cleverly concealed DEBT tucked away in CCP controlled banks and corporations and in local cities and provinces. And “…from 2009 to 2015…China’s governments collected 22 trillion yuan just from selling land. That’s comparable to selling all the land in Manhattan two and a half times over. Nationally, land sales in China account for roughly a third of all fiscal revenue.”4 And incredibly, global markets allow the CCP to hide or not report this debt, or as one senior CCP minister was glibly quoted in 2013: “If China were to declare that nonperforming loans were in fact much higher than thought, does anyone really benefit?”5
- 1 The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Authorized Edition, New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.
- 2 H.A.L. Fisher, quoted by Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989, p. 291.
- 3 Toffler, Alvin, The Third Wave, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980, pp. 274-281.
- 4 Dinny McMahon, China’s Great Wall of Debt – Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, pp. 70-71.
- 5 Ibid, p. 6-9; McMahon observes: “There was a certain appeal to his reasoning. Why should China endure unnecessary pain if the authorities could just waive the rules for a while? (Of course, the strategy works only if authorities use the time they buy to clean up the mess. Five years after that conversation [in 2018], the scale of the problems has only worsened.”