Follow-up to ‘GG as 5GWarriors’

The Zen Pundit

Mark of ZenPundit has followed up with two parts of a series looking at perturbations:

”On System Perturbations and the System Builders”, in which he considers the importance of, well, keeping an open mind. Being able to look at any problem from multiple points of view may facilitate understanding and may be something that the intelligence community desperately needs to do. I tend to agree; although, there is always the question of having too open a mind, or one incapable of making actionable decisions.  This may be a problem not only because action is forestalled, but on the contrary, because those analysts most willing to offer a solid decision choosing one of two points of view are more likely to be listened to by those who are in a position of having to act.   The decision-makers are sometimes called “wafflers” and accused of being “too nuanced” if they cannot offer solid understanding as a basis for action.  Analysts willing to cut through the chaos with a “solid analysis” therefore gain more currency in politics:  This will have a bearing on 5GW activity.

”Further Reflections on System Perturbations”, in which Mark takes a look at the issues of memes and perturbations previously discussed here on D5GW, but also looks at RevG’s consideration of ‘ensembles acting with authority.’   We had some interesting back-and-forth on the question of emergence for memes.  I think that network theories of ‘meme transmission’ are useful but have a limited usefulness, because a world with multiple local environments and local histories will limit the effectiveness of ‘transmission’, particularly if ‘superempowered individuals’ and smallish ‘ensembles’ are also emerging.  Thought, operating holistically, will alter whatever messages are being ‘delivered’, because prior information also has an effect on the emergence of memes within individuals.  Thus, the Long War may indeed be long, generational.  And chaotic.  But we seem to have more need of a theory of memetic engineering that can account for the macro-levels as well as the micro-levels — and a better theory of what makes up a meme, since in theory no two memes are identical although they may be similar, depending on how memes are defined and identified.  This is an open question.

Mark also made a distinction I did not make concerning perturbations:

Generally, Global Guerillas will not manage to set off system perturbations, such events are rare things, but their destructive actions will add to the aggregate amount of “noise” in the system. The “noise” or “chaos” ( or “entropy” or ” novelty”) is the the disintegration of the old system which creates a certain fluidity or space in which people will naturally seek out rules to create certainty. The weakening of the old system’s authority makes the construction of new rule-sets both easier and harder while creating the necessity to do so.

So Global Guerillas might have a “common effect”. And should they succeed in setting off a system perturbation what is accomplished is a dramatic acceleration of the process.

It is true that I have used a very loose definition of perturbation.  When Mark suggests in commenting on RevG’s post that “increased speed (or modulation of speed) is a strong possibility” but is not “the only way to ‘get inside’ your opponents OODA Loop,” he is approaching my own consideration of perturbations.  Again, the macro- and micro- levels are less distinct than perhaps they should be — or should they be?  Another open question.  Tying this to the consideration of memes, the question becomes one concerning the effectiveness of Big Bang perturbations vs the effectiveness of smaller bangs for successful memetic engineering.  Also, I think we must also keep in mind something mentioned by Mark in a comment on D5GW concerning perturbations:  that they may “emerge from a confluence of lesser events acting in synergy.”

The Christian Soldier

In “Toward Ensembles Acting with Authority”, RevG of Christian Soldiers offers some intriguing analysis.

On novelty:

Those who act upon fundamentals analysis require relatively stable systems or at least ones where system perturbation can be anticipated. System perturbation creates novelty, a kinder term than chaos or entropy but functionally identical. Their fundamentals analysis apprehends a historical view anticipating traditional cause and effect chains to continue intact.

Yes, and sometimes I think we would be better served by thinking that ‘chaos’ is always only cognitive.  Such a thought may require a different kind of ‘fundamentals analysis’, since a true lack of chaos (except in our cognition) would suggest mere complexity of physical realities or orders.  This might in turn promote skepticism while we search for those fundamental orders affecting a system.  However, the possibility exists that we will prove incapable of finding those orders and understanding their interactions, in which case cognitive chaos may continue and our functionality (we are in the system) will be the same as if actual concrete chaos, rather than mere complexity, shaped the world about us.

This has lead to the emergence of unpredictable secondary effects due solely to there being vastly more cause and effect chains. This proliferation of the number of cause and effect chains, this increase in complexity, has contributed to a higher level of novelty.

Orders emerge, change, dissipate (into other orders), beyond our observational range.  Even if chaos is only cognitive — rather, because it is — we fail to anticipate newly ordered particulars and are thus faced with novelty.  It may be argued that these new confluences, new orders, are by nature novel; or, it might be argued that novelty is also largely a cognitive assessment, like chaos.  Hmmmm.

On interconnectivity:

Now extend the analogy of cause and effect chains to see that with the increase in both the number of chains and the length of the chains that the chains also may be increasingly interconnected. Interconnectivity creates supportive cause and effect links when system perturbations introduce novelty into historical relationships. Interconnectivity creates the illusion of historical relationships by maintaining cause and effect. Interconnectivity redistributes novelty.

This is intriguing.  I’m tempted to suggest that a certain class of meme forms to address the ‘illusion of historical relationships’:  generalizations.  Generalizations may dismiss many particulars if the aggregate effects of so many distinct particulars, operating in so many directions down so many chains of cause and effect, nevertheless lead to greater, perhaps encompassing, orders formed by the complex soup of cause and effect — orders that we can actually see or at least believe that we see.

A hope exists that generalizations like democracy and capitalism and freedom will help to bind people together, but these generalizations often fail to address individuals — simply because they are formed to address the aggregate of all these individuals, or societies.  E.g., a ‘free society’ nevertheless has individuals who are not free, such as prisoners and children.  (Can children act with freedom, or must they act only within the limits prescribed by parents and the laws of that society?  Can children provide for themselves, or must they depend upon the constraints of their environment — like everyone else?)  So individual interpretations of democracy and capitalism and freedom may differ from person to person, because each person is forming that generalization from a particular perspective within the complex system.  Arguments even exist, some of them valid, that a limitation on freedoms for individuals will promote a generalized freedom for everyone within a society:  as long as the aggregate effect is a greater degree of freedom for each individual than would be produced in some ‘otherly ordered’ system.

Contrary to at least one out-front strategist, RevG suggests that ‘interconnectivity’ of cause and effect chains may quite limit fundamentals analysis, or what can be achieved through faith in those fundamentals, particularly when system perturbations also exist.  Such interconnectivity and perturbation are likely to lead to greater levels of novelty, chaos.  All of this reminds me of an old post on Phatic Communion, in which I considered “The Gaps in ‘Globalism’.”  It also reminds me of my consideration of “the Conservative” in a PC post called “Flu(n)x”:

In essence, a high degree of flux may lead to a loss of stewardship control of the resources of thought, because those resources are overburdened or inadequate for operating within the flux.

So it would seem that increased interconnectivity creates a disadvantageous environment for traditionalists everywhere, regardless of their form of traditionalism.  On the other hand, the power of generalization — its ability to make light of many particulars while presenting a seemingly coherent model — may operate as a powerful motivator when chaos becomes too vague for shaping goals and legitimizing them.  If we believe we cannot act in every direction at once, we are more likely to pick one out of many.

On ‘authority to act’:

Human society is rapidly approaching the condition where the authority to act must be located in the specific environment being analyzed. This is the result of a trend in human development that once required a vision spanning generations to fully appreciate. Current conditions no longer need rely upon multigenerational knowledge to support this conclusion. Current events outstrip the conclusions of historical precedent. History only serves to show us that which is no longer relevant. The need for speed to action, the need to analyze current constantly changing conditions, has been created by novelty. The great irony in this is that those very people whose endeavors have most accelerated the growth in novelty also have the most to loose by circumstances created by its growth.

I wonder if business models might tie into this thought.  Yesterday I read an analysis of Wal-mart’s plan of action:  They have perhaps expanded too quickly and now are turning their attention back to the stores they have already built, in order to make them better revenue generators, individually.  Competition from Target and other stores has grown.  Ford is suffering, as a result of not having adapted quickly enough, but Toyota is poised to gain the #1 position.  This also reminds me of a late-night university class session broadcast on my local PBS station last night, concerning the Portuguese trade routes around the Horn of Africa in the late 15th C and early 16th C:  When England and the Dutch (in the Spanish empire) saw what could be accomplished (a novel business approach!) they had to join in and compete by building their own trade routes.

Novelty creates new opportunity if it doesn’t paralyze. From an OODA perspective, increasing levels of new information in comparison to levels of applicable old information may often cause paralysis or else cause impulsive activity (a 3GW tactic), although better analytical ability may allow the creation of new cognitive paradigms able to operate in the novel environment:  as Shloky has recently said, “In a fragmented world if you don’t get out of bed to fight you won’t survive…”

RevG supposes an increase of novelty on individual levels, in local environments, which competes with the paradigm-sustaining hierarchies of the past.  This is micro- vs. macro-.  This also ties in with John Robb’s analysis of ‘networked tribes’ in a future world.  RevG postulates the emergence of ensembles acting with authority:

Fifth Generation Warfare is and will be conducted by ensembles acting with authority. The protected hierarchies’ authority distributed through unity of organization will be replaced by unity of purpose among ensembles or there will be no unity among the ensembles at all.

This theory depends upon the notion that the efficacy of macro-level establishment of purpose is fated to diminish, insofar as that approach is more dependent on organizational coherence and stability.  That is, merely because not only lawmakers say it is so but also the policeman on the street enforces that law, this does not mean that the person on the street will buy into the authority of that law.  We see some reflections of this dynamic in Iraq, at present.

What this theory does not appear to address is the mutability of memes — which has also been called their resiliency, but which I will call the ‘nether-ness’ of memes but might as well call the ‘neitherness’ of memes.  How’s that for a technical designation!  By these spontaneous formations of order, however novel they may appear, I mean to address the way in which similar memes are often thought to be identical:  Although individual interpretations of an environment may be unalike and may seem to promote disparate novelties, requiring disparate interpretations, and thus leading to the formation of authorities which do not agree, the similarity between memes may be enough to bind a group together, so that hierarchical authority may continue to have significant influence, should it address this nether region or operate in the neither-region.  To put it grossly: Just because Christians in America have formed so many different sects, this does not mean that they will not view each other as brothers-in-arms should an attack on Christianity come.  Or, think of Muslims in the ME.  Or think of ‘Americans’ and ‘Iraqis’ — one generalization appears to be enough to bind a group or at least facilitate peaceful interaction although the other does not, as yet.

I am slipping into the realm of brainstorming, so this post must near its end.  But let’s look again at something RevG has said:

Human society is rapidly approaching the condition where the authority to act must be located in the specific environment being analyzed.

In the previously-linked consideration at Shloky’s blog, I commented on the ‘faith’ of GG warriors unable to see that ‘order is doomed’; I suggested that these GG warriors will confuse the local for the universal.  A defeat of American troops on a street in Baghdad may seem like a defeat of America, but it is not.  Two towers may be destroyed, but America continues.  This may suggest the ineptitude of such warriors.  Unity of purpose may form around the realities of a local environment, true, but interconnectivity may be eroding the very notion of a ‘local environment.’   If so, then such an authority — one formed to address the realities of a local environment and its particular novelties — may not seem legitimate to a people viewing the larger world and the realities of interconnectedness.  This is Thomas Barnett’s dream, I think, and not one to be dismissed.  However, since I am brainstorming now, I’ll offer one vague fingertip feeling I’ve been having:  That should any authority appear who seems capable of offering a coherent interpretation of the complex world — the interpretation is proven correct, time and again — we may have on our hands the early formation of a global totalitarian authority. This is not to say that such totalitarianism would be recognizable from a historical perspective of totalitarianism — the old ones always had competitors on the world stage, but a global system would not have such boundaries. Global rule-sets with enforcers and broad agreement on the local level. Just a thought.