This is a series of posts. You may
wish to read the other ones first:
1. "Dimensions of Government"
2. "Symmetries of Responsibility"
3. "Stacking of Thresholds"
I was talking about how it could be useful to view organizational
structures along three axis': Anarchy vs Authoritarianism,
Capitalism vs Socialism and Large vs Small.
In addition to this, I think I may need some way of talking about
unit's relation to other units. Every unit (I assume) will have an
internal value and an external value. I don't know how
this is going to work out, so let's try an example.
There's a family living in the States. The family is rather old
fashioned and has the father as the head of the family. Let's
say they are some type of conservative christians. So, if we take
the family as a unit, it is a small, authoritarian, socialist
structure. Socialist because they share the resources
(comparatively) freely among themselves. Let's give it
coordinates in the diagram: 0.2 - 0.9 - 0.1
The family is part of a larger structure, the congregation. I mean
the people who are in this local church, not the church itself.
This is a medium sized, rather anarchic structure. It is more
socialist than capitalist for sure, but more capitalist than the
family is. Coordinates: 0.5 - 0.3 - 0.3
NOTE: It occurs to me that it could make sense
to think of the individual (instead of
the family) being part of the larger
structure.
Meaning that we may not need internal and
external values for "family" but instead
the father of the family is part of
the family and the congregation. It
seems to me that when you actually are
part of two structures, they compete for
your attention and loyalty, much in the
way the father would have to choose if he
is speaking to his family or the
congregation while they are both present.
Let's see where this goes. So, the congregation is lead by this
large, authoritarian, mostly capitalist structure: the church.
Capitalist because there is a transaction of services and
resources, instead of free flow. Let's imagine it like the
Catholic Church, a real international megastructure.
Coordinates: 1.0 - 0.9 - 0.8
Inside the church there can be different units. Let's say there
is a committee that discusses what sort of charity work the church
will sponsor. This committee would be rather small, more anarchic
than authoritarian and socialist. Coordinates 0.2 - 0.3 - 0.1
(We expect that these people are paid for being part of the
church structure, and not because of sitting on this committee,
so within the function of the committee, there is no structured
transaction of resources or services).
NOTE: I would point out that if it turned out
that this committee in fact is capitalist
while working on the function of deciding
about the use of church resources, this
would actually be called corruption.
In other words, if a board member bought
another member's support for their own
opinion as to where they should invest
the churches money. Have to think about
this more. Is corruption a failure to
work along the coordinates that you are
supposed to belong to? What other examples
are there?
NOTE: It seems that in order to decide something
we need socialist structure, but in order
to implement we need capitalist structure.
But what about authoritarian socialist
committee? What would that look like?
The anarchic socialist have a domain where information (or other
resources) moves freely between all participants who are present.
Authoritarian socialist discussion is more like a classic school
class. There is an authority that facilitates or restricts
the sharing of the information. There are overlapping domains,
for example, the teachers collect to discuss with head teacher,
then they descend to their own classes and bring the information
from the higher domain.
Authoritarian capitalist structure exchanges information to
other resources or other information. This tends to create
pyramidic structure.
Anarchic capitalist exchange is a structureless collection
of nodes exchanging information.
I get the feeling that there is no way to run the society without
having all of these structures present to some degree. I think
that it won't be too hard to find out what structure is most
beneficial when. It might be harder to find out for whom is it
beneficial.
