Filling an intellectual void to save democracy and humanity

Humanity is sleepwalking into a ghastly future. This is because of an intellectual void in university education. It is not just climate change. It is the degradation of our atmosphere, oceans, soils, forests, water ways, and loss of biodiversity, but also democracy. The number of democratic states has been decreasing. At the same time democracies are electing more dictators.

Both existential risks to humanity and democracy are being driven by universities. They can only educate our future leaders to be more effective dictators. No university provides an education on how to introduce self-governing bottom-up stakeholder distributed decision-making. Distributed decision-making is described by Elinor Ostrom as "Polycentric Governance". Her 2009 Nobel Prize lecture was "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems".

The intellectual void means that democracy is continually being poisoned with centrally controlled top-down command and control alienating, toxic hierarchies. These are inadequately accountable for either environmental harms or the wellbeing of voters.

There are notable exceptions to prove that the efficacy and resilience of polycentric self-governing businesses, civic, and sporting organisations. These follow the practices of all living things. All biotas must become self-regulating and self-governing. They must be to survive their birth until they can reproduce. And to do this without the need for "Markets or States"!

Because of the educational void, current examples of self-governing organisations were developed by practitioners. They used a trial and error approach. So some may be subject to dysfunctional activities. Some use of markets or states could be involved. Some have sustained themselves through business cycles for over half a century. They include the VISA card organisation in the US, The John Lewis Partnership in the UK and the nested networks of stakeholder Mondragon cooperatives in Spain.

These examples prove that no changes in the law is required to introduce bottom-up stakeholder self-governance, only changes in corporate constitutions. The VISA organisation was designed by its founding CEO, Dee Hock in 1970. In 1995 Hock explained that VISA had "multiple boards of directors within a single legal entity, none of which can be considered superior or inferior, as each has irrevocable authority and autonomy over geographic or functional areas."

Our brains are designed the same way without a "Chief Executive Officer neuron". Different parts of our brains make different decisions competing and/or cooperating with all the other parts according to our internal needs and drives, and our external risks and opportunities. It's a way nature simplifies complexity as required by the cybernetic law of requisite variety.

Cybernetics was defined in 1948 as the science of control and communication in the animal and machine. At the end of the 20th century technology made it possible to meter the performance of humans in their ability to receive, store, process, and transmit bytes. This is identical to how we assess the performance of computers and the internet. It allowed the science of cybernetics to become the science of governance within and/or between any biotas and/or devices.

Hock pointed out that "Industrial Age, hierarchical command-and-control pyramids of power, whether political, social, educational, or commercial, were aberrations of the Industrial Age, antithetical to the human spirit, destructive of the biosphere, and structurally contrary to the whole history and methods of physical and biological evolution. They were not only archaic and increasingly irrelevant, but they were also a public menace".

If humanity is to obtain an eternal future it will need to likewise simplify the complexity of the manifold human degradations of the global environment. The law of requisite variety forbids regulation of complexity being achieved directly but does not forbid it being achieved indirectly through a requisite variety of supplementary co-regulators.

Indigenous Australians have illustrated how humans need to be governed by the eternally renewable endowments of each bioregion. Modern citizens need to adapt their practices locally, and extend it to a global scale. A total reset of society is required to transform toxic top-down hierarchies into multi-stakeholder self-governing nested networks of "holarchies". These could be introduced with a tax incentive.

Holarchies are networks of almost self-governing components that cyberneticians describe as Holons, because they can be both a component and a whole. A defining feature holons is that they possess paradoxical behaviours like being both competitive and cooperative. It is worthwhile to note that this feature is not introduced by the changes in corporate constitutions used to create what is described as "For Benefit" or "B" corporations. Neither is feature created by the two-tiered boards that a commonly found in Europe.

Olympic sporting organisations illustrate multi-stakeholder self-governing networks of holons without necessarily relying on markets or state. The Olympic Committee is a self-governing body. It is made up of self-selected multi-stakeholder self-governing international sporting disciplines. Each discipline is in turn made up self-governing national organisations. These in turn are made up of self-governing regional bodies. Likewise, these are in turn are made up of local self-governing local clubs whose constituents are self-governing humans.

While universities may educate engineers to design self-governing automobiles and space explorers, this knowledge has been neglected by social scientists. A global exception is the Australian National University school of cybernetics. This could give Australia a first mover advantage in filling the global intellectual void. A void that needs to be filled to preserve both democracy and humanity.