If we define a system as an entity composed of multiple parts whose mutual interactions contribute to the durability of the whole, two principal varieties of human system can be identified.
The first, and the one with which most people are most comfortable, can be equated to the rider who convinces her horse to advance by means of a carrot dangled in front of it at the end of a long pole.
By holding out a tempting but ultimately unobtainable reward, the rider ensures that all components of the system - that is to say, herself, the horse and the carrot - will advance as one, cooperating to overcome any obstacles.
Examples of this type of goal-driven system abound: every nation with a teleology, for a start. Opposed though their supporters may be on almost every other issue, Christian and Communist states are functionally identical when classified according to a systems taxonomy. Citizens are incentivised to work together by the presence of an unattainable ideal. Ideals are not the only carrots, however. Successful businesses follow the same model: the goal is not merely to earn money, but to earn more money. Thus the goal is never fulfilled, and employees continue in their reciprocal striving, becoming a perpetual motion machine.
The second kind tends to be harder to identify and understand, functioning as it does like a circular stone archway, in which the forces exerted upon each component and hence by each component upon the others ensure the stability of the whole.
In this case each element already has its own “desire”: to fall to the ground according to a trajectory determined by its weight and the corresponding force exerted upon it by gravity. It is prevented from doing this by the pressure exerted upon it by the other stones, and the whole remains intact.
The market is the canonical example of this type of system. The individuals are driven only by their own inherent desires, but their interactions produce a coherent signalling and distribution mechanism. Other examples would be the Western checks and balances system of government, and the emperor-bureaucracy-populace triad in Chinese administration. (We have modelled both systems here.)
These inertia-driven systems are more mysterious for two principal reasons. Firstly, because they tend to evolve over centuries rather than being consciously designed, as ineffective iterations collapse and are replaced with marginally better configurations. Secondly, because they are dependent upon second and third order effects which human brains tend to struggle to understand.
In practice, both types of system often coexist. Thus many of the actors on any given market (gravity system) are corporations (carrot system), while the functioning of political checks and balances (gravity system) is heavily dependent upon the activities of political parties (carrot system) for its efficient functioning.
This symbiosis has a solid evolutionary explanation: the advantages and disadvantages of each type are a mirror image of the other. Most importantly:
Carrot systems are relatively easy to design and build, but their subsequent evolution is difficult for the builder to control.
Gravity systems are extremely difficult to design and build, but once this has been achieved the builder’s original intentions are replicated with extreme fidelity.
In the first case, a charismatic founder will find it relatively easy to acquire followers inspired by his vision of a glowing future. However, his system will be extremely leaky. The accurate reproduction of his design is dependent upon multiple factors:
Followers must be motivated to realise the founder’s vision, even after he himself is no longer present.
They must not too motivated, however. Because his vision is a teleological one, it will necessarily attract many adherents motivated by altruistic visions of self-sacrifice for a greater good. If they are immediately wiped out after throwing themselves into an unwinnable battle with perceived opponents, the system will also die out. Consider the demise of the Cathars, who stuck (religiously) to their dogma, and compare it with the survival of the early Roman church which outlawed suicide and grew chary of naming martyrs for fear of losing a majority of its adherents.
His vision must be passed down accurately from follower to follower, often living many generations after his death, and in the face of a teleological vision so attractive that it would seemingly justify the recourse of any means to realise it. Karl Marx would most likely have been dismayed by the Stalinist show-trials of the 1930s, but for many of those involved they were a necessary step on the road to his vision.
By contrast, it is extremely difficult to persuade people to join gravity-type systems without an element of compulsion, but once they are in, they will replicate them faithfully more or less ad infinitum. Thus, the founders of both the Western and Chinese iterations needed recourse to the full majesty of the law to convince people to comply with their designs in the initial stages, but after these had been given time to bed-in, their denizens cheerfully rebuilt them even when they collapsed in bloody internecine violence. Here, in fact, lies a crucial difference between the two systems: while the former insists on a particular outcome and leaves members a relatively high degree of agency regarding the means by which they attain it, the latter makes no distinction between the means and the ends. Rather, it redefines agents’ mental models of the world such that they are incapable of conceiving it functioning in any other way. (We demonstrated this in a previous article, in which we showed that the political structures formed within a given polity are not defined by leaders but by the definition of power held by followers and leaders alike.)
In each case the system can be described as an attractor. In the case of carrot systems the configuration towards which they tend is a vector of the perceived position of the carrot. In gravity systems it is the set of descriptive algorithms held in the heads of each individual within it.
In both cases, the behaviour of any individual within the system is chaotic: there is no way of telling in advance whether he will choose devoted compliance or rebellion. Despite this, however, it is possible predict how most individuals will behave most of the time[1]: 90% of them will always be within one standard deviation of the average path 90% of the time (or similar, these are just example numbers).
It is for this reason that gravity systems are much harder to push off track. In the case of a carrot system, anyone with a level of charisma approaching that of the original founder can either change the position of the carrot or - even easier - the list of acceptable methods for obtaining it, and thereby reorient all or part of the system (Martin Luther would be the most famous example of this). In the case of a gravity system, anyone wishing to implement changes must redesign the system from scratch, which - as we have already said - is extremely difficult to do. Individuals with the capacity to do so emerge relatively rarely and the system itself ensures that when they do, they will face the opposition of the vast majority of their peers, who have lost the ability to conceive of alternatives to the invisible structures within which they exist.
In both types of system a new entity is created through the interactions of the component parts. Both a corporation and a market have minds of their own, which can be sustained but not controlled by any individual member - just as no one neuron can produce a thought. Having been summoned into existence by its own components, the system then grants them significant evolutionary advantages[2]. Not only to they gain a degree of protection from outsiders, but they learn faster and store the information acquired more reliably. Anything useful learnt by one individual within the system will spread relatively rapidly to other members, and being stored within a greater number of brains the data will have a longer half-life. This process is not perfect, however: as noted above, information that seems to contradict systemic a prioris will often be rejected in each case. This will generally be less of a handicap in gravity systems, however, wherein the only new data with a consistent likelihood of rejection is that relating to the design of the system itself, while in the case of carrot systems anything appearing to contradict the founding vision will struggle to achieve widespread diffusion. Goal-adaptation is a natural process in gravity systems but a subject to internal conflict in carrot systems. Thus, for example, capitalist economies cheerfully sustain communist groups, while Christian societies expel perceived heretics.
Our own DAObi project was designed to be a pure gravity system, something that has led to frequent questions regarding the point of the exercise. There are plenty of web3 projects with inspiring social goals, so why pay attention to one that has no objective save self-perpetuation?
We argue that the problem with freshly constructed carrot systems is the very fact that they are easy to build and to persuade others to join. While many are begun with the best of intentions, rapidly devolve into multi-level marketing schemes. In modern instances, this usually involves creating a smart contract token to incentivise participation in an ostensibly social goal, with the system the collapsing when there are no longer sufficient new entrants to sustain the value of the token. Intentionally or not, they become multi-level marketing schemes transferring wealth from those at the bottom to those at the top. Only those which find a way around this problem - whether by providing ideological rather than financial incentives (as in the case of religious organisations) or by producing a constant stream of revenue (as in the case of corporations) - survive.
DAObi employs a different solution, by forcing those at the top of the wealth pyramid to redistribute their resources downwards, since it is only by bribing those poorer than them that they can gain enough support to ensure the implementation of their preferred economic policies. A new whale rises, redistributes his fortune for as long as he can sustain the balancing act, sinks, and is replaced. Where a multi-level marketing scheme collapses when no more new suckers can be found, the DAObi system is set up to “make the poor rich and the rich poor” using designs that have been functioning for over 2000 years, as described here.
While the DAObi gravity system itself has no outside goal, this fact allows it to function as an incubator space for members’ own carrot systems. Because DAObi’s goals were not set by the founders, any given member can establish a goal of his own and employ the system’s resources in working towards it. If one project fails, the system not only remains undamaged but grows stronger, having learnt from the mistake without incurring any existential risk.
[1] As an analogy, consider the Lorenz equations. These describe convection patterns in two dimensions.
The produce a system in which it is extremely difficult to guess from the initial conditions the position that will be held by any given particle at a point in the future, though one can describe with accuracy the paths that they are most likely to follow:
[2] In most cases. Some systems develop relationships that are more parasitic than symbiotic. The abovementioned martyrdom-focused religions would be one example. While tribal gods live or die with the group devoted to them, martyrdom faiths sacrifice a proportion of their members to recruit new adherents, using the self-sacrificial altruism-rush experienced by social species as an exploit to redefine their own existential risk patterns. (Such faiths are not reliant upon the survival of a particular group for their own continued existence, but if the fanaticism they inspire grows too extreme they are at risk of killing their hosts at a faster rate than they can replicate themselves, as in the Cathar example.)