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Bureaucratic institutions have increasingly become means
of awarding perks and maintaining control for its own sake, while seldom
accomplishing anything constructive. A 1973 book written by Washington
D. C. lawyer Robert N. Kharasch, entitled The Institutional
Imperative, made this clear several decades ago. 9/11 clarified it
further, while pointing the way to what actually can be done to build a
viable democratic society that does not invite destruction, not only
from its enemies, but also from its friends and its environment.
Bureaucracy is the result of two horrific aberrations of modern life:
command and control models of rulership perfected by the Roman Empire,
and the rise of the industrial age. The former was created by a small
group of heavily armed and well organized people determined to bring to
submission, for purposes of exploitation, millions of others who were
not so well organized. The system of exploitation designed by the Romans
is alive today in the form of the World Bank and other such bureaucratic
organizations. It is alive, but it is not well.
The system of industrialization, which designed the public schools to be
factories that could mass produce the workforce, is now being relegated
to the Third World, where large numbers of people are still willing to
work for slave wages. A new system of worldwide networking is rapidly
replacing it.
Natural Forces know no Bureaucracy
Nature, which abhors a vacuum, also knows no bureaucracies to speak of.
All of the enormous complexity of nature, which has produced systems far
more subtle and sophisticated than human beings have so far even
imagined, has evolved from chaotic systems that do not understand and
have never used command and control models, except in very special
situations. Instead, nature employs a form of democratic decision-making
that has the delicate sensitivity of a New England town meeting in the
hands of quadrillions of well coordinated participants. All of these
masses of cells are potentially in touch with each other, and all of
them manage to coordinate their activities with timing down to the
microsecond that dwarfs anything modern technology has yet
reverse-engineered. You can see them at work in both rainforests and
human bodies like yours.
Random Acts Outpace Bureaucracies
The most effective response to 9/11 came not from bureaucracies, but
from random acts of kindness, organized on the spot by private citizens.
These groups, without awareness of each other’s existence, spontaneously
rose to the occasion and proved that they could handle the situation a
great deal better than bureaucracies could. The reason is that if you
are on the site of a catastrophe you have a lot of information and
ability to respond that someone in a remote place can’t possibly know or
anticipate. If you respond with the few simple rules that make up human
kindness, you’re likely to do what’s necessary to the extent that you
have the tools for doing it and know how to use them. With accelerating
efficiency that tends to permeate the entire population, our age is
making those tools available to individuals.
Gaia
This technology currently includes the Internet, cell phones, and
certain forms of broadcasting. Collectively these are assembling
themselves into what is rapidly becoming the nervous system that powers
the awakening consciousness of our Earth, which has come to be called
Gaia. Thus, in a series of events now recorded in a major motion
picture, private citizens thwarted an extremely well planned terrorist
attack by bringing down a plane headed for the U. S. Capitol into a
largely unpopulated area in Pennsylvania. They managed it so that the
only lives lost were those of the people aboard. Similar groups
continued on afterwards, dismantling and seriously wounding Al-Qaeda in
ways that the CIA and the FBI never imagined. Furthermore, they did so
without compromising the privacy of average citizens. You can read about
this in An Army of Davids by blogger Glenn Reynolds.
(See review in Article 7 – ED)
The End of Bureaucracy?
The evacuation of Manhattan also occurred almost instantaneously at
least four days earlier than any bureaucratic response could have come
forward to stage it. Strangely, however, bureaucracies are blind to this
phenomenon and seldom learn much from it or make any productive use of
its enormous potential. That’s why bureaucracies themselves will soon be
a thing of the past. Their use, at first necessary to control large
populations and run large factories, is rapidly becoming negative and
hopelessly out of date and out of focus.
The spontaneous organization of human beings inevitably springs into
action in a crisis. In it, large groups of people who have never met
before, and have no previous experience in doing anything except
following orders, instantaneously figure out how to handle a difficult
situation at the locale in which it occurs. You can observe the
spontaneous organization of an ad hoc emergency rescue crew, on duty and
functioning before any public officials have arrived, any time there is
a traffic accident on a relatively busy neighborhood street. Those who
witness the accident almost invariably organize themselves and dole out
responsibilities, such as calling the police, assisting those who may be
injured, and otherwise responding with better timing than the most
effectively organized bureaucracy could muster.
Technology and People Power
Meanwhile, modern technology has placed into the hands of ordinary
citizens tools that used to be so expensive that only heavily invested
capitalistic companies could afford them. These technologies can now be
used to make films or recordings that rival the best productions of
highly complex and much more expensive organizations. The ultimate
effect is to spell the doom of many types of large companies and replace
them with small collections of virtual corporations and other
organizations, much better organized and more efficient to operate.
Those companies that know how to organize themselves in this manner will
survive. An example is Southwest Airlines, which weathered the storm of
9/1l much better than any of the other airlines because it was already
organized along many of the above-described principles.
Globalization of People Power
Today many crises are no longer just local emergences. They are
worldwide emergencies, like spreading terrorism, global warming, and
economic inequality. These global emergencies are also being handled, in
increasingly large numbers of cases, by collectives of private citizens
who organize themselves over the Internet and defeat terrorists, spread
the word about corporate and political rip-offs, build a growing public
awareness of dangers to the environment, and show third world countries
how to build big money-making industries.
This behavior of the world’s population (documented in books like The
World is Flat, the Singularity is Near, and the
aforementioned An Army of Davids) mimics your body’s immune
response and other cellular mechanisms, that spring into action when a
threatening organism gets into your bloodstream, or a vicious dog rips
out a chunk of your flesh, or you read an article that interests you
(like this one) and decide to reorganize your thinking. Billions upon
billions of cells in your body spontaneously organize themselves around
the situation without Central Casting or any headshrinkers or manpower
organizations ever coming into play.
Structures Out Of Chaos and Survival of Our Species
What we are witnessing is a worldwide revolution that is rapidly
producing the most radical form of democratic de facto world government,
while leaving in the dust behind it many of the world’s governmental
organizations. This system is capable of thwarting terrorist
organizations, segmenting dictators into economic starvation, and
overcoming barriers of religion, culture and economics. This
Internet-based behavior uses the more positive and cooperative forms of
the almost universally misunderstood Darwinian system of evolution to
create structures out of chaos that rise to the occasion when the going
gets rough for the survival of our species.
Consider the following problem. Our world bureaucracies are now
collaborating to support and develop a system that scientists have
agreed has a reasonable chance of making global warming so volatile that
it could lead to a new ice age descending upon the world in a mere
couple of years. In this scenario New York City could be underneath a
huge glacier before the end of the current decade.
(See Win Wenger, Article 2 for additional
ideas– ED)
Heating Up Catastrophic Co0ling
Here’s how that can happen. As the temperature of the atmosphere heats
up, increasing amounts of water vapor are in the air at all times. This
universal misting of the upper atmosphere paradoxically reflects the
sun’s heat back into outer space, producing a sudden lowering of
temperatures in critical places. This can produce rapid plummetings of
temperature so profound as to be able to freeze large segments of the
Earth’s surface in a few minutes. This, in turn, transforms the water
vapor into ice crystals that reflect far more heat back into outer space
and produce a runaway cycle that drops the overall temperature of the
world climate catastrophically. We have evidence of this by the fact
that frozen mammoths have been found with fresh buttercups still
undigested in their stomachs.
Blogging Toward a solution
There’s only one hope for avoiding a catastrophe like this (there are
many other possible scenarios, several of them equally disastrous). That
hope is the rapidly accelerating process of spontaneously forming human
bloggers and their followers effectively neutralizing the impact of the
bureaucracies and replacing them with groups of people that act the way
the various elements of living systems act. In other words, we six
billion – we happy six billion – are suddenly finding ourselves bringing
to life the consciousness of Gaia in a single harmonious state of
superconsciousness that transcends our individual knowledge or
imagination. Nobody in the media is interested in this story because it
doesn’t speak well for their corporate sponsors, so that’s why you have
to read it here.
The Transformation of Education
In this evolutionary process, education will play no small role. But
less and less of this education will take place in schools or colleges.
It will transform itself rather suddenly and on a worldwide scale,
because intelligence-raising techniques will emerge as videogames
capable of quickly raising the average person’s effective intellectual
abilities. Evidence for this is scattered, just as news reports of the
really significant actions that took place on 9/11 are scattered; but it
is there.
Marian Diamond’s research at UC Berkeley shows that (at least in rats)
adult brains can increase their weight by 25%, simply by being exposed
to the right kinds of carefully selected newly enriched environments –
exactly the sort of thing that the Internet is ideally designed to
provide. These enriched environments will mean that people will be able
to learn almost anything many times faster than they do now. In the
process, something like Moore’s law will emerge to describe the growth
of collective human intelligence. (We already have evidence that
classroom education can easily be made 25 times as effective as it
usually is, by simple methods that any teacher can learn in a week.)
Universities in a Box
Today you can buy from the Teaching Company a complete college education
in the form of the best lectures delivered in the best colleges by the
best professors. You can use these lectures, and the activities that
come along with them, to give yourself a university education at a
fraction of the cost of attending an actual college – particularly since
you can borrow many of these courses from your local public library. The
budget-breaking expenses of college will gradually disappear as more and
more people discover that they can create their own universities and get
advanced degrees at any age, simply by getting together with friends and
staging their own undergraduate and graduate educational programs.
A Revolution Away from Traditional Education
Meanwhile, these same people can buy intelligence-raising videogames for
their children, which they will then sneakily use on themselves as well.
In the months or years to come, such games will start to break onto the
market in ever increasing numbers. These games will collectively turn
the children from ordinary brats into Renaissance-type geniuses, while
allowing their parents to catch up with them. And they’ll do all this in
an amazingly short time. They’ll be universally adopted with
breathtaking rapidity (just like cell phones) because no parent[s] will
want all the other kids on the block to be smarter than their own little
darlings. Like their parents, these children, under the guise of home
schooling, will organize themselves in places like libraries and
bookstores and teach each other how to take advantage of the employment
opportunities they can create for themselves by starting their own
businesses. It won’t be long before here and there a twelve year old
working with neighborhood pals can unpin the hopes of some captain of
industry in a distant part of the world.
The result is that the problem of reforming the public schools will soon
become a non-problem. That’s because public schools will slowly
disappear. Children can be educated far more effectively in the home
than in a bureaucracy that turns them into automatons designed to work
in factories that no longer exist. Neighborhood education centers
organized by parents will see to it that their children gain an
education greatly superior to anything that the bureaucracies have yet
produced or could produce.
Paradoxically, this may well happen in the inner city ghettos before it
happens in economically upscale neighborhoods. That’s because when poor
people wake up and discover opportunities they were not aware they had,
their motivation can be tremendous. Meanwhile, in the suburbs, the
public schools often seem to be good enough to satisfy those willing to
settle for the current state of civilization.
The seeds of this new educational revolution exist now. Home schooling
has repeatedly proved to be far more effective than bureaucratized
education, even when the parents make a mess of it. Everywhere in the
world, neighborhoods are beginning to organize to share services like
baby-sitting, neighborhood watch and garage sales. It is but a short
leap from this to neighborhood homeschooling projects and neighborhood
graduate school projects. Along with this will come neighborhood
entrepreneurialism, as the people on the block join together to create a
new type of music, computer programming or fashion design that can be
marketed worldwide by the Internet technologies that the children in the
family will have learned to master and transform, so their parents can
sell their products.
The only barrier to this new type of education, many times more
effective than anything the schools now offer, is a few more years
during which it will have time to be born, flourish and transform the
world. Funny how easily the most intractable problems may give way
before the irresistible force of the most important discovery in
history: the widespread enhancement of human intelligence – all
accomplished by capitalistic enterprises operated for fun and profit,
and without help (or at least controlling guidance) from the Department
of Education, or any of the world’s great universities. The result will
resemble the replacement of Detroit’s automobile manufacturing companies
with a collection of home built erector sets. Eventually, of course,
that will happen as well, though the erector sets will be nanotechnology
devices that turn mud from the back yard into whatever combination of
molecules and design principles you wish to manifest.
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