The Committee of Public Safety

In Linus We Trust

Zenpundit links back to The Tactical Loop in Following up on Learning Organizations. I found this section interesting:

I will quibble with Adam [Elkus] in that “crowdsourcing” phenomena or open systems that acquire a “community” aspect with recognizably distinct cultural norms are usually dominated by a “natural aristocracy” among the membership – a cadre of “influencers” who make qualitative contributions frequently and disproportionately and have individual and collective ”auctoritas” to police the larger mass than contribute occasionally. There’s a “feedback loop” where certain members of “the crowd” add complex thinking for collective evaluation, modification and ratification. Linux is the original example as is Wikipedia, where senior and elusive ”Wikipedians” carry great weight compared to say, me, logging on and editing away.

The “natural aristocracy” Zen refers to is enforced in Linux, other open source software projects, and Wikipedia by a version control system (VCS).  The simplest VCS is the undo/redo functionality found in most application software. Undo/redo is linear: you either go x steps back or x steps forward. A slightly more complex VCSes like the one used by Wikipedia adds an additional wrinkle: while undo/redo is usually confined to a single user using a single application, Wikipedia gives multiple users the ability to undo and redo. This creates complications because just anybody can come along and make a change, sometimes improving but other times defacing or inserting personal idiocy. The Wikipedia community must assume the wiki’s burden and preserve the integrity of the wiki from faction, malice, trolls, spammers, and anonymous cowards. This involves ’senior and elusive ”Wikipedians” standing vigilant over the wiki, fending off attacks in often vicious edit wars.

BDFL. Refreshing.

In open source software projects, a VCS usually is under even tighter control. While Wikipedia is a libertarian paradise where any yahoo can make a contribution, open source software projects feature access control that restricts who can commit or revert changes to the VCS. Many projects are divided into a “natural aristocracy” of committers and users. Committers themselves can be subdivided into tiers of commit rights, with some developers only having rights to commit to some portions of the code and some developers having the right to revert other developer’s changes.

Some projects have a dictator who exercises final control over what code does or does not make it into the main software release (often called a trunk because other versions of the code branch off of it). This is probably true for most projects since most open source software projects only have one or two developers. Others have a dictator surrounded by key lieutenants who are delegated certain parts of the codebase. This is the case with Linus Torvalds and Python’s Benevolent Dictator For Life Guido van Rossum and their merry men. Others have an meritocratic oligarchy like the Apache Web Server core developers.

When a major disagreement breaks out between developers that comes to (virtual) blows, often the result will be a fork. Programmers, generally being anal-retentive types, love to quibble over arcane and obscure minutia. In this regard they are a lot like early Christians and prone to schism. A schism in an open source software project, called a fork, occurs when one faction of developers takes the source code from a particular project and begins developing it independently of the original project. They vote themselves off the island in order to maintain their vision for the software.

The saga of one core group is indicative of how this system can play out in practice. BSD was originally a fork of the One True AT&T UNIX that was developed and maintained by the University of California-Berkeley. AT&T, prevented from making money off of UNIX initially because of an antitrust agreement with the Justice Department, distributed the source code for UNIX to interested parties for the nominal cost of the media to ship it on. Berkeley was one such party and made their own variant of core UNIX. After Ma Bell was broken up, AT&T was allowed to enter the computer market so they decided to monetize UNIX. They sued Berkeley and forced them to stop developing BSD UNIX, the basis for Sun’s original versions of UNIX. This produced an effort to make a version of BSD that was no longer tainted by AT&T’s copyrighted code. Berkeley released a final version of BSD in 1995 and stopped developing the operating system.

Beware Lucifer, Son of the Morning Star

An earlier version of BSD developed into what eventually became the NetBSD project. The original developers of NetBSD were unsatisfied with the couple developing 386BSD and forked their code. NetBSD was devoted to making BSD run on every object in the universe, especially your toaster. However, the original developers had an argument and Lucifer was expelled from heaven.  The sign of his fall was the revoking of his commit rights to the NetBSD source. Lucifer, his evil designs thwarted, plotted his vengence. He picked over the NetBSD source code until he had his own Canadian version: OpenBSD. Lucifer’s vision was to allow every object in the universe to be a firewall with military grade security. The reasons for his madness are hidden. Pray they are never revealed. (A friend of mine had a brush with Lucifer when he tried to help an innocent OpenBSD newbie configure the operating system (OS). Lucifer howled with rage, cursed my friend, and expelled him from Hell.) In the meantime, FreeBSD was also born, dedicated to running BSD on your PC instead of your toaster.

This saga, much of it caused by rigidity some development oligarchies maintained over there VCS repositories, led to BSD falling by the wayside as the open source OS of the future. Instead Linux, with its more efficient benevolent despotism, became the open source operating system (unless you count MacOS X as a BSD, in which case BSD has 9% of the OS market while Linux has ~1%) while BSD forked and schismed.

Linus, however, is a tyrant that sits easily upon his throne. He popularized the adoption of the Distributed Version Control System (DVCS), a system which replaces the one central repository under the control of a dictator or oligarchy model favored by traditional VCSes like CVS and its successor Subversion with many distributed repositories under the control of many developers. Instead of changes being submitted to a few committers and then, if blessed, being added to the main trunk of the software, developers using the DVCS approach push and pull changes from their own local repositories to and from other developer’s repositories in a peer-to-peer relationship. Linus’s own repository of Linux is technically equal with every other Linux developer’s repository. He, as with every other Linux developer, can push and pull changes from other repositories as he wants. However, Linus, being Linus, is more equal than others developers. He still possess the sole right to “sprinkle holy penguin pee” on a Linux software release and declare it the official Linux release.

He uses his power wisely and intends to liberate the world from the domination of monolithic VCSes. The video that made me believe is a talk Linus gave at Google where he walks in, tells them that their VCS (Perforce) is lousy and that they should follow the DVCS model. Linus compellingly argues that the DVCS scales an open source software project better than a VCS. It allows more developers to contribute, reduces the more prominent developers tasks to picking the best code possible from multiple repositories instead of guarding their precious, precious core repository, and minimizes the chance that an outright fork has to occur in order to push minority changes into the codebase. His performance is a tour de force.

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend.

Zenpundit has a fortuitously timed post On “Learning Organizations”. It covers many of the same themes from the bottom up as Adam Elkus’s post Can Strategy Be Crowdsourced? (which I linked to earlier) covers from the top down. Zen asks:

Why would the “tactical” level have achieved “learning organization” status and not the “operational” and “strategic” levels of military command?

He offers some suggestions:

• The social networks within the official hierarchical org at the tactical level can effectively leverage both weak and strong ties
• Greater degree of shared purpose and sense of mission
• The tactical level, being a “smaller world” in systems terms than the operational or strategic levels, has a much better “signal to noise” ratio.
• The social networks within the hierarchical org at the tactical level create an environment of greater transparency -discussion may be squelched but situational awareness can’t be.
• Encouragement of critical discussion and incentives for problem-solving.
• Greater tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Tacit knowledge is likely to quickly become explicit organizational, knowledge through “shop talk”, the grapevine, de-briefing and formal “lessons learned” dissemination procedures.
• The stress and danger of the tactical environment itself is an incentive to adapt and learn – “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The underlying themes between each of these points which I’d sum up as:

• Tactical OODA loops operate over shorter time-frames and smaller space-frames and involve fewer people per individual loop and more people per group of tactical loops.
• Tactical loops directly interact with external forces and are therefore in a better position (and have a more pressing need) to observe and adapt to “unfolding interaction” with the environment.
• There are generally many tactical loops.

These factors make the tactical level more likely to be iterative learning machines. More tactical loops mean more hypotheses are proposed and tested, This will populate the solution space with more potential answers through more rapid tactical iterations.

Zen then asks:

Can the operational and strategic levels of the military ( or any organization with a bureaucratic structure – schools, corporations, government agencies etc.) become a “learning organization” despite greater scale, distance from events, degrees of abstraction and other obstacles?

This is a similar question to what Adam Elkus raised in his post. Elkus argues that the strengths attributed to crowdsourcing and other “wisdom of the crowd” phenomena are potentially strong on the tactical level but fail to scale to higher levels on the CPSOT stack. The higher layers on the stack, when compared to tactics:

• Have OODA loops that operate over longer time-frames, larger space-frames, and involve fewer people per loop and fewer people overall across all groups of loops.
• Have loops that are, to varying degrees, more removed from direct interaction with external forces. This places them in a worse position and under less pressure to observe and adapt to “unfolding interaction” with the environment since that interaction has to be transmitted through tactics and other intermediate layers (producing a higher “signal-to-noise” ratio, as Zen points out).
• Have (increasingly) fewer loops.

Concepts from Howard Bloom’s Global Brain are useful here to demonstrate the elements the higher layers of the CPSOT stack need to align in order to steal some of that vim and vigor from tactics:

1. diversity generators: agents that generate new hypotheses.
2. conformity enforcers: agents that ensure that agents have enough in common to exchange hypotheses.
3. inner-judges: systems that decide if an individual hypothesis is true (it other words, that it survives) or if something is untrue (if it fails).
4. intergroup tournaments: competitions between groups that test the hypotheses produced by one group against hypotheses produced by other groups. Victory produces truth and defeat is the father of lies.
5. resource shifters: systems that do the dirty work for inner judges and intergroup tournaments. They heavily reward winning hypotheses and heavily punish hypotheses that perform poorly. Bloom summarizes this by quoting the Lord: For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.

Tactics have more of each of these elements than higher layers on the stack which involve fewer and fewer people. This means fewer hypotheses to loop through and more conformity enforcing gatekeepers. A great deal of what the higher layers do is filter out the multiple hypotheses produced by tactics and its direct interaction with the unfolding environment and use conformity enforcement to pare down the number of hypotheses and make them more consistent. This is similar to how Jeff Hawkins hypothesizes that the human brain works in his memory-prediction framework:

The central concept of the memory-prediction framework is that bottom-up inputs are matched in a hierarchy of recognition, and evoke a series of top-down expectations encoded as potentiations. These expectations interact with the bottom-up signals to both analyse those inputs and generate predictions of subsequent expected inputs. Each hierarchy level remembers frequently observed temporal sequences of input patterns and generates labels or ‘names’ for these sequences. When an input sequence matches a memorized sequence at a given layer of the hierarchy, a label or ‘name’ is propagated up the hierarchy – thus eliminating details at higher levels and enabling them to learn higher-order sequences. This process produces increased invariance at higher levels. Higher levels predict future input by matching partial sequences and projecting their expectations to the lower levels. However, when a mismatch between input and memorized/predicted sequences occurs, a more complete representation propagates upwards. This causes alternative ‘interpretations’ to be activated at higher levels, which in turn generates other predictions at lower levels.

Consider, for example, the process of vision. Bottom-up information starts as low-level retinal signals (indicating the presence of simple visual elements and contrasts). At higher levels of the hierarchy, increasingly meaningful information is extracted, regarding the presence of lines, regions, motions, etc. Even further up the hierarchy, activity corresponds to the presence of specific objects – and then to behaviours of these objects. Top-down information fills in details about the recognized objects, and also about their expected behaviour as time progresses.

Following this framework, you can call your OODA loop an OOPA loop (Observe-Orient-Predict-Act) (or, alternatively, a OOMA loop (Observe-Orient-Moralize-Act)).

Zen concludes by providing requirements for better hierarchies:

[Whether the operational and strategic levels of the military (or any organization with a bureaucratic structure - schools, corporations, government agencies etc.) can become a “learning organization”] depends greatly on two things – creating a “tighter” network with a high velocity of meaningful communication and a new kind of leadership committed to the hard work of re-engineering the organizational culture around adaptive “fitness” and learning.

Makes you wonder how you do Scrum on a mass scale.

Adam Elkus has an interesting article up: Can Strategy Be Crowdsourced?

He makes several interesting points. General thesis:

Business hype over wikis, networks, and crowdsourcing has led to some dangerous misconceptions about the nature of network forms in counterterrorism and irregular warfare. While network forms of organization are superior to hierarchies in many ways, their strength has been substantially exaggerated. Emergent intelligences cannot formulate strategy nor sustain momentum beyond the tactical level of conflict, networks are not as invincible as commonly portrayed, and hierarchies have certain advantages worth preserving.

On the requirements of different layers of CPSOT stack for hierarchy:

…human emergent systems repeat a series of rules that give rise to patterns. But crowds do not think—the most basic perquisite for conceiving strategy.

Formulating strategy, as opposed to tactical or operational plans, is beyond the means of a largely mechanical intelligence that mechanically reacts to environmental stimuli. Strategy, as Peter Paret writes in the introduction to Makers of Modern Strategy, is “the use of armed force to achieve the military objectives, and by extension, the political purpose of war. …[as well as] the development, intellectual mastery, and utilization of all of the state’s resources for the purpose of implementing its policy in war.” Conceptualizing strategy requires calculating political, military, and economic variables of dizzying complexity—as well as dealing with the paradoxical nature of human conflict. In war, glorious victories morph into defeat, stable alliances shatter, and invincible weapons are countered by cheap small arms.

Both Carl Van Clausewitz and Edward Luttwak argue that strategy’s paradoxical nature is a consequence of adaptive human adversaries. Linear solutions and homogeneity, while effective in peacetime, are fatal in conflict. In his book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, Luttwak explains this paradox by examining economies of scale. In peacetime, it is more efficient to mass-produce one product rather than a diverse array, as you can train workers and machines to quickly and efficiently turn out one object rather than many different ones. But in wartime, producing all of one weapon allows the enemy to easily counter it. Emergent intelligences can neither conceptualize this abstract level of conflict, nor develop an instrumental means of achieving a positive end state.

Confined to the tactical level, emergent groups often melt away once the tactical action they have formed to accomplish is over.

On how the successful networks are filters that allow valuable participants to rise to the top while screening out the noise of lurkers, anonymous cowards, and trolls:

Most successful insurgent and terrorist networks are hybrid forms of network and hierarchal organization. As Naval Postgraduate School professor David Tucker details, hierarchy enables organizations to enforce standards, efficiently marshal resources, and formulate strategic goals. Even the most protean “leaderless” organizations often have a strategic class of dominant personalities who create the basis for instrumental action by formulating ideas and punishing deviant behavior. Wikipedia, for example, is commonly cited as an example of the wisdom of crowds. Anyone, after all, can contribute to it. But Wikipedia enforces standards through a class of privileged monitors who scour the online encyclopedia for errors. It is also important to point out that a small group of contributors produce the bulk of entries, in contrast to the casual user who edits a couple of minor details.

On the elasticity of some hierarchies:

Counterterrorism analysts should also take care to avoid regarding all forms of hierarchy as inherently rigid. Even the most brittle hierarchal organizations often contain network forms with elastic lines of command and control. The German military, a highly hierarchal institution, embraced infiltration tactics led by decentralized hunter-killer teams on the tactical level. Successful counterterrorist networks such as the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group (TEW), have fluid lines of control and a multi-disciplinary focus but still retain defined roles for each individual and a clear unity of command. Most hierarchies do tend to be stodgy and brittle but fixing them involves building resiliency, autonomy, and a capacity for self-correction, rather than wholly deconstructing them and hoping for the best.

On Edward Bernays:

Additionally, increasing human connectivity and the complexity of the infosphere may strengthen single points of authority instead of the multitude. Edward Bernays, considered the father of modern propaganda, saw propaganda’s hidden influencing process as a solution to problems created by the chaos and complexity of modern life. Americans, Bernays wrote, had too many choices and were not intellectually equipped to make decisions about even a fraction of them. The purpose of propaganda, which Bernays had spent time crafting as a member of a government strategic influence unit during the first World War, was to subtly guide humanity in the right direction. Only then, Bernays argued, could democracy function in a harmonious manner. Were Bernays alive today, the often-vilified P.R. consultant would feel vindicated by the complexity created by the expansion of the infosphere and the beginnings of a genuine information metaverse. He would also sense a valuable opportunity to ply his trade.

Read the whole thing.

Scale of War

The evolution of war between the Great Powers up till 1945 was a push towards extremes of victory in power (annihilation) and desire (culture). After 1945, there was a pullback from annihilation due to the high probability of mutual annihilation. There was sporadic outbreaks of conventional war but much of the direct confrontation between Great Powers was through the less power intensive areas such as irregular war (usually by proxy), terrorism, subversion, propaganda, and coercive diplomacy. There was still enough plays for total cultural victory to make even this lower power game one for high stakes.

Similar culture wars fought with a mix of information and low kinetic power remains the most probable future of Great Power conflict. This is not the sort of war the United States is set up to fight. The best organizational structure for waging such a war is unclear. It needs to be multi-discipline, focused on common cultural and political desires, somewhat synchronized in strategy, and highly decoupled in operations and tactics. It’s structure should probably be flat. It should make heavy use of fellow travelers and useful idiots. It should probably have multiple cross disciplinary teams. These will be independent diversity generators. Some may be blue teams, others may be red teams. Some teams should be covert and cellular while others may be more overt. It should probably draw on elements inside and outside of government and be centered on task forces assembled for particular problems. Task forces should go quietly in the night when done. The central focus of its efforts should be creating one massive narrative to displace competing cultural narratives. Displacement includes the occasional kinetic wetwork for added emphasis.

Such a structure may be impossible due to politics being fundamentally a struggle for power but placing the institutional (self-preserving) imperative over the instrumental (mission) imperative has always been an issue for human organizations of all stripes.

Starting in February 2008, ChicagoBoyz hosted a roundtable on Col. Frans Osinga’s Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. This roundtable featured blog posts from  contributiors:

• Introduction
• Wilf Owen
• Dan tdaxp
  
• Dr. Chet Richards
• Shane Deichman
• Historyguy99
• Zenpundit
• Lexington Green
• Adam Elkus
• Colonel Frans Osinga

Of these, Dr. Chet Richards, Dan tdaxp, Shane Deichman, Adam Elkus, Lexington Green, Mark “Zenpundit” Safranski, Thomas “historyguy99″ Wade, and Dr. Frans Osinga contributed revised versions of their original posts to a new book (published by Nimble Books) based on the roundtable with an additional essay by Osinga and a contributed essay from Frank Hoffman (originally on Small Wars Journal). The end result is The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War, edited by Mark Safranski and with an introduction by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Dan tdaxp was kind enough to give me a review copy. My impressions follow:

A History of the OODA Loop by Daniel tdaxp

Dan tdaxp does a good job of dissecting the Xs and Os of Boyd’s OODA loop and expanding on Osinga’s discussion of the origins of the loop in the psychological Zeitgeist of the time. He then offers some preliminary connections of the OODA loop to contemporary state of the art psychology. I found the mapping of the Orientation and Decision stages of the OODA loop with the Automatic System (System 1) and the Reflective System (System 2) paticularly interesting.

The Origins of John Boyd’s a Discourse on Winning and Losing by Chet Richards

Boyd was a master of synthesis and Dr. Richards, a close associate of Boyd, provides an interesting expansion on Osinga’s examination of the many sources that Boyd synthesized his ideas from. I found this reference to Clausewitz interesting:

People are sometimes surprised that Clausewitz had a strong influence on Boyd, but he did, particularly in the concepts of friction and centers of gravity. He accepted Clausewitz’s definitions of these terms and refers to him throughout Patterns more than he does any strategist other than Sun Tzu, some 18 times on eight charts. Boyd’s use of these ideas, though, often differed from how they appear in On War.

My initial impression of Boyd’s impression of Clausewitz was that he was aping Basil Liddell Hart’s often erroneous characterization of Clausewitz as the “Mahdi of Mass”. I also wonder which translation of Clausewitz Boyd used as well. There may be more to Boyd and Clausewitz, two great tastes that go together.

The Intellectual Legacy of Colonel John Boyd by Shane Deichman

I don’t like “chaoplexity” either. Sounds like something you take lithium for.

Osinga’s John Boyd Through the Prism of Military History by Thomas Wade

The essence of:

Appear to be an unsolvable cryptogram while operating in a directed way to penetrate adversary vulnerabilities and weaknesses in order to isolate him from his allies, pull him apart, and collapse his will to resist; yet;

Shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.

The first sentence is an advice to remain, in the words of Sun Tzu, unfathomable to the enemy, yet operate coherently in several levels of war and across different dimensions.

What does war remain throughout as the centuries fly pas? One word: survival.

The Two Colonels: Osinga and Boyd by Mark Safranski

Zen points out that Osinga was an archaeologist, digging through the thoughts of a man he never met, mapping the innumerable threads of Boyd’s thought as they wound, unwound, and rewound over the decades. Osinga has done a lot but there’s more to be done.

Why Didn’t Boyd Write a Book? by Lexington Green

Lexington Green makes an excellent case that Boyd’s dedication to building his listeners into vital components in an open, dynamic system kept him from writing a book. A book would have become the Koran of Boyd, a dead tree weighing down Boyd’s legacy with Boyd orthodoxy for years to come. The absence of a Boyd bible means that everyone gets to discover Boyd afresh for themselves. Osinga is the closest you will get to the raw Boyd bible you’ll get and its more of a fountain of living water than dead letters inscribed for all time in solid rock. Excellent case.

Applying Boyd: Iraq and Strategy by Adam Elkus

What happens if Boyd isn’t a silver bullet? Adam Elkus argues that many of the ideas of Boyd were present in the initial assault on Iraq in Operation Iraqi Feedom/Telic. Saddam’s OODA was out looped by “effects” based warfare and fell. Victory: Boyd. But “shock and awe” was all foreswing and no follow through. The Iraqi insurgency was (at least for a while) played the US Army to our Saddam. Their loop was faster for a few years. The solution, Elkus asserts is a greater harmony of strategy focused on “vitality and growth” instead of destruction and greater integration across strategic frameworks. Boyd was one of the few that straddled many schools of military thought.

My Struggle With Boyd by Frans Osinga

Excellent description of his book by the author:

I consider my book akin to the Sawyer or Cleary introductions to Sun Tzu; they serve as texts to tease out meaning of sometimes rather cryptic sentences and paragraphs
handed to us by greater minds.

Something I’d be interesting in seeing for curiosity’s sake:

Somewhat to my surprise there was only one seriously critical review that questioned Boyd’s work, which was immediately hit upon in about 10 comments. I hope, and I believe Boyd actually would enjoy and encourage, that at some point we’ll see a substantial effort which in Popperian fashion aims to critique either Boyd’s work or my explanation/interpretation of his ideas, all in the spirit of the ‘dialectic engine,’ the term Boyd often used for describing his comprehensive OODA loop. The debate can use someone who can be to Boyd what Mearsheimer has been to Liddell Hart.

Unlocking the Keys to Victory by Frank G. Hoffman

Frank Hoffman had a chance to attend a legendary Boyd briefing twice, the second being necessitated by his falling asleep during the first. He offers an excellent summary of Boyd’s contributions to military thought from the Marines to the Small Wars raging at this moment.

John Boyd and Strategic Theory in the Postmodern Era by Frans Osinga

Good overview of how Boyd’s thought underlies both network-centric warfare and the Generations of War. This passage stuck with me:

Boyd aimed for creating adaptable and learning organizations consisting of informally networked teams that could comfortably operate in an insecure environment, due to their reduced information requirements. If everyone understands clearly, and is attuned to, the organization’s purpose and/or the commander’s intent, explicit communication beyond the objective is superfluous. Because of the shared outlook one knows what to do and what one can expect of others, be it supporting units, higher commands etc., implicit communication will suffice.

Strikes me as one component in the fight against wicked problems.

Overall, this book is an excellent companion to the original online roundtable.

Buy it. Buy it now. Buy the Osinga book too. Hopefully they’ll do a reprint of the paperback.

Before

After

From Wikipedia:

The metamorphosis of Saint Nicholas into the more commercially lucrative Santa Claus, which took several centuries in Europe and America, has recently been re-enacted in the saint’s home town: the city of Demre. This modern Turkish town is built near the ruins of ancient Myra. As St. Nicholas is a very popular Orthodox saint, the city attracts many Russian tourists. A solemn bronze statue of the Saint by the Russian sculptor Gregory Pototsky, donated by the Russian government in 2000, was given a prominent place on the square in front of the medieval church of St. Nicholas. In 2005, mayor Suleyman Topcu had the statue replaced by a red-suited plastic Santa Claus statue, because he wanted the central statue to be more recognizable to visitors from all over the world. Protests from the Russian government against this action were successful only to the extent that the Russian statue was returned, without its original high pedestal, to a corner near the church.

Alas, poor Russia. So far from God, so close to the North Pole.

Wandering the Web, I came across distributism, an idea pioneered by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc:

…distributism distinguishes itself by its distribution of property (not to be confused with redistribution of property carried out by socialism). Distributism holds that, while socialism allows no individuals to own productive property (it all being under state, community, or workers’ control), and capitalism allows only a few to own it, distributism itself seeks to ensure that most people will become owners of productive property. As Hilaire Belloc stated, the distributive state…contains “an agglomeration of families of varying wealth, but by far the greater number of owners of the means of production.” This broader distribution does not extend to all property, but only to productive property; that is, that property which produces wealth, namely, the things needed for man to survive. It includes land, tools, etc.

Distributism is positioned by its past and present advocates as a third way between capitalism and socialism. Other contentions of distributism are:

• Banks should be replaced by cooperative lending institutions like credit unions.
• The family, not the individual, should be the owner of property and the broad distribution of ownership of wealth creating properties to families is the key to building and upholding the family.
• Distributism follows the principle of subsidiarity: no large unit human organization should do something that can be done by a smaller unit of organization. This is another argument in favor of dividing the means of production into as many pieces as possible.
• “Distributism promotes a society of artisans and culture. This is influenced by an emphasis on small business, promotion of local culture, and favoring of small production over capitalistic mass production. A society of artisans promotes the distributist ideal of the unification of capital, ownership, and production rather than what distributism sees as an alienation of man from work. This does not, however, suggest that Distributism favors a technological regression to a pre-industrial revolution lifestyle, but a more local ownership of factories and other industrial centers. Products such as food and clothing would be preferably returned to local producers and artisans instead of being mass produced overseas.”

This set of ideas, an outgrowth of the same papal encyclicals on economics that gave birth to Christian Democracy, reminds me of two other ideas:

• Resilient communities, an idea advocated by John Robb, which have a similar focus on hyper-localism, the production of energy, food, wealth, etc. on the local level and resilience by building redundancy back into the fabric of human society.
• Thomas Jefferson’s championing of a class of yeoman farmers as the basis of a successful republic.
• This quote of James Madison’s from Federalist No. 51:
  

  In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself…It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

  There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable. The first method prevails in all governments possessing an hereditary or self-appointed authority. This, at best, is but a precarious security; because a power independent of the society may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties. The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

  In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government.

Little Jemmy

In Federalist 51, James Madison observes:

It is equally evident, that the members of each [government] department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

I had a history professor in college who was a fiery Portuguese nationalist and ultramontanist from San Francisco, CA, a creature so novel it made me wonder how he could be found in any history department in contemporary American academia. Being filled with insights from off the beaten path,this professor, citing an obscure historian whose name I have forgotten, introduced me to this lifecycle of human organizations:

1. Organizations are founded as instruments, dedicated to a particular mission.
2. Over time, instruments degrade into institutions, dedicated to the mission of organizational continuity. The original instrumental goal falls to a distant second.
3. An organization that is more institutional than instrumental ceases to be useful and becomes parasitic, taking much but returning little.

In W. Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, we find a dilemma, much of which arises out what Felt’s motives were:

• Did Felt bring down Nixon because he was protecting the Bureau’s independence?
• Did he act because his personal ambition was thwarted when he was passed over by Nixon for FBI director not once but twice?
• Was he acting out of moral indignation at Nixon’s machinations? Was he being loyal to a higher form of patriotism?
• Did Felt act from a mixture of all of the above?

Which motives Felt was acting on determines whether he was following an instrumental imperative, the mission of the FBI to detect violations of the law, or an institutional imperative, the Bureau’s desire to preserve its extra-constitutional power from encroachment by the People’s elected officials. Following Madison, it also determines if Felt was filling a instrumental role by using “necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments” or whether he was merely following an institutional imperative, the personal motives of a raw ambition counteracting another raw ambition under a thin and conveniently elastic veneer of “constitutional means”. The dilemma is this: how do you ensure that human organizations fulfill their instrumental role when their natural inclination is to seek power, ending in institutionalization.

Our system is based on Madison’s solution to that dilemma: the separation of powers between separate branches of government. But, in an era that saw the aggrandizement of executive power due to a standing military-industrial complex and the reduction of Congress to an adolescent choir singing accompaniment to the executive choir, did the power of the presidency need to be checked by powerful bureaucratic forces that had sufficient teeth to check executive pretension? Is an executive divided into powerful baronies a better safeguard of a republic than a pliant, corrupted legislature or a nominal court? Is Mark Felt, as an instrument, the future of checks and balances?

George Friedman makes a compelling case that Felt brought down Nixon for institutional motives. However, there’s a case that Felt, even if unconsciously, served a instrumental role: he detected a crook and set in motion his removal from office. Nixon attacked many a core principle of the republic:

1. He attempted to illegally manipulate the Democratic Party through black ops, subverting the electoral process.
2. He attempted to thwart the processes of justice by throwing a wrench in the wheels of justice, subverting the most important function of a republic, the creation of justice.
3. He got caught on tape doing 1 and 2.

Number three’s Nixon’s worst crime. The American republic, argues Walter M. McDougall in Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy is largely driven by pretense:

A major theme of Throes of Democracy is Americans’ penchant for pretense, for largely unspoken conspiracies of silence or unspoken agreements to pretend certain things, in the interest of civility, of keeping a huge, diverse democratic society from tearing itself apart. But it never occurred to me even to think about pretense as a national trait, much less an often positive one, until I read Tocqueville, Trollope, Martineau, Dickens, Schaaf, and other European observers of the American scene in the 1830s and ’40s, and was astonished to learn that they all remarked at length on something spread-eagle Yankees themselves were blind to, which was their own howling pretense. Americans pretend lots of stuff. They pretend in order to get along with each other, or to grease the skids of their institutions, obscure the contradictions in their politics and law, or just to sustain their common faith in truth, justice, and the American way.

This is all in the service of a higher end:

I should not have been so surprised that pretense became a theme of my second volume [Throes of Democracy], because a major theme of the first was Americans as a nation of hustlers…Of course I trace the roots of what became the American character back to the Old World, especially the economic, political, religious, and legal heritages of the early modern British Isles. But insofar as the institutions designed by the founders of the United States maximized the individual liberty of Americans (excepting always the enslaved), and insofar as the expanse and resources of North America maximized the prosperity and opportunity of Americans, then they enjoyed a freedom and power to express themselves, to pursue their happiness, to give full vent to the good, bad, and ugly behavior of which people are capable: more so, I think, than any whole nation before them. The upshot, as I argued in Freedom, was that Americans became past masters at hustling: both in the pejorative sense of scofflaws, speculators, imposters, tricksters, self reinventors, and conmen, but also in the positive sense of hard workers, strivers, builders, doers, joiners, and team players.

My particular insight, or to give proper credit, my elaboration of Samuel Huntington’s old insight about the utility of corruption, is that Americans simply have no patience for any law, authority, or bullying faction that stands in the way of their pursuits of happiness. Accordingly, Americans are very tolerant of what I call creative corruption of the sort that may enrich a few, but which expands opportunity for all (think Transcontinental Railroad or Brooklyn Bridge).

Creative corruption is counter-balanced by religion:

…the character of American spiritual impulses is unique, however, is that sectarian faiths shared the landscape with an even more powerful civil religion. That is a taboo subject, I know. That Americans pretend not to notice that their republic competes for allegiance with the God they worship on the Sabbath, that their civil religion must in fact be a higher loyalty because it is what guarantees the freedom of sectarian faiths, that their civil religion can in need command their treasure and very blood in ways their religious sects no longer can, that the creed and promise of their American civil religion in fact conflate the worship of God and Mammon: all those (and more) are unmentionable, indeed heretical, from the perspective of the civil religion.

Or, to put it another way, the Founding Fathers implicitly (or in Tom Paine’s case, explicitly) turned the idea of America itself into a sort of religion. The whiff of religions—sectarian and civil, now reinforcing, now competing—is especially pungent in the Civil War era. The challenge of history is in sorting out the religious odors and trying to put them in words.

These feed Americans fundamental characteristics:

I don’t say this expressly in the book, so I am not stealing my own thunder to finish by listing four character traits the Civil War seemed to hard-wire into the character of Americans, traits they would display time and again during the 20th century. The first is a gay abandon insofar as the American people and political system invariably put off pressing problems until they cannot be ignored any longer. As a result the solutions prove exponentially more costly and less satisfactory than they might have been. The second is a collective amnesia insofar as the American people tend to forget or misremember their mistakes and ordeals out of cheerful optimism and a faith in the future born of their civil religion. The third is an amazing resilience insofar as Americans confidently rebound from the ravages of wars, depressions, and other calamities in a very short time. In that sense, having no room for tragedy in one’s culture is a plus. The fourth, to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, is a nationalism with the soul of a church. For the United States, resurrected after the Civil War, purged old myths only to fuse its sense of national destiny even more inextricably with a cult of material progress disguised as a holy calling. That coalescence of Union and Creed, power and faith, rendered Americans uniquely prone to sanctimony, but also uniquely immune to cynicism.

Whatever crimes of commission and omission Mark Felt committed, they pale in comparison to Nixon. Where Mark Felt is only a criminal, Nixon is a heretic. He violated the civic creed by being caught hustling (in the pejorative sense) on tape. His glowering visage weighed down America’s gay abandon. His crimes were as scarlet so they have yet to be purged by our collective amnesia. The ordeal of Watergate and its long aftermath taxed our amazing resilience. His naked power plays took the soul out of our nationalism. His demeanor was so petty that it didn’t even meet the relatively low bar of creative corruption. The nakedness of his machinations were crimes against the Church of America and Felt, filling at minimum a Madisonian role by countering Nixon’s ambition with his own, served the higher ends of American civic religion by turning Nixon over to its inquisitors.

Nixon was operating within a political OODA loop. He was focused on the mechanics of the division of power without examining the impact his divisions of power would have on higher cultural ends. He went to China in a political masterstroke in both the foreign and domestic arenas but didn’t consider what the long range impact of enabling China’s rise would be and what the Gordian knot of Taiwan would do to our strategic posture. He pulled out of Vietnam under a pretense of a treaty that had no realistic mechanism for ensuring that either North Vietnam or the United States would abide by its terms. He tried to geld the CIA and FBI after they spent years on the loose in institutional overreach but he tried to ensure their loyalty to him rather than to the American republic. He exercised cunning realpolitik without the veneer of moral sanctimony that is one of the strongest tools in an American leader’s arsenal. He was honest about the wrong things and when he said “Sock it to me“, the world took him at his word.

Wrong One

The closest thing to a science of politics that would satisfy Dan’s desire for a quantitative revolution is the public choice school pioneered by William Riker and epitomized by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. One of Riker’s key contributions to political science was the idea of heresthetic:

…the art and science of political manipulation. Intrigued that the root of heresy is from the Greek word meaning ‘to find out’, Riker coined ‘heresthetics’, and later dropped the final ‘s’. The coinage both parallels ‘aesthetics’ and correctly reflects the Greek middle voice for the sense ‘to find out for oneself’. Riker mostly had in mind manipulation to increase or diminish the number of issue dimensions in politics. If the number of dimensions is two or more, the median voter theorem does not apply, and cycles in majority rule are possible. Therefore, politics may lead to surprising outcomes. Herestheticians are politicians who can glimpse such possibilities and perhaps achieve such an outcome. Riker and his followers have claimed the title for a number of politicians, including (in the USA) Gouverneur Morris and Abraham Lincoln; (in New Zealand) ‘King Dick’ Seddon; and (in the UK) Sir Robert Peel and David Lloyd George. Lloyd George had a motto over his bed from the Book of Job, ‘There is a path which no fowl knoweth and which the eye of the vulture hath not seen’.

In The Strategy of Campaigning, Bueno de Mesquita illustrates Riker’s heresthetic using the examples of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. The example of Reagan is illustrated in contrast with Nixon. Nixon was an accomplished rhetorician but not an accomplished heresthetician. Nixon operated at a political level but not at a cultural level. He couldn’t get beyond optimizing the current system. He could not reshape the world to match his vision. That effort exceeded not only his grasp but his reach.

Reagan, in contrast, could see beyond the current state of the world to one in which entire current system could be changed. He could alter the world to fit that vision. Nixon was a fox to Reagan’s hedgehog and more omni-competent but he was only right in many small things. Reagan was right on a few big things but that got a lot of little things right in the process of getting the big things right.

Reagan also properly tended to the rituals of the American civic religion. He went out abroad in search of monsters to destroy and brought the full power of American moral hubris to bear on Soviet Russia. The weight of American pretense was more than Soviet pretense, a cheap foreign knockoff, could bear. Reagan slipped into his long twilight with American’s believing that they had gazed into his eyes and seen their own souls. He is a saint of the American civic religion. Nixon, on the other hand, though he made a brave stab at rehabilitation, will go down in history as a Judas in the American civic religion. And we have Mark Felt, coming from a species that has no angels, to thank for putting him there.

Stratfor’s George Friedman writes about W. Mark “Deep Throat” Felt:

Felt saw [L. Patrick] Gray’s selection as an unwelcome politicization of the FBI (by placing it under direct presidential control), an assault on the traditions created by Hoover and an insult to his memory, and a massive personal disappointment. Felt was thus a disgruntled employee at the highest level. He was also a senior official in an organization that traditionally had protected its interests in predictable ways. (By then formally the No. 2 figure in FBI, Felt effectively controlled the agency given Gray’s inexperience and outsider status.) The FBI identified its enemies, then used its vast knowledge of its enemies’ wrongdoings in press leaks designed to be as devastating as possible. While carefully hiding the source of the information, it then watched the victim — who was usually guilty as sin — crumble. Felt, who himself was later convicted and pardoned for illegal wiretaps and break-ins, was not nearly as appalled by [Richard M.] Nixon’s crimes as by Nixon’s decision to pass him over as head of the FBI. He merely set [J. Edgar] Hoover’s playbook in motion.

[Bob] Woodward and [Leonard] Bernstein were on the city desk of The Washington Post at the time. They were young (29 and 28), inexperienced and hungry. We do not know why Felt decided to use them as his conduit for leaks, but we would guess he sought these three characteristics — as well as a newspaper with sufficient gravitas to gain notice. Felt obviously knew the two had been assigned to a local burglary, and he decided to leak what he knew to lead them where he wanted them to go. He used his knowledge to guide, and therefore control, their investigation.

[...]

For Felt to have been able to guide and control the young reporters’ investigation, he needed to know a great deal of what the White House had done, going back quite far. He could not possibly have known all this simply through his personal investigations. His knowledge covered too many people, too many operations, and too much money in too many places simply to have been the product of one of his side hobbies. The only way Felt could have the knowledge he did was if the FBI had been systematically spying on the White House, on the Committee to Re-elect the President and on all of the other elements involved in Watergate. Felt was not simply feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein; he was using the intelligence product emanating from a section of the FBI to shape The Washington Post’s coverage.

In our view, Nixon was as guilty as sin of more things than were ever proven. Nevertheless, there is another side to this story. The FBI was carrying out espionage against the president of the United States, not for any later prosecution of Nixon for a specific crime (the spying had to have been going on well before the break-in), but to increase the FBI’s control over Nixon. Woodward, Bernstein and above all, [Ben] Bradlee, knew what was going on. Woodward and Bernstein might have been young and naive, but Bradlee was an old Washington hand who knew exactly who Felt was, knew the FBI playbook and understood that Felt could not have played the role he did without a focused FBI operation against the president. Bradlee knew perfectly well that Woodward and Bernstein were not breaking the story, but were having it spoon-fed to them by a master. He knew that the president of the United States, guilty or not, was being destroyed by Hoover’s jilted heir.

The Washington Post decided not to report it. The story of Deep Throat was well-known, but what lurked behind the identity of Deep Throat was not. This was not a lone whistle-blower being protected by a courageous news organization; rather, it was a news organization being used by the FBI against the president, and a news organization that knew perfectly well that it was being used against the president. Protecting Deep Throat concealed not only an individual, but also the story of the FBI’s role in destroying Nixon.

[...]

Again, Nixon’s guilt is not in question. And the argument can be made that given John Mitchell’s control of the Justice Department, Felt thought that going through channels was impossible (although the FBI was more intimidating to Mitchell than the other way around). But the fact remains that Deep Throat was the heir apparent to Hoover — a man not averse to breaking the law in covert operations — and Deep Throat clearly was drawing on broader resources in the FBI, resources that had to have been in place before Hoover’s death and continued operating afterward.

[...]

…the press in Washington continues to serve as a conduit for leaks of secret information. They publish this information while protecting the leakers, and therefore the leakers’ motives. Rather than being a venue for the neutral reporting of events, journalism thus becomes the arena in which political power plays are executed. What appears to be enterprising journalism is in fact a symbiotic relationship between journalists and government factions. It may be the best path journalists have for acquiring secrets, but it creates a very partial record of events — especially since the origin of a leak frequently is much more important to the public than the leak itself.

The Felt experience is part of an ongoing story in which journalists’ guarantees of anonymity to sources allow leakers to control the news process. Protecting Deep Throat’s identity kept us from understanding the full dynamic of Watergate. We did not know that Deep Throat was running the FBI, we did not know the FBI was conducting surveillance on the White House, and we did not know that the Watergate scandal emerged not by dint of enterprising journalism, but because Felt had selected Woodward and Bernstein as his vehicle to bring Nixon down. And we did not know that the editor of The Washington Post allowed this to happen. We had a profoundly defective picture of the situation, as defective as the idea that Bob Woodward looks like Robert Redford.

Finding the truth of events containing secrets is always difficult, as we know all too well. There is no simple solution to this quandary. In intelligence, we dream of the well-placed source who will reveal important things to us. But we also are aware that the information provided is only the beginning of the story. The rest of the story involves the source’s motivation, and frequently that motivation is more important than the information provided. Understanding a source’s motivation is essential both to good intelligence and to journalism. In this case, keeping secret the source kept an entire — and critical — dimension of Watergate hidden for a generation. Whatever crimes Nixon committed, the FBI had spied on the president and leaked what it knew to The Washington Post in order to destroy him. The editor of The Washington Post knew that, as did Woodward and Bernstein. We do not begrudge them their prizes and accolades, but it would have been useful to know who handed them the story. In many ways, that story is as interesting as the one about all the president’s men.

Will China experience negative growth? Naked Capitalism ponders the question.