The Committee of Public Safety

Wheel of Time

The life and death of civilizations has been the subject of song and story since the beginning of history. The ancients thought the passage of time was cyclical: the ages of the Earth repeated over and over. Everything was doomed to repeat again and again and again. The destiny of man was bound to a constant cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Western culture begins with a faint remembrance of a fallen civilization. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey retell the culminating moment of a lost heroic age. The classical Greeks were aware that they lived amongst the ruins of faded glory. The world had descended from a Golden Age through a Silver Age and a Bronze Age to the current Iron Age. Whether the high Mycenaean Age was all that grand or not was irrelevant: it was much better than the long and deep Dark Age that followed.

In this spirit, Plato, Aristotle, and, most prominently, Polybius developed the theory of anacyclosis, the cycle of government. Polybius’s version of the cycle followed this pattern:

1. Monarchy – tribal rule based on brute force
2. Kingship – virtuous rule by one man
3. Tyranny – wicked rule by one man
4. Aristocracy – virtuous rule by a few men
5. Oligarchy – wicked rule by a few men
6. Democracy – virtuous rule by the many
7. Ochlocracy – wicked rule by the many (mob rule)

Ochlocracy would eventually elevate one man to power and the cycle would repeat itself. Niccolo Machiavelli picks up this theme in Book III of his Discourses on Livy. He argues that a political community only renews itself either through external accident or internal prudence. Either of these function as a wake up call and restore a political community’s connection with reality. Truth will break out all over.

John Boyd’s OODA Loop demonstrates the machinery of adaption.

OODA Loop

The world is observed. This observation is then fed through a process of analysis and deduction where the observation is torn down into its essential bits and then reassembled into a new compressed orientation through a process of synthesis and induction. This orientation is a prediction about what the next observation will be. In order to test how accurate its prediction is and verify how well its compressed form represents the outside world, the orientation either acted upon directly or submitted to an inner judge for further deliberation. This inner judge examines the compression according to its internal standards and either acts upon it, sends it back for further orientation, or discards it. If decision acts upon the orientation, it subjects it to the unfolding environment through action. The effect of the action is then observed and the process repeats itself.

If the process of orientation compresses the outside world with great fidelity, capturing all the important bits of reality, and leads to action that successfully copes with the unfolding environment, than an OODA loop is healthy. If its compression of the outside world is faulty, leaving out essential details, and leads to action that fails to cope with the demands of the unfolding environment, than an OODA loop is unhealthy. Healthy OODA loops lead to a healthy adaptive system, leaving it capable of surviving and even flourishing. Unhealthy OODA loops lead to a maladaptive system which may not even be able to summon the power to survive.

The OODA loop of a political community functions on five levels.

Scale of War

1. Culture: divides priority between desires.
2. Politics: divides power between desires.
3. Strategy: reconciles power and desire.
4. Operational Art: arranges power and desire in time and space.
5. Tactics: controls the interaction of power and desire with external forces.

Each of these is a OODA loop running independently of the others. Each runs at its own rate. Each may reach conclusions that differ from other levels. Each feeds higher levels. The highest level, culture, runs at a pace slower than the last level, tactics. Tactics is in direct contact with the unfolding environment while culture is insulated from the outside by several levels. All levels must ultimately answer to the dictates of the outside environment but they also have the ability to push back. Pushing back, if successful, will adapt the unfolding environment to the orientation of the inner OODA loops.

Most of the processes of the OODA loops are devoted to optimizing and working out the kinks of an existing orientation. However, periodically, the state of the unfolding environment triggers a complete destruction of the previous orientation. If the adaptive system does not adapt to the new state, it will almost inevitably perish. Such a transformative change can be gradual or catastrophic. An orientation may suffer from the slow accumulation of discrepancies between it and the outside world or it may be atomized by one gigantic black swan. Whether it’s the culmination of a thousand cuts or one gigantic blow, the end result is a paradigm shift. The environment changes utterly and the orientation must follow suite or bad things will happen.

The shift depends upon the orientation

The problem that any political community faces is that its OODA loop is the sum of five OODA loops, each running at different speeds, each producing different orientations, and each focused on a specialized role that leads to periodic clashes with other OODA loops. This means that while the orientation produced by an OODA loop at one level may successfully adapt to the dikat of the unfolding environment, other levels orientations may lag in adaptability or even fail to adapt. This means that the system as a whole has, at best, a mixed adaption to the unfolding environment or, at worst, a fatally flawed orientation. It is distinctly possible, for example, for cultural orientation to lag tactical orientation by centuries or even millennia. If there’s a decent margin of safety, this may not matter. If not, bad things are happening.

Political communities have problems. Most of their institutions start out as instruments dedicated to accomplishing a certain desire. They are based on a clear conception of their role and a clean definition of their purpose. However, over time this original clarity diminishes. The environment the institution was originally designed for changes. The members of the institution spend their time preparing to fight the last war and optimize the institution for its original mission even if the world has changed in such a way that that mission is unrealizable. Even worse, the institution becomes dedicated to a secondary objective: the protection of the power allocated to it to perform its mission. This deflects the institution from its original goal and shifts it to the game of fishing for sinecures. Over time, this clogs the orientation of a political community’s OODA loop and makes the already large problem of five way adaption even more problematic. Power is drained into institutions that don’t forward the overall adaptation of the community. This tends to lead to the equivalent of a paradigm shift for political communities: revolution.

Adaptation within a political community may come as a result of external shock or internal prudence as Machiavelli pointed out. It may be that most adaption is internal prudence, the optimization of an orientation within a paradigm and the external shock is what delivers the paradigm shift, triggering the need for mass adaptation. While sometimes adaptation to an external crisis is successfully accomplished by the same actors that were present at its inception, usually a change in orientation is proceeded by a change in who’s warming the chairs. This is Pareto’s “circulation of the elite” since it is the elite of a political community that largely drives a community’s incremental adaptation through internal prudence and it is a rotation of elites that usually drives a community’s large scale adaption to external shock. James Burnham covered this in the thirteenth Machiavellian principle:

13. There occur periodically very rapid shifts in the composition and structure of elites: that is, social revolution.

From a Machiavellian point of view, a social revolution means a comparatively rapid shift in the composition and structure the elite and in the mode of its relation to the non-elite. It is possible to state the conditions under which such a shift takes place. The principal of these conditions are the following:

1. When the institutional structure, and the elite which has the ruling position within this structure, are unable to handle possibilities opened up by technological advances and by the growth, for whatever reason, of new social forces.
2. When a considerable percentage of the ruling class devotes little attention to the business of ruling, and turns its interests to such fields as culture, art, philosophy and the pursuit of sensuous pleasure.
3. When an elite is unable or unwilling to assimilate rising new elements from the masses or from its own lower ranks.
4. When large sections of the elite lose confidence in themselves and the legitimacy of their own rule; and when in both elite and non-elite there is a loss of faith in the political formulas and myths that have held the social structure together.
5. When the ruling class, or much of it, is unable or unwilling to use force in a firm and determined way, and instead tries to rely almost exclusively on manipulation, compromise, deceit, and fraud.

The elite and those rising into the elite from the non-elite constitute the essential mechanisms of a political community’s OODA loop. If the elite are responsive to the unfolding environment, then the opposite, Burnham argues, is the likely state of affairs:

If, in the selection of members of the elite, there existed a condition of perfect free competition, so that each individual could, without any obstacle, rise just as high in the social scale as his talents and ambition permitted, the elite could be presumed to include, at every moment and in the right order, just those persons best fitted for membership in it. Under such circumstances—which Pareto seems to imagine after the analogy of the theoretical free market of classical economics, or the biological arena of the struggle for survival—society would remain dynamic and strong, automatically correcting its own weaknesses.

If they, for the reasons Burnham outlines, are no longer reading the unfolding environment correctly, than they are maladaptive. It may require an external shock on a dramatic scale to bring a political community back into correct alignment with outside reality. Unfortunately, the the external shock may be so violent that it destroys the political community altogether. The story of the birth and death of civilizations is more often than not the story of the death of civilization. For a political community to maintain institutional continuity and coherence over even a few millennia like the Papacy or China is a minor miracle. Even the first cultural achievements of the West, the works of Homer, are sad songs of civilization passed thence.

America, watch your back.