The Committee of Public Safety

Yaarrr!

Every Internet success story can be summarized as:

1. Collect information about stuff.
2. Store stuff in one place.
3. Let people look through the stuff.
4. Enable interaction with the stuff they find.

Take Twitter. Please. The lure of Twitter is not messaging. If you want messaging just like Twitter, you could use a competing service like Identi.ca or you could deploy your own Twitter-like system using Laconi.ca. You can escape the need to scale the impossible scale.

Imagine. No more ugly Twitter timeouts. No more flakey service. Unfortunately, this would forgo Twitter’s main appeal: discovering other Twitter users. They’ve enabled the creation of a managed, centralized, searchable, API accessible database of people that other people want to connect with, 140 characters at a time. No other 140 character communications platform offers the same advantages.

Map

Similarly, a social networking platform like Facebook or MySpace provides a single place to find people. It’s possible that every person on Facebook could create their own web presence by making a home page or starting a blog. However, while that would provide a place where, serendipitously, long lost friends could find them, the chances of finding those long lost friends are improved if you take the basic idea of the web and distill it down to being just about searching, connecting, and communicating with people you know or knew.

Google is even more primal. Google is about finding stuff on the Web. You type in a single search phrase, click on search, and behold the power of PageRank. Google is like an army of people who went out and spent millions of man hours finding stuff on the web and linking to it. PageRank takes this mass of links and pools in a single massive database. Things that a greater number of people found and linked to rise in the search ranks while things that few people pay attention to languish in the dark recesses of the Web. Google provides a single text field that can take you to the highest reach of human achievement and the utter depths of human depravity.

Discovery is the killer application of the Internet. The Internet is a mesh network. There is no single path or hierarchy on a mesh network topology like there is in a star, ring, or bus topology to guide discovery. Each node must discover other nodes because each node has at least the theoretical capacity to be a peer or a gateway for other nodes. If this discovery does not take place, there is no network.

Every node on the Internet asks for the location of other nodes. If a node is not on the same network as the requesting, the node asks the default gateway to find out the location. This gateway usually knows about routes to other networks already. If it does not, it asks its peers to give it the required information. The request bounces back and forth through the Internet until the desired node is found.

This may work for networks but how do humans find other nodes to interact with? In the early days of TCP/IP it was easy. You downloaded a file from a central location and that told you where all the other nodes of interest were. This file was simply a mapping of an IP address onto a human readable name i.e.:

10.10.10.10 foo

This worked until the Internet grew so large that maintaining and downloading a giant file was impractical. The solution was DNS, a centralized system where a hierarchy of nodes maintained a dynamic distributed but centrally accessible database of human readable names to IP address mappings. Human readable names were split into hierarchical namespaces. At the very top were top level domains like .com, .org. and .net. Next came subdomains like google or twitter. These were followed by hostnames like www. The order proceeds from right to left with TLD at the right. Following traditional filesystem hierarchy, it would run left to right e.g. com.google.www. However, things are backward on the Internet so it goes www.google.com. Whichever way the domain name goes, it’s easier for someone to use it (and remember it) than an IP address. In effect, DNS was the first Internet search engine, focused on finding computers on the Internet.

Most people encounter Internet hostnames in a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This standard provides a uniform way to link to an Internet name. First comes a scheme like http:// or ftp:// which tells the computer which Internet protocol to use. Then comes the address or hostname, 10.10.10.10 or google.com. This can be followed by a path like /home/index.html and query strings or fragment identifiers. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the URL (and the World Wide Web), wishes it had a simpler format like http://com/google/www/home/index.html which is more logical but in a universe of HTML tag soup Tim Berners Lee regrets a lot of things.

Indeed Tim Berners Lee further addressed the problem of discoverability on the Web by leading an ongoing but so far futile exercise in ontology that seeks to create a Semantic Web. The Semantic Web seeks to provide standards to attach computer readable descriptions to Web resources. It’s basically the World Wide Web for your machine in the off chance it wants to browse the Web. Central to this idea is the notion of a triple. If you wanted to describe the author of http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/, Berners Lee’s home page, the triple would be:

1. Subject: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
2. Predicate: Author
3. Object: Tim Berners Lee

Unfortunately, most explanations of Semantic Web technologies like RDF aren’t this concise. The best candidate for a Web wide roll out is RDFa, which allows the RDF format to be embedded in HTML. The other barrier is that as soon as the Semantic Web was rolled out, someone would find a way to spam it. This is the problem of metacrap.

The fragility of metadata is an important concern because much planning for improving the web (such as the semantic web) is predicated upon certain flavors of metadata becoming widely adopted and used with care — something which, according to [Cory Doctorow], will not and cannot happen.Doctorow’s seven insurmountable obstacles to reliable metadata are:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy
3. People are stupid
4. Mission Impossible: know thyself
5. Schemas aren’t neutral
6. Metrics influence results
7. There’s more than one way to describe something

Other reasons that result in metadata becoming obsolete (crap) are:

1. Data may become irrelevant in time
2. Data may not be updated with new insights

This means search result will return outdated and incorrect data

This already happened with HTML meta tags which is one reason why search engines before Google were filled with all sorts of terrible results. In the beginning, media is touted as a way to finally bring high culture to the masses but, ultimately, it becomes just another way to find porn.

However, most people will never use RDF or Semantic Web technologies. Many people never even type URLs into their browser’s address bar. They use a search engine to find what they’re looking for. Most people don’t surf the Web on the raw technology of the Internet: they use an aggregator who presents a selected interpretation of the Internet which exposes selected Internet resources for the user to interact with. While the efforts of the teeming millions produce those resources, it is the aggregator who gathers the resources into something coherent. They enable discovery for the Internet user.

However, that’s not the ultimate goal. The “information distiller” who boils out superfluous Internet noise to arrive at the truly valuable data is the ultimate in discovery technology. In a recent piece, Adam Elkus provides an example of what sort of man-machine fusion an information distiller might be based on: John P. Sullivan’s Transaction Analysis Cycle (TAC):

“The Transaction Analysis Cycle is a pattern generator…centered on Analysis/Synthesis. Utilizing this framework, analysts can observe activities or transactions conducted by a range of actors looking for indicators or precursors…Individual transactions…have signatures that identify [them]…These transactions and signatures (T/S) can then be observed and matched with patterns of activity that can be expressed as trends and potentials (T/P), which can ultimately be assessed in terms of a specific actor’s capabilities and intentions (C/I). At any point, the analytical team can posit a hypothesis on the pattern of activity and then develop a collection plan to seek specific transaction and signatures that confirm or disprove its hypothesis. “

TAC may provide a model for better information distillation:

The essential element of TAC is the structured process by which the network develops information collection priorities. Truly crowdsourced TAC would mean more than just aggregation—TAC would help build greater qualitative understanding through analysis and synthesis. The network would actively synthesize information from the cloud, setting priorities about the kinds of “signatures” that must be observed, matched with patterns of activity into trends and potentials, and built into a collection plan that could prove or disprove the hypothesis created. Like Wikipedia, the model would marry the expertise and dedication of an administrative core with a mass of casual users. Collection, visualizations, and aggregation systems would be the processing tools for these networks. To be very clear, the purpose of visualization and aggregation systems would be as means rather than ends—tools to implement command concepts rather than conceive them.

Cold War

Here’s some Sunday night synergy: George Frost Kennan and spaghetti sauce. Cue Kennan:

DAVID GERGEN: Let me ask you this in terms of thinking back over then of that period of American foreign policy in the last forty or fifty years, one of the ironies here is that in an age of information you suggest we have too little wisdom.

GEORGE KENNAN: Yes, I do, and one of the things that bothers me about the computer culture of the present age is that one of the things of which it seems to me we have the least need is further information. What we really need is intelligent guidance in what to do with the information we’ve got.

DAVID GERGEN: There are echoes in what you’re saying of Barbara Tuchman as she looked back over history, she wrote that book The March of Folly, and indeed, Robert McNamara in his most recent book has argued that Vietnam was based on some false understandings on our part or false wisdom on our part.

GEORGE KENNAN: It was. Well, it was–we look for general policies, very sweeping policies–

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

GEORGE KENNAN: –in the world. And that isn’t the way international affairs work. We ought to look at every problem on its own merits.

DAVID GERGEN: Um-hmm.

GEORGE KENNAN: I see a groping on the part of our people today. They say, well, the Cold War is over, but what’s going to become the worldwide basis of American foreign policy now?

DAVID GERGEN: Yes.

GEORGE KENNAN: And they don’t realize you can’t confront it that way. This is a big world. It’s a developing world. It’s not a static world. It’s full of different forces contending with each other.

New World Order

Dr. Howard R. Moskowitz would agree. Dr. Moskowitz is the George Frost Kennan of spaghetti sauce. However, where Kennan had one gigantic insight (and he claims he was misunderstood on his way to immortality):

In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.

Moskowitz had three insights that revolutionized strategy forever:

1. There are different types of mustard for different types of people.
2. The mind knows not what the tongue wants.
3. There is no Platonic dish.

Moskowitz was hired by Pepsi to find the perfect level of sweetness for the first incarnation of Diet Pepsi. He conducted a wide ranging national taste test and gathered thousands of samples. When he sat down to look at the data it didn’t make sense. While expecting it to flow easily into a bell curve, it refused to be so bent and so distributed. Moskowitz moved on to other projects but pondered this original conundrum for years afterwords (saying, if you’re a worm in horseradish, all the world is horseradish). Then one day he had a stunning insight that changed the way Americans eat forever: you shouldn’t be looking for the perfect Pepsi; you should be looking for the perfect Pepsis.

At one time, Prego was looking for a way to beat market leader Ragu in the battle for the spaghetti sauce market. They were lagging badly behind Ragu’s watery, runny red sauce despite Prego having better ingredients and flavor. They were bewildered. Moskowitz went into their kitchen, created 46 possible variations on spaghetti sauce, and test marketed them. He then analysed the results. He was able to identify three clusters of spaghetti sauce consumption: plain, spicy, and extra chunky.

Moskowitz then had to confront the Gray Poupon delusion. Gray Poupon came along in the early Eighties when there was two brands of mustard and they were both yellow mustard: mustard, turmeric, and paprika. Grey Poupon put their more flash mustard in a nice little jar, charged three bucks more for it, and had a stunning success. Other companies then tried to find the right mustards of aspiration until Moskowitz convinced them that there was no right mustard and no wrong mustard. There were merely different types of mustards for different types of people. This insight led to a proliferation of flavors and variety on grocery store shelves. From a tiny seed a great tree of products grew.

Back to spaghetti. The discovery of the three types of spaghetti leads to Moskowitz’s second insight: the mind knows not what the tongue wants. Two types of spaghetti were known: plain and spicy. The third, extra chunky, was not. Only through his taste test was Moskowitz able to discover that an incredible one third of Americans had a desire for extra chunky spaghetti sauce. The kicker was that the one third of Americans who had a desire for extra chunky spaghetti sauce didn’t know that they wanted extra chunky spaghetti sauce either. It was an accidental discovery that Prego was able to exploit when they realized there was an invisible extra chunky spaghetti sauce market that was lying there, unexploited. The first extra chunky spaghetti sauce was an immediate success: Prego made $600,ooo,ooo from extra chunky spaghetti sauce alone. The fundamental moral of the story: people don’t consciously know what they want so asking them isn’t going to get you anywhere. It’s finding out what they unconsciously want that will get you somewhere.

Moskowitz’s third insight is that there is no Platonic dish. There was an obsession within the food industry with finding the one perfect dish. Moskowitz demonstrated that the search was in vain: there was no perfect disk. He found that, in trying to choose a perfect coffee, he could generally achieve about 65% approval of one blend by everybody. However, if he split it into different clusters and gave each cluster its own flavor of coffee, satisfaction with the blend would rise to 78%. The overall conclusion: greater diversity of choices leads to greater possibilities for happiness for more people.

What does this have to do with strategy?

I would suggest three possible implications for strategy (defining strategy as the reconciliation of desire with power):

1. There are different types of strategies for different types of people.
2. Politics does not know what strategy culture wants.
3. There is no Platonic strategy.

Not goo

It may be a mistake for a nation as diverse in its population as the United States to have One Strategy to Rule Them All. Having many strategies for many parts of the world, as George Frost Kennan suggested, may be the only way to deal with the staggering diversity of the various populations who are at multiple levels of stateness at one time. Some are open states, some are secret states, and some are silent states. It may be better for American strategy to be constituted as goo rather than a monolithic block. Hard to say. I doubt that it’s entirely the right solution because of this problem: a successful strategy in one area may be an unsuccessful strategy in another area. For example, NATO expansion in the 1990s and 200os may have been good in Europe but it may have also reunified China and Russia, one of the great realignments produced by American diplomacy in the 1970s. Whether emergent strategy would suffer from the same defect is an unknown quantity.

The second implication of Moskowitz’s ideas for strategy, that politics does not know what strategy culture wants, its possibly more important than the last implication. Culture is an emergent process in which one desire is prioritized over another. Culture is the art of the unspoken assumption. Part of the process of emergence is detecting those desires that are most unconscious and aligning power to them. This is the process of politics, the division of power between cultural ends. It may be that the search for a single strategy that’s at variance with the extra chunky spaghetti desire that lies hidden in the cultural grocery store will lead to more problems than the more obvious mismatch between politics and strategy. It may be that the first task of strategy is to tease out the hidden cultural desires that fundamentally support its effort.

The third implication is probably the hardest for some. There has been a great desire, as even Kennan noticed, to have a single perfect strategy to tie all of the loose ends of American policy together that would be as comprehensive as containment. Chances are that such a thing is neither possible or desirable. There is no perfect strategy, only the virtues of variety for a complex nation. Such a grand frame emerges, as it does from time to time, it’s unlikely that it will be as hallowed and pure as the Ten Commandments carved with the divine Finger upon the mount. It will be a grand mess of things touched and handled by every politician in the vicinity of the kitchen. Attempts at achieving perfect strategy may also lock you into a less than effective strategy that just looks perfect. That can lock you into an inflexible and vulnerable position at just the wrong moment.

However, for all of those searching for a single word like containment to sum up and rationalize American strategy in the last twenty years, I give you this one magical word: burrito.

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.

Epigrams. Remarkably concise for a Perl cultural artifact.

Happy LDP

Aldebrn made this interesting observation:

Similarly, although we cannot know it now, the current financial collapse may be the best thing to happen to Western civilization for centuries.

This rings true to me. Crisis is the permanent opposition party in an democracy. Democracy marches to the beat of punctuated equilibrium: long periods of complacency and stasis punctuated by short, sudden, and sharp periods of chaos and terror. Crisis forces the system to adapt. If a natural one doesn’t occur, a crisis can always be manufactured by human nature colluding with itself. An idea that was current in the early ’90s was that the bombing of Japan and Germany made those countries the economic superpowers from c.1973-c.1992. Whether such extremes are necessary or even a key element in cultural evolution is unknown.

Jonathan Rauch argued in his book The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan that Japan in the early 90’s didn’t need an internal opposition party. The ruling LDP used the United States, a lumbering, red-haired long nosed oafish gaijin power, as a spur to drive policy adoption. China may play this role in the future. It may be that the Soviet Communist Party played a similar role in the US before its premature demise.

Lamarck's Giraffe

This is a time for zombies. In the wake of the resurrection of Zombie Convergence and Zombie Keynes, here’s another zombie: the return of Lamarckian evolution. Though not as witty and engaging a table companion as Zombie Keynes, Lamarckism has traditionally been held up as an example of the highest French wit. Lamarck, a Frenchmen, proposed a theory of “soft inheritance” in which characteristics that an ancestor acquired through its behavior like, most famously, a giraffe’s long neck, were passed on to their descendants. This theory was largely replaced by Wallace-Darwinian Natural Selection based on random genetic mutations that, by chance, fit the unfolding environment and, because of that fit, are passed on to a greater number of descendants than mutations that don’t.  Now it appears that both types of evolution are occurring:

In Feig’s study, mice genetically engineered to have memory problems were raised in an enriched environment–given toys, exercise, and social interaction–for two weeks during adolescence. The animals’ memory improved–an unsurprising finding, given that enrichment has been previously shown to boost brain function. The mice were then returned to normal conditions, where they grew up and had offspring. This next generation of mice also had better memory, despite having the genetic defect and never having been exposed to the enriched environment.

[...]

In a second study, researchers found that rats raised by stressed mothers that neglected and physically abused their offspring showed specific epigenetic modifications to their DNA. The abused mice grew up to be poor mothers, and appeared to pass down these changes to their offspring.

Previous research has shown that bad rat mothering can be passed down through this kind of DNA modification–but those changes are thought to be triggered specifically by maternal behavior. In the new study, researchers also had healthy mothers raise the offspring of stressed mothers, and found that the problems were only partially fixed. That suggests that the changes “were not due to their neonatal experience,” says David Sweatt, a neuroscientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who oversaw the study. “It was something that was already there when they were born.”

Everything old is new again. During the 1970s, a popular idea among the literati was the idea of “convergence”. The argument was that the institutions of the Communist bloc and the Free World were evolving towards each other, meaning that one day their institutions would be so similar that the ideological part of the Cold War would be over. The Free World would adopt welfare policies that would draw closer to Communist models and the Communist bloc would adopt democratic policies that would bring it closer to Western norms.

Things converged but not in the way the literati anticipated. Communism became passe and the Communist bloc ended up adopting much of the Western model. Communism’s downfall may have even been helped by Gorbachev’s belief that his actions were leading to convergence.

However, it seems as if the announcement of the death of classical convergence was premature. Plenty of zombies long thought dead are roaming the earth once again, with Lord Keynes at their head. I wasn’t too surprised when I came across this snippet which resurrects convergence in a darker formulation than the Seventies version:

East-West competition is intensifying on a fundamental level for (1) control of the globe’s finite strategic resources and (2) access to, and control over the world’s finite capital wealth. These two factors constitute the life-blood of the industrialized economy of any nation, or any geopolitical grouping of nations.

This fact distinctly limits the range and degree of compromise and accommodation on both sides, East and West. The facade constituted by East-West ideological rivalry, which in the pre-1991 era gave thick cover to the fundamental East-West contest over control of the two vital resources named above, has been getting thinner and more transparent since the death of communism in 1991.

Since 1991, that facade has only thinly veiled mounting East-West competition over those vital resources. And now, with liberal capitalism massively discredited, and swiftly giving way to statism in the West, the dissimilarity between Eastern and Western political and economic ideologies is only becoming thinner.

We are moving into an era where East and West are much less dissimilar. We will soon have Western-style statism and Eastern-style statism, with only a thin difference between the two. Especially is that so when you consider that the mounting ill effects of the deepening economic collapse in the West will undoubtedly produce such levels of civil protest, anger and disorder as to oblige Western governments to progressively curtail and revoke civil liberties, take more and more steps toward ever stricter government control, all for the sake of national security.

As the ideological facade gets thinner and thinner, near the point of evaporating completely, the underlying motives and goals on both sides will only be more fully exposed, leading to more open and bitter rivalry for the control of the two vital resources mentioned above.

In a perverse sort of way, the thicker ideological facade has enabled both sides to hide behind, keeping up the pretense of noble motives and aims, and giving a place for some courtesy in the rivalry. But when that facade inevitably evaporates, as it is already progressively doing, neither side will have the option of maintaining any noble pretense, nor any civility, in the contest. For these reasons, the worst in the epic match is yet ahead of us.

In the near future, the reader should look with skepticism on any media hyperbole regarding the supposed emergence of East-West accommodation under Obama’s leadership. In any agreements that are reached between the two sides, the devil will be in the details, and these won’t support the wishful thinking that the two sides are moving toward strategic compromise. The reader should be prepared instead, perhaps after a brief honeymoon period in the ongoing East-West rivalry, for matters between them to rapidly worsen.

Ah, to be young again.

Max Weber observes in Politics as a Vocation:

A really radical ‘Machiavellianism,’ in the popular sense of this word, is classically represented in Indian literature, in the Kautaliya Arthashastra (long before Christ, allegedly dating from Chandragupta’s time). In contrast with this document Machiavelli’s Principe is harmless.

Since Weber, a giant of Western political science, made this observation in 1919 and, given the fashion for non-Western books on war like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, the neglect of the Arthashastra in the United States is surprising.

What is the Arthashastra? It is one of the few complete books on statecraft ever written. It is the collective wisdom of centuries of Indian thought on statecraft distilled into one handy volume. The Arthashastra covers governance, law, internal security, economics, foreign policy, diplomacy, covert operations, and war.

The book is attributed to Kautilya, also known as Chanakya or Vishnugupta. Kautilya was the mastermind behind the rise of Chandragupta Maurya, India’s first great conqueror. Kautilya, the story goes, was a professor at Takshashila University. He was thrown out of the royal court of the Nanda empire and swore revenge. He found Chandragupta along the road as a small boy, dispensing justice to other boys. After acquiring Chandragupta from his mother, Kautilya proceeded to train him in the arts of statecraft, intending to use the boy as the instrument of his vengeance. In the wake of Alexander the Great’s Indian incursion in 326 BC, Chandragupta and Kautilya destroyed both the Nanda empire and the Macedonian satraps Alexander left behind. By the time he reached the age of twenty, Chandragupta had conquered this much of India:

Start

At the end of his reign, he bequeathed these conquests to his successor:

End

Whether Kautilya himself actually wrote any part of the Arthashastra is unknown. Parts of it may date back to his lifetime but additions seem to have been grafted on to the original text as late as AD 400. Like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, the Arthashastra was probably compiled from the efforts of multiple contributors.

The Arthashastra is one of the few works of literature that places every shade of power into a single spectrum of power. The Arthashastra illustrates several points on this spectrum of power. The first four points are the four methods of dealing with conflict (a staple of early Indian political thought):

1. Conciliation: “praising the merits of someone, extolling mutual connections, talking up mutual benefits, inducing, putting yourself at the other’s disposal, and bestowing awards and honors.”
2. Placating with gifts: “relinquishing what is owed, continuing payment that is already being made, return of something received, giving something new out of one’s own wealth, permission to take something from the enemy”
3. Sowing dissension: “creating mutual suspicion between two enemies or threatening one of them”.
4. Use of force: “depriving a person of his property, liberty, or life (plunder, harassment, and death)”

The Arthashastra explicitly places these methods on the spectrum of power:

It is easier to employ a method earlier in in the order than a later one. Placating with gifts is twice as hard as conciliation, sowing dissension three times as hard, and the user of force four times.

Like any sage advice, the Arthashastra recommends using the four methods in combination and enumerates several examples:

In the case of a son, a brother, or a kinsman, the appropriate methods are conciliation and placating with gifts. In the case of citizens of a city, the people of the countryside, or the army, placating with gifts or sowing dissension among them are the right methods. In the case of neighboring princes or forest chiefs, one should use dissension or use force…In the case of allies and enemies, a combination of methods ensures success because the different methods mutually reinforce each other…Some methods are ideal in some cases and render the use of others unnecessary. For example, conciliation is adequate for dealing with the enemy’s ministers whose loyalty is uncertain, placating with gifts for traitorous ministers of the enemy, dissension in case of confederacies, and force against the powerful.

In foreign policy, the Arthashastra lists six methods on the spectrum of power:

1. “Making peace is entering into an agreement with specific conditions”.
2. “Active hostilities is waging a war“.
3. “Being indifferent to a situation is staying quiet.”
4. “Augmenting one’s own power is preparing for war“.
5. “Getting the protection of another is seeking support.”
6. “Dual policy is making peace with one king and war with another.”

The Arthashastra extensively discusses when it is time to use one method or another (and when not to) based on whether you are currently stronger or weaker than an enemy:

The would-be conqueror shall apply the six methods with the due regard to his power. He shall make peace with an equally powerful or stronger king; he shall wage war against a weaker king. [He shall not wage war against a stronger king] because he who fights against a stronger king is crushed like a foot soldier fighting an elephant. A fight with an equal brings losses to both sides, just like the destruction of two unbaked mudpots hitting each other. Like a stone striking a mudpot, a more powerful king gains decisive victory over a weaker one.

The six methods are also explicitly placed on the spectrum of power:

When the degree of progress is the same in pursuing peace and waging war, peace is to be preferred. For, in war, there are disadvantages such as losses, expenses, and absence from home. For the same reason, a policy of neither peace nor war is to be preferred to making preparations for war. As between adopting a dual policy and seeking the protection [of a stronger king], the dual policy is to be preferred. For, in adopting the dual policy, one gives importance to one’s own undertakings and, thereby, promotes one’s own interests. One that seeks the protection of another serves only the other’s interest, not his own.

For one method, war, the Arthashastra identifies at least four more points along the spectrum of power:

1. “war by counsel” is “the exercise of diplomacy; this applies mainly when a king finds himself in a weaker position and considers it unwise to engage in battle”
2. “‘[silent or undeclared] war’ is using covert methods to achieve the objective [of the war] without actually waging a battle, usually by assassinating the enemy”
3. “[concealed or secret] warfare…refers primarily to the instigation of treachery in the enemy camp”
4. “open warfare [specifies a] time and place – i.e. a set-piece battle”

Boesche argues that, in waging a “war by counsel”:

Kautilya assumed that he lived in a world of foreign relations in which one either conquered or suffered conquest. He did not say to himself, “Prepare for war, but hope for peace,” but instead, “Prepare for war, and plan to conquer.” Diplomacy was just another weapon used in the prolonged warfare that was always either occurring or being planned for…Kautilya argued that diplomacy is really a subtle act of war, a series of actions taken to weaken an enemy and gain advantages for oneself, all with an eye toward eventual conquest. A nation’s foreign policy should always consist of preliminary movements toward war: “In this way, the conqueror should establish in the rear and in front, a circle (of kings) in his own interest…And in the entire circle, he should ever station envoys and secret agents, becoming a friend of the rivals, maintaining secrecy when striking again and again. The affairs of one, who cannot maintain secrecy, …undoubtedly perish, like a broken boat in the ocean.” In Kautilya’s foreign policy, even during a time of diplomacy and negotiated peace, a king should still be “striking again and again” in secrecy.

At the other end of the spectrum, open war “is fighting at a specified time and place”. The most interesting points on the spectrum are the middle two: concealed war and silent war:

[Concealed] war is terrorizing, sudden assault, threatening in one direction while attacking in another, sudden assault without specifying time and place, attacking an enemy when he makes a mistake or is suffering a calamity, and appearing to yield in one place but attacking in another. [Silent] war is using secret agents and occult practices against the enemy.

Roger Boesch comments:

[S]ilent war is a kind of fighting that no other thinker I know of has discussed. Silent war is a kind of warfare with another kingdom in which the king and his ministers—and unknowingly, the people—all act publicly as if they were at peace with the opposing kingdom, but all the while secret agents and spies are assassinating important leaders in the other kingdom, creating divisions among key ministers and classes, and spreading propaganda and disinformation. According to Kautilya, “Open war is fighting at the place and time indicated; creating fright, sudden assault, striking when there is error or a calamity, giving way and striking in one place, are types of concealed warfare; that which concerns secret practices and instigations through secret agents is the mark of silent war.” In silent warfare, secrecy is paramount, and, from a passage quoted earlier, the king can prevail only by “maintaining secrecy when striking again and again.” This entire concept of [silent] war was apparently original with Kautilya.

Open war and secret war are analogous to what Sun Tzu called orthodox warfare (ch’i) and unorthodox (cheng) warfare but, as Boesche points out, the concept of silent warfare is unique to the Arthashastra. Silent warfare is analogous to the vague and shifting concept of 5GW, anticipated and improved upon by a dead Indian thinker two millenia ago.  The Arthashastra is also unique in the number of tactics it suggests for silent war. It recommends the use of courtesans, fake priests and holy men, fake merchants, disguises, poisons, assassinations, fire, and many other methods for undermining an enemy (and spying on your own population). The Arthashastra places high value on silent war:

Miraculous results can be achieved by practicing the methods of subversion…A single assassin can achieve, with weapons, fire, or poison, more than a fully mobilized army.

The task of silent warriors was to:

1. “neutralize the principal officers who, though living by service under the king, work for the enemy”
2. “keep under surveillance people of the country who are likely to fall prey to the incitements of the enemy”
3. “wage psychological warfare against the enemy”
4. “weaken the enemy”

The Arthashastra elaborates:

A wise king shall protect his people (his important chiefs and the ordinary population) against the intrigues of the enemy, irrespective of whether the persons are likely to be subverted or not. The kinds of people easily subverted by the enemy are: the angry, the greedy, the frightened, and the haughty. In his own country, spies in the guise of soothsayers, readers of omens, and astrologers shall keep a watch over those likely to be subverted and find out whether these have contacts among themselves or with enemies or with jungle chiefs. Appreciation shall be shown, by awarding honors and gifts, to those who are happy with the king [and therefore loyal]. The discontented shall be tackled by the four methods (conciliation, placating with gifts, sowing dissension, and use of force). In the enemy’s country, those who are easily subverted shall be won over with conciliation and gifts. Those who are not easily subverted shall be tackled by sowing dissension, use of force, or pointing out to them the defects of their king.

I won’t go into the Arthashastra’s use of black magic. The connection between the occult and 5GW is already too strong; any sufficiently advanced 5GW is indistinguishable from magic.

There are three English translations of the Arthashastra from the original Sanskrit:

• The 1915 translation by Rudrapatna Shamasastry
• The 1972 translation by R.P. Kangle
• The 1987 translation by L. N. Rangarajan

There are some copies of the Rangarajan translation available from U.S. booksellers. While this translation may be the most accessible, having excellent explanatory notes, maps, illustrations, it is incomplete: it only excerpts portions of the Arthashastra. The Kangle translation is the most comprehensive but there are few copies available from U.S. booksellers and ordering it from the original Indian publisher is a somewhat laborious process. The Shamasastry translation is available online but it lacks the up to date scholarship found in the Kangle translation. In contrast to this sorry state of affairs, the Art of War is available in many English translations. What the Arthashastra needs is a Ralph Sawyer type to provide both an appropriate English translation and the necessary background text for American readers. Perhaps a bundling of the Kangle translation and The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and His Arthashastra by Roger Boesch would be a good start.

Seen on Ajaxian: openness to robots from the new whitehouse.gov:

The Bush version was ~2400 lines long:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text
….

Obama?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

The appalling thing about the new website is that it appears to be running Windows and IIS. It would be nice if openness extended all the way down the stack to the web server and operating system. Running Microsoft anything is malpractice: it’s pricier than a LAMP stack solution, more unstable, more manpower intensive, and more vulnerable hacking attacks. This is my favorite anecdote about the risks of using Microsoft in national defense: cruiser towed back to port after systems crash.

America’s system of government follows an evolutionary pattern called punctuated equilibrium, an idea popularized by paleontologist Steven Jay Gould. In punctuated equilibrium, species are biologically static over long periods of time. Periodically, however, events trigger a burst of evolution and species morph through a wild variety of forms before settling down into another period of crisis.

Similarly, America has a crisis driven form of government. The institutional and socio-cultural framework of the American republic guarantees that under normal circumstances constitutional and legal change will happen at a snail’s pace. Agendas will pile up in the forgotten cupboards of congressional staffers, bureaucrats, lobbyists, public intellectuals, journalists, and think tanks. Then a large crisis will occur, agendas will emerge from the darkness, and sweeping enactments will make them law. 9/11 and the GFC are two recent examples of such punctuated equilibria.

5GW, to use purpleslog’s definition is:

5GW is the secret deliberative manipulation of actors, networks, institutions, states or any 0GW/1GW/2GW/3GW/4GW forces to achieve a goal or set of goals across a combination of socio, economic, and political domains while attempting to avoid or minimize the retaliatory offensive or defensive actions/reactions of 0GW/1GW/2GW/3GW/4GW powered actors, networks, institutions, and/or states.

Given the crises necessary to drive our system of government forward, I wonder if it isn’t prone to 5GW-style manipulations. Furthermore, I wonder if the system doesn’t require 5GW-style manipulations in order to function, change, and evolve. If your system requires a steady stream of catastrophe inputs in order to adapt to emerging trends, a far-sighted statesmen may have to manufacture crises in order to move the Leviathan forward. Our leaders past and present tell us that an educated citizenry is supposed to deliberate of the great issues of the day and move the nation forward through the enlightened wisdom of the crowds. That’s poppycock.

Consider one (possibly) 5GWish operation: the creation of the US Constitution. The Federalists were a group of proto-nationalists who wanted to build a local superpower. Note Alexander Hamilton’s ambitions expressed in Federalist No. 11:

By a steady adherence to the Union we may hope ere long to become the Arbiter of Europe in America; and to be able to incline the balance of European competitions in this part of the world as our interest may dictate…I shall briefly observe, that our situation invites, and our interests prompt us, to aim at an ascendant in the system of American affairs. The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America have successively felt her domination. The superiority, she has long maintained, has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority; and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America–that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed a while in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all trans-Atlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!

The key to creating a more powerful United States was acquiring the four corners of the square of power as outlined in Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus:

1. Tax bureaucracy.
2. Parliament
3. Central Bank
4. National Debt

Each of these were necessary to get the financial and military muscle to create a muscular Empire of Liberty, financed at non-junk rates. However, what was needed was a crisis, real if possible but manufactured if necessary. Daniel Shays helpfully provided the crisis. The Federalist’s were able to get themselves appointed to a convention to help revise the Articles of Confederation but used the occasion to launch a slow motion coup d’etat against the states. This is a classic example of the frog boiling slowly.

A possibly even better example of 5GW at work in American history is the triggering of the American Revolution itself. Samuel Adams was the Lenin of the American Revolution. At some point in the early 1760’s he developed the explosive idea that America should be independent from Great Britain. Adams carefully built up agitprop machinery around the notion that America just wanted to return to the status quo before the onset of the Seven Years’ War. However, behind this agenda was the desire to breakup the British Empire. In his case the British ministry was more than up to the challenge of providing crises but after the repeal of the Townshend Acts Adams was left without a major issue for his conspiracy to exploit. He had to manufacture his own firebrand. Seizing on the only duty not repealed with the other acts, the duty on tea, he organized an assault on an East India Company ship and dumped tea into the harbor. This set off a series of events that Adams exploited, with a little luck, to create an independent United States and throw off the deadening hand of perfidious Albion.

The history of the United States may be more of a sequence of orchestrated Boston Tea Parties than we realize. Whether these constitute 5GW since, to paraphrase Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire, 5GW is neither a fifth nor a generation nor warfare, is an open question. However, it seems that at minimum the American system is driven by crisis. George Marshall offered this great insight on the essence of the American system while reflecting on FDR’s decision to go ahead with Operation Torch, an operation that was opposed by Marshall and other senior US military commanders who thought it was militarily unnecessary:

The leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. (This may seem like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.) The people demanded action. We couldn’t wait to be completely ready. Churchill was always getting into sideshows and if we had gone as far as he did we would have never gotten out. But I could see that the president had to have something.

If 5GW, assuming it exists, can be boiled down to anything, it’s providing the American people with entertaining diversions. Paradoxically, it’s easier to get an agenda after you’ve gotten the American people to stampede rather than when they are peacefully chewing their cud.