A PERFECT STORM OF COMPLEXITY CONFRONTING INCOMPETENCE?

Might two columns from distinctive perspectives have outlined how scary a Fourth Turning could become?

Let's start with Richard Heinberg in Common Dreams.

The Cascade Institute notes that “a global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.”

Evidence of polycrisis is usually separated into two buckets—environmental and social. Signs of environmental crisis include climate change, the disappearance of wild nature, relentless resource depletion, the increasing chemical pollution of air and water, soil loss and degradation, and fresh water scarcity. Evidence of social crisis includes increasing economic inequality, poverty, racism and other forms of discrimination, the rise of authoritarianism, and impacts of rapid technological change (such as automation).

Pretty standard stuff, and no surprise to readers of long standing.  Will the saecular crisis be resolved over the time it takes to raise the next generation, or, this time, is a protracted era of stagnation a possibility?

Our current set of crises can be described as a polycrisis because self-reinforcing feedbacks between ecological breakdown and social breakdown are strengthening and growing more numerous. For example, climate-driven human migration presents challenges to political systems while also eroding traditional cultural norms that support environmental stewardship. Societies in the midst of social crisis, and ones turning toward authoritarian regimes, are seldom able to muster efforts toward resource conservation, emissions reduction, and habitat preservation; indeed, under such circumstances, past efforts in these directions may be undermined.

All of this is happening in the wake of a couple of decades’ worth of historical studies that show societal collapse to be a normal, predictable, and even inescapable periodic occurrence throughout the past few thousand years. It appears that societies tend to become more complex, develop new technologies, accumulate wealth, and grow more unequal over time. Their leaders start to quarrel with one another, weakening overall social cohesion. Finally, after two or three centuries of this, almost anything can push a society over the brink—a natural disaster, resource depletion, war, insurrection, epidemic, or financial crash. Scholars who engage with the accumulating literature on societal collapse can hardly help noting the relevance for today’s world. We’ve built a global civilization of unparalleled complexity, wealth, and inequality, all based on depleting, polluting fossil fuels. What could go wrong?

Well, for one thing, that complexity has emerged concurrently with the incompetence.  Let's go to Harold Robertson in Palladium.

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

Yet another polycrisis, this one self-inflicted by a different pathology?

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

I don't know, the Technocratic Experts who have made such a hash of the first quarter-century of the 21st Century keep appealing to their Credentials.  It's not as if all the box-checking tokens of the Jarrett regency don't have degrees from the Best Universities, is it?

Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Rather, it's that Complex Adaptive Systems tend to do what the Damn Well Please, and the Men (or Women, or Hermaphrodites) of System aren't as smart as they think they are. Maybe, contra that earlier post, High Modern Authoritarianism will be a casualty of the ekpyrosis.