The Totalitarian Organizing Principle

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Following Up

When I wrote my article on Communication Overhead, I talked about how to avoid it and make communicating across cultural and contextual lines easier. Of the mitigations I presented, the most powerful and dangerous one is the Organizing Principle. I defined it as a prescription or rule that allows individuals to make decisions in a predictable manner – distinct from a procedure or a routine in that those methods are input-dependent, rather than being input-independent as the Organizing Principle is. That is the most important part of the Organizing Principle, as well as the most dangerous.

The idea of an Organizing Principle is incredibly general. If you stretch the definition, nearly anything agreed between two people can be an Organizing Principle. Everything from deciding to meet up with a friend at a certain time and place to the entire Bible – all of it could be shoved under that definition of an Organizing Principle. It’d be like trying to hit the inside of a barn. From the inside.

Let’s narrow it down a little. Just a bit.

An Organizing Principle is a mental mapping or model, analogous, a hypothesis, a religious faith, a language, and a law all at once, and possibly the general term for all of these things. Based upon a foundational statement – the principle – we infer outwards to explain phenomenon by invoking the principle, which, if agreed upon, allows large amounts of information to be conveyed much quicker. As an example, let us consider something universal – gravity.

The Gravity of the Situation

Let’s say that you drop something on your foot, probably something light, like an apple. After giving a cry more of surprise and pain, rubbing your foot while hopping on the other, you realize that leaves fall from trees too, and plenty other things, now that you think about it. In fact, everything that isn’t supported in some way seems to fall – even fruit still on the tree bends the branch. Things must all want to fall down.

Observation: Something you were carrying fell downwards onto your foot and then rolled onto the earth.

Organizing Principle (v1): Things always fall down.

Here we have the first version of the Organizing Principle – a little crude, but still valid. Let’s see what happens when you decide to test the theory. Hanging upside-down from a branch, holding a little pebble, you let go, expecting it to go down – but to your surprise, it slips from your hand and falls up, past your eyes and towards the earth.

Ah, so it’s the earth what’s doing it.

Inference: Even if I drop something while hanging from a tree branch by my knees, things should still fall downwards, towards my feet.

Observation: When hanging upside-down from a tree, things appear to fall up.

We therefore revise, but importantly, do not reject, our Organizing Principle. We couldn’t possibly be wrong, after all – just not quite there yet!

Organizing Principle (v2): Things always fall down towards the earth.

Inference 1: Some force must be pushing or pulling them towards the earth.

Considering you were able to climb the tree, and testing your legs, make a few short hops before coming back down to the ground, it is not a stretch to add another such inference:

Inference 2: It is possible to overpower this force momentarily, but it is constant and will overpower you without constant application of force.

You nod to yourself before realizing that there are things that do not fall. Birds can fly and land seemingly at will, and clouds never seem to come closer to the ground:

Observation: Birds and clouds do not fall to the ground.

Inference 1-1: Birds, clouds, and other objects that do not fall to earth must have some method of mitigating or nullifying said force.

Then, you realize something important. How is it that the sky itself does not fall to the earth and crush you entirely? Looking to the horizon, you see mountains – ah, that’s it! The sky must be a firmament held up by the mountains, and as a tent held up by poles, it sags where there are no poles supporting it.

Observation: The sky does not fall on us.

Inference 2-1: The mountains hold up the sky like a tent held up by its poles. The sky can no longer fall towards the earth, because the earth has come up to meet it.

Inference 2-1-1: The low lands are areas where the sky sags due to lack of support.

Another thing sparks your curiosity as you squint at the horizon. How does the fireball, the sun, rise in the morning after falling to the ground? It must have some method it can only use intermittently, perhaps something to do with fire!

Observation: The sun shines in the morning and brings light and heat like a fire, and is at its highest when the fire is strongest.

Inference 2-2: Being full of heat and light like a fire causes things to rise.

Inference 2-2-1: If you wish to reach the sky, you can do so by taking fire into yourself.

Okay, let’s stop here for a moment and boil this down. From the Organizing Principle of “Things always fall towards earth”, we have extrapolated quite a bit. We know that everything falls towards earth unless supported or provided with force, the sky is a tent held up by mountains, and heat causes things to rise into the sky. Let me just throw out one more inference we could make at this point:

Inference 2-2-1-1: Setting things on fire will allow them to join the sun in the sky. The smoke from the flame carries the burned object into the sky to join the sun. If you want to fly, set yourself on fire.

Suddenly we’re in fucking wacko territory, just through a little bit of brain work. Even in this incredibly simple example, without the constant injection of observational data, we’ve gone off the rails very quickly. We’ve quickly started from gravity and gotten an entire web of implications, simply from one thing and reasoning by analogy. However, this also makes Organizing Principles incredibly powerful as communication tools – by communicating just the principle, you can, by corollary, imply the rest of the system. But surely, you say, there must be a drawback!

There is, and I can show you with a quick story.

The Average Conceals More than It Reveals

Say you have two batches of a hundred students each, and they’ve all taken a test to prepare them for a big standardized test – be it the SAT, the gaokao, university entrance exams, insert the relevant test to you here – and their scores have come back. Being the busy bee you are, however, you decide just look at the averages of the two groups, since that should give you a good idea, and both of them turn up at 50.

Organizing Principle: The average, or the number in the distribution with the least difference to all the points, should be an accurate summary of the whole distribution.

Now, while you’re stretched thin and have to do something else in fifteen minutes, you know that kind of coincidence is unlikely. Being the sharp operator that you are, you look at a few of the numbers from the underlying data sets, and they look something like this:

Group 1: {49, 54, 42, 39, 61, 46, 58, 51, 65, 35} (10 of 100)

Group 2: {85, 30, 72, 24, 32, 62, 73, 50, 36, 26} (10 of 100)

Scanning through the rest of the numbers, you see that they follow a similar pattern – Group 1’s scores are clumped up along the center, while Group 2’s have 2 peaks, one below average, and one above average.

Observation: The averages of Group 1 and Group 2 are the same, but the underlying distributions are very differently distributed.

Inference 1: The average does not capture the different underlying distances, only summarizing the point that is closest to all of the points.

This is why, in statistics, there are three summary measures of central tendency – the mean, or the data point that is most frequent in the data, the median, or the central data point when all the observations are lined up top to bottom (interpolated for even-numbered data sets) and the mean, or the average, as previously described.

These methods are all classic Organizing Principles – methods of decreasing the size of the message while allowing as much as possible of the underlying meaning through. This immediately runs into problems, however, since the way the principle works is by converting data to a rule – a rule that they only generally, but not strictly, conform to. What’s more, that is only based on what has already been observed. Datasets from different domains or measuring different things each have their own characteristics, meaning that any and all of the measures of central tendency can become deceptive in different situations.

One can think of the different academic systems, each using different data sets, statistical methods and confidence intervals, as borrowing from a body of Organizing Principles for dealing with description and inference of information, this body being called “statistics”. A question now arises – who, then, is the repository of Organizing Principles for all of society?

If you look back to the definition of the Organizing Principle I wrote, it’s as simple as ABC.

Academia, Bureaucracy, and Clergy

The heading says it all. I believe that the academia, bureaucracy, and the clergy all had authority over a portion of society’s Organizing Principles, and the sack of one class, the degradation of another, and the immense temporal power of the third, has removed our ability to both decide on values and ended our quest for knowledge, reducing us to creatures of consensus and conflict-avoidance.

Below, I briefly describe each and their matching Organizing Principles.

Clergy – The Power That Was

The clergy¹ collect Organizing Principles relating to good and evil – essentially, what to do and what not to do – as well as values, or why to do, taking the form of both religions and philosophies. Being born into periods off great uncertainty about the world around us, acknowledged as knowable but ever-evading our grasp thanks to the limited powers of humanity, religion, and by extension, the clergy, functioned as the first bearers of Organizing Principles.

Catholic monasteries preserved knowledge during the Fall of Rome – knowledge that was used to seed the great educational institutions of the time. The writings of Mohammed, Confucius, and the Buddha each shaped their respective societies in ways that we can recognize to this day – be it Islam’s many passages relating specifically to the Prophet’s life, the study of Confucian societies, or the simple acceptance of the Buddha. Broadly speaking, I’d throw philosophers and most other thinkers on “how to live a good life” in this bin. Anyone who’s the founder of an “-ism” belongs here, probably.

This class best shows the totalitarian nature of Organizing Principles. Fundamentally, any Organizing Principle, used to its logical outcome, is mutually exclusive with all other Organizing Principles not wholly subordinate to it. Religious wars such as the Thirty Years’ War or the ideologically tinged Second World War are proof of that – in principle, no Organizing Principle can suffer any other to live. While powerful in directing people, this class only had a limited effect in improving lives, focused as it was on immaterial things.

Enter the second class, who used this gap to sideline them.

Academia – The Power That Wanes

The Catholic monasteries that survived the fall of Rome were the seeds for the great universities, and thereby, the authors of their own demise. These great universities housed academicians² who became the repository of the liberal arts, and from there, began to dabble in the practical arts. Forming an investigative superstructure over and beyond the amateurs who built the machines and did the experiments, acting as wholesale clients to patron lords and nations, the universities and the academics delved into the world of science.

Their Organizing Principle is the belief that rules of science and logic governed the world, and that by application of these rules and ideas all questions can be answered. All was categorized and filed into different bins and fields of knowledge – the dizzying array of departments and course offerings at any university today can tell you that much, and questions of meaning and truth fell by the wayside as eminently practical questions of what works and what doesn’t come to the forefront. The technical advances of this time, and all after it, are proof enough for the benefits of this line of questioning, which easily sidelined the questions the clergy posed.

This class best shows the truly pivotal nature of Organizing Principles. Any Organizing Principle has the goal of shorter messages conveying greater complexity, following the discovered rules and phenomenon to their logical ends. However, academia was interested in investigating relationships and understanding what was and wasn’t correct, which takes time and effort to convey and understand. When the massive energies of coal and oil were harnessed, the time and effort of the few who understood such things became prohibitively expensive and difficult to secure.

Enter the final class, who took their lessons and ran with them past where they belonged.

Bureaucracy – The Power That Waxes

The great universities trained many in their myriad ways, and thereby, were the authors of their own demise. These many graduates all required their own apprentices, and to train others to work under them and take on their role. However, their time and effort was precious, and so efforts were made to crystalize knowledge – teaching what was required for the individual to work, without ever being equipped to search for themselves and find the truth. Enter the Bureaucracy³, which to me has a far wider meaning than others may attach to it.

Their Organizing Principle is adherence to Organizing Principles. Academia, religion, “best practices”, technique, procedure – these are all their own Organizing Principles. There are only “best practices” and “rationalizations”. No change can occur without the constant updates of e-mails, memoranda, and meetings to establish communication and build consensus. Context, by contrast, is a conman’s game - a myth, a legend, a story told of to frighten young bureaucrats at night. One can think of the bureaucracy as the connective tissue and nervous system of the organization, and therefore, of the world as a whole. As I covered in Communication Overhead, large corporations, governments – any sufficiently large organization, really – will take on elements of a bureaucracy, if not become a bureaucracy in its entirety. Most of us reading this, even I, have bureaucratic tendencies I would go so far as to say that 99% of the world today, is bureaucratic. For the essence of the bureaucrat is knowing how to do the job, but not enough to understand why the job is done that way, or why the job is done at all, while simultaneously being completely convinced that the job is to be done that way, and no other, as it was handed down from Mount Sinai. This constrains things to what can be agreed upon, which is often nothing, stymieing progress and frustrating everyone, including the bureaucrats themselves.

A natural reaction to the Information Superhighway and Communication Overhead.

Now that I have given the bureaucracy both barrels, I will turn around and go to bat for them with the butt of my shotgun. As I’ve said before, they form the connective tissue and nervous system of any organization, and thereby, all of society. The primary skills here, rather than being the belief of a clergyman or the skepticism of an academic, are a diplomatic and pleasing personality, the ability to go along to get along, and the ability to wrangle peskily varied people. The Bureaucrat requires both enough intelligence to understand what they are doing, while not enough to question it. These factors make one able to communicate with the widest array of people, allowing one to guide the herds of people necessary to getting anything done, and making them very important pieces in large organizations. Consensus-building and agreement in this environment is integral to getting anything done in this world of incredible specialization, requiring experts at harnessing Organizing Principles to establish consensus. This faith in the consensus of their peers and the authority of Organizing Principles allows the great crews and ships of the modern day to be steered, firmly esconced in the belief that they are learning from smart and successful people - if they weren’t any good, why would they be paid so much?

Maybe this is what caused the rise of the Midwit.

This final class best shows the truly dangerous nature of Organizing Principles. By using Organizing Principles as rallying cries for consensus, the bureaucrat attempts to seize power by borrowing these concepts, however abused they may be in the process. Once a consensus is formed around these principles, the bureaucrats will close ranks in lockstep to defend it. This shows the most eminent danger of Organizing Principles – they inform worldviews and become unquestionable dogmas, rather than methods of communication and starting points of discussion. All the stuffiness of religion, all the arrogance of academia, and none of the understanding that either give is embodied here, simply because the Organizing Principle is not knowledge, only a gateway to knowledge. Only the act of scholarship - checking if the principle matches observation and its inferences are supported, and understanding its limits thereby - can truly grant knowledge.

Perhaps, however, even at the zenith of their power, they may be dethroned.

The Next Class

I have no firm idea on if there is another class that can disrupt the Bureaucrat, but I see some potential contenders on the horizon.

The first is the Techventurer⁴ class. Centered in startup culture and techbro evangelism, their Organizing Principle is cybernetic development - the integration of information technologies into human processes to streamline and improve human operations. Competing with the Bureaucrats for money and power, they combine the religious devotion to technological efficiency and human improvement with academic know-how. They are a direct competitor to the Bureaucracy.

The second is the Influencer⁵ class. Inspired by John Carter’s recent article, Under The Influence, the Influencer Class’ Organizing Principles revolve around authentic persuasion. Using word of mouth, and the word of megaphone that is social media, they represent themselves as iconic ideas with which others sympathize. This is what creates the influence they possess. By appearing as authentic and reliable representations of conscious or subconscious beliefs, they harvest the attention, minds, and money of their viewers. They appear to me as a form of modern demigod - always giving the appearance of adhering strictly to whatever ideas and values they represent. The best example I can think of would be VTubers - digital idols who represent the anime waifu come to life. The other classes have also attempted to use Influencer methods, but the presentation of authenticity and relatability is easier as a single person or a small team, rather than as part of the machine.

Whichever of these classes it may be, we’ll have to find a name for it that starts with D.

A Word On Class

I used the word “class” here in the sense that it is used in fantasy roleplaying games - as representing a person’s experience in the particular trades that the game world allows for, divided into levels. All of us have elements from multiple classes, often represented in game by taking levels from multiple classes. For example, a university professor with a small social media following could be a 5th Level Academic and a 2nd Level Influencer. A social media influencer discussing philosophy or religion could be a 4th Level Influencer and a 3rd Level Cleric.

I emphasize this because in most social sciences, classes are pretty rigid and are designed not to have overlap. This heavily understates the complexity of the individual, and the fact that an individual can hold as many Organizing Principles as they please, as long as they can deal with the conflicts therein.

Take this as an invitation to clear your mental cabinets of any Organizing Principles you no longer use or that contradict ones you truly hold dear.

Conclusion

All these classes are necessary and important, but a balance between them must be struck for a functioning set of Organizing Principles around which society can be oriented. Without all of these voices, society will become unable to orientate itself and turn into a confused mess.

The proof is left as an exercise to the reader, as the exercise will serve as proof.

1. Scientific name: Homo Why-Are-We-Hereicus

2. Scientific name: Homo What-Is-Going-Onicus

3. Scientific name: Homo What-Am-I-Toldicus

4. Scientific name: Homo Revenge-Of-The-Nerdsicus

5. Scientific name: Homo Word-of-Mouthicus