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? CHAOS AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING ?
? ?
? by ?
? Mack Tanner ?
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"Law of the Perversity of Nature: You cannot successfully
determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter."
--Anonymous
Most of you have probably heard the story about the
clever young man who offers to go to work for a businessman
on a try-out basis in which the young man will be paid only
one cent on the first day, two cents for the second day, four
cent on the third day, and so on, the salary doubling each
day until the businessman decides whether or not he wants to
hire the young man on a permanent basis.
Thinking he's getting a good deal, the businessman takes
on the kid and a month slips by before the businessman
decides he won't keep the young man on. When the young man
presents the bill for his wages for thirty days, the
businessman discovers it's cheaper to sign over the company
than paying the wages.
The businessman has just learned the truth of compound
interest. By doubling a single cent thirty times, you end up
with $5,368,709.12 on the last doubling. The business man
owes the young man over 10 million dollars for the thirty
days of work.
While this common mathematical principle has long been
understood, it's only been in recent years that scientists
have examined and explored what impact compounding small sums
can have on what are called chaotic systems.
A chaotic system is any dynamic physical, biological, or
mathematical system in which a complicated set of data
interact in non-linear and non-repetitive way. (Anyone
interested in a more technical explanation of chaos theory
should check out a library book on the subject.)
Until recently, the philosophy of determinism was the
basis for much of scientific thought and direction. The
concept was that if we only knew the equations and had the
precise data, the future could be predicted. This concept is
best summarized in Laplace's famous statement:
"An intellect which at any given moment knew all the
forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of
the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast
enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense
into a single formula the movement of the greatest
bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom:
for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and
the future just like the past would be present before
its eyes." Pierre Simon de Laplace, 1749-1827
Chaos theory now shows how naive and ridiculous this
statement is. What scientists have come to understand in
only the last few years is that in all chaotic systems, very
small variations in input data can have a profound impact on
the future development of the system. The more the variables
at the initiation of the system, the greater the difficulty
in predicting what impact tiny increases or decrease in a
single variable will have on the progress of the system. In
a perverse sort of way, the longer term the prediction
attempted, the greater and more accurate the amount of
initial data that is required to make the prediction. As the
thousands, or millions of different variables act upon each
other, no human, nor human manufactured computing machine can
predict what the smallest change to any single variable will
do to the future of the system.
The most commonly cited example of a chaotic system is
the weather. Other chaotic systems include hydraulic
turbulence, biological species interaction, epidemiology, and
all human societies and economies.
Understanding chaos theory explains why scientists have
such a difficult time predicting the weather more than
twenty-four hour in advance and why they now realize that
they will never be able to make trustworthy long-term weather
predictions. It is simply impossible to collect the in-put
data in the quantity and with the degree of accuracy
necessary to make a credible long term prediction. (Of
course, the government will never admit this is good reason
to stop spending billions trying to do so!)
Understanding chaos theory also explains why it will be
impossible for humans to ever control the weather to produce
a desired result with no danger of unexpected and undesirable
results. Cloud seeding may make it rain over a dry Iowa corn
field, but the impact of that intervention might result in an
hurricane destroying a coastal city in Florida six months, or
six years in the future.
Given the complexity of the non-linear equations in
describing weather patterns, no scientist will ever be able
to prove that it was the cloud seeding that caused the
hurricane, nor, for that matter, that the cloud seeding
didn't contribute to the hurricane's development.
Humans can impact on or redirect a chaotic system, but
we can not prove or disprove exactly how the human
intervention impacted on the system over the long term. We
will know we changed the system, but we can never know how we
changed the system, nor what the system would have done if we
had changed nothing.
All human societies and all human economic systems are
chaotic systems. They develop and progress as a result of an
incredible amount of input in which any single individual may
do something that will have an unexpected and unpredictable
multiplier impact on how the system will operate at some
future point in time.
Chaos theory explains why social engineering can never
produce the expected result and why such schemes will always
produce unintended results. Chaos theory also explains why
neither the social engineers nor the critics of social
engineering can ever prove what real impact an attempt at
social engineering actually had on the economy and the
society.
We have been listening to a lot of political debate
about what caused the riots in Los Angeles. The
conservatives blame the deteriorating situation of the city
on social programs of the Great Society, welfare dependency,
government regulation, minimum wages laws, high taxes, and
moral decline while the liberals blame the failure of the
government to spend enough money, racism, police brutality,
illegal immigration, and the entire American corporate
cultural.
The entire debate is total bullshit!
There is absolutely no way anyone can scientifically
establish what things might have been done differently that
could have prevented the deterioration of our cities into the
current social morass. Furthermore, there is no way anyone
can scientifically demonstrate what new proposals for social
engineering will produce intended and only intended future
results.
The entire political debate over the domestic agenda
that goes on in connection with the current presidential
election is also total bullshit!
Nobody can explain scientifically exactly what caused
the recent recession nor place with any scientific certainty
the blame on any set of government actions. And nobody can
predict what impact all of the different proposed economic
solutions will actually have on the future world economic
situation.
Yet every politician is demanding that we spend a
trillion dollars on programs that they can't demonstrate will
work and they won't ever to be able to prove that they did
work once they are in place.
The national economy and its interrelation with the
world economy is a chaotic system even more complex,
unpredictable, and unmanageable than the world weather and
climate patterns. Any politician who claims he can control
it for the benefit of everyone without damaging large groups
of other people is either a fool, or a crook, or more likely
both.
The government can do lots of things that will have
short term impact on the economy. Political leaders can
lower interest rates, shift investment opportunities,
legislate prices, regulate exchanges, and all those things
will alter the economic future of the economy. But chaos
theory explains why we can not predict what the long term
result of such action will be and why the unintended results
may well be much more disastrous than the original problem
could have ever become if left alone and free of government
intervention.
All of this is scientific fact that can be described by
observation of prior events, the examination of mathematical
formulas and demonstrated with computer modeling.
But don't expect any political candidate, office holder,
member of congress, bureaucrat, or scientist working on a fat
government contract to admit the truth of this. For them to
do so would be for them to admit that the American federal
budget is being wasted on social engineering projects with no
guarantees that they will work or that they won't produce
disasters.
Chaos theory not only explains why economic central
planning can't work, it also explains why government
bureaucracy grows so fast.
Because political leaders and the bureaucrats refuse to
recognize that what they are trying to do can't be done, they
work under the delusion that they only thing preventing
ultimate success is more and better data. They excuse their
repeated failures by insisting they didn't have enough data,
*which is right*, but they refuse to understand that no
matter how much data they collect, it will never be enough to
allow them to predict and control what the economy is going
to do.
Instead, they collect and quantify increasingly greater
amounts of data as the cost escalates much like the salary of
the boy who stated out at a penny for the first day's work.
The more information they collect, the more difficult the
task of correlating, interpreting, and analyzing the
information they have. They hire ever larger numbers of
people who can be put to the task of collecting and handling
the information.
When things go wrong, the excuse is always a failure in
intelligence and the proposed solution is to hire more people
and gather more raw data. The more things go wrong, the more
money they spend trying to fix it. A fascinating conclusion
of chaos theory is that you cannot predict the result of the
fix, even if you try to put everything back exactly like it
was! When we used DDT to kill the bugs and found out that it
did more harm than good - in unexpected ways - the decision
to quit using DDT may have resulted in greater damage than
would have been the result of continuing its use.
But if the government can't control the economy for the
benefit of all, what is the government doing?
Our politician leaders and the bureaucrats they hire
play exactly the same role in the modern secular state that
pagan priests and shamans played in ancient civilizations.
Except, where ancient pagan priests and shamans promised to
magically control the weather, stop the earthquakes, and
curse the enemy with disease and pestilence, these modern
wizards and magicians promise us that everyone will have a
good job, decent medical care, and a useful education while
avoiding drugs, unwanted pregnancies, and crime in the
streets.
Fortunately for us all, the weather generally does treat
human populations pretty well, and despite the bungled
attempts of government interference, millions of free people,
all looking out for their own selfish interest, usually
succeed in creating a chaotic, but healthy economy that
provides most of us with all the good things of life and a
few of us the chance to get rich.
Like their ancient counterparts always claimed credit
for spring rains, sunny weather, and good harvests, the
modern political wizards and magicians claim credit for the
successful economy and insist that the taxpayers contribute
even more money to guarantee continued success in the future.
They are taking credit for things they didn't do and charging
us high prices for not doing it.
The amount they take for themselves and for those whom
they decide to bless with entitlement programs continues to
grow. Most of us are working five full months a year for the
sole purpose of feeding our monstrous and useless government
beast. And still the wizards are telling us they need more
money.
They will keep demanding more money for as long as the
taxpayer will pay it. The debt will grow like the wages owed
the clever young man until it reaches the point where the
whole government system will collapse under the weight of
it's own debt.
But don't worry. Just like the good weather stuck
around for long after humans gave up on paying pagan priests
to guarantee good harvests, the basic economy, the sum total
of all human interactions and economic exchanges, will still
be around long after the collapse of big government.
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