Friction and Synergy

Plato believed that reality lay in the realm of pure ideas. The reality of the senses is, as it were, merely shadows of this transcendent reality. Time, change, and diversity were all imperfections of the one perfect, changeless reality. He described the mathematical perfection of the Platonic solids as embodying the different elements. The belief in this geometric perfection infused the prevailing cosmology. The fixed stars seemed to exemplify a timeless heavenly perfection, while regularity of planetary movements showed a geometric order unlike the chaos of the world below. Truth lay in this elegant, simple perfection. The world was false and imperfect because it was messy, pushing back against our designs, deviating from the ideal toward which it is directed.

Plato likewise sought an ideal political order ruled by the wise, who guide the ignorant masses to perform their proper social role. This enlightened despotism would lead a frictionless society, with all things in their proper place, all power distributed according to merit. The proper ordering of society was to reflect the proper ordering of the soul, with reason ruling over the passions and appetites. Such was the totalitarian logic of Plato, for whom simplicity and order were divine, which complexity and change were signs of corruption. It was therefore an ethical and political prerogative to fight this complexity and bring order to chaos. This drive for simplicity, hierarchy, and order would persist as a running thread throughout Western civilization. 

Power operates by simplification. Our very ability to perceive and interact with the world involves a capacity to tune out portions of it and pick out certain parts of it as relevant. In this way we are tuned into a particular frequency of reality. This embodied simplification of perception is carried further in our modifications of our environment. We create paths and structures that order our environment according to our needs. We develop laws, traditions, and social norms that govern our social behavior. We find forms of mutual regulation to generate common understandings through what Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action.

Power hierarchies emerge when this interaction becomes asymmetric and one person has the power to regulate the behavior of another but not vice-versa. Sovereignty lies in the ability to regulate the behavior of masses of people. The sovereign becomes the one according to whose will the design and regulation of society is oriented. Society becomes an object for the sovereign to mold and shape according to his grand designs. Of course, the sovereign cannot do this alone. He needs enforcers who carry out his orders. These armed forces are drilled into regiments that act as a cohesive unit, following orders without question to carry out their mission. This order is then imposed upon their targets, subduing populations and commanding obedience.

Society itself operates as a vast machine, which Lewis Mumford calls the megamachine. This machine built the great wonders of the ancient world, such as the pyramids and ziggurats of the Bronze Age. The machine operated through simplifications which made society more legible to power. Anthropologist James C. Scott describes the rise of “grain states” whose power was built on grain monoculture, which matured at a predictable time every year and was easy to quantify and collect as taxes, perfect for running a bureaucratic state. Other simplifications were achieved through urban planning, census-taking, and even such phenomena as family names. The megamachine required a society in which people and things could readily be catalogued and organized into their proper place.

Capital

The ancient megamachine began to recede following the Late Bronze Age collapse, but another megamachine later emerged with the rise of capital. Capital is essentially quantified power. It is the measure of one’s ability to mobilize resources. Whereas feudal society accorded such power by hereditary titles, capitalism is a system of competitive power. Under this system, different capitalists compete to accumulate capital, which they use to expand their control and thereby accumulate more capital. If one does not continue accumulating capital, one will be surpassed by others and destroyed. In this way, capitalism is characterized by monopolistic competition – always striving toward monopoly, but never quite attaining it. Under this system, no one person achieves absolute sovereignty, but a competitive ruling class continually seeks new ways to secure their sovereignty. 

The relationship between capital and the state is a complex one. Capital cannot exist without the state. It lacks the enforcement mechanisms to maintain its power on its own, and relies on the violent apparatus of the state to enforce its claims. Yet the nation-state is likewise dependent on capital. Capital accumulates power through dispossession and then uses that dispossession to keep the people dependent on them for employment and housing. They create a situation in which they hold the economy hostage and destroy people’s livelihoods if retaliated against. Capital further exerts its influence over the state by constituting a ruling class with easy access to the levers of power. Capitalists make large political donations, own mainstream news sources, donate to universities, run public relations campaigns, fund think-tanks, and sometimes run for office themselves, but more generally travel in the same circles as the political class. They attend the same public events, send their children to the same elite schools, live in the same neighborhoods, and regard one another as their peers. The political class and capitalist class mutually belong to what C. Wright Mills called the power elite.

The nation-state has its own interests and priorities. Since the capitalist class is a plurality of different interests often at odds with one another, the state must mediate between those interests while also beholden to a base of voters. The voters must be attended to, but if the influence of capital extends to all mainstream parties, the voters themselves have only a choice between platforms that serve capital in different ways. The masses may organize in ways that force a compromise between their interests and those of capital, such as through unions, advocacy organizations, civil institutions, and social movements. Such popular movements have in the past secured significant social gains in the realms of civil rights, labor protections, and social safety nets. Yet capital managed to regroup and usher in a global counterinsurgency known as neoliberalism, which globalized supply chains, established an international order that coerced states into compliance with capital demands, and crushed labor by securing free movement of capital across the globe while restricting the movement of labor.

Under this coalition of state and capital, a technocratic regime emerges in which society is regulated according to the prerogatives of capital accumulation. Cities are developed not for the purpose of providing housing for all, but to increase property values and bring in a wealthier tax base. A process of accumulation by dispossession occurs through privatization, financialization, manipulation of crises, and state redistribution. Mergers and acquisitions, asset stripping, and outright scams and ponzi schemes become paths for intensifying inequality. All of society is organized to direct its surplus toward capital. Capital accumulation is ultimately nothing but the reproduction of social inequality. It is the continuous sabotage of the commons for private appropriation.

Stratification

Surplus populations are dispossessed of housing, criminalized, and incarcerated. These people, once stripped of all economic value, are discarded, dehumanized, and vilified. Such people are seen not only by capital but by those just above them in the social hierarchy as disposable, an inconvenience at best and an existential threat at worst. State violence is encouraged, and carceral solutions are sought in lieu of a social safety net that continues to be dismantled. Politicians fear being seen as “soft on crime.” People learn to defend what little social standing they have by joining in on the cruelty against those beneath them.

This process of scapegoating promises to eliminate friction for participants in the system. If only those people could be dealt with, everyone else’s problems would be solved. So long as someone else has it worse, people are content to keep them down rather than unite with them in solidarity against a system that exploits them all. Mass incarceration, deportation, slum clearance and sweeps all get mass support because the people affected are all the wrong sort of people.

For the power elite, the division of society along social strata allows for easier management of society as a whole. While capitalists must compete with one another to expand their power, they limit competition from below by expanding the gap between them and those beneath them and increasing entry barriers to joining their ranks. Systems of stratification based on race or gender are not merely “social problems,” but serve a key political and economic function by intensifying this power differential.

Some seek to assert themselves against those they see above and below them. They resent those they see as elites as well as those vilified classes below them. They resent the present social hierarchy because they believe their rightful place is at the top of that hierarchy, and they resent that section of the elite that they perceive as holding them back from their birthright. This is in essence the appeal of fascism. Fascists view themselves as the natural aristocracy, born to rule like Plato’s philosopher-kings. Fascism promises not justice, but vengeance. It offers up the marginalized as a sacrificial offering to the bloodlust of those who feel they’ve been deprived of their due reward.

The ruling class themselves are accustomed to viewing themselves as the natural elite. They view their wealth and privilege as earned, a reflection of their true merit. They promote narratives that portray themselves as hard-working, intelligent, and well-bred, and they very much believe these narratives themselves. They justify their power by convincing themselves that they really are the natural elite and were born to rule. The ideology of such people inclines toward genetic or biological explanations of social stratification. Some people, according to this view, are simply more genetically fit to rule, while others are more suited to servitude. Efforts to produce equitable outcomes are “social engineering,” interfering with nature by forcing the equality of unequals.

Reduction

We all would like life to go smoother, for our plans to manifest just as we envision them. Yet when we push, the world pushes back against us. We find ways to reduce this resistance, to flatten the terrain ahead of us and develop clear pathways. Yet we seek to flatten not only physical resistance, but also social resistance. Power seeks to flatten social differences into manageable categories that can more easily be manipulated. Class, race, and gender categories allow for a system of social stratification in which everyone has a stake in defending their position from those below them, even as they find themselves crushed by those above them.

We try to reduce the friction below us to compensate for the friction imposed from above that we are unable to resist. To belong to the ruling class is to face as little friction as possible, and the masses would rather aspire to this position than lift up their neighbor and overthrow systems of oppression. Yet the ruling class also struggles to reduce friction. They must constantly innovate in ways to keep the population manageable and appropriate from the commons. Like the Red Queen, they must continue moving to stay in place.

The ideology of control seeks to level the world and shape it according to some grand design. It seeks to overcome friction by overwhelming it with sheer force. This is the principle of conquest, of imperialism, of technocracy, of statecraft. It pervades our economic system. Fossilized carbon is extracted from the ground to fuel further growth rather than live within Earth’s ecological limits, even as we test those limits every day. It is the ideology of the machine, of mass manufacturing, standardization, regimentation, and predictability. It is a project seeking to reduce the complexities of human life into manageable bites of information that can render the human as machine.

This vision of human as machine is generally understood to have first emerged with René Descartes, later worked into a mechanistic understanding of physics by Sir Isaac Newton. Yet we must also keep in mind the socioeconomic setting in which Descartes operated. A generation before he was born, the Dutch East India Company was founded. This was a new phenomenon: a joint-stock company, collectively owned by investors who each had a share in its profits. This led to the development of the first stock market, in which investors would spend the day speculating on stock prices, buying and selling constantly to maximize profits. In other words, in the 17th century Netherlands he inhabited, Descartes experienced an early iteration of capitalism. It was not the industrial capitalism that would emerge in England toward the end of the 18th century, but it was certainly one in which markets, debt, speculation, and corporate power were beginning to emerge as major themes. 

Reduction

The market is a setting that lends itself to instrumental rationality. In market relations, both seller and consumer act from a place of calculating self-interest, each trying to get the best deal for themselves. Supply and demand, according to economic orthodoxy, are sloping curves that meet neatly in some precise intersection where prices are determined. It is not so simple in reality, with power playing a role in not only setting prices but also shaping consumer demand, but the idea of “self-regulation” is a central pillar of market ideology. The Market is upheld to hold all things in balance. Its wisdom exceeds that of us mere mortals, an emergent intelligence distributing goods with maximal efficiency. It is hubris to question the wisdom of the Market and its providential Invisible Hand. It promises a frictionless automatic operation of the economy, if only we get out of its way. If it fails to deliver on this promise, it can always be blamed on government interference with the market. The market cannot fail: it can only be failed.

Opposed to market ideology lies the ideology of central planning. This was the governing ideology of the Soviet Union, which rapidly industrialized what had been a largely agrarian economy within a little over a decade. Its five-year plans outlined national development priorities and determined the production and distribution needed to achieve those priorities. This system of state planning was hailed as an economic miracle by its proponents while ruthlessly denounced irrational folly by its market-supporting opponents. Both sides had a point: Soviet planning proved wildly successful in meeting its development goals, becoming an industrial power quickly enough to defeat Nazi Germany by the end of its third five-year plan and seeing record improvements in longevity, nutrition, and childhood mortality, yet it also suffered from frequent supply chain issues, with stores frequently full of empty shelves. Central planning proved great at achieving the development goals of the planners, but their plans could not encompass the day-to-day demands of consumers.

The two approaches are not as different as they at first appear. Every capitalist is a central planner. They lay out their own extended plans to bring in more profit by directing production according to specified targets and budgeting for supplies, wages, and other anticipated costs. The market is supposed to balance these plans in a kind of equilibrium, but that only works if all capitalists are equally powerful. Yet the nature of capitalism ensures that this cannot be so. Each capitalist seeks to accumulate more capital, and with increased capital comes increased market share. Thus each capitalist is a central planner to the extent of the market they control, and the goal of their planning is to extend their control over the market. Today, the top corporations and billionaires control more of the global economy than Joseph Stalin could ever dream of.

In fact, statecraft and markets arose together. The bureaucratic regulation of society created standardized legal frameworks in which markets were able to operate. It was the unified nation-state that allowed for national and global markets. The state’s prerogative is to make markets work for the maintenance of its power and authority. Capital’s prerogative is to seek a competitive advantage from the state. They are mutually interdependent but also at odds as each seeks to derive its power from the other. Likewise, the capitalist class and the political class are part of the same “power elite” to which C. Wright Mills referred, occupying the same social strata and intermingling in the same social spaces. Together they exercise a rationalized form of power based on quantification and simplification. Together, they engineer society for the smooth accumulation of power.

This drive to simplify, to quantify and control, is essential to the operation of power. It seeks to render the world legible to exert control over it. This reductionist impulse makes the world manageable and exploitable. This reduction is necessary for conducting scientific experiments and feats of engineering, but this mechanistic thought is readily applied to the manipulation of people and engineering of society. To reduce someone is to control them. To greet them as an equal is to be open to their plenitude and live with the friction of one’s interaction with them. We must learn to work with them in a give-and-take between their interests and our own.

Democracy

The world of the living is one of reciprocity. In exerting our will, we encounter the limitations of others. This friction frustrates us and we seek to rid ourselves of it. Yet such a frictionless world is a lonely one devoid of human connection. Only when we are vulnerable with one another and willing to encounter one another in our complexity can we live ethically and co-create a world for mutual benefit. In working with the friction, we create synergy. This is how a democratic society works. Democracy is not something that happens in the voting booth. It belongs to our cooperative nature as a social species. It is the web of interdependence we weave in our daily lives. It is the realm of the public sphere, in which ideas are discussed, issues are debated, conflicts addressed, compromises reached.

Democracy is how people solve problems as equals without subjugation, domination, and exploitation. Democratic governance is not statecraft: it is the antithesis of the state. The state is an instrument of power that resists democracy. Democratic forces seek to win power from the state for the people, while state forces seek to restrict democracy to concentrate power in the hands of the ruling class. Democracy is likewise opposed to the social hierarchy that the state seeks to protect. Democracy is also opposed to capitalism, as well as any other economic system based on exploitation. It is opposed to hierarchies of race, gender, class, caste, and other systems that empower one group at the expense of others. It insists that decisions be made by reason and deliberation rather than by money or access to power.

Democracy is messy. It is full of friction as people’s interests and agendas clash and problems are debated and fought over. Yet it is also collaborative. When done right, it synergizes the knowledge and abilities of the people to accomplish what they could not do alone. It depends upon a democratic spirit, a willingness to cooperate and work out problems. A healthy democracy will imbue people with this spirit, emphasizing cooperation and co-creation over the frictionless ideal of authoritarianism. Democratic discourse must resist authoritarian attempts to co-opt it. Democracy is not opposed to delegation of tasks, but those delegates must be accountable to the people.

Democracy is the governance of the commons. The commons is that shared space of natural and social wealth which we actively participate in cultivating. It is a shared pattern language of our participation with the world around us. It is the economic synergy by which we co-create wealth. Capital and the state each seek to appropriate the commons in their own ways. Yet the commons continues to reassert itself, which is why these forces must constantly innovate in ways to reinforce their control over it. A drive for democracy is met with a drive for dominance and control.

Unfolding

Synergy yields complexity. Self-organizing systems achieve what Stuart Kauffman refers to as the “razor’s edge” of order and chaos. An overly ordered system is rigid and inflexible while an overly chaotic system can become unraveled by a small perturbation, but a self-organizing system is adaptive and resilient, maintaining its form in the midst of change. This is what a democratic society looks like. It is the way a society self-organizes to create culture and institutions. It avoids the dominating impulse that seeks to exert power over society and yields to the co-creative power of collaboration.

Opposed to the authoritarian idealism of the Platonic system is an organic conception of nature in which form is emergent rather than descended from on high. It unfolds through the interaction of its components. Each step in its unfolding opens a new universe of possibility. It is ceaselessly creative. It unfolds in stages, creating centers that strengthen other centers. This was a key insight of architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander. Alexander found that certain buildings seem to have more life to them than others. Much of modern architecture follows a technocratic program of efficient technocratic rationality, resulting in a cold, lifeless built environment, while traditional architectural styles seem to have a vibrancy to them.

Alexander identified fifteen design principles that living architecture displays: levels of scale, strong centers, thick boundaries, alternating repetition, positive space, good shape, local symmetries, deep interlock and ambiguity, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, the void, simplicity and inner calm, and non-separateness. I won’t attempt to define every one of these, but essentially what these principles express is the organic unfolding of wholes. This unfolding is a collaborative effort: a synergy between the forces involved. A craftsman works with the resistance of their medium to produce an object that is given life through their interaction with it that a prefabricated object lacks. Where the Platonic solids are perfect in their simplicity, it is this “roughness” of the emergent object that produces a more complex, living perfection.

This unfolding process applies to cities, as Jane Jacobs saw in her writings on urban development, with living communities unfolding in small steps where large-scale development tends to flatten them. It works in democratic systems, with the synergy of the community finding novel solutions to problems. It is also, according to Alexander, found in nature. When an organism is growing in the womb, it is not built up as first a head, then a torso, then arms and legs, and so on, but as a whole subdividing into new wholes that strengthen the center. The fifteen principles he identified are organic principles, which the vast variety of natural phenomena demonstrate. Good design, whether it is buildings, cities, crafts, or institutions, follows these organic principles. Artifice needn’t contradict nature, but only does so when it goes against this natural order.

We must seek this natural order by emptying ourselves of our need to control everything and enter into synergy with our neighbor and our environment. This process of self-emptying, or kenosis, allows us to be attentive to the tensions around us and work with them in a spirit of collaboration. We become collaborators with our environment rather than dominators. In learning to work with friction, we can co-create a living world in which dynamic order is allowed to emerge. In this kenotic ethic, we make ourselves open to complexity in others as we co-create complexity in the world. In this spirit of openness and collaboration, we find the Logos unfolding through us. We are brought to a state of unity-in-complexity, articulating the whole in novel ways. We become one with the creative heart of the cosmos.