Control versus Freedom
(How Spontaneous-Order is the Secret Ingredient of Freedom)
Contents
Spontaneous-Order Has the Most Powerful Enemies
12 Decades of U.S. History, as a Mystery.
Some of the Parts: Systems of Human Interaction
A one-dimensional Hierarchy of Control
Centralized Direct Control. The Controller issues commands to every part.
What to Do about All the Problems with Control
Why the Military Loses Some Control
Workarounds for the Flaws in Control
The Systems Thinking of Transport Geography
Cities: How They are Born and Grow
Houston, We Have a Control Problem
It’s Not a Housing Crisis — It’s A Planning Crisis
The Cities That Government Created
Introduction
You would think that Americans, being Americans, when asked whether or not more freedom would be a good thing, we would all say yes, and probably once they would have. But in a September 2023 RealClear Opinion poll, one-third of Democratic voters said that Americans have “too much freedom.”
In fact, by 2023, if you judged leftists by their actions, they all believed that too much freedom was causing most of our problems, and that could be fixed by giving government more control over essentially all of our institutions and every part of our lives. I.e. less freedom for us, more control for government regulators/ (We discuss this in the long-form project titled GovSwamped.)
If you are an American who would instead answer, ‘Yes, more freedom is good’, then we would like to ask you, ‘What is the secret ingredient of freedom?’ Because it seems that there really is one.
Spontaneous-Order is the secret ingredient of freedom, we say in this book. But Spontaneous-Order (sometimes called ‘Self-Organization) is a thing that is becoming less and less taught, talked about, or known of in the 21st century. That is not an oversight or accident. Spontaneous-Order has enemies here in the 21st century, just as freedom has enemies. Very powerful and numerous enemies.
In the 21st century, Spontaneous-Order is the secret ingredient of freedom, but it is fast becoming the missing ingredient. Because another claim we make is that leftists lie when they say that they “love democracy”. Most leftists don’t love freedom and democracy. They love control, lies, and hypocrisy. And they oppose freedom, and they hate Spontaneous-Organization.
Spontaneous-Order Has the Most Powerful Enemies
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek said in his famous book, The Road to Serfdom, “The fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of is the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion.”
And seventy years later, leftists were in a position to dismiss that idea out of hand, if they still admitted that it existed at all.
“…he [Hayek] clung to his liberal dream of a ‘spontaneous,’ unplanned, self-sustaining order…” And “A hostile witness… might rashly conclude that he had seen and understood nothing.”
Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (2014)
...neoliberal recipes Hayek embraces are apt to increase this fragility more than to diminish it. It also may become clear how those outside the neoliberal tradition need to rethink the images of self-organization, creativity, and human freedom...
William E. Connolly, The Fragility of
Things: Self-
Organizing Processes,
Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (p. 6) (2013)
For the important question today... is the question whether those are right who think the course of prudence and proved wisdom is to trust to time and natural forces to lead us with an invisible hand to the economic harmonies; or those who fear that there is no design but our own, and that the invisible hand is merely our own bleeding feet moving through pain and loss to an uncertain and unprofitable destination.
John Maynard Keynes "Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies" The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (1981)
...we need to question our reflexive belief — or unwarranted expectation, if you prefer — that emergent or self-organizing phenomena are some how always (or, at least, generally) for the best.
Steven Shaviro, Against Self-Organization (2009)
It was hard to find these quotations, that is, quotes of leftists openly and directly attacking S-O in public because they rarely do. Here’s why:
1. It is very difficult to make a rational case that Spontaneous-Organization (S-O) does not work better than control, because it usually does. And it became virtually impossible to make that claim in the era that followed the collapse of the USSR in 1989. That famous failure of control versus freedom caused Frances Fukuyama to claim, in The End of History, that the long struggle between Marxism/Control and Democracy/Free-Enterprise was over once and for all, and Democracy/Free-Enterprise had won, and the system of freedom + free enterprise was the only possible future. Therefore, history had reached its conclusion. And he was right to say the Communist-Rightist struggle had led to the conclusion that freedom and free enterprise worked better, even if that didn’t turn out to exactly be the end of history. (In the long-form OverRegulated, we discuss this whole leftist web of untruths about the late 1980s and what happened next, and how the leftists claim that an Era of Deregulation occurred in the U.S., a claim that is false regarding America — where no Era of Deregulation occurred, but rather the opposite — but, strangely, it is true about most of the rest of the world which, as leftist/communism fell out of favor, embraced free enterprise, in a Worldwide Era of Deregulation that really did happen, but was essentially never reported on by the U.S. media, and that later Euro-leftists would start to call the era of “Neoliberalism”, and blame on it, and ‘too much freedom’, all the problems actually caused by leftism. It’s complicated, made that way by leftist lying, but interesting, if you like to know the details about what really happened in that time.)
2. So the leftists, who control media and academia, have preferred to try to disappear the concept of Spontaneous-Order rather than give it public attention by, necessarily ineffectually, disagreeing with it. leftist elites may pretend that Spontaneous-Organization does not exist, but they understand very well that Spontaneous-Organization does exist, and what it is, and that it poses an existential threat to leftism.
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12 Decades of U.S. History, as a Mystery
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, European leftism (communist socialism, we could call it) was imported into America. Its goals and means were antithetical to the American beliefs of that time. Let us call those beliefs the American way: representative government; the rule of law; free-enterprise; individual rights, and so on.
In the succeeding twelve decades, about half of U.S. elections were won by candidates who were on the left and about half by candidates who were on the right. But in those 120 years, essentially the whole leftist agenda (i.e. the platform of the socialist-communist workers parties of the early 1900s), was enacted by U.S. government regulators. As the size and scope of government, and the percentage of U.S. productivity that it consumed, unrelentingly increased, the leftism of the early 1900s replaced what had been the American way.
How did this happen?
It’s an important question, because we are unlikely to be able to defeat the leftists and take back our freedoms if we don't really know how they removed them.
What Now?
In this book, we will try to show that leftists have succeeded in replacing the Spontaneous-Order that was the main ingredient of our freedom with control of our institutions by leftists. We will try to show that by taking a deep look at what Spontaneous-Order is. It’s beautiful stuff. It’s the main ingredient of freedom.
Urban Legend and the Paths of Desire
You may have heard about the college that, once upon a time, constructed the buildings for a new campus but intentionally did not put in sidewalks to connect the buildings. Instead, the builders waited a year and allowed the students to create paths by walking on the grass. Then when it became obvious where the sidewalks belonged, the builders simply paved the paths.
It seems like a good idea: Let the people who use the system design it by using it. Or you could even think of it as letting the system of walkways design itself. Not only does the college get its walks put in the right places, but it does not have to pay planners to decide where to put them.
People who told the story of the self-designing college sidewalks did not usually say at which college it happened. Or if they said which one, they were not sure. So were the walks real-life, an urban legend?
Several discussions on the internet addressed this question. In September 2015, one was on The Straight Dope Message Board. The question of where or whether the self-designed walkways really ever happened was not quickly answered; everybody who commented had heard the story but no one was completely sure of the details.
CynicalGabe
05-25-2005, 09:57 PM
I heard this method as a common way of designing footpaths in Denmark.
Squink
05-25-2005, 10:19 PM
The story has been around for decades and is so logical that it's in books on design. Scientific American ran an article on similar methods of footpath design in the late 70's to mid 80's. Sorry I can't pin it closer than that.
friedo
05-25-2005, 10:31 PM
I have heard the same story about the Apple Computer campus in Cupertino, CA. I have no idea if its true or not.
js_africanus
05-27-2005, 12:39 PM
While I was at the Univ. of Oregon, I remarked to a graduate student in landscape architecture that people who plan walkways should do exactly what the OP describes. He told me that was how Thomas Jefferson laid out the walkways at the University of Virginia.
Interestingly, the commenters seemed to at least entertain the idea that self-designing walks might work as a good solution, even though many of them seem to have been landscape architects or other such professional planners, who might have been thought to be averse to a solution which did not involve planning and control. Anyway, there was an answer to the question, urban legend or true story?
It was finally answered by Patty O'Furniture who explained why the story of the college paths is a myth:
Patty O'Furniture
Something like this would never fly now, or as far back as building permits have been required. Building plans without sidewalks would never make it past the permit office.
In the U.S. in the 21st century, real paths which create themselves, without the need for designers, are de facto illegal. The government regulators simply won't allow them anymore.
Professional planners see spontaneously appearing walkways as an enemy. An article in the British newspaper The Guardian describes them as, "Desire Paths: The Illicit Trails That Defy the Urban Planners". While the article quotes J.M. Barrie, who didn't hate them and called them, "Paths that have made themselves", the reality is that government regulators hate the desire paths.
The spontaneous emergence of order in the form of ideally located walking paths is not mythical, it happens all the time. The "myth" part is that government regulators will allow it if they can prevent it. In the real world, controllers typically put up barricades to prevent people from walking on the desire paths. Government regulations require planner-designed walkways, even if they cost extra and are in the wrong places. Freedom to walk where you wanted had to be stamped out.
In the 21st century, everyone seemed to believe that everything would work better if it were controlled by someone. But were they right?
Some of the Parts: Systems of Human Interaction
We can think of our world as consisting of lots and lots of systems.
-nations
-economies
-courts
-businesses
-sciences
-towns
-political parties
-languages
-families
In this book, we will look at human systems. Not human organisms, but systems of which humans are the parts. Systems that we will call Systems of Human Interaction (SoHIs). It seems that some of these produce Spontaneous-Order (S-O).
What kinds of systems operate by Control? Machines, obviously. But also lots of Systems of Human Interaction operate by Control: Militaries; Prisons; Ships at Sea; school systems, and others.
What SoHIs operate by S-O? We will look at lots of examples. S-O (as opposed to Control) is a way that a lot of different kinds of systems can operate. But, in the 21st century, few of our SoHIs still operated by S-O.
That was because leftists/Controllists had been converting many of our SoHIs from S-O to Control. And those of our SoHIs that were only partially controlled became entirely or almost entirely controlled by government regulators. A lot of books discuss and chronicle this conversion (including OverRegulated and GovSwamped).
But in the 2020s, few members of Generation X and Millennials were more than dimly aware of what spontaneous order or self-organization were. And members of Generation Z seemed to barely comprehend the idea that systems of human interaction could operate in any other way than by Control. Any possibility of spontaneous order occurring order was literally almost unthinkable.
As of this writing, knowledge about S-O has become so sparse that it is essentially secret. Some people, the people who want more Control, deny that S-O is even real.
No matter how many examples there are of spontaneous order emerging out of chaos, there are still those who cannot bring themselves to believe that such a system, or lack thereof, is possible. In previous essays, I have shown that spontaneous order is not only possible but that it is already happening all around us.
Brittany Hunter, "The English Language Is the Product of Spontaneous Order", Center for Individualism (2018)
Many things such as society, economic activities and markets, and cultural behavior are apparently man-made but grow on their own to reach some kind of self-organization.
Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)
Brittany Hunter was right; there are people who cannot bring themselves to believe that S-O really happens (and the English language is a great example of S-O, as we will see in Part II). But, in the 21st century, many educated people do admit that that S-O is a real thing, a real way that some of our SoHIs operate. But, as we said, Spontaneous-Organization has numerous powerful enemies. No wonder S-O has been under so much attack that it now seems to be dissolving entirely, in danger of disappearing from the public consciousness altogether.
How Some Systems Work
But the idea of this book is that S-O is the best way that most of our SoHIs can operate. Much better than as Hierarchies of Control (HoCs)
A one-dimensional Hierarchy of Control
The arrows represent the interaction of Control, as a command which the controller gives to a controlled part, which then passes it on, and so on.
This is the same system as, say a diagram of a corporation: A hierarchy of levels, each of which is controlled, and passes the control on to the next level.
A hierarchy of Control is a chain of command, with people as the parts.
Centralized Direct Control. The Controller issues commands to every part.
This diagram looks different, but it is a picture of the same system: Centralized Control. The Controller issues commands to every part.
In all controlled systems, the aggregate behavior of the system is the Control of the controller. The interaction among the parts is Control.
This, on the other hand, is a system that operates by Spontaneous-Organization; there is no hierarchy of control or central control. The parts interact with each other in something like a network. The aggregate behavior of the system is the interaction among the parts, that is the system.
It’s Spontaneous Order
It’s how stock market indexes keep track of stock prices, when the people buying and selling the stocks did not intend to alter the Dow or the S&P 500. If measure is made of the aggregate price for a stock at the end of a trading day, what individual trader intentionally created that price? It may be that no share of stock was traded at that exact price. No one intended to create the price or knew what it would be; the interaction of market created the price, spontaneously.
That is how college students walking around can create walkways in right places when the students did not intend to do that. And, as we will see, it is how the vocabulary and grammar of the English language changes, even though the speakers only intended to talk to each other, not change alter the evolution of the language. And it is how humanity, as a species, changed over hundreds of thousands of years, even though every individual human was just living his or her life, not intending to change the species.
S-O and Decentralization
This is why decentralization so often makes complex systems of human interaction work better. The well-known Network Effect is the result of the fact that, in S-O systems, more parts produce more order. Decentralized systems do not have a centralized command but consist of numerous and diffuse parts, each controlling itself. In other words, freedom. More parts means that a system can produce more value and is more stable, as we will see in a later project.
In a linear chain of parts, a force or information or something passes from one part to the next. By the word ‘linear’ we will mean simply, in a line, in one dimension, like links in a chain. A simple machine can work in this way if, say, energy, is passed from one part to the next. Or like the sequence of parts in a Rube Goldberg contraption.
For our purposes, “linear” just means: Organized in a line, a 1-dimenional sequence of parts.
In a System of Human Interaction that is organized in this way, a Command can be passed from the head/first part of the system, then to the next and the next and so on. We call this Controlled System of Human Interaction.
The Commands of the Controller move through the parts of the people-machine like energy through a mechanical system.
Lots of our System of Human Interaction (SoHIs) seem to be organized in this way. Examples of SoHIs that are organized by Control would include:
— ships at sea
— militaries
— schools
— prisons
(In these SoHIs and others, some of the parts are people, but not all are. SoHIs can include parts such as tools, vehicles, buildings, books, computers, money, and lots of others.)
If a Controlled system has a lot of parts (many
of those parts being people), then usually the system is organized as tiers or
levels, with several, perhaps a great many, parts on each level. Picture the
organizational chart of a corporation or an army. The Controller or Controllers
are on the top level. The system operates by the controlled parts acting on
orders or according to rules/edicts created and issued by the Controller, and
which descend down the controlled levels. There can be thousands, or hundreds
of thousands, even hundreds of millions of parts on the 
lower
levels, the ones controlled by the commander(s).
Some Controllists think that all of our Systems of Human Interaction really operate as Controlled systems. Those people can imagine no other kind of system. They are the leftist equivalent of the religious people who believe that an omnipotent Controller god controls and causes all the events in the universe.
Meanwhile, some other people understand that not all SoHIs do operate by Control. Some operate in a different way. But those people still think that all of our SoHIs should operate by Control. Those people are leftists, by definition. Leftism is Controllism.
Hierarchies of Control are one-dimensional: An array of parts, or levels of parts, in a line. Each part passing on the Control that starts with the Controller.
Such systems can be very efficient, but, especially as they get bigger (and many systems of human interaction have millions or billions of parts), they become more subject to various kinds of failure.
Failures of Control
Communication is invariably associated with misunderstanding because mechanisms and means of information processing at the receiver differ from those at the sender. The significance of information is ascribed to the increase in thermodynamic entropy in the receiver system that results from execution of the received message...
Mahesh Karnani, Kimmo Pääkkönen, Arto Annila, "The Physical Character of Information" Proceedings of the Royal Society of Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences (2009)
Famously, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A purely linear, Controlled system will fail work less well if one of the parts fails or works less well, and that is, of course, a major drawback of that kind of system.
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
For want of a rider, the battle was lost.
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost…
The Horseshoe Nail was already an ancient proverb when Benjamin Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack in 1758. In the 21st century this kind of problem with linear, controlled systems was called the Single Point of Failure (SPof).
SPOF and the Failure of Control
Engineers have always fretted about SPOFs in
industrial machines. So have military leaders who handle logistics. And
financial regulators 
confronted the issue during the 2008 financial
crisis, not just inside separate banks, but across the entire banking
ecosystem.
Gillian Tett, “Executives Are Only Now Waking Up to Their Collective Blind Spots: We Learnt from the Financial Crisis That When Networks Lack Diversity They Are Vulnerable To A Single Shock”, Financial Times (2022)
In a linear hierarchy of Control, if there is a failure to carry out the command, or to correctly pass the Control on to the next part, then the whole system fails to produce the desired output. I.e. the output of the system is either nothing or an error. Sometimes that is called a Single Point of Failure (SPOF).
As the Financial Times article said, any system of human interaction that operates as a hierarchy of Control may be subject to this kind of failure. We go further into the subject of fragility, instability, and other kinds of failure elsewhere.
A single point of failure (SPOF) is a potential risk posed by a flaw in the design, implementation or configuration of a circuit or system. SPOF refers to one fault or malfunction that can cause an entire system to stop operating.
Paul Kervan, Tech Target (2022)
The occurrence of SPoFs in systems increases as the size of — the number of parts in — the system increases. In linear systems, a small error that is introduced in or by one of the sequence of parts grows larger in later parts. So more moving parts you add to a linear system the more likelihood of error and failure, and of greater error and failure.
To anyone who has studied the deterioration of precision in the course of a long calculation, the answer is clear. This deterioration is due, as pointed out before, to the accumulation of errors by super-position, and even more by the amplification of errors committed early in the calculation...
John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (1958)
In linearly organized systems where the parts are complex, such as humans, small errors often appear — as noise in the system — and are exacerbated as the errors are passed through the system, and can cause the system to fail. The fact this doesn’t constantly happen to (most) of us, caused Von Neumann to suspect that a human brain may not actually be a computer. We can look at systems which are organized linearly, and see how such failures do happen.
Such failures can be disastrous, or hilarious, if the system is, say, the parlor game called “The Game of Telephone” (in Britain “Chinese Whispers”), or just “telephone”.
telephone, n. a game in which a sentence or phrase becomes distorted by being passed along to the next person in a whisper.
Oxford English Dictionary (2019) (also see a video on “Chinese Whispers”)
The Telephone Game: A Funny Failure to Communicate
Communication is invariably associated with misunderstanding because mechanisms and means of information processing at the receiver differ from those at the sender. The significance of information is ascribed to the increase in thermodynamic entropy in the receiver system that results from execution of the received message... Information theory has its roots in statistical mechanics...
Mahesh Karnani, Kimmo Pääkkönen, Arto Annila, "The physical character of information" Proceedings of the Royal Society of Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences (2009)
Telephone is a system of human interaction even if it is just a game. It is a Controlled, linear, machine-like system, where the people the parts, organized serially. Adding more people-parts will make the systems operate more poorly, resulting in hilarity. So it demonstrates some of the weaknesses of linear systems.
Obviously, the susceptibility of our 21st century Controlled SoHIs to disastrous failure is no joke. Adding more people in the Game of Telephone increases the odds that the system will fail in the end. But for Controlled systems to grow, more parts have to be added, increasing the probability that the system will fail. Leftists love to blame the failures of our systems, such as our economy and our financial system, on capitalism and too much freedom; but the most common real cause is replacing freedom, as S-O, with control by government regulators. In the book, The Mysterious Freedom of English, we take an in-depth look at one of our communications systems of human interaction (SoHIs) that, unlike the Telephone game, worked better as more parts were added and the system got bigger. And it was one of those rare SoHIs which seemed to be subjected to no government control.
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What to Do about All the Problems with Control
If systems which are organized linearly and the interaction is Control, have so many drawbacks then how we can give critical, life-and-death missions to some of our biggest Controlled systems, such as airliners and corporations? Missions, in which those systems cannot fail.
There are work-arounds for some of the many problems with Controlled systems.
Redundancy
A Boeing 777 is a machine with lots of parts, but it is extremely reliable. It is reliable because a lot of those parts are redundant. They are back-ups, ready to do the job of parts that fail. A Boeing 777 flies only on one course at a time, but it has four separate navigation systems (including an inertial navigation system which can measure acceleration and rotation without any moving parts; it uses mirrors). If one or even two or three are wrong, the pilot can still stay on course. In Controlled linear systems, adding more parts can reduce the likelihood of failure, if the added parts are backups, not added to the main chain of Control.
Systems can be made robust by adding redundancy in all potential SPOFs.
Wikipedia, “Single Point of Failure”
So a fix for SPoF-prone linear chains is: Add redundancy as backup systems.
Why does this work? Because big, complex Controlled systems become more likely to fail as they get bigger and more complex. Adding more chains can be better, when adding more links to the chain causes SPoFs and other problems.
This is just as true of an education system, an economy, a corporation, a financial system, a government, or almost any other System of Human Interaction, as it is of any other kind of big, controlled system, such as a machine or an IT system. By converting our big SoHIs from S-O to Control, leftists are making them rigid, brittle, more prone to failures.
Redundancy is not a solution; it is just a kludge. The word ‘redundant’ does not have good connotations. Redundancy just treats the symptoms of Controllism. The cure for problems caused by Controllism is usually Spontaneous-Organization, as we will see.
Decontrolling Corporations
Many things such as society, economic activities and markets, and cultural behavior are apparently man-made but grow on their own to reach some kind of self-organization.
Nassim Taleb, Antifragile (2012)
In his book,
Nassim Taleb wrote that by controlling our systems we were making them
‘fragile’, less efficient, and more prone to failure. “…we hurt systems with the very best of intentions by
playing conductor,” he wrote. “We are fragilizing social and economic systems…”
In a corporation that operates as a Hierarchy of Control, the tiers can be thought of as the parts of the system. The tiers are organized by top-down Control, and are subsystems of the corporation (they could also be other corporations which have merged with or been acquired by the controlling corporation).
So the tiers themselves (whether departments or
sub-corporations) can internally be organized in a way other than
Control. Corporations avoid the downside of
Control (which can take the form of deleterious, controllist Managism, which we
discuss elsewhere) by allowing the tiers to be organized as teams, or flat
teams, or in some other less top-down Controlled way.
Linear Controlled systems can be highly efficient, so they may seem strong. But they are also rigid, inflexible, fragile and brittle, and that makes even small Controlled systems prone to failure. And when those Controlled systems become large, with lots of parts, they become certain to fail, and fixes such as redundancy, teams, and, as we will see, parallelism, have to be added to reduce failures. By itself, linear Control is very limited in what it can do.
(As we said, leftists counter the truth about spontaneous-order with leftist untruths. The year after Taleb’s book Antifragile was published, a Political Science professor produced a book called The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. “I have attended to precariousness and the fragility of things before,” he wrote. “But advances in the exploration of self-organizing systems and the hegemony of neoliberalism both suggest the need to do so more relentlessly now...”. By the word, neoliberalism, he meant the European definition. Rightism and free enterprise. Predictably, the conclusion is that self-organization and neoliberalism — too much freedom — are causing our problems. The world is fragile, and needs the control of wise, benevolent leftists. Before that, he blamed fragility on other forces, such as evangelicalism, in his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. The solution for fragility is, of course, more Control. Lots more Control, of everything. “…a multiform activism in a world that is very fragile, an activism that folds an ethos of cultivation into political practices set on several intercoded scales: local, familial, workplace, state, theological, corporate, global, and planetary.”)
So if corporations are controlled and fragile, why are they so successful?
The answer is complicated, because U.S. Business and Industry is a gigantic and immensely complex system. One short answer is: Because government regulators make corporations successful.
We think of corporations as towering examples of capitalism and free enterprise, but in fact the corporation is a creation of government regulators, created by legislators. Laws grant corporations advantages over the businesses which are not corporations. Those advantages are not small, at all; they include tax breaks, and indemnity of shareholders from lawsuits and civil and criminal charges made against them by government regulators. So, in essence, government regulators can legislate the guaranteed success of the corporation as a business model/system.
Another reason that corporations succeed is that they are seldom if ever the neat and complete hierarchies of control that their organizational charts make them appear to be. Within each level of the corporation, some or most of the subsystems operate at least in part by Spontaneous-Order. Managers often intentionally create “flat” teams that operate by spontaneous-order (S-O), because S-O works better. A lot more can be said about this, and we will return to the subject of the organization and operation of U.S. corporations in the 21st century.
Why the Military Loses Some Control
Above, we listed the military as one system that must operate by linear Control, and that’s true. (Have you ever wondered why dictators, who rule by Control, wear uniforms? They probably have, or at least want to give, the impression that the nation itself is a Controlled system.) They probably have, or at least want to give
But even an army, like a corporation, works better when it replaces some Control with something better. So, missing horseshoe nails may be less of a problem these days. But what is the military going to do about their 9,000-mile screwdrivers? An answer is: Less top-down Control.
Classic military operations and nimble battlefield decision-making are exploiting the incompetence and top-down command of Russian forces.
“How Ukrainian Strategy Is Running Circles Around Russia’s Lumbering Military” Wall Street Journal (2022)
Central Command went searching for good ideas. It had to flatten the chain of command to find them.
“What Happened When the U.S. Military Played ‘Shark Tank’”, Wall Street Journal (2022)
A 2022 article in The Economist quoted a U.S. Marine spokesperson, “Mission command is a style of military management that gives more agency to rank-and-file soldiers. Commanders issue their intent—the principles and objectives of a mission—and delegate responsibility for achieving it to more junior officers, allowing them to exercise their own initiative and judgment. This speeds up decision-making and allows armies to respond flexibly…”
“What is Mission Command? Democracy and Freedom Can Play a Role in Military Effectiveness”
The Economist article quoted an Israeli military analyst, “It’s very tempting for superiors to call in and say, ‘Go right, left’. American soldiers call such meddling ‘the 9,000-mile screwdriver’.”
Parallelism
Parallelism is like redundancy, but while in redundancy the backup subsystems do not function until the main part in the linear sequence fails, in parallelism the sub-systems all work at the same time, side-by-side, as it were.
A super-computer which employs parallel cores should itself still probably be thought of as one linear machine. But, because it is more effective and reliable than a computer which consists of one linear system, the super-computer begins to give us the suspicion that linear Control is not necessarily the best way for our big complex systems to operate.
In Controlled systems, such as machines, the use of parallelism does not convert them into S-O systems. The digital computers of the early 21st century were still just machines. S-O systems are different, and they don’t have the problems that Controlled systems do.
Workarounds for the Flaws in Control
A lot of other efforts are made to find and/or prevent cumulative errors that are bound to happen in linear Controlled systems: Various quality control measures, checksums, feedback, and so on.
But these, and redundancy, are only kludges, partial fixes for the big problems inherent in linear, Controlled systems. They don’t turn Controlled systems into something different and better. Spontaneously-Organizing systems though are a different ball game.
In a Controlled system, adding more parts makes it more brittle and more likely to fail, unless steps are taken to work around that weakness. But in Spontaneously-Organizing systems, the opposite is true: Adding more parts makes the S-O system stronger, less likely to fail, and more efficient.
And we are all familiar with the truism that adding more moving parts to a machine increases the likelihood of its failure. But, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, that is not necessarily the case with Spontaneously-Organizing systems. In fact, the opposite is usually the case.
It’s easy to see how a P2P Spontaneous-Organizing system is much less subject to the SPoF kind of failure, and others. If one part fails, the whole system will probably keep working. Especially if the system has millions or billions of parts like, say, the internet. Then the failure of one part will probably not even be noticed. We discuss the concept of “More is Better” elsewhere.
Leftists have convinced people that socialism creates a P2P network. Each of the parts (i.e. people) gets a “fair” amount of the goods produced by the society. But in a large collectivist system, say a society with over a thousand people, who decides how much each person gets? The people who distribute the goods decide who gets how much. That makes the distributors very powerful. If the goods in question are food, then the distributor of the food has the power of life or death over the other people in the society.
So the socialist society can really only be organized as a hierarchy of control or centralized command:
When some people have power and control over the other people, the system can never really be a network of equals. (We discuss and other reasons, if we need any other reason, why Socialism will never work in Leftist Untruth #5 Socialism.)
Our discussion of 'desire paths' above may seem whimsical or anecdotal. Surely, you may think, it does not apply to the roads and highways of big, real-world transportation systems. After all, those systems can only be highly planned, designed and regulated by technocratic government regulators. Right?
Not really. The ideas of central Control and Spontaneous-Organization that we have discussed so far do apply to real-world transportation systems.
The Systems Thinking of Transport Geography
Transportation systems are commonly represented using
networks as an analogy for their structure and flows. The implementation of
networks however is rarely premeditated but the consequence of continuous
improvements as opportunities arise…
Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois, Brian Slack, The Geography of Transport Systems (2006)
Transport Geography is a sub-discipline of Geography, and relates to Economic Geography. Like most systems that explain systems, Transport Geography is pretty interesting. It has to step back and look at space, time, and human interaction in a different way than other disciplines do. In it, distance is thought of as a kind of friction (and so is government regulation, “Political factors can also influence transport transportability such as laws regulations borders and tariffs.” ibid).
Our diagrams of kinds of systems are used in Transport Geography to illustrate kinds of transportation systems, but with different names.
In transportation system terminology, this is called a Hub-and-Spoke system.
And this is called a Point-to-Point system.
To quote The Geography of Transport Systems again, “When traffic becomes sufficient, direct point-to-point services tend to be established as they better reflect the preference of users.” In other words, the S-O transportation system grows organically and spontaneously, as new parts are added where and when people need them.
The hub-and-spoke transportation system is used in Controlled systems, such as airline traffic. The Controllists who hate desire paths love the hub-and-spoke system, and such a centrally controlled system can indeed be efficient. But users tend to love the point-to-point systems, whether walking (on college campuses, for example), biking, or driving cars. The point-to-point system gives users the most freedom to go wherever they want whenever they want.
Real-World Roads
We said: ‘Our
discussion of 'desire paths' above may seem whimsical or anecdotal. Surely it
does not 
apply to the roads and highways of big,
real-world transportation systems.’
But maps of real road systems look like maps/diagrams of Spontaneous-Organizing point-to-point/network systems, not Controlled spoke-and-hubs, or any other kind of Controlled system. Because they are maps of S-O systems.
Georgfotoart, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Just as with the Controlled linear systems we talked about above, the centrally Controlled Hub-and-Spoke systems become more unstable and prone to failure when more parts are added. Remember those SPOFs? Quoting The Geography of Transport again, “Many transportation services have adapted to include hub-and-spoke structure… However, potential disadvantages may also occur such as additional transshipment, as less point-to-point services are offered, which for some connections may involve delays and potential congestion.”
“Delays and congestion”? Sound like airports? In the hub-and-spoke system, traffic is controlled by a Central Controller. In the point-to-point systems, the traffic controls itself as people go where they want when they want. No central control needed.
What's
Wrong with the Airlines?
...37 per cent of Americans held a negative view of the airline industry, compared with 27 per cent who held a favourable impression — the first time in more than a decade that critics have outnumbered fans...
Claire Bushey, "How the US Fell Out of Love with Flying", Financial Times (2023)
Above, we mentioned that airlines use a hub-and-spoke system, and those typically “involve delays and potential congestion”. So, why do U.S. airlines have a hub-and-spoke system? Wouldn’t they and their customers be better off with a point-to-point system?
They may not have much choice. Although media, historians, and government regulators say that the airline industry was deregulated in the 1980s, that is not true. The opposite is true. The truth is that FAA and other government regulators have total control over what routes airlines can fly — any request for a new route where one is needed can take months or years to be allowed by the FAA, and requests are often denied. In reality, government agencies tightly regulate every aspect of the operation of airlines, except for the amount that the airlines can charge for tickets, which actually was deregulated in the 80s. It's a story we tell at length in OverRegulated.
In 2022, the media attacked Southwest Airlines when a pre-Christmas storm caused 17,000 flight cancellations, prompting calls for more government regulation. Fifteen U.S. senators sent a condemnatory letter to Southwest, and Senator Elizabeth Warren threatened to prevent future airline mergers. But when, two weeks later, a government computer failure at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) caused 10,800 cancellations and delays, the media and government regulators were mostly silent. No one suggested that, for example, the U.S. switch to the more reliable and cheaper private-sector air-traffic control that Canada and other nations had adopted long ago.
So if the airlines are delivering a less and less lovable service, probably because of massive and onerous U.S. government overregulation, what is the solution? The Financial Times article titled "How the US Fell Out of Love with Flying" had a subhead, “Cancelled Flights, Missing Bags and Disappearing Routes Are Infuriating Passengers — And Galvanising a Push for Tighter Regulation”.
When government regulation causes problems, we are always told that the solution is: More government regulation. The solution they never suggest is more freedom.
Still, more spontaneously-organizing and less controlled point-to-point systems cannot be a panacea, it would seem. Car traffic can become congested, in cities. So let’s look at cities; they also are systems of human interaction.
Cities: How They are Born and Grow
...cities without freedom have never expanded either in dominion or in wealth.
Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1651)
Imagine the American frontier in the 1700s or 1800s. There's a spot on a small river where it is easy to ford. And that spot is halfway between two villages. Someone named Wills builds a home on that spot. And then someone else - perhaps a relative, another Wills - builds another house near the first. And then another family builds a house on the other side of the river, and the man who lives there is a good blacksmith. He begins to do some smithing work for people who live in the surrounding area. Then someone else builds a house nearby that becomes a boarding house where people traveling among nearby villages can spend the night. The owner later adds on to the kitchen and dining room and turns it into an inn. Someone else builds a little store.
A few years go by and there are thirty houses there, and people in the region refer to the place as "Wills’ ford". It's a village, with three streets going east-west along the route between the two towns and two streets going north-south. But who intentionally created the village? Who decided to build a village there and laid out the plan for it and decided what businesses to put there? No one, of course. No one built anything with the intention of creating the town of Willsford. It just sprang up, and the order was spontaneous. No city planner decided where to put the streets or the buildings. West, lots of towns sprang up around gold strikes. Some became ghost towns, but some grew to be cities, one became the capital of Montana. Nobody planned the lives and lifespans of those places, they just happened, as people lived their lives.
From these lives emerges behaviour beyond the dictates of any Stanford programmer: the agents diffuse information, form relationships and co-ordinate. They wake, cook breakfast, go to work and school, shop, socialise, run for mayor and discuss mayoral candidates. And so Smallville’s social network complicates and densifies all on its own. The town enriches itself.
Oliver Roeder "What Can a Virtual Village Made Up of AI Chatbots Tell Us About Human Interaction?" Financial Times (2023)
In 2023, evidence emerged that the rules of interaction (i.e. the real rules by which a town works), emerge spontaneously from the interaction even of AI beings. AI researcher Joon Sung Park created a community, that he called Smallville, where the residents were chatbots, who could communicate with each other and who lived in virtual houses on virtual streets in a virtual town.
Smallville
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442 the paper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb_dJ6nUeBE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKCJ3BMUy1s
“In one case, Smallville residents threw a Valentine’s Day party. They autonomously spread invitations, asked each other out on dates (Maria invited Klaus, her secret crush; he accepted!) and co-ordinated their arrivals on the day. They even decorated for the occasion, organised by café owner Isabella, though they were never instructed to decorate.”
Oliver Roeder "What Can a Virtual Village Made Up of AI Chatbots Tell Us About Human Interaction?" Financial Times (2023)
No one programmed the residents of Smallville to do those things, the behavior emerged spontaneously. And the AIs who lived in Smallville were phenomenally stupid compared to humans. But the rules by which Spontaneous-Organizing systems interact may be simple enough for those AIs to rediscovered them all by themselves.
Houston, We Have a Control Problem
Does Houston have government zoning laws and a government zoning board or zoning commission with government regulators sitting on it to control land usage?
The answer is no. As of 2020, the city of Houston, Texas had no zoning board or zoning laws, and it never had.
Houston certainly had its share of problems: It suffered from hurricanes and crashes in oil prices, but it always bounced back. And in the 2020s it had long been one of the fastest growing most prosperous big U.S. cities. It certainly worked as well as and probably better than cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and most of the big cities run by Democrat Controllers. But another thing that made Houston unusual was that it really didn’t have any zoning laws or zoning boards.
But can that be true? Did Houston really survive, function, and grow without zoning when all other cities of any significant size in the U.S. required tons of zoning boards and regulations? Or is that some kind of trick of words?
In some cities, land zoned for industrial (sometimes euphemistically referred to as “manufacturing”) purposes is jealously guarded against residential development. Not in Houston! The lack of a zoning code means there are no special hoops to jump through — no politicians to appease — for this 400-unit building announced in December on 15 acres of land...
Stephen J. Smith, “Seven Buildings (and Neighborhoods) That Would Never Fly in Any City but Houston”, Next City Magazine (2014)
And the people of Houston repeatedly rejected attempts by politicians to establish zoning.
Houston voters have rejected efforts to implement zoning in 1948, 1962, and 1993. It is commonly believed that "Houston is Houston" because of the lack of zoning laws...
“Zoning in the United States” Wikipedia
Some people did write about city planning and claim that Houston really had zoning or something like it but just called it by a different name or something. (People who made their living from government city planning hated Houston). But this was just not true. That hatred of no-zoning itself provides some (grudging) proof that Houston really did not have zoning. Because, Houston has lots of buildings and development which would never have been allowed by government zoning regulators. And yet the un-zoned buildings work. People who love government Control hated those buildings and developments, but the people who lived in Houston didn't seem to dislike them at all. They just used them.
Houston did have some land use restrictions. But they were many fewer and much different than zoning regulation—they were the opposite of zoning in a way. It was the difference between Government Control and Spontaneous Organization. Changes in land use regulations originated from the bottom up in Houston, not from government regulators issuing edicts from the top down.
“...governance mechanisms have evolved, including deed restrictions and historic designations that allow homeowners in a neighborhood to impose rules that function as a sort of de-facto locally controlled zoning, and district organizations that give local businesses some influence in shaping the look and character of their areas…” wrote Patrick J. Kiger in a 2015 article about Houston titled “The City with (Almost) No Limits”. He described land use rules which emerged from the bottom up, from the people instead of from the government down, in a process of “evolution”, as opposed to top-down control. He wrote that, “…developers themselves have stepped in to fill the regulatory gap by creating master-planned communities…that provide a more carefully controlled environment for those who seek it.”
So some land use restriction was possible in Houston, but only if the citizens and builders wanted it and created it themselves. Instead of it being forced on them as decrees from government regulators. One simple and obvious advantage of that was that Houston did not have to pay the cost of maintaining a Planning and Zoning Commission, holding elections for seats on it, or pay for Zoning Board of Appeals, a Zoning Board of Adjustment, Zoning Board of Review, etcetera. There were other benefits. The cost of housing in Houston, compared to wages, was significantly lower than in most other cities. Houstonians could enjoy nice houses at a fraction of the cost people paid for housing in highly regulated California cities.
Between 1980 and 2020, the population of the Houston area grew from about three million to over six million. The greater Houston area represented nearly 2 percent of the population of the United States. How could this have been possible if top-down government regulation of development and government planning is necessary for cities to grow and work? Why do thousands of U.S. cities need thousands of zoning boards and hundreds of thousands of regulators to man them creating hundreds of thousands or millions of zoning regulations at an expense of billions of dollars, when Houston grows and thrives with no government zoning at all?
If Houston is proof that zoning commissions cannot really be necessary, then is there some movement to get rid of those useless laws and expensive government regulations and regulators in other cities? Apparently not (although politicians and urban planners continue to push for zoning in Houston). Getting rid of zoning is an unthinkable possibility to city politicians and planners, and to the mainstream media, in the U.S. But a tiny few bits and pieces of thought can be found online which discuss the possible advantages of getting rid of zoning laws.
grneggandsam,
I applaud you for making some interesting realizations about the dysfunctions related to zoning and its adverse effects on urban economies and the many people who have been priced out of affordable housing near city centers. It's basically what a libertarian would say, which is considered heresy in Archinect forums. If you want to be popular here, you'll need to tow the line by first pontificating how things should be, that it's for the greater good, and that coercive planning policies are the best way to get there... Then you make fun of anyone who speaks favorably of laissez-faire, while belittling the dimwitted people who live in sprawling suburbs. Rinse and repeat.
As zoning laws become more numerous and onerous, government regulators across the U.S. use zoning as a way to erode what is left of Americans' property rights. The Left has always had as its goal to eliminate private property. The essence or ownership is control. To own something is to control its use. If government regulators control the land, they do not necessarily have to legally own it to own it.
In 2022, Caroline, NY was one of the American towns with no zoning laws. But leftists were trying to change that, and the result was heated conflict between pro- and anti-zoning sides. On one side were the farmers who owned land in the city limits and the people who lived and worked in the town. On the other side were leftists who lived there and commuted to Cornell University in nearby Ithaca. It was the latter who were trying to impose zoning, to enforce their idea of what the town should look like on the longtime residents.
“Kathy Mix, who has lived in Caroline for 37 years. She and her husband were farmers, and now her children farm adjacent properties. ‘I’m against the draft plan that they’ve put into place...’” reported a local newspaper. "Multiple residents spoke against zoning during the meeting, with a minority in favor of the drafted law or calling for unity and less contention in a town of just more than 3,000 people. R.C. Quick, a fifth-generation Caroline resident, said during the meeting that his grandparents would 'be rolling over in their graves' at the idea of zoning."
Geoff Preston, "Zoning Debate Continues to Divide Caroline" Tompkins Weekly (2022)
https://www.tompkinsweekly.com/articles/zoning-debate-continues-to-divide-caroline-2/
But the leftists were intent upon imposing their rule on the town, and with state government regulators on their side, they were probably bound to win in the end. As a system of human interaction, Houston is a success, and so was Caroline, most of the residents felt. But the same cannot be said for many of the cities that were more controlled by government regulators.
It’s Not a Housing Crisis — It’s A Planning Crisis
In the year ending March 2023, construction began on 72,000 new homes in Houston, Texas, population 7.5mn: more than three times the 20,500 new homes started in London, whose population is considerably larger.
… You would have to pay $1.2mn dollars for the average property on sale in the San Francisco/Oakland area today, around $800,000 for the typical homes in London and New York, but just $300,000 in Houston.
…Homes in Texan cities are cheap and their populations soaring because the state has made urban development easy. California, New York and London are overheating and squeezing out young families because their planning systems place artificial constraints on supply, making urban development extremely difficult.
John Burn-Murdoch, “What Texas Can Teach San Francisco and London About Building Houses” Financial Times (2024)
The subtitle of the article is, “It’s not a housing crisis — it’s a planning crisis”. As in, too much planning “…by progressives who wring their hands publicly over their acute and long-running housing crises” but don’t understand (or don’t want to understand) that their controllism is causing the societal ill of unaffordable housing.
The Cities That Government Created
Government regulators often create new towns from scratch, frequently as capitals of nations or states. Besides Washington DC and Indianapolis, Canberra, Brasilia, New Delhi, and Abuja in Nigeria were government projects from the start. But government regulators also decree new cities in places where the Controllists think a city should be. The government regulators often get it wrong. The Communist city planners of China produced many examples.
The country's ambitious plans for urban growth have led to more than 50 abandoned cities whose empty buildings paint a dystopian landscape.
Natasha Ishak “34 Unforgettable Photos Of China’s Massive, Uninhabited Ghost Cities” Ati (2019)
The Towns That Leftists Build: Welcome to Kijong-dong
The name of the North Korean town Kijong-dong means literally "Peace Village". Kijong-dong was a planned community from the start, designed and built by NK government regulators. In Kijong-dong you will find a 200-family collective farm, with a child-care center, kindergarten, primary and secondary schools, and a hospital. Except that you won't.
Kijong-dong was built near the DMZ which separated North and South Korea, as part of an effort to trick South Koreans into defecting. Besides being a propaganda ploy, Kijong-dong housed elements of the NK military who manned a network of artillery positions, fortifications, and underground bunkers on the north side of the DMZ. Hence, the typically-leftist name "Peace Village".
“’Some of the buildings have their windows painted on’, said Cmdr. Robert Watt of the combined Southern forces. Other tall structures appear to be shells; when night falls, light shines brightly in upper windows but is dim closer to the ground, suggesting there are no floors or walls inside,” according to a Los Angeles Times story about Kijong-dong by David Wharton.
We said, ‘But when any city gets big, don’t they need government regulators to control them? Because otherwise, chaos will result. Right?’
Houston would disagree. But it’s not an exception. It is controlled systems that experience problems such as instability and increased probability of failure as they get bigger. Controlled SoHIs are like machines, and machines tend to be more prone to fail when more moving parts are added. There are lots of reasons why S-O systems actually become more efficient and more stable as more parts are added to them. As we discuss elsewhere, at length, “More is Better” for spontaneous-order systems.
Cities of Control, or Not
It’s about control … activists have big dreams. They want local governments to rebuild the urban environment—housing, transit, roads and tolls—to achieve social justice, racial justice and net-zero carbon emissions. They rally around slogans such as “ban all cars,” “raze the suburbs” and “single-family housing is white supremacy”—though they’re generally white and affluent themselves, often employed in public or semipublic roles in urban planning, housing development…
Christopher F. Rufo "New Left Urbanists’ Want to Remake Your City" Wall Street Journal (2019)
Leftists want government regulators to control the cities? But don’t they do that already? Government regulators and other leftists would like you to believe that cities are planned by government city planners and need to be controlled by government regulators. Is it possible that’s not true?
Surveillance cameras plastered all over neighbourhoods, complicated and burdensome traffic rules, heavy restrictions on the circulation of vehicles… These are all watchwords of an emerging philosophy of city planning whose authors appear to view citizens as pawns in a master plan, or as children to be herded around…
David Thunder, “Here's Why Engineering City Life from the Top Down is a Terrible Idea” Substack (2023)
The government of Barcelona Spain is using the city’s supercomputer to create a super-detailed model of the whole city, which they will use “…to analyse and predict traffic and energy usage with machine learning and artificial intelligence…” to plan and control Barcelona’s future.
But, to again quote from Christopher Rufo’s article, "New Left Urbanists’ Want to Remake Your City", “The new left urbanists’ fatal mistake is to view cities as collections of buildings, roads, tunnels and bike lanes. Urbanists can demolish and rebuild physical environments, but they can’t pave over the people. Life in a metropolis is simply too complex, too variable and too ephemeral—it will evade even the most careful planning.”
The government’s dreams of total control of the futures of cities will more likely turn into totalitarian nightmares. Why empower politicians and spend billions of dollars to control cities when, as Houston and others gladly prove, cities do better by controlling themselves?
Conclusion
Cities do not provide the only evidence for the claims that most of our systems and institutions will work better with less top-down control and more freedom and spontaneous-organization. In other pieces, we will look at lots of other systems that provide good order for free. No controllist government regulators needed. The desire paths do not have to be urban legend. They could be real, if the controllists would get out of the way.