Core belief #1 - on decision making

Distributed decision making is superior to centralized

This post is the first in a series contemplating certain political concepts, ideas and labels that are taken for granted without any serious analysis or examination.
This post is rooted in an earlier one on First principles and core beliefs, while it will serve as an anchor to ideas discussed in subsequent ones.

Just to recap,
“My first principle is ‘evolution’, the belief that things can best be understood by the discovery and understanding of the continuous process that led to their present state in it.”

Evolution is a complex web of decisions and stimuli-response interactions in an infinitely complex universe. Conscious decisions are but a small fraction of autonomous and reflexive decisions that we make as living entities. I can decide to hold my breath, but breathing in general is an autonomous function of my body.

What I am doing now, writing, is a process of decisions. I decided on the subject, its placement in a larger narrative, doing it on this platform, choosing the level of details and each and every word in it.
All this may sound trivial, but I think it would be very difficult to overstate the importance of decision making in our lives.   
Once a decision has been made and acted upon it becomes a fact of my reality, a fact that I am responsible for, because it affects the world beyond myself. If you are reading this, what I say is affecting you.

Decision making is a most essential part of our lives, I would even argue, that decision making is life itself and as such, a manifestation of evolution, a first principle.

Responsibility

We should not forget, however that “No man is an island entire of itself” (John Donne); that we are part of the world; our societies and that we are responsible for the results of our decisions. 
In an ideal world, we are all responsible for our actions and the decision that led to them.
In the real world we are also subjects of the decisions of others.
In our personal interaction, your decision may help me or harm me. You will be responsible for your action, as I will be for my reaction.
We may make a decision together to help or harm a third person.
We may delegate our decision to someone else to act on our behalf.
I may decide to restrict or hinder someone’s ability to make decisions, or delegate that power to somebody else.

If you slap me in the face, there will be consequences. I may hand it back to you. Our decisions affect as both. The decisions of all those Canadians who voted for Trudeau THREE TIMES have serious consequences for the rest of Canadians who did not. People drive around with flags saying:

Shouldn’t their disdain be directed against those who delegated their personal power to him with their votes?

As you can see, it took just a few steps to arrive from a most general axiom about decisions to its most personal manifestation in politics.

Every political system is an arrangement of decision-making. If we want to understand any of them, we need to understand the decision-making arrangements in them with all their pros and cons.

In the vast majority of times, I find that we use the words ‘democracy’, ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’  as if we knew what they mean. We assume a shared understanding of fuzzy definitions.
“Democracy” is the ‘kinda-sorta’ thing we have. The problem is not just the fuzziness in the definitions of political ideologies, but also the fact that they are evolving. We need more than just a good definition, we need to understand the internal logic of its functioning.

I believe that the best way to understand them is through the lens of their decision-making arrangements.

I think my stand on it is clear. The more distributed the better. The more open and transparent the better.
While centralization may have some positive aspects, it tends to be an impediment to true progress. Positive changes are always happening on the margin. Creativity always happens on the margin. True genius is the most marginal of all. Change is contrarian by definition, a challenge to the status quo.  Centralization is the death of evolution, the death of progress.

In the next few posts, I will be talking about confused fascism, misunderstood communism, delusional democracy, the not so smart ideas of Yuval Noah Harari.
I will also have posts on Elon Musk and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and what they mean for the future of our world.

Come with me for the ride: subscribe!

Further reading

I will list here the posts in this series when completed.  

References

The full quote from John Donne:

“No man is an island entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were,
As well as any manor of thy friend’s,
Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.”