# 8.1 Introduction
My interest in government was sparked by the head teacher at the last secondary school I attended, but at that time that interest was overshadowed by my enthusiasm for mathematics and science. However, the experience of living and working in the United States for two years 1968 to 1970 reignited that interest, so that on my return to the UK I began a programme of reading to better understand government and its functioning. Apart from the work of Jay Forrester (1971) and the MIT group that was discussed in the last chapter, it became clear from my research that science had had little impact on models of governing and global evolution. This remains true to this day but there is now increasing interest in applying system thinking to the endeavour of modelling government (e.g. Ison and Straw 2020).
As a result of my experience of the United States I joined the UK Labour Party in 1970 and in 1974 I became a party activist, and so began my initiation and apprenticeship into the complex world of management, government, and democracy. In the first instance those experiences raised many questions for me, but as a result of an article in a computing magazine describing project Cybersyn, undertaken by Stafford Beer in Chile 1970-1972, I read my way through his writing. The Cybersyn project was 1 described by Beer in his book Brain of the Firm (1981 2nd Ed) and has been subsequently described in ‘Cybernetic Revolutionaries’ (Medina 2012). In 1983 I sought to meet Stafford Beer because, in his writings, I believed that he had created a scientific path to understanding the questions that my previous reading and practical experience had raised. That initial meeting with Beer and the many subsequent others until his death in 2002 resulted in the change of direction to my life from exploring the ideas of mathematics and physics to exploring systems thinking and its applications.
A society is a dynamic entity that exists in a dynamic world and should be conceptualized as a dynamic system, that is it should be thought of as a purposeful input-process-output structure consisting of subsystems defined as I have discussed in previous chapters. Secondly modelling governing, is exactly to model a control system with the purpose of holding aspects of the dynamic society steady, as also discussed in the previous chapters. Governing, therefore, is an application of the science of cybernetics, just as Plato (2006) more than 2,300 years ago and Ampere (1834) nearly 300 years ago both understood. Any governing system must be structured in accordance with the laws of cybernetics; in particular that is Ashby’s Law of requisite Variety, the Conant-Ashby theorem, and the sub-optimisation theorem all discussed in Chapter 4. We would not now neglect the laws of gravity, and aerodynamics in designing an airliner, but we do the equivalent, forget the contributions of Plato and Ampere, and neglect the laws of cybernetics, when thinking about the design of a governing system. Not surprisingly our governing systems don’t get off the ground!
As with all WEIRD thinking, traditionally the starting point when thinking of government, is to think in terms of objects, hence nation, country, government, parliament, etc. words all describing objects not processes and omitting the fact that all exist within the dynamic ecosystem of planet earth.. But government is about leading and managing a society, it is a regulatory system which must sustain a people and their environment. The world is a dynamic place, the environment is an evolving dynamic system; the collection of people that are present in the geographic area that is a nation are an evolving dynamic system. The culture, attitudes and values of these people are emergent properties of that system and change over time. The actions of the people can change the ecosystem for the better and for the worse. A society must maintain a productive relationship with its environment if it is to survive. The government is also an evolving dynamic system of itself, and the culture, attitudes and values of those people who form the government are emergent properties of that system and change over time. One of the purposes of democracy is to keep the evolution of the governmental system in step with the evolution of the system that is the nation as a whole. A government must maintain a productive relationship with its people if it is to keep its trust. If it parts company with its people the historical evidence is that even the harshest and most violent methods cannot maintain a government in power for very long. Governments of this nature inevitably fail but usually not before many people have perished. A representative parliament therefore should be an evolving system that is capable of reflecting the evolution of its people. To that end we could ask such questions as ‘why have all elections on the same date?’, ‘Why have fixed term parliaments with all members potentially changing at the same time/’. There are many other possibilities; that would provide steady evolutionary change. Are elections the best method of choosing a representative? The ancient Athenians used sortition, a lottery system, to choose their government. A lottery system takes away one of the least desirable aspects of our present system that representatives are chosen on many 2 occasions from those that seek power for personal reasons, and once they are elected seek change in order to preserve their own continuing position holding on to the power they have achieved.
Societies are of course extremely complex in their functioning, much more than any airliner, my aim for this chapter, therefore, is just to outline an approach to Modelling Governing from a systemic process perspective that is rooted in the science of cybernetics. I begin by setting out how a collection of people may be defined as a system in the same way that any living entity may be considered in an ecological system. From there I then consider firstly the implications for the way in which the environment might be managed, following the considerations in chapters 5 and 6. Then secondly I explore the guiding implications arising from the Law of Requisite Variety for a constitution. Further, the Conant–Ashby Theorem tells us that to be effective a control system must contain the best possible model of the system under control.
Because of the complexity, **only by engaging all minds in a society** can an effective model be brought to bear on the problem of controlling the society. This I take to be **the primary purpose of ‘democracy’** and why democracy is thought to be the best possible form of government.
But of course it is through the governing system that all minds are brought to bear, and there are a multiplicity of ways in which the governing system can be structured to achieve this aim, the Conant-Ashby Theorem and Beer’s VSM suggests the guidelines. From my studies and engagement it seems to me that the evidence is that in the great majority of cases the systems of national government currently operating are failing. I therefore explore the consequences of using the principles developed in the previous chapters to design guidelines for a process systemic democracy. Lastly I explore the implications of the sub-optimisation theorem, how can we avoid sub-systems seeking to optimise their wellbeing, wealth, or any other variable at the expense of other sub-systems.