# 8.2 Defining the system in focus
Nations are a relatively modern idea (Hobsbawm 1990) and assumed to be if not the sole focus when considering government at least the principle focus. In chapter 4 section 4 I explored the question of the understanding of the systemic individual and concluded that an individual system is the system in focus at any one time. I therefore propose to consider government in terms of community. A community can be a band, a tribe, a chiefdom, a state (Diamond 2012), but further than that also a hamlet, a village, a town, and many other types of group. I begin with communities that live together in a geographic area, later I will consider the role of communities brought together by their common skills, and other organisations operating within a geographic communities or across many geographic communities. 3
Figure 8.1: Illustrating the recursive nature of the word 'community'.
Communities have a very much longer history than states, or countries and certainly predate agriculture and the idea of fixed settlements. Early communities were small groups of people but in the modern world communities can be of any size, even, a country, a region, or the whole community of homo sapiens. Further, in our modern world communities come together not only in terms of communal living, i.e living together in a geographical area, but also coming together through common interests and common expertise. The problems to consider in governing a community, include what is the purpose of the community, how must communities come together to build larger structures, and how might the various communities work together?
Just as animals and ecological systems sometimes fail to adapt, communities do too, and sometimes collapse. Malcolm Levitt (2019) concludes from the historical evidence that – > Explanations of collapse in terms of competing mono causal factors are found inferior to those incorporating dynamic interactive systems.
This brief extract supports the path I am taking, that a systemic approach to understanding how a community might maintain viability is the one most likely to provide explanation. Levitt also writes that - > .....collapse should be explained as failure to fulfil the ancient state’s core functions, assurance of food supplies, defence against external attack, 4 maintenance of internal peace, imposition of its will throughout its territory, enforcement of state wide laws, and promotion of an ideology to legitimise the political and social status quo.
Here Levitt sets out the purposes that the government of a community must address. In summary this is exactly the maintenance of the relationship with the external world and the maintenance of the internal relationships as would be expected from the preceding chapters. But he does not mention here the role of the natural environment which has played a role in societal collapse (Diamond 2005)
The problem for management of a human organisation is to constrain the variety of actions in the behaviour of those people involved within the organisation to those actions which fulfil the purpose of the organisation. But if we now focus on a community and its government, for a community of people co-living there is no immediately obvious overall purpose to constrain actions to in quite the same way as for example the restaurant considered in Chapter 4. From the preceding chapters I conclude that any human organization has the same necessities as an animal in its need to survive and adapt to a changing environment. But any human organisation has the added problem of maintaining its internal structure and the necessary relations between all the people (and organisations including sub-communities) involved in that community. People are free agents in a way in which the sub-systems of an animal or ecological system are not. Evolution has reduced the variety of states of the subsystems of an animal or an ecological system to very few states leaving little to be done by the managing brain and nervous system even if there is one. There is a much more complex set of interrelations to be maintained between the subsystems of organisations and people in a community not necessarily directly relating, but which nevertheless need to be maintained. Firstly, I will consider the maintenance of the external relationships, and then subsequently the maintenance of internal relationships.