ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ» º CHAOS AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING º º º º by º º Mack Tanner º ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍͼ "Law of the Perversity of Nature: You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter." --Anonymous Most of you have probably heard the story about the clever young man who offers to go to work for a businessman on a try-out basis in which the young man will be paid only one cent on the first day, two cents for the second day, four cent on the third day, and so on, the salary doubling each day until the businessman decides whether or not he wants to hire the young man on a permanent basis. Thinking he's getting a good deal, the businessman takes on the kid and a month slips by before the businessman decides he won't keep the young man on. When the young man presents the bill for his wages for thirty days, the businessman discovers it's cheaper to sign over the company than paying the wages. The businessman has just learned the truth of compound interest. By doubling a single cent thirty times, you end up with $5,368,709.12 on the last doubling. The business man owes the young man over 10 million dollars for the thirty days of work. While this common mathematical principle has long been understood, it's only been in recent years that scientists have examined and explored what impact compounding small sums can have on what are called chaotic systems. A chaotic system is any dynamic physical, biological, or mathematical system in which a complicated set of data interact in non-linear and non-repetitive way. (Anyone interested in a more technical explanation of chaos theory should check out a library book on the subject.) Until recently, the philosophy of determinism was the basis for much of scientific thought and direction. The concept was that if we only knew the equations and had the precise data, the future could be predicted. This concept is best summarized in Laplace's famous statement: "An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes." Pierre Simon de Laplace, 1749-1827 Chaos theory now shows how naive and ridiculous this statement is. What scientists have come to understand in only the last few years is that in all chaotic systems, very small variations in input data can have a profound impact on the future development of the system. The more the variables at the initiation of the system, the greater the difficulty in predicting what impact tiny increases or decrease in a single variable will have on the progress of the system. In a perverse sort of way, the longer term the prediction attempted, the greater and more accurate the amount of initial data that is required to make the prediction. As the thousands, or millions of different variables act upon each other, no human, nor human manufactured computing machine can predict what the smallest change to any single variable will do to the future of the system. The most commonly cited example of a chaotic system is the weather. Other chaotic systems include hydraulic turbulence, biological species interaction, epidemiology, and all human societies and economies. Understanding chaos theory explains why scientists have such a difficult time predicting the weather more than twenty-four hour in advance and why they now realize that they will never be able to make trustworthy long-term weather predictions. It is simply impossible to collect the in-put data in the quantity and with the degree of accuracy necessary to make a credible long term prediction. (Of course, the government will never admit this is good reason to stop spending billions trying to do so!) Understanding chaos theory also explains why it will be impossible for humans to ever control the weather to produce a desired result with no danger of unexpected and undesirable results. Cloud seeding may make it rain over a dry Iowa corn field, but the impact of that intervention might result in an hurricane destroying a coastal city in Florida six months, or six years in the future. Given the complexity of the non-linear equations in describing weather patterns, no scientist will ever be able to prove that it was the cloud seeding that caused the hurricane, nor, for that matter, that the cloud seeding didn't contribute to the hurricane's development. Humans can impact on or redirect a chaotic system, but we can not prove or disprove exactly how the human intervention impacted on the system over the long term. We will know we changed the system, but we can never know how we changed the system, nor what the system would have done if we had changed nothing. All human societies and all human economic systems are chaotic systems. They develop and progress as a result of an incredible amount of input in which any single individual may do something that will have an unexpected and unpredictable multiplier impact on how the system will operate at some future point in time. Chaos theory explains why social engineering can never produce the expected result and why such schemes will always produce unintended results. Chaos theory also explains why neither the social engineers nor the critics of social engineering can ever prove what real impact an attempt at social engineering actually had on the economy and the society. We have been listening to a lot of political debate about what caused the riots in Los Angeles. The conservatives blame the deteriorating situation of the city on social programs of the Great Society, welfare dependency, government regulation, minimum wages laws, high taxes, and moral decline while the liberals blame the failure of the government to spend enough money, racism, police brutality, illegal immigration, and the entire American corporate cultural. The entire debate is total bullshit! There is absolutely no way anyone can scientifically establish what things might have been done differently that could have prevented the deterioration of our cities into the current social morass. Furthermore, there is no way anyone can scientifically demonstrate what new proposals for social engineering will produce intended and only intended future results. The entire political debate over the domestic agenda that goes on in connection with the current presidential election is also total bullshit! Nobody can explain scientifically exactly what caused the recent recession nor place with any scientific certainty the blame on any set of government actions. And nobody can predict what impact all of the different proposed economic solutions will actually have on the future world economic situation. Yet every politician is demanding that we spend a trillion dollars on programs that they can't demonstrate will work and they won't ever to be able to prove that they did work once they are in place. The national economy and its interrelation with the world economy is a chaotic system even more complex, unpredictable, and unmanageable than the world weather and climate patterns. Any politician who claims he can control it for the benefit of everyone without damaging large groups of other people is either a fool, or a crook, or more likely both. The government can do lots of things that will have short term impact on the economy. Political leaders can lower interest rates, shift investment opportunities, legislate prices, regulate exchanges, and all those things will alter the economic future of the economy. But chaos theory explains why we can not predict what the long term result of such action will be and why the unintended results may well be much more disastrous than the original problem could have ever become if left alone and free of government intervention. All of this is scientific fact that can be described by observation of prior events, the examination of mathematical formulas and demonstrated with computer modeling. But don't expect any political candidate, office holder, member of congress, bureaucrat, or scientist working on a fat government contract to admit the truth of this. For them to do so would be for them to admit that the American federal budget is being wasted on social engineering projects with no guarantees that they will work or that they won't produce disasters. Chaos theory not only explains why economic central planning can't work, it also explains why government bureaucracy grows so fast. Because political leaders and the bureaucrats refuse to recognize that what they are trying to do can't be done, they work under the delusion that they only thing preventing ultimate success is more and better data. They excuse their repeated failures by insisting they didn't have enough data, *which is right*, but they refuse to understand that no matter how much data they collect, it will never be enough to allow them to predict and control what the economy is going to do. Instead, they collect and quantify increasingly greater amounts of data as the cost escalates much like the salary of the boy who stated out at a penny for the first day's work. The more information they collect, the more difficult the task of correlating, interpreting, and analyzing the information they have. They hire ever larger numbers of people who can be put to the task of collecting and handling the information. When things go wrong, the excuse is always a failure in intelligence and the proposed solution is to hire more people and gather more raw data. The more things go wrong, the more money they spend trying to fix it. A fascinating conclusion of chaos theory is that you cannot predict the result of the fix, even if you try to put everything back exactly like it was! When we used DDT to kill the bugs and found out that it did more harm than good - in unexpected ways - the decision to quit using DDT may have resulted in greater damage than would have been the result of continuing its use. But if the government can't control the economy for the benefit of all, what is the government doing? Our politician leaders and the bureaucrats they hire play exactly the same role in the modern secular state that pagan priests and shamans played in ancient civilizations. Except, where ancient pagan priests and shamans promised to magically control the weather, stop the earthquakes, and curse the enemy with disease and pestilence, these modern wizards and magicians promise us that everyone will have a good job, decent medical care, and a useful education while avoiding drugs, unwanted pregnancies, and crime in the streets. Fortunately for us all, the weather generally does treat human populations pretty well, and despite the bungled attempts of government interference, millions of free people, all looking out for their own selfish interest, usually succeed in creating a chaotic, but healthy economy that provides most of us with all the good things of life and a few of us the chance to get rich. Like their ancient counterparts always claimed credit for spring rains, sunny weather, and good harvests, the modern political wizards and magicians claim credit for the successful economy and insist that the taxpayers contribute even more money to guarantee continued success in the future. They are taking credit for things they didn't do and charging us high prices for not doing it. The amount they take for themselves and for those whom they decide to bless with entitlement programs continues to grow. Most of us are working five full months a year for the sole purpose of feeding our monstrous and useless government beast. And still the wizards are telling us they need more money. They will keep demanding more money for as long as the taxpayer will pay it. The debt will grow like the wages owed the clever young man until it reaches the point where the whole government system will collapse under the weight of it's own debt. But don't worry. Just like the good weather stuck around for long after humans gave up on paying pagan priests to guarantee good harvests, the basic economy, the sum total of all human interactions and economic exchanges, will still be around long after the collapse of big government. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | THE CHAOS ADVOCATE is copyrighted by Mack Tanner. You | | may review and read sections of this electronic publication | | to determine whether or not you would like to read the entire | | work. If you decide to read the entire magazine, or if you | | keep a copy of the magazine in the unpacked, readable format | | for your own personal use or review for more than two days | | must pay a SHARELIT fee by mailing $2.00 to | | | | Mack Tanner | | 1234 Nearing Rd. | | Moscow, ID 83843 | | | | If you want a receipt, include a self-addressed and | | stamped envelope. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+