Society has been increasing in complexity since the beginning of human civilization. Image: Yaneer Bar-Yam
For example, Trump's hiring freeze has left thousands of policy expert jobs across the executive branch unfilled. Disconcertingly, the administration has left nearly 200 top jobs open at the State Department, which would normally be filled with policy experts who understand geopolitical machinations. This means that decisions about domestic and global policy are being made by Trump and his closest advisors, as opposed to a more lateral system of experts advising them. Reports suggest that Trump also makes decisions on-the-fly, dispensing with the advice and plans of some of his closest advisors."The basic challenge is we still have to learn what the impacts of our decisions are actually going to be"
C-individual is the point at which one person cannot effectively make decisions. Representative democracies are not strict hierarchies, however they still centralize power in a few individuals (the "hybrid" model). Bar-Yam suggests society will need to move toward a more team-minded decision making process to cope with the complexity of human society.
Talking to Bar-Yam is both comforting and disconcerting—his assertion that current systems of governance around the world simply don't work because the world is too complicated for a couple people to make smart policy makes as much sense as any other explanation out there. But it's also a hypothesis that doesn't have an easy solution—if he's right, we can't simply impeach or elect our way out of this mess, we would literally have to write a new Constitution that allows for more teams of policy experts to make decisions for the country without devolving into authoritarian rule or utter chaos.Throughout the years we've created band-aid solutions to this lack of complexity within the current system—it's why under President Obama and previous administrations there have been so many policymaking task forces, commissions, and panels. But Bar-Yam says that while those sorts of teams have the ability to make government work better within the existing system, the ultimate decision-making power still filters up into a few individuals. Ideally, the teams he imagines would have the power to enact policy themselves."It's important to understand violent revolution is regressive rather than progressive—you cannot create a complex structure quickly," Bar-Yam said. He also suggests that the left-right divide in the United States and around the world is kind of a red herring; the real problem is that we often don't even know what the outcomes of policy decisions will actually be.We are quickly moving toward a world that is so complex that politicians can't be expected to anticipate the outcomes of their decisions, which means that there's less of a divide between right and left than you might think: "In the environment in which we live, the complexity progressively becomes higher and higher and it's basically like we're making random choices. The imperative to share decision making becomes greater and greater over time. The difference between even an adult and a child making decisions is shrinking," he said."People can have different values and seek different things, but if the decision about what you want to do creates policies that don't actually achieve what you were intending, it doesn't matter what your values or ideologies are—you're just ineffective," he said. "The basic challenge is we still have to learn what the impacts of our decisions are actually going to be.""In the environment in which we live, the complexity progressively becomes higher and higher and it's basically like we're making random choices"
