I think this is the wrong way to go about things, as it seems to have political capture baked right in. We will end up with some form of 'only loyal Soviet citizens with a thorough understanding of Marxist economic principles and our place in Socialist history get the vote and only Party members get to be the government'. And I don't see how to avoid this, when the world is already well supplied with people who want precisely this. Will the USA get voters who have a grounding in what traditionally was taught as American history? or the 1619 project's history? What if you think with Henry Ford that both sorts are just bunk? The current problems facing a divided electorate is not citizen ignorance, but institutional untruthfulness and untrustworthiness. There is little point in becoming 'an informed citizen' when you no longer believe the sources which purport to inform you.
I'm still working through these ideas too. But I'll play devil's advocate (or Lobaczewski advocate) to see where it goes.
"only loyal Soviet citizens with a thorough understanding of Marxist economic principles and our place in Socialist history get the vote and only Party members get to be the government"
Maybe it will end up like this. But this is precisely what L is trying to avoid. Party membership was very limited and restricted in the commie countries (e.g. I think it was something like 5% in Poland). The various filters L proposes are to block precisely that 5% (which was almost uniformly personality-disordered), to the greatest degree possible, from any influence in politics, and open up "party membership" to the 90%. If it's not doing that, it's not a logocracy. And if it's pushing an ideological fiction like Marxism, that in and of itself is evidence the competence principle is not being followed.
I'm willing to put up with *some* form of this, if it is based on common sense. Put another way: there are all kinds of historians I *would* trust to write a very basic history of the past century. Currently those types of historians are sidelined in the ideological battles. I suspect that in a logocracy, they would gravitate to the "logocratic association" as opposed to any parties pushing a radical or overly idealized take on recent history.
"What if you think with Henry Ford that both sorts are just bunk?"
That's where the idea of the "logocratic association" comes in. Ideologues would not be writing the curriculum, so the political history section would look like neither the American myth nor the 1619 Project.
"The current problems facing a divided electorate is not citizen ignorance, but institutional untruthfulness and untrustworthiness."
I think it's both, and that Lobaczewski's main point is that competence breeds trust. This is so far removed from all contemporary systems of politics (to one degree or another) that it seems impossible. Maybe it us, but I suspect not. I see its truth on smaller scales.
The thing I'm finding about L's logocracy ideas is that they're a package deal. Not that they're all necessarily the best options - just that any given one taken in isolation won't necessarily work on its own. For example, if we just import this idea of the textbook to the existing American political system, it will probably work as you say. But what L's proposing is that probably most of the politicians currently in office and on the market would not be in office were the U.S. a logocracy. The principles and values would have to be spread at all levels, and that means the driving force would really be bottom-up. Competent leaders would be identified locally in a very different manner than the way leaders are chosen in modern democracies.
It does seem so, based upon what you have published so far.
Now, the last chapter of the book will be devoted to the plan of implementation. I await what Lobaczewski has to say about that.
From my perspective, incremental implementations seem like a safer approach, but they are subject to "capture" as Laura says.
I was in the IT industry for 33 years, and I saw way too many IT projects fail because they were not incremental in nature. In the 1980's, many IT vendors advertised their packages as "turnkey" solution, meaning you could just install and go. The problem was conversion of existing systems to the new "turnkey" system. That made too many of these packages TURKEY systems, "gobble, gobbling" more and more money.
Another pitfall I saw a lot of, was "Big Bang" implementations, where a development team would spend two years or more redesigning everything from a clean sheet of paper. Too many of these "Big Bang" installations ended up "nuking" the organisation in question.
A spectacular example this was IBM's "Big Bang" replacement of the New Zealand Police's computer systems. The new systems was dubbed INCIS (for Integrated National Crime Information System). After gigantic budget blowouts, the project was abandoned in 1999.
Some wit posted the following on-line:
"For Sale: New Zealand Police computer system. No reserve. Will exchange for Play Station."
So, let us beware of "clean sheet of paper" solutions!
Yeah, Lobaczewski is big on incremental changes as opposed to revolutionary ones. Though he did think that the early 90s would have been a good time to create logocratic systems in Eastern Europe, after the collapse of communism. He thought the transition would have been less stormy than they turned out to be.
Feb 23, 2023·edited Feb 24, 2023Liked by Harrison Koehli
Competence does indeed breed trust. In some ways, it is too bad that we do not have a completely reliable lie-detector. It would be nice to wire up potential candidates for public office and toss the ones that cannot manage 'I want to be a trustworthy person'. Because, right now, I fear that being willing to lie is becoming a requirement for public office. It is bad enough that I wonder if we might do better to select people in government by lot instead of electing them.
Rather than a mechanism for preventing the unsuitable from attaining public office we may need a better mechanism for removing them once we have determined they are unsuitable. Institutions which only function when 'the right people' are in control are dangerously fragile, to use Nassim Taleb's terminolgy which divides things into fragile, robust, and anti-fragile systems. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book))
I think that trapped priors are a significant part of what holds an ideology together, which could partly explain why Marxism is still alive and kicking.
"It is bad enough that I wonder if we might do better to select people in government by lot instead of electing them."
I've thought exactly the same thing! And as for removing ones determined to be unsuitable, maybe they would have to provide quarterly reports on fulfilling their campaign promises... No results, no job?
These days, of course, we are more likely to have problems because we are governed by an administrative class which is neither elected nor selected by lot. When the public servants become the masters of the public it is very difficult to wrest control back from them. Plato's Republic will always have appeal. Most people dearly would love to be ruled by Enlightened Philosopher KIngs/Benevolent Despots/Excellent Technocratic Experts. But we never seem to get them -- we get the Foolish Princes/Tyrants/Groupthinking Oligarchs instead. Again, and again, and again.
After rereading your article later, I think that another objection I have to this way of doing things is that it promotes the idea that lack of intelligence is what is behind the bad governance we have -- thus intelligence restrictions would do us some good. But what we need is more wisdom rather than more intelligence, and a double helping of trustworthiness, honesty, and conscientiousness would do us wonders as well. There is a certain type of intelligent person who thinks that wisdom is simply a crutch for those people who are insufficiently intelligent. Given ample opportunities to acquire wisdom they reject them more or less every time. Rather than learning from experience they go back to whatever abstract model they have about how the world ought to work -- and double down on the model, perhaps with a few tweaks.
The message 'an intelligent, well-educated fool is still a fool' is one they never seem to be able to receive. These people are rather more of a danger than the merely unintelligent.
see: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/six-questions-that-neil-ferguson-should-be-asked/ for a spectacular example of how this has played out in recent time. Neil Ferguson, the highly intelligent oxford physicist looks to be the quintessential intelligent fool. (I haven't completely ruled out the possibility that he is an evil sociopath and/or sadist who likes harming people for it's own sake, but he is precisely the sort of person who falls for the intelligence trap. So I think this is what is more likely.) He keeps flogging his computer simulation and mathematical model of how pandemics work and no matter how many times he is proven wrong he doesn't learn humility and wisdom. What's more distressing is that the world at large hadn't learned that he is the first person you should disinvite to your pandemic response team because he has a long proven track record of being utterly wrong -- despite, or perhaps in his case because of being a 'smart Oxford guy'.
Why didn't we know better? The Spectator did. Why didn't the message get out more widely before we all scared ourselves half out of our minds?
Yeah, I think he focuses a bit too much on intelligence too. Though there are several places in PP (and a few in Logocracy) where he highlights the importance of "basic intelligence" (i.e. emotional intelligence), and the importance of good morals.
We have plenty of smart fools. Though I do think that dumb fools are pretty dangerous too, in their own way, and we've got a handful of them too.
trad society was meritocratic for this reason!
results above correct ideology or moralizing!
I think this is the wrong way to go about things, as it seems to have political capture baked right in. We will end up with some form of 'only loyal Soviet citizens with a thorough understanding of Marxist economic principles and our place in Socialist history get the vote and only Party members get to be the government'. And I don't see how to avoid this, when the world is already well supplied with people who want precisely this. Will the USA get voters who have a grounding in what traditionally was taught as American history? or the 1619 project's history? What if you think with Henry Ford that both sorts are just bunk? The current problems facing a divided electorate is not citizen ignorance, but institutional untruthfulness and untrustworthiness. There is little point in becoming 'an informed citizen' when you no longer believe the sources which purport to inform you.
I'm still working through these ideas too. But I'll play devil's advocate (or Lobaczewski advocate) to see where it goes.
"only loyal Soviet citizens with a thorough understanding of Marxist economic principles and our place in Socialist history get the vote and only Party members get to be the government"
Maybe it will end up like this. But this is precisely what L is trying to avoid. Party membership was very limited and restricted in the commie countries (e.g. I think it was something like 5% in Poland). The various filters L proposes are to block precisely that 5% (which was almost uniformly personality-disordered), to the greatest degree possible, from any influence in politics, and open up "party membership" to the 90%. If it's not doing that, it's not a logocracy. And if it's pushing an ideological fiction like Marxism, that in and of itself is evidence the competence principle is not being followed.
I'm willing to put up with *some* form of this, if it is based on common sense. Put another way: there are all kinds of historians I *would* trust to write a very basic history of the past century. Currently those types of historians are sidelined in the ideological battles. I suspect that in a logocracy, they would gravitate to the "logocratic association" as opposed to any parties pushing a radical or overly idealized take on recent history.
"What if you think with Henry Ford that both sorts are just bunk?"
That's where the idea of the "logocratic association" comes in. Ideologues would not be writing the curriculum, so the political history section would look like neither the American myth nor the 1619 Project.
"The current problems facing a divided electorate is not citizen ignorance, but institutional untruthfulness and untrustworthiness."
I think it's both, and that Lobaczewski's main point is that competence breeds trust. This is so far removed from all contemporary systems of politics (to one degree or another) that it seems impossible. Maybe it us, but I suspect not. I see its truth on smaller scales.
The thing I'm finding about L's logocracy ideas is that they're a package deal. Not that they're all necessarily the best options - just that any given one taken in isolation won't necessarily work on its own. For example, if we just import this idea of the textbook to the existing American political system, it will probably work as you say. But what L's proposing is that probably most of the politicians currently in office and on the market would not be in office were the U.S. a logocracy. The principles and values would have to be spread at all levels, and that means the driving force would really be bottom-up. Competent leaders would be identified locally in a very different manner than the way leaders are chosen in modern democracies.
Re: Logocracy as a package deal
It does seem so, based upon what you have published so far.
Now, the last chapter of the book will be devoted to the plan of implementation. I await what Lobaczewski has to say about that.
From my perspective, incremental implementations seem like a safer approach, but they are subject to "capture" as Laura says.
I was in the IT industry for 33 years, and I saw way too many IT projects fail because they were not incremental in nature. In the 1980's, many IT vendors advertised their packages as "turnkey" solution, meaning you could just install and go. The problem was conversion of existing systems to the new "turnkey" system. That made too many of these packages TURKEY systems, "gobble, gobbling" more and more money.
Another pitfall I saw a lot of, was "Big Bang" implementations, where a development team would spend two years or more redesigning everything from a clean sheet of paper. Too many of these "Big Bang" installations ended up "nuking" the organisation in question.
A spectacular example this was IBM's "Big Bang" replacement of the New Zealand Police's computer systems. The new systems was dubbed INCIS (for Integrated National Crime Information System). After gigantic budget blowouts, the project was abandoned in 1999.
Some wit posted the following on-line:
"For Sale: New Zealand Police computer system. No reserve. Will exchange for Play Station."
So, let us beware of "clean sheet of paper" solutions!
Yeah, Lobaczewski is big on incremental changes as opposed to revolutionary ones. Though he did think that the early 90s would have been a good time to create logocratic systems in Eastern Europe, after the collapse of communism. He thought the transition would have been less stormy than they turned out to be.
Competence does indeed breed trust. In some ways, it is too bad that we do not have a completely reliable lie-detector. It would be nice to wire up potential candidates for public office and toss the ones that cannot manage 'I want to be a trustworthy person'. Because, right now, I fear that being willing to lie is becoming a requirement for public office. It is bad enough that I wonder if we might do better to select people in government by lot instead of electing them.
Rather than a mechanism for preventing the unsuitable from attaining public office we may need a better mechanism for removing them once we have determined they are unsuitable. Institutions which only function when 'the right people' are in control are dangerously fragile, to use Nassim Taleb's terminolgy which divides things into fragile, robust, and anti-fragile systems. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book))
Just today I was reading this interesting bit about 'Trapped Priors', a concept I had not run across before. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem
I think that trapped priors are a significant part of what holds an ideology together, which could partly explain why Marxism is still alive and kicking.
"It is bad enough that I wonder if we might do better to select people in government by lot instead of electing them."
I've thought exactly the same thing! And as for removing ones determined to be unsuitable, maybe they would have to provide quarterly reports on fulfilling their campaign promises... No results, no job?
These days, of course, we are more likely to have problems because we are governed by an administrative class which is neither elected nor selected by lot. When the public servants become the masters of the public it is very difficult to wrest control back from them. Plato's Republic will always have appeal. Most people dearly would love to be ruled by Enlightened Philosopher KIngs/Benevolent Despots/Excellent Technocratic Experts. But we never seem to get them -- we get the Foolish Princes/Tyrants/Groupthinking Oligarchs instead. Again, and again, and again.
After rereading your article later, I think that another objection I have to this way of doing things is that it promotes the idea that lack of intelligence is what is behind the bad governance we have -- thus intelligence restrictions would do us some good. But what we need is more wisdom rather than more intelligence, and a double helping of trustworthiness, honesty, and conscientiousness would do us wonders as well. There is a certain type of intelligent person who thinks that wisdom is simply a crutch for those people who are insufficiently intelligent. Given ample opportunities to acquire wisdom they reject them more or less every time. Rather than learning from experience they go back to whatever abstract model they have about how the world ought to work -- and double down on the model, perhaps with a few tweaks.
The message 'an intelligent, well-educated fool is still a fool' is one they never seem to be able to receive. These people are rather more of a danger than the merely unintelligent.
see: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/six-questions-that-neil-ferguson-should-be-asked/ for a spectacular example of how this has played out in recent time. Neil Ferguson, the highly intelligent oxford physicist looks to be the quintessential intelligent fool. (I haven't completely ruled out the possibility that he is an evil sociopath and/or sadist who likes harming people for it's own sake, but he is precisely the sort of person who falls for the intelligence trap. So I think this is what is more likely.) He keeps flogging his computer simulation and mathematical model of how pandemics work and no matter how many times he is proven wrong he doesn't learn humility and wisdom. What's more distressing is that the world at large hadn't learned that he is the first person you should disinvite to your pandemic response team because he has a long proven track record of being utterly wrong -- despite, or perhaps in his case because of being a 'smart Oxford guy'.
Why didn't we know better? The Spectator did. Why didn't the message get out more widely before we all scared ourselves half out of our minds?
Yeah, I think he focuses a bit too much on intelligence too. Though there are several places in PP (and a few in Logocracy) where he highlights the importance of "basic intelligence" (i.e. emotional intelligence), and the importance of good morals.
We have plenty of smart fools. Though I do think that dumb fools are pretty dangerous too, in their own way, and we've got a handful of them too.