The political, social, and economic forces of change are dependent, interactive, and simultaneous. They are not independent, hierarchical, and sequential.
The Power of Balance
The distinction between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democratic Party is no longer useful. Both are using singular political ideological perspectives which oversimplify the complexity of our current social issues. This has left the nation without clear positive alternatives to deal with the disruption of rapid change. In addition, the takeover of the Republican Party by Trump and the right-wing MAGA movement has elevated political power at the expense of essential economic and social constraints. There is now a choice before us – either create a functional democracy that is relevant to modern life in the 21st Century or default into an authoritarian style of dysfunctional government.
Complexity Not Simplicity
The significant social issues of our time all have political, social and economic elements that must be considered simultaneously. A recent example was the politicization of COVID management that rejected a mandatory mask or vaccine mandate because it was an infringement on personal freedom. This is a singular political perspective that overrides the social and economic elements of the pandemic and failed to identify the most appropriate comprehensive set of management practices when all three elements are simultaneously considered.
Likewise with the current stalemate in response to climate change, the political, social, and economic elements are interactive and must be reconciled with each other simultaneously. Science has shown us that we are consuming our global resources faster than the earth can regenerate them. We know we are killing the very planet we need to sustain ourselves. The environmental collapse resulting from climate change can only be addressed by global cooperation and agreements, which have political, social, and economic components.
Such objective, definable “social issues” only appear to be intractable because they are complex, and because the relationship between their three components must be reconciled. The three elements are all exponential, not linear, functions. An exponential function is a rate of change which gets larger (or smaller) over a series of steps. While a linear function adds a fixed amount at every step, an exponential function multiplies by a fixed amount at every step. An example is wealth and income disparities in the United States in which the bottom percentages of people have little money, while the upper 1% have huge amounts of wealth.
Such complex social problems cannot be solved if we continue to treat them, from either a simple liberal or conservative ideology, as if the three element are independent, hierarchical, and successive. The required task is to account for the complex interplay between these three elements as dependent, interactive, and simultaneous.
Dependent, Interactive, and Simultaneous
If the goal is to maximize the positive value of each of the political, economic, and social elements, then the resulting consequence is that as one element increases toward its own upper limit, the corresponding values of the other two elements must decrease to maintain the overall balance. This relationship illustrates that the value of any single element is not independent; rather, its exponential value is determined by its relation to the other two. Thus, any efforts to maximize one element will inevitably require even larger concessions in the others, demonstrating the dependent, interactive, and simultaneous nature of the three elements.
A Graphic Example
In practical terms this translates into a situation in which any one of the factors can increase its relative weight only at the expense of reducing the relative weight of either one, or both, of the remaining two. Because the function is exponential rather than linear, there is a balance point in which the sum of the three is maximized; but, if any one of the factors approaches the limit, the value of the other two approach zero. The attached graphic illustrates the principle that balance has greater utility than even a small increase in the role of any one of the three elements.
In the context of the current concern over the
shift toward authoritarianism in the US, the graphic illustrates how marginal
increase of political power, beyond the balance level, can be achieved only at
a cost of extreme reductions in economic and/or social institutions and their stability. Changing the balance among the three
elements by increasing political authority is therefore extremely disruptive to
the integrity of the democratic process.
The Utility of Balance, illustrated by the graphic, goes well beyond the specific illustration of the abuse of authoritarian power in a democracy, such as the negative social consequence of greater economic inequalities.
For example, holding the political element constant at the balanced value, relatively small additional increases in the concertation of wealth above the balanced level will produce significantly larger decreases in the strength and effectiveness of social institutions and services as illustrated in the second figure. This application of the model illustrates the exponential effect of diminishing marginal utility: An extra $100 for a billionaire has no social or personal value, but for a destitute person, a meal and warm bed have many more times of social and personal value.
Raw Political Power
Contemporary examples of the excessive exercise of political power in the United States are detailed by Joseph O’Neill in Trump’s exercise of raw power. These include such items as his efforts at annexing Greenland, rupturing NATO, transforming the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security into political security forces, ICE abducting children and breaking into homes without a judicial warrant, and in Minneapolis, shooting of a peaceful protester. His conclusion was:
“Trump and the Republican Party have embarked on a new stage of authoritarianism: an imperialistic foreign policy, extrajudicial murders on the high seas, and the mass deployment of Border Patrol and ICE agents into Democratic cities…(as) an unprecedented spectacle of democratic implosion.”
Left unchecked, the imbalance illustrated in the graphic example could become a reality for the United States as it has in other authoritarian nations, such as Putin’s Russia. The ineffectiveness of the Democratic Party to meet this challenge is as large of a problem as the effectiveness of the Republican Party. There is no viable future if we anchor our beliefs, values, and actions on Nationalism, Prohibitions and Censorship, and Privatization as Trump and the Republican Party are now doing; those authoritarian policies are not compatible with living successfully in the globalized modern world.
Two Principles
First, the significant challenges of our time, such as environmental collapse and international law and order, are like a complex mobile -- messing with any single part ruins the whole piece. Our current ideological political divide is messing with one part of our urgent challenges, while the whole package has three parts that must be considered simultaneously. The three elements are not independent, hierarchical, and sequential. Singular ideological political perspectives are not only a distraction, but they are also dangerous.
Second, increasingly we need to move toward relying on
the greater utility (power) of balance rather than striving to achieve the
balance of (political) power. This is the exact opposite of MAGA and
America First. The greater utility of the “power of balance” rather than owning
the “balance of power” applies not only to the relationship among nations and
the effects of economic inequalities, but also to the relationships between
individuals for a peaceful and more cooperative world.
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