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Reasoning by analogy is a tricky business, but its accuracy is always worth exploring. Considering fractals: ‘Similarity at different scales’ is the principle underlying fractal presence in all complex systems. We can apply that theory to certain fixed principles governing our world.

When it comes to the human condition, the fixed principles that play out on scales both large and small are apoptosis, ferroptosis, autophagy, and necrosis, the four methods the body uses to deal with dysfunctional cells.

Apoptosis occurs when a cell that has detected a serious problem in its programming automatically destroys itself. In this way, we fight the development of cancer. Each cell takes responsibility for the entire organism’s health by recognizing signals from the whole unit that it should cease its deviance and disappear.

Ferroptosis kills a cell through an environmental chemical attack that thickens the cell’s walls and weakens its energy production until it can no longer function.

Image of a happy cellular society made using AI.

Autophagy is, essentially, a self-cleaning process where each cell cares for itself by degrading dysfunctional pieces of itself by gently starving its energy-producing mitochondria. If there is too little starvation, the cell becomes ineffective for its purpose; too much starvation and the cell kills itself. Done in moderation, this process helps the cell rejuvenate and extend its personal lifetime and contribution to the whole organ.

Lastly, necrosis kills large populations of cells due to traumatic injury or disease. All cells in a necrotic area die from the severity of the injury or loss of nutrition.

Each of these methods of cell death has its paradigmatic equivalent in the social life of nations.

Apoptosis occurs in the business world in ‘creative destruction’ when new ideas replace old ones, or younger, cheaper, more ambitious workers replace older ones. This movement toward younger and cheaper workers improves the economy by sacrificing the older, less efficient individuals. (This is not a moral argument for euthanasia. It is simply a statement of the way our world functions. In our best societies, we offer generous benefits to the less energetic to avoid the consequences of engaging in daily mass murder.) In some cases, elections can be seen as an apoptotic process. Undermining the election process will reduce a society’s lifespan.

Ferroptosis occurs in the socio-political world through long-term conflicts, blockades, or embargos imposed upon a group of people, a nation, or an institution until it collapses for lack of funding. When resources are meager, it causes starvation, forcing people to fight among themselves for diminishing wealth.

Autophagy, in social terms, occurs when a society expects each individual member to take responsibility for his viability and vitality. In that way, the entire city, state, or country functions better because self-correcting leaves high-functioning and flexible individuals to care for the state of the entire society.

Finally, social necrosis causes the death and decay to those members of the community because of war wounds or social pathology that are too catastrophic for anyone to address, even if the healthy remainder of society continues to function. Necrotic populations of people fall away like necrotic limbs falling off a gangrenous body. We can see this phenomenon daily in the epidemic of homelessness and our dubious response to elderly COVID victims during the 2020 epidemic.

Social necrosis will include the loss of productive capacity, the shriveling of industry, and the oversimplification of life to the point of loss of organization. Necrosis is like sacrificing the poor of society to continue their profligate ways. As structure declines, the risk becomes too great, and there is no path to future well-being and improved prosperity.

If there is enough social necrosis, investment in the sick sectors of the economy dries up, and an increasing number of individuals succumb to the structural failure of society, something we see in an economic depression. In this way, the entire society may fail catastrophically, though that was not the purpose behind the process. The future upon which we measure our lives is now in minutes instead of years and decades. Horizons shrink, and the air smells constantly of pessimism and the failure of hope.

And here is the take-home lesson! In complex societies, errors left to fester without the chance to be corrected are likely to cause a general collapse of the whole. Caught in a death spiral, maintaining a functioning society requires redundancy to be built into it, like multiple fingers and two eyes instead of one. Critical infrastructure requires redundancy, but very critical infrastructures need a lot more redundancy. That was the original basis for the development of the Internet. It allowed multiple paths of communication from point A to point B.

With this understanding, we can intuit that any individual or institutional entity seeking a reduction in redundancy is not sufficiently interested in the future. In biological terms, many brain or liver cells are better than just a few of each. Exerting power and taking plunder in the present in the name of efficiency mortgages the long-term viability of the entire body politic.

Every society will do better with a distribution of power over many individuals and smaller functional units like Switzerland. Society, like the human body, requires programming-like rules of behavior that, when violated, will naturally instigate corrective measures. That correction serves as a model for the rest of society.

Unlike distributed authority, the problem with centralized authority is that any single error ripples through the entire body politic. ‘Tinkering,’ the lifeblood of any form of progress, is best accomplished with distributed authority over an extended period.

Totalitarianism, by its nature, thwarts tinkering. Such rigid or simplified societies tend to fail before they can update their functioning to meet new challenges. Anyone who wants to see instant change has denigrated and crippled the process of tinkering to the point that failure is the most likely outcome.

Further, in a totalitarian system, suffering is magnified because an individual’s suffering is marginalized. Thus, extinction of otherwise viable individuals and functional institutions becomes more likely.

Only autophagy provides for both the individual and the whole of all individuals. Isn’t social autophagy the process that should be encouraged?