The Frankenstein Monster as interpreted by Boris Karloff may have been a big guy who didn’t know his own strength – again unbalanced reinforcing loops. As interpreted by Mel Brooks he was just misunderstood. Once those reinforcing loops were balanced – put the big lug in a tux – all hell didn’t break loose.
Systems Thinking
is a framework and a toolkit (check out Stella and i Think from I See Systems ) with which ecologists and ecological economists can model the real world of the carbon and hydrologic cycles, ecosystems and economic “bubbles.” But how do we model systems that are difficult to quantify? Is it science fiction, as in the psychohistorians of Asimov’s Foundation Series ( e-book )? The actions of the government of the United States have profound effects on this country and the world. Can we use Systems Thinking to model political movements? Did Bill Clinton and James Carville, George W. Bush and Karl Rove and Barack Obama, David Axelrod and Dan Plouffe use Systems Thinking to create a balancing feedback mechanism and win an election? Could they have?
As we were taught in high school, the Constitution set up a system of government of three balanced branches. The “checks and balances” of the Executive enforcing the laws written by the Legislative and interpreted by the Judiciary. This is a system with balancing feedback mechanisms.
Was the system “overbalanced” when, on Dec. 11, 1998, the Congress impeached the President for personal actions that did not – or should not have – adversely impact national security. Did the system break down when the Supreme Court intervened in the 2000 election to decide the outcome, and in the period that followed when neither the Legislative nor the Judiciary acted to check or balance the Executive Branch.
During the Bush Administration, there were: Politicization of the Justice Department in which Prosecutors were fired for not “playing ball” with the Administration, the The position of US Attorney in New Jersey went to a Wall St. Lobbyist who gave the Bush Cheney 2000 campaign $400,000. The regieme privatized of “National Security,” the military, and Emergency Response to KBR, Halliburton and other politically connected operators, Privatization of Education, and Prisons, disregard of the Judiciary in terms of the FISA law, Habeous Corpus, disregard of the rule of law in the use of torture and extraordinary rendition. All of these constitute a set of reinforcing feedback mechanisms. There were no balancing feedback mechanisms. And things got out of hand.
Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder
As the saying goes, Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely! A systems thinking approach would suggest that this 6 word truism really states that: “unbalanced power that grows unchecked will inexorably lead to abuses of power until it collapses.” The 1000 year Reich ended May 8, 1945. The power of Hirohito ended on August 6 and 9, 1945 with Fat Man and Little Boy laying waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another difficult to quantify feedback mechanism is in the history of the Manhattan Project. The physicists and engineers included European refugees like John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi and Americans like Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman who would have been killed by the Nazis. Stalinism collapsed in Peristroika in the 1980s. The excesses of the neoconservative movement appeared to end with Sarah Palin bopping to Amy Poehler’s rap (lyrics / video
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Lest you feel this is “just politics” the dollar cost can be measured in trillions of dollars. And the cost in human suffering: thousands of Americans dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraquis and Agfhans, a weaker US, power vacuums in Iraq and Afghanistan, a stronger Iran.