What's So Great About Polycentricity?

Breaking up power means making society more antifragile and governance more tailored.

In “When Governments Compete, You Win,” we discussed the importance of polycentral law as an extension of the fact of pluralism. In this piece, we’ll discuss the blessings of polycentricity and local empowerment. —MB

Competition among governance rulesets isn’t intuitively good for everyone. So it behooves us to share at least one practical fact about polycentrism at the outset: it’s antifragile.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb outlines an entire theory in his book Antifragile. The basic idea is that systems should be designed without single points of failure. Inevitably, claims Taleb, black swans will threaten monolithic systems. Distributing or decentralizing systems—including governance systems—makes them less vulnerable or more “antifragile.”

“If there is something in nature you don't understand,” Taleb cautions,

[O]dds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

In a similar fashion, polycentricity is biomimicry.

To mimic nature, we can start by privileging the law that emerges from natural interactions and collisions of people moving about in the world. The common law, for example, has evolved over time. Statutes, by contrast, are rationalist contrivances of central elites. Still, if central elites are to design law to some degree (like Eugen Huber did) they will do well to practice “network design.”

“Design harnesses the designer’s subconscious, and it recognizes the need to empathize with the user’s,” explains complexity theorist Diego Espinosa.

Of course, it isn’t as black and white as all that, but rather a matter of orientation. Design largely bypasses the Cartesian payoffs-and-probabilities calculus. It embraces human fallibility and the chance to learn from error. It goes where complexity takes it.

The question before us is: Where will complexity take us next?

Polyarchy

Only the savviest readers will have noticed a big fat assumption in the conversation. Recall the idea of “neighboring” states in this article.

If you don’t like Vermont, we said, you can move to New Hampshire. This framing, though thoroughly ingrained in our thinking, might increasingly be unnecessary. It’s an artifact of human history since the Age of Agriculture. It’s a byproduct of war, conquest, and the drawing of borders upon territory. 

In Polystate, cartoonist Zach Weinersmith argues that, whether in Catalonia or Texas, the imposition of the “geostate” (governing laws) upon the “anthrostate” (emergent culture) can never be taken for granted. That is, “a geostate continues to be itself only so long as there is not a discrete moment at which the people governed by it choose for it to change, usually at great cost of blood, treasure, and order.” The connection among people, territory, and law is thus contingent. Weinersmith writes:

Geostates are not pre-ordained by the human condition. They should not be taken as inevitable. We should especially consider the extent to which technology influences the meaning of geography.

Indeed.

What if we realized most of what counts as jurisdiction today is completely arbitrary? What if most of what falls under the rubric of governance today need not be tied to territory at all?

Most people are political partisans if they care about such matters. If you’re a partisan, I have a challenge for you: Have you dreamed of a day when your favored party could finally implement every plank in its platform? Seriously, what if it were possible? What if you could live in your favorite system of government and keep all those idiots in that other party from obstructing your plans?

One such proposal recommends itself.

“In the past and in the present, the idea of tailoring the experience of every individual to his taxes, healthcare laws, social services, and so on would be unthinkable,” writes Zach Weinersmith. He continues:

Government bureaucracy is large enough without having to provide this massive service. But suppose that at some point, computer AI is good enough that ‘computer assistants’ actually assist the user in a meaningful way? Suppose that more and more delivery of goods and services can be done on the spot by individuals, thanks to better technology. In this case, it is possible that government could be extremely tailored to the individual.

AI assistants are one thing. Amazon is another. But people have been kicking around similar ideas since well before Ray Kurzweil and Jeff Bezos.