The Power of Rules and How Change Can Happen
What are rules and who needs to create them
This article is part of a series of 12 articles about applications of 12 leverage points to intervene in a system. Systems thinking author Donella Meadows published Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, a paper in 1997, in which she enumerated the 12 points in an increasing order of effectiveness.
The rules of the system is the 5th in the order of 12 leverage points that are effective for systems change. I lifted her thoughts in the paper and have carried them across in a current context
Why do rules need to exist? Who needs to create and change the rules? How are rules abused and when are they beneficial?
Donella Meadows, a renowned Systems Thinker and “Limits to Growth” lead author, postulated that system rules are designed for constraint, penalty, and incentives [or disincentives]. Rules are a leverage point: to correct, arrest, or mitigate something. Accordingly in social systems, rules are used for governance. In individuals, rules drive behaviors and our daily habits.
An example of a social rule is freedom of expression with a right to free speech. Then, there are universal social rules that exact punishment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house (resources exploitation); Thou shalt not steal (corruption and plunder); Thou shalt not kill (war, murder, human abuse).
The rules of any System then are to define the scope, boundaries, and degrees of freedom.
Systems of government
In the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union and opened information flows (glasnost) and changed the economic rules (perestroika), and the Soviet Union saw successive tremendous changes until its final collapse as a state system in 1991.
We can draw lessons from highly centralized governments such as Soviet Russia, as from any other statist empire. These lessons are best drawn not only from the annals of their political history but also from how its society evolve its social rules.
A country’s constitution is the strongest example of social rules. We are governed by laws, punishments, and incentives. So are our informal social agreements. These are, however, progressively weaker and alterable rules than the principles of justice that are concerned with how well political and social orders secure the basic rights and liberties of a country’s citizens. Conversely, the laws of physics, such as the four laws of thermodynamics, are immutable. These laws govern any living system, humans included and the adaptive complex systems that we create. Government among these.
Rules to govern rules
The four laws of thermodynamics are absolute rules in physics. Its second law states that as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted. This law also states that there is a natural tendency of any isolated system, as would unpopular governments, to degenerate into a more disordered state, according to Boston University.
Saibal Mitra, a professor of physics at Missouri State University, finds the Second Law to be the most interesting of the four laws of thermodynamics. “There are a number of ways to state the Second Law,” Mitra states. “At a very microscopic level, it simply says that if you have a system that is isolated, any natural process in that system progresses in the direction of increasing disorder or entropy of the system.”
Change the rules for change
To demonstrate the power of rules in society, imagine different ones for a college. Imagine the students grading the teachers, or each other. Suppose there were no degrees: You come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you’ve learned it.
Suppose tenure were awarded to professors according to their ability to solve real world problems, rather than to publish academic papers. Suppose a class got graded as a group, instead of as individuals.
A more complex illustration is that of governments: its legislature, judicial and executive officials. What if these individuals are elected by a graded system, not through election or appointment but created by its citizens based on their lived everyday experiences, not by any abstract measure but by their realities.
Modern societies have risen and collapsed with the same set of rules that have governed humans since we’ve domesticated animals and tilled land with agriculture. Every concept of society that was advanced has emanated from a few who kept and abused it for their own interests. That which is invented by humans can only last with the fragility of the created system itself.
Conversely, Ubuntu, the ancient African concept of a human existence for a tribe to prosper and thrive, translates to “I am because you are’’. The phrase is a universal adage for the natural practice of interdependence among all systems and its players. Joomla, another African term borrowed by a web content management system means “all together!”. We all have but relegated such concepts and terms to information technology with an unknowing regard for their profound meaning.
Ancient societies knew much better.
As we try to imagine the imperative to restructure and change the rules, imagine also what our behaviors would be under them. Only then can we come to understand the power of rules and why it can be beneficial, be abused, or can work against us.
Rules are high leverage points
Power over the rules is true power. That is why those in the corridors of power in government create such rules. Congress, which supposedly represents us, writes the rules of our law. Congress, at times however, is circumvented by the Executive Branch. Then the Supreme Court when it interprets and delineates the Constitution — the rules for writing the rules — makes decisions that have even more power than Congress which should have represented us.
If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.
Now, another looming global recession is sending off alarm bells as the “new normal” post CoVid-19 Pandemic unfurls. The outcomes? Runaway inflation, or worse, economic stagnation and inflation (stagflation). Governments are again repeatedly implementing the same established measures to hold back a long overdue economic meltdown by using the same old rules. Toward what end? Social entropy.
The “new normal’’ is but a mere term dressed in a different cloak of the same recurring social systems abuse. Its rules are influenced by Milton Friedman-esque corporations. By its very essence, Friedman’s normative theory of business ethics holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Nothing else. Its rules exclude almost any feedback from what feeds its very existence, a dependence on us as “consumers of its products or services”. We are never participants to corporate information flows nor feedback that benefit us. It forces us — individuals, communities, institutions of governments, and even nations — into vicious reinforcing loops that is a “race to the bottom,” competing with each other that weakens environmental, economic, and social safeguards in order to amass more corporate investments coming out of our own shrinking pockets.
These all are a recipe to sustain “success to the successful’’ reinforcing loops, until it generates enormous accumulations of further power and huge centralized planning systems that, as the immutable second law of thermodynamics dictate, will destroy us. And themselves, the “successful”.
Must we want change to happen? How so? Change the rules, but preceded by changing our ways so as not fall into the trappings of the unfailing tragedy of the commons.
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References and credit to Donella Meadows’ 12 Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System at donellameadows.org
