Alan Rosenblith on Fractal Sovereignty

fractal sovereignty is where the sovereignty of the individual and the sovereignty of the group are simultaneously fully embraced.

Excerpt from Alan Rosenblith:

“The question about where to place sovereignty has long been one of the core divides in politics. Many who consider themselves conservative favor the sovereignty of the individual over the group, decrying regulations, taxes, etc. Those who may consider themselves liberal tend to believe that taxes are a good thing because they contribute to the common good. In the spirit of “transcend and include” we have been exploring what it would mean to embrace both types of sovereignty fully. And, as is the case with many other topics, the MetaCurrency people don’t all agree. But here are my thoughts.

Fractals are all over the place in nature. Consider a snowflake. Its hypnotizing symmetry is a direct result of the “V” shape of a water molecule. A water molecule is bent at a very specific angle, causing it to be polar. This means one side is positively charged and the other is negatively charged. The collective interaction of billions of these tiny polar molecules is what ultimately leads to the snowflake’s macro crystalline structure. So the larger scale pattern emerges fractally from the smaller scale pattern.

Now apply this to sovereignty. For a group to be truly sovereign as a group, the only possible foundation is full individual sovereignty. So what do I mean by full individual sovereignty? In this case I don’t simply mean that you have a vote. I mean you are fully sovereign to act however you deem best given the information you have. That last part about information is really the key.

As you may already be aware, I consider a currency a method of keeping account of things that happen in the real world. It doesn’t take a big leap to see that my perception of the world largely depends on how I account for events. If I am a teacher who cares how polite the kids are with each other, I might want to keep track of pleases and thank yous. Perhaps I would choose to use a gold star system. If I care about academic performance I would use grades. If I care about athletic performance, I would keep score. All of these are currencies that shape my perception of the students in my class.

When we share methods of accounting, we can better coordinate our actions. For example, it wouldn’t be much of a football game if half the team was paying attention to the score, and the other half was counting the pleases and thank yous on the field. Coherence in the game emerges from shared perception of the events taking place on the field, and our perception emerges from how we account for these events.

So far, so good. But how does this apply to sovereignty? In the Industrial paradigm, we tend to get to cohesion through coercion. There are rules that are usually dictated from on high. Even in a democracy, how much say do you really have over the rules? Not much. What if instead of relying on RULES to create social cohesion, we let cohesion emerge from everyone’s fully sovereign individual actions. Everyone would be fully sovereign to use whatever method of accounting for events they found most useful. In other words, everyone would be fully sovereign to choose how to perceive the world around them. I predict that ultimately, this would produce large scale social coherence without coercion, much like how water molecules produce the coherence of the snowflake without any coercion or rules.

That is the soft claim. The strong claim is that true group sovereignty has as a necessary logical underpinning full individual sovereignty. Groups that cohere otherwise are not actually sovereign in the sense of choosing how to respond to their environment AS A GROUP. Sure they can respond, but not as sovereign entities. They respond based on rules and policies formalized on paper.

Think of it this way. In nature, species exist BECAUSE they work. No one sat down and looked at the ecosystem and said, “You know, I think a small hairy critter would do well here.” If there are small hairy critters, it is because small hairy critters emerged. Similarly, groups that are truly sovereign will exist BECAUSE they work, not because they were designed ahead of time. That is the essence of emergence versus creation from outside.”

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