I was recently contacted by Gus diZerega, a post-Wilberian integrative thinker who has been studying “emergence”, and started a website with online journal, Studies in Emergent Order.

One of his articles, New Directions in Emergent Order Research, from the Fall 2008 issue, charts out the aims of the project and its historical grounding. Much of the content is still as relevant today, and particularly relate to our p2p concerns.

For example, how does the self-aggregation of peer to peer dynamics inter-relate to existing institutions?

Some excerpts of interest by Gus diZerega:

* Tensions Exist Between Spontaneous Orders and Instrumental Organizations

“Hayek distinguished between spontaneous and what he termed made or constructed orders. I will describe these latter more generally as instrumental organizations: they are created or in nature evolved to pursue concrete purposes. Anything describable in teleological terms is an instrumental organization in this sense, be it social or biological.

On balance, spontaneous orders increase the likelihood of successful action within their confines by coordinating otherwise disconnected actions through feedback signals, but they also threaten these efforts. When organizations do not control their environment they can be weakened or destroyed by the same processes that once facilitated their success. This problem is scarcely confined to businesses. Political parties, organized religions, and indeed any instrumental organization within a free society all face the same kind of problem.

If they act rationally, instrumental organizations therefore have interests in conflict with the requirements for sustaining emergent orders. [8] As a result we can theorize that large business organizations will not support free markets as soon as competition threatens their prosperity. We can also predict political parties in a democracy will often try and limit competition from new entrants unless those entrants serve to undermine their competition. The same will be true for competing schools of thought in science so long as no strong consensus exists about a scientific issue. Ultimately they will try and convert an emergent order into an instrumental organization they control. This tendency holds for any organization in any spontaneous order.

In many respects the strongest centralizing forces in American politics have been corporations seeking to standardize conditions across the country by disempowering localities. When this paper was first written there were such efforts by GM, Ford, Adidas, and many agricultural corporations. This issue is consistently neglected by classical liberals who usually focus on politically weaker forces also seeking to expand political power at the center (Weinstein 1981, Kolko 1977, McConnell 1996). To some degree Hayek (1960: 124) was aware of this issue, but his brief analysis has been long neglected.

In attempting to manipulate the rules of an emergent order to preserve their dominance, instrumental organizations use systemic resources obtained by successful action within that order, or import resources acquired within other orders, to try to short circuit spontaneous processes threatening their existence. Thus Disney Corporation got copyright rules changed shortly before Mickey Mouse and similar characters could enter the public domain. Credit card companies get rules for bankruptcy changed in their favor with minimal public attention. This list could be lengthened considerably. The primary beneficiaries are usually well-established companies. Successful new firms often do not seek political favors – until they become well established and therefore vulnerable themselves to new market challenges or alternatively, to political extortion.

Corporations and other interests seek to influence political decision-making by contributing money and hiring lobbyists. Politicians seek to make money due to the power they exert in influencing government outcomes, both in government and through networks of personal connections after they leave, to become lobbyists. It is sometimes hard to tell whether public policy is set by bribery or extortion, and in government it will almost always be influenced by one or both.”

* The tension between civil society and the market

“It is within civil society, including the market place but not the financial order, that the fit is greatest between socially defined successful cooperation and individually experienced successful cooperation. This is because civil society incorporates the richest mix of values into its multidimensional feedback and coordinating process. This complexity also makes it far more difficult to theorize about civil society than more simplified orders that have differentiated themselves from out of it. Even so, Alexis deTocqueville made a good start at discerning how civil society was rooted in emergent order processes.

Civil society is therefore the most basic realm of individual autonomy and freedom. But past a certain point in social complexity, more specialized emergent orders gain increasing autonomy, becoming able to be analyzed in terms of feedback processes specific to them. The personal element shrinks, and within purely market order phenomena such as computer programs selling stock, it fully disappears. We need both civil society and the emergent orders to which it gives birth, so this tension is inevitable.”

* Classic Liberalism went astray by seeing emergent order only in the market

“I have watched as one of the most vital upwellings of creative energy from civil society – the rise of thousands of community based environmental groups, has been attacked as “socialist” and worse by supposedly free market organizations even when they seek to create voluntary organizations, such as land trusts, and when the private businesses they oppose are often the recipient of legal privileges denied to others. For example, only logging companies can bid for heavily subsidized timber cuts. Environmental group bidding to protect the forest are prevented by law from winning. And the contracts put out to bid are written in such a way as to preclude any but large corporations from being able to “compete.” (Danks 2004) Huge subsidies are then provided. But classical liberals generally accuse environmentalists of being the advocates of big government and claim the corporate oligarchy as an example of economic freedom. [21] George Orwell would sadly feel at home.

Worst of all has been the failure of many classical liberals to see the threat to all liberal institutions by the contemporary radical right and the political party it dominates. If democracies are states, and states respond to whomever is in control, it logically follows that classical liberals and their allies need to be in control. Otherwise the ‘enemy’ rules. And so, in cooperation with their anti-liberal allies, classical liberals supported centralizing power in the executive. Techno liberals are also guilty, but with a difference. For the most part their goals were popularly supported. They did not need to deliberately seal themselves off from popular accessibility, and turn a democracy into a state. But because they opposed popular programs, classical liberals and their allies also supported executive efforts to insulate themselves from popular pressures and even from Congress. The sad result was they aided efforts to turn the American political system into a traditional state: a hierarchy of power organized to implement commands from the top.

Why do they not see these problems? I think because classical liberals so often equate freedom only with what can be achieved by the market order alone. This results from their logically and factually inaccurate belief that markets are simply tools for facilitating voluntary exchange. That they do not see other kinds, and so find any criticisms of the market as somehow opposing “freedom.” Therefore values sought by environmentalists (or anyone else) are by definition “socialist” or some similarly inaccurate epithet. And so for reasons of theoretical myopia, classical liberals often become apologists for oligarchy, aristocracy, and exploitation.”