Fractal Democracy

                One of the interesting aspects of looking at complex systems using fractals is that the different levels of the system do not necessarily all have the same organizing principle.  Each level of the system is an iterative construction of some fractal structure, just not necessarily the same structure on every level of the system.  I think that is a good way to think about how a radical democracy could organize itself to be both systematic and diverse.  One of the failings of the formal democracy that was constructed in our country is that it tries to reproduce exactly the same structures at every level of the system.  Concepts such as laws, freedoms and rights are supposed to operate the same way everywhere, but they never do.  As a result, they become more and more vague and indefinable.  If we understood that some parts of the system would operate differently in different contexts, maybe we could start to conceptualize a democratic system that was both coherent and diverse.

                We know that in our current system we all have a right to equal representation, but we also know that lobbyists and money drive the system.  We all have a right to an equal education, but we also know that your parents’ wealth pretty much determines what kind of education a child actually receives.  In short, the Euclidian view of social life promoted in a formal democracy is never what it claims to be.  Trying to reach the potential of a diverse political, social and economic culture is constantly being frustrated by our insistence that every piece looks exactly like every other piece.  All kinds of privileges are baked into the system on the basis of race, gender, religion and sexual identification, but calling them out is always frustrated by the false concept of equality.  The way that affirmative action was labeled as an unfair advantage in a society of blatantly unfair advantages is a good example.  The only way a formal democracy can think of us is to think of us as all the same, even though we obviously are not.

                If democracy is going to morph into a viable expression of diverse but equal people it has to find another way to model what it is going to think of as consistency.  Our political and legal dialog has degenerated into a childish game of who got more cookies than the other.  It is particularly ineffective when we can see that the folks that started with the most cookies in the first place can use the game to extend their advantage.  Why do we construct political arguments around issues such as abortion as a zero-sum game?  Why does there have to be only one way of adjudicating an issue?  No one is running into anti-abortion communities and demanding that people have abortions, but it seems perfectly natural to us as part of our legalistic formalism to demand that other communities follow one set of laws.  All this does is to create obviously hypocritical arguments about life and rights that are as tedious as they are flawed.  A radical democracy has to allow for differences on those issues.

                Communities can have different organizing principles as long as two conditions are met.  The first is that the organizing structure of the community cannot threaten the structural organization of another community.  Issues surrounding climate or war or food have to be protected and adjudicated at the most comprehensive and powerful level of the democracy.  Other issues can be settled in smaller communities as long as people have the right to leave or join the community as they choose.  That means that there are some communities that will do things that you (and me) find objectionable, but as long as the people in the community aren’t coerced into compliance, as long as they have a chance to leave, we should accept that.

                The two forms of purity that threaten American democracy are Puritanism and identity.  Both are a result, although in opposite ways, of trying to make everyone the same.  The most onerous is Puritanism, which tries to impose a moral judgement on anything that violates the dominant value of the community.  Morality is often just an intergenerational reaction to change.  The supposed right of any one value system to dominate another, as long as some basic principles and free association are real alternatives, should be resisted.  If that were the case, the fierce battle over identity might be avoided.  In our culture identity is driven by the difference generating forces of capitalism and the uniform suppression of difference in our politics.  It is a schizophrenic charade.  If we could see ourselves as multiple, as having different organizing structures within ourselves, we could move toward a democracy that is both radical and fractal.