When we look at our present society, we can find many things to complain about. We could, for example, complain about crime, our congested roads, about the prices of goods, or about how many laws are being broken. We could also complain about what is not being done to improve things, or about how many resources are being wasted - even as we complain about how scarce our resources are.
But I have discovered that complaints do not do any good. They don’t correct anything, and they actually make things worst as they get people upset, engender a negative attitude and seed further complaints. Complaints generate more complaints and create a negative social attitude, which makes it difficult to get anything done. Instead of trying to fix things, we put our effort into passing the blame on to others, who in our opinion should fix things, but as they also do the same thing we never seem to get to the stage where action is taken. It s clear to me that complaints do not correct anything. If Barbados could be improved by complaints, it would be the most developed country in the world, but it isn’t. Because complaints have such a negative effect, I could try to get rid of them by complaining. This is another favorite pastime in Barbados. People calling the radio station to complain that, “too many people are complaining.” But if you complain about the complaints, you are doing exactly what you are complaining about and instead of fixing the problem, you may be making it worst.
Obviously, if we want to fix the problems in our society we need a different approach. This is where our engineering training becomes useful. We are taught how to solve problems and we need to apply that skill to the social problems that we are living with. We are in the best position to offer solutions and our society is in dire need of our expertise.
As every engineer knows, if you want to fix something you have to first understand how it works and to understand a complicated system you need to analyze it and create a model of it. We know how to use models to design buildings and power networks and communications networks and we now need to apply these modeling skills to the society in which we live.
Doing this with reference to complaints brings me to an important insight. All of the things we complain about are to do with people. When we complain about laws being broken, we are complaining about people and when we complain about nothing being done to enforce laws, we are again complaining about people. When we complain about the state of the roads, we are complaining about the people who are responsible for them.
The expectation is that if you complain about the roads, the people responsible for them will fix them, but that does not work as they in turn complain about the inadequate resources that their bosses give them to work with and about the people that they have working for them. Similarly when we complain about prices, we are really complaining about the people who sell the goods, they in turn complain about the taxes they have to pay and the laws that force them to operate inefficiently, and the prices demanded by the people they have to buy the goods from. Every complaint leads back to a person, or several people, and every complaint generates several more complaints. This has the classic characteristics of a positive feedback loop, as many of you know from your training.
This is another interesting insight, as it suggests that the same natural laws that apply to inanimate things, like control systems, also apply to our society. Think of our society as a dynamic information network. Each person is an active component in the network. Each person receives signals from other elements in the network, processes them and then transmits signals to others and it is the characteristics of these people, these active components, that create the characteristics of the network and the society in which we live.
Think of a complaint being generated by one element in this network and being transmitted to say three other people. Each of them modify it to remove any blame that might be attached to themselves and retransmits the modified complaint to three more people. At this stage the complaint generated by one person is now affecting the thoughts and behavior of thirteen people. None of these have done anything to correct the action, instead they have been busy modifying the complaint and re-transmitting it. Some of project site meetings I have attended are good examples of this process. This model suggests that once complaints start, they will continue to increase at an exponential rate until the system overloads and components begin to fail. If you take a distant overview of our society and think of the high level of absenteeism and sickness and the growing levels of the more chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease and think of this is an indicator of component failure, you will be inclined to agree that we are entering the overload stage. Just as structures fail when over stressed, people fail when over stressed and instead of complaining about it, we need to fix it.
To do this we have to examine the network and see what needs to be changed to fix the problem. The key thing we need to focus on is the positive feedback characteristic of the network; its tendency to amplify and retransmit complaints. This positive feedback is a reflection of the characteristics of the components of the society, its people. So if we want to re-engineer society, we have to re-engineer how people generate and respond to complaints. If we can find a way to significantly reduce our tendency to generate complaints and retransmit those received, the characteristics of the network will change for the better.
This suggests that we need to come up with a model of how the components in the network, its people, behave. We need to model ourselves. Society is created by the actions of individual people and if we can understand what drives their individual behavior, we can... I think, come up with some ideas about how we can alter things to create the type of society we want to live in. I would like you to hold this idea while I diverge for a bit.
In engineering we are taught to build and fix things and we do quite well at it. We know how to produce mathematical models of the things we want to design, a structure, a power network, or communications network, and test the design mathematically so that when it is built, it performs as expected. While doing this, we do not complain about the characteristics of the materials we have to work with. It makes no sense doing this, as the materials are not going to change their characteristics because we complain about them. We work with the strengths of the materials we have and we design to utilize their strengths and accommodate their other properties. For example, in designing a circuit to carry say 1000 amps, we do not complain about the resistance of the conductors or the heat generated when the current flows through them, we simply anticipate these things and design to accommodate them.
This is the engineering approach and we need to ask ourselves, how can we take an engineering approach to designing social systems? In engineering we create simplified models that highlight the characteristics of the components we use and then link these together in our designs. For example, we model how steel behaves when subjected to stress and then use that model to create a model of a beam and then use that model as a component in a model of a building such as this. It works well and we can feel safe in this building because this process has been proved to be highly reliable.
The way steel behaves when subjected to stress is modeled and the design of the building ensures that the beams do not fail. Similarly, in order to model our society we need to isolate its key characteristics. We are seeing stress failures in society. It is the stress of living in our society that is creating the absenteeism, the sickness and the deaths due to chronic heart disease and diabetes. I argue that, because we are seeing stress failures in society, we need to determine how people behave when stressed and then use this in our model of our society. I talk of designing a social system as if it has never been done before, but this is not true. Our present social system was designed, but the designers used the wrong model of people when they were doing this. They modeled people as being good or bad. In their view, the world contained both good people and bad people. They further assumed that in order to ensure that the society did not descend into chaos, a control system was needed that punished bad people. They assumed that good people could be ignored and focused their attention on bad people. They then constructed a control system using the assumption that if they made it difficult to be bad, everyone would be good.
Using this concept they built walls around their towns and cities to keep bad people out. Under this system, anyone found to be bad in the city was thrown out. This worked for a while, but then, as cities became bigger and it became more difficult to “police” this system, laws replace walls. The same underlying concept of a “wall around the good people,” was retained. The law now played the role of the city wall and protected the good people from the bad people. In the olden days this meant that the bad people were thrown out of the city, but as this became an untenable solution, prisons were built to house these bad people. More recently the “developed” countries have reverted to throwing these “bad” people out of their countries, rather than bearing the cost of keeping them in prison. It is an old idea. It did not work then and it is unlikely to work now.
This very simple control system has been preserved and enhanced over thousands of years and today a major part of our community is devoted to the process of making laws, enforcing them and taking are of the people who break the laws. It is a very inefficient process as people are not either bad or good, they are sometimes good and sometimes bad. This creates immense difficulties for this system as it cannot now ignore the good people. Instead of just dealing with bad people, it gradually had to deal with more and more people.
As this system of control grew bigger it consumed more and more of the community’s resources. In addition it created a lot of stress and induced stress related antisocial behavior. As the realization grew that anyone could be bad, people viewed their neighbors with greater suspicion. But this was not limited to neighbors, members of the same family, wives, husbands, children, were subjected to this heightened scrutiny. This created divisions that lead to separations and wars.
As this system developed it fed on itself, creating greater and greater levels of distrust and suspicion which then promoted witch-hunts that fueled even greater distrust. From an engineering perspective it is a very badly designed system. There are many many problems with it, but instead of listing them I want to tread on some dangerous religious ground and draw an analogy to a very old story; the story of Adam and Eve.
We all know the Genesis story where God charges Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from any of the trees in the Garden of Eden, except from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. There are many ways of interpreting this story. Many Christians believe that Adam’s bite of the apple represents an unrecoverable fall from grace. They suggest that our forgiving God has condemned the whole of humanity to a life of turmoil, because Adam bit this apple. I can’t bite this interpretation.
Instead I would like to offer a different interpretation and suggest that this story is a warning about applying the concept of good and evil in society. God’s instructions to Adam and Eve were to avoid eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Applying this concept very broadly to modern society leads to the prediction of dire consequences for any community that “eats” from this source. As described above, applying this concept designs a society that amplifies social stress and promotes conflict and turmoil. Could it be that an ancient sage recognized the dangers associated with this concept and tried to warn successive generations to avoid taking this road by incorporating this idea into the Genesis story?
It makes sense, because war seems to plague any community that endorses the concept of good and evil. War and this good & evil concept go hand in hand. One complements the other. War involves thinking of your opponent as evil. A recent example is George Bush’s pronouncements about an “axis of evil”. If you step back and analyze the situation, as engineers are trained to do, it must be obvious that to get beyond war, we have to avoid using the concept of good and evil. As an interesting aside, this Genesis story also seems to endorse the “eating” of any other fruit in the garden and if we take the other trees in the Garden of Eden to also be trees of knowledge, it suggests that we are following God’s instructions when we eat our fill of the fruits of these other trees.
In modern language, the Genesis story tells us that we should learn and apply knowledge while avoiding the use of the concept of good and evil. Engineering, our profession, is a good example of doing this. We are trained to learn and apply our knowledge and we don’t try to label the materials we work with as evil. So if we now jump back to our problem, how to re-engineer society, it is apparent that, if we are to take the advice handed down to us via the Genesis story we need to abandon the old “good & evil” control system. We need to come up with a new model of people and design a control system that replaces the old with the new. People have many characteristics and it takes skill to choose the correct ones to model, but it is not that difficult when you are trained to do this. It is apparent that stress is the defining component of the system. Just as we need to know the characteristics of how steel behaves when stressed, we need to know how people behave when stressed and then use this in our design.
For simplicity we can model people as having two behavioral states. (a) How we behave when operating within comfortable stress limits. This includes behavior that can be described as cooperative, helpful, forgiving, NISE, friendly etc. and (b) How we behave when over stressed. This includes all our antisocial behavior; becoming angry, selfish, cruel, nasty, uncaring, complaining, suspicious, vicious, sly, two faced etc. It is interesting to note that steel also changes its characteristics depending on the level of stress. When the stress is below a critical limit steel is elastic and retains its shape and is very useful in building such as this, but when the stress gets high enough, it becomes plastic and permanently deforms, so too with people in a community subjected to stress.
Apart from individual levels of stress, the community as a whole is subjected to stress. When the stress levels in the community exceed a specific limit the more sensitive elements of that community display the antisocial behavior described above and gradually more and more of the community follows suite and over a period of time the community self-destructs. This closely follows the analogy of an over stressed building failing, one over stressed component at a time, but the social destruction takes much longer.
We have seen this collapse occur in Guyana and Jamaica, both of which are slowly recovering from the self-destruction resulting from the community becoming over stressed. Trinidad may be close to the limit, but there, the stress of social disharmony is offset by the assurance of wealth that comes with oil and they have a window of opportunity to reverse the trend to social dis-stress that is apparent in the high level of crime and violent death in that community.
All of us, all people, have both of the behavioral characteristics described above and we easily switch our mode of behavior, depending on our level of stress. Some of us have a higher tolerance to stress than others and can maintain socially supportive behaviors under high stress, while others are much more sensitive and adopt antisocial behavior at relatively low stress levels. This is also the case with materials. Some materials are strong, but can’t be used to make comfortable accommodation while other materials are soft and comfortable, but not very strong. We use all types of materials in our buildings and take advantage of their characteristics to produce safe, comfortable buildings. Our community can be designed along the same concept.
While the analogy with steel is useful it has its limits, because, unlike steel, each of us individually can change our ability to deal with stress. This is because we can monitor our behavior even as we “behave.” Each of us now knows that we can determine the level of stress in another person by monitoring their behavior. If they are angry, quarrelsome, or exhibiting any antisocial behavior, you know that they are being stressed beyond their good behavior limit. This may be brought on by current events (such as this presentation), or it could be a sensitivity that is inherited from previous experiences, or it may be that they have simply copied the behavior from a parent, not realizing the implications of doing this.
If we picture a community composed of people programmed with the idea, that their behavior is driven by the level of stress they are experiencing, we can start to model how people in such a community would interact. Since there is no “good or evil” judgment to worry about, no one now needs to be concerned about being branded evil and so there is no need to avoid blame and pass it on. This community does not judge people to be evil and so has eliminated evil from their community, simply by not thinking in those terms. This is automatic, because the state “evil” is created by the good/evil judgment and without that judgment it simply does not exist. This is a key insight – it is the good/evil judgment that creates evil, we create it by thinking about it.
