
The piece, in The Dao of Complexity, that is probably my favourite piece (out of more than 70 in total!) is ‘Who got the power’. The thinking gradually developed through engaging with the work of various authors writing about the rise and fall of autocracies. There is Ece Temelkuran’s How to Lose a Country, building from the perspective of Turkey, Maria Ressa’s How to Stand up to a Dictator, looking at the Philippines as well as older books such as Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless based on experiences during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Another book that had a great impact on me when I read it decades ago, is When Society becomes an Addict, by Ann Wilson Schaef.
The interest for me in these books is that they show the way power, if not checked, concentrates, how power leads to more power and wealth to more wealth. These are examples of path dependency, of the way the future is shaped by what happens along the way, of how power ‘locks in’ and becomes very hard to oppose.
One of the aspects of process complexity that really comes to mind in reading these books is that the co-creation of the future is a dynamic. It may sound a strange thing to say, but, when faced with issues, we analyse the present rather than understand how the present emerged from the past, what shaped it along the way, and how that might help us consider solutions.
Let me give an example. I went to a talk last weekend by Ben Ansell based on his book Why Politics Fails. He described a survey he conducted to ask people if they would be more up for an increase of income tax of wealth tax. Most people were more in favour of an increase in income tax, if they had to choose between the two. Part of his point was that, as economic inequality has escalated the last decades, to re-balance that needs wealth tax, but people are too selfish to countenance that. My point is that much is revealed if you look at the dynamics of the rise in inequality. In the mid-1960s, CEOs in the US earned 20 times an average worker’s salary; in 2019, this figure was 278. Excess income is often turned into wealth and this tends to become locked in. And it is easy to forget that the highest rate of income tax was, believe it or not, 97.5% in the 1950s and 1960s. And politicians these days are scared to even contemplate a 1% rise.
I am not suggesting that we raise taxes to that extent! But I am suggesting that this dynamic perspective offers insights in how to tackle inequality and have more money for public services (as an alternative to either growth or borrowing). Increase higher rates of tax! Over time this will impact wealth mountains and resets norms.
You don’t have to agree with my solution, but thinking dynamically has the potential for surfacing useful insights that are often missed or discounted when merely focusing analysis on the present.
In The Dao of Complexity, I develop examples of how a dynamic perspective can revise our categorisation of ‘fragile states’. Returning to the political writers explored in ‘Who got the power’, many of them, Vaclav Havel in particular, emphasise that ‘challenging early’ when there is a rise in political power is much more effective than trying to challenge it later when autocrats have become embedded and powerful.