Ideology in Crisis: On the Innovative Ideology - as a Substitute for Conservative Ideology (Part 2)

Innovation is similar to conservatism in that it prefers replacing ideology with methodology, but it simply chooses a more established methodology than the conservative one - and especially a faster and more flexible one. Political science is called upon today to broaden its horizons and apply lessons and learning methodologies learned in organizational theory and the world of algorithms. It will then discover that new horizons of enormous organizational methodological experimentation are opening up before it, based on billions of years of evolution (evolutionary algorithms and those inspired by neuroscience), on new mathematical and physical ideas (God forbid), on the scientific method itself - and also on lessons from the world of startups operating under extreme environmental constraints

Maximum Acceleration: The Organizational Antithesis to Conservatism, Enabling for the First Time the Vision of the Empirical State, Thanks to Information Technology (Source)

In our time, the central importance of the historical philosophical engagement with state theory does not relate to the state itself - but to the organization. Today, organizational philosophy contains the philosophy of the state as a particular (and important) case, but its scope extends far beyond the state, which is a problematic organization in decline, towards the center of our economic and technological lives - built as countless organizations. Plato did not know limited liability companies, or a stock market, or a modern army, or an academic department, or internet corporations, or the rest of the enormous organizational world that surrounds us today and largely determines our fate and consciousness, but his ideas about the ideal state can be translated into the ideal organization - and organizational theory - as can every classical thinker in the history of political science. Thus we can also project onto organizational theory the division between right and left, or the dispute between conservatives and revolutionaries. And it works the other way around: we can project ideas from the organizational world onto the state world.

As Plato writes in "The Republic" - the large letters of the state allow us to read the ethical map more easily than the smaller letters of the individual, or perhaps of the organization. But perhaps the opposite is also true, and it is precisely the small letters of the organization - that allow us to anticipate writing that has not yet reached the state stage. And since small organizations (for example startups) are today under much more severe constraint systems than the state, and also more than larger organizations like corporations, their evolution is much faster, and they have been forced to adapt in a way that the state has not yet adapted to - and there we will often find the last word in terms of organizational adaptation. But are these conservative organizations? Come on, really. On the other hand, they are certainly not chaotic organizations either. Or organizations where there is freedom. Or equality. Or fraternity. These organizations have found a methodology that maximizes only one value: innovation. And so also at the state level - in the face of rising right-wing conservatism in our day, with growing fears of the future, and threatening to slow down and hinder the development of civilization at a critical stage, we must position not the helpless and irrelevant left, but the method of innovation.

Can we imagine a commercial corporation adopting conservatism as a method? How long would it take for such a corporation to go bankrupt in today's business environment? So why would we recommend to the state what we would never recommend to an organization in which our money was invested (even conservatives' money)? And in the current situation, where the state is increasingly taking on characteristics of a commercial, competitive corporation in the global market, why not believe that the time for state conservatism has also passed? Reading the fine print of the startup, or the person required for constant change, teaches us about the medium letters of the corporation, which teaches us about the large letters of the state. Conservatism seems to be an approach in trouble, just as a corporation that would be controlled today by ideology - is also in trouble. Conservatism is fighting the battles of the past against the great ideologies and their revolutions, but the war of the future is precisely rapid, frequent, adaptive, creative changes - and not ideological ones. When the environment changes rapidly, it is folly to maintain a constant or low mutation rate, evolutionarily speaking, and not to increase experimentation rapidly. This is a recipe for the extinction of the species, just as it is a recipe for the extinction of the state (a reasonable possibility in the next century! And precisely because of its inherent conservatism). If so, what is the source of the attraction of conservatism in a period of unprecedented innovation?



After about a hundred years of modernism of destroying the past and empty innovation for the sake of innovation, in quite a few cultural and academic fields, which was accompanied by comprehensive mental brainwashing, conservatism and traditional (and sometimes religious) perceptions often shine in a subversive precious light, surrounded by an underdog halo, breaking conventions and paradigms, iconoclastic and nonconformist, which attracts many - because of the innovation in them (the irony!). But the correction needed by modernist innovation is not reactionary, or through a conservative antithesis (whose honor is in its place, as a balance to modernity), but through a synthesis between conservatism for the sake of conservatism and innovation for the sake of innovation. The most efficient and innovative innovation method known to us - is the scientific method - and it maintains an impressive conservative continuity of knowledge. This method uses experiments and randomness and statistical tools to draw conclusions in complex and chaotic environments. This method is also the inspiration for the idea of the "lean startup", which is the fundamental organizational idea of the startup world today, as formulated by Eric Ries, and spread as a field like wildfire (rapid adaptation, we said?). This refers to a startup that conducts scientific experiments (random and controlled) on its chaotic business environment, and changes rapidly according to the results of the experiment. In addition, like a scientific researcher, it quickly starts with simple hypotheses and progresses to complexity, through the idea of MVP - Minimum Viable Product, which translated into the large letters of the state is Minimum Viable Policy. It means to quickly release to the chaotic external environment the simplest minimal policy - to test it and improve it in short cycles. How different is this idea from the sick evil of early and failed optimization of policies and laws by "smart" legislators without actual experimentation? And how much faster and more efficient than conservative policy-making processes with endless balances and discussions.

This startup method at the state level would look something like this: initiating countless controlled experiments (including the use of randomness), on a small or large scale, of policy changes, and gradually including the successful and established ones on the entire state as an expanding experiment, while striving for rapid efficiency and optimization. All this while being open to checking wild hypotheses and sometimes also mutations of random policy. Introducing randomness in relation to the population is certainly not ideologically justified (why, for example, should the rate of allowance vary randomly between individuals from the experimental group?), but it is methodologically justified. Such a state does not formulate policy, but conducts controlled experiments on its citizens, and perhaps also on its enemies, and acts according to the results. In fact, such a state is a methodology, or a field of research dealing with the citizens of a certain state. What is the voting method that increases the voting rate? Let's do experiments. What is the taxation method that increases the amount of state and individual income? Let's do experiments. What is the policy that causes an Arab village in the territories to produce less violence? Let's do experiments. Traditions and ideologies are not interesting - only the results. The debate can remain on the measured goals, but the way should be left to the experimenters. Policy changes that are not based on empirical experiments - are not legitimate (how different from legislation today!). Therefore, this method is based on experience much more than the conservative method, which tends ultimately to a very conservative, human and limited experience - the experience of the past. This, instead of turning experience into a mechanism that researches the present and accordingly shapes the future - as in the innovative method.



In the end, in light of the frequent changes in the world, there is no one on the left or right who thinks that the state should not change constantly. The central question is what is the correct method for the state. Ideological thought, both on the right and on the left, presents a final goal to which the state should aspire, as a function aspires to an ultimate limit. This is thought that has already "cracked" the correct algorithm, and aspires only to implement and advance it all the time to its goal - learning is towards a fixed direction. Pragmatic-realistic thought presents a greedy algorithm, which tries to optimize in the short term (and populism is a greedy algorithm in relation to internal reality, instead of external). On the other hand, conservative thought emphasizes precisely the need for a continuous and gradual learning algorithm, weighted with the past, which is not sensitive to the noise of the present and to every new data. A conservative algorithm is less vulnerable to unfounded generalizations, and on the other hand much slower - which is not acceptable in an accelerating world, unlike, perhaps, a constant environment. In an accelerating environment there is a need for a much faster algorithm, and on the other hand its foundation must be preserved - and for this purpose one can simply collect much more data, and not only past data, but through active experiments. Fortunately, the scientific method has been working well for about 500 years, and even more fortunately, information technology allows for the first time to implement it at the state level - on citizens, as it allows a startup to implement it at the software level - on users. The result will be one: unprecedented innovation, and unprecedented foundation - thanks to state empiricism. The conservative is similar to a sworn empiricist scientist who ignores the scientific method, relies only on natural and not initiated experiments, and prioritizes a distant (and biased) database over an up-to-date and random database. In this sense he is an armchair scientist (who sharply criticizes the theoretical scientist!) - instead of a laboratory scientist.

When the human world itself is facing a transition to a semi-human society (and not necessarily post-human), conservative awareness of historical human weaknesses is not the right consciousness to deal with the change, because the main threat comes precisely from new human weaknesses (for example, the neurological addiction to push information from screens) and computer weaknesses - and past balances are nullified. Therefore, precisely a method devoid of human sentiments, like the scientific method, is better built to deal with the complexity of the future than human neurological biases. Conservatism was probably a mediocre and reasonable historical ideal for the human state, but what a pity that today we are already on the threshold of the algorithmic state, which allows organization in a completely different way, and new forms of leftist regime (for example, algorithmic communism, in which the economy is planned by a central algorithm more efficient than the capitalist one). Against planning in a top-down direction (which is the true meaning of the left) and formation in a bottom-up direction (the true meaning of the right) - two algorithms with known flaws, dependent on large and slow feedback loops - one must position the short loops of the experimental state. It is possible that conservatism was in the past the best strategy for managing the affairs of the present (optimization according to past experience), but the concern of human society has never been the present - but the future. This is due to the nature of man as a future machine, and hence the revolutionary and innovative nature of human society. Today - the future is more correct than ever, and conservatism less than ever - and this situation will only worsen, as a humanistic reactionary response to the information age and the formation of super-human intelligence, both from the left and from the right. Not human nature, good or bad, is the problem of our lives - but the nature of the computer.