From a comment on Facebook, 9 December 2016, other comments answering a friend’s question, 21 July 2015, and a handwritten note, 9 August 2018:
Here’s what I believe that, as far as I can tell, no one else does: Everything is a combination of bottom-up and top-down processes, and most problems arise from focusing too heavily on one side to the exclusion of the other. This is particularly obvious in politics, with progressives emphasizing adaptability but often unable to see the forest for the trees, and conservatives leaning more toward the stability end of the spectrum but frequently ignoring the trees for the forest, when in fact both sides are (partially) right…you need both, and you actually can’t have one without the other.
But this issue goes much deeper than politics, and in all such dichotomies on any level, I disagree with both sides…or rather, I agree with both. Should technology operate according to an open source or a proprietary model? Yes. Does evolution in general progress toward increasing complexity, or greater simplicity? Absolutely! I have yet to find an issue that can’t be helpfully analyzed in accordance with this framework.
Competition and cooperation are two sides of the same coin (as are specialization and exchange, production and consumption, differentiation and integration): you can’t have one without the other. (In that sense and from that perspective, one isn’t “better” than the other, though cooperation is the higher-order phenomenon and thus creates more value by providing a platform for expanding competition through increasing specialization.) Overemphasizing one at the expense of the other leads to disintegration (too much competition and not enough cooperation, as in underregulated anarchic or undeveloped markets) or misintegration (too much “cooperation” without enough competition, as in centrally-planned markets), but both are of necessity always present to some degree. The trick is to strike the optimal balance for accelerating adaptation and dynamic growth.
Every hierarchy evolves from the bottom up by necessity, almost by definition. Take the hierarchy of knowledge. Every higher level item of knowledge can only be reached by building on the lower level ones. But there is feedback between all the various levels, as Ayn Rand captured in her spiral theory of knowledge.
But that theory is just one instance of a much broader principle. People tend to view these centralized/top down and distributed/bottom up approaches as opposites in most domains, but in fact it’s always both. All hierarchical systems or organizations emerge from the integration of lower order elements into higher order states, and once a certain level of complexity is achieved the higher order elements can set the organizing principle from the top down, facilitating further integration and still higher order levels of complexity.
This is true of all living processes from the workings of the complex cell (with its centralized nucleus and top down DNA, but also extra-nuclear DNA distributed among the mitochondria as remnants of their bacterial heritage in order to locally regulate energy production, much the same way as our man-made energy grid works), up the hierarchy through tissues and organ systems to the interactions of individuals within a species and with other species, up to and including every human activity (though it applies somewhat differently in the context of volitional consciousness—basically, we can, and often do, screw it up).
Take, for example, music. It began with very basic elements such as rhythm, pitches in succession, and combined them into what eventually became the melodic line, which then served as the organizing principle around which further complexity (harmonics, the timbres of various instruments, etc.) could be integrated. Or take the musicians performing it. Individual musicians can join in a small group—a band, string quartet, etc. (though a leader will often emerge even in such small groups). But by the time you reach the level of an orchestra, you really need a conductor. Actually, by that stage you have multiple levels in the hierarchy, with a concert master and principal players in each section.
Where it can break down is when either the bottom up or the top down element dominates to the detriment of the other. The conductor’s job is to set the organizing principle, to determine how the piece is to be interpreted and bring together all the various elements into a well-integrated (i.e., symphonic) performance. The individual musicians’ jobs are to play to the best of their ability to contribute their part toward the greater whole within the guidelines established from higher up. If some of them try to do their own thing in disregard of what the others are doing, the result is cacophony and disintegration. But by the same token, if the conductor tries to perform all the lower level functions by micro-managing how every musician plays every note, they are not likely to achieve a highly integrated result either.
The same is true in business, though in the tech industry there is still an unfortunate tendency to view the more centralized, top down, proprietary, for profit approach of say Apple or Amazon as opposed to and incompatible with the more distributed, bottom up, open source, non profit approach of say Github or Wikipedia. A business model that recognized the spiral effect and combined the best elements of both approaches could potentially create much more value. And there are some signs that some people are at least partially beginning to recognize this and things are evolving in that direction.
Politically (since that’s what you mainly asked about), the overly bottom up approach is of course democracy (in the sense of unlimited majority rule), and the overly top down approach is any form of centralized authoritarianism. The genius of the framers of the American constitution was precisely to combine these bottom-up and top-down elements, placing sovereignty in the individual (recognizing the fundamentality of the bottom-up element), identifying that governments were properly instituted to secure those rights (establishing the organizing principle), and establishing a strong enough federal (centralized, top down) system (with intermediate state and local levels) to do so (and the spiral effects between all the various levels are obvious). Unfortunately they didn’t identify all this fully, explicitly, or consistently, but still the system that they established has been the best, most stable, longest running political system in history, allowing us to achieve an unprecedented level of integration in what is now rapidly becoming a global society. And to the extent that the central top-down element goes beyond its higher order function of setting the organizing principle of individual rights by say, trying to centrally regulate the economy, the result is disintegration. But the American Founders were still way ahead of their time and far more advanced politically than most of today’s business and technology leaders are in their domains.
I call this the spiral theory of integration or growth, and it’s based on an even more fundamental principle of specialization and exchange, or differentiation and integration (which again you can see operating at every level from basic cellular functions to sexual reproduction to human economic activity). And now you probably either think that I’ve gone way out on a limb, or that everything I’ve said is incredibly obvious since once you understand it you can’t help seeing it literally everywhere. I believe that in another generation or so people will look back at how we used to debate whether things worked “top down” or “bottom up” and wonder how we could have fallen into such a silly false alternative for so long, and not understand how everything evolves from the bottom up but then spirals back and forth between each higher level of order that emerges. But maybe it’s just me.
Just a side note, but when you think of the incredible complexity of human systems with our global economy of seven billion people that supports an unfathomably high level of technological development, just remember that that’s nothing compared to the complexity of any single one of us as individual organisms, with our trillions of cells (counting all our friendly bacterial passengers) all working almost seamlessly together to produce and support by far the most complex system in the known universe, the human brain (with its trillions of connections) and mind. Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?
