Seeking subsidiarity

 PANDA Chairman Nick Hudson

Every leader, every parent, every influencer, has to take a stand for subsidiarity, or else everything you cherish, everything we cherish, will get absorbed by some central planning machine that will dole out prescriptions and life guidelines and parameters of freedom, due to some narrative minted based on who knows what life-denying and fact-evading dogma 

My kudos and warm thanks to pal Nick Hudson, Chairman of the think tank and organisational change agent “PANDA” for bringing “subsidiarity” to light in a powerful presentation at the Palace of Parliament, Bucharest, Romania. 

I have here distilled his insights and hopefully expanded on them and also showcased how they apply far and wide, including right here in Sri Lanka.

The problem with centralisation

Centralisation is the corrosive. It dials out singularity and nuance and applies a “one size fits all” solution, discounting real needs. Expansive government remedies, task forces and whatnot, apply sweeping generalisations that almost always trip over the real data and details of issues.

In essence, overly centralised governments or approaches: ignore complexity, are usually in service to an elite hierarchy, are incompatible with organic growth that is responsive to ground realities, need artificial crises as rallying cries, tend to ignore local populations in the grand sweep of their nostrums, give rise to “stupidity clubs” as Nick calls them (the supporting institutions there to prop up dogma), create zero-sum (I win/you lose) outcomes. 

The antidote is subsidiarity.

Managing complexity

Does anyone believe that any of our current problems of war and peace, of budgets and national growth, or managing debt and reshaping the economy, of ethnic harmony and reconciliation, of tackling corruption or judicial reform are not at times ineffably complex? 

And the complexity extends beyond borders. As Nick says, “…ecologies, society, immune systems, the banking system, social order, climate…” The world is staggeringly, refreshingly complex (in terms of it being bracing in a way that should awaken us from ennui unless we’re crazy).

And all our national and international challenges are begging for transfusions of innovation, fresh knowledge, breakthroughs in collaboration, to fill the void of paralysis and ignorance.

Centralisation by its nature seeks the “simplistic” in order to be able to apply control. Centralising bureaucracies are particularly excited by algorithmic models. But deduction from the already known and linear thinking, no matter how gloriously enhanced, makes only a scant contribution to knowledge creation.

Knowledge is created by testing hypotheses, and from a sea of infinite hypotheses, experience laced intuition leads us to pick one or more, “try” various approaches and test them. And we need “induction” (going from the known to the unknown) for that to happen.

The history of human progress is essentially the history of transformative ideas that came from such evolutionary trial and error. This requires the free and unfettered flow of ideas and interactions, with institutional permeable membranes, not walled off elites and edifices.

There is a reason that representative democracy has tended to economically and culturally outperform command and control economies. Even in periods of great change, like the Renaissance which began in Italy and spread across Europe, it was not governments, but individuals, albeit with the right patronage and support who changed our sense of the world and our own capabilities.

Yes, rulers, princes, governments enabled or blocked, that is true. But they were never the source, they were catalysts. And it is that partnership between a central government and decentralised enterprise that has to be nurtured and has to flourish if we are to march constructively forward.

The scam at the heart of centralisation

An “algorithm” is essentially a set of rules to be followed for making calculations. There are no such “rules” when there is a true Black Swan event, like a country going bankrupt, or a terrorist attack and its blowback, or a financial meltdown, or a global supply chain interruption. 

You cannot “predict” how a system will evolve over time, or where the “shocks” will lead to. That is inevitably a work in progress, and it depends on a multitude of decisions and responses, and outlier events.

Certainly, none of the “models” as those that were strutted out by Imperial College in the UK, during the COVID mania have held up. 

They were either parsimonious (didn’t address enough collateral impacts) or simply wrong by extrapolating from flawed data (the asserted and therefore inputted infection fatality rate of the virus was exponentially higher to what was experienced in real life).

Similar modelling shenanigans with say swine flu or SARS 1 or other “world-devasting” events, each time spectacularly wrong, grossly overestimating the impact, seem not to have increased our appetite for ignoring them as an example of analytical delirium rather than insight.

So what actually has happened in the past, and should happen now in terms of stimulating progress, is a series of conjectures, open to criticism, rather than a central pre-set narrative with those who disagree, being pilloried and deplatformed. These conjectures are gradually and unambiguously tested, open to course correction. This way such an approach, can ongoingly promote human resilience and flourishing.

So there is no “settled science,” the concept is an oxymoron. Science is corrigible, open to amendment, and updates, evolution and sometimes revolution (the introduction of quantum mechanics and it’s remaking the paradigm of the Newtonian universe for example). 

Biologically, genomes blend, there is mutation, and in the realm of human interactions, such interaction and criticism provide a fitness test. 

A quote ascribed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, but powerful whoever generated it, is: “Truth is a shifting residue from a competition of ideas.”

It “shifts”, it is what is left after our going to and fro, testing and revising and adapting. It is a fitness test from competing hypotheses. 

Galileo told his team that in evaluating their own theories they must actively try to falsify them. Only when it is impossible not to believe them, should they conclude they have reached something akin to the truth, at least for that period, within the bounds of those instruments.

Answers are discovered and unearthed in this way, not pre-designed. So the “command and control” paradigm violates the way progress occurs in the real world. 

When any answer, Nick Hudson suggests, is presented as “static consensus” rather than evolving exploration, you have a “scam” on your hands. The entire apparatus of discovery and experimentation and prototyping is co-opted to the conclusions desired by some “elite” or some moneyed hierarchy.

Here is a heuristic therefore associated with Nick’s position here, which we can call “Hudson’s Razor.” Namely if any problem is presented as 1) a global crisis 2) admitting of only global solutions 3) amid silencing of dissent, then it is a SCAM, a power grab and illicit to the core. 

Centralisation is the corrosive. It dials out singularity and nuance and applies a “one size fits all” solution, discounting real needs. Expansive government remedies, task forces and whatnot, apply sweeping generalisations that almost always trip over the real data and details of issues. In essence, overly centralised governments or approaches: ignore complexity, are usually in service to an elite hierarchy, are incompatible with organic growth that is responsive to ground realities, need artificial crises as rallying cries, tend to ignore local populations in the grand sweep of their nostrums, give rise to “stupidity clubs” as Nick calls them (the supporting institutions there to prop up dogma), create zero-sum (I win/you lose) outcomes. The antidote is subsidiarity

Imagine here in Sri Lanka in looking at the economic meltdown. We can look at debt and borrowing, we can look at cost of government, we can look at bloated bureaucracy, we can look at low value-added exports, we can look at regulations that stifle enterprise, we can look at corruption, and if we can find the recurring errors here, the patterns and stress points, we can take them on. If we do, there may be a fighting chance…at least for some healthy, tangible, progress, however iterative. 

If instead key institutions become propaganda and public relations outlets for the powerful and wealthy, then narratives become decoupled from reality, until one day…another tidal wave of reality hits! 

And if any contrarian tries to point out issues like insane agricultural policies as happened under the last regime, or lack of service standards in too much of the tourism industry even today, and if the primary reflex is to stifle dissent, to ignore practical improvement suggestions because we lack the will to act on them, then we are in the death grip of the centralising mechanism that leeches life opportunity from the many, while unjustly enriching the few.

The economics of the centralised delusion

You can see this misapprehension in action, despite its evident real-world shortcomings. Central bankers succumb to the conceit of thinking they control economic growth, because they have their hands on the levers of interest rate manipulation. But no country ever grew, much less sustained growth this way. Controlling the money supply is a short-term gambit, which often backfires.

As Nick Hudson points out in the case of China, when Deng Xiaoping liberated the small and medium enterprises of China, growth skyrocketed liberating millions from poverty, until Xi Jinping began to clamp down on that very free market, and began to retard this. 

Look at Vietnam, the fastest growing economy in Asia in 2022 with 8% growth, and among only a handful to achieve two years of consecutive growth since the C-19 hysteria.

Vietnam has benefited from manufacturers’ efforts to “de-risk” their exposure to China, but also from high value-added exports, to an increasingly open and capitalist model, economic reforms, welcoming foreign direct investment, innovation enhancing productivity and competitiveness, as well as a young and dynamic workforce being invested in. 

Vietnam’s GDP growth in the last three decades has surpassed all its ASEAN regional peers. This was not due to money manipulation or printing antics!

The centralists, those wanting to “control” rather than catalyse the world’s capabilities, know they have to suppress knowledge growth and interaction to succeed. So they undertake to proffer crises that may, by sparking fear or duress, allow them to inhibit the liberties that actually are needed and which lead to dynamic societies and economic growth. 

The crusade to control

In 2018 Anthony Watts reported that Al Gore ten years prior had predicted the North polar ice cap would be gone. Inconveniently it’s still there. When climate alarmism falters, a fresh pathogen can do the rounds. If that falters, provoke wars, which continue to rage to feed the military industrial complex. Oh, and let’s not forget to terrify everyone with AI, which today cannot conduct even a modicum of a complex conversation. It may reach terrifying manifestations, but no time soon.

Of course, we’ve also had heated concerns shared about peak oil, shortages of topsoil, rare earth metals and more. These are usually replete with bizarre diagrams and as Nick says, “…amid an endless world salad that thinly contains their stupidity.”

You can see the cavalcade: WHO to impose a top-down system called “One Health”, all health found in pharmaceutical products, while actual public health declines in developed countries. 

In medicine, doctors who dare to treat patients, no matter how successfully, rather than abide by clearly dysfunctional protocols find themselves being threatened by having their licenses revoked. The COVID period was replete with this.

Central Banks are seeking to marry the State, with programmable central bank digital currencies, so our money would come under their control as well. Central bank borrowing and fiat currencies constitute a form of theft according to numerous pragmatic economists, but “Modern Monetary Theory” was invented to keep those concerns at bay in public discourse. It sounds so ideologically imposing, even if the “theory” is clearly divorced from any way to balance a productive economy.

The food industry is seeking to replace small farms with large ones growing monocultures, all using the same seed stocks, and where we can be “educated” to switch from meat consumption to insect delicacies. Rather than go to more sustainable farming, with fewer pesticides, supporting farms with locally raised animals and locally grown food, we need a gigantic bureaucracy to administer pseudo “nutrition”?

In IT, “permissible content” is all the rage (never once justifying who the arbiters are to be), and with it come mass surveillance, digital IDs, “health” passports, social credit and regulations that would keep AI itself from inadvertently exposing the agenda being propagandised.

On the energy front, net zero, leading to plummeting of energy budgets, can lead to so much of the world literally starving while pipe dreams of digitised controllable infrastructure abound.

Who is to hold anyone accountable here? We are to trust these people, who gave us everything from phantom WMDs in Iraq, to global financial meltdowns, to mRNA “vaccines” with more adverse effects than all vaccines in history combined? 

Lest anyone learn to think, these pundits want “outcomes-based education.” Standardised syllabi, where people parrot talking points. This would make people eligible for politics for sure! However, it would hold back the type of Socratic and scientific thinking that would expose the stupidity and cupidity being propounded from centralised pulpits for what they actually are. 

And of course, in geopolitics we have war mongering and actively destabilising parts of the world lest they develop and seek to consume the resources that these blinkered centralists are sure are “finite” (as if human knowledge will finally find a cul-de-sac, and run to the bureaucratic nanny). Actually, we will need sustained outbreaks of courageous, independent thinking, regional national leadership and local enterprise to demonstrate the alternative.

Turning to subsidiarity

P.J. Wolfe put it well decades ago, “The principle of subsidiarity holds that decision making authority is best placed where: a) responsibility for outcomes will occur; and b) in the closest approximate proximity to where the actions will be taken that will produce the outcomes.” 

This is true globally, as it was true when Deming demonstrated it via Total Quality Management and kaizen in Japan.

We needn’t become libertarians and decouple from our social and community instincts and aspirations. That too is a downward spiral. However, might we state that it is silly, possibly immoral, for decisions to be made any higher up the hierarchy than they need to be? 

This then allows countries like Sri Lanka to solve so many problems. As instead of top-down driven structures, with acolytes and handlers scurrying around delaying implementation and having drones awaiting direction, we would draw on the spirit and energy and creativity, so evident in Sri Lanka at the local level, and focus and educate and mobilise it for truly productive outcomes.

Could we accept “Subsidiarity” rather than seeking to become tools of the “Globitarianism” lurch? 

This means niche rather than sweeping solutions. Flexibility and dynamism not hierarchy and pointless regulations. 

It means not awaiting the dictates of the “grand leader” but tapping knowledge creation and growth by running targeted controlled experiments far and wide. It means fostering individual means and stoking interdependence and agency. It means a society where there is wide-scale education and accountability -- resilient and therefore anti-fragile against current and future challenges.

Subsidiarity is a commitment to different solutions in different places, honouring a variety of ideas and inviting constructive criticism. 

It is learning to partner with stakeholders for larger aims and aspirations. And because a poor decision is localised, not centrally mandated, its missteps can be caught, corrected, and leveraged and parlayed differently elsewhere. Failure can be educational rather than catastrophic.

By empowering local initiative, people have a greater sense of meaning. Their circle of influence expands to come closer, as Stephen Covey wrote, to their circle of concern. The alternative is to alienate and dispirit people, rendering them more amenable to being ordered around by some centralist potentate.

Why not make meaning and purpose a central plank of our development culture, and let other places celebrate interest rate manipulation and identity politics and other such follies?

The genius of the US system when originally fashioned was subsidiarity. Parliamentary systems were based on this. 

And then in the modern era, the EU backlash came, due to fears that member countries would have to shun their individual cultures. The battle lines are drawn. And these trade-offs are coming to a head. The Camembert makers say their cheeses cannot “breathe” in plastic; they want to defend the wooden boxes they have come packed in for centuries. We should all rally to that cause and others like it.

It’s up to us

Every leader, every parent, every influencer, has to take a stand for subsidiarity, or else everything you cherish, everything we cherish, will get absorbed by some central planning machine that will dole out prescriptions and life guidelines and parameters of freedom, due to some narrative minted based on who knows what life-denying and fact-evading dogma. 

Human agency is the holy of holies. Social hierarchy begs for humans to be empowered at all levels. Civilisation needs another Renaissance. This will require the wisdom to realise central planners are not God, far from it. And of course, neither are you or I, no matter what positions we might attain. So we have to trust the process not the position.

Let us rekindle our wonder at the possibilities that real growth engines across history have fostered, creating knowledge, running experiments, exchanging and building on ideas. And from possibility to possibility, vitalised by people energised in this way in various locales, we may yet light the lamp of human hope again. 

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)