Peut-on avoir une Gouvernance partagée à l’échelle d’un État ?
Difficultés d’avoir une Gouvernance partagée à grande échelle
Source: Discussion du groupe email sociocracy, 2025
there are some serious, natural difficulties in scaling up to a state, and they are not only about increasing complexity and abstraction. They are probably right, when they say, that they cannot surmount those difficulties. It is completely true for them; but it doesn’t necessarily mean, that these problems are unsurmountable.
There are at least two unforgiving rivers to cross.
One of them is you need to leave the personal relations out of the equation, once you want to go beyond Dunbars number and about 150 people. Of course you can build ant-sociocracies where the personal relations contribute to support the governance system - and if you are lucky, you can make do with a fairly primitive kind of sociocracy. If you conclude, “this is good enough for us”, you of course also say goodbye to getting to state government.
The second is an even worse and literally violent river: The river of taking responsibility for the kinds of problems, where only physical force, coercion and violence works: Insanity, crime, war etc. in short, the prerogative problems of the state.
You may think, that the river of violence is far away, but it is not.
In general between 12 - 15% of random people have personality disorders, one of which is psychopathy. In very short, the only thing psychopaths are able to respect is overwhelming force. Different countries and populations have VERY different amounts of psychopathic traits, and in the US there are more than 10 times as many who have traits enough for a diagnosis, than in Taiwan.
In Denmark we lie in the nicer end of the spectrum, but still: If we take 100 random people, we have a 84 % probability, that either 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 people have what it takes to get a psychopathy diagnosis. They are only a little part of the personality disorders, and these again are only a little part of psychiatric problems altogether.
Ant-sociocracies can deal with this problem simply by removing people from circles - and eventually from the organizations altogether - if they are really committed to dealing with it as much as they can. Some of the communities are too reluctant to do this - and they cannot make their ant-sociocracies work properly.
But just removing people is obviously an exclusive solution, nothing that works in a state. A state must acknowledge that violence problems exist, and take responsibility for the problems of its citizens - those of violent and unreasonable citizens, and those of its own violent practices and those of the psychpaths and other personality disorders, that are generated by the violence of the state.
A state is by definition a violence monopoly and to dream of a society completely without is probably unrealistic - and a calling from a far future dream-land where no personality disorders are generated at all.
What a good state can do is strive towards a society where violence is minimized and kept under control. Obviously USA has a longer way to go than Taiwan and say, Denmark. But if people who claim to work with sociocracy don’t aspire to contribute to that, it will probably never happen.
Greetings, Frands.
Abstraction is also a root of most of our problems.
Calling for more abstraction, or more ‘levels’ (whatever that means) of
abstraction, is calling for more trouble.
Abstraction combined with inappropriate scale is not just additive, it
is multiplicative, in terms of damaging systemic consequences.
In terms of governance, human relating does not scale beyond a certain
degree. As soon as one implements a system at greater scale than that,
emergent behaviors of the system will cause trouble.
By ‘trouble’ I mean consequences of essentials of human relatings being
ignored. Usually in favor of abstractions, such as ‘representative
democracy’ or ‘stage theory’ or ‘spiral dynamics’ or ‘divine right of
kings’ or ‘the rule of law’.
And that’s not to mention the trouble-causing consequences of ignoring
the voices of all life other than humans.
Again usually in favor of soothing but pathological abstractions such as
’the environment’ or ‘carbon credits’ or ‘endangered species’.
Or the ultimate human arrogance of “the rights of nature.”
An argument that some yet-to-be-devised flavor of sociocratic governance
can ‘fix’ issues of scale is analogous to arguments that some
yet-to-be-devised technology will ‘fix’ all the problems caused by prior
and existing technology.
cheers,
John
Couldn’t agree more, John!
Simple example: if we as a circle want to get feedback from outside of the circle, we need to inform people and have them even understand the issue and what we’ve already tried etc etc. If the feedback givers don’t have enough context, their feedback will not be as useful. The bigger the org, the more there is to know, the less common ground we have.
It’s not just about trust that doesn’t “scale”, it’s also about simple bandwidth around information sharing that doesn’t just scale.
Another example is if you have a budget where each parent circle decides the budget for the subcircles, you will end up in a situation where circles have to make financial decisions without fully knowing the assumptions and conditions of where the money is spent. This doesn’t go away with other forms of budgeting - if Finance Circle makes the financial decisions, the Finance Circle will only have superficial knowledge of the other 50 circles. Or if you have some sort of participatory budgeting, then each voter will only have superficial knowledge of hw to money would be spent.
In short: the more people/circles are involved, the more the shared context gets thinned out and decision-making gets harder. Sure, sociocracy does an amazing job at packaging domains to require less shared context, filtering/amplifying etc, but ultimately, I don’t think we have to be able to scale to prove that it’s a good system.
That’s why I’m looking more at deepening shared context through practice, instead of thinking about patterns of scale. Information can be abstracted, but most other ways we are held together cannot.
I think thicker contexts are the more promising edge of sociocracy than scale. Maybe not as smart-sounding but more realistic wrt human nature.
I don’t support or aspire to scale to the sizes you are interested in
because I see that as a fundamental misunderstanding of the systems
involved, and a fundamental systemic mistake.
My questions are along the lines of “what are appropriate scales for
human governance systems?”
By ‘appropriate scales’ I mean scales at which those systems function
optimally for all affected - including all life, since human life is
intimately and intricately dependent on all other life.
Pick any empire or nation-state, past or present - they all do great
violence to most of their subjects, human and otherwise, and then break
down, the breakdown increasing the violence and damage.
This is not because they have the ‘wrong’ governance system - it is
because governance is attempted at too large a scale. And often out of
alignment with larger systems.
All systems have optimum sizes. Too big, or too small, they produce
more harm than benefit, they don’t “work,” or they cannot exist at all.
Governance systems are no exception.
There is more than ample empirical evidence throughout human history,
including non-white non-western history.
Plus, any governance system that separates humans from the rest of life
will be problematic. To the extent sociocracy replicates this separation
in all its variations and implementations, it offers nothing towards
addressing the pathologies caused by that separation
At some scale we can no longer honestly call a system “sociocracy.”
The etymology of “socios” is “companion, friend, ally,“
(https://etymologyworld.com/item/socio) or “companion, ally, associate,
fellow, sharer,” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/socio-).
As soon as we scale up such that those relatings are not conserved (not
continued, not possible) among all involved, there can be no
”sociocracy” because the people involved are no longer “socios.”
And if one leaves the personal relations out - which cannot be done in
any case - there is clearly no “socios” and thus no “sociocracy.”
cheers,
John
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