Designing a new social contract requires a guiding philosophy that considers the complexity of our times. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the legendary American jurist, famously said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity”.
Nature, with all its complexity, may provide this guide through the grand simplicity of its fractal design.
Although, nature’s system design was first described mathematically by the maverick mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, fractal patterns were always familiar, since nature is full of fractals in trees, snowflakes, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, and hurricanes.
In complexity theory and in reality, the transition space between order and chaos, is called the ‘edge of chaos’. It is at the ‘edge of chaos’ where the highest evolutionary and adaptive potential exists. In other words, too much top-down structure causes stagnation and too much randomness is all chaos with no beneficial order. In-between systems at the ‘edge of chaos’ exhibit fractal behavior. It is where everything is most alive.
Nature has done the empirical research for us. Its grand design has worked for millennia from the bottom up to create higher order levels of living. It suggests that, in designing a new social contract, we should place at its center, a focus on maximizing our potential for harmonious evolution and adaptive fitness. Societies have always grappled with balancing these great and conflicting ideas of liberty, equality, efficiency and community. Fractalism, or perhaps the more relatable term of adaptivism, suggests that by maximizing our potential for harmonious evolution and adaptive fitness, we can reframe and bring harmony to these conflicting ideas.
The tenets of this grand design approach for adaptive fitness are connected-decentralization, transcendence through iteration, and moving from scarcity to abundance.
Fractal structures are smaller, distributed and networked. Fractalism elevates the individual to reveal collective higher order structure; the hyperlocal and global. This recognizes the connectedness of everything, while favoring bottom-up organic network structures over top-down hierarchies. Primacy lies with the autonomous unit and through iteration, the higher order structures that best serve us are created. Simplistically, meta-structures would be more akin to widening or narrowing spirals, rather than bottom-up or top-down linear connections. Through the fractal lens, we are both the whole and the part. Author and philosopher Arthur Koestler, described this as a ‘holarchy’.
As fractalists, we would support decentralized hyper-local autonomy, combined with hyper interconnectedness. This would play out in the future of work, organizational design, local and global governance, and the systems and value networks that support this.
New juristic persons such as rivers, lakes, wetlands, and forests would be recognized as having rights and as sovereign participants in these networks. This has already begun to happen in India and New Zealand, and the body of legal philosophy work on ‘wild laws’ and ‘personhood’ is growing. Artificial intelligence may also add machines as participants in these networks, and distributed ledger technologies like the blockchain will continue to rise in prominence to support these new networked relationships and expanded concepts of value.
As we continue to march towards a dematerialized and renewable society, the marginal cost of production tends downwards towards zero. This should shift the dominant economic paradigm of scarcity to one of abundance. Fractal design supports this non-zero-sum game philosophy and provides a framework for infinite iteration that enables both individual and collective optimization. This quality of abundance is also an important reason to elevate the fractal design embedded in nature and the organic. It will provide a positive and kinder pathway to development of intelligent design in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and quite possibly, singularity.
The world is more complex than ever. Fractalism (or adaptivism) — the grand simplicity of nature’s design — provides a powerful and practical compass for us to reach simplicity on the other side of this complexity. It provides a vast intellectual and practical territory for us to develop the underlying ideas and mechanisms for constructing a new social contract. It suggests the opportunity for an effervescent public discourse and renewal. It may offer a set of ideas to vote for, rather than a present that many people are simply voting against. It gives us a new name, and sometimes vintage ideas need new names.