Brief: Overview of and reasoning behind the Resilience-to-Robustness Equilibrium (RRE) process proposed under the Qaucus programme of the OneGoal Initiative for Governance (OGI)
(first published on alevemine.com on February 27, 2024)
HIGHLIGHTS:
The best attainable global and international governance from the point of view of the decision maker necessarily minimizes the margin problem, which is made of four fundamental systemic dynamics, and RRE was designed for this.
Ignoring the margin problem inexorably leads to exponential or sudden loss of life potential, particularly from the decision maker point of view.
Implementing RRE enables the minimization of damage, particularly for the decision maker standpoint, no matter the technological advancements.
THE PROBLEM DECISION MAKERS FACE: THE “MARGIN PROBLEM”
The “Margin Problem” is the situation that arises though the following four perennial processes that lead to the divergence of our actions from those that could bring about the best outcome - for us as humanity and in particular for us as decision makers:
Internal Drive: The tendency to seek safety and security for oneself and for persons or groups of one’s predilection.
Incompleteness of Knowledge: Notwithstanding the impossibility of complete knowledge, what informs our decisions today is unnecessarily skewed information.
Risk Recursion: Transferred risks keep a momentum and continue being transferred to adjacent compartments and transformed at each step. Time to recurrence isn’t necessarily long. De-risking without worsening one’s own risks is only feasible when risk is deleted without creating or worsening other risks anywhere in the system that is constituted by humans and the environment they are interacting with taken together, be it on Earth or elsewhere.
The Risk Arrow: Risks grow at every action as well as with the evolution of systemic processes, due to the compounding of side effects.
These mean that we the decision makers not only are drifting away from our best outcome, but also that we don’t have any option to transfer risks.
SOLUTION ALTERNATIVES
Because of the universal nature of systems, the overall structure of a solution necessarily correspods to that of RRE: a permanent goal, functions and their leeways, and successive strategies, all from the human standpoint. Narrowing the details thereof to reflect the actual system the humans, their structures and environment form leads specifically to RRE.
In context, the vector M of risks to our functions is the single measure of sustainability.
“The oval” provides an overview of functions. The permanent goal can be formulated as human durability with respect for the depicted vital values:
A more detailed desciption is available in the RRE White Paper at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10633773
HOW AND WHEN TO IMPLEMENT
The implementation must be whole and intact, because the omission or modification of elements yield a poorer outcome: RRE enhances the effectiveness of governance, therefore a full alignment of policies with the actual human system is critical. To that end, the implementation should be made with OGI, which provides the required consequence upon the observed state of affairs, while conveying the visceral understanding that enables such consequent action may not be systematically possible.
RRE ideally should have been implemented in any feasible shape from our dawn, but it is particularly pertinent now partly because it is on the table now for the first time, and partly because we are making uniquely big decisions in rapid succession in conjunction with a rapid technological evolution and a trend toward “blobbalisation” - processes that lead to cluster risk, whereby systemic losses tend toward the “blobbalized”, or “made effective”, de-facto goal’s. In other words, mistakes made now are most powerful mistakes.
The steps to be taken are as follows:
The development of the corresponding ICT platform and design of synchronized procedures, in parallel to legal texts’ formulation;
The initiation of an international and/or global implementation;
Universalisation and the upholding of the process.
ANNEX
A notable fallacy:
Our current governance, in its very attempt to change, starts out with in-the-box self-restrictions that make it impossible (yet this we must overcome) for a truly useful approach to get initiated or to take hold. In doing so, it perpetuates the processes that brought us to such a difficult and problematic situation as today’s, be it in a belief such as that of the absence of an alternative or of this being a phase after which things get better with the endless help of innovation and creativity in our current directionality.
The awareness of RRE as an approach and of the margin problem itself, perhaps notably of the risk arrow, provides the insight that these beliefs are erroneous: human potential after each such phase is greatly reduced, as depicted in the following figure through a series of Warshaw circles representing each such cycle, with sizes shrinking similarly to the rising frequency of oscillations in a single Warshaw circle:
The Warshaw circle is used here because the container model* of the economic cycle yields a view of the cycle as seen from one container across time that, in a reiterating pseudo-apocalyptic paradigm, will look exactly like the Warshaw circle:
*Undesirable side effects of economic activity feed back into all agents and factors involved. The container model of the economy describes these as leaky and interlinked fluid-holding containers in a non-homogenous gravitational field, respectively with pumps between containers, that get damaged and damage adjascent containers depending on their capacitive state and their flows, whereby breaches of the structurally encapsulating containers entail restructuring and scavenging among the there encapsulated containers, until the most encapsulating one breaks, point where survival or restructuring become impossible and the remainders of the system terminally collapse. The containers represent items involving capacity, inventory and the structures needed to fulfill all functions as defined by the Resilience and Robustness Factors (RRFs). The most encapsulating container regards the simultaneous viability of the habitat and territory functions. This model is representative of the margin problem. As in ecology, a container’s status across time is a function of all containers’ statuses across time. None is independent. In this paradigm, the scalability of a business process is generally the definition of a market failure. Appropriate scaling actions can only be short term in a way that is tailored to the topology of the overall system. Such would be the introductory phase of the deployment of the RRE process, or a phase of human expansion. Functionally, what is outside of a container can be computed as being inside of that container. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fluctuation is a function of the status of the respective containers captured by the concept of GDP, not more: not of our actual system.
