Markov Boundaries and Organizational Gamesmanship
and the paradox that wasn't
So you tried to start a new Integral/Metamodern/tolerant/liberal/nonpolitical space and within a few months all of the activity is just bigots in a circle jerk of self righteous hatred with all the interesting players long gone. So why did this happen? And why does it happen so frequently that I can write this and it’s not even weird? We’ve all seen it happen so many times in these spaces that it’s not even surprising when some nazis start ganging up on an LGBT person in any of these spaces.
The problem here is that these spaces are a little bit too deep in “oneness” and “wholeness” with everything else, and while the edges of concepts bleed together and often things are defined by their antithesis, everything connected and related, there is a manner and a way in which things are connected and related, it is not an infinite, despite what these groups believe.
In statistics, there’s a concept known as a Markov boundary, which is the mathematical definition that establishes an “inside” and “outside” of a system and the plane of contact between them and the interactions along that plane. It’s definition is more complicated than this and I’m not quite doing it’s mathematical reality justice, but for the purposes of this conversation this is important, not everything interacts with everything else at once, organized systems have internal and externals and regulated relations between them. Your blood does not react directly to somebody walking around in another city, unless modulated through the markov boundary and it’s rules.
All of our systems operate this way, *systems* in general operate this way. So what does all this have to do with why your organizations and systems are failing to create meaningful change or progress or advance theory?
Well, let’s look at it through the liberal Karl Popper’s concept of the “paradox of tolerance”:
”Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” - The Open Society and it’s Enemies
Tolerance: sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own, or the act of allowing something
Tolerance on an individual level has strictly this single dimension and we can imagine it going from 0 to infinity. However there has never been an individual, our development and our interactions and the context of tolerance is within that of society, braying up against other people.
On this level of society, a different scope of analysis is necessary, a different way of modeling than this 0 to infinity has to exist. As you widen tolerance beyond a certain level you begin to encounter different tolerances that contradict one another, that are opposite each other, that are incompatible when mapped across a larger number of people. When we start to examine the symmetries of the system of tolerance in society and simplifying it down to only that which remains without contradiction, which is unique and uncontradicted, instead approaches a logarithmic limit, it is not 0 to infinity, but instead 0 until you hit the contradiction limit of tolerance, beyond which you’ve left this confined system of tolerance and are now interacting with the system of tolerance instead of within it. This is the Markov boundary of the tolerance system. The behaviors and games within this system are fundamentally different from the interactions of the parts of this system with the outside of the system. For example, your blood really doesn’t like being exposed to the open air, that’s not how it’s supposed to work, it’s supposed to stay nicely contained within your vascular system and if it’s outside that system it’s not going to be doing it’s job effectively.
I believe what is happening in the cases I opened this article with, they lack an understanding of, or perhaps more importantly a conviction of, where that boundary is.
So let’s dive a little bit deeper into the tolerance system and then we’ll look at a couple others. Within the tolerance game, we tolerate each other’s differences so long as nobody is harmed or lessened by that difference in belief or way of existing, because it allows us all maximal freedom, self determination, and self actualization, it connects us with each other and it keeps the peace and civil interaction between peoples. So long as we all play the tolerance game, live within the boundary conditions of the tolerance system, we’ll safely rest within it’s protections and it’s fruits.
Now let’s say we let a racist into the space, a gool ole fashioned “race science” guy talking about crime rate differentials by race as if we didn’t police differentially by race, claiming he’s not racist and is just telling it like it is, that it’s not the people or the race but a “culture” because he claims he’s being tolerant and he sounds that way, but his “facts” are decontextualized cherry picked nonsense that breaks down with the slightest honest examination or serious discussion, but those are both easily derailed so the intolerant can keep spreading the hateful messages about others in the space that are that minority being criminal, being awful, etc. And when the victims of this intolerance have emotional reactions to it, it is these that are viewed as violations of the tolerance game because they lacked the willingness to play the dishonest games and tactics used by the intolerant. The minorities in the space begin to feel uncomfortable, without allies, alienated, unwelcome, and leave. Pepped up by his win, the racist invites more of his friends to the space, and then the people who were more willing to put up with the racists at first but dislike the bigotry end up forced out of the space by the same pattern. A couple rounds of this and the dominant voice in the space starts being the intolerant voice.
The fix here is simple and it is honesty and accountability. If somebody comes into a space and is making the race science arguments, we call them out. Point out how their statistics are false, and we do not let them control the conversation, we set strict limits and force staying on topic and defending each and every point or admitting when they have lost a point, and when a voice is obviously fake and obviously not engaging in an honest and open discourse while preaching things that may lead to intolerance of certain groups that are within the tolerance system, then they must be dragged and kicked to the curb, to protect the victims of the intolerant and preserve the boundary of the tolerance system.
Allowing a bigot, however “possibly just mislead” into a space and letting them get away with interacting directly with their victims, is like firing a 7.62 round right through the heart of the system and suddenly the blood is no longer in the body but being drained out. The “ally” in the tolerance system is the clotting agent that rushes to the wound and closes it, holds the blood in and takes the blunt of the impact of the round, the sternum of the system, the skin, the armor, the people who ensure that the intolerant get dragged, get called out, and get dismantled publicly so that the victims of intolerance do not have to leave to avoid it being put upon them. That is to say, by maintaining the boundary condition of the system of tolerance.
Unfortunately as it stands, in many of these spaces there is a false immune reaction to the people maintaining the boundary condition, instead of towards the projectile smashing apart their system.
But of course spaces and organizations can not rely on the tolerance system alone to operate, several other systems are important to the maintenance and growth of complex systems and organizations. The next one of vital importance and with some degree of overlap with the tolerance system is the solidarity system.
Solidarity: unity (as of a group or class) that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards; mutual support within a group.
Obviously if you are building a community or an organization, solidarity is necessary for it’s growth and development, and for its maintenance against hardship and difficulty. So let’s follow the same process of eliminating symmetric opposites and simplifying the system and establishing and understanding the boundary condition of this system.
The point we start seeing contradictions as we expand solidarity outwards is when we start sharing it with people who do not engage in it, or worse, with those who engage in the opposite of it. A system can only generate so much energy and resources, so whose who take from a system and work against it are like ticks burrowing into the skin and extracting that precious blood, or worse, viruses trying to infect it and take it over for it’s own external ends. Our movement has many workers, precariat, minorities, LGBTQ, fringe, displaced, disenfranchised and alienated people within it and around it who do not feel safe but if they did would be within it. Those who place these groups into double binds, who extract from them, who instead of helping them achieve freedom and peace try to trap them in indenture and in servitude and in debt. Landlords, employers, bankers, these drains on our people tap us of resources and drain our capacity for solidarity and growth. Mutual aid and mutual support must exist and must be confined by the system boundary set by it’s minimalist set of boundary conditions for persistence, and perhaps even for exponentially adding atop each other’s efforts for actual growth. Mutual patronage, spreading each other’s content and ideas, talking up the figures that deserve and which need it, putting more into the system than you take out when you can and asking for only what you can put to use - these are the methods by which we mutually develop and mutually grow.
Just as tolerance of the racist drives out the minorities from a space, solidarity with a landlord drives tenants out of a space, solidarity with a capitalist drives out the worker or the debt trapped, because these people are the literal victims of, losers of the market games which the landlords and capitalists have won by outcompeting them to purchase capital, and leveraging this ownership to extract a sum from the other, in trying to appease the landlord the tenant must always suffer because the landlord always demands a greater share of the tenants income, often even beyond it. In your connection to one you have cut open the veins of the system to feed the vampires of dead capital.
There are many more systems relevant to organizational structure and development whose boundaries with the world outside of the systems convey important details about the nature and growth of those systems, and these boundary conditions can almost always be found. Of course there will be disagreements, as we all have different ideas of what is and what is not a burden and what actions affect us and which do not, one person may find the texture and weight of clothing physically and mentally unbearable, but another may find the mere sight of another person’s body to be a burden criminally placed upon them. Working out which of these is a real boundary, which should have preference, which side of these contradicting positions is more towards the system’s benefit or detriment as well as that of the people inside it. There is a clear and definite answer to this question and it can be found with honest discussion about what actions constitute a burden and what do not, what force would have to be applied and to who and how in order to appease one party’s definition’s over another, and it won’t be until we can figure out and understand how to have these conversations and obey the boundary and the thriving conditions for these systems of tolerance, solidarity, and other systems that we will finally stop having our spaces and organizations collapse into intolerant and ineffective, fractured spaces and movements.