Stafford Beer on Cybersin
Discussion
Stafford Beer:
"In November 1970 Dr Salvador Allende became President of the Republic of Chile. In November 1971 after some letters had passed, a meeting held in London, and some homework done. I arrived in Santiago. There I first met the prepared group of a dozen men who formed the nucleus of a team which is now much larger, and with whom I am still working-for I have been commuting the 8000 miles between London and Santiago ever since. The charge was daunting indeed: how should cybernetics be used in the exercise of national Government?
You will note that the question whether cybernetics had any relevance to the problems of society and of government had already been answered affirmatively. What was and is the situation'? The answer as I have intimately known it for these last eighteen months. is immensely complicated. Let me paint my own crude picture for you with a rapid brush. First, more than half the total population lives an urban life in the small central region of this long thin country -- a region that perfectly balances the arid North and the wet South in a superb climate. Here the people are highly literate, and constitutionally minded their men are frank and friendly their women gorgeous and gay. There is as great a spirit of freedom in the air as I have sensed anywhere in the world-and decreasingly sense in so much of it today. Yet, as you must surely know. Chile is in the middle of a Marxist revolution that has so far been constitutional, so far legal, so far bloodless. On the land the previous government had begun a process of agrarian reform and that policy had general agreement. Landowners would no longer control estates larger than eighty hectares -say about 200 acres. The residual land was split up and handed to worker's co-operatives who have the support of government agencies. In the six years of that previous government about 20ºof the programme was implemented. But the people were impatient especially in the South and a deeply embedded bureaucracy slowly moves. New forms of expression were given to agrarian reform and the programme was completed not always in good order. in the first two years of the government of Popular Unity. This rate of change has surely contributed to the current food shortage: not so much perhaps because the new arrangements are inefficient in themselves. but because the remaining landowners-disrupted by these events and fearful of further change-are eating their seed corn rather than investing it in production. In industry too the new government’s policies of nationalisation and worker participation have been implemented so rapidly that the control of that process was-and remains-extremely difficult. Foreign managers of expropriated firms have mostly left the country, and the problem of finding men to take temporary charge (these are the interventors) was-and remains-severe. It has been exacerbated by a brain drain of native Chileans: too many qualified professionals have left the country. That they should do so was surely implicit in their upbringing and their expectations, but their problem was much aggravated by the psychological panic induced by Opposition campaigns to spread rumours of terrors to come. As to industrial investment, we should note that all the banks were nationalised and those banks hold the internal assets of the landed classes. Politically the government's problems have been huge, all along. In the Presidential election that put Dr Allende in power, he obtained only 36% of the vote. The coalition he leads itself contains factions, which struggle for influence between themselves. Throughout he has faced a hostile Congress and Senate, capable of blocking any government initiative by the Oppositions’ majority of 60 % to 40%. On the other hand, the government is empowered to block the majority vote of Congress-so long as its own support is at least a third. Hence the political stalemate, hence the tension of the marginal vote, hence the importance of the Congressional Election next month. All of this is easily recognised especially in cybernetic terms as a grossly unstable situation. And its explosive economic tendencies were perfectly predictable when 1 first became involved. There had been a very large and very sudden increase in the purchasing power of the rank and file. Wages rose fast for the land-workers in particular - who were put on the same footing as the blue-collar workers. Social security benefits were much increased for everyone with young, old, or incapacitated dependants. Then clearly there would be a run on stocks: clearly there would be a run on reserves. Indeed this was well understood: on my very first visit a Minister took several hours to explain the risks being run, and the political determination with which those risks were accepted as the price of rapid social progress. The question was whether the government could get a sufficient grip on the situation in time - before this inflationary timebomb blew up in its face. In the event it did not, and the state of' the country is very precarious. It is superficial to think of' this in terms of' food shortages and “housewives marches” tiresome as the food problem certainly is for the middle class. The more important fact is that Chile suffers from the effects of' an economic blockade. There has been a blockade of spare parts, which has made it even harder to keep agriculture going, industry productive, and transportation moving. There has been a blockade on exports, by which I refer especially to copper - which used to earn more than eighty percent of the country’s foreign exchange. The attempt is being made to close world markets to Chilean copper. and the world price has fallen. Above all, there has been a blockade on foreign credit. And since Chile’s natural resources will one day make it a rich country when those resources are properly deployed, it follows that the stranglehold on credit is not a solely economic matter. It appears to me that the government did not anticipate the full vindictiveness with which the rich world would react to its actions, which I emphasise have - so far - been perfectly legal.
At any rate, a true resolution of the very potent conflicts in Chilean society is not discernible within the mounting instability, and may be long postponed. But I consider that this is largely a phenomenon of the cybernetics of international power: you could say that the Chilean people have not been given a chance. They are being systematically isolated behind those beautiful Andes Mountains, and are in a state of siege. The mass media have not helped much-especially insidethe country itself, where freedom of speech has been respected in very testing circumstances. Because of its ownership, this freedom is largely employed to oppose the government. Because of its prestige, the anti-government press is widely copied - embroidered even - across the world. It says a lot for the good intentions of the Government that the work I shall describe been going on in the midst of such obvious turmoil. It wanted scientific tools to help the country’s problems, and it knew that their provision would take time-perhaps long. So it may be proved. The government has so far had to work with the tools governments have used without success. It also wanted to work out the between science and the people, and that too ought to interest us all. We have moved an epoch in which the misuse of science has created a society that is already close to technocracy. The very language - the dehumanised jargon-in which powerful talk about the wars they wage, or powerful companies talk about the people they frankly makes me vomit. I am a scientist, but to be a technocrat would put me out of business as a man. Yet I was eighteen months ago, intent on creating a scientific way of governing. And here today, proud of the tools we have made. Why? Because I believe that cybernetics can do the job better than bureaucracy - and more humanely too. We must learn how to expunge technocracy, without rejecting science - because the proper use of science is really the world’s brightest hope for stable government."