Resilient Social Systems

Characteristics

"The method to achieve long-term stability is resilience.

Resilience is a quality of systems. It helps us to recover from external shocks and to become resistant to crisis. The notion is also used in medicine for patients who survive illnesses more easily or recover sooner than others.

What we need are resilient social structures.

Here are some features of resilient social systems:

TRANSPARENCY

The participants know of each other what they are doing and can react accordingly and cooperate instantly. There is no room forsecret committees and boardroom politics.

COMMUNICATION

The participants are ready to communicate effectively and inclusively, on-line (as it were) and as personally as possible.

COOPERATION

The participants benefit from the mutual use of their capabilities and talents. The over-all benefit of cooperation is larger than the mere addition of individual contributions.

DEMOCRACY

The participants create a system of collective benefits on the basis of equal rights.

The actual democratic systems are all oligarchic, as the so-called private economic sector is excluded (about 60 per cent of the social reality). Democracy makes identification and a sense of responsibility possible.

Dictatorships and other hierarchical systems are notoriously unstable.

MODULARITY

Resilient systems consist of well-defined interchangeable modules which support each other. Redundancy is enhanced by modularity.

DECOUPLING CAPACITY

Modules can survive on their own for a certain period of time. Defects can be repaired without endangering the whole system.

DECENTRALIZATION

Decoupling presupposes decentralization.

Local self-sufficiency within a defined context makes democracy more manageable.

RELOCALIZATION

Multifunctional local systems correspond to local needs. Modules need proximity to support each other and to create local/temporal synergies.

Transportation must be minimized because it consumes energy and therefore fuels.

ECOLOGICAL DESIGN

Sustainable systems can only work with a new ecological design of the things used by them. Instead of planned obsolescence20 robustness, repairability, re-usability (“cradle to cradle”), combinability etc. are the basis of ecological engineering. According to Stahel, 21 the material throughput could be reduced by a factor of ten and still achieve the same level of utility. Such products/ processes are poison for growth, of course, and have been kept off the market so far.

Our future will not be based on low-tech or on a return to the middle ages (or the Paleolithic).It will be based on a kind of modular high-tech, that we have yet to see. Once we have overcome the capitalistically stunted form of technology, the real technological age will begin at last.

Instead of consumer goods for strictly individual use, we’ll develop tools, machines and other goodssuited for communal and cooperative use, for the synergetic luxury of neighborhoods.

ADAPTED SIZE

Size must be adapted to function. “Big” is not always the most effective. Just as “small” is not always beautiful. On the whole we could speak here of adaptive basic patterns.

COGNITIVE DIVERSITY

A variety of methods, ways of thinking and cultures is needed. Diversity itself is an important feature of stable systems.

Our current monomaniacal system (valorization of capital) must be replaced by a variety of relatively independent systems.

GRADUATED COMMITMENT

Resilient organizations are based on grades of varied intensity of commitment. There is always a core group with a higher degree of commitment, surrounded by circles of varying participation. Not everybody must do everything. Division of labor can be a good thing.

BELONGING

The feeling of belonging to a community improves resilience. This also goes for health and happiness.

They can be religious, ethnic, cultural or other communities of a certain stability.

Resilience is based on cooperation and isincompatible with an absolute imperative of competition. There is nothing wrong with a certain amount of competition at the right time and in the right context, though." (http://www.o500.org/books/pm_power_of_neighborhood.pdf)

Source

From the book on the Commons and Its Institutions, i.e. The Power of Neighborhood and the Commons