The Self-Correcting System

     When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws. – G. K. Chesterton

     The Holy Grail of all designers, no matter what they design, is the self-correcting system. Decades spent in systems design and implementation taught me how ardently such systems are pursued… and how impossible they are.

     Actually, that’s an overstatement. A self-correcting system might be possible… if it had no inputs and no outputs, and if all it ever does is correct itself. It can’t do anything else, because that would require a “monitor and correct” subsystem to monitor and correct the “worker” subsystem. That in turn would require yet another “monitor and correct” subsystem to do the same for the other subsystems, which would require yet another “monitor and correct” subsystem, which would require yet another “monitor and correct” subsystem… oh, forget it.

     Any system that couples to the world outside itself will eventually break down. A system that doesn’t couple to the outside world is useless. Toss it into Plato’s Cave and forget about it.

     Man’s societies can’t be made perfectly self-correcting. Our attempts to do so have always had vulnerabilities. The most important of those vulnerabilities – the one that’s always targeted by the agents of destruction – is the set of rules that defines what it means for the system to work.

     Some such rules are made into laws. No murder! No stealing! No contract-breaking! No false witness! Simple rules like those are widely understood. Yes, some will break them, but as long as the overwhelming majority continue to believe in and support them, that majority will serve to correct the lawbreakers.

     The society will break down if the number of rulebreakers grows so large that the work of correcting them won’t allow the normal functions of society to continue. The more correcting is required, the less time, material, and energy remain for getting other things done. Imagine a society where 50% of people are criminals and the other 50% are law enforcement.

     But that’s not the only way a society can break down. It can also fail if too many rules become laws.

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     Jamie Wilson has produced a fine, compendious piece on the importance of etiquette to liberty and civilization. The heart of the matter:

     When politeness weakens, institutions compensate. They add rules and procedures and signage, training, scripts, escalation protocols, and enforcement mechanisms. This expansion is not driven by malice, but by necessity. When informal, community- and self-enforced norms fail, formal control rushes in to fill the gap.
     In high-trust environments, rules are sparse because people regulate themselves. Courtesy absorbs friction before it escalates, apologies work, discretion works, and flexibility is possible because bad faith is the exception, not the expectation.
     As trust erodes, however, discretion becomes dangerous. Zero-tolerance policies replace judgment, and escalation replaces conversation. Enforcement by bureaucracies and government structures replaces negotiation. The result is a paradox familiar to anyone living in a bureaucratized society: the more formal rules are added, the worse public behavior becomes. Not because rules are evil, but because rules cannot substitute for internal restraint.

     But “formal control” – i.e., enforcement of norms by law – can’t do the job of self-control. In the nature of things, it cannot be enough. And self-control has been under sustained attack since the end of World War I.

* * *

     Chesterton’s glum reference to the “small laws” doesn’t address the problem of enforcement. He probably felt he didn’t need to go there; it “should” be “obvious.” It’s plain enough from the history of overregulated societies.

     The dismissal of prior norms for public conduct has produced a situation in which many Americans find going out of their homes distasteful or worse. The dismissal of norms for private conduct, which many hardcore libertarians are wont to shrug aside, may be even worse. It’s especially worrisome in a society that upholds the concept of privacy as a right.

     We’ve had some ghastly examples of what can occur behind closed doors. Jeffrey Dahmer. Ed Gein. Ted Bundy. There are many others that are less famous.

     Nothing could have stopped any of those men other than a forceful invasion of their private lives. Others are among us that have similarly decided that there are no rules, and we don’t know who or where they are. We won’t know until some mistake reveals their horrors. Matters have become serious enough that we must suspect that there are many of them.

     No, I’m not suggesting that mass murderers are consequences of the failure of etiquette. But the enervation of self-control, coupled to the premise that if it’s behind closed doors, it’s alright, is what makes their infamies possible.

     The social system cannot self-correct. It requires a reinstitution of norms, and law enforcement is not equal to that task. Their origin was in faith.

* * *

     When John Adams wrote:

     Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

     … he was expressing the premise required for a society to have both a high degree of liberty and a tolerable amount of order. For liberty to be not only possible but sustainable, the rules of order must be internal to us. They must be as self-enforcing as the law of gravity. Today, owing to the increasing disaffiliation from our previously common Christian faith and the norms it propounded, that self-enforcement has largely failed.

     See also Lynne Truss’s valuable little book Talk To The Hand.