Conceptual Economy

Future Research: The Nature of Economic Freedom

September 21, 2015 in A) Country Archetypes & Scenarios / D) Unicist Future Research / E) Structural Conflicts / The Unicist Research Institute / Unicist Cobots / Unicist Functional Design tagged Conceptual Economy / Country Future Research / Future Research / Social Scenario / The Unicist Research Institute / unicist anthropology / Unicist Confederation / Unicist Evolutionary Approach / Unicist Future Research Lab / Unicist Logical Approach / Unicist Theory of Evolution by Unicist Future Research Lab

This work deals with the conceptual structure of economic freedom and its integration with economic democracy. It includes no ideological considerations or influence. It is based on the unicist approach to complexity science, which uses a pragmatic, structural and functionalist framework.

The reach of one’s globalization is defined by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

There are prejudices and fallacious myths installed in the world dealing with the concept of economic freedom.

Unfortunately, no literature could be found that approached economic freedom based on its concept to define its nature (the “stem cell” of economic freedom).

The existing approaches are strongly influenced by ideological positions.

This introduction, based on an excerpt from the book “The Future of Democracy and Capitalism” by Peter Belohlavek, provides a conceptual approach to capitalism, going beyond the beliefs deposited on facts by people to understand the nature and dynamics that define the present and future of Capitalism.

It can be said that Greece was the origin of political democracy in the West but was not an economic democracy because in those times the expansion of cultures was driven by military actions.

It can also be said that the United States of America are a paradigmatic example of evolutionary democracy that integrates social democracy, economic democracy and political democracy to manage the domestic affairs.

As an evolutionary democracy, the United States of America could be taken as a paradigmatic example of Economic Freedom and Capitalism. But Economic Freedom and Capitalism cannot be imported or exported. The unique structure of values that are implicit in a culture’s archetype are the demonstration that it is meaningless to copy any model to a foreign culture that has different structural values.

The understanding of the nature of economic democracy and capitalism allow defining the particular way in which a country can deal with economics and economic democracy considering its own characteristics.

This complete document includes:

Economic Democracy Ethics
The Structure of Capitalism
The Nature of Justice: The Catalyst and Entropy Inhibitor of Capitalism
The Future of Capitalism
Annex 1: The Nature of Economic Democracy
Annex 2: Corruption: The Anti-concept of Capitalism

Economic Democracy Ethics

Ethics defines the accepted rules of an environment. These rules satisfy the functional needs, the morality that is accepted in the environment and the ideology that underlies this ethics.

In the economic democracy, we have structured the four basic ethics that are accepted as existent:

The Statism
The Protectionism / Dirigisme
The Pre-capitalism
The Capitalism

The ontogenesis of these ethics is homologous to the phylogeny of the human growth processes. This is to say that Statism implies the childhood of economic behavior, protectionism / dirigisme is its adolescence, Pre-capitalism is its youth and Capitalism is its maturity.

Anarchy is the stage previous to these ethics. It implies that individuals develop their economic activities eluding the rules of the environment.

Statism

Economic Statism is based on using the drivers of rational morality to guide economic actions. As economic or materialistic behaviors belong to the field of individualistic attitudes, Statism necessarily needs to make others responsible for the results to be achieved.

It is a low productivity economic ethics, in which the fulfillment of the established rules prevails over the achievement of results. Statism installs economic behavior in the rules of childhood, which means that the “family” prevails over the individual desires. It achieves a superior level of productivity in environments that have a superior ethics driven collective intelligence and are highly disciplined.

This is not the case when dealing with the social aspects of Statism. Statism in economic behavior requires authoritarian dirigisme in order to define what needs to be done and is driven by the need to make people align in an environment where the property belongs to others.

Protectionism / Dirigisme

Economic protectionism / dirigisme is based on installing autonomous entities that live based on the exchange with other protected entities in order to survive and provide adequate living conditions for the members.

Protectionism is a typical adolescent organization that corresponds to an economic stage where the environment has not been organized as a democratic entity.

It is based on the self-sufficiency of the productive entities that cannot deal in an adapted way with the environment because the control on their protected organization prevails over the productivity that can be achieved.

As there is a need to be self-sufficient, there is no possibility of introducing innovations or adapting to the change of the external environment. Their productivity suffices for survival and their horizon is limited to the reality of their “private” entity. Economic protectionism achieves a superior level of productivity when it is driven by a superior ethics driven ideology.

Pre-capitalism

The economic pre-capitalism ethics implies that private property prevails over any other consideration in economic behavior.

Pre-capitalism implies, on the one hand, that the private initiative should prevail over governmental or State interventions and that all that hinders economic freewill is dysfunctional.

It is naturally the capitalist logic of non-democratic environments and, paradoxically, it represents the prejudices that non-democratic and non-developed countries have about capitalism.

Pre-capitalism is homologous to the behavior in youth where the voluntarism, omnipotence and energy prevail over a rational use of resources. It is a typical model for primary industry driven countries that have not known the meaning of a true democracy.

The productivity of pre-capitalism is based on the power of transferring costs to the participants of the economic activity.

Capitalism

Capitalism is the ethics that corresponds to a superior economic democracy, which is natural in democratic countries and not natural in countries that are developing towards a democratic environment.

Economic capitalism implies, on the one hand, the existence of a social economy where the society participates in the ownership of the productive entities through the stock market and, on the other hand, the existence of a newcomer’s place in which pre-capitalist rules apply within the general rules of capitalism

Capitalism is sustained by justice, which is the catalyst and entropy inhibitor of the system. Without a functional judicial system, capitalism degrades towards a pre-capitalist ethics.

The level of productivity in capitalism is catalyzed by the need to integrate shareholders and clients within the entities. Thus, those who achieve an adequate level of productivity succeed and those who do not, disappear.

The educational system is the driver to provide the necessary resources for R&D to maintain the competition at a superior level.

Unicist Future Research Lab

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
http://www.unicist-school.org/future-research/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/turi-1.pdf

The Unicist Approach to Future Research

June 22, 2015 in D) Unicist Future Research / The Unicist Research Institute / Unicist Cobots tagged Conceptual Anthropology / Conceptual Economy / Countries evolution / Country Archetypes / Country Future Research / Future Research / Institutional Evolution / Intelligent Systems / Social Scenario / Unicist Evolutionary Approach / Unicist Future Research Lab / Unicist Theory of Evolution by Peter Belohlavek

The unicist approach to future research is based on knowing the nature of an environment that is found in its past and using the data of the present to infer the future based on the knowledge of the evolution laws.

This approach is based on the fact that future and past are not symmetric. This is the case of all the environments that are evolving or involving. The past and the future are only symmetric in stagnated environments.

The Unicist Approach to Future Research is based on the research of the unicist ontogenetic intelligence of nature that started at the beginning of the 80’s. It was developed at The Unicist Research Institute.

It was a step by step discovery based on the apprehension of the nature of social phenomena entering afterwards in the institutional and individual evolution. Its integration with biology and physics was the final stage that was achieved.

The objective of the unicist approach to future research is to define a future scenario in order to adapt and influence it.

When an individual “looks back” at the history, the events that occurred are reasonable, understandable and logical. Therefore when approaching the future what is required is having the “logic” that is evident when analyzing the events of the past.

The building of future scenarios is based on the fact that the structure of the unicist ontology of a specific environment needs to be found in the past and that the facts of the present are used to infer the future.

The unicist approach to future research is based on inferring the future based on the laws of evolution established by the ontogenetic intelligence of nature, which allowed developing the unicist ontology of evolution.

This allows building reliable future scenarios.

The Unicist Ontology of Cultural Evolution

Introduction

The members of a culture that is evolving naturally accept that they might be involving. This concern is what avoids their involution.

The dominant ethics defines the evolution of a culture and defines its attitude towards influencing the environment. A culture is evolving when it has the capacity to adapt to the environment, meaning that it is able to influence it while it is being influenced.

This implies that the dominant cultural segments and the elite of the culture have a spontaneous attitude towards influencing the environment to generate growth.

As the habits of a culture evolve driven by the dominant ethics, an evolutionary culture evolves when the ethics of value adding prevails and the value earning ethics is the energy conservation function of the culture.

The synthesis

The driver of cultural evolution processes is the adaptation of a culture. This adaptation implies that a democratic attitude prevails, providing the necessary consensus to have social cohesion, being driven by a social efficiency, and making the necessary trade offs to maintain an efficient consensus.

The consensus of an evolutionary culture is oriented towards growth, which implies having a proactive attitude in the environment to generate value. Social efficiency means that the system is institutionalized having therefore a minimum level of entropy.

This institutionalization is materialized in the habits and in the myths and fallacious myths installed in a culture.

Trade-offs are implicitly conflicts and generate crises.

On the one hand, they can be evolution conflicts when they happen within the limits of efficiency and the value earning behavior. Or they can be involution conflicts, on the other hand, when the goal of these trade-offs is “buying” consensus.

In this case the culture enters a conjunctural involution which naturally eliminates the leaders that made this trade-offs if the value adding ethics prevails in the institutions.

If this is not the case, and a survivors’ ethics becomes necessary for the institutions, the culture will have entered into an over-adaptive behavior driving the culture towards involution.

The maximal strategy of evolutionary cultures is sustained by their value adding ethics.

This implies that the leaders of the dominant segments have a level of consciousness that allows them to be aware of the social processes and the long term consequences of the decisions that are made.

Social evolution requires participative processes within an authoritative environment that does not require the exertion of power to be efficient.

The catalyst of the evolution of a culture is given by the value earning behavior which includes a conscious value adding process.

This conscious value adding process is what accelerates the processes of the minimum strategy in order to sustain the adaptive behavior and the evolution of a culture.

The minimum strategy is based on a value earning behavior in order to ensure the wellbeing of a society.

The entropy inhibitor of this value earning process is given by the survivor ethics behavior of the members which ensures the wellbeing of the members of the society.

Levels of cultural evolution

The stability of the evolution of a culture depends on the attitudes of the culture. The spontaneous behaviors of the members of a culture are: Work driven behavior, Education driven behavior, Institution driven behavior, Technology driven behavior.

1) Work driven behavior

It is defined by the “purpose of life” of the members of a culture. Work driven cultures are those where pastime activities are only valid if the duties of work have been fulfilled. People feel guilt if they cannot do “their” work.

2) Education driven behavior

It includes a work driven attitude. The role of the members of a society depends on the educational level of its members. In this case, the central role of families, the introduction of the new generation in the society, is ensuring that they an education that allows them to overcome the level of their parents.

3) Institution driven behavior

It includes the education driven attitude. In these societies the behavior of the members is subordinated to the rules of institutions. Institutional behavior prevails over individualistic attitudes.

Freewill has the place established by institutional rules which have been established in a democratic way. The roles of the members are within the limits of the roles of the institutions.

4) Technology driven behavior

It includes the institutions driven attitude. As technology is the driver for growth, this requires that the members of the dominant segments of a culture need to be technology oriented.

This technology orientation implies seeking for new ways to produce more with less. This attitude fosters growth and drives towards permanent changes in order to upgrade the possibilities of a culture.

The capacity to generate or use innovative behaviors establishes the roles of the members of a culture. Democratic leaders are natural in this environment.

The Unicist Ontology of Social Mutation

The evolution of a biological entity is produced by “tiny” revolutions that produce small mutations that are integrated in the complex system generating the evolution or involution of this entity. Social environments also evolve based on small mutations.

A social mutation is produced when the functionality of a social entity has been lost, and there is the necessary available energy to generate a change. This can happen based on the persistence of social viruses type “A” that become chronic social diseases, generating a dysfunctional purpose that can be hardly limited by the exertion of power.

This chronic disease of an entity can be produced by inaction or by the continuous use of palliatives to neutralize its crises.

The mutation is produced by the appearance of a strange attractor that generates a change of the chaos, transforming it into a new and different functional behavior.

The strange attractor generates an unpredictable new order that exceeds the possibilities of the power to control it and mutates the existing chaotic credibility zone towards a different functionality. That is why mutations cannot occur in entities that are managed based on the exertion of absolute power.

This strange attractor disappears as such and evolves into an object as soon as the new credibility zone begins to exist.

This process can be understood by comparing, at the end of the first decade of the XXI Century, the evolution of the European Communist Countries and the evolution of Communist China.

Social strange attractors are social objects that have a lower ethics when the situation mutates towards a more instinctive and individualistic behavior.

Strange attractors generate evolution when they are objects that integrate a driver and catalyzing and gravitational aspects. In this case, they become fully unstable but conjuncturally functional, because catalysts and gravitational aspects cannot be part of a system.

It has to be considered that strange attractors disappear as such and are replaced by an object that is homologous to their driver as soon as the entity has mutated.

This new object generates the necessary complementary and supplementary functions in the environment using the energy generated by the dissolution of the original object.

The result of social mutations is unpredictable. All what can be predicted is the trend towards evolution or involution.

If this process includes the participation of change agents, they are excluded in the case of involutions and eliminated in the case of evolutions.

Strange attractors are defined by the change of the technology that sustains the ideology on which the social entity and its environment are based. The dysfunctionality of the existing technology is what generates the chaotic situation that requires the use of power in order to control it. The concept “technology” needs to be apprehended in the wide sense, meaning different ways, hard and soft, to improve the functionality of something.

The introduction of a new technology maximizes the existing chaos and generates the possibility of the appearance of the new strange attractor.

If the strange attractor does not appear, the chaotic entity explodes or implodes depending on the characteristics of the context. If it appears, the entity evolves or involves depending on the characteristics of the strange attractor.

Peter Belohlavek