Webster: robust adjective
1D: capable of performing without failure under a wide range of conditions
In the last few years, we found, and now seemingly look to explore to the point of exhaustion, the present corporate globalization system is not very robust. Centrally controlled and structured systems, dependent on certain essential elements, all have design weaknesses. When challenged by acute and hard change, they are not robust.
Looking across history, the failure of long established, powerful centralized systems seemingly occurs overnight. This experience cuts across cultures, including the two millennia Imperial Chinese system, the Classical Maya period, France's Ancien Regime, Tsarist Russia, and most recently the Soviet Union. The list is endless, the specifics of their collapse somewhat diverse, but one thing all have in common, central control’s inability to respond to changing circumstances.
Over reliance on a few things makes centralized systems fragile. No matter their seeming indestructibility, fragility is built into every centralized systems’ existential reliance on a few essential components. All civilizations have risen reliant on several key resources, for example, the Maya and maize. On top of these few essential resources is built a knowledge base and power system. The Maya had maize god Hun Hunaphu, who among other things, represented a specific time in their agrarian calendar. Like all farming cultures, the Maya had to know when to plant, when the rain would come. Hun Hunaphu had an entire dedicated priesthood.
Control of centralized civilizations is always exercised by a small political class, whose power is completely reliant on limited resource and knowledge channels. If any essential channel is upset, the system finds it difficult or simply unable to respond. System design is completely wired to be reliant on a few things, a severe limiting of any essential element causes system malfunction.
Historically, centralized political systems seemingly collapsing overnight, were actually in decline for years, decades, even centuries. The decline is the incapacity for change in response to an evolving environment. Things just continue to work until they no longer can. Failing centralized politics, whether France's Bourbons, Tsarist Russia, or Imperial China, continued for decades before the regime's collapse.
We learn from the world around us robust systems aren’t efficiently centralized. They’re distributed, horizontally networked, and inefficiently redundant. Darwin writes,
“The more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.”
Industrialism is the most powerful centralizing process in human history, displacing almost everything coming before it, creating its own rigid and extreme hierarchies. Industrial culture, whether it's Tokyo, Kocaeli. Detroit, Sao Paulo, Chengdu, Johannesburg, or Monterey are all homogeneous, all reliant on centrally controlled, relatively narrow energy and food channels. The FT reviews Oceans of Grain, a book concerning the centuries development of the present global grain system and its reliance on the fields of Ukraine and Russia. The FT writes,
“The world’s breadbasket is at war. Russia and Ukraine together account for about a quarter of the world’s wheat, and roughly 12 per cent of its total calories. Should the war interrupt the spring planting season — which it shows every indication of doing — poor countries and rich countries alike could face food shortages and steep inflation. That disruption of grain trade may in turn bring massive economic, political and social upheaval.”
Yet, a centralized, hierarchical, clearly failing, knuckleheaded, global political class quickly go about destructing the resource channels on which not just their societies, but their own power is dependent, doubling down on what’s not working. As the Old Moor wrote, “History repeats, first time tragedy, second time farce.”
Not to quibble or be pedantic, but he's the Old Mole, not the Old Moor.