MORE PNM THEORY: REVIEWING THE DELETED SCENE ON SYSTEM PERTURBATION – PART I.

A while back I posted on Dr. Barnett’s concept of System Perturbation, coming up with a set of rules I thought such events were likely to follow. Dr. Barnett in turn suggested I review the part his editors left on the cutting room floor – one of his deleted scenes – that he developed from a workshop with a high-powered gathering of formidible intellectuals, strategists and social scientists. The material deserved to be in PNM so I’m hoping it gets fully developed in the upcoming sequel. I strongly suggest you click the link for yourself and, if nothing else, take a quick look at the Powerpoint slides that emerged from the workshop before reading the review.

In Part I. I critique the preparatory remarks that explain Vertical and Horizontal scenarios and in Part II. I will tackle the rules that came out of the System Perturbation workshop themselves. Dr. Barnett’s text will be in bold, my commentary in regular type:

“What I got from the workshop was a ton of disparate ideas about how vertical and horizontal scenarios play out among vertical and horizontal political systems. That was the weird thing about this workshop: I introduced the concept of vertical and horizontal scenarios and pretty soon everyone in the room was talking about vertical and horizontal societies or political systems. I like those phrases better than “authoritarian” and “democratic,” because those phrases come with so much baggage and are so all-inclusive, whereas my workshop participants seemed to use the phrases vertical system and horizontal system with far greater freedom. For example, both China and Russia could be described as having far more horizontal economic systems than political systems, meaning their economies are increasingly built more around ties among firms and among individuals than between the political leadership and firms, or the more vertically arranged patterns of authority and activity under past communist rule. Their political systems may still be quite vertically arrayed, from top to bottom, but their economic systems are far more horizontal.

Dr. Barnett excels at conceptual reorganization and identification of primary characteristics or premises. To an extent this is a process of simplication – something required to communicate concepts used by specialists to a wider audience and a prerequisite for analogical thinking – but it is also a process of clarification. To get complicated ideas down to their irreducible premises makes their logical implications visible.

Vertical and Horozontal are excellent terms for describing the connectivity relationships – basically Hierarchy versus a Lattice – a lattice that contains within it a variety of hierarchies, linear cross-connections and randomly evolving strands. Power, information, resources flow along the lines but in a Vertical scenario the guiding hand of the system is visible and the lines are rigid.

You might ask, Why not just call them authoritarian market economies? Clearly I could do just that, but I prefer referring to vertical and horizontal systems because, that way, I can talk about how different aspects (i.e., economic versus political, or social versus security) of China might respond to a System Perturbation differently. I think China’s economy and society are more horizontal in form than vertical, but I believe the Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army remain extremely vertical in form, so a System Perturbation hitting China hits different sectors differently. Why is that important? Well, here I go back to the dinosaurs and mammals notion: a System Perturbation may disrupt or destroy different aspects of different systems across China. For example, SARS was more challenging for the political leadership than for the economy, which in the end proved awfully resilient whereas the Party looked awfully stiff. The mass media displayed a surprising amount of horizontal form, whereas the military assumed its usual stonewall stance. You get the idea. I just want more flexible concepts because I am still fumbling my way around this new strategic concept

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