Civilization and pyramidal intelligence

How can the two limits of the original collective intelligence – number of participants and distance separating them – be bypassed? What social machinery could be implemented in order to coordinate and maximize the power of the multiple? How could communities of communities be harmonized and synchronized? As for building, planning, cultivating, transporting, making, erecting temples at the glory of the Gods, human works required more and more muscular strength and knowledge specialization. That is a high number of participants. We enter in History (birth of the writing) and the beginning of large civilizations.

This mutation is absolutely original since it shows almost no perceptible change in our physical constitution, unlike in the animal world. Our brain, our body and our genetic code are the same as they were a few tens of thousand years ago, yet all has changed. The piece is played on another stage, the one of the noosphere – the mind – on which the "invisible" ecology of symbols, myths, knowledge, beliefs, data, is what organizes the social life, visible to our organic senses (biosphere).

With the invention of the writing, man has open the era (area) of the territory. Signs engraved on physical supports were first used for counting, managing, norming, lay down the outlines and the surface of a territory, list, define belongings and exclusions, permissions and restrictions.

For the first time, a message was able to circulate without being physically attached to its issuer. The qualifier, the fact, the counting, the law, the description... objectivized themselves in the circulating object graven with symbols, and sealed the object-signifier-signified trio.

This symbolic labeling of the world was also applied to humans themselves: name, profession, qualification, wealth, facts, misdemeanors, caste, lineage, became so much attributes that positioned the individual in the social geography. The writing is, by essence, the technology of the State.

Equipped with this extraordinary capacity to send signifiers to long distances toward a virtually unlimited number of recipients, the pyramidal intelligence was able to take off and give birth to civilizations and their States.

The four dynamic principles

Four fundamental principles constitute the universal signature of these human edifices, no matter whether these are companies, administrations, governments, armies, religious organizations or empires. These are:

1. Labor division?: everyone has to cast himself in a predefined role in order to allow people interchange. An immediate corollary is the division of access to information, which establishes a context opposed to holopticism, i.e. panopticism? that we will detail later;

2. Authority: from divine right, by filiation, by merit, by expertise, by law, by diplomas… No matter the legitimating principle, authority institutes a pawl effect, a dissymmetry in the information transmission between the emitter and the receiver, and sets up a command and control dynamics (C2). Authority determines the rules, assigns rights and prerogatives, organizes the territories (thus labor division), distributes wealth by means of the money;

3. A scarce currency?: originally money is a social convention and an information system made to allow the market. It serves as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Unlike what many people believe, scarcity is not a inherent quality of money, but an artificially kept property. Scarcity generates channels of allegiance from those who need toward those who have, it naturally catalyzes the hierarchies of the pyramidal intelligence. This phenomenon of hierarchization is strongly accelerated by the Pareto effect? (the more we have, the more we earn);

4. Standards? and norms?: they allow the objectivizing, the circulation and the interoperability of the knowledge within the community. The language is itself a standard. As for circulating artifacts (electronic components, pieces of machinery, materials…) they all have a "fitment pattern" made to chain their added value and build more complex functional sets.

The strength and the stability of the organizations built on pyramidal intelligence largely come from the fact its four founding principles mutually reinforce and legitimate themselves. Wealth is distributed by authority, hierarchies are catalyzed by scarce money, inclusion-exclusion rules are established by standards and norms, and so on.

Today the pyramidal intelligence still drives most of human organizations, from that moment on the original collective intelligence is no longer possible because of the number and the distance. By organizing and synchronizing the original collective intelligence communities, the pyramidal intelligence has allowed the making and the governing of cities and countries, the invention of airline planes, the sending of satellites into space, the raising of gigantic armies, the conducting of symphonic orchestras, the discovery of vaccines. The past 120 years, the rapid growth of telecommunications has significantly increased the levers of power of this form of collective intelligence.

Limits of the pyramidal intelligence

The pyramidal intelligence has an Achilles heel: unlike original collective intelligence, it shows a structural incapacity to adapt to the moving and unpredictable grounds of complexity.

In some way these are the weaknesses of its strength:

• Work division: the social architecture is hardcoded (organization charts, job descriptions, information access levels…), there is no way they can self-modify upon the changing circumstances like in the case of the sports team. Whatever the efforts to improve and optimize the flow of information, the intrinsic limits of hierarchized structures will always show up, with its pawl effects, its dynamics made of territories and prerogatives;

• Authority: the top management organs, reduced to leading minorities, are by nature unable to perceive and process the tremendous flow of information that pour in the large body of the organization they are supposed to manage. This generates reductionist visions that become a source of conflict between the "head" and the base;

• Scarce money: scarcity breeds competition which minimizes collaboration, that is the capacity to self-adapt;

• Standards and norms: most of the time they are subordinated to a logic of competition, they serve a strategy of territorial occupation and monopolistic control by the means of artificially rarefying the knowledge (patents, intellectual property...), rather than maximizing the permeability and the interoperability with the external environment. The most obvious example in the computer world is the one of Microsoft Windows operating system that seats in most microcomputers, which make the final user dependent on the next evolutions, gives him a hard work to evolve into other environments, and imposes "tollgates" to the whole market (licenses, labels, trainings, etc).

Indeed today's organizations are larded with infrastructural and human "cabling" that are made to counterbalance the weaknesses of strict hierarchical architecture: information systems, intranets, KM, project oriented organization, works councils (that shuffle human relationships), ERP, HR management, etc. But the fundamental structure remains, based on the industrial dynamics of mass transformation through the economies of scale principle.

Today we cruelly suffer from the limits of pyramidal intelligence organizations. Their deficiency in front of systemic complexity is expressed by a common symptom: the fact they turn into directions that can be opposite to the will of their own participants, either because internal coordination is virtually impossible, or because leaders use the de facto opacity – even cultivate and legitimate it – to take advantage of their power.

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