Hmm. Michel's "Iron law of oligarchy". Summarized as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts." See also Niklas Luhmann's[1]

Hmm. Michel's "Iron law of oligarchy". Summarized as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts." See also Niklas Luhmann's[1] idea of autopoiesis[2] in modern social systems, the political system being an example of a modern social system. Luhmann contends that modern social systems are functionally differentiated from each other: legal, political, mass media, and so on. Autopoiesis is the idea that these social systems contain within them the means for their own continuation and effectively do not exist for anything other than to continue their own existence. In order for these systems to come into being one needs self-reflexivity, this is provided by language. No language, no autopoietic systems (this is my contention). "An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something other than itself (the factory)." The common natural example (of an autopoietic system) given is the biological cell. The primary function of a cell is to keep the cell being a cell. Sure, different cells do different things but they all use the raw materials of their environment primarily for their own upkeep. Ok. So given the Iron Law and Autopoiesis how do we stop social systems from becoming self-serving? This is the challenge of our times. Luhmann is a pessimist. He contends that you _can't_. Should we be pessimistic? It is the nature of these systems. We have never been able to have a full participatory democracy because of the coordination problem. Does the internet change this? Can we show that the internet allows everyone's hand to be on the tiller so to speak? Another idea might be to go with the inevitable flow of the way systems "evolve" and "mutate" over time and come up with a virtue theory for social systems much like we have a virtue theory for human behavior. So we should 1) reject monopolies (in politics, single party systems; in commerce, single telecoms carriers, single os vendors, and so on), we should 2) prefer transparency over opacity (think wikileaks), following on from this we should 3) prefer freedom of expression over censorship (an example often given is the advantage protestant countries had over catholic countries because of the papacy banning certain titles thus handing economic advantage to protestant publishers). Anybody else got any ideas? Sorry for the vagueness and haphazardness of my thoughts. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis edit: clarification, elucidation, and grammar