Large Events Come From Stored Tension, and Direct Democracy Releases It Early

The science of complex systems describes economies and polities as members of a family that also includes earthquakes, forest fires and avalanches. The family has a signature: the sizes of its events follow a power law. Small events are common, large ones are rare, and there is no natural ceiling. Every so often the system produces something enormous: a market crash, a war, a depression, a revolution.

That description is now standard. What is less often drawn out is what it says about how to govern.

Where Large Events Come From

The theory cannot predict the large events. Nobody knows which spark starts the fire. But it says something definite about where they come from, and that is more useful than prediction would be.

A large event is the release of tension the system has been storing, often for a long time. The forest burns catastrophically because decades of small fires were prevented and the fuel accumulated. The fault slips violently because it did not slip gently for a century.

Politics and economics store tension the same way. World War One did not start with a shot in Sarajevo; the alliances were already in place, the mobilisation plans written, the grievances decades old. The shot was a spark falling on fuel that had been stacked for a generation. A financial crash is the same shape: years of loans that should not have been made, each of which was small, until enough parties simultaneously refused to believe the loans were worth their face value and the whole structure gave way. A monopoly that runs for decades, slavery that runs for centuries, are stored tension in the same sense: arrangements that a great many people are quietly straining against, held in place by the interest of a few.

The spark is unpredictable. The stacking of the fuel is not. It is visible for years, to anyone who chooses to look.

What the Theory Says About Avoiding Them

If the large event is stored tension released, then there is only one way to reduce its size: release the tension earlier, in smaller amounts.

Complex systems theory says exactly this. A system that continuously corrects itself, that lets small adjustments happen as the pressure for them arises, does not accumulate the fuel for the catastrophic one. It still has events; it has many small ones instead of a rare enormous one. That is not a way of avoiding all events. It is a way of changing the distribution of their sizes, which is the only thing available.

Translated into government: a good system of government is one that constantly reduces tension, and a bad one is one that stores it.

Releasing Tension Is Itself Tense

The obvious objection is that releasing tension is not free. Telling a bank it may not make a class of loans creates a conflict with the bank. Telling a region it may not hold slaves created a war. Reducing tension means acting against someone's interest before the interest has grown large enough to force the issue.

That is true, and it is the whole point. The small conflict now is the alternative to the enormous one later. A system that avoids the small conflict, because the interested party is powerful enough to prevent it, is a system that has chosen the large event without saying so. The fuel goes on stacking, and everyone involved can honestly say they did nothing.

Who Stores the Tension

Now ask who, in our arrangements, does the storing.

The tensions are between interest groups and the public, between minorities holding a resource and the majority that pays for it, between banks and their depositors, between states. And the parties that generate tension are, overwhelmingly, organised groups pursuing their own interest against a diffuse majority: they hold the monopoly, they make the loans, they keep the arrangement that a great many people are straining against. States do the same in their relations with each other.

A representative government is exactly the institution these groups know how to work. I have written about why concentrated interests defeat diffuse ones inside it, and about why institutions survive long after the public wants them gone. Both are descriptions of a system that stores tension: the small correction is always available and is never made, because the party whose interest it would cut has more purchase on the legislature than the millions it would relieve.

Why Direct Democracy Fits

Direct democracy is the arrangement that makes the small correction cheap.

When the diffuse majority can act directly, the interest group has nobody to capture. The loan rule, the monopoly, the arrangement everyone is straining against, can be changed while the strain is still small, by the people doing the straining, without waiting for it to become a crisis that forces a legislature's hand. Each such change is a small event. Each one is fuel removed.

I do not claim it removes all tension. States will still have interests, groups will still organise, some fuel will still accumulate. The claim is comparative: of the systems available, the one in which the majority can correct continuously stores the least, and therefore has the smallest large events. That is what the theory of complex systems says about earthquakes and forests, and I see no reason it says anything different about us.