Cybernetics and the Banality of Narcissism

The unalloyed stupidity of reckless tariffing and threats by the Trump administration against trading partners and allies around the world is baffling and deeply concerning. Even when a serious economist admits that tariffs can play a role in helping onshore manufacturing, they also slam the uncertainty that Trump’s mercurial behavior imposes on the world economy. Then there is the childish lashing out at universities, law firms, and perceived enemies like the former director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who contradicted Trump in 2020 on election fraud. Next we have the cruelty of rapid and wrong deportations and visa revocations based on alleged allegiances; freedom is no longer guaranteed for visitors and guests in our country. And then there are the oxymoronic efforts at efficiency in governance that involve no efforts whatsoever to identify how exactly to make our government more efficient.

This is the banality of narcissism aided by incompetence.

But, mercifully, the counter-currents that are pushing the country away from an economic catastrophe demonstrate the self-correcting nature of complex systems. The term “cybernetics” comes from the Ancient Greek term for the steersman of a boat. It was used by the French polymath Ampère in a volume dedicated to the structure of human knowledge where it referred to the science of governance. Ah, the Age of Enlightenment, when some hoped that through careful thought ideas like economics, government, and international relations could be improved. If only David Ricardo were here today to discuss his theory of comparative advantage with America’s leadership. Governance was in mind when Norbert Wiener invented the theory of cybernetics as a mathematical approach to system control where feedback signals steer the system towards stable patterns of operation. From simple thermostats regulating our homes’ climates to autopoiesis (organizational self-generated feedback systems) in ecological systems, the more complex a system is leads, in turn, to the invention of more diverse and complex sets of resilience mechanisms. Otherwise, all is lost and systems succumb to the inevitable: things fall apart.

So we are seeing the feedback loops collide with narcissistic incompetence and push back. Giant swings in the treasury bond market become a feedback signal in the greatest man-made thing in history: the international economic system of trade and commerce. Throw in the threats of additional inflationary pressure created by heavy-handed tariffs and the political consequences are becoming a feedback itch. The damage to international relations based on zero sum and self-focused policies and threats spur new alignments that bring new protective agreements, like the EU’s commitment to defense spending using an internal loan system that prioritizes EU-made weapons systems. The operational plan has become chaotic and the system needs self-generated reinforcement networks to ensure the steering of the order continues.

In a beautiful 2020 book about John Maynard Keynes by Zachary Carter, the eminent economist is painted as a curious throwback to Enlightenment values in his belief that economics can be an agent for peace. He wrote about the 1922 Genoa Conference that was to help repair the international systems of trade and infrastructure destroyed during World War I:

The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice.”

But it wasn’t until the US-led international order after World War II that large-scale peace and prosperity, flawed and fractured though it may have been, held because of new feedback systems deployed to ensure stability. I can only hope that the resilience we built into everything from our own national and regional governments, as well as the international economic order, can steer us back into patterns of prosperity and peace, and defeat the banality of narcissism.