The Will of the People

Author(s): Stafford Beer

Source: The Journal of the Operational Research Society , Aug., 1983, Vol. 34, No. 8,
Systems in O.R. First International IFORS and O.R.S. Meeting. Discussion Conference at
Henly, U.K. 9-11 May 1983 (Aug., 1983), pp. 797-810
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals on behalf of the Operational Research
Society

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J. Opl Res. Soc. Vol. 34, No. 8, pp. 797-810, 1983 0160-5682/83 $3.00 + 0.00
Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved Copyright ? 1983 Operational Research Society Ltd

The Will of the People

STAFFORD BEER

The paper discusses the cybernetic mechanisms whereby our institutions fail to tr
the people into effective policies, and those by which the will of the people is an
of human potentiality in the first place. A systemic model is developed to accoun
phenomena in terms of a cybernetic theory of the management process, and this
from current dilemmas facing humankind. The model is subsequently extended
theory of viable systems, the principle of self-reference, and a model of self-hood
concepts that close the model into its starting point of human potential. The tota
the capability of individuals, groups, institutions, societies and nations to realize t
thwart the dangers in which our civilization is plunged.

Key words: analysis, government, management, methodology, organizational

planning

Suppose that you were suddenly told: "In the pursuit of economies of scale, you have been
put in charge of the whole Earth."
The logic of this appointment is appealing. Now you will be able to create a production
plan whereby every living soul will be properly fed and sheltered. The resources exist for
that, quite certainly; and now you will have the authority to contain greed. With the
authority, presumably, goes the power to contain greed.
Already, you begin to suspect, there is something fiercely wrong. It lies not so much in
the logic, as in the psychology. As for the logic, however, it could be mapped out in
organizational terms: resources would be allocated geographically, and logistical pro?
grammes would be constructed. .. Well, yes, that would mean the creation of a vast
bureaucracy, into the very fabric of which the termites of corruption would insidiously
bore to the utlimate nerve-endings of the information flow: then the messages themselves
would be corrupt. You could police it, using guns, the armed forces. You could put it in
the hands of business enterprise, and market forces. Now you have institutionalized
corruption?twice over. We are back to psychology again. Moreover, in the outcome, we
are back with a bump to what we have already got.
Perhaps (what do you think?) you would be well advised to turn this job down. It looks
as if, whatever you do, you will be in instant hot water, and the social realities will continue
to look just like those with which we are already familiar. IV11 all be the same in a hundred
years, a hundred years from now. At least, it is tempting to think so; the temptation is to
shrug off any responsibility, to disallow the possibility that the individual has any capacity
to shape affairs. Stanley Holloway's monologue faces right up to it: For Vll be dead and
you'11 be dead, a hundred years from now. Finally, comes the ironic twist; it almost changes
a sad tale into an amusing tale, and its catharsis minimizes personal accountability: And
somebody else will be well in the cart, a hundred years from now. Yes, that makes me laugh.
The laugh is a product of my own culture, of course. To the vast peasant population
ofthe world there is not much laughter, ironic or otherwise, in the fatalism that says: We'll
all be dead in a hundred years. Nor is there any laughter in its ego-maniacal denial by the
group of the frenzied priviliged who are determined that cryogenic science shall freeze them
into immortality. Yes: there is a growing number of people who truly believe that science
will not allow them to die. But most people seem to proceed on the assumption that the
world and our own species will stumble on through our own proximate generations, with
conditions very much as they are. I do not know whether to call this the fate ofthe people,
the expectation of the people, or indeed the people's will. Looking towards the future scans

The Lindsey Sutcliffe Lecture, 1982. Delivered at Middlesex Polytechnic, 1st November, 1982.

o.R.s. 34/8?j 797

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 Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8

a philosophical minefield?as well as those we noted, merely in passing, on the logical, the
psychological, the logistic and ethical fronts.
And yet behind this exceedingly daunting and complex and maybe incomprehensible
picture, wherein "it'll all be the same in a hundred years", lies a different picture altogether,
wherein it will all be quite different. For if I'll be dead and you'll be dead, those who are
then alive will be NEW PEOPLE. And these new people could be markedly different from
us. At present, roughly half the world is under twenty. In cheerful disregard of all the
philosophical problems involved, I cannot manage to believe that this youthful population
really does embody a will to continue the march of their recent ancestors towards
extinction. These people surely embody a will to survival?in the biological terms of
adaptation, and in the spiritual terms of joyful children in a wonderful cosmos. Politics
will be laid on them later; cynicism may get its canker into them; they may be exploited
and tortured and killed. But for the moment, and for the continuing moment of our
successive tomorrows, half and then more than half of us human beings will be within
reclamation and could become a new embodiment of hope. This is something which, amid
much and well-justified gloom, we can afford to celebrate. It is why we have a Lecture to
celebrate the life of Lindsey Sutcliffe, because it was just this hope that she embodied.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM ?

If we could create a 'firebreak' in time, so that the Earth were uninhabi

years from now, and start all over again with a youthful and uncon
where would the changes lie? They could not be with the fundam
humankind: evolution does not work that fast. But we might find
behaving differently, and even exploiting aspects of the persona that m
so far recognized in themselves. We might also expect radical
institutions?because those would have to be newly created. It is sure
a new generation, reconstructing affairs after a temporal firebreak
same unproductive and indeed threatening and fearful solutions tha
chance and mischance over the last five thousand years. At once a new v
is disclosed to our simulating eye, and we could spend a happy even
own version of that Utopia. Because in simulations there is an endem
and we could hold an auction of our preferences.
The problem with the world in which we actually operate, the world w
in time, is precisely that it seems to offer us no choice?because all t
used up, or are preselected. The vast preponderence of available ene
the military-industrial complex, in gigantic budgets for making war
this 'defence'?the ramifications of which extend throughout the ec
world. Wars themselves are foisted onto small nations, who fight ea
their sponsors in various bouts of derring-do. Thousands of pe
crunched up by the juggernauts that still we have no power to stop
In all of this there are the people who make the whole system w
military people and their bureaucracies, who are of course 'only obeying
the people from whom the orders emanate, who find themselves
because their options have been pre-empted; and there are the scientists
workers who design and build the implements of genocide. Most ofthe s
they are most of the scientists who ever lived, are supported in their wo
lives by this machine. If you ask them what on earth they think they a
that there is no alternative: almost all jobs in science, including the
hooked in to the warfare network somewhere. And these are the ve
choice, who have often wondered how the fascist family-man can k
and children, and set off to a day's work pulling out fingernails an
shocks.
Well, it is a matter of distancing oneself from the blood and the agony; and, well, it is
a matter of where is one going to draw the line. We are all implicated in an enormous
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 S. Beer?The Will of the People

system, in which no part may choose other than his appointed role, and, should s/he rebel,
then not only will life become very difficult for that rebel and dependents, but nothing will
change in the big system?because it has instant repair facilities using a plenitude of spare
(people) parts.
Every kind of specialist sets out to describe the enormous system; s/he fails, because it
is too complicated, and because the specialty operates as a filter?allowing through only
those aspects that the specialist can recognize or handle. Then perhaps operational
research, supposedly interdisciplinary and supposedly problem-oriented, can investigate
the enormous system, and provide a new set of strategies. But O.R. has abandoned its
interdisciplinary approach and its problem orientation (witness its literature) in favour of
mathematical enquiries into the well-formulated problems that we do not have, or at the
least which do not figure in the perspective ofthe enormous system. Then perhaps general
systems theory (G.S.T.) or cybemetics (which I take to be conterminous topics) can
account for the whole workings of the enormous system. Again, they cannot: no-one's
brainpan has requisite variety to this end, and no-one's research institute is empowered
to change the categories of orthodox scholarly taxonomy (witness, for instance, the
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis). This has the effect of driving concern
away from actual people and towards the world population of abstract nouns such as
'health' and 'education' and 'resources'?as if the living person and the viable community
in whom all such abstractions find simultaneous embodiment did not exist.
Then what can be done? Well, it is certain that what we need to discuss is the way
which the enormous system regulates itself; and it is also clear that both O.R. and G.
know some things about regulation. So I submit that we should firstly enquire, not h
the enormous system operates, but how it is regulated in such a way that it fails to refle
the will of the people. Why is there no choice, in short; and above all, can we tell fr
analysing this question what sort of developments would count as practicable undertaking
towards ameliorating the mess that we experience on every side? Well, if anything i
be understood about this, it is also clear from the arguments of this section that
understanding will involve a change in paradigm. My final advocacy in this Lecture
depend on the model now formulated; and this model will almost certainly be unfami
so I hope that no-one will take offence at my simple explanations.

THE MANAGEMENT PROCESS

From the cybernetic standpoint, management processes are be

hierarchically. They are not, then, necessarily pyramidal power struc
may approach this model in the limiting case of an authoritarian va
Consider a managerial action, which is the same as to say: consider
of a regulator. Take heed of the fact that this state occurs simultaneousl
state of the (regulated) environment. Since both states are coincident
to have 'caused' the other. Between them, however, they will result
world which may or may not be opportune in the eyes of an observ
nomenclature1 says that the two states are directively correlated, and it
Nobody supposes, however, that this correlation is fortuitous; there
antedating this 'present' moment which influences or perhaps generates
'now'. These factors were called coenetic variables (pronounced 'senne
koinos for 'common') by Summerhof. So our picture ofthe manageme
a diamond. A set of coenetic variables generates two vectors, o
management action, and the other in an environmental condition.
directively correlated, converge upon an outcome in the world.
This picture is anti-paradigmatic insofar as there is, at any given
connection between the regulator and what is regulated. Ashby's use
fifties at least) of coenetic variables was to identify them2 with his
'disturbances'; and perhaps that is to emphasize the disjunction, if somet
arbitrary as a mere disturbance were the only causatory element that un
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 Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8

and its environment. My own original formulation of the approach3 did not derive from
Summerhof, but from Godel. It seemed clear to me (and still does) that a managerial
language would find itself unable to formulate its most crucial dilemmas, because of the
Incompleteness Theorem, and that the result would be the confrontation of managers with
logically undecidable propositions. Thus my own theory demonstrated a disjunction
between the regulator and the regulated environment, too; but the machinery for
mitigating disaster was the recognition of a black box capable of keeping the regulator's
perception more or less in line with reality. This mechanism was originally called
Completion from Without: it was to have its major development and application in the steel
industry.4
The world outcomes of directive correlation between a regulated environment and its
management constitute a continuum to which the observer may assign values such as good
or bad. Now in the case of the human manager, it is very clear that s/he is the observer,
and also the one who (in the first place) imports values to whatever is going on. But there
are also other observers who impute values to what is going on. It may well happen that
these sets of values are inconsistent or even contradictory, as in the case we were discussing,
whereby government does not seem to reflect the will of the people. All observers of the
continuum of affairs, who are also participants in the continuum of coenetic viability, have
problems of filtration in the very act of observing; and each will solve those problems
differently. For the fact is that the world is a place of very high variety, and an individual
person's variety is much lower. Note: cybernetics defines variety as "the number of possible
states of a system".
The diagram in Figure 1 depicts the managerial process as it has been introduced?
although the diamond has become deformed. The set of outcomes is shown by a box
(latterly the final vertex of the diamond) labelled "consensual/institutional surrogate
world", which is the only 'reality' susceptible to discussion?although it is meant to be a
homomorphic transformation of the world potential that can never (too high variety) be
fully understood or agreed upon. This is the surrogate world we manage5 because our model
of the real world is of low variety and always out of date. The circle curcumscribes all the
point-sets that represent the possible states of this world, and the amoeboid shape called
B is that subset of states that are found statisfactory to an observer. Now the B states are

CONSENSUAL/
INSTITUTIONAL
SURROGATE
WORLD
VARIETY
ATTENUATOR
Resulting

BLACK
BOX

WORLD
POTENTIAL

Happening
Regulating

COENETIC
VARIABLES

Fig.

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 S. Beer?The Will of the People

generated by the A states of world potential and are mirrored by the C states of a would-be
regulator. The precise shapes of the regions of satisfactory states are not accurately known
and do not therefore fully agree with each other. The dotted trajectories that complete the
'diamond' circuit are shown here as registering in the good outcomes set for A, B and C.
Now if the regulatory process fails, then according to the theory with which we began,
the respresentative point in B would be knocked out of its satisfactory set. But this would
probably have happened because the representative point in A had left its set; and the
regulator would probably recognize that its own point on C had done so as well. These
results are contingent rather than necessary, because the mappings of A on B and of B
on C are all homomorphic, thanks to variety attenuation; and therefore antecendent points
cannot be infallibly recognized as the 'cause' of any particular change further down the
modelling line.
The exploration of this Figure 1 model would take a very long time, and we need it now
for only one result?although that is of major importance. The model enables us to
understand that variety attenuation and the position of the observer will account for any
amount of cognitive dissonance in the enormous system, and that 'the will of the people'
is a function of who wants to know. For any representative point may transmogrify into
an unsatisfactory condition without forcing its correlated points to do the same, while a
point may regain its satisfactory subset without being able to guarantee that its correlated
points have also reformed. And it will readily be seen that observers in different
grandstands will offer quite different accounts of the same events, not only because each
model of those events will be uniquely perverted, but also because the parallelism between
sets and trajectories has no underlying causatory explanation.
In all these ways the language we are developing is appropriate to the description of the
human predicament with which we began. It facilitates further discussion; whereas the
standard notion that management can read the world situation, act upon it and produce
results which are susceptible to modification by error-controlled feedback fails to account
for the reality that we began to probe. To proceed further with this enquiry, then, we shall
need to peer into the black box in the hope of limning out its major infrastructure, and
of interpreting the variety attenuators that are responsible for what is in fact a rising
entropy in the enormous system. We can then see whether our new cybernetic formulation
of affairs throws light on the phenomena that we set out to consider.

PERVERSIONS OF POTENTIAL

Human potential to deal with the environment of humankind is diminish

and in Figure 2 we begin by an opening-up to some degree of the cir
1 depicted it. The three diminishing circles are now used to indicate
which systematically lowers the perception of choice?whether it be
for a human institution, or indeed for a nation. These subjects all se
do because of the historical trajectory that has brought them to where a
the past has pre-empted their future because 'that is the way of it', and
to conceive of liberation from this destiny. In a similar way, if, strangely
weighs down on humanity with its proposition that it will all be th
years: there will be no firebreaks in Time. The present, as a result, is fo
institutions simply a mark bearing a date on a trajectory which has a fu
(despite the egregious ambiguity of recorded history) and a largely
(despite an absolute power to act quite differently). In such ways th
potential, its number of possible states, is in effect squeezed down to a s
to choose. Assurance that variety is thus cut down in what people of
is made doubly sure by the impact of variety attentuation arr
consensual/institutional surrogate world discussed in the previous section
studied in context on the diagram.
In its turn, the variety of world potential, which includes all the p
and their rearrangement under the benign or malign supremac
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 Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8

Alpha TRANSCENDENCE Omega

Habits SUBCULTURAL
CONFORMITY

HUMAN
Categories
POTENTIAL WORLD
POTENTIAL

MEDIA

f(p)

F(p)

COENETIC
VARIABLES

Fig. 2

constrained to a spectrum of options to act. Variety is here reduced by the outputs o

power-bloc interactions which squeeze effective outcomes down to their lowest comm
multiples. The diagram notes especially the variety attenuating power of political, military
and economic forces, which are generally agreed to exert restraint, and includes th
educational and religious forces, which do so also under the guise of expanding the variety
which in practice they inhibit. The effect of criminal activity cannot be ignored a
attenuators of world potential, both insofar as they act directly on events through
mafia-style operations such as drug trafficking, and also because they now account fo
huge, though unspecified, segment of all first-world economies. It is, of course (as Fig
2 shows), the spectrum of options to act that generates the variety-attenuated surrog
world that impinges on the spectrum of options to choose, rather than the reverse
might at first be thought. That is because it is impotence that defines the boundaries
consensus, under the plea that politics is the art of the possible.
Now although there is no regulatory connection directly to link the management o
human potential to the world potential, there is another kind of connection flowing in th
opposite direction, which has to do with observation of the actual world. Perceptio
concerns the surrogate world, and we shall peer into its black box of filters shortl
meanwhile it is undeniable that direct observations of physical action are available to
would-be regulator (and to its subscribers or electors). Out of the spectrum of options
act, some actions are selected by players of the world game, and of these some are selected
as the focus of action to be transmitted to observers and would-be regulators alike. Th
selection is undertaken by the mass media, depicted by a television camera symbol
Figure 2.
Although many critics of the mass-media are to be found, and although the criticism
itself may be regarded as vieux jeu, the cybernetic mechanisms involved are not properly
understood by most people. In the first place it has to be faced that the selection of an
item for transmission, which betokens an editorial judgment, excludes other items
competing for transmission time or space (for this argument relates to newspapers too).
The variety reduction is immense; and for the majority of people, only those items selected
actually happened. The item on which the media have focussed is, secondly, subjected to
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 S. Beer?The Will of the People

a feed-forward function?f(p) in the diagram?of very high gain. That is to say, the item
is invested with glamour simply by being there, and it will have (what editors call) its
'sexiness' enhanced by whatever means are available. Thirdly, all this will happen within
the framework of subcultural conformity that determines what audiences are willing to
consider, and the feed-forward function proliferates and reinforces those terms. The input
of highly selected information delivered with great eclat obviously delimits a range of
perceived choice from within the spectrum of options to choose. If anyone doubts the
power of this variety squeezer, s/he has only to consider the effect of expensive
advertisemenets on the people's choice. Clearly those advertisements are not funded in the
aid of any charity.
There is yet a fifth cybernetic mechanism implicit in this biased and perverted form of
compulsory observation. The power blocs which we have noted to operate within the world
potential, attenuating its spectum of options to act, have a heavily vested interest in
ensuring that an event within the aegis of the range of perceived choice is observed in the
way in which these dominating actors wish and intend. Insofar as the transmission fails
to subserve these purposes, its signal must be taken by them to include an error {e on the
diagram). The powerblocs themselves have control of the feedback function F(p) that is
able to correct that error in their own interest by modifying what is selected for
transmission and its mode of presentation. The comparator (an encircled cross) inside the
'camera' in the diagram shows this modification happening. The interesting result of using
this model is that it is easy to show that the signal rapidly becomes dominated (not simply
'corrected') by the feedback function.6
The five cybernetic effects of modelling media activity in this fashion seem to be
consistent with experience. It is usual to hear folk who have some special knowledge of
a topic treated by the media complain about travesty. Before dismissing such complaints
as paranoid, but also before assaulting the media as meretricious, it is worth noting that
things could hardly be otherwise: proliferating variety must always attenuate to match the
variety deployed by the recipient. It is an exemplification of Ashby's Law of Requisite
Variety.
We now pass to consider the black box by which outcomes are connected to the
would-be regulators in Figure 1. This may, as we see in Figure 2, be made somewhat
transparent by examining the subcultural conformity that responds to the consensual
world. It generates habits which constrain the variety of the human potential through the
erection of. self-confirming low variety models. They are self-confirming because they
cannot accept the very data which would modify them: witness the link to the signals that
delimit the range of perceived choice.
The models themselves ought surely to be learning machines, but they rarely achieve this
status. It is because the subculture supplies their categories and values. It is evident that
value structures condition the adaptability of the models that relate to perceived choice:
experimental ethics are knowingly rejected, for instance, by people whose ethical models
are deliberately chosen and on public exhibition. The question of the categories by which
we sort out problems, information, solutions, and so on, is another matter. They are
normally simple features of the subcultural ethos, not deliberately chosen, yet unwittingly
influential. For all our models are built from components that are presented to us
ready-categorized; and we fail to solve problems that are couched in terms of the very
categories which have already proven useless as parameters of recognizable solutions. Thus
we accept, and may even boast about, the role of values in our world-view; but we shall
not parade the categories whose power to mask solutions is so strong if we do not recognize
what they are, never mind admit that they are arbitrary. (In preparing this Lecture for
publication, I am most struck that a list of key words is put forward, from which a selection
will "define the essential content". No such selection would at all convey any such
definition; and therefore it can be assumed that the Lecture has something new to offer.)
Here is a startling illustration of what prior categorization means. Consider the problem
of underdevelopment in the third world, and try to define it. The values you use are not
to be jibbed at: starvation, malnutrition and extreme poverty are offences before God, and
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 Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8

no-one supports them. But reflect on the categories of your definition. Does not this
description7 disrupt them?

"We understand underdevelopment not as a stage in a historical process preceding

development, nor as a situation of stagnation in the levels of productivity and welfare, but
as the antithesis of development, that is to say: of the process which results from the
expansion of world capitalism which generates development in nations which never were
underdeveloped."
This statement is obviously not value-free, but its categories invite new thoughts under any
value structure; and a reconstitution of categories may be illuminating in any context.
Media producers, offended by the kinds of comment to which they were subjected here,
have often been heard to say: "But you were not misrepresented". The category has been
neatly chosen. Somehow the answer: "But I was not represented either?you were" is
disallowed.
In concluding this discussion of Figure 2, it must be mentioned that many feedbacks
are not indicated for lack of space. This particularly applies where no arrows indicate
direction: indeed, most ofthe pathways represent two-way loops, one direction only having
been indicated to aid understanding of the general argument. This comment applies
especially to the topmost connection, which has received no other comment. If the reade
knows how to transcend the variety squeeze of this workaday model, and if he has som
conception of what meanings to ascribe to alpha and omega, then the model can
accommodate him or her. More light may be shed on this obscurity by Figure 3.

EXEMPLIFICATIONS

It is well to try out the worth of this model before seeking to com
invitations towards the expression of the people's will. Here are so
The notion of directive correlation is very powerful. It replaces 'forec
commonly used. When coenetic variables act, they drive the system and
disparate paths to a convergence on an outcome that is well-nigh i
knew this; a poetic insight as well scientific profundity may discern it
understood that the development of the engines and instruments
inexorably lead to a moon-landing, just as it did. We followed our t
our military dictates, and there it was.
Consider an issue that concerns us in Britain as I write: the pos
Falklands or Malvinas war. Anyone who has visited Argentina
middle-class Argentinians has known the claims and counter-claims
be both long-standing and irreconcilable. It has been so for a very long
negotiations had been virtually permanent over 15 or more years. The
sees the outcome as war and would call this outcome inexorable were it not for a conviction
that so obvious and dire a conclusion would be averted by regulatory action: presumably
some mixture of diplomacy and warlike posturing set in the context of international
power-politics.
We had all this clearly before us. But the surrogate worlds of the two actors were not
consensual. Each shed massive variety?but not the same variety: the models drew apart.
Once this mechanism is laid bare, it is easy to follow through the pathways of the
semi-transparent 'completion-from-without' box for both sides. The directive correlation
leading to war became insusceptible to influence by its regulatory components because the
subcultural ethos with its habits, with its categories and its values (none of which were
shared by the two nations) generated very low variety models, quite different from each
other, of surrogate worlds that were already wholly separate perceptions. Eventually both
the options to choose and the options to act became unitary for each country, even though
those final options were ludicrous and lethal: they therefore occurred.
It is especially important to notice that warnings of incipient disaster cannot be registered
in the language of the low-variety model. The point was made in the previous section in
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 S. Beer?The Will of the People

establishing the theory: here is its empirical verification. A year's worth of warning was
ignored in the case ofthe South Atlantic, just as a direct three-month alert by Mountbatten
concerning the vulnerability of Pearl Harbour was ignored by the United States in 1941.
How could this possibly be? What is to be lost by noting an alert? The explanation is (and
must be expected to be) more profound than mere foolhardiness. The admonitions did not
map onto the model, and the language expressed undecidable propositions. Once the war
was in progress, the effects of the media loop on the whole regulatory system became
obvious, and they generated more farce. Government sources of information became
sententious and lagged as the war ministry attempted to dominate public opinion by
controlling the feedback function F(p). The television powers were having none of this,
and used foreign sources of news to dominate the feedback function themselves?thereby
earning the rebuke of fighting on the wrong side. The press, long since designated by
Aneurin Bevan as "the most prostituted in the world", wishing not to be outdone by the
high gain on the feed-forward function occasioned by tele-recorded film of bombs going
off and people actually dying, resorted to high gain feed-forward itself in ever bigger and
more vulgar headlines. The positive reinforcement given by so much emphasis to people's
low variety models variety-squeezed the range of perceived choice to the point where
individuals and their parliamentary representatives were manifestly incapable of drawing
the conclusions that the model makes apparent. It has since led to the exoneration of the
Government by a Commission of Enquiry, and (according to opinion polls) to over-
whelming support for the Government as expressing the will of the people.
All this being so, the directive correlation for 1983 still indicates war in the South
Atlantic; but the mixture of diplomacy and posturing that is supposedly regulatory in the
face of this threat has necessarily to be based on even lower variety models, categories and
values, even more stringently embraced. Thus the policy now called Fortress Falklands is
inexorably called forth by the directive correlation; and the problem is no longer how to
settle with Argentina, but how to modify the directive correlation of a second war, and
how to escape the ruinous financial penalities of all this vainglorious behaviour.
Matters of principle (which derive in Figure 2 from the value structure of the subcultural
conformity) can be inferred from the Government's dedication to inequality at home and
the sale of armaments abroad?to fascist regimes, and even to Argentina itself. These
principles were much spoken about, especially on behalf of this small parish of dependent
Falklanders who had just before been denied the status of full citizens by an Act of
Parliament. Matters of fact, such as the existence of oil deposits in the region, were not
spoken about at all. So the variety of world potential that becomes attenuated by all the
mechanisms depicted in Figure 2 is very large indeed?and this is what makes polarization
of the kind just witnessed not only possible but inevitable. If we think of two world
surrogates as overlapping circles on a diagram, where the intersect is most of the twinning
picture, and if this central portion of world potential represents the variety that both sides
attenuate, then all that remains are the two entirely separate sets at the extremes. This
polarization produced, sustained and now exacerbates the South Atlantic tragi-comedy.
There is a larger, more dramatic, more threatening polarization now looming in front of
humankind.
By now we stand knowingly on the brink of a nuclear abyss. Jonathan Schell tries to
convey8 to us what Hiroshima was really like and tries to get it into our thick heads that
a new holocaust would present a difference in kind as well as in magnitude. The
magnitudinal difference is measured by the metric that one Hiroshima equals a millionth
part of the Armageddon that is already implicit in the warheads deployed today by both
sides. To trigger this is to destroy society itself?and that is where the qualitative difference
lies. We should not be in the business of patching up the cities and the services. As Schell
demonstrates: "At the outset the United States would be a republic of insects and grass".
You may well imagine that it is the will of the people who inhabit this planet not to
engage any longer in these dangerous antics. But the enormous system will have none of
that, and nations find themselves dragged into nuclear commitment and technology, if only
not to be outdone, or to gratify the paranoid delusions of their crazy leaders.
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 Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8

In the United States, a hugely expensive study ofthe intended evacuation of major cities
has resulted in apparently serious proposals whereby the horrors adumbrated by Schell
may be mitigated. Families are supposed to leave by car in alternate blocks of hours
depending on their number plates, abandoning their pets, for small towns all of two
hundred miles away.
Remember that sufficient warheads already exist to bomb each U.S. city of 20,000 or
more inhabitants to obliteration. Never mind: in this evacuation there are to be no guns,
no narcotics, no alcohol?and no high heels. But people should take a picnic lunch; and
if they experience radiation sickness, then (says the Federal Department of Defense9) they
should take "one or two aspirin tablets every three or four hours".
How people are to act, or to choose, in the face of such disparate surrogate worlds as
these two models conjure is a mystery. Some counties have refused huge government
funds allocated for the articulation of its 'survival' plans, at a time when social service
budgets are being cut and even eliminated. But the will of the people should not have to
be expressed as a repudiation of its own governmental folly in attempting to redress follies
more hateful and more dangerous that were earlier committed in their name: the nuclear
strategies themselves.
Let us not imagine either that disaster by war is any more likely than ecological disaster.
Jerome Deshusses writes10 of "life on the edge of human history". The destruction of
forests, the spread of concrete over grassland, the dangers of acid rain and toxic wastes,
the threat of unreplaced oxygen, the daily elimination of species are all matters that we
experience now?never mind the likelihood of mistakes yet to be made in, for example,
the experimental development of genetic engineering. The risk of nuclear accident in power
stations is staggering: "a major accident" (and we have seen this heralded in Three Mile
Island) occurring "in a single large nuclear power station in northern Germany could kill
thirty million Germans, ten million French, and the entire population of Switzerland in
one fell swoop". Deshusses sees all this quite recent technological enormity in historical
perspective when he remarks that, after the world had been made in seven days, the eighth
day saw humanity rise to the full flower of its civilization. "As we enter the eighth night",
he asks, "can we look forward to the prospect of another dawn?"
In acknowledging the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's accession to power, Willy Brandt
recently questioned "whether we have learned that madness can dictate action, if we do
not pre-empt it with reason". The exemplifications of this section underline his point. The
policies under which the world is run are quite literally insane; and the outcomes of their
directive correlation are staring us in the shroud. There is not the least sign that reason
will pre-empt the ultimately suicidal action of a species that has robbed itself of perception
and of choice. Instead, as the South Atlantic disaster perfectly well illustrates, lunatic
policies will be reinforced by the positive feedback regulators that always attend
adversarial politics. The usual term for the outcome is 'escalation'. Within such a situation,
it is not possible to effect change by tinkering with the existing system. Moreover,
dangerous as the existing system may be because of its incipient instability, any suggested
interference with the status quo will be represented as rendering it more unstable still.
Witness the inevitable reactions to the Church of England's recent report which favours
unilateral nuclear disarmament. Useless as Britain's nuclear capability has always been,
vulnerable as its deployment makes us, ruinously expensive as it certainly is, and morally
opprobrious as you-don't-have-to-be-a-Bishop to realize, the role of Britain in the
enormous system makes its possession a fact.

TOWARDS REALIZING POTENTIAL

If it is useless, as argued here and elsewhere, to 'tinker with the existi

to indicate cybernetic approaches to expressing the will of the people t
to resolve these sad dilemmas. A map is provided in Figure 3 to ai
It should immediately be noted that this is a completion of the dia
lack of space forbids the replication of that diagram within the to
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 S. Beer?The Will of the People

Alpha TRANSCENDENCE

COENETIC
VARIABLES

EUDEMONY
The class of
'well-being" VIABLE SYSTEMS
? Structure of
ALGEDONICS
5 subsystems
pain/pleasure'
? Recursive
property
? Closure

PRAXIS
'doing with tools'
The class of
EKISTICS
'of human SELF-REFERENTIAL
settlements' SYSTEMS

ENTELECHY XV
making potential a
actual1
SELFHOOD

Fig. 3

it is, the continuing diagram begins on the right hand side by noting the existence of "t
class of viable systems" generated by the world potential (whose triple circles are n
reproduced in miniature).
A viable system is one sustaining the capability for independent existence a
recognizable identity. Thus a person is a viable system, and so is a firm. In particula
the current purpose, the institutions that humanity has devised to express the will of th
people (from government departments and social services to the agencies of the Un
Nations) are supposedly viable systems. They do not work at all well, and so their fu
viability is in question. This fact lies at the root of our problem, whose mechanisms
mapped out in Figure 2 and whose exemplifications were reviewed in the previous section
There is no space in this paper to propound the full theory of the viable system, whic
is available in book form.11 There are, however, three major characteristics of viability t
which attention is now drawn. First of all, any viable system (and this includes the anim
and inanimate, as well as the social) is characterized by five subsystems which expres
necessary and sufficient conditions of survival. It is because of this invariance that
redesign of (not tinkering with) existing institutions is a practical possibility rather
a utopian dream. Whole rafts of management systems, and especially those express
computer software, can be put together to float on the communication channels of
institution, once it has been described in terms ofthe viable systems model (V.S.M.).
means that the trouble, time and expense of redesign is trivial compared with the curren
practice of ad hoc redesign, since the latter is done on the basis of a redistributio
political power by compromise, and an assessment of alternative effectiveness by gu
work. This advocacy stresses the appropriate theoretical basis of the cyber
V.S.M.?which includes the human side ofthe management process. All this is discu
in the book just quoted; but a different account6 incorporates the case history of
nationwide application to the whole of the social economy.
Secondly, the V.S.M. theory demonstrates the recursive property of viable systems. On
of the five subsystems mentioned above is necessarily a set of viable systems itself. So th
is another invariant property which, like the first, absorbs variety?without the sor
attenuation depicted in Figure 2's loops at the top of the current diagram. This kin
characteristic is the property of closure, whereby the fifth of the five subsystems of th
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 Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8

V.S.M. embodies the purposes ofthe first, thereby administering closure to the whole and
avoiding the teleological fallacies of mere asseveration. That is to say, the V.S.M. is what
it does, rather than what it says it is.
These three are the crucial properties of viable systems that enable us to use the V.S.M.
model to redesign institutions as self-organizing systems, rather than as creatures of a
central autocracy. Only through autonomy can the institution retain requisite variety to
stay viable: but in present experience, undue centralization, with its inevitably low-variety
models, generates surrogate worlds . .. Then questions arise as to how the performance
of the institution is to be monitored.
In the first place, what matters is not whether an institution answers to some criterion
of effectiveness determined by authority 'for its own good', but whether the will of
people is satisfied?and this is an expression of well-being. Because that term itself
loaded with materialistic connotations drawn from Figure-2 style low-variety models
'standards of living', it is replaced5 by Aristotle's word eudemony, meaning an I-like-it-her
kind of happiness, that does not prejudge the nature of the well-being that the peop
will seeks to express. Note from the diagram that eudemony derives from world potentials
made explicit in viable systems (rather than surrogate worlds), and that eudemonic
measures impinge directly on the range of choice perceived within human potential (rather
than on low-variety models carrying the expectation that success will belong to th
categories and values (such as G.N.P. per capita) of subcultural conformity).
The second kind of signal generated by viable systems and not normally registered
low-variety models is the signal denoting pain or pleasure?or otherwise causing arous
in the organism. This signal, called algedonic after the Greek words for pain and pleasure,
operates in the institutions we know only when a very high threshold has been breach
("the roof has fallen in, sir"), or when the media choose to make an issue of some ev
and put high gain on a current focus of attention. What we need is a signal designed
cause arousal routinely when the physiological processes of the viable system are bein
overstretched. As the diagram shows, this signal impinges on the spectrum of options
choose. It enlarges the human potential that has been accepted at this point by virtue
the diminished variety of the surrogate world, by a clamant demand to find an alternativ
course. When redesigning institutions via the V.S.M. algedonic signals can be arranged
travel up the levels or recursion, if they are not 'cancelled' as a result of timely respo
where they occur?until their causes have finally been dealt with, and assimilated into
learning experience to which they gave rise.
The fact of closure as characterizing any viable system takes on heightened effect when
it is of the essence of the viable system to be self-referential: that is, the viable system is
an observing system that includes observing itself in its activity. Big discoveries may
expected from the study of self-reference, beginning perhaps with the mathematics12
Spencer Brown, with its notational innovations and theoretical brilliance, and the ne
biology of autopoiesis,13 whereby self-referential systems are identified as produc
themselves. A theory to explain self-awareness?the consciousness of one's own being?l
at the end of this road; it may well prove to be the major scientific discovery of the secon
half of the twentieth century, comparable in importance with the discovery of the theory
of relativity in the first half.
I draw on these prospects now with the model of selflwod depicted in Figure 3. T
diagram in itself is a powerful image, because it seems to evoke many denotations.
Mandalas were uppermost in my mind when designing the symbol for selfhood, and
mandala in particular; but all mandala-like symbols are powerfully evocative. This one
made others think of insect colonies and of alchemies; it looks very like the pattern i
liquid medium generated by a pure sound tone; a distinguished historian thought it w
"the perfect design of a Renaissance city". There is no doubt that many cybernetic
invariances discovered in organizations find topological expression.
First let us consider that quintessential entity of human potential, the self that is a livi
human being. Let the innermost ring stand for the envelope of skin that forms th
apparent boundary of his or her physical presence. This ring is irradiated with lin

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 S. Beer?The Will of the People

emerging from the Still Centre that represents the self-conscious T of each of us. These
lines stand for self-regulation in the body: the nervous system, the endocrines, and so on.
Insofar as the body is fully innervated and healthy, we expect no regulatory problems.
Think now, however, of the human being who seeks to extend his prowess. He trains
himself to run the marathon, or to obtain high qualifications at the limit of scientific
knowledge. Any such pursuit requires the extension of this person's self-regulatory
capacity of both body and mind (these two constituting a unity more literally than the
low-variety models of education, of medicine, and so on seem to grasp), and it becomes
questionable whether the person will achieve such mastery. This stage of selfhood is
marked on the diagram by the next-to-outer ring; the tendrils of the regulating system are
observed to be reaching out towards the tiny circles that are linked together to express the
higher state of self that aspirations have set forth as targets of attainment. It is evident
that the regulatory system may fail the enterprise: it will itself need training. In particular,
it must learn how to express models of its own activity that have requisite variety for
control.
What has so far been said about the selfhood diagram as applied to a person happens
to apply to a community or instution as well. For there is a way of looking at these social
units in terms of their most familiar and agreed upon format, in which regulation already
works to the general satisfaction; but there is always a better version of the system
concerned lying beyond the familiar, which may be well-formulated as the goal of activists
or may be a more vague hope of the forlorn. In either case, the attainment of this better
mode of being or behaving will require special attention to the regulatory system: that will
have to be enhanced if it is to display requisite variety. And again it will need new models
of itself to express itself to itself in this more elaborate guise. We are talking here, once
again, about formal invariance between certain features of viable systems of various kinds.
If a community seeks to improve its quality of life, or a city wants a better transport
system, or a society wishes to undertake a different order of health surveillance, it faces
the same cybernetic issues as does the individual bent on self-improvement. Outstandingly,
regulation to the desired ends will be effective only insofar as the regulator contains a
model that exactly reflects the complexity of the system intended?and that is the meaning
of the diagram's tendrils and their tenuous hold on the penultimate ring of selfhood. The
formal proof of this contention is available in a theorem14 devised by Conant and Ashby.
The final ring of the diagram of selfhood expresses what Aristotle called the entelechy,
which is the full realization of potentiality in actuality. For the individual, the group, the
institution and society alike there may be a final (or perhaps ever-receding) state of
advancement that we cannot specify. What we know about its attainment, however, has
to do with the process of expanding and exploring what is here called the regulatory mode
of existence. The discussion of utopian societies is the outstanding political case; the
pursuit of spiritual enlightenment (to choose a term) may be an appropriate interpretation
for the individual. In either case, self-regulation and its cybemetics is the prerequisite of
attainment, as both social and religious teachers know?and exemplify in such combined
persons-and-societies as monasteries. Because of the Conant/Ashby Theorem, any other
approach is doomed: we should find ourselves or our social units moving blindly and
incontinently in unknown territory. This is exactly what happens to people who seek their
nirvanas through untutored drug-taking, and to communes who cannot understand that
a 'loving principle' is inadequate to the resolution of human conflict. So this is why the
little model of selfhood in Figure 3 is tied into the transcendental loop of the diagram
which first appeared in Figure 2: it is there for the sake of completeness, and the attention
of anyone who realizes the meaning of his or her own alphas and omegas.
As far as the will of the people is concerned, however, reflection on the nature of
selfhood as here categorized has led me to postulate three concepts which might give it
new effect at all levels or recursion, from the individual to the state. First comes praxis:
the doing of things, the 'progress of a business', which (let us note) is a function of the
available tools. Microprocessors change everything for our generation in this respect,
precisely because they permit the total redesign of all our regulators, and make readily
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 Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8

available (for the first time at the level of large social units) full-scale autonomy without
the loss of cohesion. Praxis therefore impinges on the human potential 'before the squeeze',
breaking with subcultural conformity and inviting a new society that really could express
the people's will.
Only on the understanding of praxis can a suitable new approach to human
settlements?the communities, villages and cities?be propounded. This aspect of life is
dealt with by ekistics, the Greek roots of which are in house-building, the establishment
of settlements and the peopling of countries. The ekistics that newly arise could also fulfil
the human potential of the big circle, reopening the delimitation on options to choose.
Finally, the concept of entelechy itself ought to be liberating in this same domain. The
notion belongs to the projection of selfhood around the circuits of our total diagram,
whether or not it needs to be nurtured by a fresh understanding derived from some or other
transcendental loop.
And so this introductory thesis closes its own loop and offers a route to satisfy
expectations that it raises?that we may yet make real in our society the people's will. At
least, I have proposed a model and a language for its discussion. As to that language, I
have added to the terms 'eudemony' and 'algedonic' (which I have used for many years)
the terms 'praxis' and 'ekistics' (which are words in fairly general use among social
scientists), and the term 'entelechy', keeping all five all Greek. The reason for this is that
the way the concepts named are here used is determined by the structures of the model;
the concepts' names are meant to connote all that the model gives to them by way of
systemic enrichment. Then perhaps if they are used in any discussion of this theory, they
will facilitate and not impair communication.
Theoretical though this paper be, however, it is my own intention to use it as a practical
tool in trying to solve real problems, and to open new routes to the realization of the will
of the people in terms of the potentials discussed. Readers are invited to use it in a similar
creative way, rather than as fodder for academical disputation. It is not that I mind this,
but that we really do not have all that much time to spare. As to the perennial accusation
that the background to this Lecture is 'just another prophecy of doom', I can only say
that the dooms of over-population, of pollution, of starvation, of worldwide tyranny and
torture, and of war, are all existing realities?not prophecies at all. People tend to forget
that. As to the results that I offer, I say again do please use them. People keep adding to
the pharmacopoeia; they forget to swallow the medicine.

REFERENCES

[G. Summerhoff (1950) Analytical Biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

2W. R. Ashby (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London.
3S. Beer (1959) Cybernetics and Management. English Universities Press, London.
4S. Beer (1966) Decision and Control. Wiley, London. See especially Chapter 13.
5S. Beer (1975) The surrogate world we manage. In Platform for Change. Wiley, Lon
6S. Beer (1981) Brain ofthe Firm. Wiley, London.
7M. Marina (1982) Doctoral Thesis, Brunel University, Uxbridge, England.
8J. Schell (1982) The Fate ofthe Earth. Picador (Cape), London.
9Federal Department of Defense (U.S.A.) (1977) Protection in the Nuclear Age. Defens
Agency, Washington.
10 J. Deshusses ((982) The Eighth Night of Creation. Dial Press, New York.
11S. Beer (1979) The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, London.
12Spencer Brown (1969) Laws of Form. George Allen & Unwin, London.
13 H. R. Maturana and F. J. Varela (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition. D. Reidel, Dor
14R. C. Conant and W. R. Ashby (1970) Every good regulator of a system must be a m
Int. J. Systems Sci. 1, No. 2.

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