Commitments and the Dynamics of Social Organization
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This post focuses on the role of commitments in shaping the social dynamics within and between societies. I propose that the overarching goal of societies—to persist over time by overcoming novel challenges in their environment—generates both a commitment to existing subsystems within a society (families, tribes, nations, and so on) and the capacity to shape new problem-solving patterns that has the potential to serve as the foundation for emerging subsystems.
To explore this, I reflect on the humble beginnings of social subsystems—specifically, how responses to novel environmental challenges can yield new ways of persisting as distinct and coherent “entities” within the sociopolitical environment. I will examine the “glue” that holds societies together, the distinction between forms of social interaction (such as communities) and patterns of self-organization, and speculate on the conditions under which patterns of self-organization evolve into fully fledged subsystems.
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Societies and Social Subsystems
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My understanding of social organization is strongly influenced by the Free Energy Principle. Accordingly, I view societies as manifestations of collective intelligence operating within the speech-act (Arendt 2019, 176) problem space. I describe societies as abstract control structures consisting of hierarchically nested subsystems—families, tribes, nations and ethnic minorities, religions, and states. Each subsystem must establish boundaries that separate it from its environment; in other words, it must be capable of maintaining both internal coherence and external distinction to be regarded as a subsystem.
The external distinction of social subsystems is maintained through negative feedback loops from which their boundaries can be inferred. In the case of families, the ability to provide care to dependent members functions as such a feedback loop. For nation-states, the monopoly on the legitimate use of force fulfills this role.
A negative feedback loop distinguishes between failed subsystems—those that struggle to maintain a monopoly over force within their territories or, in the case of families, to provide adequate care for their young, elderly, and sick—and successful subsystems that can extend legitimacy for the use of force beyond their borders or extend care to vulnerable members of their broader society.
Alongside negative feedback loops, which indicate the size and resilience of a subsystem, subsystems must also identify their members and distinguish them from other agents in the environment. To do so, they establish principles of differentiation—such as place of birth or parents’ faith—along with methods of recognition (e.g., ID cards, circumcision).
For internal cohesion, subsystems develop a Grand Narrative, which answers the question: “If this subsystem is maximally successful, what must be true?” Grand Narratives serve as a kind of North Star: they reflect the shared fantasy that aligned agents commit to realizing and living by. They also disclose the reasons for severing commitments to previous subsystems; for example, each declaration of independence by nation-states begins by identifying the former regime as the source of chaos and uncertainty in society.
Complementary to the Grand Narrative, subsystems establish an explicit set of enforceable rules, including rules about how to make and amend rules. Whether expressed as the Rule of God or the Rule of Law, these rules illuminate strategies for risk-sharing and benefit distribution, bring subsystem boundaries into effect, and structure decision-making processes.
Together, the Grand Narrative and explicit rules inevitably generate “prediction errors,” or gaps between narrative and reality. While both narrative and reality are, in asense, fictional constructs, they enable continual refinement of the subsystem’s environmental model and thereby improve its capacity for control, manifested in an enhanced ability to plan for the future.
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The “glue” that holds societies intact
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From the above, we can assume that subsystems face two major challenges in their attempt to persist over time: maintaining coherence and maintaining distinction. Two social techniques play a crucial role in overcoming these challenges. The first is agents’ commitment to interpret events in the social environment in ways that promote the most prosperous future they can imagine. The second is the threat of exclusion from a subsystem, a society, or even an entire level ofsocial organization (i.e., the family of nations). In both cases, agents act to reduce the degree of freedom—the range of social behaviors regarded as legitimate and acceptable—thereby increasing predictability and reducing surprise.
The diversity of social subsystems reveals some of the coping strategies developed by socially organized agents through out known history. They reflect the balancing act between two sometimes conflicting social needs: the need to belong and the need to adapt. Within each level of the social hierarchy, we find variations of the same subsystems: single-parent families, foster families, monotheistic and polytheistic religions, democracies, authoritarian states, and so on. Variations within subsystems disclose an interaction between social “hardware” and “software,” highlighting that commitment to living by the rules of a subsystem (software) is often more crucial than who is committed (hardware).
Families may consist of a single parent, two fathers, biological or adopted children; care duties may be performed by family members or outsourced to strangers—yet the core function of the family remains intact. The same applies to religions. Conceptions of God vary across traditions; definitions of what is holy, ordinary, or sinful differ; some religions actively recruit members, while others impose barriers to entry. Many also count their secular members, so long as they do not adopt a different religion. Shifts such as moving from multiple gods to a single God, or diverging from “waiting for the Messiah” to “Jesus is the Messiah,” may give rise to new religions—but they remain religions, bound by faith and by commitment to living according to the rules of God.
Nested Subsystems: Hierarchy and Autonomy
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Besides variation within the same level of social organization, each society is composed of several hierarchically nested subsystems that must maintain coherence and alignment among them. To achieve this, the subsystem at the top of the hierarchy is expected to hold authority over the risk-sharing and benefits-distribution strategy (the policy selection mechanism), while subsystems at lower levels of the hierarchy are expected to adopt the policy selection mechanism of the subsystem at the top of the hierarchy.
For example, families in nation-states must send their children to school, yet they retain autonomy in deciding which school to choose. The separation of state and religion offers another example: religious institutions in democratic societies relinquish political power in exchange for autonomy. In this way, subsystems with faster temporal scales (those with limited ability to plan far into thefuture, such as families) gain resilience and improve their ability to persist by aligning with subsystems that operate at slower temporal scales (such as nation-states). These gains in resilience and persistence come at the cost of reducing degrees of freedom of the subsystem and its agents.
Today, the subsystem responsible for policy selection is the nation-state, which grants autonomy to multiple religions, ethnic minorities, and families. Yet each of these other subsystems once occupied the top of the hierarchy. From this, we can infer that subsystems gain, retain, lose, and sometimes regain salience as mechanisms of policy selection depending on their capacity to shape the sociopolitical environment. Simply put: the more agents and resources a subsystem can manage over time, the greater its chances of shaping the fate of a given society.
This underlying power dynamic between subsystems shapes societal problem-solving mechanisms and reveals that, for a society to maintain coherence, the top subsystem must be able to constrain the independence of subsystems below it. This includes responsibility for circumscribing their autonomy and for maneuvering internal pressures by modifying its models when persistent bottom-up prediction errors threaten cohesion. Democratic nation-states adapting their laws to accommodate non-heterosexual families provide a good example of such bottom-up pressure.
This delicate balancing act between autonomy and authority shapes a socially constructed “self” that is explicit and internally managed with the aim of generating a sense of collective coherence, stability, and continuity over time. One of the tests of a society’s coherence arises when the explicit set of rules contradicts or overwrites the Grand Narrative of the subsystem at the top of the hierarchy. Such contradictions often reflect deeper challenges in reaching consensus on whether the policy selection mechanism of a subsystem promotes the“greater good” or serves only the “few and powerful.”
Internal conflicts between subsystems within a society can lead to modifications of policies and policy selection mechanisms, but they can also spiral into violence that may escalates into regional or global conflicts. Taking into account the shared goal of subsystems—to persist as long as possible by resolving novel problems in their environment—subsystems will generally seek to contain internal variations without splitting and to maintain interoperability with higher- and lower-level subsystems to maximize the survival chances of their agents.
In the next part, I will explore how contradictions between the rule of law and the Grand-Narrative shapes commitments that guide the emergence of a new pattern of social organization, and stipulate on the possible reasons older (faster) subsystems do not simply dissolve into higher levels of social organization.
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A humble beginning
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In 1776, thirteen American colonies declared independence from the British Crown. Such declarations also occurred elsewhere in the ‘West’ and highlight the critical role commitment plays in social organization: the difference between a very rich and powerful man and a king lies in the latter being bestowed with divine legitimacy to raise taxes and send people to war. When that commitment is severed, a king is reduced to being a man whose policy selection mechanism no longer shapes the sociopolitical environment.
The severance of commitments to kings in European societies illustrates how agents’ commitmentscan shift from one subsystem to another, thereby altering societal policy-selection mechanisms. Yet the early years of U.S. independence were marked by an incoherent “self,” split between two contradictory policies: institutional slavery, which allowed men to own other men and women, and the Declaration of Independence, which afforded all men the right to life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness.
While it is reasonable to assume that those who formulated the Declaration of Independence did not intend to abolish slavery, it is important to note that a society, as a complex system, is not controlled by individuals’ intentions, no matter how powerful they may be. The societal commitment is to the Grand Narrative, not to those who formulated it. Thus, within the constructed speech-act space of the U.S., slaves, women, immigrants and white men alike were afforded the opportunity to shape the consensus regarding the interpretation of the society’s new Grand Narrative.
The American society—as sets of subsystems that had to cohere in order to exist—had to reconcile discrepancies between their vision (the Declaration of Independence) and their explicit rules (institutional slavery). And while most agents remain loyal to institutional slavery, out of fear or alignment, some agents, in the U.S. and beyond, both enslaved and free, anticipated and acted as though the abolition of slavery was inevitable—nearly 90 years before the passage of the 13th Amendment, which officially abolished slavery in the U.S. (though many would argue that the 13th Amendment merely reconfigured slavery through private prisons and mass incarceration).
The Underground Railroad database contains narratives documenting the efforts that shaped discourse around freedom and slavery, as well as the collaborations to free enslaved people prior to the legislative change. From the perspective of collective intelligence, agents active in these networks possessed no special information about their society. Yet in hindsight, their policy-selection strategies predicted the social future of the U.S. more accurately than the Rule of Law.
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A second, no less radical, example occurred across German-occupied Europe during WWII. By that time, countries such as France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway were already democracies that afforded their citizens certain protections and rights. The “Final Solution” imposed a new challenge: the principles of equality and protection underlying democratic societies were revoked and replaced with policies that stripped “undesirable” citizens of protection and legitimized their persecution. The consequences of the Final Solution suggest widespread compliance with Nazi ideology, whether out of fear or alignment. Yet this historical period also includes agents in occupied territories and beyond—both stateless people and citizens—who anticipated and acted as if the Nazi regime would inevitably be defeated, well before this became apparent. The Righteous Among the Nations database contains testimonies documenting the collaborations that protected stateless individuals throughout the Final Solution and until the Nazi defeat.
To these historical perturbations a more recent one was added in the form of deportation regimes. Immigration laws present a comparable challenge for citizens in democratic societies, as they offer migrants two official pathways: citizenship or deportation. Although deportation regimes remain active and have gained momentum in recent years, there is evidence of deportable migrants securing permanent legal status in ways that cannot be explained by changes in immigration law.
Like the historical examples, these contemporary collaborations involve citizens and deportable migrants from both the Global South and North, determined to shape discourse around protection and belonging. Beyond these cases—which highlightthe selective application of the principle of equality in democratic societies and its implications for social coherence—other global challenges are steering collective intelligence beyond the confines of nation-states.
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Narratives from historical datasets, as well as testimonies from deportable migrants, reveal apattern of self-organization driven by equality-based policy selection mechanism applied to events in the social environment. These involve communication, information-sharing, and adaptive learning to deal effectively with contradictions between the rule of law and the democratic Grand Narrative. Moreover, subsystems at lower levels of the hierarchy use their autonomy (property laws, freedom of religious) to provide vital resources and legitimacy for such collaborations alongside a moral and cultural basis to guide decision-making processes.
The rarity and consistency of this pattern of self-organization, emerging whenever the rule of law in a democratic country is contradicting the Grand Narrative, highlight sthe difference between any type of social interaction and patterns of self-organization that may or may not amount to an abstract control structure.
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Predictions, Consistency, Distinctiveness
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The first distinction between a pattern of self-organization and other types of social interaction is that the former is future-oriented, whereas the latter is primarily concerned with the present. Emerging patterns of self-organization provide more compelling interpretations of societal Grand Narratives, enabling more accurate predictions of the social future than existing frameworks. While we now know that institutional slavery was abolished and the Nazi regime was defeated, both policy-selection mechanisms commanded considerable legitimacy and power during their existence. In that historical context, predicting their eventual downfall might appear to have been a mere lucky guess. Yet, given that subsystems within a society must cohere in order to endure, the prolonged survival of either institutional slavery or the Nazi regime would have inevitably led to the collapse of Western civilization as an open and democratic society.
Taking this in to account, we can see that patterns of self-organization emerge precisely because of their capacity to galvanize agents’ commitment to the Grand Narrative of Western civilization. As noted above, the Grand Narrative serves as the North Star of a society. If the rule of law leads in a direction that does not align with the Grand Narrative, that alone can signal to other subsystems to reduce their commitment to the rule of law and increase their reliance on alternative policy-selection mechanisms. Reading the narratives from historical datasets, we observe that families and religious institutions often took the lead in facilitating the road to liberty for slaves and securing the right to life for stateless individuals.
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The second distinction between a pattern of self-organization and other types of social interactions is that the former shapes bounded collaborations, while the latter is indifferent to boundaries. Recognizing the need to bound “liberal” collaborations within temporarily “illiberal” societies is a qualitative difference between agents who acted from a higher moral stance or humanitarian sentiment and those who acted from an urge to protect their own fate. In the cases noted above,consensus mechanisms were used to distinguish agents and resources dedicated to preserving democratic values, with the assumption that the rule of law would eventually realign with the Grand Narrative.
Testimonies from both historical datasets and contemporary cases describe a continual process of learning the environment (epistemic foraging) and responding swiftly to changes—for example, preparing alternative hiding places or escape routes in case of attacks or the compromise of sensitive information. Furthermore, agents developing patterns of self-organization beyond the rule of law recognized the need to test whether other agents in the environment aligned with the Grand Narrative or merely with the rule of law. In the jargon ofthe Free Energy Principle, this process is called niche construction: two strangers exchange information to check whether their worldviews align.
In cryptography, this resembles zero-knowledge proofs—the ability to demonstrate what one knows or believes without disclosing details that could expose oneself, one’s resources, or one’s intentions to harmful attacks. Evidence of niche construction and zero-knowledge proofs can be found in the narratives of slaves, stateless persons, and deportable migrants, who emphasized that their actions were not merely about being “free,” “saved,” or “legal.” Rather, their actions reflected a desire to shape a life that embodied their idea of living in an open and democratic society.
The third distinction between a pattern of self-organization and other types of social interactions is that the former maintains a distinct and consistent mechanism for risk-sharing and benefit distribution. For such collaborations to persist, agents had to be able to identify what they can contribute that will be most beneficial to the success of the collaboration over time. In the Underground Railroad dataset, we find named roles such as conductors, stationmasters, andagents. Resistance movements in Europe likewise included agents who provided vital information, escorted fugitives to safe houses, or supplied food and clothing.
This method of risk-sharing enabled collaborating agents to provide access to freedom, life,and protection for bearers of rejected identities. The scale of the collaboration and the resources it amassed determined the number of agents who could be assisted. Moreover, those who were assisted often continued as contributors and advocates—especially in the cases of slavery and deportable migrants.
In summary, the distinction between ordinary social interactions and patterns of self-organization lies in the latter’s orientation toward the future, its bounded “self” (through the ability to distinguish aligned agents, inferboundaries, and maintain novel mechanisms of risk-sharing and benefitdistribution), and its consistency. Yet, one question remains: what is still missing for a pattern of self-organization to evolve into a fully developed abstract control structure?
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Conscious Awareness and Technological Development
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Examining the intersection of existing subsystems and emerging patterns of self-organization highlights a common feature: both construct environmental models that function as good regulators, that is, models capable of reflecting the conditions of the environment in which they are embedded. The greater the temporal depth of such models, the more effective their risk-sharing and benefit-distribution mechanisms become—where effectiveness is understood in terms of cost-efficiency. The collaborations of the Underground Railroad and the Righteous Among the Nations exemplify this dynamic: both were designed to persist until the rule of law re-aligned with the Grand Narrative of democratic societies, whereas the rule of law itself projected untenable futures (e.g., the notion of a“democratic” slave society, or Christianity without Judaism).
In addition to projecting feasible futures, these collaborations relied on feedback loops that were substantially less costly than the monopolization of violence. Consensus mechanisms leveraged agents’ motivation to sustain free and open societies,thereby enabling coercion-free modes of risk-sharing and benefit distribution. Furthermore, their reliance on fractal network structures provided a more efficient means of regulating the flow of information and resources than the hierarchical, top-down structure of nation-states.
Taken together, these collaborations exhibit comparative advantage over nation-states with respect to anticipating the social futures of democracies. However, they remain ephemeral and situational, emerging when the rule of law diverges from the Grand Narrative and dissolving once alignment is restored.
For such patterns of collaboration to evolve into abstract control structures, two conditions must be satisfied. First, while self-organization can operate without conscious awareness, abstract control structures require explicit self-representation. Consequently, the transition to an abstract control structure necessitates the compression and formalization of a collective “self” that transforms democratic societies from nation-states to consensus-based networks.
Second, self-organization requires technological infrastructures capable of transforming the energy invested in collaboration into the capacity to generateand maintain social order. This entails enabling agents to gain and retain power through their contributions to collective governance. In religious subsystems, this capacity is institutionalized as righteousness; in nation-states,as wealth and prestige. In both cases, subsystems establish evaluative mechanisms—effectively, ledgers—that classify actions as “good” or “bad” and distribute sanctions or rewards accordingly.
The pattern of self-organization described here lacks precisely two components: explicit awareness of its predictive models and social utility, and agreed-upon mechanisms for recording, evaluating, and aggregating contributions. Yet, compared to other initiatives currently emerging in the social environment in an attempt to shape a better future, this pattern of self-organization demonstrates a proven capacity to provide more accurate predictions of the social future. It also exhibits a bounded “self” and a prototype of a policy-selection mechanism.
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To sum up,
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This post examined how commitments shape social dynamics and enable societies to persist over time. It distinguishes between subsystems (families, religions, states) and emergent patterns of self-organization (e.g.,the Underground Railroad, resistance networks during WWII), focusing on how the latter arise when the rule of law contradicts democratic Grand Narratives. These patterns differ from ordinary social interactions by being future-oriented,bounded, and consistent in their mechanisms of risk-sharing. Historical and contemporary examples reveal their predictive power, but also their ephemerality. For such patterns to evolve into abstract control structures, they must develop an explicitly constructed "self" and technological infrastructures capable of transforming collective energy into durable forms of social order.
Reference
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With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. Arendt, Hannah. The human condition. University of Chicago press, 2019, P.176-177.