THE POLITICAL MAUSOLEUM
Our political and governmental structures, to begin with, wore designed at a time when the nation-state was still coming into its own. Each government could make more or less independent decisions. Today, as we have seen, this is no longer possible, though We retain the myth of sovereignty. In-ilation has become so transnational a disease that not even Mr. Brezhnev or his successor can prevent the contagion from crossing the border. The Communist industrial countries, even though partially severed from the world economy and rigidly controlled from within, are dependent upon external sources for oil, food, technology, credit, and other necessities. In 1979 the U.S.S.R. was forced to hike many consumer prices.Czechoslovakia doubled the price of fuel oil. Hungary daggered its consumers by boosting the price of electricity 51 percent. Each decision in one country forces problems or calls for responses from the next.
France builds a nuclear reprocessing plant at Cap de la Hague (which is closer to London than the British Wind-scale reactor) at a place where radioactive dust or gas, if released, would be wafted toward Britain by the prevailing winds. Mexican oil spills imperil the Texas coastline 500 miles away. And if Saudi Arabia or Libya raises or lowers petroleum production quotas, it has immediate or long-range effects on the ecology of many nations.
In this tightly wired web national leaders lost much of their effectiveness no matter what rhetoric they employ or sabers they rattle. Their decisions typically trigger costly, unwanted, frequently dangerous repercussions at both the global and the local level. The scale of government and the distribution of decision-making authority are hopelessly wrong for today’s world.
This, however, is only one of the reasons why existing political structures are obsolete.
THE INTER-WEAVE PROBLEM
Our political institutions also reflect an out-of-date organization of knowledge. Every government has ministries or departments devoted to discrete fields such as finance, foreign affairs, defense, agriculture, commerce, post office, or transportation. The United States Congressand other legislative bodies have committees similarly set aside to deal with problems in these fields. What no Second Wave government— even the most centralized and authoritarian—can solve is the inter-weave problem: how to integrate the activities of all these units so they can produce orderly, wholistic programs instead of a mishmash of contradictory and self-canceling effects.
If there is one thing we should have learned in the past few decades, it is that all social and political problems are interwoven—that energy, for example, affects economics, which in turn affects health, which in turn affects education, work, family life, and a thousand other things. The attempt to deal with neatly defined problems in isolation from one another— itself a product of the industrial mentality—creates only confusion and disaster. Yet the organizational structure of government mirrors precisely this Second Wave approach to reality.
This anachronistic structure leads to interminable jurisdic-tional power struggles, to the externalization of costs (each agency attempting to solve its own problems at the expense of another), and to the generation of adverse side effects. This is why each attempt by government to cure a problem leads to a rash of new problems, often worse than the original one.
Governments typically attempt to solve this inter-weave problem through further centralization—by naming a “czar” to cut through the red tape. He makes changes, blind to their destructive side effects—or he piles on so much additional red tape himself that he is soon dethroned. For centralization of power no longer works. Another desperation measure is the creation of innumerable interdepartmental committees to coordinate and review decisions. The result, however, is the construction of yet another set of baffles and filters through which decisions have to pass—and a further complexification of the bureaucratic labyrinth. Our existing governments and political structures are obsolete because they view the world through Second Wave lenses. In turn, this aggravates another problem.
THE DECISIONAL SPEEDUP
Second Wave governments and parliamentary institutions were designed to make decisions at a leisurely pace, suited to a world in which it might take a week for a message to travel from Boston or New York to Philadelphia. Today if an Ay-atollah seizes hostages in Teheran or coughs in Qom, officials
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