Context? : Human Intelligence and the Corporate / Natural Environment?

The issue is ultrastability (Ashby) the capacity of the system to change its values to ensure survival.


The problems are systemic concerning the institution, they are not the fault of individuals...




 It's particularly interesting to take a look at the people who are running these campaigns, say, the CEOs of big corporations. They know as well as you and I do that it's very real and that the threats are very dire, and that they're threatening the lives of their grandchildren. In fact, they're threatening what they own, they own the world, and they're threatening its survival. Which seems irrational, and it is, from a certain perspective. But from another perspective it's highly rational. They're acting within the structure of the institutions of which they are a part. They are functioning within something like market systems -- not quite, but partially -- market systems. To the extent that you participate in a market system, you disregard necessarily what economists call "externalities," the effect of a transaction upon others. So, for example, if one of you sell me a car, we may try to make a good deal for ourselves, but we don't take into account in that transaction the effect of the transaction on others. Of course, there is an effect. It may feel like a small effect, but if it multiplies over a lot of people, it's a huge effect: pollution, congestion, wasting time in traffic jams, all sorts of things. Those you don't take into account -- necessarily. That's part of the market system.


It's not because they're bad people or anything. If they don't do it -- suppose some CEO says, "Okay, I'm going to take into account externalities" -- then he's out. He's out and somebody else is in who will play by the rules. That's the nature of the institution.  You have to try to maximize short-term profit and market share -- in fact, that's a legal requirement in Anglo-American corporate law -- just because if you don't do it, either your business will disappear because somebody else will outperform it in the short run, or you will just be out because you're not doing your job and somebody else will be in. So there is an institutional irrationality.
Within the institution the behavior is perfectly rational, but the institutions themselves are so totally irrational that they are designed to crash.

http://chomsky.info/talks/20100930.htm

We have a situation of internal and external rationalities which appear to conflict, a corporate, competitive  survival rationality and a human ecological survival rationality, this mostly concerns the massive corporate sector.
(this is about the US as it is they who set the agenda with their massive military and corporate power, and who the uk govenment tend  to see as a role model)