The UK Home Secretary has said that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose”. It has lost control over almost every aspect of the criminal justice system, the prisons and immigration.

The root of the problem is the Blairite Human Rights Act, passed in jubilant self-congratulation in 1998, plus a delegation policy that places key people in post by political persuasion rather than competence. Both break the fundamental principles of Superdemocracy.

The idea of a Rights Society is all the rage in Labour-dominated Britain. It sounds good. We all have defined rights which mean we’re free, yes?

NO.

Freedom is not about giving everyone and anyone “rights” without checks and balances. Many of the rights we have we make for ourselves, through hard work and merit. Merit brings us wealth and allows us the freedom to enjoy the best things in life without too much worry or disturbance.

Basic rights, like equality before the law, God and the ballot box, are the rights of all citizens in any democratic country. Some of these rights should not be given to anybody who simply turns up on its shores. Civil liberties don’t travel beyond the jurisdiction that defines them.

Cast these rights liberally around to everyone on the planet and they will act as magnets for mass, unstoppable immigration of people who know only two words of English, “My rights”.

The so-called Human Rights Act allows anyone who enters Britain full rights to the treasure of its citizens, even as far as mandatory housing, health care, schooling, legal bills, and a “salary” for life. Since newcomers have not earned these “rights” they just impoverish the country’s citizens, without adding a jot to the nation’s well-being.

Of course, if you say that, you risk sounding rather mean-spirited. That’s the weapon of choice in destroying the truth in this case. The government has woven new taboos against challenging any of its equality agenda, even embedding them into statute law. Never mind that this kind of equality : equality of attributes, needs a totalitarian regime to enforce, you are stigmatized if you complain.

The reason for this Home Office-induced catastrophe is that decisions are taken by greenhorn, starry-eyed politicians and their political appointees, who see themselves as benefactors of mankind — albeit with other people’s money and lives. They have no idea of the complexities of the case, nor of the huge response they are initiating.

Moreover, nearly every agency in Britian is now run by knee-jerk Blairites who act according to political received opinion rather than careful, dispassionate, and expert consideration of the situation.

Merit is the way out of this morass of incompetence and waste. A common cry in England now is “Nothing works anymore”. That’s because the “All shall have prizes society” is run by dolts and slackers, as could be predicted before it was imposed on us.

When each critical decision, no matter how small, is taken at the point of maximum competence, near enough, everybody in the community benefits in an cumulative way. The small increments of improvement mount up over time, completely transforming the landscape and the way it operates. That’s Superdemocracy.

So-called Human Rights are a way of moving resources from the competent who have worked for them, to the incompetent who have not. It depletes a society’s level of expertise and tilts the slope of impoverishment ever more steeply downwards.

The Rights Society should be replaced with Superdemocracy, especially in the public sector where chaos finds its natural breeding ground. The Home Office is just one example that needs to be addressed in haste.

A secret battle between synergy and particularity is raging beneath the surfaces of societies all the time. Here are some of the consequences.

All mergers and acquisitions are based on the idea that economies of scale will drive down costs across the board and produce synergies between organizations. This assumption is so ingrained in our thinking that few people stop to ask why most takeovers fail.

In any group activity there’s a hierarchy of decisionmaking. Each person in the structure gets a bagload of responsibilities based on various assumptions, and the empire-building of their predecessors. Like cream in a milk bottle, decisions have a strong tendency to rise up the hierarchy, stopping only when the number of assumptions needed to take them exceeds common sense.

Notice the word “exceeds”. This isn’t a rational process, it’s pushed purely by ego and vanity.

The result is that most decisions in any organization (business or governmental) produce a one-size-fits-all outcome which gives a false sense of synergy, while destroying efficiency and particularity.

“Particularity” may sound odd here but, in reality, it’s the crux of the well-being of any complex infrastructure. It means decisions are made with few assumptions and with a “size”, or scale, that fits the need of every case.

Modern Western countries are one-size-fits-all societies. It’s our weakest link and the point where our enemies concentrate their attacks. They know most decisions, whether laws, regulations, red tape, whatever, are unpopular and largely unworkable, because they lack particularity and precision-relevance to the case.

Thus we need armies of lawyers to sort things out, over long periods of time. We also have to throw huge amounts of national and business capital at problems just to keep them afloat.

Politburo orders are always wrong. EU “directives” are never right for most people. Decisions taken on 10 Downing Street’s sofa have been proved disastrous time and again. White House decisions are hardly spangled with success. Microsoft, and even lucky Google, make crass moves all the time which go totally pear-shaped.

If every decision were taken at the point of maximum competence, or very near to it, there would be few assumptions to make, and the outcome would be as close to perfect as it’s possible to reach.

So here’s The Syntagma Principle: Particularity means never having to make assumptions. If you’re making assumptions, the decision shouldn’t be taken at your pay grade.

You may be wondering why Superdemocracy — the art of corporate governance — is included in 21st-century Phi network magazine. The answer is that the 21st century is being built on “soft” sciences.

In computer technology, the hardware is the least of it nowadays. Software rules the technological roost and has since Bill Gates made Microsoft the most successful company in the world.

Software is deferred design, and so complex are the tasks computers perform now, much of the design is deferred to the user’s choice — a good example of Superdemocracy at work.

Similarly, in corporate governance and the adminstration of nation states, decision-making is becoming more complex in an increasingly technical world. Politicians and civil servants no longer have the skills and knowledge to take most modern decisions. They still do, of course, and make an unholy mess of almost everything they touch.

In Britain, we’re informed that a government-ordered computer system for the National Health Service is unlikely ever to work. Some £20 billion ($38bn) has been spent on it. Other expensive systems for the Farming and Environmental department and the Passport Office have all been flops.

Soft technology skills are vital in the 21st century if anything is to work. The art of government and corporate governance are prime examples. Superdemocracy is the supreme science that must be learned by our masters if we are to compete against the newly resurgent developing nations.

Of course, delegation has always been important to efficient working. But refined delegation to the the point of maximum competence is an art yet to be mastered by most administrators.

Superdemocracy is an idea I had a long while ago while musing on the optimum hierarchy for any organization. It’s really a variation on meritocracy — so despised by the postmodern crowd.

Imagine if you will the billions of decisions taken daily in businesses, agencies, governments, and other organizations up and down your country. Most of them will be made at nodal points where power has settled and accumulated over time and where empires are ruthlessly defended. In other words, they will be taken well above the level of optimum efficiency — the Point of Maximum Competence.

A little thought reveals that almost all decisions are made at points where the taker(s) are not fully aware of the complexities of the task. In today’s technical society, that disjunction is growing all the time.

If each decision is depicted as a small arrow, it’s not hard to visualize most of them pointing downward, albeit by a tiny amount. Day after day, these billions of small decrements add up to a massive efficiency deficit, which can only be supported by vast quantities of public money propping the whole edifice up.

Small businesses, by contrast, develop the expertise to avoid this tendency or they die, which is why they are usually the most dynamic elements in any economy.

Big businesses become more like governments as they mature, even creating social security and foreign affairs departments — look at Microsoft.

But government is the principal problem for Superdemocrats. In the UK, central government operates the highly technical National Health Service, with predictably dismal, and costly, results. It also runs the state schools, transport and other big areas of public concern. It now takes 43pc of the national income and employs 25pc of the workforce. In the world of Superdemocracy, we call this Decremental Drainage. The losses are fabulous and continual.

Let’s nail the problem then: governmental decisions are taken at the Level of Minimum Competence. In the UK, we also have the even more remote European level in Brussels — the Level of Maximum Incompetence. Why would any decisions beyond multi-cross-border issues ever be sent to Brussels?

What’s the alternative? Superdemocracy!

For a moment conjure up a vision of decisions being taken much further down the food chain at the point where all the complexities and variations of the case are fully appreciated. See all those billions of arrows beginning to point upward, albeit just a tad.

Jump forward a year or so and listen to that faint, distant rumbling of a tidal wave just visible on the horizon. It’s a tidal wave of MONEY.

Think I’m kidding? Look at any successful operation and you’ll see decision-making at the Point of Maximum Competence. Look at any failing organization and you’ll discover decisions being made well above those levels by fat cats ensconced in positions of conceit and self-delusion. There is no exception to this rule. Decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, will always rise to the top.

All decisions therefore should be taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. The CEO role should comprise nothing more than shaking the milk bottles all day long.

Of course, we need a decent algorithm to determine where that Point is in any organization. This is the next step.

Superdemocracy and representative democracy
Representative democracy, our standard political institution in the West, is vital for two reasons:

1. It spreads decision-making thinly, ensuring that power doesn’t concentrate in too few hands, and
2. It allows ordinary people to feel they are represented in the highest taxing and lawmaking councils of the land.

But, as Churchill implied, you wouldn’t appoint a CEO of a major organization by a kind of Pop Idol, televised, beauty parade. “Democracy,” he said, ” is a bad form of Government, but it’s better than any of the others.”

We have to recognize that most politicians are rank amateurs at what they do — and it shows. Seizing on a dangerously-small stock of information, while being blissfully ignorant of the complexities of every case, they often make huge, irreversible blunders in the name of the People.

Clearly, representative democracy is necessary. But it needs to be modified still further to limit the amount of decision-making available to these hick-town dilettantes and amateur actors who rise to the top of election process.

That’s where Superdemocracy comes in. Superdemocracy occurs when decisions are taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. It is almost always situated many levels lower than the norm in both the political and business environments.

Using Superdemocracy as a principle of governance across a whole society would naturally rob the robber barons of power, and add a huge efficiency increment to a country’s earning power.

Here then is the natural way for the West to meet the challenges of China and India and the other nascent superpowers. The world’s wealth needs to be held largely by the most sophisticated nations, who have at least some wisdom in determining its dispersal.

The current danger is that — like the discovery of oil in the Middle East — massive industrial growth in non-democratic regimes, will bring great dangers to us all in the 21st century.

So, are you a Superdemocrat? You simply have to be.

To hell in a handcart
Why is it that politicians now try to protect us from what used to be called Acts of God?

In that great book, Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel asks a Zen master what Zen actually is. The master motions him to sit down on some sand overlooking a garden. They sit in silent meditation for three hours. Later the master points at the spot where he sat — it’s a perfectly formed depression with well-defined edges. Then he indicates where Herrigel sat — a much larger area with sand flung out untidily.

It was not your body that moved, said the master, but your mind. Your restless Western mind thinks that if you aren’t busy at something, the world will stop turning and chaos will take over.

But look, the grass kept growing, birds flew about in the sky, people went about their business. Nobody missed your presence, least of all the world.

When Presidents and Prime Ministers are sworn in, they should be made to read that passage. If they ceased restlessly interfering in our lives — and it’s much worse in Europe than in North America — Superdemocracy would be naturally present in society and most things would be done at the Point of Maximum Competence, or nearer to it than now.

Right now, the politicos and their armies of role-stealers are sending us to hell in a handcart.