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from his cybernetic ontology along lines already indicated. Nation-states are
obvious examples of exceedingly complex systems, always in flux and never
fully knowable. Their interaction should thus take the usual form of reciprocal
vetoing or mutual accommodation, exploring, respecting, and taking account
of the revealed variety of the other. Beer found little evidence for such sym-
metric interaction in the contemporary world, and thus, much of his analysis
focused on what happens when it is absent. At the other pole from homeostat-
like explorations lies the attempt to dominate and control the other, and
Beer's argument was that this must fail. According to Ashby's law, only variety
(on one side) can control variety (on the other). Any attempt simply to pin
down and fix the other—to make it conform to some given political design—
is therefore doomed to make things worse. The imposition of fixed structures
simply squeezes variety into other channels and manifestations which, more
or less by definition, themselves subvert any imposed order.
Beer's general analysis of macropolitics was thus, throughout his career, a
pessimistic one: conventional politics is bereft of cybernetic insight and thus
continually exacerbates crises at all levels. This rhetoric of crisis is a resound-
ing refrain from his earliest writings to his last. In Beer's irst topic, the crisis is
one of the West in general (the only instance of Cold War rhetoric that I have
found in his writing) and of British industry in particular (Beer 1959, ix): “The
signs are frankly bad. . . . The index of industrial production has not moved
up for four years. We desperately need some radical new advance, something
qualitatively different from all our other efforts, something which exploits the
maturity and experience of our culture. A candidate is the science of control.
Cybernetic research could be driven ahead for little enough expenditure com-
pared with rocketry, for example. And if we do not do it, someone else will.”
In his later and more political writings, the crisis was often said to be one of
the environment and of the conditions of life in the third world, as well as the
more usual sense of political crisis: a socialist government in Chile as a crisis
for the Americans and British being a prime example.
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When I first encountered this language of crisis in Beer's writing, I tended
to ignore it. It seemed self-serving and dated. On the one hand, the rhetorical
function of “crisis” was so obviously to motivate a need for cybernetics. On the
other, we all used to talk like that in the 1960s, but, in fact, the world has not
come to an end since then. As it happens, though, while I have been writing
about Beer, his stories have started to seem very relevant and, indeed, pre-
scient. Everything that has happened since those planes flew into the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon speaks of an American attempt (abetted by
