STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 276

Figure 6.16. The cybernetics of crisis. Source: S. Beer, brain of the Firm , 2nd ed.
(New York: Wiley, 1981), 354, fig. 48.S.
the British) at command and control on a global scale, seeking to freeze the
world, to stop its displaying any variety at all—running from endless “secu-
rity” checks and imprisonment without trial to the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. And the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq—what we have
been taught to call “the insurgency,” the killing, destruction, mayhem, and
torture in the name of “democracy”—speaks vividly of the negative conse-
quences of seeking to repress variety.
Little more can be said here—this topic is not a treatise on recent world
history—but I do want to note that Beer's “cybernetics of crisis” included an
analysis of how crises like the present one can arise. Again, Beer's focus was
on transformative flows of information. Figure 6.16 is his basic diagram for
considering such processes: the hatched area denotes a crisis affecting three
different interest groups, which might be nation-states, A , B , and C . The de-
tails are less important than Beer's general analysis of the information flow
from the crisis region into A (“sensory input”) and the return action of A on
the crisis (“motor output”). What Beer emphasized was that such informa-
tion flows necessarily impoverish variety, and that in a systematic way. His
argument was that representations of crises are inevitably filtered through low-
variety conceptual models, models through which governments interpret
crises to themselves and the media interpret them to the public. These models
then feed into a low variety of potential actions which return to intensify the