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variety of the crisis along axes that are unrepresentable in the models, and so
on around the loop.
Let me close this section with three comments. First, we can note that this
last discussion of the role of models in the production of crises is of a piece
with Beer's general suspicion of articulated knowledge and representation.
Models might be useful in performance, as in the VSM, but they can also
interpose themselves between us and the world of performances, blocking
relevant variety (hence the significance of the inarticulacy of Beer's algedo-
nic meters, for example). Second, Beer died before the invasion of Iraq; the
above thoughts on that are mine, not his. But, again, I am struck now not by
any self-serving quality of his rhetoric, but by the prescience of his analysis.
The highly simplifed story of information flows and variety reduction that I
just rehearsed illuminates how global politics could have collapsed so quickly
into one-bit discriminations (Beer 1993a, 33) between “us” and “them,” the
goodies and the baddies; how it could have been that a majority of the Ameri-
can population could believe there was some connection between Al Qaeda
and Iraq prior to the invasion and in the existence of what we were taught to
call “weapons of mass destruction”; how it is that the American public and,
perhaps, their government could have expected the invaders to be greeted
with flowers and kisses rather than car bombs; and (turning back to the ques-
tion of controlling variety) why mayhem should have been expected instead.
Of course, third, one does not have to be Stafford Beer or a cybernetician to
be critical of the war on terror, a “war” in which, “allies are expected to go
into battle against an abstract noun, and to assault any nation unwilling to
mobilize in such folly” (S. Beer 2001, 862-63). What interests me, though,
is the generality of Beer's cybernetic analysis. We all know how to generate
simplistic stories of heroes and villains, and much of the political talk of the
early twenty-first century takes that form. Take your pick of the goodies and
baddies—Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush and the
neocons. Such reversible stories will no doubt always be with us. Beer's analy-
sis, instead, did not focus on the particulars of any one crisis. He actually
began the most extended exposition of his analysis by mentioning the British
abdication crisis of 1936, arguments over Indian independence from Britain
in 1946, and the Suez crisis of 1956 (Beer 1981, 352-53). His analysis did not
hinge on the question of whether George W. Bush was evil or stupid; his argu-
ment was that something was and is wrong at the higher level of large-scale
systems and their modes of interaction that persistently produces and intensi-
fies rather than resolves global crises. I take the novelty of this style of analysis
to be another example of the ways in which ontology makes a difference.
