Ethos of evolutionary societal complexity

Abstract

Consideration of the ethos component makes it possible to give a whole range picture of the essence of social arrangement at different stages of the evolution of communities. The living elements of Western and Eastern governance traditions presented in the cases display a great variety in the configuration of the coexistence of formal institutions and informal practices, which reveals an irreducible variability of the spectrum of social complexity. Attempts to artificially unify the governance environment are based on a project vision of reality, which, when in contact with the initial conditions of reform, can lead to counterproductive results and bounce back on the personal fate of decision-makers. In this regard, the problem of the ethos of the reformer's personal responsibility in conjunction with the continuity and cyclicality of the political process becomes highly relevant. Ethos in politics fits into the gap between the individual and the public — the gap in which choice is born. This formulation of the ethos issue creates the possibility of its two-vector consideration — from top to bottom and from bottom to the top. The first vector implies a deterministic need to make a decision in a situation that is represented in the literature as a «trolley problem» — a scalable choice based on a quantitative (good for the majority) or qualitative (value of an individual fate) criterion. A prerequisite for the cognitive «trolley model» is the configuration of the situation in such a way that inaction choice is not an ethically neutral alternative: it equates to a choice that is fully amenable to normative analysis, taking into account the consequences of such a decision for an individual and / or collective subject. The second vector of studying the ethos component in politics concerns the often contradictory sequence of steps in decision-making by an individual subject who has delegated the right to govern to a collective level subject. The problems of this analytical spectrum are presented in the «principal-agent» theory (M. Pollack) and are based on the role of information asymmetries. A principal delegating managerial authority to an agent assumes that the agent has more qualifications and expertise to make decisions in favor of the principal. After the conclusion of the «social contract of delegation», the agent does not always use these information asymmetries in order to benefit the principal. The described collisions, arising in the course of evolution in the ethos component of complex societies, significantly increase the difficulties in predicting the course of development of the immediate and distant consequences of current events, thus intensifying the dependence on the sole and collective subjects of political decisionmaking.