The Capillary Effect (“CF”) principle sees social systems as humans’ spontaneous creations that appear due to the pulling effect of collective needs of the individuals they serve – the “capillaries” of the system. At some point in their evolution, systems may become self-serving; i.e., they continue to exist and even expand despite failures to adequately provide for the needs of the population they are supposed to serve. This post explores the signs that appear when a system reaches that point.
Let’s first look at a very successful social system that continually evolves to provide an ever-changing and expanding “benefit basket” for the individuals in its membership. That would be Amazon.com. When one looks at this company, this social system, through the Capillary Effect lens, it’s no wonder that it is one of the most valuable companies on the planet, and has also made its founder one of the wealthiest on the planet as well.
The Capillary Effect assesses the success of a social system by how well it meets the needs of the population it serves. The system produces what is called a “benefit basket” – an offering of goods and services from which basket each member can choose what they want on their terms. Through a feedback process the system listens to its members and modifies the benefit basket as their needs change over time. Amazon has been spectacularly good at listening to feedback and rapidly changing its benefit basket – adding free delivery, one-day delivery, one-click payment, easy returns, broad product selection, and other services such as music, movies and groceries. In this way, Amazon appears unstoppable in its growth, starting out as an online bookseller to the behemoth it is today.
A dynamic, successful system engages with its members in a constant give-and-take relationship. The system produces goods and services, and its members reciprocate with inputs – usually money – and valuable feedback that the system utilizes to sustain itself and evolve with the needs of the population it serves.
Systems today are generally not self-aware, meaning that they do not automatically listen to and incorporate feedback to change their offerings over time. They rely on the people managing them to sift through all the feedback, determine what should be noted, and then make decisions as to what to do with it. These managers have their own needs; in fact, the management group itself is a sub-population that is also served by the same system, and this sub-population has its own unique set of needs for which the system offers a unique benefit basket that is different from that of the greater membership, and often at odds with it. This gap between the management’s needs and those of the system’s members results in friction and conflict that can range from mere annoyance to frustration, to outright violent mob behavior. This dysfunction can be described as the point at which the roles start to reverse, and the system demands to be served by its membership.
This change often creeps up by degrees, eventually to the point that people begin to leave the system, sometimes running from it and forfeiting the benefits they have already received in the process of trying to get away. In this situation, a disciplined application of the Capillary Effect principle and use of its analysis tools. The most extreme examples are found in nation-states around the planet, the starkest examples being Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, El Salvador and others. These government systems seem to have taken on a life of their own, demanding benefits from the individuals within their borders in a destructive role reversal. Recently, the North Korean government has demanded that farmers provide at least two liters of their urine each day for the government to produce fertilizer in a desperate effort by its leadership to deal with a food crisis brought on by mismanagement of its system of governance.[1] It is well known that attempts to escape the country will result in severe penalties for failure, and harm to one’s family and friends when successfully accomplished.[2]
“Serving the system” is usually more subtle, however. This can be seen – from the CF perspective – in several of our social systems today. In the healthcare system, both providers and patients are constantly required to deal with layer upon layer of bureaucratic morass that requires enormous amounts of time and effort for little or no benefit. In this situation, the system is gorging on inputs from its members to grow increasingly in size and appetite, providing a benefit basket in return that seems to get more and more stingy over time.
One experiences the same kind of trend with many other systems. Government taxation continues to increase for a large percentage of the population who feel they are getting less and less benefits in return for their contributions to the system, yet government continues to grow in size and scope of social activities impacted by its control.[3] In the US, and in Western Europe as well, one does not see its citizens running and escaping from the country, as in North Korea. In fact, the opposite happens here, with folks from all over the globe risking their lives and leaving most everything behind in a struggle to gain entry to these countries. What does one learn from this? That social systems can both provide and demand benefits from their populations, and it comes down to the measurement of the net benefit flow to understand at what point and exactly where individuals will abandon the system, either because they are being asked for too much input into the system, or there is some lack of benefits that they can find outside of the system on more favorable terms.
[1] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/compost-05112021142617.html
[2] https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/learn-nk-challenges
[3] https://fee.org/articles/the-growth-of-government-in-america/