Kill la Kill: cybernetics for kids or how the layers of a viable social system are interconnected through the limbic systems of their participants

Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time, they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be.
- John Gray

The blind watchmaker named Evolution carves her creations in tight accordance with the principles woven into the very foundations of this world. She is a very harsh mistress who does not forgive mistakes. People believe that they can create things much better that she does only with a kind heart and pure intentions. But again and again, they break their nails in the futile attempts to build a Utopia. It takes some knowledge about how this world is arranged to understand what is in principle possible to build in it. It turns out, that the pure intentions are only a part of the picture, that will crumble if only these intentions are what is left in it. What is the remaining part? Surprisingly, Kill la Kill - a grotesque animation TV-show - may shed some light on this.

Introduction


[ep. 8] Rinne-Do Junior High School implements a poorly-built social system. It is mired in corruption and chaos. At the image above a group of students driven by their animal impulses forces an another student to jump off the roof using high social status of their patents to cover the incident.

Ira Gamagoori, the Student Council President. He is fond of order and discipline but isn't able to change anything, because he is the only such person in the entire school.

[ep. 9] A freshman Satsuki Kiryuin knows a way how to transform the academy into a viable social system. She intends to test the social model which may then even be able to conquer the world. In the context of the story, Kiryuin's surname probably has a connotation of spring or purity. In the contrast, her name (Satsuki) literally means "May", but it uses the kanji that may mean "a swamp". She considers the students of the academy preoccupied solely by their own interests, which is the primary source of corruption. Satsuki thinks that a strict autocracy is necessary to make people to take system's and each other interests into the account.

Satsuki offers Ira to become her right hand man, but Ira resists her offer at first in hope to put Satsuki down and prevent her plan. Although, being defeated by her, Ira becomes the first member of Satsuki's team. The disproportion in sizes of the characters in the image above must be an artistic device which is used by painters since the Renaissance and indicates the relative position of a character in a given scene (Ira is the most senior student in the school at the time).

[ep. 15] Satsuki's psychedelic top officers (The Elite Four) comprise the second layer in the chain of responsibility at the hierarchy of power after Satsuki herself (who takes the role of the chief warlord). They represent all the necessary components of a viable social system, such as law enforcement, feedback analysis, tactical planning and... close air support. All, including Satsuki herself, are wearing the life-fiber uniform which gives them super-human abilities.

[ep. 10] Ryuko Matoi is a master of the red scissor blade who is blinded by rage and desperately trying to avenge her father. The name Ryuko may bear a connotation of a daughter of a dragon, although, it uses the kanji which may literally mean "a flow". She wears a 100% life-fiber uniform named Senketsu which feeds on Ryuko's blood, has its own mind and also gives her superhuman abilities.

[ep. 4] Similar semi-alive clothing with the lesser amount of life-fiber is used by Kiryuin's family as the backbone element of (now) Honnouji (which literally means "an instinct") academy bureaucracy. But not in the sense of "the body of non-elective governmental officials", because in Kiryuin's system bureaucracy is selected and disciplined along with the rest of population through the tournaments of "natural elections" in the best traditions of social Darwinism. An official with a higher rank has the greater amount of life-fiber in the clothing.

[ep. 5] The authors put a great emphasis on food. This can not be made just accidentally, as the next section suggests.

[ep. 15] The Nudist Beach organization: an ideological opponents of the life-fiber clothing produced by Kiryuin family at the Revocs Corporation. They consider the clothing (the crucial instrument of power), an extraterrestrial life-form which has a parasitic nature, resides at the top of the food chain, feeds on humans and subjugate them. They intend to destroy Kiryuin's fiber manufacture using Ryuko's abilities.

Viable systems


This is not just a catchy phrase. The term "viable system", a system that is able to survive in a constantly and unpredictably changing environment, is coined by Stafford Beer, a prominent cybernetic theorist who developed the viable system model for economical applications (as a structure of a firm) at 1960-70s. Although cybernetics has decayed into several specialized subdisciplines, Beer's works are essentially fundamental and will always be actual.

The Limbic System


The limbic system is a part of the human brain which is responsible for basic instincts and emotions such as fear, pain, pleasure or reward. In Beer's theory, a system should utilize the equivalent of the limbic systems of its subsystems (as a kind of an actuator/sensor) to avoid micromanagement of the areas at which only the subsystems have a specialization. This allows to optimally utilize limited information-processing capacities of all elements comprising the system. As we will see below, such processing is the key factor that determines the only possible shape that any viable system should take.

The success of Kiryuin's rule


Satsuki has managed to build a truly viable system that is not so easy to destroy. Moreover, she schemed a successful plot against the Nudist Beach organization. During the school raid trip, Satsuki's team has overthrown regimes in the three other schools backed by anti-fiber rebels. After accomplishing that, she had finally succeeded by destroying almost the entire Nudist Beach. Probably, the reasons which have led to the fall of the other regimes allow to understand why Satsuki's system is viable, and why the others are not.

[ep. 14] Kami-Kobe High School looks like a plain military corporation, but it has failed because of the reliance on plain brute force without any coordination.

The social system of Abekamo Academy uses religion and mysticism for organization, although it has failed against Kiryuin's team backup plan, because Abekamo Academy had no backup plans at all.

[ep. 15] Naniwa Kinman High School is organized due to loyalty based on money, it even uses money as a weapon. But no one from the academy except its leader wishes to fight Kiryuin from an explicitly disadvantaged position, because money or reward alone do not provide any solidarity. Despite that the leader had a backup plan, he failed due to the lack of training and mastery.

Satsuki celebrates her victory with the sacramental phrase: "It's not the money that rules men. It's also fear." Her uniform bears frightening resemblance with the one of the dictator at the image below.

Joseph Stalin attends a military parade.

At the screen, we see that Kiryuin's system is successful and viable because it is well organized and disciplined. In accordance with Beer's theory, it also uses self-audit along with tactical and strategic coordination of its own actions. Its participants are trained and competent because Satsuki uses a kind of strict social "natural selection" to choose her elite without any doubts about human rights (a real-world dictatorship would just oppress anyone instead). Unfortunately, her system has a strictly sadistic and autocratic nature. This also may throw a shadow of doubt on the dreams of grassroots democrats or even Ayn Rand followers - could a social-Darwinist system be viable in principle?

As we will see below, this hundred-year-old cartoon suggests, that probably can, but only while the existing level of global warming would allow because rational actions are unprofitable at the free markets.

Adaptability


A viable system must adapt itself to the constantly changing environment, or it may be destroyed by the changes that it can not react to. To adapt its creations to an environment, Evolution uses the phenomenon of genetic mutations and amplifies the effect by packing different variants of genes in dominant and recessive alleles. Although, because these mechanisms are purely probabilistic and not rational, this may lead to a pointless competition (for example, a competition for the tree height at a sequoia forest) or evolutionary arms race.

A rational player bestowed with memory and cognitive abilities may implement heuristic algorithms to adapt to the environment. Such a system takes some strategy, which is chosen not arbitrarily but according to the conditions of the situation and remembers the result of its application to the environment. Then it changes the strategy and compares the result of the new strategy with the old one according to some criteria. By repeating this operation it creates a new strategy and stops after a certain amount of steps if it can not find a better strategy until the environment changes. However, a properly tuned viable system must produce a spontaneous strategy with some low probability to not to fall into the trap of overspecialization. To be able to make decisions about suitable strategies in a reasonable time, a system should obtain an adequate picture of the outer environment and of itself by processing information efficiently enough. How can it achieve that?


The problem of complexity and the shape of a viable system


At episode 8 you might have noticed that a system comprised of a large amount of relatively unconstrained entities may become quite chaotic being left for itself. Of course, this is not completely the case for a hive, ant colony or a military parade. In some specific situations, for example in the field of distributed computing, a decentralized system may be the primary answer to the complexity, but every such system has a couple of interesting features. The first is, that it takes some time for the control actions to propagate through the system, which puts a boundary on its reactivity. The second is that, because every element participates in the process of control, such a system needs to somehow solve the problem of its own consistency, so it puts severe restrictions on the abilities of its constituents. You know that worker ants do not reproduce. This puts a limit on system adaptability. Is there a better solution?

Every system engineer, as well as every Roman emperor, knows that the best solution to these problems is a hierarchy. But only system engineers know that hierarchy allows to reduce the complexity of the control process to the amount proportional to the logarithm of the number of the elements. For example, to search for a soldier in a Roman legion of 65535 (216) solders, organized as a balanced and sorted binary tree, you need to perform roughly 16 actions instead of 65535 in the worst case. So, the controlling organ should build a set of hierarchies to solve the problem of complexity in the different aspects of the decision-making process. This grants freedom of the control to most of the system elements and lifts the restrictions on their circumstances.

Kiryuin's system implements a five-layer hierarchy. The bureaucracy, represented by decision-makers and law-enforces, wear the star-ranked life-fiber uniform which enhances their abilities according to the amount of the stars. Kiryuin applies a severe social selection procedure to the entire social system to keep the bureaucracy competent.


Satsuki Kiryuin (100% life-fiber uniform)
|
Student Council (The Elite Four, *** uniform)
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Club Presidents (** uniform)
|
Club Members (* uniform)
|
Other Students (casual uniform)


Feedback and control


The essential control process implies that the controller constantly monitors the system output, and if the output exceeds a certain threshold, the controller makes corrections in the system input to stabilize it.


Satsuki monitors the situation at the LCD-table. The obsolete monochrome LCD-technology and the design of the table resemble the artifacts in the control room of the Cybersin system - the application of Beer's ideas to Allende's Chilean command economy.
To free ourselves from the process of control we delegate it to some person or entity which (ideally) should become an embodiment of the interests of the system as a whole and can perform the task of coordination, playing the role of a brain of the system.


 Being free of control, Ryuko is able to find time for something else.

But to be stable enough, the system should obtain a precise enough knowledge about its circumstances, so the capacity of feedback [or actuator] hierarchies - the nerves of the system - should be an adequate answer to the complexity. Because the complexity level may change, a hierarchy should be able to figure out when it needs to shrink or grow by observing changes in its own throughput, which may be quite uneasy by various reasons when humans are involved. Human involvement introduces yet another couple of unpleasant hindrances: the problem of intelligible feedback and decision errors.

If you participate in a hierarchy, you may delegate some work to its lower levels to solve the problem of complexity in a recursive manner. If the lower levels are comprised of specialists or expert systems, they may create a very complex strategy that you would never be able to comprehend (this problem takes the fundamental nature in the case of the expert systems). Moreover, different levels may have different specializations, and there may be a situation when the levels aren't able to communicate with each other. For example, a scriptwriter, a director, and a producer may use different languages of ideas, aesthetics, and profitability to speak about their work and use different criteria for its evaluation.
    Level 1/Language 1         [S1]
                               / \ 
    Level 2/Language 2       [S2][S3]
                             / \   \
    Level 3/Language 3     [S4][S5][S6]
There are two obvious ways to solve this problem: you may say that the strategy is good or wrong according to your criteria and the better one is still necessary, or you may do the work by yourself instead. The first one trains the underlying system to work in the domain of the language of your level. This process may be cumbersome and resembles the training of a dog: you must call to her limbic system using scolding or sugar because the dog does not understand your words. Stafford Beer calls such an approach "algedonic". Although algedonic input is binary (with the two "good" and "wrong" values), it allows to gradually find a direction to a good strategy, because its user remembers the quality of strategies, offered by the underlying level. By reading all the above, you may be horrified by the amount of systemic memory and estimation abilities of a regular democratic electoral decision making procedure.

And how do you minimize the appearance of decision errors? Stafford Beer offers an ingenious solution. The decision-maker must use the knowledge and experience of some portion of the underlying control hierarchy by communicating with them and taking their opinion into the account, so the hierarchy is transformed into a network for some time. But as the millennia of human history suggest, because of a well-known social phenomenon the decision-makers tend to rot from within, by losing contact with the reality instead.

Where is the holy grail of the eternal Utopia? 


It appears that you only have a choice between the two types of suffering: the chaos of a completely unrestricted zoo-like social system and the sadistic pressure of a brutal dictatorship. It is obvious, that the best possible variant is some kind of mysterious golden balance between them, where the blessed benevolent ruler does not breed bureaucracy to suppress citizens' every impulse, and fairly civil citizens are not submerged in the constant tribal warfare but respect reasonable social norms. So, proper social norms seem to be the only humanistic solution.
There is an interesting question in the context of all the above: what may make dictatorships to stop to reproduce themselves, and can this process be democratic? What a scaffolding you need to build around the society to direct the vectors of the selectional pressure in such a way, that the controlling organ will attract only followers of Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela with a degree in system science? Surely, you would get a Fields medal, the Medal of Technology, three Nobel prizes and an Oscar if you would be able to solve this problem.

 See also

 

 42: how a theory that adequately describes reality may look like

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