WHAT IS KYBERNOLOGY? (Part III)

WHAT IS KYBERNOLOGY?

3

COMMUNITY, NOT THE STATE

At The First Instant, Observations Focused On Community,

Not The State, As The Object Materia Of The Study.

I understand that every community is a cultural entity. It begins with families. The community is driven by three movers or subcultures. The first one is economic. We call this economic subculture (ESC). ESC is the fundamental culture of human being. Its main functions are to preserves and creates values. Basic needs of people that must be fulfilled to make human life sustainable, consist of various kinds of values

Values needed are products of exploitation, elaboration, reconstruction, and development of natural, human, and virtual resources. Of course, there is a natural mechanism to run the value systems and processes called the rule of the market, but now and then the haves groups are still dominant over those have-nots, so the rule is hard to enforce.  

The ESC itself brings injustice since the value gained depends on the amount of resources possessed. The great the amount of resources owned, the higher is the value gained. The rich will be going on richer and richer while the poor become poorer and poorer. To overcome these ever-wider discrepancies and anticipate its negative impacts, people posses another subculture called power subculture (PSC). The actor of the PSC is the government (Ind. pemerintah). PSC responsible for controlling the ownership and exploitation of resources, serving the customers, and adjusting value distributions among people. To make the PSC capable to function, for example to keep peace, enforce rule and implementing the law, some special values charged into it. They are authority, force, coercion, violence, and sometimes it can punish by death sentence. Being charged with those values, the actor of PSC can arbitrarily do what Lord Acton once said “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The building of PSC is going through political process, called election. Out of the election process, rise up two parties the paid and the payer. The elector pays with his or her vote (vox populi), so the candidate (the paid) get power to govern. Based on this transaction, the payer  becomes a customer. Why elector elects the candidate? Not because the candidate has shown good performance on the position which fought for, but because the candidate promises something in the future. Here again rise two parties: the promisee  and the promisor (promiser). The promisor promises something needed by the promisee to do when the candidate has been elected. In this case, as said above, the promisee becomes costumer. How if the customer has no capability to gain the thing promised? He or she will be victimized. He or she becomes victim of the promisor’s incapability. Without an effort for rescuing, the victim becomes prey for predators. That is why community pays strong attention in to control the building of PSC upward, and to control its actions overtime downward.

So far, the analysis shows that community gets various qualities, namely payer, promisee, customer, victim, and prey. Those complex of qualities is called social subculture (SSC). How the community or the SSC controls the PSC upstream and downstream? It controls the PSC upstream (upward) with its political quality called constituent, by constitutes the future of their own: making laws, policies, and plans development programs for progress. Then, the SSC controls the PSC downstream by monitoring and evaluating the value distribution among people, and ask the PSC for responsibility. These processes resulting in day-by-day political culture of the nation and the political attitude of the people toward next election. Analogizing a soccer

competition, the role of each subculture of the community, seems subsequently like  players, referee (judges), and the ticket payers---the viewers. Figure 2 shows how every subculture interacts one to each other. Let us define the interaction between

subcultures as governance (Ind. pemerintahan).

If the governance succeeded in delivering such performance, notably the sustainable increasing of the level of life of the whole people, as ECOSOC of the United Nations declared in 1956, “to improve the economic, social and cultural conditions of communities, to integrate those communities  into the life of the nation, and to enable them to contribute fully to national progress,” then we say, the governance is good, the community lives in the state of good governance. Otherwise, bad governance.

The question now is, how to make the interactions of subcultures capable of producing good performance? There are five conditions to take into account or conditio sine qua non, namely:

1.      Conformity, which is the degree of time and direction precision and synchronization of the three subcultures aiming at the common and committed goal, so the success of one subculture doesn’t destroy by the performance of the other. In another words, we say it coordination. The more independent the relations between subcultures, the more the coordination important
2.  Balance, that is the degree of bargaining power of one subculture in relation to  the other,  so each subculture gets equal opportunity and ability to bargains,   that resulting in mutual consent and common commitment   
3. Harmony, that is the degree of compatibility of attitude and behavior between different subcultures, to create and maintain maximum organizational or   national achievement, by the controlling of or adjust to the least “out of tune,”     discordant or indecent of behavior between parties as early as possible  
4.  Dynamics or motion, that is the degree of accuracy and acceleration of  adaptability to changes of the three subcultures, as to realize positive fluent  community movement from state of homeostasis to heterostasis and vice versa, and to make a progress of one subculture resulting in a progress of the others
5       Sustainability, which is the degree of self-propelling growth and development of  the community on a long term basis. 

In line with the above analysis, the object of study of Kybernology is governance rather than government.