We need to fix society before fixing government. A government that dictates society is tyranny and oppression. Government is a reflection of the desires of a society.
Today our society is broken. One could say even mad. Is it any wonder that our governments are also broken and mad?
I was having this conversation with a buddy of mine. He disagreed. His example was feeding kids in school. Studies show that well fed kids perform much better in school.
My counter argument is why aren’t parents feeding their kids?
We had a short discussion about the many reasons for this. The discussion was short because we both were of the same mind as to the many causes.
We then moved onto why government needs to feed kids, mostly centered around individuals don’t have the resources. You can’t hold enough bake sales.
Irreni implements both a top-down and a bottom-up approach to fixing society as we fix government. As we fix society we then update government to reflect that fix, then rinse and repeat.
This discussion reminded me of my coursework in college on how to design software. Is bottom-up a better approach or top-down, where citizen direct action is bottom up and government is top down? In software there are studies that have shown that iterations of top-down and bottom-up yields the best results. The top is responsible for design and requirements. The bottom is responsible for implementation. Too much top-down yields micro-management and infeasible implementation. Too much bottom-up yields to missing requirements and subsequent rework.
My buddy and I are both software engineers. The efficacy of top-down, bottom-up iteration is a proven approach for both of us.
The reason this iteration approach doesn’t work with representative government is government doesn’t hold the requirements. The founders viewed “requirements” as monarchy, or tyranny. The founders of the US hit upon an approach to have a minimal set of top-level requirements and leave the rest to State, local, and individual requirements. This minimal approach is a hands-off approach. The US government in 2025 being too hands-on is a fundamental tenet of conservative politics.
SNAP and school lunches is caught in a tug-of-war of feeding kids for education efficacy and government overreach.The US government is caught in a perpetual trap of liberals implementing large scale social programs and conservatives tearing them down. Who is right here?
To answer this question we need a little research. When I first started working on Irreni I started with two threads. One thread was reading the Early American History around the Revolutionary War. The switch from monarchy to representative government was a world shift. The other thread was the break down of the American family. We don’t talk about this break-down much today because, alas, this break-down has become the norm. But back then there were publications in newspapers and magazines about “latch-key” kids, shopping malls, and other social factors eroding the family unit. By the late 80s and early 90s it was understood that bad parenting was the root cause for kids doing worse in school. Further, attempts to have the State fill the gaps that parents leave behind were mostly ineffective. The question of how to address parenting was still an active topic.
No more.
Arguably SNAP, Medicaid and other government programs are better than doing nothing at all in the face of absent parenting. Conservatives just want to abandon kids altogether. Conservatives live in some pipe-dream, Utopia that Christian Nationalism will fix all of social problems without a shred of evidence to support those claims.
A weak government solution is still better then abandoning all effort. I think those of us who consider conservatives enemies would be less inclined to do so if they first solved the problems the weak solutions address before dismantling those government programs. Instead, conservatives just cancel SNAP and Medicaid then gloat about it. Enemies.
What is the right approach to solving the absent parenting problem? My buddy and I agreed on this: it’s complicated. Single parent households make up some 50% of households. Further in the 80s under Reagan the economy shifted to requiring both parents work full-time jobs just to make ends meet. This then cemented the absent-parenting problem either for a single-parent family or a two-parent family: parenting is absent.
I remember in the 90s reading an article about the adoption of the microwave oven. One anthropologist wrote that this was the final nail in the absent parenting, family coffin. Prior to microwaves families were still having nightly meals. Parents told stories and shared the values with their children at dinner. After the microwave was widely adopted in the 90s this family meal disappeared.
The conservative solution is Christian Nationalism: women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Enemies.
Why aren’t State governments stepping up and feeding kids? This is one area I’m somewhat sympathetic with conservatives. State powers are neutered because of strings attached to Federal money. However, as was correctly diagnosed in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, our root cause of children increasingly doing worse in school is absent parenting. State solutions are weak tea.
Top-down or bottom-up? We do need both. We need the studies that only large government can run that tell us, in fact, children need to eat properly for school. This is a top-level requirement. However, government created this problem in the first place by not adjusting society to single-parent families and further destroying families by requiring dual-income families.
Social design is not software design. First, society is constantly evolving as with gay marriage. Software requirements do evolve and the top-down, bottom-up approach takes this into account. Something we call the Agile process today. However, software is designed in silos. Companies don’t need to account for the social impacts of their software’s success. Social media is a perfect example of unleashing a Kraken without regard to larger social impacts.
Society, on the other hand, does need to always consider the broader implications of even small changes. Reagan’s approach to solving the recession in the early 80s had a side-effect that led to dual-income families rather than increasing single-income family wages.
Irreni takes a bottom-up approach initially that quickly scales to both top-down and bottom-up. This approach is designed to manage free-will.
Free-will is an abstract concept that we should be able to do whatever we want, unfettered. As animals we lack the ability to implement free-will due to limitations imposed on our brains. Our choices are limited due to our biology. However, where you may lack freedom to chose in one area, someone else may well be able to make that choice. This means society when orchestrated correctly can optimize freedom for everyone where the sum total of available choices approaches a maximal limit.
For example, I had a conversation with a bigot once who admitted the unfairness and cruelty of their bigotry The bigot admitted that while they were raised as a child to be the bigot they were and felt compelled and justified in still being one, on the other hand they didn’t act on it. They didn’t vote their bigotry and tried to limit other actions.
Self-imposed censoring is one way to expand overall free-will of society. We need better though as is obvious in our culture in 2025.
Irreni optimizes freedom choice availability with a bottom-up design approach initially.
Irreni is a mesh society. There is only horizontal society growth, no hierarchy. First Irreni is comprised of mesh nodes known has micro-governing organizations (MGOs). These MGOs are fixed in size with thirty people. This design is easy to think about as spaceship politics.
Imagine a spaceship on a hundreds year long journey. The people on the ship are a closed society that shares all responsibilities. They share all responsibilities, including parenting. MGOs are designed as survival organizations. They must have one years supply of survival needs on hand at all times. This will require shared responsibilities far beyond just parenting.
Survival is not enough. We all want quality of life. This is where the top-down comes in. Mesh society implements large, group-effort social benefits with projects. Projects are made up by two-or-more MGOs using a contract. This contract distributes goods and services using barter: terms of the contracting stating the distribution.
Today representative government weakly scales free-will with a local, State and Federal government distributed design. This design has failed today with the Federal government suppressing local and State government will using strings attached to funding.
Mesh society has as many projects of any size always in play. This optimizes our social ability to make choices beyond oue natural limitations. Further, contracts for projects are limited to one-to-fire year duration. When the contract expires then the contract gets revised if needed and renewed.
How would Irreni address feeding kids for school? That is done at the MGO level. MGOs always have a years supply of food on hand. The supply is replenished on an ongoing basis by participating in projects.
All MGOs must first participate in project zero, project management. That contract provides replenishment of the years supply of survival needs in exchange for undergoing management.
The choice of other projects is up to the MGO. They can choose only small projects or some mix of small, medium, and large.
Project contracts only lasting 1-5 years means that MGOs can withdraw from contracts relatively quickly. Large scale projects trying to build large social consensus can expect the most frequent amount of MGOs abandoning them.
Irreni focuses on fixing society first by implementing MGOs first. However, survival will quickly be seen as insufficient and MGOs will need to start joining projects. Projects are managed by project zero, which you can read about in The Economy, Complexity and other research articles available via the Irreni Research page.
MGOs are the bottom-up. Projects are the top-down. The balance of top-down versus bottom up is granular compared to the local, State and Federal government approach of representative government. It is therefore more robust and flexible, able to meet the rapid changing needs of high-tech society as ever more tech is introduced.
Parenting is first a shared responsibility of the MGO. Then projects.
Shouldn’t parenting first be a responsibility of the parents? No.
You know how people lament that there isn’t a manual for parenting kids? Yes there is. There are tons of books. I could probably write one given the amount of research I’ve done. No parent should be at a disadvantage raising their kids because they themselves don’t have the capability to read parenting manuals. The MGO collectively will have such capability. Further, each MGO is required to have a house AI. The house AI is the library of all known information and the initial general application of that knowledge based upon MGO requirements. The MGO group of people plus AI provides the best “manual” for raising a child.
Finally, project management requires monitoring everyone in an MGO. Irreni is an empirical government, not an ideological one. MGOs must ensure its members are well cared for using standards taken from a broad spectrum of MGOs. If MGOs aren’t even feeding their kids then the MGO is subject to the one sovereign power project management has over MGOs: membership. Project management can swap out members, including the entire MGO if warranted due to mistreatment of members.