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POSIWID comes from Stafford Beer’s 1979 book, The Heart of Enterprise.
It stands for “the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.”
Determining the nature of a system is a subjective affair. The manager of the manufacturing company might have one explanation of a system’s purpose, but that isn’t necessarily reflective of any observable reality.
If we COMPLETELY IGNORE what the system’s designer or its owner or its defender or its proponent has to say and look at what the system ACTUALLY DOES, we can see the objective reality of that system.
OK, alright, you get the idea, but who cares about car parts suppliers? Let’s look at some more consequential systems.
Like the War on Terror. You know, the wars of aggression waged primarily in the Middle East in the name of 9/11.
What was the purpose of the War on Terror?
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
Thank you, Larken and Amanda, and thank you everyone for coming to this Approaching Humanity celebration today.
In case you don’t know me, I’m James Corbett of corbettreport.com and Amanda and Larken were kind enough to invite me here to join you today to discuss an important topic: POSIWID.
What? Never heard of POSIWID before? Then you haven’t been following The Corbett Report!
If you want to get caught up to speed on POSIWID, you can see Episode 499 of The Corbett Report podcast, “The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.”
But come with me and I’ll give you the long story short:
This is Stafford Beer.
Actually, to be more accurate, that’s Stafford Beer in full-on professional business manager mode.
This is what Stafford Beer looked like most of the time.
You could say he was a pretty … unconventional guy.
The bastion of truthiness (Wikipedia) describes him as a “British theorist, consultant and professor at Manchester Business School,” but that really only begins to scratch the surface of his esoteric explorations in the field of “management cybernetics.”
In fact, his involvement with Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile, complete with a Star Trek-inspired retro-futuristic command room for technocrats to oversee the Chilean economy in real time is probably worth an exploration in and of itself.
…But today we’re going to discuss something different: POSIWID.
POSIWID comes from Stafford Beer’s 1979 book, The Heart of Enterprise.
It stands for “the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.”
You see, as a researcher in cybernetics management, Beer was fundamentally interested in systems and how they work…or how they fail to work.
He gives the example of a time he was living in London and bought a luxury car…that promptly proceeded to fall apart piece by piece as soon as he drove it off the lot. First a door handle came off, then a windshield wiper, next the odometer gauge.
Despite all the servicing stations for this car having a mutual agreement to supply each other with spare parts, he was unable to get the last missing part before the next one broke off. And as a good systems engineer, Beer decided to take his complaint to the source:
I wrote to the managing director of the manufacturing company to point out that the System for spare-part provisioning did not work. He disagreed. He said that there was nothing the matter with the system. […] ‘I am of the opinion that our system is efficient and that it only fails to maintain availability, due to manufacturing conditions or outside deficiencies.’ […]
What is the nature, and what is the purpose, of a spare parts provisioning System—and what are its boundaries? And if we may know the purpose of a System by WHAT IT DOES, then what did this System actually do? From my point of view it was a System for not supplying spare parts. From the managing director’s point of view, it must have had a different purpose: minimizing the capital tied up in spare parts, perhaps. In any case, the nature of the System was certainly a subjective affair.
Beer’s observation is deceptively simple.
Determining the nature of a system is a subjective affair. The manager of the manufacturing company might have one explanation of a system’s purpose, but that isn’t necessarily reflective of any observable reality.
If we COMPLETELY IGNORE what the system’s designer or its owner or its defender or its proponent has to say and look at what the system ACTUALLY DOES, we can see the objective reality of that system.
OK, alright, you get the idea, but who cares about car parts suppliers? Let’s look at some more consequential systems.
Like the War on Terror. You know, the wars of aggression waged primarily in the Middle East in the name of 9/11.
What was the purpose of the War on Terror?
George W. Bush tried to define it by its supposed end goal:
BUSH: Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
SOURCE: Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People
…But let’s not take his word for it. Instead: POSIWID. The Purpose of a System is What it Does.
So, what did the war on terror actaully do?
It killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. It cost the US over $8 trillion. And it actually led to the rise of more violent and extreme terror groups.
So, the purpose of the war on terror was to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, transfer $8 trillion from US taxpayers to the military-industrial complex and increase violent terrorism.
The Purpose of a System is What it Does.
Or, let’s look at the War on Drugs.
Everyone remembers when Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971.
NIXON: America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.
SOURCE: President Nixon Declares Drug Abuse “Public Enemy Number One”
So, the purpose of the War on Drugs was to fight and defeat the enemy of drug abuse?
But what has the War on Drugs actually done?
It has incarcerated nearly one million people per year for drug offenses. It has cost an estimated one trillion dollars. And it has resulted in an increase in drug abuse.
Thus, the purpose of the system called “The War on Drugs” is to incarcerate a million people a year, divert a trillion dollars into the prison-industrial complex and increase drug abuse.
The Purpose of a System is What it Does
OK. One more example.
How about the War on Poverty?
JOHNSON: …and this Administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America. [Applause]
[…]
Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. [Applause]
SOURCE: President Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union address, 1/8/64. MP503
So the stated purpose of the war on poverty was to cure and prevent poverty.
But what has it actually done?
It has created a web of nearly 100 interrelated welfare programs, spread across 14 government departments and agencies, and nine budget functions that spend over a trillion dollars a year on various federal welfare programs.
The result of these programs is that there is a greater percentage of the American population living in poverty than there was when the war was launched.
So, the purpose of the war on poverty is to create a vast bureaucratic infrastructure, transfer a trillion dollars a year from taxpayers to bureaucrats, middlemen and welfare recipients and to keep a greater and greater percentage of the population dependent on those handouts.
The Purpose of a System is What it Does
Simple, right? And straightforward. It takes the guesswork and the subjectivity and the “but we had good intentions” out of the equation and it gets to the heart of the matter.
So, are you ready to try it yourself?
Alright, come with me.
So, let’s test:
What was the purpose of the American Revolution?
Did it lead to freedom, prosperity and happiness, as the founding fathers supposedly intended?
Or has it resulted in the creation of the largest, most deadly, most data-hungry, privacy-invading, technocratically empowered empire in the history of the world?
What was the purpose of MAGA?
Did it Make America Great Again?
Or has it resulted in an EVEN STUPIDER and MORE MEANINGLESS war in the Middle East on the behalf of Israel, the expansion of the technocratic surveillance state, the growth of the military-industrial-artificial-intelligence complex, increased government protection for Monsanto and Bayer in their poisoning of Americans and the world, the hard wiring of the stablecoin scam and the Polymarket scam into law, and the systematic cover-up of the Epstein network?
The Purpose of a System is What it Does.
What is the purpose of voting?
Is it to make the people’s voice heard, as the Hope and Changers believed when they voted for Obama in 2008 or the MAGA die hards believed when they voted for Trump in 2024 or the pacifists believed in 1916 when they voted for Wilson because “He Kept Us Out of War”?
Or is it to provide the populace of the state with the comforting idea that they have any control whatsoever over a system that is fundamentally made by and for oligarchs?
Finally, here’s the most important question of all, and I invite you to apply everything you’ve learned here today : What is the purpose of the state?
While you ponder that, I’m going to assert my freedom as an unbound individual and I’m going to start approaching humanity.
I hope you’ll join me soon.
James Corbett, corbettreport.com
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Nice hidden hand masonic gesture at 6:35-6:38. Anyone else clock that?
I like James Corbett - but after some thinking, I came to realize that every single ‘system’ will eventually go rotten.
If you time it right, you will judge the system once it entered its most decadent and corrupt phase and conclude that this was always the purpose of the said system, when clearly it wasn’t.
Everything follows a cycle - everything.
Human life, human ideas, nations, planets, galaxies - they all follow a cycle.
While some ideas/systems were always sold under false premises, others were subverted mid-way.
So my counter is: the system can always be corrupted and turned into something it was never meant to be. Every system.