May proponents of Catalyst assume thatCatalyst as a DAO will thrive enhanced, but this is arguably not the case; they are making a mistake by proposing decentralisation as an orthodox, immutable belief; it has been proven to fail in other experiments that have neglected social sciences in their calculations. Decentralisation in decentralised technologies is not a desirable feature per se. Let me explain…
There is a belief that everything should be decentralised in a decentralised ecosystem; this is precisely the failure of blockchains such as Ethereum. Given that Ethereum is built over the axiom that absolute decentralisation is “good”, Ethereum have a chaotic agreement system for scalability; in other words, this is what Charles Hoskinson pinpointed at the Ethereum creation against the belief of Vitalik, it is also a denominated core solution for which Cardano was created: Governance.
I can see that many Cardano members praise absolute decentralisation, but they forget that going against such an orthodox view was the motto for creating Cardano.
To prove that decentralisation is not always desirable in governance, we can use the categorical imperative of Kant, but it may take another article to explain it properly. In short, Kantian logic is one of the apolitical milestones of pure philosophy, concluding that there is no moral value that will always be sustained as “good” when applied forever in every situation. Then, when is it convenient to centralise and when does it become an obstacle for “progress”?
To harness the power of decentralisation and avoid its messiness for the Catalyst Project, my research attempts to advance a small branch of social sciences on governance by praxis. Fundamentally, this will be done by studying Hannah Arendt's denominated ‘Council System’. Arendt was the first renowned female German philosopher, and her advancements in politics and philosophy were subjects of great debates at the time. Perhaps she ideated an implementation of the council system of governance in which peace between Israel and Palestine would be sustainable, but it was never implemented because this signifies giving power to the people while taking it away from the elites. The council system in the Israel/Palestine conflict is not in consideration for the elites.
But why should the council system be considered in Catalyst? Neither Catalyst nor even Cardano is a nation-state, which means that it has no land to defend or conception of who is a citizen. It makes catalysts function under a totally different nature in comparison to a nation-state to which the theory of the council system can be applied.
The system is based on historical research, similar to the work of Michael Foucault. Hannah Arendt's historical analysis finds that the nature of every single political system started when its members were empowered the most, as it happened in the revolutions where people met to make decisions over the land that they inhabited. Posteriorly, bureaucratisation took place, creating political parties, politburos, and dictators.
Nonetheless, I don’t intend to extend the science literature but to create a proposal for the application of political sciences over the conundrums of governance. It intends to correct the failures and structural mistakes of conventional democracy. Plainly, applying all that body of theoretical knowledge because philosophers usually think too much and do little.
Yet the council system is not created by the outcome of the research; it is in itself crafted by its members. Its core structure is what I intend to define as the spark that starts a machine. It must have the discovered-proposed amendments to conventional democracy achieving self-renovation, open and permanent political participation, political freedom, regional autonomy, assuring rights such as the right to learn, to forgive, to participate, to review its own history, etc. It is like democracy on steroids, it avoids the creation of power clusters, meaning that elites do not have an incentive to incorporate the system because, structurally, the system does not work to sustain them.
How much of this ‘political heaven’ can be achieved? There is no simple answer; my thesis is that since dictatorship can achieve a balance on the monopoly of power and this balance comes to be a pragmatic structural governance, then, a system of governance of decentralised power can be achieved if we take the architectonic tools of governance to foundationally set corrective dynamics that will keep the system decentralised. This is to create a kind of “equation” for its core structure that does not tell the people what to do, but instead, the structure will secure whatever the people want to do out of a decentralised Catalyst having great opportunities to correct itself when power clusters start to appear.
Such an equation requires the study of a significant amount of theory on governance that will include feedback mechanisms or structural loop/reinforcement dynamics that will keep a healthy, strong system of decentralised governance while the users are empowered politically at any time. This is different from conventional democracy in many ways; for instance, in contemporary democracy, political power is given just on the day of elections, while the individual stays four years without a chance to participate in the system unless they are a politician. On the contrary, the council system attempts to keep the individuals empowered to participate and gain more and more experience in this craft with warranties to always participate and improve themselves as well as the system.
It sounds kind of logical and even straightforwardly easy, but in practice, it is complex because as Catalyst grows and membership increases, whether the council system is implemented or the current body that makes Catalyst possible keeps running Catalyst. It naturally tends to be bureaucratised according to social sciences. This is normal. Bureaucracy is created and built up as the implemented solutions for recurrent standard events that generate a series of procedures addressing these issues intentionally for better productivity. It is to keep order and continue to achieve productiveness using protocols, but most importantly, this natural bureaucratisation always tends to grow in governance systems to a point where the bureaucratic procedures change the nature or purpose of the system itself.
Remember the Kantian postulate? Well, it happens that bureaucracy assumes categorically that a procedure is standard in order to have the best outcome, and as these procedures are built up over previous ones, it is assumed that these always will work for the best, and logically, as demonstrated by Kant, these axioms tend, to malfunction because these are moral assumptions about what is “good” or “bad” for the system, and as rigorously demonstrated by Kant, the moral assumptions that intent maximising utility have the pretension of universality and logically there no moral value that can be always be applied for “good” or “bad” universally.
Here, my thesis is important because it requires finding the retro-feedback system in which centralisation and decentralisation are applied within the system as checks of balance and power to keep the system decentralised forever. This includes the future dissolution of the initial findings, axioms or constitutional building blocks that I will propose myself, perhaps, in the cases in which the system grows so much or changes its nature, similar to a singularity of governance that could occur if Cardano buys land as nation, or it starts to audit electoral votes in a democracy.
This may sound crazy, but if you pay attention to the development of catalyst, its participation, as well as the monetary value of funding, both keep growing exponentially. This signals that Catalyst may invest billions of dollars in the community in the near future. This is bigger than the GPD of some countries, and such magnitudes pose a great challenge for governance that becomes harder as more funding, participants, and bureaucratisation are added to the system. Such amounts of funding could create similar entity systems such as banks or corporations, some not seen so far, such as mega-DAOs having millions of participants.
This was my main motivation for proposing this research because it is clear that, so far, there is not a single governance system similar to a DAO that has been mostly successful, and this includes Catalyst. Contemporary news outlets are filled with articles of failed DAOs that represent millions, if not billions, of dollars wasted. Yet, Catalyst is like a spark of hope for many other models, as it is Cardano. These are setting the standard, and these standards come from the rejoice that Cardano takes decisions based on solid foundational knowledge as it is the peer review protocol.