When a critical mass was achieved, the settlers negotiated with the original owners of the land and dissuaded them from reclaiming it. Settlers also organized to invade state-owned land. They held meetings and persuaded others to join them. They distributed lots and got engineers to design homes and public buildings. They delegated responsibility for law and order. They then invaded the land at a pre-arranged time with all they needed to start construction.
They built not only buildings, but extra-legal systems that lent increasing stability to their activities on the expropriated land. Informal organizations provided security, infrastructure—roads, sewers, and water—lot registration, and an extra-legal justice system for disputes and criminal offenses. Networks of cooperation grew between the informal system and legal property owners, vendors, construction companies, etc., which easily subverted government regulations and laws.
A system that does not permit the lawful development of land is vulnerable to the actions of the informals. Informal commerce began with vendors marking off sections of streets for a place to sell their wares. Street markets were born. They then took over whole streets and eventually built their own shopping centers. Privately run transportation systems began with the purchases of trucks, and then added minibuses and whole fleets of full-sized buses. Routes were developed ad hoc as the informals created new neighborhoods. These routes became well established, signs were put up, and streets were paved.
The informals have recently made major inroads on the legal economy. They’ve produced a huge amount of wealth, including 95% of Lima’s transportation, 80% of its clothing, and 60% of its furniture. 439,000 people are employed in the informal economy. They spend 47 times more than the state on housing. They operate 83% of the markets, and spend more than $1 billion on vehicles and maintenance.
The informals are reshaping Peru in an unpremeditated, unplanned way, just as earlier “informals” reshaped feudal Europe centuries ago. They’ve rediscovered the value of spontaneous cooperation, more commonly known as freedom.
The Organized Society
How can we, with our differing views on what ought to be, agree on what will be? We build up processes that, as Novak put it, “…preserve the sphere of the person inviolable,” while permitting the process of debate and consensus necessary for change to take place. In a word: politics.
James Madison explores aspects of self-organization in political systems in the essays he contributed to “The Federalist Papers.” Writing as “Publius” in 1787 and 1788, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, he tried to convince Americans to support the ratification of the proposed Constitution. But his essays transcended that task. They include some of the most carefully reasoned arguments for a democratic society ever written.
Madison argued that the Constitution would allow Americans to build the world’s first large republic. The republic’s very size would provide shelter for human liberty. As the republic gains population and territory, factions proliferate and check one another. Minorities diversify. Majorities become unstable. Tyranny is avoided.
The large republic becomes a society filled with free-flowing factions that communicate readily with one another. Coalitions shift periodically, allowing earlier political judgments to be reviewed. The system becomes self-correcting and self-regulating, and achieves a certain measure of insulation from disruption as it learns to anticipate and forestall trouble.
But, there are difficulties inherent in large republics. The government is remote; the bureaucracy is unwieldy. So, the framers of the Constitution sought to transcend the problems of earlier forms of government by providing America with a new structure, a confederate republic, known today as federalism. A federal republic is not a centralized nation-state, nor is it a decentralized confederacy. It is something in between. It maintains a system of dual sovereignty for the states and the nation.
Federalism established the world’s first non-colonial expansion policy by instituting procedures for the addition of new states, equal to the old, not subservient colonies. The large republic positioned itself to become much larger.
To further weaken any tendency toward tyranny, the framers provided the Constitution with checks and balances between and within the three branches of government, effectively spreading out the political decision-making process. This forced America to create a much more widespread communications network in order to allow the political process to work.
Political conventions and parties grew, interest groups formed, the press grew phenomenally as it reported on and questioned many activities in the young Republic. As new methods of transportation and communications were invented, Americans put them to work, and again the political process expanded. Today, we enjoy unparalleled freedom as we participate in dense networks of relationships and build mediating institutions that change at the speed of light.
But even with our fantastic technology, the potential and limitations of the people who painted the cave walls at Lascaux remain with us. Michael Novak insists that the most profound meaning of a free and open society lies in this most basic of biological facts: Human beings, even when we are closest to one another, are alone. Each brain, each mind, is walled off from all others by its physical separateness. We have but one recourse: We must accept one another as “originating agencies of insight and choice” whose decisions must be taken seriously. We must value our lives, honor our differences, and try to shape our society so that it reflects these values at its very core.