part 21

200 The governor of a steam engine took its name from the fact that it governs the engine as a government governs a country. A government in a free country is a group of men and women to whom the people give the power to govern them. In free countries there is government of the people, by the people, for the good of the people. The government is the instrument by which the country controls itself. In a free country the people can change the government: they can take the power away from one group and give it to another. And there is a limit to the powers that any government is given or can take.

201 In a free country the men and women in the government are dependent upon the people and responsible to them for the use made of the power which has been given them. In any good system of government, there must be ways of controlling and limiting the amount of power anyone has, as the flyball governor controls and limits the output of the steam engine. One of the chief controls over the power of a government is the law of a country. The law is a body of statements about what may be done to or by any person. In free countries all people are equal under the law which they are responsible for keeping. To help them to keep it there are police and judges.

202 Our bodies govern themselves in many ways (pp. 87–91, 115) but we have to control them consciously too. We have to be their judges and police, when necessary. But in a well governed country there is little work for police and judges. A good education develops the power of people to govern themselves in more and more complex ways. As population increases and as people become more responsible for meeting their needs on a larger and larger scale, machines become more important. As the facts become more complex, machines (computers) are being used more and more to do all sorts of measuring, counting and controlling. Can machines think? In a sense, yes. In another sense, no. They can answer a question if we have built into them the power to answer that sort of question.

203 We can make machines work for us, but machines cannot tell us what that work should be. It is people who are responsible for the direction of the work. A person has to know not only how to do things but whether to do them and when. A machine has only to do what it is made to do. Free men and women have to make up their own minds about all important questions. How does one learn to do this? By being with, talking to and watching others who are able to think for themselves one may see how to think for oneself. One gets better at it by trying. Education in this cannot start too early.

204 How do people come by their ideas about what is better and what is worse, about what things are important in life, what unimportant? How do they judge between things? We have grown to what we are out of the past. We have come a very long way through change and growth from the first living cells. All living things, however simple, control themselves to some degree. Many cannot be said to have ideas but they have direction. Within limits they have self-control.

205 Thinking is the most complex sort of self-control; and our brains, with which we think, are the most complex systems of feed-back. The thermostat and the flyball governor are about the simplest of them. In feed-back systems, effects control their causes. In the thermostat feedback circle the effect of increased input of fuel is increased output of heat. This effect feeds back, through the thermostat, and cuts down the input of fuel when the increase becomes too great. In the flyball governor circle the effect of more steam is more output of work from the engine. This effect feeds back, through the governor, and cuts down the steam when the engine goes too fast. In the brain millions of feed-back circles are always controlling one another.