Idea-Driven Systems

An idea driven system is organized around ideas and actions rather than around personalities, parties or group identities, and Marsh gives it a chapter of its own in Binding Chaos as one of the book's central proposals. The contrast is with personality driven systems, in which who is speaking determines whether a thing is heard. Her formulation for the difference is the body of laws against the judiciary, meaning that a rule assessed on its own terms is a different object from a rule interpreted by a person whose authority attaches to their office. The practical argument runs through what personality driven systems make possible. Character assassination becomes an effective way of attacking a message, which is why privacy matters so much in her account and why she says that until societies are governed by idea driven rather than personality driven systems, freedom of speech which masks the suppression of others' speech has to be recognized as such. Attaching credibility to sources rather than to content is also what allows official channels to be treated as trustworthy by default and marginalized voices to be dismissed regardless of content. Her own experience is the origin of the position rather than an illustration of it, since she found the movements with the widest success were action-based instead of personality-based, and began thinking of them as verbs instead of nouns.

Blind review in academic publishing and blind auditions in orchestras are established institutional attempts at the same principle, both with measurable effects on who gets selected. Rule of law doctrine expresses the laws against judiciary contrast in constitutional terms, and Habermas's ideal speech situation describes deliberation where only the force of the better argument counts. Anonymous and pseudonymous online cultures have practised it directly. Marsh's version is more thoroughgoing than any of these, since blind review removes the name from an assessment while leaving the structure otherwise intact, whereas she is proposing that systems of governance be built so that no authority attaches to a person in the first place.