D. M. MACKAY 
recourse to cybernetic jargon. From our present standpoint 
this is encouraging evidence that our more general approach may 
be on the right lines; but even the sample list above suggests that 
more may yet be done to integrate economic thinking with the 
general theory of self-regulating mechanisms. At the least, we 
might hope that this would bring a deeper understanding of 
the regulative process in the economy as a whole. It need 
hardly be added that in some cases the most direct solution 
suggested for our ills by general theory may have no demo- 
cratically acceptable embodiment! But this is a thought to 
which we must return. 
Although we have taken economic regulation as an example, 
it is evident that similar questions are raised by the general 
theory in relation to other social information-systems such as 
a large business organization, or political mechanisms for the 
self-government of society. Here in particular we must be on 
the lookout for instability caused by hypersensitivity to change, 
since anticipation in the psychological sense can have corres- 
ponding anticipatory effects in the information-channel 
concerned. Whereas in economics such processes as investment 
in manufacturing equipment, or storage and distribution of 
output, contribute a certain irreducible inertia, the communi- 
cation system of social attitudes and ideas has rather fewer 
inherently inertial channels, and many more of the anticipatory 
kind. The press and radio, for example, are typical channels 
that give preferential attention to sudden change. Since 
democracy is a form of social organization that relies more on 
self-regulation by informational feedback than any other, it 
is of more than usual interest to note that “improvements”’ 
in mass communications could in principle make democracy 
unworkable. 
Have we any safeguards against this danger? Has the 
instability of some democratic self-regulating structures, such 
as that of France in the 1950’s, been a case in point? Are some 
kinds of democratic structure more inherently vulnerable, or 
stable, than others? Even if such questions are already being 
asked with more urgency than is publicly apparent, they seem. 
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