The acts,
rules, procedures, instruments of power and institutions by which the citizens of a country (or more generally the parts of a
system ) communicate with (
see communication ) and exert
control upon each other so that the country as a whole maintains its
unity and is directed toward ends chosen from within that country (
see self-organization, autonomy ). Its opposite is
laissez faire. In the reality of politics, government is rarely uniformly distributed and is constituted (
see constitution ) instead in a ruling elite, exercising institutional control over those governed. This unequal distribution of government is particularly prevalent in technical realisations. E.g., the governor of a steam engine, computer control of a production process. In biology, such control hierarchies (
see hierarchy ) rarely exist which suggest that they may be an outgrowth of rational
construct ions not a
fact of nature. (
Krippendorff )
