Proposals for progressive wealth taxes to balance our growing income inequatities are popular, as discussed in the NY Times this week, by Patricia Cohen. What will actually work is to ALSO shift to profiting from the long term care of what we started on earth, rather than wreck it with growing exploitation. It’s a change of life hidden in plain sight, that PROFITING FROM GROWTH STARTS IT, BUT IT’S CARING FOR WHAT GREW THAT’S THE NATURAL LASTING SOURCE OF GOOD PROFITS.
A natural systems view of economics looks at economies as organizations of working parts that develop by growth and then transform to fit into the workings of their environments, — or not. Our world economy developed to work by growing as a whole. over centuries, as our own bodies also did in the womb, over several months… an extended period of self-animated formative working design.
The catch is that the economy was also designed to, in effect, never be born, but just multiply ever more dramatically in the womb of nature, forever. Yes, that is indeed not working out for us (again), as it often has not for others in the near and distant past. The problem arises from starting economies the way nature starts *all* new lives, with a long period of using things that work to multiply the work they do, as in business done by reinvesting the profit.
Why people become so very misled by that long exerience of achieving the impossible is the real issue, and a more complex story, too. We basically become fixated on it. What we can clearly see now is that our own growth drivien economy is creating at least three major kinds of potentially fatal inequities that are growing ever faster, and distributing wealth really needs to come chanting its purpose, too, repurposing it as in natural growth, from profiting from exploitation to profiting from good care :
ESCALATING INEQUITY #1. In the figure below you can see that low middle and high income household incomes increased in proportion to each other. However as economies face natural limits the more powerful can take more of the profits. That could be balanced with redistribution, but as we see today, there already is considerable redistrabution and inequality is increasing faster than ever.
ESCALATING INEQUITY #2 is that the economy is designed to push the limits of the earth, maximizing the economy’s profits by maximizing its endless compound growth of exploiting the earth, societies, and people, inequitably undermining their health and ability to support the economy— that threatens the whole system and would cause both physical and financial collapses if taken to its limits.
ESCALATING INEQUITY #3 a great accelerator of the first two, that kicked in 1970. What happened is the rules were changed, in effect transfering the ownership of business to shareholders, thinking that would make finance and business more profitable, which it certainly did. It also made the whole world explosively more inequitable:
a) their exploitation of the economy and nature by putting money in and then taking more out,
b) without caring for the health of the economy, so instead driving it to collapse.
The new rules came from the “Chicago school” of economics persuading the SEC to change the rules. That sounds crazy, but it was intended to consolidate the multiplicity of stock markets into one, make the market more open to the public, and to be easier to use. Of course it unleashed a gambling heaven, driving disruptive competition, and shortchanign good care, to sacrificing the rest of the economy to making bets on putting money in to take ever more out. And it worked fabulously.
EXCEPT — What went wrong was the neglected effect on the economy’s main resources, people, and nature. With shareholders acting as the owners of the economy, they used their ownership to control all the jobs, maximizing their growing profits while degrading their resources as quickly as possible. This had made them blind to the economy’s supports. That’s how we got to today, with our pushing unprotected systems to their breaking points — AND PUSHING THE WHOLE SYSTEM TOWARD FINANCIAL AND MATERIAL FAILURE, already progressing rapidly as we see around us today.
That most people become fixated on one thing then another, may be why, miraculously, no one seemed to notice what a suicidal design the economy had developed. It worked so well that it now threatens its own collapse, likely to be long-lasting, as it rapidly undermines the economy’s natural foundations for recovery.
However — THERE’S A TRIED-AND-TRUE KIND OF ESCAPE —
From surveying nature, it becomes apparent that all new systems start with dead-end growth plans. It is what NATURE ALWAYS DOES to complete the huge task of getting things started from next to nothing. So, nature also developed a simple but essential trick for changing directions to protect its new systems from the real danger of overshoot. That sounds vaguely familiar I hope, as it’s also what people do to get anything started, too.
To survive, every natural growth system has to:
REDIRECT ITS PROFITS FROM MULTIPLYING TO PERFECTING ITS DESIGNS.
That is THE NATURAL WAY for new lives to achieve long-lasting and healthy survival, distributing its profits for perfecting its design. It’s such a surprising and abrupt reversal of purposes, and in most cases, it happens so smoothly and quickly that people haven’t noticed what a brilliant survival tactic it really is.
The switch from getting things started to finishing them is achieved by refining their designs, as people do with anything they successfully begin and complete. For designs to work, the finishing stage is also about perfecting their surrounding relations, much like finishing a house by painting it and then inviting new friends to a party.
So… the truth is our whole world should do what nature very clearly says is the most freeing, profitable, and satisfying natural transformation for dead-end growth systems, making the turn to growing up to finish the job and enjoy successful new lives.
We all know that life is not as simple as it looks from afar; it always takes a little struggle to get things going. However, doing things to grow up right is generally the best thing that ever happens in new lives, allowing them to survive long-term, have rich experiences, and thrive.
Well… that’s my view, anyway. There’ll be lots of questions, but mainly, it’s looking around to see how the real-world works will help the most, feeling your own way around the issues, and talking with friends.
Diagnosing our ongoing world civilization change is becoming more possible as what’s happening is more graphically displayed, but still very counter-intuitive. Our whole human and natural worlds are changing systems.
The main driver, obvious to many, is our old civilization’s world committment to push its economic growth as if to infinity, which is of course self-destabilizing at the limit. So… while the principles of the NGOs are still valid, such as trying to support the disadvantaged countries and seeking more equitable global governance, the general upset of the world systems we once knew is now an added challenge.
The nearly universal mental block we’re struggleing with is that of trying to stabilize economic growth, despite growth being inherently an ever more destabilizing process at the limit. Growth is a whole system process of working parts using profits to multiply their workings… Perhaps you can instantly sense the various strange places that might go?
Growth is a kind of pregnancy for any system, a natural part of both its desirability and great danger, that humans have been very confused by for millennia, 10 milennia, actually, since people in the Middle East it seems discovered that the planting of seeds can be organized to multiply both plants and more seeds, the secret of economic growth. Boy! has that ever caused trouble along with surprising riches.
So, having misunderstood what growth is for such a long time, we now need to understand that our many current fast growing global perils are coming from the false hope of making growth last, rather than choosing to guide its transformation. Growth naturally can never last, but as we experience in our personal lives, growth at any scale may transform to wonderfully advance the wealth of new life.
However, the opposite is true too, as we well know, growth can end in quite unexpected great tragedy. For growth climaxing in the birth of individual new lives there are many hazards we all know, and the one great hazzard our world is facing would just never occur, modern civilizations so vigorous effort to keep growing in nature’s very finite womb, as if to attempt to never be born.
What’s happening, instead of economic growth producing a healthy live birth, we’re seeing the opposite, civilization climaxing in dysfuncion, as history shows has happened at a grand scale least three times before, leading to long “Dark Ages,” that all but completely erase the cultures that were at first seeking fulfillment. We could take it “as a sign,” to do the right things, change course to maturing the new world we’ve been making rather than driving it to collapse, yet again.
All living systems appear especially prone to produces one or another kind of “panic attack” when pushed too far, directly associated with the cohesion of the organisms from which they get their ability to behave as a whole. So, being able to feel threats to that cohesion coming is essential to survival, a matter for most living systems of “reading the field” for signs of danger.
When that fails, the most dangerous of familiar panics we’re not seeing emerge, is how people turn to just smashing things. We now see that in the general societal panic occurring in the US, with energized mass movements literally seeking to destroying democracy to save it. That is one of the preciously important clues to the derangement of the originally good intent. Anoter side of that is how it’s such a very uncristial thing to do and centered in devoutly Christian communities. They’re not evil so much as just gravely mistaken.
That’s because panics are, of course, both quite intentional and uncontrollably inadvertent, one of the great hazards of trying to protect systems working as a whole under strains that cause them to panic, a universal frailty of all human minds at least. So… to escape it one needs to learn how to read it, noticing emerging disjointed responses to the strains of as yet boundless growth as clues to what is causing them. It’s a common art of perception we need to reinforce rapidly now that global dysfunction and panic appear on a long term rise.
Passover is another of those disjointed indelible tales of people pushed to their very limits becoming inexplicably destructive. As clear as it is, we didn’t get the clue, though. Historically that story seems to come from the similar, extraordinarily self-destructive Bronze Age collapse, that erased our first exuberant multicultural world economy. So, that may be why we didn’t get the message, seeking infinity is a real threat.
The parallels to today’s smash everything cultures are everywhere, some claiming to be saving societal structures. These are what one should study as “canaries in the coal mine” or “leaks in the dike” as read in the many classic stories of grave hidden danger to be quickly averted.
The irony is that almost everyone develops skill in using the magic of natural growth, taking the little explosions of creative genius we collect as jewels of personal achievement to add to our chains. It’s that same creative thrill that gets us in the worst of trouble, too, distracting us enough from the small voices, to not see them becoming a “disturbance in the force” rather than a blessing, almost guaranteed if pushed too far.
The force of finance, using profit to multiply profit starts as wonderful creativity, too, but then quickly becomes societally suicidal, crossing the limits of its surroundings, their worlds of sustaining contextual systems and essential capacities of nature. All may then get pushed to their natural limits of torment and disfunction. Oops… that’s too far!
So, the point is to use all those observations of the life within and around us for steering along our pathways to fulfillment, discovering what we can make of our own magical places and times, making lives to enjoy… preferably not to be tormented by. It’s often quite a challenge, especially now, as we all face the result of the leading Western cultures’ nominally 10,000 year quest for infinite power over each other and nature, fooled again and again, blinded by the abstractions seeming to be the realities.
So, today there seems very little time for us to globally change direction to avoid adding our greatest ever planetary living system collapse to our list of accomplishments! That would be too bad, indeed.
The way not to is to learn how to steer, rather than just run into ever bigger trouble and hope something survives.. One way can start with just briefly stopping in one’s track, as you read this, to consider where to better to go, and make a turn in that direction!
There are so many signs of our being disoriented… it’s something everyone should be asking now. Everyone’s experience of accelerating change is indeed unprecedented, except during periods of dramatic historical change. But today’s is notably marked by an absence of vision of where we’re going.
I grew up in an exceptionally peaceful little village and somehow became an accomplished natural systems scientist, coming from a family of scientists and educators, and events later motivating a search for what sense I could make of what seemed to make none at all; noticing what you might call “gaps in the story” that begged for answers. That led to becoming fascinated by various things science seemed to pay no attention to at all, one of which was the intriguing question of “What makes life so lively?” Physics suggests that everything is running down, somehow without begging the question of how things must also have started up, many of which build up and remain stable for long periods.
My first hint to all that turned up as a first-semester freshman while watching a physics lab demonstration commonly used as an introduction to the field. A strobe light was turned on, illuminating a ping-pong ball tossed from one end of the demonstration table to the other, recorded as a dotted curve by a time-exposure camera. The ball is pulled by gravity, and the equation for the curve is a simple parabola, which one can deduce from the distances between the dots, representing the flight of the ball, a simple bit of real magic made by turning something very common we all see, quite unaware of what we’re seeing, suddenly illuminated in our minds by an unusual perspective.
In such cases, a class might respond with silence, and I thought to fill the silence with a silly question, asking, “What about the tossing and the catching?” The tossing and catching were missing from the demonstration, and not in the formula, produced by bursts of energy and animated coordination of hand and eye, first to release, then catch the ball so it doesn’t bounce away. That we never talked about those parts of the experiment stuck in my mind, though.
I got a little laughter from the question, but then it took several months before I realized I’d stepped right into a very deep void in physics. Physics does not know what “happening” means, or a vast array of other things our everyday words refer to. Physics has no way to explain any kind of beginning or ending; in fact – just let its equations trail off to nothing, without reason, which rather shocked me as an odd thing, given the laws of physics are always portrayed as the laws of nature, and apparently just were not at all.
Isn’t that nice?
It seems that every kind of observable behavior also has an inexplicable beginning and ending, lacking any kind of formula, though our own intuitions readily fill in those gaps in science that appear everywhere. The gaps in formulas can often be estimated, though, guessed at to give a little time for responses to develop, predicting when and where things will begin or end.
Who cares? – seems to be the practical response, of course. All that often matters is how things end, not begin, and approximation is all that’s needed if large parts of things can be accounted for. There’s a bigger reason to be concerned that science has largely lost interest in how things begin and end. It has to do with why all of life is inherently lively and incapable of starting or ending anything without being creative.
It’s that beginning where things take hold, creating organizations of working processes… usually requiring a growth process, which science failed to notice was more fundamental in nature than the equations that give people power over what we wish to change. That things-in-formation are generally also unobservable is another part of the puzzle. We don’t “see” their forms until they are developed, much as one does not see the adult when introduced to the child.
Therefore, formation processes are necessary everywhere, and are mostly unrecordable and unexplainable, only known by the implications from the evidence of the changes they enabled. They “seem” to come from nothing, but only virtually nothing, as it is also quite clear that emerging designs emerge from the contexts they are found in by a local self-organizing process, things set in motion as emerging forms that develop in relation to their surroundings and their capture of energy from their environments to do it.
Isn’t that nice?
It took a few decades to validate the physics of it, but then, I guess, naturally, it was generally dismissed as uninteresting, too, to find quite essential working parts of nature that physics completely ignored or thought were uninteresting. That did not even change when it became clear that what’s hidden in the gaps of science are the processes that connect all the more visible things. The equations that serve as the “standard forms” of nature physics have done such brilliant work exposing still ignored not the singular and uniquely emergent ones, causing physics and many other fields to lack curiosity about what is really happening, for which we may all be as profoundly sorry as one can be in short order. The formation of nature’s formulas has no formula, as THAT still appears to be what’s “happening,” especially when we see things going terribly wrong.
I grew up in a multi-generational physics family. I was encouraged often enough to “look around” to see the world as being in motion, not just composed of individual questions and answers. It was thus that the general view, combined with my initial observation of a glaring gap in its application in physics, eventually led me to discover that “every formula needs to develop in the context in which it takes place.” In context, of course, that “big idea” is not much more than how every response to life develops in relation to its particular time in history, place, and context of environmental relationships. Of course, the question of how many levels of working self-organizing relationships are needed for anything to happen is rather daunting. It seems what matters is remaining curious and finding one’s comfort level with what you find interesting.
What came to be the most shocking to me, though, was not how physics left little gaps in the tails of life, or that it failed to notice, or that beginnings and endings of events contain the formative meanings and processes of the self-animating systems of life. It’s their interaction with their context that may or may not result in meaningful connections, energize creative and lasting relationships, and hold together their secure worlds of connections with others. However, those are the nourishing mana of all of life’s rewarding experiences.
To me, the most shocking thing is that apparently, not one of our amazingly successful and popular artistic, scientific, political, business, financial, philosophical, or governance establishments and movements finds it necessary to investigate the huge gaps in humanity’s ideas of how to live on earth. Today, it’s incontrovertible that humanity is unified in pursuing long-term compounding of business profits for our endless doubling of our spoiling of the earth’s habitability. Why wouldn’t we notice that being unprofitable?
All our institutions and cultures tolerate the grand collective suicide-mission of business and finance, designed to skim societal profits and concentrate them at the top, never using them to care for what society builds, as every kind of sustainable living system must do. It entraps everyone in taking power over nature until we destabilize it, a decidedly unprofitable general plan. I think the problem is very likely to be where we’re not looking, with the resulting deformation of our formative contexts blindly pushed to their limits, where things that need to get it together also become where things go all wrong.
The old rule is “look around.” There are many better ways of large organizations to live on earth.
We have a great many individual, family, and professional cultures dedicated to the truth, but they’re all too easily pushed aside. All in all, the most common oversight does in fact seem rather simple too. For living systems, it is essential for survival to end their compound growth in a creative process of growing up to know and care for the world they’re in. Apparently, that has been left off the standard curriculum.
Ideally, we should talk. I’m an accomplished senior natural systems scientist who has been decoding the “weirdness” of our world’s suicidal head-on, breakneck accelerating collision with the natural world for 40+ years. I began as a physicist, and when I discovered that physics has no explanation for organization, or particularly how organizations begin and end, I realized all of physics is made of shortcuts for manipulating things we don’t understand, as its source of funding. I checked the history… and yes physics was founded on the demonstration of that method by the first scientist, Thales of Miletus, showing that equations can be used to time purchases in the Greek olive market to make a financial killing.
Fig 1. Shortcuts and Wisdom – with deeper and deeper layers
Contrary to its image, science became the workshop for driving economics, using the profits from research to multiply the research and keep growing with ever doubling profits. All the time the method uses only abstractions, taken out of context to simplify the work, and so detached from its contexts of local system organizations that give anything in them their primary meaning. The modern world’s separation from nature that it greatly adds to is much older, but multiplying our control of nature with abstractions taken out of contexts of nature surely adds quite a lot.
So… as a result of their design, whether intended or not, the design of theoretical; science without contextual information about the working contexts of nature, makes physics and economics appear to have no natural limits at all, that is until your civilization starts to collapse, as we’re now experiencing, as the only indicator available to the natural limits of a limitless growth system in nature, a kind of QED!, affecting directly affecting the two most important fields of science we use to steer the planet. It’s not that we couldn’t make some corrections for that, the best would be to use the abstractions to help us see how very different nature’s complexly layered designs and self-adjusting designs are. It’s removing nature entirely from the picture of science that seems to be the cause of the current head start to a general civilization collapse to rival those of the past.
Given how powerful and profitable simple rules for controlling nature are it seems five millennia or so of human cultures favored the simple abstract rules of power and ignored the horrific complications from which they would develop. Made blind to the internally and externally responsive designs of nature, the designers of abstract rules would hear and see things in the cultures around them that lived by nature’s rules and have no reason at all to think of going back to those older forms of knowledge and wisdom.
However, various anthropologists, who worked more like archeologists, sifting every layer, began to study the three great and prosperous civilizations that appeared to have collapsed from being too prosperous, like we are too, (#1 Babel, #2 Bronze Age Atlantis, and #3 Rome). It seems inevitably, that if ruled by unnatural laws… “something else always happens on the way to the Forum.” Economies designed to multiply without limit do naturally destabilize their internal cultures and explode in contradictions.
At present, in our case, growing inequity between the layers of the working and wealthy households remained at least proportional; to their long stable relationships up to the end of WWII and the general “update” of capitalism that would follow and spoil the day. Profits began to suddenly concentrate only at the top and failed to filter down as before, from a change in competition at the top it seems. The growth of the American economy, put in place by decisions of the SEC, heavily favored wealth concentration at the top, in the financial world and its shareholders. Apparently, they saw no reason not to take virtually the whole pie for themselves, not realizing the peace provided by the prior pattern of trickle down that kept the society unified, and the new one would take power over the steering of everyone’s world to maximize profits at the top.
As in the Bronze Age Collapse (if my reading is correct) that resulted in such outrage from the bottom that it occurred to the working layers of the economy they could do better without the top, leading to collapse not reversing the order. As decision making had come to be based on the abstractions favoring each community separately, they both made great plans blind to all their contexts that, at the limit of growth for the whole, would rapidly tear it apart.
So, This is the societal sequence of events that takes us to the point when and where the gaps of connection become wide enough and the legitimate but uninformed grievances and resentments become extreme enough allowing a civilization to become prone to takeover by hatred and vengeance seeking cults, driven to their desperation, like our so called Christian-Nation and its legitimate but misunderstood grievances, choosing all the wrong solutions and people, like teaming up with the similarly resentful member of the super-rich as a “savior,” Mr. Donald Trump, still sore from not being accepted in polite New York society.
Cette la Vie! What happens next is the killer. With the divergence of once shared interests continues, segments of the cultures split apart economically that once mingled amiably. becoming enraged and at each other’s throats instead, starting tp smash things for the pleasure of insulting the evil images of the folks they have come to resent for doing them harm, even if almost totally misplaced. The actual harm may be coming from their own leader, one of the super-rich causing the demise of good working-class life. For the dispossessed and their leader orchestrating the destruction of the cultural assets of America’s once commonly celebrated culture, is more than a terrible shame. Somehow the smashers never realize that if they smash the working connections there won’t be anything left for them either.
That is what we see in rough terms today, Trump rewarding the vengeful resentments he has fed in his base, who will help him retain power, but who will not be helped at all by the severe damage to the society he and they are attacking and blaming for the oppressive working class exploitation that their leader had a big part in, as all power players who in a panic honestly seem to become blind to their own roles in alienating the parts of society they most depend on.
What Trump says he is offering to the resentful roots of Middle America, that he fanned into flames to serve him won’t be delivered. They just served him by letting him take control of congress and the courts, using a great misrepresentation of who was responsible for their very legitimate complaints. They were left behind by the business world, because of the “fast money” produced by the “Shareholder Value” plan of the super-rich… most of whom if memory serves were extremist Republicans.
They are nearly all like everybody else now, just wanting their old world, or something like it, back. The Trump program of smashing the working parts of America’s once unified civil society and common culture, only assures he won’t be able to help his own resentful base. Dismantling the workings of a system to serve the people won’t help anyone at all, in fact, what also did happen in the Bronze Age. You’d just never get it back. But is this a moment, of having had a taste of it, we should now know what’s wrong with politicians skillfully weaving resentments into hatreds for them to exploit — and walk away. No one ever needs that again, and history is so full of that very evil. Hate is not helpful at all.
What you’ll need is the original dreams revived, with “some midcourse corrections,” for sure, and a long effort to keep learning about what happens when you seriously mess with a real good thing. We could still have the American national family plan, I don’t think. That isn’t worn out yet, that plan to heal the wounds, start caring for the planet and all the vibrant cultures we admire, respect and love as part of our home.
It seems our natural confusion about nature is quite natural. We are part of nature, but we behave so differently, seem so powerful and talented, yet have kept making huge mistakes throughout history. Is there a way for us to live “normally” and not keep having to make such lasting trouble for ourselves?
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One of the noticeable common patterns in both human and natural behavior can help us see the hand of nature, or God, if you prefer. Both our bodily and mental behaviors are energy processes, and in one important way, like all observable behaviors, they are alike in how they begin and end
Their changes all begin and end with long or short chains of “emergence and convergence,” as local system “startup and finish-up” processes develop and subside, allowing nature to build up and taper off its energy system designs. They’re necessary for nature, including for our bodies and minds, but may only be visible from the pervasive, smoothly connecting S-curves of change that are found everywhere in nature.
S-curves of Change, periods of emergence and convergence: All observable events begin with a period of cumulative compound growth, simply because nothing can start from its top rate of change, but has to start slow and build up.
Those common features are parts of the solution. The great problem facing humanity is that as we separated ourselves from our animal experience, we also lost much of our once considerable ability to intuitively read what was happening around us, from our senses responding to the changing directions of these natural curves; symbolized above.
We still feel the sharpness of movements when traveling, sometimes signaling emergency needs for preparations or, the opposite, “that everything can relax.” We have thousands of words to describe these informative connections with the natural streams of information from the behaviors of the world around us. What would you do, for example, if great nations suddenly and rather wildly began heading off in unexplored directions?
It could happen, and it just did!! So, for as long as one can keep close to things that will still matter, the continuity of life and our connections with each other will be maintained. We also lose connection with how our world is responding to us by “making up stuff” about what’s happening, in place of “observing and feeling stuff.”
It seems not too hard to reeducate one’s bodily feelings that would normally respond to environmental signals of change, like feeling a hesitation is someone’s response to you, sometimes good to verify, sometimes better not to. It’s this way of being alert to what’s happening in a way that revives our original way of feeling our way along, reading the world as in step with our understandings, that will be key to successfully restoring a little comfortable order to the Earth again.om how they push one way or another, feeling comfortable or increasingly uncomfortable as “signals” from nature we feel in our guts.
What seems to have created a deep deception for us is that we started making up our own realities… rather than learning how falsely simplify our view of nature, we have generally represented those creative periods with equations, **erasing** evidence of their emerging processes and the contexts they emerge in, permanently blinding people to the organizational complexity of how nature works!
In effect, that choice represented all of nature with business models for how to interfere with nature for profit or to “buy low and sell high” in the business world.
The turning point in the history of mankind’s struggle with our own false self-importance –the only way to put it – came during the recovery of civilization, ~600 years after the Bronze Age Mediterranean civilization’s collapse from it. It was the emergence of science, from the great innovations offered by Thales, that formalized what we call “the growth to collapse model” for very creative, yet certain, civilization development to self-destruction.
It’s only a fairly firm research opinion, but science may have developed by combining the creativity of two earlier groups of Mediterranean cultures, group A) the marvelous design abilities of earlier Egyptian, Cretan, and Greek cultures, and group B) the Babylonian and Hebrew cultures that focus on abstraction and absolutes, providing the mathematical foundation for sysematicly empowering group A. That, unfortunately, also organizes modern civilization science designed around a business model for endlessly multiplying its power. Anyone could see it would not last, but for self-important people, it is often too captivating to resist.
The fatal flaw would not be noticed for a long time, as the highly profitable but faulty change in Mediterranean societal leadership from connecting group A design cultures focused on natural designs (which give warnings of destabilizing limits) and Group B cultures from the more unforgiving Fertile Crescent and Middle East, focusing on statistical rules that easily project to infinity, which tied to even forgiving natural environments will fail before the get there.
What caused the amazing productivity of these partnerships to end in utter disaster was probably discovered by many, but was put down again and again as social forces, as they so often do, for lack of explanations, and disoriented by their proven formulas for success terribly failing again and again, blind to the role of contexts.
Even today, society’s commitment to maximizing growth **without concern that the growing instability of ever more sudden change** (the actual symptom we’re experiencing that we feel as being jerked round) may not have a good chance of settling down as our growth systems turn to relieving strains and perfecting their designs, on the path to surviving our period of ever faster growth.
So,1) given humanity’s often misleading feelings of self-importance and 2) our deeply entrenched cultures committed to growth, we could collectively see the advantages of finding how to care for what we made, or keep bickering.
Great changes of World View are also Life Changes such as the experience of being born to grow up, enjoy life and pass on the wisdom as one declines. It seems ALL NATURAL FORMS develop and pass away by some variation of that same chain of START-UP TO END-UP flowing organizational experiences and developments.
germiation
emergence and formation of a new system by rapid growth of the germinal design
the turn to the future design seen happening at the growth inflection point, to begin adapting to its new environment as it adapts, refines and matures its internal and external relationships
To then enjoy and endure the rite of “having a life” in the roles it finds in the ecosystem it was born into to engage with others
There is the downside, too, having possibly richly contributed to the lives of many others during its life, taking on new roles of sharing the wisdom of the experienced for the inexperienced to consider, like makijng the rain.
The Whole Long Now – and the Rain
The Long Now clock is to be found and potentially read nearly everywhere you look, from the S-curves tracing the universal progressions of emerging systems. Both the physics of change (requiring continuity of processes) and the universal evidence of the natural systm growth stages that the S-curves are generated by, indicate that the universe as a whole goes through the same characteric organizational stages, of:
THE CONTINUITIES THAT DEVELOP WITHIN & AROUND THEM, TO HOLD THEM TOGETHER DURING THEIR LIFE CYCLES AS THEY GO THROUGH THEIR COMING, LASTING AND GOING CHANGES OF FORM CHARACTERISTIC OF EMERGING SYSTEMS.
As animated systems, using energy to self-organize, they transition from being lifeless to lively as they emerges within their ‘natal context,” and then perhaps mature and ‘grow up’ as enduring and adaptable as part of the system of “systems with a life” to enjoy as part of an environment, or to waste, whatever the case available that may happen by itself or that it may be attracted to.
IT MAKES EVERY NOW A LONG NOW, IN SO FAR AS S-CURVES OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND DECAY ARE NATURE’S TIMEPIECES FOR LIFE CYCLES OF NATURE. SO ALL THE MAIN LIFE STAGES OF COMING AND GOING ARE EXPERIENCED BY EVERY LONG NOW; WHATEVER THE SCALE AND KIND, BEGUN AND COMPLETED BY EVERY NEW THING AND EVENT IN NATURE AS “WHAT’S NOW HAPPENING,” FROM BEGINNING TO END.
It’s all happening in the S-curve ¸¸¸.•´ ¯ ¯ `•.¸¸¸ So, the question is, how do we make the one that suits us?
While there are an amazing variety of answers to that today, the one I gravitate to is that the question is very meaningful to everyone. We all have a clear understanding of what the words “happen” and “happening” mean. We know they have to do with the changing “organization” of things that “matter” to us. Some may not realize it, but there are no comparable scientific definitions for those deeply meaningful parts of life.
a) The most serious issue: “How can our world escape the apparent doom cycle we’re in of ever-escalating mistakes and tragedy, destabilizing our societies and the whole living environment.”
b) The more open: “What is really happening to us?”
In your search, are you finding anything about what’s happening to us as occurring naturally or happening to all other kinds of growth systems, too? The truth is people all naturally know a WHOLE lot about “what’s happening” that science is unable to detect or describe, as happening is natural.
There is a simple scientific reason. It’s that human knowledge develops from experience in the living contests of growth and change as part of nature. Science searches for perpetual and unchanging truths that can be stripped of context in order to define answers with measurable, absolute certainty.
Life is lively, though, and nature created organisms to become highly skilled in negotiating the often rapidly changing worlds around them. So humans are quite an exception in finding ourselves unable to respond to growing crises like climate change, economic overshoot, societal conflict, and ecological catastrophe.
What I use is a practice anyone can use to improve their observations of what’s happening and find where the changes come from. It starts with learning to *feel the rates of change.* It’s very often what we react to, something coming on slowly, quickly, or suddenly. It may be feeling it in your gut, in your throat, in your eyes, or in other ways, sensing a need to respond to signals of change in relationships that matter.
With practice, one can learn to mentally trace those feelings to the specific things one is responding to well enough to tell what else is connected. The rates of change are key. They tell you whether it’s a 1) steady change, 2) accelerating, 3) a growing system, or a 4) fluctuating pattern.
Those shapes of change over time can be used to find and connect with other parts of it since **change is a system, and all its linked parts tend to move together** as for economic growth, as shown below. Notice how constant the growth rates are. They trace nature’s most radical process of developing new systems, which may then tear them apart. So.. “Good question.”
The general shape of all these stable concentric curves (having the same exponential origin) is that some of the subsystems are changing slower, but they’re all changing at what has become an explosive rate relative to what’s manageable on Earth, rearranging the earth ever faster than anyone thought possible. That appears to be why we don’t know what to do.
So, my casual research practice (before a long-term study, perhaps) starts with noticing something and seeing what’s happening around it. That’s how you find what’s moving in the same way, implying the organization of the system connects them. That’s very helpful, as with personal relationships, so that you can find and respond to the right things.
Societal relationships show similar diverging coupled rates of change as the economy. With societal changes, we are much more aware of the resulting disruptive crises of conflict in relationships, as those are where we live our lives. The reason is that change in everything is being accelerated to its limits of breakdown or misbehavior. It pushes every system to the threshold of it breaking apart. Yikes…
As these changes are at different paces and raising different unfamiliar complications for everyone, we even find the people pushing this endless radical rearrangement of the world (mostly using the financial system) being quite blind to their contexts and the fragility of living systems pushed to reorganize ever faster.
From my long-term studies of it, all of what’s happening to us is ‘natural’, if also rather negligent given the failure to successfully respond. Growth is a system of compound accelerating change that invariably creates a crisis for itself. You might say nature uses it for blowing up new designs for life to see if they’ll respond by stabilizing their designs before growth rips them apart, or not.
Some growth systems tip from multiplying to unifying and maturing very early in their growth – to have a long rich life… and others tip rather late on miss that turn all together, breaking up their relationships. It’s nature’s test for living systems, choosing between emerging lives growing up and falling apart, for life, a choice.
Not noticing this quite pervasive pattern, I think, is why the modern world missed how dramatically climate change would intrude on our lives, leaving us now without a real clue as to what to do about it. I’ve been studying that kind of mysterious discrepancy between native and scientific languages for some time. Native languages have all kinds of ways to alert people to unstable change, but as that comes from feeling what’s happening, science, business, finance, government, the academy, all can’t translate it into what to do. In this case the main flaw in science causing it to not know what to do seems to be it had no practice of surveying what is going on in the contexts of the rules science and economics use, completely blind to the natural relationships the resulting activity of using the profitable rules to steer the planet.
That we’re all in this together is still the great observation.
It lets you realize that what just happened to politics in the US and around the world is part of a common struggle to hold societies together, pushed to the dangerous limit of seeing no way forward than – by breaking things. The desperate actors apparently do not realize it’s all our also common efforts to seek ever faster change (by compound investment multiplying solutions and then hidden problems they create) that’s the principle source of all great threats.
Jan 2, 2025
The rest of the article is on my research site as Whats-really-happening-to-us Below is a list of the related research reports I chose to give http://bit.ly links to:
I’m a systems scientist who’s studied all kinds of natural emergent system designs and transformations. People used to know more about them in most cases, back when language primarily referred to the meanings of systems in context. So that’s a telling division between cultures from the most ancient times, and full of great stories.
Easy self-link to this report: bit.ly/WhatCultWeDo
With national cults, as with smaller ones, their devotion to a false reality is both their greatest power and greatest failing, generally getting them in trouble. However, as with paradigm shifts in science, sometimes it’s the societal standard worldview that is so mistaken and getting its world in trouble, like the infinite growth “cult” of modern capital accumulation. So… it can be complicated.
I think the desperation from which today’s Christian nationalism culture became a real cult of false realities really first came from the natural growing frustrations of living in an endlessly self-disruptive economic system. I wish people noticed such things. It would help help people see the common needs we all have.
What concentrates the self-deceptions and frustrations that seem at the heart of cults (notice “cult” is the first syllable of “culture”) seems to be the seemingly inescapable feedback of animosities that drive their growth and misguided conspiracies. Even those can expose very useful new insights to open minds, like how it is that the leaders focus a lot on escalating the culture’s animosities to earn adherence to their leadership.
Endless reinforcing feedback (of animosities or anything else) invariably destabilizes itself, of course. There may often also be a chance to change direction as the limit of the escalation’s stability and as to wavers allowing de-escalation to begin. That may be to offer opportunities for enough people to escape the approaching collapse on their own to isolate the hardheads. Except for criminals, it would be the wrong move to punish them (rewarding their animosities). Separating them for their protection could be aimed clearly enough to help them on their own or for others to help them calm down.
So, to activate that, one first needs to think of familiar situations where bubbles of animosity have deflated. There is a great variety, most of which might contain lessons on how to deflate threatening cults like the one we face today. No promises at all, of course, and taking all necessary precautions, as the cult’s design for feeding its growth on animosities may be deeply embedded. There would always be some within it capable of being relieved of its compulsions, though.
Today, we also need to factor in that the humans on earth have what you’d call much bigger fish to fry than straightening out what amounts to contagions of family bickering writ large. We have a collective war with nature to recognize and undo as fast as we can, too. Still, learning from one can help one find healing responses to the other; using humor, offering real friendship, and being responsible in not taking the bait are among the basics. Both kinds of aggressive cults are dangerous because they are quite unaware of their devotion to false realities.
I’ve also studied how people once created languages well insulated from growing little cancers of false realities, apparently around 60,000 years ago, as the foundations of useful language were secured, simply by what I’ve called “the genome of language.” That’s the highly informative key role of words for connecting our minds to nature, serving as culturally shared references to commonly observable things and patterns in nature attached to communicable impressions of them and their meanings to us.
If you understand that as becoming a global self-validating process of securing our mind’s understandings of nature by cross talk and mutual adaptation to settle on meanings and uses that last, you could recognize that pattern as a kind of AI training (aggregated intelligence) for human minds based on rich exposure to what makes sense in natural systems, environments, and human cultures, not hearsay, as computer AI does. So, it seems fair to say that IC-AI (in context aggregated intelligence) is the kind we need to recover from the larger cult of ever-escalating power over nature that is our greatest imminent threat today.
II. My short reports to two great institutions with some responsibility for responding to our current grand cultural misunderstandings of life.
A. Intro to the curves.
This pair of graphs shows word frequencies found by Google in its scans of books in English language libraries. I selected the particular terms to show the coupled trends found during my regular habit of looking for the patterns of system transformations to study, noticing these for the recognizable, unique signature of all the curves being connected with emerging phenomena.
The main evidence of the curves displaying the emergence of the Christian nationalism cult is the regular, long-term, proportional relations between these word use frequency curves, moving together, and in the light of recent events becoming clearly associated with the cult’s national take-over attempt, now regularly discussed as a concrete plan.
The curves move together, growing exponentially, displaying the same signature shapes, seeming associated with the cult’s imagined victimization and growing frustrations with life in a free world, clearly responding as a whole to presidential politics associated with Trump’s emergence as a candidate. Do study the patterns and parts, find your own questions, and draw your own conclusions.
There is hope that we’ll notice that the eruption was partly energized by mutually reinforcing social/political retaliation attacks that blew up largely to profit the organizers, taking advantage of freighting ing their followers… Ohy! We are human, and it comes with some unneeded baggage that will take a lot of care to heal.
1. The cult’s top apparent terms of motivation- (case insensitive) “right” add “love”
2. The cult’s “body” of frustration terms – (case insensitive) “pain” “fear” “Christian” “trouble” “anxiety” and “hate”
1) Report to The Executive Office of the American Psychological Association (APA)
I’m an accomplished senior natural systems scientist asking that you give appropriate attention to how the republican party was largely taken over by an aggressive cult’s false reality, formed in ~1975.
I’ve been studying its the very strange word use pattern for a number of years, as a clear evidence of an emerging culture language. I somehow didn’t connect the dots pointing to it becoming an immanent national and world threat till I sathe exuberance around its government takeover plans, like the world’s rather nutty richest man jumping fanatically in celebration of the moment now at hand.
It’s not that such national security threats are likely to succeed, but our most likely responses being exactly the wrong ones. I certainly would defer to authoritative APA initiatives, but I think prompt, calm, and caring response is needed.
Here’s the image of the cult’s regular word use frequencies. I used Google’s amazingly useful Ngram tool, here for English word use frequencies over time from 1960 to 2019. I don’t know when it will be updated. The indicators of it representing a cult is the fixed proportionality of its key word frequencies, indicating a natural system design working as a whole, like an organism.
The two graphs trace the word use frequency for the same words at different scales, so their signature shapes can be seen as all connected.
2) Report to the US Dept of Justice – DOJ
I’ve been studying the emerging Christian nationalism cult and its now open intention to change our government for it’s own use, with the help of America’s strangest public servant ever, former president Trump. WATCH OUT
You must now see the parallels with other very large, furious, and aggressive cults interfering in societies with wall to wall crazy conspiratorial campaigns, aided by charismatic leaders repainting reality and skillfully name calling, openly campaigning on defrauding the public by exploiting their genuine frustrations.
Added evidence of this large insular culture experiencing a false reality in our midst is the dramatic way its word uses have changed English. The curves show the cult started to grow exponentially in ~1975. I’ve posted the graph on Twitter a few times today, alerting others. The severity of the likely threat and similarity to the threat Germany faced from another such cult is what’s shocking.
The graph showing the rapid growth and coupling of the cult’s popular love/hate terms is on my public Twitter account, near the top. — https://x.com/JLydiaHenshaw — It’s the Google Ngram plot the selected word frequencies, all having the same signature shape and fluctuations aligned with presidential politics, it seems.
Of course the shocking thing about humanity is that we are apparently all prone to mass self-deception of such a grand scale. So though interrupting its hate-spreading centers seems likely to be needed, those captured by it are victims to be cared for, as neighbor helping neighbor in need, and no one but the those exploiting the disturbed thinking should be seen at fault.
Thanks , I hope this helps you set up the the right teams. In my view the issue MUST be presented quietly as soon as possible, that may delay certification of the election to avoid trouble. We need to take care.
Below are three short pieces I. WHAT WE TOTALLY MISSED II. THE SYSTEMS THINKING WE ALREADY KNOW III. THE MEANING OF OUR OLDEST DREAM They’re to help our enormous audience with the great puzzle of what to do now, now that we’re at the very ends of the earth. We have no more excuses for continuing to use up all our options to make our home a good place to live. The wrong turns we’ve made go back a very long way; with most of our history and brilliantly thinking animals, we did not live in civilizations growing to their famous collapses. So we have some original good senses to build on that we can still recover, much of it recorded in plain sight by the richly meaningful words we made that connect our minds to nature. That language has been harmed and distorted by our falling into traps, requiring us to endlessly multiply our power over nature, each other, and ourselves, a question of steering.
I. WHAT WE TOTALLY MISSED – The current decade of growing breakdown and dysfunction in critical natural and societal systems needed for good lives, even in language itself, and the environmental, climate, inter-cultural, international, government, and economic systems didn’t develop overnight. The interventions of scientists of many kinds, and perhaps most notably the economist J. M. Keynes, have long pointed to the whole system instabilities that would develop as a result of continual doubling of our impacts on the earth and each other, driven by profiting from compound investment, have been oddly very clear and ignored for a long time.
Despite great efforts to avert the whole system crisis now upon us, its disasters have also continued to spread and escalate, the harsh realities finally becoming quite undeniable. Why don’t we do what we do best, though, see what’s amiss as things to do and get about doing them? Is it that we’ve given up trying to manage the unmanageable, or just not noticed we’re using outmoded management for a very natural kind of whole system crisis for an endlessly multiplying system? What if we changed the story? What if we saw what’s wrong as the perverse consequence of the economy’s “growth imperative” cheating us out of every innovative solution we’ve tried?
Shouldn’t we have foreseen that the growth economy would use innovations to heal the huge damage growth has caused, now seen so clearly in hindsight? What seems to have happened is that those caregiving efforts were exploited as efficiencies to invest in, speeding the profit growth as the disruptive innovations disrupted the environments, economy, and lives of others. Honestly, of course, such a dramatic change in reality was probably not expected by the investors blindly investing in making money as the cost/benefit curve turned upside down.
That’s what the data seems to show so clearly if just looked at with an open mind. Because of that, we do need a “general law of care” for the people who didn’t see what was coming to help us all learn what happens when long-trusted rules turn upside down. Nature’s growth rules always reverse as systems approach their limits to growth. See if you can think of one that doesn’t. In personal relations, what’s on the other side of affection as it’s pushed too far? What’s the better growth policy for a business? Invest in what was profitable before till you go bankrupt, or treat growth as fragile and care about serving the whole world you live in?
So, the environmental and sustainability movements need to be forgiven and forgive themselves for not realizing that cause and effect would reverse as we began to see growth becoming the most destructive rather than most creative force on earth. Who would have ever guessed that the growth economy would misuse 50 years of dedicated effort and creative collaboration for the opposite purpose? Nobody at all would have, well, except a few like Keynes, who studied the ironies and looked around the corners of the systems we energize.
Sustainability became a growth stimulus and is one of the oddities, making things popular, efficient, and easy to multiply, with great social support. So, those efforts both failed on the one hand despite the dedicated efforts and also backfired, profiting the dumb system that didn’t know when to quit for threatening its existence, too. You can see that plain as day in the CO2 curve below, not a ripple of hesitation in the CO2 growth curve, just as if *everyone* was strongly in favor of it.
So, it seems to be time to look at the whole problem from a fresh point of view and start sorting our choices.
The current world measure of atmospheric CO2 (the main source of the exponential climate heating crossing the thresholds of lasting harm we’re now experiencing). – The trend is closely proportional to world GDP growth from 1971 to the present (7), with CO2 growing at ~2% a year since WWII and GDP at ~3.5% a year. – CO2 Data – Scripps: https://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/atmospheric_co2/icecore_merged_products.html
II. THE SYSTEMS THINKING WE ALREADY KNOW – I’m a senior natural systems research scientist who’s been trying to shed light on some of these fundamental errors of perception that seem to be at the core of our modern world’s struggle for survival. This approach originally came from noticing gaps in physics, you know, the kind that shouldn’t be there. But it took many years before I had the beginnings of a clear idea of what to do with them. One of them was the reliance of physics on math, which meant the field had no way to study how things began and ended.
Let me explain. Scientists, not nature, define scientific equations. So, equations of change over time would trail off to infinity unless someone defined them to begin and end at a particular time or change abruptly by a scientist’s arbitrary choice. The same goes for economics, the math for our life support system! This is part of why it’s not working when, indeed, extrapolated to infinity.
Both of those illusions of math seem to come from the many centuries of our public lives relying on increasingly rigid thinking, like abstract rules, when nature presents us instead with highly varied kinds of resilient, lively, flowing systems of working relationships that themselves evolve into and out of existence. Empirical systems science is then a study of reliable but not rigid understanding. So it is also a little more focused, but not so different from what people do every day. We all spend our time looking for one after another sign of change or opportunity, or of what may be approaching, reading and getting a feel for the contexts for changing relations.
Doing that scientifically means asking key questions and looking for specific signals and patterns, more record-keeping, exploration of more related contexts, the added boundary testing and careful feeling for surprises, hoping not to be blinded by assumptions, reading situations, playing with hints of irony, and following up to confirm possible connections, all the fun mental journeys that help us get along. So it mostly works in context but also alternates with simplifying patterns to abstraction, not to follow, but like symbols, as handy guides to the questions that come up at different times. So, in that way, it’s the oldest science of all, what we as a species spent time learning from for the last million or so years as humans began to rely more on reaching for the limits of information, art, insight, connections, and feeling. The pace of that learning greatly accelerated around 60 to 100 thousand years ago, as we discovered how to form reliable language, with sounds that pointed to things and patterns in nature to our feelings and experiences with them. That “genome of language” seems to be what made it possible for all languages to collect and share useful meanings for the same things and translate them from one language to another.
Had language just been an accumulation of popular hearsay and heresy, as much of language seems to be becoming today, it would never have become such a very useful way of storing, comparing, and improving on useful insights, feelings, designs, values, and ways of working. The surprising thing today is that in so far as nature is still here, the forms of language that so effectively connected our minds to nature are, too, just sometimes hiding in the root meanings of the words we use all the time, still there, just never cut from the branches and trunks of natural meaning they grew on. While their natural meanings do “have definition” and are related to others. ”Their meanings” are “not defined,” though, in the sense of being fixed by some rigid specification. Instead, they are recreated again each time we learn from their rich histories of usage, like new flags waving what we all find in the commonly recognized aspect(s) of nature they point to.
Do you have a podium? What do you think humanity should do now? We’re mostly very nice people, but we do not know what we’re doing. We always want to find out, though. Other people need to hear what you really think if you can find a way.
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III. THE MEANING OF OUR OLDEST DREAM – What seems to be one of humanity’s oldest hopes and dreams is for there to be some great force of good to call upon as if we still had our parents to rely on or a God that might step in if problems got bad enough. We do experience the natural form of that in all the systems that we are part of and that we interact with. The word “system” came originally from observing things that held together and have experienced real “unity” and “cohesion” when part of something powerfully good for us.
Many kinds of natural systems that hold together are also organized to care for all their parts. Our healthy minds do that, and healthy families do that, too, as do friendships, organizations, and communities. It’s how things that work well work. We always like it and are happy to take part in it, but the world we also made seems driven to be at war with itself and nature, against nearly everyone’s wishes, but we just don’t see why. We might have thought we were living peaceful lives, but something seems to consistently blow things out of proportion, inflaming conflicts inside and out.
There are exceptions, but that’s been happening for at least five thousand years, and mostly for the world’s most productive cultures, starting with what seemed like wonderful traditions, leading to their terrible entire societal collapse. That kind of collapse also erases what it was that collapsed, as the tower of Babel was recorded only as disunifying the multiplication of languages and fragmenting culture. Both the Greek/Crete “Atlantis” and the Roman collapses came from the great success of intelligent, egalitarian, caring, and creative cultures, only to vanish mysteriously, of course. That’s what’s currently straight ahead for us, too, as our global system of stimulating human creativity led us to fight with and exploit each other as we destroy the only habitable planet we know.
Part of the secret is that Growth systems self-organize to work as a whole AND double in size and complexity again and again till something changes them. If they fail to find how to cooperate, nature erases them. From the smoothness of the economy’s global curves, it is clearly working as a whole, coordinating its parts. It’s regularly doubling its scale and complexity, as well as the suffering and conflicts between its parts while degrading its environments. If it is working as a whole, then why isn’t it taking care of all of its parts? It seems to be taking care only of the forces pushing itself and its environments over their last thresholds of growing instability, conflict, and exhaustion. It’s a failure as far as nature is concerned and approaching the time to erase itself.
All systems are self-organized around how the parts smoothly fit and cooperate. The long-term economic curves show how effectively increasingly educated people all over the world are working together, totally unaware of what they are now working on. To grow, systems naturally design themselves to work as wholes, smoothly coordinating AND responding to changing conditions to stay out of trouble, all that is 99% hidden from view. That natural self-coordination comes along with the system as it changes purposes, too.
Any growth system has to change purposes, though, something no one has discussed yet, it seems, either to keep multiplying and stop responding to the suffering and dysfunction it creates or the healthy way to respond to limits to multiplying, turning the same resources to new purposes, to make sure it doesn’t stop caring, to perfecting its designs and making a good home in a stable environment, … i.e. what we all did when “growing up.” Civilization just made the wrong turn.
Look around. All sorts of new lives successfully transition from emerging to maturing; some quite smoothly, and others struggle, sometimes getting the help they could use or not. “Transformations” rely on chains of reactions between the parts as they interact to their “reading the signals,” sometimes like automatic reflexes, other times as explorations of new territory, as they find and change directions – the whole system steering we see everywhere things work.
We’ll need to collectively master that to survive on earth. It can go in alternating phases of experimenting and maturing, as the course of an education or career does. It’s in growing up that any system finds itself and its freedoms.
Making life work for all our world’s parts is the trick; creating a kind of hologram of every part represented in its best way to serve the whole, as the natural goal for systems able to steer is what we’d need to focus on for some time. The role of the parts is always to share and learn, notice good, bad, fresh, stale, and other kinds of useful and enjoyable ideas, to “get the signals” to “step up” or “take off” to reorganize our way of life, follow the paths of all successful new living systems, moving from multiplying our designs to fulfilling them. It’s not erasing the primacy of creativity but finding its right place, taking part in the new focus on caring for and perfecting the many designs of existence that every beautiful work achieves.
For either kind of growth, it is how the system steers that takes it where it’s going, responding to internal and external signals as navigation, so the system’s profits to enable it is changing lasting purposes if we want our two hundred thousand years or so of accumulating wisdom to survive.
(2022). Holistic Natural Systems – Design & Steering: Guiding New Science for Transformation. Journal of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. Presentation Jul 9 https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-22/HNS1-MS-Design&Steering.pdf
I’ve enjoyed the previously marvelous etymonlin.com etymology dictionary and the also marvelous word patterns site, Onelook.com, for years. They worked great together to explore the meaning of the repeated structures of words and how words with one, two, three, four, five, or five-syllables are assembled as very lean geometries for adding the many particular nuances that modify the base term for a particular kind of use.
I seem to be at war with the site’s new managers, though. They are showing the greatest of all possible vanities in eliminating both the word “syllable” and the idea that syllables have any meaning other than the repetition of letters.
Richard Nordquist, a language scholar diagrammed the classical interpretation as follows:
You’re taking a different approach to understanding words than this dictionary. The ‘pos’ part of the words composition and pose come from different sources. Either from *apo- or *tkei- in the reconstructed Indo-European language family for composition, or from pauein in Greek for pose.
The pose entry does mention how the similarity in form between pause and position has influenced their meaning:
hence the Old French verb (in common with cognates in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) acquired the sense of Latin ponere “to put, place” (past participle positus; see position(n.)), by confusion of the similar stems.
Scott, Yes it does seem I wish I knew how to strenuously fight what I see happening on Etymonline. The site seems to be just erasing the contribution of root meanings of syllables used in the geometries of compound worlds. I’m really astounded and frightened by such a blatant error.
The root meanings of the parts combine to create elegant and rich compositions of meaning, clearly serving as the building blocks of our natural languages. These structures of language happen to derive from the most useful and lasting ways of referring to the forms of nature and our experiences of them, derived from many thousands of years of beautiful discovery, and now someone has some notion to erase them.
I think it’s wrong to erase them, particularly for some arbitrary lexicological reason. That is just awful harm to history and humanity to drop the meaning of the ancient building blocks of every language’s most durable words. They carry the history of our direct references to the designs, processes, and ends of natural systems, their material meanings, and our relationships with them.
I respect your level of concern for this stuff. Maybe you can help me understand you a little better. Here is what I think you are saying:
There is an inherent meaning connected with syllables or geometries in written words. Which implies a shared meaning between composition and pose simply due to the presence of pos in both words.
So tell me if I represented you correctly there. Also let me know what you think about these two objections.
1.) swine and pig share meaning but do not share syllables. 2.) noon and soon share a syllable but do not share meaning.
I’m having trouble imaging how your approach would make sense.
Thanks for the question. The answer is not exactly. The geometries of meaning that one finds [from combining] syllables in compound words are interactions of the ancient meanings attached to them, as units of ideas [and] meaning that had originally been expressed vocally. It’s hard to say, but as Latin and Greek record their conversion from vocal to written dialect, it appears most of which seem predate written language.
So they appear to come from sounds and gestures *referring to* natural phenomena and experiences, repeated over and over for their usefulness and added attached meaning, that formal language developed from. So as long as they live, those informal, accumulated, culturally sustained, and diversified packages of experiences, feelings, and insights remain attached to the direct reference to the subjects of the word.
Chris
Ok ok. Could you give examples of words that preserve that ancient context as well as words that are too abstracted and have less connection to the vocal roots of meaning?
Also, are there any definitive books which outline this way of understanding language?
Jessie
I have wall-to-wall meetings till next Friday. Sorry for the brief reply. It’s all the long-lasting useful words that stem from the meanings of indo-european syllables. Say “conflagration” four syllables, {con fla gra tion}, or cooperation {co oper a tion}, each geometry of subjects with syllables is a reference to an old idea of the combined meaning as a whole.
One of the other pieces of evidence is that history shows that written Greek and Latin appeared as if all of a sudden, with NO precedent, while displaying a vast and deep appreciation of nature and the human experience, with no one at all to tell the writers what all that meant, — other than — the ancient common cultures from which they emerged.
Get it? It all had to come from somewhere, and the start was the long, long accumulation of short sounds associated with deep meanings that had to have spread and built up as people spread from Africa to the Mideast, then both Eastward and Westward, then to the North, as the ice retreated, maintaining enough contact for innovations in knowledge to be passed along. There is no other way for the deeply related family of languages to have developed.
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I’m out of my league here, a natural systems research scientist against a block of pure semantic theorists (it would seem). If you have any ideas about how to respond or what this means to the truth of language, please respond.
Jessie
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
