Category Archives: Natural Economy

how economies can work comfortably within ecologies

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Is something new and unexpected taking over?

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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.

https://bit.ly/SomethingUnexpectedTakingOver

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Pathways to our whole system change

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and for the use of one’s podium

Jessie Lydia Henshaw
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CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license 4.0

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.

_____________________________________

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.

________________________________________________

Author References:

Research site:    Reading Nature’s Signals 
https://synapse9.com/signals
 Original Draft of Pathways article                 
Pathways to System Change

Papers:

(2024). A People’s Systems Science [GST/n]: Weaving Abstract & Contextual Systems:
Telling Them Apart & Aligning Their Parts. ISSS 2024 Mtg.
Draft Paper  https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-24/HNS3-PSS%20MS-v.docx   
Talk Slides  https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-24/HNS3-PPS-1.pptx

(2023). Emergent Growth of System Self-Organization & Self-Control: Contextual system design, steering, and transformation. Systems Research and Behavioral Science
Author copy https://synapse9.com/pub/2023_sys-SelfOrg&SelfControl.pdf

(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

(2021). Understanding Nature’s Purpose in Starting All New Lives with Compound Growth: New Science for Individual Systems. Journal of the International Society for the Systems Sciences July 2021.
MS https://synapse9.com/pub/2022_NewSysSci-IndividSys.pdf,  
Supplemental https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-21/ISSSJul11NewSci-IndividSys-supl.pdf  
Oct 2 Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0plSWMjnTHQ

(2019). Growth Constant Fingerprints of Economically Driven Climate Change: From 1780 origin to post-WWII great acceleration. draft https://synapse9.com/drafts/2019_12-GrowthConstFingerprintsOfCC-preprint.pdf, in Cornell arXive physics preprints https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.04340 Submissions to: Submissions to Nature Climate Change, IOP, Ecological Economics, Anthropocene, Springer Climatic Change, PLOS.

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Why did science become myopic and now unable to guide our future?

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It’s both sad and marvelous to now be reading the clear signs that science has become so misguided that only a scientific revolution will keep it from destroying all of what science built. Science has indeed shown us the great beauty of nature and our lives, given us marvelous tools for self-expression, and then also highly unbalanced ways of life now an existential threat to the only living planet we’ll ever know, not to mention threatening to the glorious diversity of human cultures made possible by the blind multiplication of our power to interfere with nature that science enabled and made science so profitable. 

One of many bits of clear evidence is the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by our overuse of fossil fuels. Technically, that is a symptom, not at all close to the cause, but aside from that, the consensus scientific response to the symptom is to try overusing something else to replace fossil fuels to see if that works out any better. 

Or, you could ask, “How’s this for progress?” This December 2023 data record of the entire history of human-caused CO2 blanketing the earth shows the accelerating acceleration of the climate-forcing trend. Its real value, though, is as remarkably clear evidence that **all our solutions are only accelerating the problem.** You could hardly find a greater or clearer cry in the darkness for a new scientific revolution. Clearly our guidance is way off track.

We’ve faced profound contradictions produced by science generation after generation, most not timely nor effectively responded to, some wonderfully enlightening too, and of both the larger and smaller varieties of important confrontations between our minds and nature.

Perhaps going back to the origin of the human species about 850,000 years ago when our peculiar constellation of amazingly perfected designs, our ultimate problem seems to be whatever caused us to be emotionally attached to making up our own realities, given minds and bodies that proved very clearly our sudden emergence back then marked a major departure from evolution. 

Image from “Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition” in Science August 2023

In this story, the rub is that in order for humans to make mental images powerful for influencing our far more complex and varied environments, we clearly had to keep perfecting our ideas and tools and selecting the most powerful for controlling outcomes as we evolved. Given the vast “mismatch in variety” between mind and nature, we’d have to keep leaving out more and more and more of the contextual variation of reality to fashion ideas, giving us more and more power, not noticing that it also divorced us from the contexts from which all other kinds of meaning come.

Thus, we came to represent nature with numbers and formulas, ENTIRELY stripping our images of nature from their contexts. That separation of our powers from the wide and rich variety of the contexts of natural working relationships was the cost. Our mental versions of nature then harmonized our blind power over nature with the warm connections of home and family, the one place in our world, the foundation of our cultural worlds. Coupling our mental worlds, centered around in-context relationships but increasingly dominated by finding abstract rules, taken out of context, selected for power over things over the centuries, is the storyline of our whole history, enriching and impoverishing our chosen way of living, then becoming trapped in using science to multiply our interference with nature for profit, that the math all projects to be potentially infinite. … well, something wrong with the math – no context.

History is replete with all manner of stories about the disastrous course of affairs that lead to, like the story of Adam and Eve or how the most successful civilizations tended to collapse, the rub being that the problem-solving gets too complicated, as documented by Joe Tainter. The familiar fables and famous plays centered on the naturally corrupting influence of power over people and nature are evidence, too. The cause? The cause, apparently, is the oversimplification of the rules of power and the blinding of the people using them to the contexts in which they are being used.

So …. that’s something of a big deal. Humans are also capable of big ideas as well, though, and it’s clear today we may have only one chance left to get the idea out of our heads that the laws of nature are what we think. Could our way of thinking change to being part of the world we live in and came from instead of being in charge of it? Sure, it is very possible. If you learn to read the markers of the difference, you find the diversity and learnability of ways for people to reconnect with the natural world and possibly continue our, in some ways, most remarkable of nature’s great experiments, are growing all over.

What’s in the way is the power of our few hundred years of perfecting our powers, unaware of how ultimately dangerous to ourselves and to life it made our dominant world culture. My most recent contribution to that is in the form of a LinkedIn post yesterday (to celebrate my birthday! :-) on how my views evolved. I come from a multi-generation science and education family and had a marvelous connection with gamey high-school friends and relations who got together in Brooklyn in 1968 to collectively ponder what in the world was happening to us and have fun doing it. 

If the LinkedIn post is not accessible, the photo journal with notes linked from there, on the ten years “Where it all happened,” is posted in my library.

Jessie 

For teachers, Natural Economy

Earth Day – And Where We Are

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Response to Fast-Growing World Confusion & Conflict
Earth Day Apr 22, 2023 – LinkedIn – Please repost if it needs to be said

In the past, we thought we could overlook the mysterious growing variety of world crises. They grew in scale as we developed, seemingly better able to overcome them. However, none continued for as long or expanded as rapidly as the one racing ahead of us today!

Keynes solidly predicted it, as have many others, but others didn’t believe it. I’ve also closely studied its physics and emerging self-organization for four decades in detail and general pattern. I had the tools and saw the very leading edge. Then I saw how growth systems multiply their scale and complexity, approaching explosive rates of change in how fast they expand, reorganize, and require their parts to adapt and reorganize their relationships. That’s the killer; what many of us now feel happening.

It comes directly from our very most immature of all possible economic plans, endless exploding unsustainable growth. Compound growth is a fast, quick start to a new life, a *pre-birth* process of not fully formed designs. We can see and feel the strains of its rising peak of internal and external pressures everywhere around us. That it’s happening to all of us at once is “the signal” that things can and must change.

Usually, self-animating growth systems in nature gracefully resolve the crises that force them to respond to change or to fail. They change what motivates them, their “purpose,” from multiplying designs to steering them toward or away from what they’re running into. It’s a sound, tried, and true strategy, if a bit counterintuitive for new lives that have only followed a fixed rule for so long.

The civilizations most successful at growing their power seem all to have succumbed to it, though. People easily become socially fixated on endlessly multiplying the power of their profitable concepts. It’s cutting that “umbilical cord” attaching us to the false hope of limitless growth that could convince us now that responding to life is our world’s best chance at life. We need to “appreciate the signal,” though.

WE SEE THE MAJOR RISING THREATS ALL OVER THE PLANET TODAY. That’s our signal. It’s to “back off, look out, and take care,” the most fundamental rule of STEERING. To survive, all new systems need to learn how to steer. All systems that survive growth are examples of the range of strategies that work.

It’s risky, like life, but even if the world has a bad slump, perhaps as inexperienced pilots make mistakes, the world getting the signal would largely assure keeping our world cultures intact. Going through a “Tower of Bable” or “dark age” type collapse would not. We would need a kind global “Marshall Plan” to help the world’s talents for organizing things, keep those talents, and put them to work on a new plan, caring for each other and making things work for and all around our fabulous new world.

___________________________________________________________________

JLH – The world is on the move, but following the rule of growth that got us here, now causing crises, is not the path to our future. As all new life must,
it’s time to back away from the edge and learn to steer.

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Reading the signals to care for our future – The Bridge from Growth to Self-Control

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First published as
A fatal flaw in the economy’s design ― Keynes first saw & the world forgot. By J L Henshaw – for the Jan 2023 UN people’s Global Futures Forum, Global Finance and Economic Architecture section.

Hi, I’m an accomplished senior systems architect, a physicist who, many years ago, found a useful scientific method for studying the designs of environmental growth systems, and the differences between growth systems taking emerging systems to fatal crises or long successful lives, what you might call “self-healing growth.” I also studied the design of UN systems at work in drafting the SDGs, which I attended and contributed to, learning a great deal about why our world economy’s growth is not.

It’s wonderful that systems architecture comes up for discussion occasionally, though rare. One reason it gets little attention is the focus on symptoms without addressing causes, as that is what most people notice. That’s important, of course, but it also perpetuates the causes. Where the cause is systems spiraling out of control, that’s bad. Today’s accelerating scales global impacts have terribly dangerous environmental, economic, and societal destabilization thresholds.

I was a physicist and then started studying the designs of natural systems designs and how they worked by themselves. As that’s not a usual scientific question, I stumbled across quite a lot. For example, physics never studied how SO many systems that develop by explosive growth at first, of both natural and human design, then, without a fuss, change strategies to then perfect their designs and connections to have active and creative lives long after their growth.

It means that nature figured out the solution to our crisis very long ago and that science did not think or see how to study how they worked. Societally we seem to get too wrapped up in problem-solving and ignore problem-sourcing, and then when we get in trouble then not change course as if always stuck. If we looked around, we’d see many systems that are responsive and change course, including ourselves often enough, examples that should be very helpful if we learned where to look.

A second important discovery is that although we discuss a growing economy in terms of numbers, economies are not numerical processes. Growth of every kind is a system-building process of creating working relationships that need to coordinate. Those new working systems originate from the build-up of connections around a tiny “seed” pattern. That produces a working whole that first multiplies more rapidly by exploiting its environment and then usually turns to make long-term relationships. Our economy is not yet doing that “part B” part of responding to limits. Keynes noticed that too, saying he thought, surely, society could find something better to invest in than growth when growth limits hit, mentioned in Ch 16, on “Observations on the Nature of Capital” in his 2nd book.

The main point is that *successful growth is always a two-stage process.* The first multiplying stage creates a new form of working relationships by growing as it exploits its surroundings. The second is perfecting the system’s internal design as it secures its new niche in the world. Call it “A then B.” The first stage lets it A) multiply its power, capturing more and new kinds of resources to build its ability to use and capture more. The second stage lets it B) refine and mature its designs to care for itself and secure its role in the new world around it. In other words, natural systems that survive their growth seem to display self-organization and self-control. That’s what humanity is supposedly trying to do, but having, as we often have throughout history, a terrible time of it.

The systems that become disrupted by external forces of their own making, as is happening to us now, differ from others that don’t by continuing to multiply their scale and complexity as they collide with hard natural limits. Those that respond to potentially disruptive changes caused by growth avoid harm by instead shifting to caring for themselves and their futures. That apparent intelligence from uncontrolled systems might only be from growth needing to be ‘self-animating,’ ‘responsive,’ and ‘cohesive.’ No growth system would get far if not also ‘exploratory’ and ‘adaptive.’ That’s not all that life is, but life always seems to have those capacities of acting as if out of self-interest and behaving cohesively as a whole. Our civilization seems unresponsive, though.

That humanity became unresponsive to the need to shift from investing in growth to care as threatening growth limits approached is the tragic mistake. We all respond to avoid such tragedies in every personal matter we can. We don’t keep taking out food for dinner till it’s a big pile on the floor with nothing left in the fridge or cupboards. No, we normally just start somewhere and A) take out approximately enough and then adjust as we B) make whatever will work for the occasion at the end to C) enjoy. That’s active steering. Civilization is not doing that, whatever you call it.

I think our societal blindness has to do with the difference between our two main ways of learning. The first is 1) absorbing experiences in familiar contexts where we become intuitively aware of and responsive to everything happening. The other is 2) making and sharing concepts. Concepts are inventions made from observed patterns that are simplified, taken out of context, and reassembled to suit our minds. How they often represent imagined realities to us and be SO satisfying we may not notice they represent a world without contexts, letting us become inordinately attached to the powerful ones. Using them hides any connection to possibly upsetting the contexts invasively controlled by their use.

The above only scratches the surface of the questions to ask, but tracing the history and demographics of this way of blinding ourselves to consequences seems to genuinely connect them to where we keep disrupting contexts by trying to impose abstract rules.

A practical response, sometimes a “cure,” lets people see their interest in caring for the contexts they might upset, something I call “contextual engagement.” The general principle is that you make better decisions if you see what’s going on. Elinor Ostrom’s video talk for receiving the 2009 Nobel prize for economics discusses it, and Gerald Midgley’s videos show his expertise in guiding divided communities to work together using it too. I’ve also developed useful methods for it, like asking people to list all the things in a given environment that connect with some primary concern — seeing the parts laid out as loose puzzle pieces makes people think much more clearly about the whole.

For more background, see my research journal, “Reading Nature’s Signals.” The theme is reading the essential non-verbal signals of change in our very lively world. We all get skilled at reading the cues in familiar contexts. Applying those skills to less familiar contexts is the challenge for learning to steer the world’s path ahead. Luckily in nature, most are related. The signs of trouble or relief and what to do next in one situation can be remarkably similar in others or at different scales. My way is to alternate reasoning and feeling, so when one turns up something odd, the other can help find what it is.

Note: This Figure is a very general schedule for the most creative and critical processes of natural system growth. The shapes and labels help notice what’s happening in the real contexts of interest. You look for how the succession of turning point events and developments take place. We seem to learn best when we’ve studied our ways of noticing interesting new connections and finding exceptions. We already know a lot about those, intuitively, so being self-critical to test those in new territory helps build what you see and clean up while better understanding the general pattern’s shapes and markers.

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Note to RegenPollination

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ALERT – ambitious regeneration … faces rapid global decline!

Lauren,

I’ve been active in the movements for decades but have been unsuccessful in pointing out how we should address the symptoms AND the causes of rapid global sustainability decline.

That has not been happening at all, though. While trying to heal the world, the UN, environmentalists, and all the other regenerative movements have done nothing about what is causing the rapid acceleration of damage. Hidden in very plain sight it’s the regular financial doubling of the economy and its side effects for maximum profit. 

However important the symptoms are, we have also been displaying about as much blindness to the real cause as the people actively managing or doing it. That is, the well-educated professionals with homes and families whose rules for profit tell them to extract multiplying wealth from the earth, blind to the costs! That’s the real cause in a nutshell.

I write lots of short pieces on it. The main possible saving grace is that the people managing the planet’s destruction are mostly well-educated, successful professionals with lives and families as threatened by global environmental collapse as anyone’s. That they are blind to how they are causing the threats to themselves is the weak point in the system.

It happens by their following the old rule for profit, to use profits to invest in multiplying profits, thus endlessly multiplying the economy’s power over nature. They don’t see it because “the rules do not connect with their contexts.” The people are then only guided by their social relations, which are mostly very positive due to all the profits, unaware of the existential threat!

The real key is for the movements to expand our caring to include those causing the harm but don’t see it, rather than despising them, as Marx and so many others have, assuming they saw what they’re doing. Their blindness is systemic and, largely, NOT THEIR FAULT.

The solution is for our care for them to let us serve their interest in caring for their homes and families at risk. That MIGHT trigger a realization that they need to fund all our cares for the future rather than deny our care and fund its ever-faster destruction. We’d be in good company then, as ALL natural and human systems that survive their growth exit growth that way, by shifting from extraction to care.

I wish I could attend some of tomorrow’s key Pollination & Ecocivilization meetings (ref below). I’m generally available to talk or consult. Would you pass the word that I’d love to help writers to write up some of this? I’m a scientist who writes and needs to connect with writers who do some science.

Here are links that go in-depth, from a humanistic natural systems view, Three talks with links in the prefaces.
– Language as a knowledge tree for systems *in context* (last week)
– How Natural Growth Makes New Lives – Opportunistic Paths to Smooth Sailing (2022)
– The Surprising Design & Steering of Whole Systems (2021),

All the very best,

Jessie

Jessie Henshaw  –   HDS natural systems design science     ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸
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Research Journal — Reading Nature’s Signals — Publication

Regeneration Pollination will be hosting its regular session (on our regular zoom link) this Friday in parallel with the Ecocivilisation 24-hr Connectathon that starts on Sept 22nd at 14:00 UTC. In addition, Regeneration Pollination will be hosting a 1 hr session pre-event (9/22 @ 13:00 UTC) and post-event (9/22 @ 14:00 UTC), which will be on the zoom link used for the Connectathon.  Register for the Connectathon here and join us for the pre-and post-event session here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8206

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Nature tells us how and when to turn

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The first recorded talk on it will help show the quandry:
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4Ysah2ZzY
The Updated Slides:
– https://tinyurl.com/2s3skpxw,
The research behind all this:
– https://synapse9.com/signals
And the early draft proposal to the UN:
– https://tinyurl.com/FreshPlanFor-Steering

Natural growth is the beginning of life for all systems with life cycles like ours. There are a series of built-in transformation challenges, though. We all know life’s a challenge, right? Nature has a tried and true path to success for the big one now approaching.

Upon approaching a new living system’s limits to its first phase of growth (its explosion of new designs), they can either a) respond with a survival instinct and change their growth strategy or b) not. So far, humanity has not. The severity of crises now developing might change that, but only if a clear understanding of what to do widely spreads. We don’t have that now, culturally, scientifically, or governmentally. Starts of it are only found in small, still ineffective, transformation movements.

Nature can be very persuasive though, making it more and more clear where the needs to divest and invest really are. Whether it’s cultural or financial, it is our investments in the future that steer where our lives go. So, it’s a matter of putting our resources where they are now most needed. Today our power centers are still obsessed with multiplying their power over nature and society, which forces ever-increasing pressures and disruption in everyone’s lives.

History offers several civilizations that have collapsed from their peak of power to leave cultural dark ages in their wake, evidently caught in following an MPP (maximum power principle) plan to the end. There are lots of others that achieved long and rich lives after their initial explosive growth, too, as people and lots of our plans also generally do. We have that challenge now, to find how to make the choice to end our growing power in a way that lets our world survive. This video linked above is the first of my talks on a fairly complete understanding of the problem and solution. Just read this and listen with an open mind, let the new questions register, and mull them over.

Unfortunately, I’m still tending to talk about what I find most fascinating about this crisis. I’m a scientist with a cool set of discoveries. It would be better if I focused mostly on what it would mean for those reading or listening!

What it is all for is to help people see why nature needs us to make better use of the world economy’s profits: A) to finally fund real-world sustainability as it should be and B) to help people learn about how to shape and prepare for the new lives our future. Both changing to investing in the long-term future and clarifying how to do it will relieve the extreme economic pressure everyone is experiencing.

What makes that possible and important now is our now finally crossing the “inflection point” in growth (the breaking point in the initial rapid growth curve), and in either smooth or disruptive ways the world will soon face reality in a very new way. On the positive side, that would allow whole systems like ours to become capable of acting in unison! Also on the positive side, almost everyone on earth is skilled at making the same kind of transformation in their relationships, as well as work projects all the time. The cycle is from inspiration to multiplication, to facing reality in having to choose what to do.

Self-interests and common interests in saving the earth then coincide. If there are leaders who understand what the needs real needs are, the whole system will turn to taking care of itself and maximizing its long-term interests. That is also what happens at the birth of organisms, growth leading to facing the future, suddenly exposed to a new world to find their way in. There’s much to learn when facing a new reality, but the first big change is less hurry for most parts of the system as the guiding principles of the system quickly change.

The shock of a new reality and big interruptions in plans, first relieve the pressure to change ever faster and by the whole system turning toward common purposes, that and getting to know what’s happening without nearly so many blinders. We’ll also need to understand the natural change to the heart of the economic system. We maximized the use of profits to multiply the system, even smoothly ending that is likely to be a shock. The values and needs for business and whole system profits will change from multiplying the system to caring for it.

Every kind of natural system starts with the same variation on accumulative explosive self-organization, getting started by an inspiration (awakening of new design) that captures energy to build more ways of capturing energy. We got stuck on it, though, in a very big way, over centuries developing expertise to continue it until suddenly by accident, quite blind to it really, threatening the habitability of the earth.

The grand surprise is that even that way of mindlessly pursuing and then having to rudely collide with self-destructive limits to that “limitless” explosive growth still does, from nature’s menu of options, offers a very satisfying and graceful end goal of perfecting the design and our ways of life in a long-lasting way.

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We have more than one problem

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Thinking about the global crisis, the people who feel it think so differently than those who don’t, and the solutions of the latter seem to be at the very root of the problem (problem A).

We need solutions that would work in practice. That would take a real understanding of the problem and its origins. Easy-sounding solutions only mention the endpoint and skip how the process of getting there starts and develops. Decentralizing the economy, for example, sounds good but would also destroy the economy, as every product today physically comes from everywhere! Social values can make excellent design principles, but they are not system designs. We have many good designers and managers, too, but they are not doing the job needed today. So “problem A” seems to be that our system designers and managers are following century-old rules that today have become globally destructive. That implies that changing their jobs is more important than changing the people. We still need the same talents but doing the right things.

That presents a huge but possibly practical challenge. The people we’d need to communicate with are largely very communicative and, from their view, caring. It’s our world culture of wonderfully educated, risk-averse, and successful professionals from good families – who steer the world’s institutions and economy while also being blind to the side effects of their steering. They even call the existential threats they cause “externalities” and don’t know what to do about them. In truth, those so-called externalities are internal system breakdowns caused by our long history of applying Many Too Many Solutions while Blind To The Side Effects.

This cream of the world crop of educated professionals is NOT intentionally blind to their impacts, now destroying the earth at the economy’s maximum rate of acceleration. They also do have access to the data on the global system breakdowns. However, their thinking is in terms of the CONCEPTS of their work (simple models of profit), not noticing how their choices became disconnected from their CONTEXTS (the rich meanings of all the living worlds they touch). So, the problem is they don’t-feel-a-thing.

Feelings and their meanings come from contextual awareness, not abstract concepts. So blind to the effects of their work, they blindly follow the outdated rules to multiply everything that was once highly creative but now is quickly destroying the earth. Yet, if you get to know them personally, it is quite ironic how they do largely seem to be caring, responsible people. They’re from good families and try their level best to secure their homes and care for their communities. Those ironies present are where the openings for real communication are!

So, how do we get them to look at different rules to follow, like for the rest of us, please “pay attention to the planet.” There are two necessary parts to freeing professionals from their “true beliefs” and opening their eyes. (((#1 One is experiential.))) Someone needs to personally lead them out to explore the world and have direct experiences of the natural beauty of life spoiled by rising global demands and dysfunction that urgently need relief from growing pressures and good care. (((#2 Another is mining deeper cultural knowledge.))) Caring for your home is as deep a tradition as any in human cultures, but our elite professionals have totally lost track of it in wildly shaping (and reshaping) our world.
The first link shows some history of what happened to cause the blindness of experts to develop. It implies the task is to help the world’s leadership recover their ability to care for the earth as our genuine home, and NOT a concept (a). It helps to see the breadth of our crises (b). a) https://synapse9.com/signals/bronze-age-roles-of-hestia-and-hermes/
b) https://synapse9.com/_r3ref/100CrisesTable.pdf

They’d never do most of the wrecking crew work they do if they followed the customary practices of “homemaking” or if you prefer “home science.” They are fairly simple and reliable practices for 1) having wide awareness and 2) respecting common interests that we all follow in our homes. We all follow them when doing tasks, too, at home, at the office, or in the community. They are the same as the universal system-making model nature follows for Making Things To Fit The Context. When making changes, it starts with building on some idea, “confluence,” or inspiration of nature. When activated, it becomes the ‘germ’ of a new working system that grows as fast as it can at first. Then it sometimes passes the test of when and how to stop.

The universal test is simple, taking resources from growth for Responding To The Growing Needs Of The New System as those needs start competing with the values of more expansion. An endless expansion gives a system more to take care of (and more complexity that prevents it) than is manageable; a fatal problem. When making dinner, for example, the natural turning point is when you have collected and started preparing what is needed and then turn to finishing and gracefully serving. That must be before you startup too much to finish. That turn from starting to completing a design process also happens when new organisms become fully formed and ready to start learning about their new world. That occurs at birth for mammals when the new life starts to explore with family support for a while as they “fledge” and then be freed. People call it “youth” and “graduate,” the preparation and point of leaving the nest.

So, communicating to professionals about their ignorance threatening the planet is a dicey proposition. That is helped by really knowing what you’re talking, protesting, or singing about. Since negativity usually reinforces opposition, it helps to take a caring rather than aggressive approach.

A good example of that came up with the US supreme court starting to take away universal rights. The idea of forcing the country to adopt radical Christian Right (CR) values by packing the court came from their decades-long quest. Now it looks like there may be more to come than denying every woman’s right to privacy in their reproductive choices. Every living thing on earth needs individual and home privacy, though, so it seems to violate nature to deny it to others unless you are seriously injured.

So to turn that all around, ask: “What in the world happened to the CR to make them feel so directly harmed” And why was the only solution to deny the world around them universal rights??”
Were they feeling an egregious loss of their home and privacy? The world around them has indeed been changing ever faster (due to problem A). The threat of ever faster change around their very fixed beliefs could have made them feel alienated, without a secure home anymore, and only able to think of lashing back? That makes it plausible that sympathy could sometimes be a better tool than antagonization, and of course, it would go both ways.

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JLH

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System change? It’s also birthing new lives

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from One community Global: Living In a New World
https://www.onecommunityglobal.org/living-in-a-new-world/

A comment on a post by Joss C.  for an Offering of tools for systems change on the Systems Innovation Network, a quite beautifully done Systems Innovation Starter Kit for which courses are offered.

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Yes, quite nice work. I think learning how natural systems develop and change as wholes seems needed too, though.  We are often easily confused by how easy it can sometimes be to change the parts of systems we want to change as a whole. Systems generally develop as wholes and change as wholes, though, of course, unless broken up. Learning how to foster whole system change often comes from attempting to engineer some living system, to then see it fail over and over, learning how from experience by deep emersion in the context to understand its needs.  That’s often how businesses evolve, by the deep emersion of its people in creating order from the chaos their first attempts cause. That’s still likely to happen, but might be made easier if people studied how actual systems emerge and change. 

Real system change is more like the birth of a child, something developing as a whole and emerging as a whole, to then find it has to actively explore and adapt to find its place in the world.  That applies to the birth of new ideas for new kinds of organization within a business, for or in a community, or in the world.  It always first starts with the germination of its growth, then development and maturation on the way to having a life. Each stage is a unique challenge and experiential learning and growth process. The first creates its insides and then develops its relationships outside, to fit with the environment it emerges into. 

What we’re struggling with globally is, of course, moving the world system in a profound and dramatic way. Though it is very different from learning to personally host and guide the birth of innovations in our work to fit their contexts there is a lot about global change we can learn from it. For a global change, we need to recognize first that we are not in control of much at all. Secondly, we need to recognize that systems are systems primarily because they are self-controlled, work as wholes, and though they have flexible parts and do often change by themselves, they really ONLY change as wholes and not by pushes and shoves, but by themselves something like we do. 

That’s where it’s useful to study our experience with systems that change by themselves, our groups, friends, communities, selves, and children are things we know a lot about. There are only a few ways an outside approach can help, or hinder. For systems that one is part of one can spread the feeling of the pressures and any useful knowledge of opportunities for a whole to change on its own. There are often places where a developing whole system awareness is not getting through, and different forms of whole system awareness are needed. That is what seems to prepare a system for some sort of inspiration of its own, sometimes called “animal spirits,” that trigger whole system change, in a direction that motivates the whole. 

We see it in our own behavior, as with what makes us overcome habits and do something new. It takes deep and ultimately inspiring feelings. If you think about change moments for other things, other words for it might come up, but it’s one or another kind of holistic response to awakening and opportunity. It needn’t be awakening due to growing life-threatening pressures, but we do hope indeed they will help motivate and inspire our world. When the system awakens to the opportunity it triggers the animal spirits to be felt by and move the whole.  

Of course, that is IF successful. Let us hope that’s what humanity will have in mind to do as push comes to shove and the terrifying game of “chicken” we keep playing with ourselves, of using power to multiply power as a way of life, finally breaks.  

_______________________________________

jlh

For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Stories & Experiences, Transformation, What to do

Betrayed by the power of our minds

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The radical separation of humans from nature, our being so self-absorbed and seeing nature as defined in our heads rather than the other way around, has been a deep mystery for a long time.

My interest in it came from noticing how mathematics became our standard for representing nature but cannot describe or help us study what makes life so lively, the abounding creative processes of nature.

I’m not against math, a fabulous art, that does help us identify certainties, however, our desperate search for certainty is what seems to have betrayed us, splitting our minds between attentiveness and total blindness to our environments, having defined in our minds nature as our rules for how to control nature…

A general systems theory and demonstration of the problem and solutions are to be presented on Jul 9 at 3:30 at the 2022 ISSS world systems science conference. See the preprint Holistic Natural Systems – Design & Steering – Guiding New Science for Transformation.

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First Openings

The search for answers in mathematics, the language of determinate relationships that science uses, has proved extraordinarily profitable, leading to growing human comforts that have also taken us to the point of our increasingly destroying the natural world. Our mysterious detachment from nature seems very directly at fault. The animation of life, its rich relationships, and creativity are all left out of the formula when people are guided by determinate rules. It’s something I’ve long studied as a physicist, having first noticed that every event begins and ends with some little dynamic transient of change.

I think part of the problem is that language was actually reflected our first highly useful systems thinking, with all its words and grammar arranged to communicate important experiences, designs, and relationships IN THE NATURAL CONTEXT. Math makes rules abstracted from a natural context, that are most profitable when offering easy ways to control nature without concern for the context. So they work great but pass on no information on when they are being overused. That is as clear in the simple cases and most extreme cases, such as the world consensus plan to maximize our economic growth rate, for regularly doubling the wealth we extract from nature while ignoring its rapidly degrading impacts on nature, called “externalities.”

But who is it that is blind to what, and how in the world do we face an existential dilemma evidently buried so deep in human consciousness?

Finding the right path forward

We see humanity’s deeply split personality, generous and playful as well as obsessed with expanding our control of the world but need to find its source. Then we will finally begin to make progress, to slowly dig our way out of the terror our powerful minds seem to have created for us. Somehow we allowed our truly wondrous designs to create a new world of enormous cruelty, following their promise of relieving nature’s cruelty. That’s definitely happening, and definitely not good.

One of the paths to a cure could come from studying the differences between how people behave in one or the other way. We might then cure the blind way of abusing our powers by restoring the principles of staying in touch with environmental contexts. The direct approach, helping others immerse themselves in the natural environments they are in trouble with, works great using an experienced teacher. The living systems scientist like Ostrom or Midgley do it by lead communities through a process of exposure to how their worlds work, leading to their making much better choices.

As parents we also talk to our kids that way too, helping them to understand problems of insensitivity to others. Every good family does that, but the children still grow up to follow the rules of maximizing growing profits and ignoring the economy’s ever-growing impacts. That very clearly defines the split between how people behave in familiar contexts, where they can feel the strains on relationships, and in the public sphere where they don’t. In the public sphere rules for profit give people only feelings of self-interest and blind them entirely to the enormous building strains in the wider world’s relationships.

I’m not saying that is the only strong force causing humanity’s spiritual separation from life, but one we can see plainly enough to realize we very much need to act on it, despite the difficulty of communication that recognizing errors in our plans naturally creates.

Modern society presents other special problems of communication too, confronting us with thousands of self-serving silos of narrow beliefs, personal, social, religious, national, and professional. I look at them all as “cultures,” the “cells of knowledge” we build to guide us on how to think, work, live, and talk to give us some local sense of security in a confusing world. Cultures are also a saving grace as well as a way to divide us, given how most are deeply rooted in what worked in the past, with authentic copies passed on from generation to generation.

Of course, individual people have individual saving graces too, to use in helping us climb out of the trap we find ourselves in. Some have vision, steady hands, charisma, moral clarity, persistence, or wonderful person-to-person good hearts. Those don’t come from theories of control, that betray our powerful minds. They come from the opposite, from our loves and cares largely cut out of the public sphere by the rules we blindly follow. Saving graces in our institutions seem harder to find. We mostly built them around ideas of expanding control or being funded by it, not on learning how to make free associations work well.

What it seems we need to rely on is family culture and their central one for all and all for one life agreement. I’d include in that both the home and work families we center our lives on, which generally make us acutely aware of the non-verbal as well as verbal cues indicating openings and strains on our relationships. That is the very kind of environmental awareness that enables our personal and family survival instincts.

That is what seems most missing from the public sphere institutions, seemingly blinded by following abstract rules rather than navigating relationships with the world. It’s not even that the world doesn’t act as a whole. It certainly can and does, as you see in the effect of managing a global economy to work as a whole. To feel where the world is going, and change our collective steering, we’d need to count all the global strains we have not been counting.

An Experimental Partial List of the mostly uncounted growing strains on our relationship with life.
The Top 100+ World Crises Growing With Growth
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(note on the home science of Hestian proto-Greek culture now the new post: Bronze Age Roles of Hestia and Hermes

JLH