Category Archives: Scientific theory

among best, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Research & Measures, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences, Transformation

Pathways to our whole system change

Leave a comment

and for the use of one’s podium

Jessie Lydia Henshaw
Please quote with credit and a link to this page
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.

among best, For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural patterns, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Popular, Research & Measures, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences, Synapse9 Work & Links, What to do

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

Leave a comment

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 

among best, For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Scientific theory

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

Leave a comment

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.

among best, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences, Synapse9 Work & Links

Note to RegenPollination

Leave a comment

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     ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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

among best, For teachers, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Popular, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences, Transformation, What to do

We have more than one problem

Leave a comment

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.

________________________________________

JLH

Natural patterns, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Popular, Scientific theory, Transformation, What to do

Behavioral ironies for our moral values

Leave a comment

It’s wonderful to have so much movement in the movement now, the passion and connections making such awakening waves around facing our global crisis of growing crises.  Capitalism isn’t amenable to the kinds of change mostly offered, moral suasion, that I hear voiced by the great host of determined voices rising in response. 

The people actually most responsible are the class of highly educated successful professionals from good families ruling the world.  We need to study ironies like that, looked at as non-verbal cues from nature to look more deeply at the problem.  Another irony is that the educated professional class running the world, who like everyone else, exhibits highly successful survival instincts in their personal environments, evidently also seems to think nothing of destroying the home of nature and humanity at ever-accelerating rates; another irony. 

The many ironies surrounding our escalating world crisis all suggest some kind of profound blindness, on the part of nature’s most intelligent species. There is one that the ironies can help us pick out. One of the other ironies that have been talked about for decades now, is that it seems our solutions are the source of our problems. That is particularly clear in how you just can’t talk to people offering great temporary solutions for growing long-term problems. They’re not motivated to look for the flaws in their proud designs. That disappointing truth is pervasive throughout the world sustainability movement. For the biggest example, even the climate change effort amounts to an enormous effort to find a temporary fix that absolutely can’t last. Its aim is to phase out one ever-multiplying energy source for another, taking no (0) account of the ever-multiplying impacts of generating and using the new source for multiplying our control of nature.  What we’re using the energy for is probably a bigger actual environmental problem than how we obtain it!

In short, we’re behaving like confused 2-year-olds with respect to some of our most important tasks, as we also act like grownups with respect to some others. For some reason, I started noticing these kinds of ironies a long time ago. They would just pop out at me.  I noticed in first-year physics almost 60 years ago, for example, that physics does not study the parts of nature that can’t be turned into a formula!  Of course, no one would listen then or ever since, though recently I may be making little bits of progress.  The insight that triggered that observation came while being taught about the parts of simple behaviors that fit formulas, like a ball thrown in the air. We were not taught about the little non-linear energizing and de-energizing transients that begin and end every case of similar events. 

Conceptual thinking, the identification of simple patterns in complex contexts, is I think, at the heart of our problem. We spend so much time with our concepts, observed patterns simplified and detached from our contexts. that we lose track of their contexts, that is, except for the contexts we are deeply immersed in.  The one you can’t feel and the other you can, and that has EVERYTHING to do with behavior.

Thus our good survival instincts are in familiar places and we tend to lose them if all we have is abstract data. That divide also means that we naturally think our social concepts and values rule the world because they touch our emotions so directly. It tends to make the behavior of the natural and institutional systems that really run the world go largely unnoticed. The worst part… is that the simple rules of science and finance for profitably (and blindly) growing our control over our nature and each other (rules we see as detached from their contexts), then also multiply ever-faster. So, naturally, they take over the world those “powers of our minds” (for multiplying our power) are unleashed. Looking at the long history shows the scope of the dilemma. We’ve been doing that for thousands of years, over and over, blowing things up and suffering the disaster. And we are still at it today.  Of course, if this like of questions helps us see the problem, maybe we can do something this time.

So what do we do?  Well, I can’t say what path to take, as that will be determined by first looking for then finding the openings in our blind convictions, to breathe fresh air into them. Then the need appears to be to at least start a cure for the very heart of the problem, how our powerful concepts blind us to the world we take power over.  If we could feel what’s going on around their use we would be able to read the non-verbal cues to the state of our relationships, and not be helpless. Where we don’t feel the state of our relationships we’re blind to the effects of our choices and helpless. The main example is of course our pension for multiplying money, not having any feeling for the extensive evidence that what we do with money is rapidly destroying the earth, for example, the Top 100 World Crises Growing With Growth. 

The list is too much to absorb all at once, but it’s one of the healthiest things to try. https://synapse9.com/_r3ref/100CrisesTable.pdf The solution is – conceptually – simple too. Learn from the examples of how both we and nature so often steer the growth of new systems to become lasting good homes for their builders!

So we need to somehow bring feeling to the environments our conceptual thinking has isolated us from and prevented us from feeling at home.  Sound good? Do you perhaps wee any openings to explore? Lots of the ones I hear about people looking into seem to me to be just the right type. It’s a diagnosis connecting the emotional and moral openings with a practical behavioral understanding of the problem that is really needed.  I think that coupling is what’s missing.

______________________________________

An edited version of a comment on Jeremy Lent’s “Patterns of Meaning?

JLH

For teachers, Natural patterns, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Scientific theory, Synapse9 Work & Links, What to do

Transformation pathways

Leave a comment

A. STRUGGLE AND BREAKTHROUGH

After inception originates a desire, a long struggle for change follows and then a fast breakout and establishment 

– To understand these best, think of examples in different circumstances from your experience, personal, business, world, or in nature. 

For the transformation to an Ecological-Civilization there’s the barrier of needing to introduce people to something very new.  If we study examples of how transformations happen in our memory we can find ways to convince people to explore what’s possible.

 

_________________________________________________________________________

B. FORMING NEW LIVES –

the universal stages of growth and adaptation that create new systems with lives of their own, small, medium, large, in a permissive environment.

Studied carefully, it’s possible to use nature’s own method of building new systems to guide our long-term path, showing us how to move forward from growth.  Stage One of new lives is the germination of a seed pattern followed by a start-up burst of development when the new life defines itself as an individual. For enterprises it’s the handshake that sets things in motion and its period of rapid growth. Stage Two is for a new life to find its lasting place, maturing as it adapts to both internal and external limitst, Arriving at it peak of vitality ready for Stage Three, its long creative life. The curves tracing this story line are highly generalized, as are the terms used, but any startup faces these challenges.

Once you get the idea it’s astounding how many kinds of familiar transformations, on all scales, follow this natural system-building process for new lives.  For projects large and small we execute our plans first starting with a concept, then working it till it is ready for its climax environment, — individuation followed by maturation and fulfillment  

  1. The start of new life is a “germ,” “spark,” or “seed” pattern, a vision or a fertilized egg, that soon starts to multiply on its internal resource and organize its internal parts, usually in a very protected and forgiving environment.  For a human embryo that’s its womb, for an Eco-civilization it’s the virgin earth, giving us whatever we wanted for a long long time.
  2. Then along with a dramatic change of environment at the limit to growth, there’s a change of life — a “turn forward” to maturing to make new relationships.  Like birth, the end of compound growth is a perilous change requiring a great change in relations, resources, and expectations, a big test of survival a system’s will-to-live. It’s called the “turn forward” because attention turns from extrapolating from the seed to making a mature life in the future, in a more challenging environment.
  3. For our newborn Eco-Civilization, hitting the limits to growth comes as a complete surprise, and will take the emergence of a great will-to-live, and lots of work to pass nature’s universal test of survival for new lives. Most of the human population is still blind to the profound change at hand and thinks growth is life, and that overcoming our troubles will be like returning to the past.  It won’t BE THAT AT ALL!  We’re heading for mature life, which given nature’s ways could be far better.

As humans, we have distinct advantages for charting our course. We have loads of experience in giving birth to all kinds of systems and giving them lives of their own. Personal relationships are one, requiring that we follow each step in the process and making good choices about going too slow or too fast, among other things. Making dinner is another, needing to be lovingly imagined, assembled, and perfected to serve its purpose. Both home and office projects fit the model too, starting with a seed that grows and is made to fit into the world around it.

So the fact that large systems go through much the same birthing process as small systems is a new discovery. To manage the end of growth for our Eco-civilization will call for all our personal wisdom for what’s right to help us understand what’s too slow and too fast, among other things, for the transition to an Eco-Civilization.

It will also have to do with money, so tied up in driving what seems like a growth imperative for civilization to operate, but is really just a choice of what to invest in. And now we need to invest in better things, like #FAIR_Money.

_________________________________________________________________________

C. Three Horizons:

Allows different people to think of working on different paths, which all work out together naturally. Small steps needed for bigger ones, big strategies that make room smaller ones,  things to wind down, things to build up, temporary measures for both.

______________________________________________________________________

D. Panarchy Adaptive Cycle

Based on forest of cultural succession.  A very loose model, much of it misleading for transforming our growth system.  Might be applicable to the progress of humanity through its long series of failed civilizations, making cultural progress all along.  Might be applicable to the ebb and flow of the ‘forests’ of political and intellectual fashion as some of us stumble around trying to imagine the future and others find ever more dastardly ways to say NO.

____________________________________________________________________________

D. Doughnut Economics:

A wonderfully intuitive model, starting with local innovation in designing for internal human needs and external responsibilities builds familiarity with the natural system model of cells in the environment, envisioned to extend to our whole world to take better care of ourselves and the planet. Join the movement.

___________________________________________________________

E. Ever-growing systemic crises.

The only way to address our global limits is with global coordination, and for many things global coordination is absent. The nine planetary bounds referred to in Doughnut Economics are certainly critical, but there are a great many others going unmentioned, equally critical. These include:

  1. escalating disaster risks due to overdevelopment and climate change
  2. the growing long-term economic damage to capital resources,
  3. government problem-solving failures
  4. growing governmental lust for power
  5. aging & inflexibility of ever more interdependent and complex systems
  6. growing social polarization, ….. and other great systemic world crises.

Here’s my long list of planetary boundaries we are rapidly crossing, my Top 100+ Global Crises Growing with Growth.   It is based on collecting lists from high-level reports, the major crises getting brief notice in the news, and my own description of flashpoints of unsustainable systemic change. Here’s a link to the 2021 Global Risks Report.

It is my belief that these kinds of growing systemic threats can only be reversed by a movement of global business and investors choosing to shift resources from pushing the harmful limits of wealth to fitting in with a healthy world society and environment.

For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural patterns, Natural systems, Scientific theory, Transformation, What to do

The Ecological Economics of Growth – When to turn

Leave a comment

This is a preview of my new submission to Ecological Economics
Please have a look at and comment on the review copy FYI
Some of the figures and captions are below

Jessie Henshaw sy@synapse9.com

<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>

Abstract: Organized human and natural systems generally develop by an observable process of growth, with a beginning, middle, and end. Examples range from the growth of organisms, cultures, and ecologies to that of businesses, social movements, weather systems, even personal and social relationships, and many more. Close observation reveals organizational growth to be a progressive building process of self-organization. Most recognizable are its recurring three shifts in direction, each followed by a development period. That six-stage pattern can guide the study of a growth system’s internal and external designs, recognizable as a series of milestones along an “S” curve assembly line. That common model allows useful comparison of all kinds of natural and human-designed growth systems, using a diagnostic as opposed to a deterministic research method, keeping what “ought to be” in close association with “what is.” Discussed are the historical roots of the field, a set of pattern recognition tools, three brief pedagogical case studies, and an eco-economy view of our global growth and its natural time to turn.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>

ow living systems develop their complex organizational designs by rapidly evolving self-guided growth processes has fascinated scientific observers for millennia. Natural growth also still resists scientific definition though. Perhaps the delay comes from scientists asking the wrong questions, looking for deterministic rules for nature’s creative processes, rather than generative patterns of natural design.

Here we start from the broadest patterns, like how growth processes are evident throughout nature, even in every kind of work people do. Growth generally displays a three-part development cycle of beginning, middle, and end, but like a tree expands on opportunistic rather than deterministic pathways. Our problem with understanding it, then, might come from having so singularly studied nature for the deterministic patterns we can rely on, pushing aside the study of nature’s indeterminate building processes.

Another commonality is that whether it’s the growth of a mammal, a business, or a snowflake, the ultimate end is a state of complex perfection of design. On close inspection, that highly organized end-state seems to come from having alternating periods of diverging then converging (positive and negative) development feedback, first getting growth to start-up to then turn to perfect the design as growth finishes-up, as if generating a framework then filling it in.

fig 1 – A Snowflake and its Central Kernel: Look at the layers of its kernel that built up around central dot. The first hexagonally differentiated shape you can easily see is still quite simple, but the next layers become quite complex. The six spines that emerge develop nearly identical filigree as if originating from an organizationally “entangled” first crystal core.
fig 4 – Three stages and three turning points of natural growth.
1) the seed event, Image, and following start-up growth period (red) – Individuation
2) the turn forward event, Image, and finish-up growth period (blue) – Maturation
3) the arrival event, Image, and Climax life period (green) – Fulfillment
fig 5 – Economic systems need to use energy to harvest more energy. The ratio is called EROI, a ratio of returns to costs and has to stay greater than one for the system not to shrink or collapse. Usually, a new system’s first energy source, EROI-1, is consumed as the system develops a more lasting resource, EROI-2. Succession from one resource to another can also be repeated (not shown), like climbing a ladder, or it may fail.
fig 9 – In a finance-driven eco-economy, choices by businesses and investors determine the directions of future development, predominantly based on what will be most profitable in the short term, whether by serving of quietly manipulating the markets.

Every economy is also an ecology, both a self-organizing system of mutual benefits which also relies on having positive net resource flows; both beneficial design and net material profits. Together these two faces of natural systems make a complex whole one can study from many points of view, but rely critically on all its parts.

Networks of mutual benefits are mostly composed of organizational, design, and qualitative relations, like that a cup holds water, or that a fish swims, or whether someone knows how to work with you, or whether a shop serves its local culture. Those aspects of design, organization, and qualities have no numerical definition but create the systems of mutual relations on which the designs of life rely, Some may be products of nature and others of fine arts and crafts: a fine meal, a delightful garment, or a meaningful film as inherent benefits of life.

Those benefits of life are also needed for the systems that deliver the physical resource flows that market price and investment returns determine the investment in, letting one calculate the budgets by which our world economy is managed. So to understand any particular living system, one needs a clear-headed understanding of how those two sides work together.

JLH

Scientific theory, Synapse9 Work & Links

New Book Notice!

Leave a comment

Guiding Patterns
of Naturally Occurring Design

A new window on Pattern Languages
A new window on the working design patterns of nature.

1st Release Oct 1
from Amazon and MoreBooks

Blurb: The leading sciences offer a pattern language for nature in the form of interrelated mathematical equations. Scientifically undefined natural language remains needed for referring to and discussing the rich self-defined patterns of organization found in nature and discovering their roles in our lives.  Those include general multi-scale patterns of ‘cellular organization,’ ‘mediums,’ ‘homes,’ ‘growth,’ and ‘cultures,’ and are among the guiding patterns of naturally occurring design this pair of revised 2015 papers explore. 

The author’s effort is to bring together her long studied natural science pattern language of emergent organizational growth and climax transformations with Christopher Alexander’s pattern language of holistic architectural design, to be a resource for a combined design-science point of view.  The discussion does not rely on a detailed study of either precedent.  It relies instead on the reader’s own experience with and ability to recognize naturally occurring patterns of design.   The text is arranged as a series of short essays, combining introductory and advanced issues, that one may read through or pick up to read and reread a piece at a time.

Vita: – BS in physics – St. Lawrence Univ., post-graduate math courses – Stony Brook & Columbia, architecture & landscape design MFA – Univ. of PA. A mix of rich experience and field study of energetic patterns of organization in emergent microclimate & other growth systems, showing how after growth the vitality of systems is sustained to make life so lively.

Press contact – Rose@synapse9.com
__________________

…. One of the more curious things about nature is how obvious it is that every natural design develops by its own individual growth process, building up from an initial design pattern and emerging as a whole as it runs its course. That applies to a storm, a volcanic eruption, a lightning strike. It also applies to smaller scale life systems, such as for personal relationships or conversations, human or other plant or animal lives, civilizations, ecologies, and of course businesses and economies. The living systems for which growth is a holistic building process, preparing them for long lives after growth, all start by organizing and expanding faster and faster at first, and then shift gears to develop slower and slower, refining and coordinating their designs to climax when ready to begin their long lives ahead. It’s a switch from scaling up the starting patterns to then take a sustaining role their environment.

… If that understanding, of how to succeed in life after growth, were to spread around the world, it could dramatically change our now doubtful future. Today our chances are compromised by our global inability to stop our ever growing our consumption, disruption, and confusion of life on earth, not knowing how to smoothly switch from the red to the blue curve, to get ready for a long life.

The natural arc of successful life stories, 1) building, 2) refining, 3) life.
the universal pattern of: Innovation – Refinement – Enjoyment
Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences

Good people cooperating for evil*

Leave a comment 
*A recovered Sept 2013 draft somehow never published
Cooperation makes us feel good socially, whatever else we don’t control may be done with it.

Dwight Eisenhower approached the question from the usual perspective in his 1960 address to the Commonwealth Club of California, quoting the club’s statement of purpose saying:

“California suffers greatly because the best elements of the population fail to cooperate for the common good as effectively as the bad elements cooperate for evil purposes.”

He then goes on to eloquently advocate and express confidence in the higher purposes of American society to heal our troubled world, to bring peace and justice to the world.   But life is not a simple contest of good and evil.  That’s a simple problem to solve, just let people join the side doing good.

What seems mistaken is portraying the evil of the world as being an absence of people doing good.   As with the German holocaust of the 1930s and 40s. It is historically common for people who feel themselves to be doing good to then lose control of their societies, not realizing till much later they were doing great evil.   In authoritarian societies, the leader commonly appears misled by the results of using their power to multiply their power, unaware of how very societally destructive their own behavior will become.   That mechanism also applies to investors and governments now using wealth to multiply wealth, unaware of how destructive to the earth that will become.   For the people in the societies doing the growing harm, like ours, “life seems normal”.

The larger difficulty is a “problem of normality”.

It’s almost too offensive for people to consider that their own good intentions and their own good feelings of cooperation in working together for the common good could be susceptible to evil.   Examples of societies acting in complete contradiction to their own cultural values, and people having their good intentions twisted to evil purposes, seem like they must apply to “someone else”.

The author of the 2006 paper, Emergence and Evil, in the systems science journal E: CO, nicely documents in intimate detail how teams of good scientists, while living very normal academic & professional lives, also devoted their talents to making smallpox more contagious than it naturally is, for use as an efficient weapon. That is a hideously evil thing to do. The Soviet biological weapons program is also well studied from other views, usually addressing it from the simplistic “good v. evil” perspective. The real problem was good AND evil, a true evil that is not so simple, one taking the reader inside what true evil is. You find how very “normal” it is and how “good as evil” is the real problem behind people cooperating socially for evil purposes, like destroying the earth.

Working energetically for what we hate

That your social relations within a society “can feel good” while your labors are “doing evil” is the problem.

There’s some kind of “disconnect” between what makes us feel good about our work,  that fools us about the nature of what our societies are doing as a whole are doing with it. As soon as you realize the nature of the relation, it’s fairly obvious why it’s a problem. It’s that the cells of an organism have a completely different environment from the body, and as cells of the human body, people are rather unobservant.   That seems to be the “disconnect.” The cells of a body have their common genome that helps guide each one to act in the interest of the whole, but for quite a number of reasons, our social lives don’t have that for our societal lives.

Continue reading Good people cooperating for evil* →