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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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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.

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

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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

among best, For teachers, Natural patterns, Natural systems

Who IS it that is really feeling the pain?

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Here’s an interesting one… in two charts.

It may be the backstory to the imminent we all feel, that there seems to be a hidden center of pain being felt in some communities. One chart is of the rapidly increasing use of some very common terms for personal despair, measured by their frequency in English books scanned by Google.

The terms were picked for having curves “moving together as a group”, and include ‘love’ as one of the linked terms. Dynamic changes moving and fluctuating together as these do means they are part of one conversation, one culture, one community, all becoming increasingly desperate over time, and acting as a whole. If we consider them to be indicators of societal distress, the increases are from 200% to 400%. Who IS experiencing all that pain, is the question?? What’s happening??

The other chart we know a little better. It’s for the historic explosion of inequality in average US family incomes that began in ~1970. It represents an exploding loss of power for almost everyone, but oddly… seeming to MAKE US ALL AMONG THE POWERLESS. That growing inequality is connected with the imposition of shareholder value as the purpose of wealth, which has driven increasingly rapid disinvestment in skilled labor in an already very challenging productivity-driven society. A brief write-up is here: https://synapse9.com/signals/was-shareholder-value-what-did-it/

AVERAGE FAMILY INCOMES GREW AT THE SAME RATE AS GDP BEFORE 1970,
then began to rapidly diverge, as people became increasingly powerless.

But the real questions are:
WHAT IS the unified culture most feeling this apparent explosion of pain?? How else could we show the connection between two dramatic changes in societal cultures we are in the middle of?? AND Would that tell us anything about how to relieve it??

AND OF COURSE:
Does it matter?? Are perhaps the big fluctuations since 2008 those of a boiling kettle ready to blow?? Are they instead indicating pressure relief, and now letting off steam?? Or something else??

AND:
Why is LOVE so regularly growing along with the pains?? Who is this really happening to, anyway?? Wouldn’t it have to be a big enough cohesive group to move the average word uses of the entire language?? AND: why is it NOT the people that I know??

What do you think?

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That’s it. Just some interesting questions.
– Note: This also shows how useful a “natural systems method” of finding nature’s stories in dynamic change can be. A new paper preprint on it is at: https://synapse9.com/_ISSS-22/MS-HNS1-Design&Steering.pdf.

among best, For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Popular, Stories & Experiences

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.  

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jlh

For teachers, Natural patterns, Natural systems, Popular

A guide to nature’s growth crisis Thrutopia!

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I really like the idea of “Thrutopias: clear, engaging routes through to a world we’d all be proud to bequeath to future generations.” I thought some might benefit from a natural systems view of nature’s primary “thrutopia” (how growth makes it through to life) for the crises that all kinds of growth systems face. Perhaps check my recent research and writing and get in touch if you have questions. I generally don’t charge if I can fit it in.

Nature has one primary strategy for carrying emerging new systems through a whole system growth crisis such as our civilization faces at present. A growth crisis comes naturally for every growth system, as growth starts as a fixed design for multiplying the new system’s power and runs into trouble. Whether it is more or less severe depends on whether there is a good response. The crisis develops as its initial period of free exponential expansion begins to multiply internal and external pressures and conflicts instead. That threatens the system and its environment. Think of a personal relationship as a model. It develops freely and marvelously until some conflict appears, and the response to it determines the fate of the relationship and its environment.

It is quite surprising that this simple and obvious feature of how natural systems develop did not attract the attention of the leading sciences, apparently just believing some other story.

Telling it a story of nature managing the birth of new lives would fit a story arc of nature first promising new lives a gift much too good to be true, but that is true for a while. That confusing signal is part of the trouble. Nature knows all along that the initial gift is one to be taken away and for it to be unexpected for inattentive new lives. Then to select some for the gift of lasting life, nature gives ever new life a warning. Then she rewards those that change their fixed designs for maximum growth to adaptive growth and engagement with the world around them. That then stands as “the door to life,” an act of a new system choosing live, nature having gotten things started and leaving it up to new entities to switch to becoming internally adaptive and externally engaging.  

You notice that I shifting back and forth between scientific and familiar discussion. It comes from my starting as a scientist and studying how language developed from people coining words and expressions to convey their experience with natural systems… ! So we have a natural systems language too.

It’s fairly easy to begin to study these transformations from familiar examples. Any of the many things we do or that happen in a day combine those startup and transformation stages. For example, the startup phase of tasks, projects, businesses, or relationships is always some natural or personal “urge to create.” If all goes well, that expansive growth follows for a bit, then at the right time, a turn toward making it a success by the system becoming adaptive to internal and external needs so it can live in its world.

The levels of growth activity in an emerging system’s life

Technically that first follows a design principle of maximizing power (called MPP) and then one for maximizing resilience (called MRP). The growth of the new system then climaxes at its peak of capability, resilience, and endurance. That change comes from the system changing its internal rule for how it invests its resources, going from multiplying its power to making it work by serving needs, including the needs of the system and the parts.

As one studies how these startup and resolution stages proceed in personally familiar cases you will find new ways of describing how it happens. That makes it easier to imagine how we could tell stories about the challenge before our world civilization, and people thrilled with it and lost and confused by it. The pattern to study and anchor other observations is that initial urge to create then accelerating activity followed by an urge to make it work and a climax with perfecting touches.

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Recent research –

2021 Henshaw, J. Understanding Nature’s Purpose in Starting all New Lives with Compound Growth: New Science for Individual System

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

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What A-R-E we doing?

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From a natural systems science view, every culture change is a growth process.

As with all growth processes, the start is small exploratory steps that if successful settle on some main direction, or directions of new development.

That development then either switches to refining its internal design and maturing its environmental fit, to establish a lasting way of working in its new world, or it starts breaking up for not establishing a home.

In a world like ours, changing ever more rapidly, as a rule, our cultures like our economies driven to redesign and reorganize ever more rapidly, we now see them also tend to split up and follow divergent paths, too, unable to predict or control their own growth as the old ways holding them together are torn apart. In the past we called it creative destruction. Now it’s become destructive creation and multiplying technology and investment disrupt social contracts and our ways of working multiple times in a work-life and driving growing angry discontent in every direction.

The problem isn’t growth per se, but not even intending to finish it, not heading for the steps needed to make the culture change of the modern world something of lasting value, to both our many societies and its environment.

My friend Linda, among many others, said “the problem is we leave out Nature, the true ruler of our destiny. This is the big correction taking place. But because we have left out Nature, we do not understand it. No system can override Nature.”

I told her “Yes, and though everyone is feeling the strain, not understanding how we left out nature we also don’t see what to do.”

What I’ve come to is one possible way to close the gap. There’s a key level of all our cultures that displays how everyone does indeed nature’s method of building lasting complex systems. It is in our familiar methods of doing work projects at home or the office. We start and finish them to give them lasting value. We don’t leave our work half-finished to get ourselves fired or divorced.

The normal way is to start efforts with some small intent and look for how to build on it, then discover that it needs to fit a range of intentions and fit with the world around it, making adjustments and adding details to finish it off for delivering a lasting service to family or clients.

In other words, it’s not starting but finishing things that give them lasting value, placing the key in the arch that lets it stand up, furnishing a home that makes it liveable, coming to an agreement that is the purpose of negotiation.

However, … the internet is designed to endlessly multiply information and exponentially change how we live ever faster, like the economy too, making ever-bigger changes in how we live, sure to keep becoming ever-more unmanageable and to derail sometime, making nothing to last.

Who’d think the host of “experts” the world relies on would all make the same fatal blunder that everyone at home or work knows how to solve??

We need to pass it on I think. There must be a way that the people who care to make things work in their own lives can have a say in our common lives. Every system begins with growth and our ancient cultures seem to have all learned from nature about how to make things that last, making nature part of our design!

JLH

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Why natural growth is our natural and likely only way out of our world growth crisis

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“Natural growth” is nature’s way of creating long-lasting new lives, of all kinds.

Intro: How system responsiveness is expressed in natural growth is as anticipation of the opportunity to end growth by perfecting the emerging system. To do that, the system’s steering needs to switch from multiplying to harmonizing (i.e. maturing) its design and place in the world.

The figure below is something of a list of what to look for in any particular case. All systems emerge with compound growth and then variably navigate their futures. A talk on the core natural science for an ISSS forum on Oct 2, 2021, is on YouTube!; the research paper (1) below.

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Throughout nature, living systems of all kinds develop by a growth process with three main stages. The first stage is an explosion of innovations in extracting and capturing resources from the new life’s environment, furiously building the new entity with what’s available. Varied examples include a seed sprouting, humans sprouting in the womb, the compound growth period of businesses, economies, and cultures. It also includes the take-off periods of new relationships and all other emerging organizational systems with lives of their own. The second stage follows the first, exploratory and adaptive maturation of a new life as it finds its place and purpose in life, creating its first niche in the world by a slowing process that perfects the emerging design, to be released to forage the greater world starting its longer third stage of life, building wider environmental relationships to last a lifetime.

Genuine “thriving through transition”* can be achieved throughout, from extractive innovation to adaptive maturation, and then finding and holding a niche in the future, even lasting into graceful decline. This storyline for how new lives develop is also found at every scale of macroscopic life of every kind, making it quite a wonder that it seems not yet studied in the sciences, nor part of our general cultural understanding … It’s so much a part of all our experiences our blindness to it is almost as if we’ve been looking the other away, not seeing how living systems work by themselves distracted by looking for something else. Perhaps we are always looking at nature only for how we can control things rather than for how nature works by itself.

A scientific research paper on the subject (1) was presented at the July 2021 meeting of the ISSS. What contributed to its success was focusing on how people already know a great deal about nurturing and guiding new lives of many kinds, initiating and supporting their growth and maturation up to their release. But, unfortunately, we do not talk about it much because it’s quite complex and is naturally intuitive for familiar creative work we mostly do non-verbally. So our discussion of it has lagged far behind. Just think about the difference between the start-up and finish-up stages of any kind of work, and how the work switches from multiplying the early patterns and then harmonizing them to achieve a truly lasting result.

For example, we follow much the same natural creative growth stages in making dinner. We start making dinner by first exploring what might be put together, at first taking small steps, then building up to large steps, and then back down to small steps again to climax with finishing touches as we sit down to eat. Raising a child or starting a business are far more complicated but follow the same creative, exploratory starting than perfecting stages to finish. Growth also faces numerous challenges along the way. If fortunate and skillful overcoming the challenges can be a thriving process all the way, taking a living system through its immature then maturing stages to serve its mature life.

The figure below is from the research paper, the composite diagram of the general growth stages of new lives, illustrating the A, B, Cs of new lives. Individual new lives will diverge from the simplest common thread of development for all new lives. Instead, each will build its own life, displaying considerable variation on the paths taken as it builds its own chain of developments, confronting its individual challenges along the way. Every new life will first build up from small to larger steps, though, and then build down from large to small steps again to finish. So the two sweeping curves are just for typifying the normal course of the progression, also called an ‘S’ curve. So the shape might as well be shown as an uneven staircase of minor and major challenges if that were not hard to draw and too specific to represent the general pattern.

The best way of reading the figure might then be to imagine what thriving would be like for particular new lives making their way through the long series of challenges of ascending levels. Then to cement the generality of the pattern in your mind, think through the periods of struggle, thriving, approaching, and receding challenges for the largest scale, the new life of humanity we are building now! So far, its first stage of growth for modern civilization has been around 300 years long and is now facing an existential crisis for not knowing how to transition to maturity. That challenge is one of the things learning to verbalize the steps of growth can help with.

The most important growth challenge of any new life is the big one in the middle. That is the great challenge world society and the economy are having the most difficulty with. Having designed our world around making the first stage of growth endless is both the big barrier and the main cause of all of our multiplying world crises growing with growth (2), pushing growth too far and too accelerate too fast to coherently adapt to the most conclusive sign that growth is at its natural limits.

The natural path of escape is labeled “Turn Forward.” It’s the shift from focusing available resources on multiplying the initial concept to using them for perfecting our designs and finding ways to thrive in our new environment. That shift from thinking about the past to the future is what turns a new life away from multiplying its past to finding its future, discovering its greater purposes and roles in the wider environment. That is a very good kind of work, one that the whole world is abuzz with today, even though our institutional systems are totally unprepared for and dead set against. That’s why we most need to learn how to discuss the problem. Our institutional world is more built on talk than intuition.

The natural pace of change can also shift faster than it seems possible. Look at the figure and see how the “Turn Forward” corresponds to a “Baseline Inversion.” That is a whole-system shift in the direction of its change that can occur with almost no actual system change, an “inflection point.” Before that point, expansion of the system was in proportional steps of divergence from Baseline1. After the inflection point, expansion of the system develops by proportional steps of convergence toward Baseline2, to arrive at the end of physical growth at its new home where the new life becomes freed to be itself.

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Please do add comments to this article or email questions and comments to me at sy–at-synapse9-dot–com.

*Note: The phrase “thriving through transition” is from Trae Ashlie-Garen, expanded on here to apply to the full set of any of life’s transitions.

  1. Research Paper https://synapse9.com/drafts/2021-NewSci-IndividSys-MS.pdf
  2. Our growth crises https://synapse9.com/_r3ref/100CrisesTable.pdf

JLH

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

Transformation pathways

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.