... to which Mother Nature is adding her own fury – not by caprice or accident, but as a consequence of the havoc we have wrought.
It is no longer a matter of something happening to some unfortunates in some remote or backward corner of the world; it is constantly touching each of us.
This mess didn’t grow on trees or, like a noxious weed, in our fields and gardens. It didn’t emerge from some forsaken womb. Nor did it hit us like a meteor from outer space or a seismic undercurrent…
This mess is the creation of human minds. We created it. All of us. Together. Whether we like it or not, this is the tangible harvest of our collective imaginations, our creativity and ingenuity. It is an achievement of the ways we, the human family, think and act.
And as terrible as “things” are outside, there, the most brutal aspect of the human condition has become the pain, suffering and insecurity inside, here.
Collectively, are we, the human race, very, very stupid or are we just ignorant and arrogant? What else could account for the mess that we have?
It deeply pains me to think that this is the world I am leaving to my children, grandchildren and posterity: my legacy to the world that has sustained me. I had hoped to leave this world a better, not more desperate, place than I found it.
We have an extremely complex problem. It has many different facets. Each facet has many issues. And there are multiple ways of looking at each issue.
How do we get out of it?
I don’t have many specific answers. Yet. Well, perhaps one: certainly, not just by working harder at what we are doing. When in a hole, the harder we dig the deeper the hole gets.
But what I do have is very timely advice and wisdom from Albert Einstein, more questions and some ideas about how we got into it which, I think, is the first clue in finding a way to get out.
First, I want to be candid and transparent about my perspectives and personal filters: the lenses through which I observe. I don’t think any one should have to guess.
My thinking in these matters has been deeply influenced by a man by the name Stafford Beer. If Spinoza was a God intoxicated man, I am drunk on Beer. Stafford Beer is to what I write what paint is to what an artist paints.
I rely on three essential propositions – which I am prepared to further explain and defend on another occasion.
First, I see everything in terms of systems, not as “things” or “entities.” Indeed, as systems that contain or include subsystems or microsystems within, and are themselves contained or included within supra-systems or macrosystems without. Like Russian metrushkas or Chinese boxes.
Second, I see everything in terms of information. The common denominator of all systems – natural, mechanical, social and human – is that they exchange information. Not only internally between component parts and subsystems, but also externally with other systems and macrosystems.
Third, I consider that the effectiveness and viability of any system depends upon the ease, facility and fluidity with which it (i) records and (ii) organizes the data and information it receives, and (iii) accesses and (iv) transmits or shares the data and information it sends out. That is, upon the richness of information exchange and flow.
Information truly means in formation.
So, through these filters and in these contexts I want to examine – perhaps, reconsider – the three most important institutions human beings have created to address the human condition: our legal, economic and political systems. “LEPS,” to coin an acronym.
LEPS play the most critical role in determining the direction and state of human affairs.
And the question that I have is this: Are LEPS a part of the solution to human suffering, or are they a part of the problem?
The way I see it, neither.
They are the problem.
We find ourselves in this mess because our LEPS have not yet discovered a way to effectively cope with and manage the monumental increase in complexity in our affairs over the past 100 years.
The design and architecture we still use was invented in the 1700's – in fact during a remarkable seven year period between 1769 and 1776 – and our LEPS were neither designed nor intended to cope with a degree of complexity and a volume and variety of information that was then unimaginable.
Further, they are premised on what was a noble 18th century dream that turns out to be a 21st century fallacy: - the notion that people are independent of and from each other. If ever we were, we no longer are. We are interdependent. Interactive, interconnected and interrelated, too.
And the reason we have not yet found an effective way, is that we still desperately cling to concepts and ideas about LEPS that were conceived to deal with a much simpler, much less complex reality.
Paraphrasing Albert Einstein’s observation: “[Technology] has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift to unparalleled catastrophes.”
Let me say that metaphorically: if our LEPS are ships -- ships of state -- then we still cling to the same techniques and strategies, the same basic tools... the same kinds of buckets that the renowned navigator, Captain James Cook, used to bail out the bilges of his ships.
Except that, today, our ships are Nimitz Class aircraft carriers.
Who would hire Captain Cook, today, to navigate the USS Ronald Reagan trusting and relying upon his 18th century navigation skills and experience?
Again, from Albert Einstein: “The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level at which we created them.”
We cling to these concepts and ideas because that is where all of us have invested a huge part of ourselves, our energies and our societies. LEPS are the anchors and points of reference or orientation we rely upon to face the uncertainties and insecurities of life.
What our LEPS have in common is this:
the systemic architecture is hierarchical: the pyramid structure of the corporate family tree, the armed forces and the Church… which is patriarchic, authoritarian, autocratic, rankist and, often, abusive: those above decide and those below obey,
the dynamics of the processes, exchanges and interaction between actors (those interacting with or within these systems) is adversarial and competitive – often, aggressive, antagonistic and destructive,
the actors have the power to censor and withhold – indeed, manipulate – data and information about themselves: they have “rights” to secrecy or privacy.
Hierarchical structures, competitive dynamics and secrecy or ability to censor and manipulate information are formidable hindrances that impede the ability and facility of LEPS to record, organize, access and transfer [ROAT, to coin another acronym] data and information. They resist the Law of Requisite Variety.
That means they are not suited to the task of managing complexity.
So we are caught in a veritable “Catch 22.” Our LEPS are both the cause of, and our inflexible solutions for this mess. And the only way out, methinks, is to change the way we think about LEPS.
I am appalled by some of the absurdities we have generated and that we are committed and cling to… ideas and theories from the past that don’t make sense in our present, complex reality.
For example, in our political systems:
representative democracy no longer makes sense,
the man who defined democracy, Pericles, said that this form of government is called a democracy because its administration is in the hands, not of a few, but of the whole people,
what we practice today and call democracy is, in fact, an oligarchy: the administration is in the hands not of the whole but of a few people,
majority rule no longer makes sense: it presumes that 51 fools can make more intelligent decisions than 50 sages,
experience proves beyond doubt that the ability to get elected varies inversely with the ability to make wise decisions,
only wealthy people can afford to seek office and, even so, both they and those without huge financial resources must mortgage their integrity to obtain the necessary funds,
the primary agenda of those who do get elected is not the affairs of the electorate, but how to get re-elected,
Communications and Information Technology now makes participative democracy possible.
In our economic systems:
the idea of competition no longer makes sense: collaboration makes much more sense,
the competitive process creates huge amounts of inefficiencies and residual waste, both in material and human resources,
monopolies are much more effective and efficient in producing the quality and quantity of the goods and services that we need – in converting input into output,
but we fear monopolies because of the corrupting effect of concentration of power or authority and our historical failure or inability to manage or control it.
In our legal systems:
the adversarial, win/lose, zero sum dynamics and mentality no longer makes sense,
rights to privacy and the privilege against self incrimination no longer make sense,
most of our ideas about civil liberties and human rights no longer make sense,
the judicial process is focused not on justice, but on due process,
our judges are concerned not with truth, but with admissibility of evidence and its probative value,
how can there be justice without truth?
proceedings take too long, cost too much and the system makes too many mistakes,
In the criminal justice system:
the innocent are innocent but the guilty are not,
the only reason that the innocent have needed the legal safeguards built into our system has been to protect them from historical abuse of authority and power,
the right to silence or protection against self-incrimination no longer makes sense,
the innocent have never needed protection from their own innocence; their best protection and defense is clarity: an accurate, full and transparent disclosure of all the material facts and circumstances; in other words, all relevant information -- “the truth,”
for the guilty, on the other hand, their best defense is opacity: the suppression and obfuscation of information,
only the guilty benefit from these ideas,
for a system designed on the premise that it is better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent be convicted, we both let thousands of guilty go free and convict hundreds of innocents!
the horrifying but undeniable fact is that, today, crime does pay,
after more than one hundred and fifty years of experience, we still have not learned the object lesson that deterrent sentences don’t deter, they educate more skilled criminals,
if the evil against which we seek protection is abuse of power by governments and people in authority, then that is an issue that we can and should address directly,
the systems and safeguards we invented to protect us, the walls that we erected to keep out dangers -- these also keep us within their confines: we are enslaved by them,
today, we do not really need privacy; we need protection from potential abuse: privacy, secrecy and opacity are a charter of opportunities for abusers.
Too many of our fundamental ideas and theories no longer make sense simply because they are strategies designed to be effective in a much different and simpler reality, a much different set of human problems than those we have now.
Our much more complex reality requires different strategies. Strategies designed and intended to cope with the fact of complexity.
In a sensible world, our unmasking of the secrets of the atom and harnessing of atomic energy, our retreat from the brink of global annihilation by the Cold War and the development of Information Technology should have meant that we should now be celebrating incredible advances and amelioration in the human condition.
As I see it, it boils down to this:
our problems are a function and consequence of our way of thinking -- of the structure, processes, content, quality and level of our thinking,
it is impossible to resolve these problems by continuing to rely on the way of thinking that created them,
the same way of thinking leads only to more of the same problems,
our first responsibility, therefore, is to change the way we think.
We have our concepts and theories about how things work – and we have theories about everything.
The problem, as frequently happens, is that our theories and the facts don’t fit: that child starving in Africa or dying from STD’s in Asia may know that, in theory, there is enough food and medicine in the world for him or her, too.
The problem, as the unknown wit said, is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice – but in practice, there is! And when the facts and theories don’t fit together, people want to change the facts or, at least, their perception of the facts.
We have much too much invested in our theories: it would be catastrophic to have to give them up. Look how they have brought us from crude Neanderthals to Mozart and Einstein... Yes, look where they have brought us!
More Einstein: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels."
Or, to paraphrase Stafford Beer: we, humanity, are enslaved by our own ideas about ourselves and the world we live in. Our minds - our ways of thinking, our paradigms – are programmed to deal with an uncomplicated reality that vanished long ago. The world today is characterized by the necessity of learning to manage complexity.
This will, I sense, require a revolution because, so far, evolution has only increased our propensity to create and intensify messes. But unlike most revolutions in mankind’s history, this one must take place not outside, there but in our hearts and minds, inside, here.
But if we listen and understand, we may gain a valuable insight about what needs to happen from Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Ilya Prigogine: adaptive systems collapse in the face of overwhelming complexity and reorganize themselves at a higher level of structural complexity.
Where, then, can we find a model for an intelligent, effective system that is adept at coping with the overwhelming complexity in our lives today?
Mother Nature: The human body. The most complex and marvelous system that we know. A system organized at a higher level of structural complexity and, therefore, competent to effectively manage complexity.
We know, without any doubt, that the human body, as a system, is not hierarchical; the dynamic of interaction throughout is collaborative, not competitive; and no part of the body has the ability to manipulate, withhold or censor information from the rest of the body – the brain and nervous system in particular.
And so it is that about 300 years after Alexander Pope first wrote it, it is ever more true: “The proper study of mankind is man.”
The good news is that, over the past 40 years or so, Stafford Beer has done much of the creative preliminary work required to invent the model: he has designed it, tested it and proved it.
What remains is the vision and imagination to begin implementing it… to take on the risk of making those awful mistakes that are unavoidable when trying anything that truly is new.
