Linda, David, Nirmalan: Interesting early dialog, some of which I am familiar with in prior personal dialog with each of you creatives. You are each responding by promoting your own “solutions”, as I often do myself in response. Each “solution” proposed by many today are components of the “solutionatique”, a new label for the proper process in response to the Club of Rome’s “problematique”. (more below)

Although long familiar with problematiques and the lack of any serious attention given to the challenge, this issue was attended to by Alexander Laszlo in his Spanda Journal chapter, by reference to a new book. Laszlo’s chapter, where I made many relevant comments has recently closed the comment session as he is going to the ISSS conference in Berlin, where the topic is Governing the Anthropocene: the greatest challenge for systems thinking in practice?

Quoting Laszlo:

“In his forthcoming book on Thrivability Strategy, Dino Karabeg considers how the Club of Rome coined the term “global problematique” to describe the complex entanglement of the collective challenges humanity faces at any given point in time. He suggests the need now to create “questionnaires” – systems of shared solutions that arise from the connected intelligence of leaders and designers of innovation. To do so, he emphasizes the importance of focusing on systemic innovation as an ecology of new ways of researching, developing and innovating socio-technical solutionatiques that embody social values, technological creativity, economic opportunity,and environmental integrity. Such a prospective, systemic and evolutionary consideration of ourselves as co-creators of the narrative of evolution on Earth offers us the chance to avoid being cast as the villains of evolution who – consciously or not – take on the role of planetary home wrecker. Equally importantly,it allows us to avoid an alternative narrative that would cast us in the role of the martyrs of evolution by suggesting that we should safeguard Earth and all it holds by removing ourselves from the scene. Learning to be leaders of systemic innovation in syntony with life and the life support systems of Earth is the survival imperative of our species at this point in time.”

 Larry/nuet’s offering in this chapter, and in all of his writings, are not “solutions to problems” (one of our most distracting paradigms, when we obsess on it), but an invitation to solutionatiquing – which involves “dialog” (of all types, some we have yet to invent).

Linda:

It will involve Bohmian style dialog, modified and improved, as one technique. Laszlo refers also to “David Price writes about the notion of engaging in a Daologue with Earth. Price asks, ‘how might we listen and act differently given this perception of the conversation of the Earth, this enveloping planetary layer, this connecting and collecting intelligence, this sum of all dialogues: this Daologue?’’ This leads to Laszlo’s generalization of “syntony”. See my two blog posts: Ramblings Around Syntony  and Syntony.  .

David:

You are correct that we must keep attention to working with natural processes – a version of syntony of Humans with Gaia. However, our challenge also includes how humans interact with humans, which may well take us beyond the “laws of nature”. See: Contexts vs Theories.  The internal dysfunction of human systems contributes to our destructive Humankind/Gaia interface and the mismatch between personal human relationships with their local “natural” environments. You are deeply active in experimenting with both. But, solving the “food problem” (itself, possibly, a problematique) will not be sufficient to “resolve” our global problematique. As I have attempted, many times, to distinguish between (1) designing/implementing local food production/distribution systems and (2) moving such systems globally to replace the industrial system. The former is a Human/Gaian interface challenge. The latter is a human system challenge, with sever time constraints and involves processes other than “natural flows”.

Nirmalan:

Some things from the past, with new interpretations, can be gateways to the future. But, I agree, we should not look to the past for solutions – if we even should look for solutions, and not engage solutionatiques. Echelon Hierarchy (Pyramid) is one attribute of the civilization mode of societal organization, but whether it can be THE cause of our Crisis-of-Crises is problematical. Indeed, from the perspective of solutionatiques/problematiques, there are no single causes, no primary problems, and no silver bullet solutions. I continually point to the “elite/bureaucracy/masses” class-structure as requiring an intentional suppression of actualizing innate human potential in the whole population – including the elites and bureaucrats. Continued elite rule requires suppression of quality learning in the general population – which is one of my motivations for proposing UPLIFT. Whether, at specific scales and for specific purposes, pyramid structures may not be a useful social technology remains to be seen. I feel any attempt to preserve existing pyramids, beyond their necessity to temporarily maintain resource flows until alternative structures are in place, may be unwise.

Access (to resources) linked to employment/wages is a critical challenge, now and into the future. I have read that “employment/wages” is an social invention of the industrial revolution. Humans “labored” or “worked” before and often not in pleasant circumstances (e.g. slavery) and their access-to-resources varied. A great amount of both mental and physical labor/work will be required of everyone as we meet our Crisis-of-Crises challenges and must be de-coupled from provision of basic needs. This must be a feature of emergent UPLIFT communities and societies. Radical and quick transformations of our existing “jobs” problem may not have any easy solutions.

Nirmalan. I speculate that “homo stochasticus” will not be a biological sub-species, but the actions of integrated/developed collective of a distribution of different human persons in teams, crews, and expeditions. Our longer term future evolution may not be a new biological species with a new set of propensity norms and deviations, but possibly more a “real” distribution (where norms and deviations are not good measures of anything).

The study of swarming behavior in animals can be useful, but with dangers if naively extrapolated to human collective behavior. Individuals in biological swarms function as deterministic S/R machines, responding to environments in terms of instinctual drives. Human collective activity will be different, when our creativity and future-vision are accounted for.

Unfortunately, I too expect a very significant reduction in the human population. If, indeed, it was the only means of avoiding catastrophic climate change, I would “recommend it” – but would not want to be part of the “operations”. I speculate that “the elites” are considering, if not already implementing, such a strategy. Automation and robotics has rendered the manual worker irrelevant, and their economic consumption is not necessary for THE economy. But, I don’t trust “the elites” to manage “the operation”, even should it be needed. Unless UPLIFT manifests rapidly human induced “natural disasters” will greatly reduce the global population. The carrying capacity of Earth/Gaia depends on our values and technology – we are not yet competent to make this decision.

I greatly appreciate you three jumping in and engaging each other about your different perspectives and proposed solutions. Here, I am looking for a detailed critique and exploration of the two related “master” conceptual schemes: UPLIFT and Societal Metamorphosis; both our “need” for them and considerations of their “viability”. These two might be viewed as proposed “solutions”, but I seek “solutionatiquing” -whatever that entails.