Published in the July/August 2011 issue of Orion magazine

Back to the Future

By James Howard Kunstler

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I LOVE THOSE CITIES-of-the-future illustrations from the old pop-culture bin. In “yesterday’s tomorrow,” they always get things so wonderfully wrong. One of my favorites, from the August 1925 issue of Popular Science Monthly, depicts a heroic cross section of New York’s Park Avenue looking to the south from around 47th Street in the far-off sci-fi future of 1950. “Airport landing fields” are denoted on the roof of a building that has replaced the familiar Grand Central Station tower at the end of the vista. A zeppelin hovers over a row of quaint little “aeroplanes” stashed up there. Park Avenue itself has become a pedestrian mall, not a honking Checker Cab in sight. They’re all down in a three-level underground tunnel system: one level for slow motor traffic, one for fast, and the lowest for trains and subways. “Spiral escalators” connect all the levels to the street above, and turntable-equipped parking garages occupy the basements of the “half a mile high” skyscrapers that line the avenue.

The illustration is a beautifully rendered black-and-white lithograph, and the layout of this future New York is impeccably rational down to the pneumatic “freight tubes” in the lowest subbasement of the buildings. It expresses every wish of its day about optimal city life to absolute perfection, the engineered efficiency breathtaking. Of course, this vision didn’t come to pass. Among other things, it failed to anticipate the effects of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the massive shift to suburbia afterward, which decanted so much wealth (and so many well-off citizens) out of the cities. About the only thing it got right was that the buildings lining Park Avenue would eventually be a lot bigger.

Another favorite of mine in this genre, done in the mid-1950s to portray the far-off year 2000, depicts a city of towers cut through with swooping super-duper highways. So far, so good. It could be Houston or Atlanta today. The amusing part is that the cars depicted all have giant tail fins—because people were cuckoo for tail fins that year. So, naturally, the future would be all about tail fins.

In other words, most visions of the future are really less about the future and more about what’s happening now. Extrapolation tends toward exaggeration. Today, there are two basic cities-of-the-future themes competing in the collective imagination: the dazzling megacity of megastructures (Dubai’s steroid-induced construction) versus something I call Thanatopolis, the city of the dead (Blade Runner, Children of Men, The Book of Eli, etc.). All this said, it should be obvious that planning for the city of the future is tied into the urgent issues of our time—climate change, peak oil, ecological destruction, the crisis of banking and money, population overshoot, and war—familiar themes to readers of this journal. Add to this the virtual certainty of the nonlinear playing out of events, and you’re soon in the realm of pure conceit. But assuming the human race will carry on (and I do), we’ll have to live somewhere, and in some manner, and lots of plans are being made now anyway.

I depart from a lot of current thinking on the subject. For instance, many people seem to think that there will be more of everything—more people, taller skyscrapers, greater suburbs, bigger airplanes, larger metro regions, or even super-gigantic slums. I don’t go along with this bundle of bull, except for the slums, which I think will be short-lived, contrary to the vision of popular author Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. Of course, trends won’t proceed with the same timing everywhere in the world. But I think the general theme going forward, certainly in the U.S., will be the comprehensive contraction of just about everything.

I see our cities getting smaller and denser, with fewer people. Skyscrapers will be obsolete, travel greatly reduced, and the rural edge more distinct. The energy inputs to our economies will decrease a lot, and probably in ways that prove destabilizing. The first manifestations of climate change will be food shortages, one of the reasons I think super slum cities will be short-lived. The growth of urban megaslums in the past one hundred years has been predicated on turning oil into food, and the failure of that equation is aggravating weather-related crop failures around the world. Food shortages will quickly bend the arc of world population growth downward from the poorer margins and inward to the “developed” center—with stark implications for politics and even civil order. The crisis of money is already hampering the operation of cities and will soon critically impede the repair of water systems, paved streets, electric service, and other vital infrastructure. We are heading into a major reset of daily life, a phase of history I call The Long Emergency. Tomorrow will be a lot more like a distant yesteryear in terms of reduced comforts, commerce, and the scale of things.

Bye Bye Beaver

A major theme of mine over the years has been the fiasco of suburbia, where more than half of the U.S. population now lives. It was not produced by a conspiracy, but because it seemed like a good idea at the time, given the confluences of history. Its time is over; the global oil predicament will finish it off, probably sooner rather than later. Laying aside the fine points of its design shortcomings, the logistical drawbacks will leave suburbia harshly devalued. That process is already under way in the aftermath of the housing “bubble.” In the past decade, homebuyers were told to “drive till you qualify”—meaning, far enough into the exurban asteroid belts to where housing was still reasonably affordable. As long-term prospects for motoring dim, these are precisely the houses that are sinking the fastest.

All suburbs have a problematic destiny. Some will do better than others, based on idiosyncrasies of politics and geography. A few will be retrofitted into towns, though a shortage of capital will be a big obstacle when it comes to money for police and other services. Suburbia’s characteristic lack of civic armature suggests an absence of community cohesion. I expect many suburbs will become squats, ruins, and salvage yards. Out of necessity, we will have to forage and reuse all kinds of materials that were energy-intensive to make, from aluminum trusses to concrete blocks.

A lot of young people already have no use or affection for suburbia, and have begun moving into big cities. But when our energy supply problems get worse, there will be wholesale demographic shifts to smaller cities and small towns, especially places that have some relationship with local food production, water power, and water transport. Our smaller cities and towns are intrinsically better scaled for future energy realities. Most of these places are in sad shape after decades of neglect, but they can be repopulated and reactivated.

Farming will require far more human attention than it did during the heyday of industrial agriculture, when roughly 2 percent of the population could produce food for everyone. This agricultural landscape will be organized differently with smaller farms and more people living on or near them. With reduced access to liquid fossil fuels, we’ll run fewer big machines. We may need to revert to draft horses, oxen, and mules as well, which will require care and feeding, with a significant amount of acreage devoted to growing animal feed. Food production will come closer to the center of our economy than it has for generations.

Shuttering the Metroplexes

Meanwhile, our big “metroplex” cities will run into as much trouble as the suburbs, but for different reasons. Categorically, they are not scaled to the energy realities of the future. Our giant cities are products of the cheap energy era; the arc of their explosive growth since 1945 is self-evident. They’re simply too large and too complex. Everything about them is designed to run on endless supplies of cheap fossil fuels and the resources and byproducts made possible by them: steel, copper, cement, plastic, and asphalt. To support daily life, they require far-flung supply chains dependent on complex transport systems. Like it or not, we are entering an era of reduced complexity, and a lot of the systems we now depend on—from factory livestock to “warehouses on wheels”—simply won’t exist anymore.

These giant cities will contract and densify around their old centers and waterfronts, if they are fortunate to have them. Remember: cities traditionally exist where they do because they occupy sites of geographical and strategic importance, such as Detroit’s position on a short stretch of river between two great lakes. Some kind of settlement will continue to exist in most of these places, but not in the form we’re familiar with. They will be urban in the traditional sense of the word: compact, dense, mixed-use, and composed of neighborhoods based on the quarter-mile walk from center to edge—the so-called five-minute walk, which is a transcultural norm found everywhere in pre-automobile urban communities. The pattern is scalable: one neighborhood is the equivalent of a village; several neighborhoods and a commercial district make a town; and many neighborhoods comprise an average-sized city.

The decline of cheap fuels will lead to the demise of the trucking system and commercial aviation. Forget about biodiesel, algae oil, and similar fantasies. They don’t scale up beyond the science-project level. We’ll have to move more stuff (and people) by rail and boat. Waterfronts and harbors will once again become important in daily life. In North America, this applies especially to our inland waterways, including the linked Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio Rivers (one of the most extensive such networks in the world), the St. Lawrence River, the Hudson–Erie Canal system, and the Great Lakes. In terms of climate change, the inland waterways will be less threatened by changes in sea level than our saltwater ports. As the global economy withers, economic activity is likely to become more internally focused anyway.

It remains to be seen what rising sea levels will do to the great harbor cities of New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore. They have some topography to protect them, but they could lose a lot of real estate. The picture is a lot swampier for Miami, Jacksonville, Charleston, Norfolk, New Orleans, and Houston. For decades, we’ve been redeveloping America’s decrepit waterfronts with condo towers, festival marketplaces, concert stages, and bikeways. Whoops. We’ll have to go back and restore the infrastructure we demolished for waterborne trade: the landings, warehouses, dry docks, and even the sleazy accommodations for sailors.

Some newer U.S. cities occupy unfavorable sites, and they will simply go out of business. Phoenix’s fate is sealed: without mass motoring and cheap air conditioning, it will collapse. You can’t grow food in the desert without heroic irrigation, and all their water comes from elsewhere and at great expense. In Las Vegas, the excitement will be over for the same reasons. Both of these cities will become small, remote outposts. Given its likely isolation, whatever happens in Vegas will likely remain in Vegas in the future as well. Denver exists in the first place because of the logistics of cattle ranching and railroads. If the Southwest gets drier, as predicted, that city may wither, too.

Other cities composed largely of suburban sprawl also face unfortunate futures, particularly in the Sun Belt—that part of the U.S. that grew explosively after the Second World War. Atlanta, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Charlotte, and other sprawl cities are hugely disadvantaged. On top of a bad development pattern, recent construction quality is atrocious—chipboard, vinyl, and “innovative” spray-on finishes. In the humid Southeast, air conditioning vies with heat on exterior walls to condense moisture in the framing, causing buildings to rot from the inside out and become uninhabitable. In Florida, foreclosed houses often decay in months as humidity infiltrates the drywall and mold grows. People who seek refuge in the Sun Belt states as our energy problems worsen may be disappointed by how things work out there.

Since the wealth of these newer cities is largely represented by sprawl, a tragic amount of political and financial capital will likely be squandered to prop it up. This will amount to a futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable. It’s already happening via enormous government life-support of the housing industry and stimulus dollars poured into highway projects. We should instead concentrate efforts on fixing our passenger rail network and developing local public transit.

Southern California is in a category of its own, with dire water politics exacerbating the liabilities of suburban sprawl. Much has been made of the relatively high population density of Los Angeles. But on the whole, the city is just too big, too spread out, too car-addicted, too thirsty, too primed for ethnic friction, and too dependent on imported supplies of everything. A favorable outcome for Los Angeles might be a network of much smaller towns connected by public transit, much like the original City of Angels—except that history is not symmetrical and the sheer inertia of disintegration might drag LA beyond any desirable reset point.

Towers of Babel

One big surprise awaiting us is how quickly the skyscraper will become obsolete. Even the architecture profession does not yet recognize the problem. It’s not primarily because of issues of heating and air conditioning, or running so many elevators, though electric service may be less reliable in the U.S. a decade from now. Rather, it’s because these buildings will never be renovated. Reduced energy resources means proportionately reduced capital in the system. We’ll be painfully short of financial resources and fabricated materials—everything from steel to the silicon gaskets needed to seal glass “curtain walls.” Cities overburdened with skyscrapers will soon discover that these structures are liabilities, not assets. The skyscrapers deemed most “innovative” by today’s standards—the ones most dependent on high-tech materials and complex internal systems—will be the greatest failures. This includes many of the new “green buildings.” We have no idea what we’re going to do about this dilemma. There’s no public awareness about it whatsoever.

In 2004, The New Yorker published a hugely influential piece called “Green Manhattan.”  Reporter David Owen wrote: “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest in the world.” This was due, he said, to the efficiencies of apartment towers and the ability to get around on foot—a notion that Harvard economist Edward Glaeser seconded in his recent book Triumph of the City.

While I’d agree that tight, dense, and walkable urbanism is crucial for our future happiness, it’s a tragic error to suppose that stacking people in skyscrapers is necessary to achieve this. Most of central Paris is under six stories and nobody complains about a lack of cosmopolitan verve there. The infatuation with skyscrapers is just another facet of the technological grandiosity that pervades American culture these days—the dangerous idea that we are unbounded by limits. It is this sort of mentality that’s gotten us into deep trouble with extreme car dependency and massive oil imports.

All this points back to the issue of scale. New York is already too big and too tall. Central Chicago has similar problems. The temptation to maximize investment returns on the floor-to-area ratio of buildings—the number of stories you can stack on, say, a one-acre building lot—had the unintended consequence of producing too many tall buildings with an unsound future. As with suburbia, we built skyscraper cities because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and for a while it penciled out economically. This is no longer the case. All our big cities will contract, but for cities full of skyscrapers this contraction will be especially painful.

As in 1925, today’s cities-of-the-future are also preposterous fantasies. Take for example the proposed “Aerotropolis” described in a book by the same title. Two decades ago, business professor John Kasarda noticed that the Federal Express company revitalized the dying economy of Memphis, Tennessee. His conclusion? Successful cities of the future must be organized around airports. Aerotropolis is once again yesterday’s tomorrow. It assumes that cheap transport is a reliable constant as far ahead as we can see, which I doubt. The author is apparently oblivious to today’s irreversible global oil predicament and the effect it is already having on commercial aviation. Airlines in the U.S. have been contracting for a decade by merging, dropping routes, and firing so many employees that it is nearly impossible to find a live one nowadays in an airport concourse.

I can’t see how this situation will improve. I’d say there’s a fair chance that commercial aviation won’t even exist in twenty years. Airplanes require oil. We have fantasies about running them on substitutes like distilled coal liquids—because, people say, Germany powered the Luftwaffe with coal liquids toward the end of the Second World War. Again, it’s a matter of scale. Running the Luftwaffe through all of 1944/45 probably required less fuel than does running trucks in and out of Providence, Rhode Island, on any given week. American cities will be lucky if they can organize their future activities around railroads and waterways.

Feeding the Future

Speaking of technofantasies, another popular proposal is for skyscraper farms. The fiasco of suburbia sowed a lot of confusion in how we think about our human habitat. It hopelessly muddled the distinction between urban and rural. A manifestation of this confusion is the notion that we should focus our resources on growing food in “vertical farms” in the midst of our cities.

The problems we face with skyscrapers in terms of capital resources argue against this idea in the first place. Add to that the need to provide either artificial lighting for plants stacked under many layers of ceilings, or the energy to mechanically rotate them around the outer walls to expose them to sunlight. It is a particularly dumb idea when you consider that there is a practical relationship between cities and their agricultural hinterlands, where crops can be grown horizontally on the earth itself, without elaborate structures, artificial lighting, or high-tech gadgetry. The vertical farming idea is a demonstration of how extreme our technograndiosity has become, and how far we’ve strayed from centuries of accumulated wisdom.

Growing food on city rooftop gardens is fine but limited. Urban kitchen and dooryard gardens are historically quite customary. Community gardens on empty lots are a swell idea. But we better get our heads straight about where most of the food will have to come from, especially when a lot more of it will have to be grown locally. The appropriate place for that is outside of town. There’s a big difference between gardening and farming. Some activities are essentially rural and some urban, and we need to reestablish this distinction.

Our confusion about this distinction is visible in proposals to turn Detroit into farmland. Detroit is so far gone, the argument goes, that the only conceivable use for all that abandoned real estate is to re-ruralize it. This speaks to our lack of confidence in architecture and urbanism per se, and leads to the current default remedy whenever our cities fail: tear things down in favor of green space.

Such thinking is the result of architecture’s decades-long inability to provide buildings worthy of our affection; municipal planners’ design ignorance and extreme reliance on traffic engineers; the environmental movement’s focus on wilderness, wildlife, and disdain for human activities; and, of course, suburbia itself, which prompts most of us to despise any human imprint on the landscape. Detroit is rotting from the inside out. The inside, the old city center, the part closest to the river, is destined to be the urban site of highest value in the future. Although it may never resemble the Detroit of 1960, we have the skills and knowledge to rebuild something of appropriate urban quality there again. And there’s plenty of adequate farmland outside Detroit in rural Michigan to serve it.

Tomorrow’s Yesterday

The Congress for the New Urbanism coalesced as a formal organization in 1993 to offer an alternative to suburban sprawl. As a battle of ideas, the New Urbanists eventually won by default when the housing bust put an end to further suburbanization. The New Urbanism is now simply urbanism. There is no other body of coherent principle that can produce human habitats that have a plausible future. Still, sheer human perversity manages to generate opposition from predictable interest groups.

Harvard has been battling the New Urbanists for two decades on the grounds that traditional urban design is insufficiently avant-garde, intellectually unadventurous, politically retrograde, technologically naive, lacking in sex appeal, square. Harvard’s Graduate School of Design is now pushing a dubious new practice they call “Landscape Urbanism.” Don’t be fooled. So-called Landscape Urbanism incorporates lots of high-tech “magic” infrastructure for directing water flows and requires massive, costly, complex site interventions. It’s explicitly against density and vehemently pro-automobile. It’s just super-high-tech suburbia in the guise of environmentally avant-garde high art. Naturally it comes with heaps of opaque theory, designed to mystify and impress the nonelect.

But the USA doesn’t need more architectural fashion statements, moral status posturing, or art stunts. It needs places to live that are worth caring about and compatible with the capital and material resources that we can expect to retain going forward, which are liable to be scarcer than what we’re accustomed to.

I don’t think there’s any question that we have to return to traditional ways of occupying the landscape: walkable cities, towns, and villages, located on waterways and, if we are fortunate, connected by rail lines. These urban places will exist on a much smaller scale than what is familiar to us now, built on a much finer grain. They will have to be connected to farming and food-growing places. A return to human scale will surely lead to a restored regard for artistry in building, since the streetscape will be experienced at walking speed.

The requirements for this will be pretty straightforward. It doesn’t call for “critical theory,” as the grad schools refer to metaphysical thinking these days, but rather practical skill and common sense. The mandates of reality are telling us very clearly that the age of fossil fuel magic is drawing to a close, with huge implications for how we occupy the landscape. It also implies a timeout for the kind of rapid technological change that has come to seem normal for us. This necessary timeout is probably the only thing that will prevent us from destroying the planet we call home. We’re suffering profoundly from too much magic.

The infatuation with technomagic in our visions of the future city has paradoxically produced places with no magic, no power to enchant the human spirit. The city of slick glass skyscrapers may inspire a certain crude awe, as anything gigantic might. But go to the tower districts of Houston, Minneapolis, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and I guarantee you will not find anything like enchantment. What you’ll find is sterility, a vacuum, a fiasco of unintended consequences. It turns out that the human spirit needs texture, not sleekness in its dwelling place, and it needs things human-sized to feel truly human, and despite all the striving to escape that, it is exactly what we’re going to get.

God Enough

Interview of Stuart Kauffman by Steve Paulson

Biologist Stuart Kauffman has plenty of experience tilting at windmills. For years he’s questioned the Darwinian orthodoxy that natural selection is the sole principle of evolutionary biology. As he put it in his first book, “The Origins of Order,” “It is not that Darwin is wrong but that he got hold of only part of the truth.” In Kauffman’s view, there is another biological principle at work — what he calls “self-organization” — that “co-mingles” with natural selection in the evolutionary process.

A physician by training, Kaufmann is a widely admired biologist; in 1987, he was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award. He’s also one of the gurus of complexity theory, and for years was a fixture at the Santa Fe Institute, the renowned scientific research community. A few years ago, he moved to the University of Calgary to set up the Biocomplexity and Informatics Institute.

If this sounds heady, it is. And getting Kauffman to explain his theory of self-organization, “thermodynamic work cycles” and “autocatalysis” to a non-scientist is challenging. But Kauffman is at heart a philosopher who ranges over vast fields of inquiry, from the origins of life to the philosophy of mind. He’s a visionary thinker who’s not afraid to play with big ideas.

In his recent book, “Reinventing the Sacred,” Kauffman has launched an even more audacious project. He seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm — reductionism — breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the “ceaseless creativity” of nature itself, which in Kauffman’s view is the real meaning of God. It’s God without any supernatural tricks.

Kauffman is now approaching 70, and his advancing age may partly account for the urgency he seems to feel in grappling with life’s ultimate questions. When I spoke with him, I found him in an expansive mood as we ranged over a host of big ideas, from the prospects of creating life in a test tube to the need for a sacred science.

You’ve suggested we need a new scientific worldview that goes beyond reductionism and incorporates a religious sensibility. Why?

The first thing to say is that the current scientific paradigm has done extraordinarily good work for at least 350 years. The reigning paradigm of reductionism takes a little bit of explaining.

It goes back to the Greeks in the 1st century A.D., and then it explodes at the time of Newton, who had three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation. With Newton comes the idea of a deterministic universe. In fact, he took himself to be doing the work of God. The theistic god who reached into the universe and changed its course gave way during the Enlightenment to a deistic god, who wound up the universe at the beginning and let Newton’s laws take over. It was the clockwork universe.

So the idea is that if you understand the laws of the universe, you can plug in all the variables and predict what the outcomes will be.

Exactly. It finds its clearest explanation in the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, at the time of Napoleon, who said if you knew the masses and velocities of all the particles in the universe, then you could compute the entire future and past of the universe. As the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg says, once all the science is completed, all the explanatory arrows will point downward from societies to people to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry to physics.

And if you can explain the laws of physics, Weinberg thinks you can explain everything else.

Right. He also says we live in a meaningless universe. Those are the fruits of standard reductionism. And the majority of scientists remain reductionists. It’s comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about “emergence.” I think they’re right.

Can you explain what emergence is?

There are things that we just can’t deduce from particle physics — life, agency, meaning, value and this thing called consciousness. The fact is that we can act on our own behalf and make choices. So agency is real. With agency comes value. Dinner is either good or bad. There’s consciousness in the universe. We may not be able to explain it, but it’s true. So the first new strand in the scientific worldview is emergence.

And that new scientific view has no room for reductionism?

Right. In physics, and in the meaningless universe of Steven Weinberg, there are only happenings. Balls roll down hills but they don’t do anything. “Doing” does not exist in physics. Physics cannot talk about values because you have to have agency to have values. So let’s talk about agency for a moment.

You and I are having an interview right now. We’re acting on our own behalf and we’re changing the world as we do so. The physicist Philip Anderson has a charming way of putting it. He says if you doubt agency, just look at the anguished expression on your dog’s face when you say, “Come.” When I used to call my sweet dog, who died recently, he would give me a sidelong glance. I think he was thinking, “Well, I’ve got more time here.” Finally, I’d say, “Come, Windsor!” And he’d come.

I don’t doubt agency in my dog Windsor. And once you’ve got agency — and I think it’s sitting there at the origin of life — then you’ve got food or poison, which I call “yuck” and “yum.” And once you’ve got food or poison, it is either good or bad for that organism. So you’ve got value in the universe.

Are you rejecting Weinberg’s famous comment? “The more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems.”

I profoundly believe that Weinberg is wrong. I also happen to think that Weinberg is utterly brilliant. He’s one of the best defenders of the pure reductionist stance. But once you’ve got agency, you’ve got meaning. This is the beginning of a change in our scientific worldview. Agency is real, so meaning is real in the universe. Value is real, at least in the biosphere. And these things can’t be talked about by physicists.

So the reductionist model breaks down when we’re talking about how life evolves.

Absolutely. This idea is frightening at first, but then utterly liberating. For 3.8 billion years, the biosphere has been expanding from the origin of life into what I call “the adjacent possible.” Once we’re at levels of complexity above the atom, the universe is on a unique trajectory. It’s doing something that it’s never done before.

To take one example, I argue that the evolutionary emergence of the human heart cannot be deduced from physics. That doesn’t mean it breaks any laws of physics. But there’s no way of getting from physics to the emergence of hearts in the evolution of the biosphere. If you were to ask Darwin, what’s the function of the heart? he would have said it’s to pump blood. That’s what Darwin meant by adaptation. But there may be other causal consequences of the heart, or any other part of you, that are of no functional significance in the current environment, but may become useful in a different environment.

Isn’t this called a Darwinian pre-adaptation?

Yes. And when a pre-adaptation happens, a new function comes to exist in the biosphere and can change the history of the planet. We just don’t know ahead of time what the relevant selective environments are. This is just stunning when you think about it. We cannot say how the biosphere will evolve.

The same is true for our technologies, our economy, our culture. We didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen with the invention of writing or the invention of tractors. These were Darwinian pre-adaptations at the technological level. This is the creativity of the universe that we’re participating in right now. We literally don’t have the faintest idea what the biosphere is going to invent in the next million years, or what technology is going to invent in the next 40 years. Who foresaw the Web 50 years ago?

It seems that one of your big goals is to explain the origin of life. You have devoted much of your career to trying to work out a science of self-organization. Can you explain this?

It’s harder than you think. I wrote a whole book, “The Origins of Order,” and I very carefully never defined self-organization. My own life work asks if there might be laws of self-organization that are sources of order in biology quite apart from natural selection. For most biologists, the only source of order is natural selection. But we don’t need DNA or RNA to get molecular reproduction. People have already made self-reproducing systems. Reza Ghadiri at the Scripps Research Institute took a string of amino acids and used it to replicate itself.

But the second part has to do with self-organization. I worked out a mathematical theory, which says if we have a large enough diversity of molecules and chemical reactions, so many reactions will be catalyzed that you’ll get some form of collective autocatalysis popping out of the soup. The mathematics has been proved, but it still needs to be shown experimentally. For years, I’ve been probing laws of self-organization that co-mingle with natural selection, and give rise to the order we see. And we’re not very far, experimentally, from creating life all on our own.

One of the great mysteries of science is consciousness. Virtually all scientists assume the mind is formed by neural circuits in the brain, while religious traditions typically see a direct connection between the human mind and God. Do you accept either of those views?

Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is. In the Western tradition, St. Augustine said the human mind is directly connected to the mind of God. The dualism of Descartes distinguished between mental substances and physical substances. Now, contemporary neurobiologists and computer scientists believe that if you have a sufficiently complex computing system — like neurons or logical gates in a computer — then it would become conscious.

But I’ll tell you my own bias. I think it’s possible the mind is associated with quantum mechanics. Now, a good physicist will say, “That’s just nonsense. Quantum behavior will disappear in 10 to the minus 15th second, so it can’t happen.” Well, there are recent theorems in quantum computing that say that’s not necessarily so. The question is, Can you get sustained quantum coherent behavior at body temperature in something like neurons? Nobody knows.

Are you saying there’s no way that computer scientists in the future will be able to reproduce the human brain? That computers will not be able to create consciousness?

Roger Penrose wrote a book called “The Emperor’s New Mind.” He looked at this argument for artificial intelligence, and he said it’s just bunk. I think he’s right. I’ve fallen in love with the idea that consciousness has something to do with being poised forever between the quantum world of possibilities, where nothing actual happens, and the transformation of that — whether it’s the collapse of the wave function or decoherence, where something actual happens in the world.

If this is related to consciousness, it provides an intellectual framework in which we can understand the mind acting on matter. Quantum mechanics is astonishing because it’s not causal. It just happens. Maybe the mind is acausal. Maybe the mind is non-algorithmic. I don’t want you to take this very seriously. It’s just Stu Kauffman getting old and thinking weird things. But it may be true. And even if my arguments are right, it still doesn’t tell us what consciousness is. I don’t have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind.

You call yourself a secular humanist. But you also say we need to reinvent the sacred. What do you mean by that?

Once one gets beyond reductionism, it leads to a radically new scientific worldview, which changes our place in the universe as human beings. We are not meaningless chunks of particles spinning around in space. We are organisms with meaning in our lives, and the way the biosphere will evolve is ceaselessly creative. The way the economy evolves is ceaselessly creative in ways that cannot be predicted ahead of time. That’s why five-year plans don’t work. The same thing for human culture.

OK, we can’t predict what’s going to happen. But I’m still trying to figure out why you invoke religious language. Why do we need a new understanding of God and the sacred?

First of all, because of global communications and commerce, a global civilization of some kind is emerging. But there’s also a natural retreat by some people into religious fundamentalism, and people are killing each other. So I think a shared sacred space across all of our traditions will lead us to coalesce around a sense of what is sacred; for example, all life on the planet and the planet itself. I hope we can find our way to a global ethic, beyond just the love of family, a sense of fairness, and a belief in democracy and free markets.

Historically, God has had a very specific meaning, particularly in the Western tradition. It refers to an all-powerful, transcendent reality. Can you take such a loaded word and give it a new meaning?

Maybe. I have a very explicit reason for wanting to use the word “God.” It’s the most powerful symbol humanity has created. We have been worshiping God or gods at least since the sacred earth mother 10,000 years ago in Europe. In the Abrahamic tradition, our sense of God has evolved. For example, the Israelites, 4,500 years ago, had Yahweh, who was a ferocious warrior, a law-giving God. That’s a very different god than the one that Jesus spoke of, a God of love. So our sense of God just in the Abrahamic tradition has evolved.

The question is whether we choose to take our most powerful, invented symbol and use it in a new way to mean the creativity in nature itself. Is it more astonishing to believe in a God who created everything that has come to exist — planets, galaxies, chemistry, life and consciousness — in six days? Or is it even more astonishing and awesome to believe what is almost certainly the truth: namely, that all of this came to be all on its own? I think the second.

Most scientists talk about the origins of the world strictly through naturalistic means. Why are you so determined to invoke “God”?

“God” carries with it a sense of awe, reverence and wonder that no other symbol carries. It’s a choice. Can we give up the creator God — the all-powerful, omnipotent, all-loving God who confronts us with the problem of evil — and instead find reverence for a ceaseless creativity in the unfolding of nature? I think we can.

I also feel parts of the religious person’s sense of awe. I sense the solace that prayer to a transcendent God brings. But I don’t believe in a transcendent God. I do believe in this new scientific worldview.

Forget the “God” word for a second and just try to feel yourself as a co-creating member of the universe. It changes your stance from the secular humanist lack of spirituality to a sense of awed wonder that all of this has come about. For example, I was sitting on my patio and started thinking about the trees around me. I thought I’m one with all of life. If I’m going to cut down a tree, I better have a good reason. It’s not just an object. It’s alive. Then I thought about the river I’m sitting next to. I can dam the river if I want to. But I’m going to change the ecosystem downstream from it and change the planet.

So even without talking about God, this new scientific worldview brings with it a sense of membership with all of life and a responsibility for the planet that’s largely missing in our secular world. In a materialist society, being spiritual is — if not frowned upon — what you do in the privacy of your own mind because there’s something flaky about it for those of us who don’t believe in God.

It sounds like your God is equivalent to nature.

I’m saying God is the sacredness of nature. And you can go a step beyond that. You can say that God is nature. That’s the God of Spinoza. That’s the God that Einstein believed in. But their view of the universe was deterministic. The new view is that evolution of the universe is partially lawless and ceaselessly creative. We are the children of that creativity. One either does or does not take the step of saying God is the creativity of the universe. I do. Or you say there is divinity in the creativity in the universe. If we can’t transform our secular humanist, consumerist worldview into one in which we have this sense of responsibility, awe and wonder for the planet and all life, then we can’t invent a global ethic. Yet we need it to create a transnational, mythic structure to sustain the global civilization that’s emerging.

You are Jewish, but you’ve said you can’t accept the God of Abraham. Have there been occasions in your life when you wish you could?

Sure. I don’t believe in God, but I seem to thank Him a lot. It’s not logical but it feels right. Of course, Jews don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. I’m almost 70 and have lived a lot more than half my life. Death is frightening. It would be wonderful to be able to believe in a heaven so that when I die, I could see my daughter who was killed 20 years ago. I wish I could, but I don’t. I think when I die, I die. But it would be nice to believe the other.

Your daughter Merit’s death must have been a wrenching experience. Did that pull you in a religious direction?

In one sense. There’s an ancient Aramaic prayer that’s perhaps 5,000 years old. It’s the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. When Merit died, it mattered enormously to me as a non-observant Jew, but a member of the Jewish community, that the Kaddish be said for my daughter.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that Neanderthals buried their dead. They aren’t even in the direct lineage of Homo sapiens. Why did they bury their dead? The need to reach out in these spiritual directions is antique in us. You can see it in the struggle that’s going on right now among religious fundamentalists. Fundamentalist Islam is appalled at the materialism and secularism of the West. Some kind of awakening to the spiritual part of being human seems to me just essential. And this goes beyond where science can go.

You don’t accept traditional beliefs about God. But are you carving out a different space from atheists, especially the scientists who are atheists?

I absolutely am. Take Richard Dawkins‘ book “The God Delusion.” It’s a very good book. And I know Richard, and he lays out the atheist case well. It appeals to the billion or so of us who do not believe in a supernatural God, and who’ve hidden in the corners, particularly in the United States, where religion is so widely adhered to. But it will do no good whatsoever in bridging the gap between those who do believe in some form of God and the secular humanists like Dawkins and myself who do not. We need something else.

Well, Dawkins does not want to bridge that gap. He wants to convince those religious believers that they’re wrong.

Absolutely. But I think Richard is wrong. Not that there’s a supernatural god. I think that there’s something else. I think the creativity in nature is so stunning and so overwhelming that it’s God enough for me, and I think it’s God enough for many of us if we think about it. You see, Richard’s view, and those of the new atheists, is simply not going to reach out and persuade those who hold to the standard Abrahamic religious views to consider something else. Whereas I hope what I’m saying may help create a new kind of sacred space.

Copyright ©2011 Salon Media Group, Inc.

A History of Violence

Steven Pinker

Once again, Steven Pinker returns to debunking the doctrine of the noble savage in the above piece based on his lecture at the recent TED Conference in Monterey, California.

This doctrine, “the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like JosÈ Ortega y Gasset (“War is not an instinct but an invention”), Stephen Jay Gould (“Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species”), and Ashley Montagu (“Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood”),” he writes. “But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.”

Pinker’s notable talk, along with his essay, is one more example of how ideas forthcoming from the empirical and biological study of human beings is gaining sway over those of the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation. —JB

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His most recent book is The Blank Slate.

Enlightened CommUnity

Timothy Wilken, MD

As we enter the second year of the second decade of the twenty-first century, our human species is in crisis. Every human knows we are in crisis. The evidence is all around us and fills the stories of our daily lives. Descriptions of this crisis fill the front pages of our newspapers, dominate the television network’s nightly news broadcasts, are the obsession of cable network’s talking heads, and provide the focus for countless blogs on the web. Our current human behavior, and our current methods of organizing ourselves are helpless in solving our problems. Our old ways of behaving and our old ways of organizing our communities are proving to be obsolete. They cannot solve our problems; in fact, they are the very cause of most of our problems. If we are to surmount our human crisis, we will need to change our behavior, and change the way we organize our communities.

Today, our problems are so difficult that they are overwhelming our individual abilities to solve them. We are rapidly entering into a state of what I call individual overwhelm. It is becoming increasingly difficult for modern humans to solve their problems as separate individuals. But what is difficult for individuals working separately is often much easier for individuals working together. Instead of asking, “How can I meet my needs and solve my problems,” we must learn to ask, “How can we meet our needs and solve our problems?”

I am a synergic scientist. The word synergy derives from two Greek roots: erg meaning “to work,” and syn meaning “together;” hence, the term synergy simply means working together. Synergic science is simply the study of working together. It is a relatively new science, but it has produced a powerful new understanding of human behavior and of human organization. Synergic science reveals a relatively simple solution to our human crisis. That solution requires that we work together and act responsibly.

The human behavior that best supports acting responsibly is called Enlightenment. The natural attributes of enlightened humans — kindness, compassion, calmness, peace, tranquility, intelligence, genius, wisdom, and goodness — insure responsible action. Enlightenment changes individual human behavior.

The organizational pattern that best supports working together is called CommUnity. When individuals form a CommUnity, they discover that they can accomplish much more by working together than they can by working separately. CommUnity utilizes synergic union. Examples of synergic union include operating together as in co-operation, laboring together as in co-laboration, acting together as in co-action, creating together as in co-creation, and thinking together as in co-intelligence. These examples of synergic union require shared motivations, shared emotions, shared intelligence and shared knowing. CommUnity must be structured so that the process of working together fosters shared values, shared goals, shared dreams, shared hopes, shared responsibility, shared commitment, and of most importance, shared authority. CommUnity changes collective human behavior. To solve today’s problems and exit our current human crisis will require nothing less than the creation of Enlightened CommUnities.

Read a 70 page overview and summary of the concept of Enlightened CommUnity on PDF.

A Prototype of Enlightened CommUnity

I am currently exploring the possibility of creating an Enlightened CommUnity in the Monterey Peninsula in California. The following overview served as introduction to a meeting that occurred on 04-30-11.

Since synergy means working together,synergic science can be described as “the study of working together.” Synergic science explains that from an individual participant’s point of view, humans can relate to each other in only three ways. These three types of human relationships can be described as falling on a continuum. Dysergic relationships are those that are hurtful and detrimental, neutral relationships are those that are ignoring and neither detrimental nor beneficial, and synergic relationships are those that are helpful and beneficial.

Dysergy means human behavior that results in working against to the detriment of others in a relationship. In the language of games, dysergy results from a losing relationship. I am made less because of my relationship with other. This is any relationship wherein I am less happy, less effective and less productive than I would be without the relationship. Neutrality means human behavior that results in working separately with null effect on others in a relationship, as if, the relationship did not matter or even exist.In the language of games, neutrality results from a drawing relationship. I am unaffected by my relationship with other. This is any relationship wherein I am equally happy, equally effective, and equally productive as I would be without the relationship. Synergy means human behavior that results in working together to the benefit of the ‘whole’—to the benefit of all the participants in a relationship. In the language of games, synergy results from a winning relationship. I am made more because of my relationships with the other members of the group. This is any relationship wherein I am more happy, more effective, and more productive than I would be without the relationship.

CommUnity is an intentional and consciously created organization in which all members participating within the organization are in win-win relationships with each other, and with the commUnity as a whole. I win, you win, and commUnity wins.

I propose creating a two tract educational process here on the Monterey Peninsula. One tract will focus on helping our neighbors become more enlightened. The second tract will focus on teaching those interested the principles of commUnity. These two tracts will support the mission of creating a real Enlightened CommUnity right here in the Monterey Peninsula.

To solve today’s problems and exit our current human crisis will require nothing less than the creation of Enlightened CommUnities. … Let us begin.

Listen to the 04-30-11 recording of the First Meeting of Monterery Enlightened CommUnity in MP3 or m4a format.

Beyond Democracy

Timothy Wilken, MD

In today’s world, it is assumed without question that majority rule democracy is the best way to organize humanity. To even offer a criticism of majority rule democracy is to invite an immediate and often emotionally charged attack on oneself. We are quickly asked to choose between majority rule democracy or the dictatorships of communism/fascism. We are quickly reminded that if we don’t like it here in a majority ruled democracy, we are free to leave.

And, majority rule democracy which is rule by the most, appears to offer a clear advance over dictatorships which is rule by the one, or oligarchy which is rule by the few.

Majority rule democracy in its purest form was found in the ancient Greek city-states and early Roman Republic, these were direct democracies in which all citizens could speak and vote in assemblies. This was possible because of the small size of the city-states almost never more than 10,000 citizens. However, even these ancient democracies did not presuppose equality of all individuals; the majority of the populace, notably slaves and women, had no political rights at all. So even here the majority really did not rule.

In modern representative democracies we find the majority rule mechanism used to select our representatives, to make decisions within committees and to make decisions within the legislative bodies. In the United States, we elect one president, 100 Senators and 435 Congressman. This is one President for ~276 million Americans. There are two Senators for each state. Senatorial representation would vary from one Senator for ~16 million Californians down to one Senator for ~350,000 Delawarians. The members of the first House of Representatives were elected on the basis of 1 representative for every 30,000 inhabitants, but at least 1 for each state. At present the size of the House is fixed at 435 members, elected on the basis of 1 representative for about 500,000 inhabitants.

Our representatives do not even know us. If any Congressman met with 10 of his constituents every day for 365 days a year, it would take over 137 years for him just to meet all of them. And Congressmen are only elected for two year terms. If our Congressman don’t even know us how can they represent us?

So if we carefully examine modern representative democracy scientifically, we discover it is an oliarchy. In other words, we are ruled by the few. When we go to the poles to elect a President, we are simply electing the leader of the few who rule. Majority rule democracy ends for we the people the moment we exit the voting booth. And, our elected leader will have no need of our opinion for four years.

Its even less representative than it appears!

Both houses of Congress facilitate business by the committee system, and each has a fixed number of permanent committees, called standing committees, the chief function of which is considering and preparing legislation.

As the United States grew in population and in influence in world affairs, the volume and complexity of the matters arising in Congress also increased. Due consideration to all matters submitted to the Congress could not be given in open debate on the floor of the Senate and House. As a result, the standing committees of the Congress became the arbiters of the fate of practically all legislation. There are 22 standing committees in the House and 16 standing committees in the Senate. Even though majority rule is used to make decisions in these committees once the decision is made the results are imposed on ~276,000,000 Americans.

In recent years, the American people have attempted to exert their will by making use of ballot initiatives. Almost always if these initiatives are not popular with the few that rule, they are quickly dismantled. In November of 1996, the majority of Californians voted for Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action, Proposition 215, which legalized medical use of marijuana, and Proposition 187, which denied legal benefits to illegal immigrants. By January of 1997, all three were hung up in the courts or in a jurisdictional squabble with the federal government. None was close to being enforced.

By May of 1998, Proposition 215, the Marijuana for Medical Use Initiative which passed by a 56% majority throughout the state and by an 80% majority in San Francisco has all but been dismantled by the Few who Rule. They had succeeded in closing the majority of the medical marijuana clinics which had opened throughout the state, and were pressing criminal charges against many of those involved in the clinics. Obviously, the majority does not rule in California.

This fact is being increasingly realized by citizens across the nation. Voting in our representative democracy does not make a difference.  And we the people appear less and less interested in pretending that our voting has any effect whatever. Voter turnout has been declining steadily since 1960. And as reported  in the Wall Street Journal for November 9, 2000:

“Overall voter turnout for this week’s election barely budged despite nearly $1 billion of campaign television advertisements and the closest presidential contest in decades

“About 50.7% of the nation’s 200 million eligible voters cast ballots this week, marginally greater than the rock-bottom level seen in 1996, but significantly lower than the 1992 level, said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Four years ago, only 49% of those qualified to vote actually did so, the lowest turnout since 1924. By contrast, some 55% of the electorate went to the polls in 1992′s close race between Bill Clinton and President George H.W. Bush.”

Seeking synergic government

However, even if we had direct democracies using majority rule, it would not be a synergic form of government.

Adversary relationships require loss.

Neutral relationships prohibit loss, but do not require winning.

Synergic relationships prohibit loss and require winning.

So in fact, if we use the Neutral criteria of prohibition of loss, majority rule democracy is not even a neutral form of government. In majority rule democracy, the minority often loses. As Andrew J. Galambos wrote:

“The word Democracy comes from the Greek words which mean “rule of the people.” However, the practice of Democracy can be no better than the understanding of the concept of “rule of the people.”Over the past 2,000 years, most people have come to accept without question or reservation the idea that Democracy means the ability of the people to choose their mode of social organization by means of majority vote.

“The political concept of Democracy arose as a consequence of counting yeas and nays on particular issues and than selecting the men who would decide how issues were to be resolved. Whichever man could muster the choice of more persons than his opposition could muster became the dominant person for the society. This was and is nothing more than an application of the old dictum, might makes right.

“This concept of Democracy (which prevails to this day) relies upon the ability of the winning political leaders to count upon the support of more people than their losing opponents. However, this concept does nothing to ensure the protection of the property, hence, the freedom of those who may disagree. Furthermore, those who may be in the majority with respect to a given issue or political candidate will eventually find themselves in the minority with respect to other issues or candidates. In the long run, therefore, everyone loses. This concept of Democracy eventually breaks down and leads to a destruction of freedom.”

Source: Andrew J.Galambos, What is True Democracy,  Free Enterprise Institute, 1963

In today’s “FREE” world all political decisions are made using majority rule democracy. The the group deciding may be small, a committee faced with solving some particular problem, or large, the entire voting electorate of a nation choosing a President. Regardless of the size of the group deciding, decision is made when one faction within the group achieves a simple majority. That faction wins, the minority faction loses. Majority rule consensus requires only a simple majority to force the minority, the losing voters to accept the position of the majority, the winning voters. There is no need to gain the agreement of all of the members. There is no need to prevent the minority from losing.

Majority rule democracy of which the committee is the most common example is filled with political intrigue and back room deals to obtain majority consensus and defeat the minority. This often results in the dark art of politics which makes strange bedfellows. Even when the majority wins they are not assured of the cooperation of the minority. Often the minority may only support the elected plan half-heartedly, or even seek to sabotage the plan they didn’t vote for since they feel they are losing anyway.

Compared to the rule by the one of dictatorship,  the rule by the most of majority rule democracy, appears to be a much fairer way. And fairness is perhaps the greatest value of our American nation.  However, it should now be clear to the reader that while Neutral political-economic systems are better for humanity than Adversary political-economic systems. Majority rule democracy is really an Adversary political-economic system pretending to be a Neutral political-economic system. In reality only lip service is given to rule by the most.

What we really have in America, the “freest nation on Earth”, is rule by the few. And, while rule by the few holds some advantage over rule by the one, its advantage does not imply there is nothing better for Humanity.

If we are to find a synergic form of organization for humanity, we will have to look beyond the representative democracies of today.

Read the Synergic Future Series: 1) Beyond Property 2) Redefining Wealth 3) Synergic Wealth 4) Synergic Wealth II: Deepening Our Understanding 5) Trustegrities — Protecting the Future and 6) Synergic Guardians — Protecting the Future.

Upon returning to California from my meeting with Dr. Coulter, I had a new focus. I knew a lot about Capitalism most of which I had learned as a student of Andrew J. Galambos. I was very clear about hierarchy. But I was a novice when it came to heterarchy. I immediately set out to find out as much about heterarchy as I could. In the early 1980’s, the best business organizations in the world were to be found in Japan. And, I soon discovered the secret of their success was their mastery of heterarchy.

HETERARCHY: The Secret of Japan, Inc.

Timothy Wilken, MD

In 1983, the major success of Japan, Inc. was serving to focus international attention on their ways of doing business. The Japanese were employing organizing strategies that produced the highest productivity and quality of work-life in the industrial world.

Their success appeared to threaten the viability of many American corporations. This threat was leading to the careful examination of the Japanese way by numerous individuals.

Their findings revealed the major focus of the Japanese was long-term and wholistic. This was in striking contrast to most American corporations where the focus was short-term and particulate.

As the world’s business corporations sought to compete and survive in the late 70s and early 80s, they sought the most powerful organizing strategies available. Who would be right — the Japanese, or the Americans?

Should businesses have wholistic concerns or particulate concerns? Did the recent major success of the Japanese prove they had the right system?

What about innovation, creativity, and originality? How do they fare under the Japanese way? Many American business leaders were forced to decide without really being able to predict the effect of their decisions.

William Ouchi is best known for his work, Theory Z, which was published in 1981 when American businesses were still scratching their collective heads in trying to understand the Japanese advantage. Dr. Ouchi pointed out that advantage, which was revealed to be a Japanese commitment to democratic leadership that resulted in increased quality, increased productivity and decreased costs while making workers at all levels full partners in business.  He contrasted the American and the Japanese ways in the following chart.

.

Japanese	American
Wholistic Concern	Particulate Concern
Collective Decision Making	Individual Decision Making
Collective Responsibility	Individual Responsibility
Implicit Control Mechanisms	Explicit Control Mechanisms
Lifetime Employment	Short-term Employment
Non-Specialized Career Paths	Specialized Career Paths
Slow Evaluation & Promotion	Rapid Evaluation & Promotion

.

Economic Survival

And how long could American businesses afford to wait before deciding? Ouchi said, “it takes a minimum of two years to convert to a type z company, and some companies might require four or six years to see effects.”

The success of the Japanese could be explained by synergic system analysis. As I examined the two ways from the point of view of synergy science, I discovered the American way was dominated by hierarchy, while the Japanese way was heavily influenced by the heterarchy.

Other-Directed Management

Nearly all of America’s businesses employed other-directed management. Other-directed management is when “A” tells “B” what to do, and often how to do it as well.

Recall that hierarchy is a vertical system with many levels of organization. Those with greatest responsibility and authority occupy the higher levels. Hierarchy creates a feeling of difference or individuality. Individuals within the system see each other vertically, “He is over me.” “I work under John.” “He is way up in the company” “She is the lowest one on the totem pole.” All too often individuals within a hierarchy experience feelings of inferiority. This is not surprising in a system based on superior  and inferior levels. In humans, feelings of inferiority produce hostility. In the jungle, being inferior was often synonymous with death.

This adversary reality was also experienced in the cave, and the tribe, and the feudal state , and is experienced in nearly all the corporations, institutions, governments, and militaries of earth.

Recent mind-brain science reveals that hostility produces a ‘down shift’ within the human mind to a very primitive mode of thinking — the SURVIVE MODE. This “mode of thinking” originated in the jungle, and is the master of fighting and fleeing.

Since the inception of hierarchy its constant companion has always been conflict. This now seems to be its primary limitation. One significant contributor to conflict is other-directed management.

Some corporations are seeking to move away from other-directed management through use of “delegation of responsibility”. Here, managers are still told what to do, but not how to do it. They have more freedom to self-direct. But even within systems with “delegation of responsibility”, the price of failure is usually termination or at the very least stagnation of ones career. This produces fear of failure with resultant conflict.

Conflict — Preparing to Fight or Flight

The SURVIVE MODE of the human mind is the real “king” of the jungle. We humans are clearly the dominate form of life on this planet. We have successfully fought and fled  our way from the African savannah to the top of the modern corporate board room.

The survive mode is quite effective for physical conflict, with its extremes of rage and terror, but highly ineffective within modern organizations. The survive mode is our most primitive way of thinking. It was for survival emergencies in the jungle. Humans thinking in this mode are highly inefficient and non-productive, they lose access to almost all of what we call “human intelligence”. Any conflict can produce hostility within a human, and hostility always shifts humans into the survive mode.

Synergy science has identified conflict as the major obstacle to efficiency, productivity, and quality of work-life within all organizations. While Hierarchy clearly has some major strengths, its problems with conflict create the greatest of liabilities. If human organizations are to survive into the 21st century, it is crucial that conflict be eliminated.

conflict        :      friction
___________        _________
organizations   :    machinery

Synergic system analysis reveals that the major secret of the Japanese way is the reduction of conflict they have achieved within their organizations.

Synergy Increases Efficiency

Synergic system analysis reveals that efficiency within a system is a direct variable of the type of relationship that exists between the parts that make up the whole system.

In other words, it is how these parts relate with one another that will absolutely determine the success of the whole system.

Recall that adversary relationships are bad for me, bad for you, or bad for both of us. Neutral relationships have no effect on you or me. But synergic relationships are good for you and good for me — WIN-WIN.

The synergic relationship maximizes efficiency. Neutral relationships significantly limit efficiency, and adversary relationships allow no possibility of efficiency.

Synergy science reveals that conflict is an indirect variable of efficiency, productivity, and quality of work-life. Using win-win relationships within organization is like applying grease to machinery.

It is by making win-win relationships that we will form systems in which the sum of the whole system is much more than the sum of the parts. This “much more” results in what Haskell called the cooperator’s reward.

If we humans desire a share of the cooperator’s reward, then, we must learn to create win-win relationships between all the individuals within our organiztions and to reduce conflict where ever we may find it.

Eliminating Conflict

I pause here to mention one apparently different point of view. Recently some business writers have  been singing the praises of conflict. They advise “managers” to learn to creatively manage conflict, rather than to try to eliminate it.

However a closer examination reveals that these business writer’s define “managing conflict” as creating “win-win relationships”. Whereas synergy science defines the creation of “win-win relationships” as “eliminating conflict”. So whether we refer to the creation of “win-win relationships” as “eliminating conflict” or as simply “managing conflic”, we would all agree, it is good to create win-win relationships.

The Japanese clearly have some cultural advantages in creating win-win relationships. First of all, they are a very crowded people with over a hundred million individuals living within a geographic area no larger than a single one of our states. This crowding has produces a strong force toward a cooperative life style, and the Japanese do strongly seek consensus. They also are the only nation to have experienced nuclear war, this resulted in a people deeply committed to the cooperative way.

Some Americans seem to want to explain away the Japanese success by pointing to obscure genetic and cultural differences, as if in so doing they will somehow invalidate the Japanese success. Their success will not be invalidated. The Japanese success results not from obscure genetic and cultural traits, but from simply reducing the conflict within their organizations.

And the most powerful strategy presently known for reducing conflict is heterarchy.

The Japanese Way

The Japanese reduce conflict by using heterarchy in their systems. In many ways, the basic structure of Japanese business appears no less hierarchical than our own. However, the Japanese have introduced heterarchy into their systems in at least three significant forms.

First of all, the Japanese use “quality circles”. Management and workers all sit at the same level in advisory “heterarchies”. This allows the managers to be very aware of the attitudes of those who will be implementing decisions. Conflict can be discovered and eliminated effectively within the heterarchy. All participants of “quality circles” feel they are on a full and equal basis to discuss problems and recommend changes.

Secondly, while much of the Japanese work day is spent in hierarchical organization not unlike Americans, the Japanese business day does not end at 5 pm. The mandatory socializing which occurs every night after work is structured as heterarchy. This provides another opportunity to reduce conflict and many business decisions are made in this social setting.

And thirdly, while hierarchy prevails in terms of organizational responsibility, the Japanese manager adopts a more open heterarchical style. He welcomes his worker’s inputs, and encourages them to participate in the decision making process.

This is a move away from other-directed management towards more self-directed management. This is accompanied by an almost instantaneous decrease in conflict.

If we are to learn anything from the Japanese, it should be that reduction of conflict always produces a significant increase in efficiency, productivity, and quality of work-life.

My study of Japanese business opened my eyes to the power of heterarchy. It is now obvious that all human organizations must master the power of the heterarchy. However, hierarchy is not the villain in this story. For American busnisesses to throw out hierarchy in a rush to embrace the Japanese way could be a worse mistake than to make no change at all. American busnesses are the masters at hierarchy, and here the Japanese can learn something from them.

The discovery of the Organizational Tensegrity reveals that human organizations require a system of organization that transcends both heterarchy and hierarchy.

At one and the same time the Organizational Tensegrity is neither a heterarchy nor a hierarchy, and simultaneously it is both a heterarchy and a hierarchy. There is a third alternative to either heterarchy or hierarchy.

The synergic way produces win-win relationships between all members of the system by transcending both heterarchy and hierarchy. This is the mechanism that allows the Organizational Tensegrity to eliminate all internal conflict.

Both-And

The Organizational Tensegrity can then be defined as that “complex organizational system that creates a balance of both heterarchy and hierarchy to produce win-win relationships among all members of the system and simultaneously eliminate all internal conflict”.

Synergy science teaches us the both-and point of view. Systems are not wholes. Systems are not parts. Systems are both wholes and parts. A human organization is not just a community, it is not just the individuals within the community. A human organization is both a community and the individuals within that community. We humans are usually misled by our great propensity to “either/or” thinking. This is not a question of “either heterarchy or hierarchy”.

An Organizational Tensegrity is highly flexible being able to move between heterarchy and hierarchy easily and frequently. This ability of the organizational tensegrity, to instantly shift between these two strategies, allows it to gain the strengths of both while avoiding their weaknesses altogether.

Heterarchy is best able to provide the needs of the whole — the needs of community, while hierarchy is best able to meet the goals of the parts — the goals of the individuals. And the win-win relationship serves as the binding that holds the system together.

Which way for Humanity? We humans find ourselves once again at the crossroads, which way shall we choose?

I believe our future does not lie in the Japanese way of heterarchy, nor in the American way of hierarchy. I believe it lies in the third alternative — the synergic way of the Organizational Tensegrity. In the years that have passed since I first described the organizational tensegrity, I have contracted the term to simply Ortegrity.

Japan’s Wrong Turn

Bill Totten

When Japan’s economy was booming in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Japan’s leaders had the following philosophy:

1. The PURPOSE or GOAL of a society is the happiness of its members; the purpose of goal of Japan then was the happiness of Japanese citizens.

2. Companies have two roles in society: (1) To provide products and services that contribute to citizens’ happiness, and (2) To provide jobs so citizens could pay for those products and services.

3. Profit should NOT be a company’s goal. Not even one of its goals! A company should only make enough profit to continue as a viable business; that is, to cover the R&D and plant & facility investments it needs to stay viable. If a company has a chance to make more profits than that, it should refrain from making them and, instead, either sell its products and services at lower prices, provide higher wages and benefits to its employees, or both.

That was the philosophy that made Japan Number 1, the philosophy of the Japanese Miracle, the philosophy that created the greatest economic growth (and social gains) in the history of this planet.

Most of those Japanese leaders, who received Confucian educations prior to 1945, had retired by around 1980 and were succeeded by people educated in the system imposed by General Douglas MacArthur’s Occupation after 1945. They have destroyed Japan’s Miracle, and are ruining Japan’s economy, with the same philosophy that has knocked the United States from its economic and social pinnacle down to third-world status:

1. Economic Darwinism (free competition): Society is a jungle where the strong have the right to take what they can from the weak. Government regulations hindering this should be relaxed or eliminated.

2. The role of companies is to make as much profit as possible as fast as possible. The main techniques are: (1) Advertise heavily to dupe citizens into excessive consumption and spending, and (2) Treat employees like coal, oil and other resources; get the maximum production from the lowest possible expenditure on resources; if your fellow citizens are too expensive, take your factories to places where you can hire cheaper human resources.

3. If speculating on stocks and bonds is a faster way to make big profits than researching and developing new products, then gamble your R&D budget on stocks and bonds. If speculating in land is a faster way to make big profits than increasing the productivity of workers, then gamble your plant & facility budget on land.

4. Use your profits to buy politicans who will reduce your taxes — reduce progressive taxes on high incomes; reduce corporate income taxes; create loopholes and tax breaks available only to rich people and large corporations who can afford expensive lawyers and accountants; reduce taxes on inheritances, land speculation, stock and bond speculation; and so on.

5. When this creates huge government deficits, do the following: (1) Make more money by loaning (at interest) the money the government needs to cover the deficits it created by reducing your taxes; (2) Brainwash the citizenry into ‘privatization’ of society’s assets — such as railroads, telephone companies, NASA. These, of course, became valuable because they were built with everyone’s tax money and protected my government monopolies. But when they’re privatized (sold off) only rich people and rich corporations can afford them. (3) Hector the government into reducing the deficits (resulting from cutting your taxes) remaining after ‘privatization’ by cutting services to the average citizen — that is, cutting spending on health, education, welfare and similar services. (4) Get the government to raise excise, social security, and other taxes that fall mostly on citizens who earn most of their incomes from working and must spend most of those incomes on consumption.

6. Use your advertising clout with Business Week, Fortune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and other media that get most of their revenues and profits from advertising to brainwash the general public into submitting docilely to this rape and plunder; if possible, convince them that it’s in their own best interests.

Japan’s MacArthur-educated colonials have used this philosophy since the early 1980s to plunder Japan’s economy.

INTERdependence is the Human Condition

Timothy Wilken, MD

As Alfred Korzybski¹⁹²¹ explained:

“To discover the nature of Man and the laws of that nature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve this problem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity – to human welfare and happiness.

“The great problem has been felt as a powerful impulse through out the ages of human striving, for in all times it has been evident to thinkers that upon the right solution of the problem must forever depend the welfare of mankind. Many “solutions” have been offered; and, though they have differed widely, they agree in one respect – they have had a common fate – the fate of being false. What has been the trouble? The trouble has been, in every instance, a radical misconception of what a human being really is. The problem is to discover the natural laws of the human class of life. All the “solutions” offered in the course of history and those which are current today are of two and only two kinds – zoological and mythological. The zoological solutions are those which grow out of the false conception according to which human beings are animals; if humans are animals, the laws of human nature are the laws of animal nature. The mythological “solutions” are those which start with the conception to which humans are mixtures of natural and supernatural – unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Mythological “solutions” contain no conception of natural law; scientifically judged, they are absurdities, well meaning no doubt, but silly and deadly in their effects upon the interest of mankind.” ⁽¹⁾

Known to the Wise

Abraham, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus understood the underlying connectedness of all humanity. Their admonitions to us contain high awareness of our human interdependence. This is why they taught us not to kill, not to steal, not to molest, not to fraud, not to coerce.

They understood that the conflict of Adversity was not for humankind. They understood that the indifference of Neutrality was not for humankind. They taught us to be our brother’s keeper. As Gandhi explains:

“Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being. Without interrelation with society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism. His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and to prove himself on the touchstone of reality. If man were so placed or could so place himself as to be absolutely above all dependence on his fellow beings he would become so proud and arrogant as to be a veritable burden and nuisance to the world. Dependence on society teaches him the lesson of humanity. That a man ought to be able to satisfy most of his essential needs himself is obvious; but it is no less obvious to me that when self-sufficiency is carried to the length of isolating oneself from society it almost amounts to sin. A man cannot become self-sufficient even in respect of all the various operations from the growing of cotton to the spinning of the yarn. He has at some stage or other to take the aid of the members of his family. And if one may take help from one’s own family, why not from one’s neighbors? Or otherwise what is the significance of the great saying, “The world is my family?”” ⁽²⁾

In 1932, at the bottom of the Great Depression, the American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke:

“The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in and parts of the United States – a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.

“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor – the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.

The neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

“If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

“With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.” ⁽³⁾

Why INTERdependence?

When a task is larger than the abilities of a single individual it requires co-Operation. If you want to lift a thousand pound sofa you will need help. Two individuals working together can accomplish more than one individual working alone. One thousand individuals working together can accomplish much more than any individual working alone.

Interdependent systems are much more powerful than independent systems. Humans are the most complex form of life in known universe, and we spin a web of complex relationships to meet our needs and wants. They allow for division of labor. It is by dividing labor, and becoming specialized, that we humans are able to increase our standard of living almost without limit. If each of us had to provide all our own needs and wants, we would have to be the jack of all trades, and the master of none.

We humans joined together to gain the advantage of the division of labor. When we divide labor, each individual can become master of one trade. The individual can then produce a single product much more efficiently then he could produce hundreds of different products. We humans have created complex webs of interdependence based on our division of labor. Division of labor can be quite simple, as when the husband agrees to carry out the trash, while his wife cooks supper. Or it can be very complex, as in a large company, where the tasks are divided among hundreds of thousands of employees.

For humanity, our choice was simple. Become interdependent or retain the quality of life of the plants and animals. Our mothers and fathers, our grandmothers and grandfathers, our great grandmothers and great grandfathers – they have already made the choice for us.

We modern humans are bound together in total interdependence – this means we are totally dependent on each other. Whether we like it now or not, really doesn’t matter. Look in your pockets, we can’t go back 10,000 years now. We don’t know how to live in a true world of independence. We could not survive without the tools of our interdependence. The animals live their lives without the tools of interdependence. They live life naked with no possessions. They catch their food with tooth and claw – killing and consuming plants and animals to survive. They are dependent on plant and animal tissue for survival. We humans share the animal body and are no less dependent on animal and plant tissue for our survival. However, our intelligence and our interdependence allows us to cultivate the plant and animal tissue we need in our gardens, farms, ranches, nurseries, and hatcheries.

Fair Market INTERdependence

The “fair market” of institutional Neutrality provides humanity a limited form of interdependence. When we buy and sell in the fair market, we are depending on each other.

Humans in neutral relationship depend on others to meet their needs. Humans in neutral relationships need help from others.

However in the fair market place of neutrality, the helpers are anonymous. This anonymity is what allows us to feel independent. Our belief systems in the Western ‘free’ world rest heavily on the core belief in independence even while this belief is obviously false.

Humanity was right when we chose Neutrality to move beyond Adversity. But Neutrality is only a short term solution. Human Neutrality does not make us independent, it simply hides our interdependence in the anonymity of the fair market.

Neutral interdependence is not synergic interdependence. Our human culture is evolving, and now it is time now to move beyond Neutrality. It is time to embrace Synergy.

Once, we accept the reality of our human interdependence, then we can get on with winning. The secret of winning then is to get others to help us. Let us examine these options through the lens of synergic science.

Getting Help

Interdependence is the human condition.

All humans need help unless they wish to live at the level of animal subsistence. Interdependence means some times I depend on others and sometimes others depend on me. Once we acknowledge our interdependence and accept our dependence on others, then there are only three ways that we can get help.

We can force others help us – adversary help.

We can pay others to help us – neutral help.

Or, we can co-Operate with others and attract them to help us by making sure that they are also helped – synergic help.

Adversary Help

This is help obtained with coercion – force or fraud. Those providing the help are losing. When you force others to help you, they do the least they possibly can. Because the helper is hurt, adversary help is low quality help.

Adversary relationships are hurting and negative experiences. The helper experiences a loss. He is less after helping you than before. When you force others to help you, they do the least they possibly can.

Adversary interdependence means that sometimes I force others to help me, and sometimes others force me to help them.

Slavery, indentured service, tenant farming, and child labor are examples of adversary help. The criminal makes you help him, when he steals your property. The government makes you help it, when it forces you to pay taxes. You are being forced to help others anytime you are given an ultimatum.

Adversary relationships are hurtful. The parties in these relationships experience loss. They struggle to avoid the loss – they conflict. In an adversary relationship, one individual plus another individual are less after the relationship. In other words (1+1) < 2, and often much less than two.

When you make others help you, coercing them with force or fraud, the helper loses and will typically give you only the lowest quality help. Adversary relationships are marked by high conflict, low effectiveness and poor productivity.

Neutral Help

This is help purchased from others. This is the way most of us get help today. We hire it or we buy it in the market place. When I go to McDonalds, I pay them five dollars to feed me.

The focus in the neutral market place is on a fair price. Because the helper is ignored, neutral help is average quality help.

Macys, Sears, Mervyns, Pennys, Costco, K-Mart, Circuit City, etc., etc. – malls, stores, markets, shops, and restaurants – are all examples of neutral help. The yellow pages in the telephone book are lists of places where you can purchase help. Capitalism’s fair market is where you purchase neutral help. You buy help in the open market place at a fair market exchange price. This is the modern free world where help is sold as products and services.

In the fair market, the helper experiences a draw and will typically produce average quality help. Neutral relationships are ignoring and static experiences. The helper experiences a draw. They are the same after helping as before. When you ignore those who help you, this is why you will get only fair help.

Neutral interdependence means that we are both buyers and sellers of help – Sometimes I pay others to help me and sometimes I am paid to help others.

Neutral relationships are ignoring. The parties in these relationships experience no change. They barter to insure that the exchange is fair – to insure that the price is not too high or too low – to insure that neither party loses. The open market of free enterprise generates a zone of neutrality which markedly reduces adversary relations. Neutral systems gain a marked production advantage over adversary systems. They are significantly more productive. However, this is primarily because they are not adversary.

In a neutral relationship, one individual plus another individual are the same after the relationship. (1+1) = 2. When you pay others to help you, offering them a fair wage in an atmosphere marked by indifference, the helper draws and will typically give you only average quality help.

Neutrality is that place where I work just hard enough to avoid getting fired, and, my employer pays me just enough to keep me from quitting. Neutral relationships are marked by accidental conflict, moderate effectiveness and average productivity.

Synergic Help

This is help attracted by co-Operating with others – working together to solve our mutual problems. When other individuals understand that by helping you, they will also be helped, they will automatically help you. When others understand that when you win, they will win, they will support and celebrate your success. This is the power of the win-win relationship. Show those who can help you, how they will win by doing so. Show them how they will be helped by helping you. Because the helper is helped, synergic help is high quality help.

Synergic interdependence means that sometimes others help me and sometimes I help others.

Examples of synergic help in today’s world are less common. We nd them in many families. Also less frequently in small partnerships and business groups. Synergic relationships also exist in many start-up businesses, where the originators work together sharing in the risks and the rewards equally. But most of the developed world is locked into Neutrality.

If you wish to attract synergic help you must insure that when individuals invest their help with yours, they are also helped. Then they will automatically reinvest with you. When others understand that when you win, they win, they will support and celebrate your success.

Synergic relationships are helping, positive experiences. The helper experiences a win. They are more after helping you than before. When you help those who help you, you get the most help. When you help those who help you, you get excellent help.

Synergic relationships are helpful. The parties in the relationship experience a gain. They operate together to insure that both parties win, and that neither party loses. They negotiate to insure that both parties are helped, and that neither party is hurt.

In synergic relationships, one individual plus another individual is more after their relationship than before: (1+1) >> 2. Synergic relationships are marked by no conflict, high effectiveness and enormous productivity.

² Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India, March 21, 1929

³ Franklin Delano Roosevelt , Presidential Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

1—Life
2—Three Ways
3—The Relationship Continuum
4—Three Classes of Life
5—Human Neutrality
6—Interdependence
7—Wealth

The Science — UnCommon Science – (PDF)

Intro—Science 2001
1—Knowing 2001
2—A Limit to Knowing
3—Scientific Mistakes
4—What Do We Know

5—Order (PDF)-New

The Present — Crisis: Danger & Opportunity

The Future – A Synergic Future

Three Ways of Relating

Timothy Wilken, MD

When we examine the relationship between self and other, we discover that we can choose actions that result in our being worse off, actions that result in our being unchanged, or actions that result in our being better off. We can choose to hurt each other, we can choose to ignore each other, or we can choose to help each other.

It was as a child on the school playgrounds of rural America in the 1950’s that I first learned of these three choices first hand. My twin brother and I were seven years old when our Dad was transferred to a new job and our family moved to the small community of Palco, Kansas. We arrived there after the start of the school year, and soon found ourselves threatened by the established group of boys at our new school. For reasons unclear to me then, conflict seemed almost constant, and real knock down battles occurred all too frequently.

One of my strongest childhood memories is of fear and running. A pack of boys are chasing me and my brother. If they catch us, they will beat us up. I am very tired. We have been running for nearly thirty minutes. My heart is pounding so hard I can hear little else. Perspiration fills my eyes making it difficult to see. A hundred yards ahead my twin brother is running easier. He is taller and a great runner. The pack cannot catch him. But, they are getting closer to me. Recess is almost over now, if we can just hold out until the bell rings, we will escape back into the safety of the classroom. But our escape will be short-lived.

I remember dreading every recess – every lunch hour.

Just like in boxing, at the sound of the bell we would all come out fighting. At every recess, the war would resume.

While my brother could often run all noon hour without getting caught, I was smaller and slower with options more limited. Sooner or later the confrontation came, and with it would come the hurt: a bloody nose, a torn shirt, a pair of broken glasses, detention after school, and the risk of a whipping when you got home for fighting at school.

To my seven year old mind, conflict seemed really stupid. Both sides got hurt. I tried to give as good as I got. Hurt and be hurt. I realized in that first year at the new school that there were no real winners in conflict. Even, when you “won” somehow you lost. It didn’t make any sense to me. I resolved to learn how not to fight.

By learning how not to fight, I did not mean giving in. In submission, the threatened party does what the threatener demands so the threatener will not hurt him. A bandit may say “Your money or your life,” the victim gives the bandit his money, and the bandit goes off with it, leaving the victim with his life.⁽¹⁾ This is an ultimatum – lose a little or lose a lot, but you will lose.

As a child, I recognized submission as a clear option. Some of the boys in the pack avoided getting hurt by giving in. But this is not what I had in mind when I sought to learn how not to fight. To me submission was worse than getting a beaten. I had always run my own life and I wanted things to continue that way. At my last school I had many friends. My brother and I began our education in a one room school shared by children ages 5 though 13. There the children were more like family. Conflict was unusual and little part of our daily life. We were friends and it seemed we had always been friends.

This way of being friends seemed to me the best way to relate.

I knew I wanted to turn the enemies in my new school into real friends, like I had enjoyed at my old school. But this could not involve giving in. I began my campaign very simply. I knew I liked friendly people. So, I started by just being friendly to my enemies.

I was friendly not submissive. I still did what I wanted. If that happened to be what others wanted that was fine, and I went along. If I didn’t, I went my own way. But either way I was friendly, and I never tried to impose my way on others. The boys came to realize that while they could beat me up, they could not make me give in. And, since I vigorously resisted being beaten, my attackers could usually count on a few bruises and pains for their trouble.

My strategy of non-submissive friendliness worked to some degree. Conflict was less and my share of battles decreased dramatically. I found myself being more and more left alone.

They ignored me, preferring to focus their efforts elsewhere, but they were not my friends. I had managed to step outside the world of conflict. I was neither predator nor prey. I was in a different place. The other boys no longer sought to hurt me. They simply ignored me. We had shifted from an adversary relationship to a neutral relationship.

However, I was not where I wanted to be. Clearly, if I wanted these boys to become my friends, something more would be necessary.

I had no idea what that more might be. The search for an alternative would dominate and shape my life far beyond any other concern.

Many years later as a physician and scientist, I would encounter the work of Edward Haskell. His relationship science would help me understand the phenomena, I had first encountered on the rural playgrounds of Kansas.

Relationships can hurt, ignore, or help

Edward Haskell ⁽²⁾ discovered that when any two individuals relate the result of their interaction may be negative, neutral or positive. Returning to the use of common gaming language, when two individuals relate they can lose, draw, or win. In all relationships, individuals experience one of the following qualitative states:

1) They can lose. They are hurt by the experience. They are less after the experience than before.

2) They can draw. They are ignored by the experience. They will be the same after the experience as before.

3) They can win. They are helped by the experience. They are more after the experience than before.

From the point of view of the individual joining in relationship, I can be hurt, I can be ignored, or I can be helped by the relationship.

Relationships that hurt are adversary. Relationships that ignore are neutral. Relationships that help are synergic.

2 Edward Haskell, FULL CIRCLE: The Moral Force of Unified Science, Gordon and Breach, New York, 1972

1—Life
2—Three Ways
3—The Relationship Continuum
4—Three Classes of Life
5—Human Neutrality
6—Interdependence
7—Wealth

The Science — UnCommon Science – (PDF)

Intro—Science 2001
1—Knowing 2001
2—A Limit to Knowing
3—Scientific Mistakes
4—What Do We Know
5—Order (PDF)-New

The Present — Crisis: Danger & Opportunity

The Future – A Synergic Future

Understanding Life

Timothy Wilken, MD

Let us begin our journey towards understanding the human condition by examining life. Biology in 1999 uses a number of different terms to represent living entities. These terms include life forms, living organisms, and more recently living systems. These terms have subtle but important differences which I will discuss later in The Science section, but for now these terms may be considered as synonymous.

We humans are a form of life. This is a fact of reality paramount to understanding ourselves. And, yet this fact is so pervasive and constant that it rarely enters our consciousness. Our clear and distant superiority to all other forms of life have made it easy for us to neglect our biological basis.

As we have seen ourselves different and superior to all other forms of life, we have missed the point . While we differ from plants and animals, we share their aliveness – we are still forms of life – we are still living organisms –we are still living systems .

When we examine ourselves scientifically, we discover that humans are living systems, and it follows therefore that our powers and our problems will be those of life.

If we are to create a safe and comfortable future for ourselves and our children, we must understand our connection to life. Our life connection is not only relevant, it is the crucial factor in determining a safe passage through the current human crisis.

A fundamental way of understanding life is by examining needs and actions.

Needs and actions

All living organisms have needs and all living organisms act to meet those needs. The primary drive of all living organisms is to survive – to continue to live.

To accomplish survival, a living organism requires a zone of survivability. In science we call this zone of survivability the biosphere. The biosphere is that environmental zone wherein a living organism can meet its needs and act to survive.

Life on earth can be divided into three general classes – these are the plants, the animals, and we humans. These three classes of life each require a different biosphere to meet their needs.

Plants need sunlight, water, carbon dioxide from the air, and adequate minerals from the soil. Plants are able to grow and reproduce by utilizing sunlight in the process science calls photosynthesis. Photosynthesis allows plants to create organic tissue utilizing energy directly from sunlight.

Animals lack the plants’ power of photosynthesis. They cannot utilize sunlight to create organic tissue. They must ingest either plant or animal tissue which they then digest to release chemical energy and molecular nutrients. They further need water and oxygen from the air instead of carbon dioxide.

Humans share animal body and like the animals lack the power of photosynthesis. We too must ingest plant or animal tissue. And, we too need water and oxygen.

The biosphere for plants must therefore provide sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, and minerals. It must also be some shelter from environmental extremes. It must not be too hot or too cold.

The biosphere for the animals, and for our human bodies must provide food either plant or animal tissue, oxygen, and water .

And for the animals as well as we humans, there must be some shelter – a safe place and time for the process of life itself – to breathe, eat and drink, to eliminate bodily wastes, to rest, and restore the body’s energy from the stresses of living, and to procreate if the species is to continue.

The biosphere therefore must provide air, water, food, and shelter or neither animal nor human will survive. Biospheres are also specific to individual species. One particular biosphere might support one species of organism well, but not another.

Tensegrity

In synergic science, a system of continuous pull balanced against discontinuous push is called a tension integrity or tensegrity.

Needs are continuously pulling on all living organisms to be met. To meet its needs, the living organism must take action.

Fourteen to Sixteen times a minute, I take a breath. Many times a day, I drink water. And two or three times a day, I eat food. My actions are discontinuous. Discontinuous means I have some control over when I act to meet my needs. I can eat now or a few hours from now.

Life and living then is all about the continuing pull of our needs and the discontinuous push of the actions we take to meet those needs.

Life is organized as a tensegrity. The tensegrity is the most powerful organizing pattern in universe and I will discuss it more completely in The Science section.

The needs of plants and animals are primarily physiological. Our human body shares the physiological needs of the animal. But what differentiates human from animal is our more powerful brain and mind. This dramatic difference in intelligence is reflected in our more complex human needs.

Human needs

To survive for 24 hours, scientists have determined that the average human adult body requires 1.84 pounds of oxygen, 1.36 pounds of food solids, and 6.86 pounds of water.

For the majority of humans these basic needs seem pretty easily met. But few humans are satisfied with the basic needs as one very wise man once said, “Man does not live by bread alone.” We humans need a lot more, and most of what we need has nothing to do with our bodies. Humans require a rich psychological and social life. In a word, humans require meaning in their lives. Plants and animals can just survive, but humans require meaningful survival.

An internet search for “human needs” results in lots of returns. As we examine these needs, we begin to realize that the relationship between other and self is enormously important for humans.

One internet page even divides human needs into two categories based upon whether they are related to other or to self.

A second internet page references scientists Wackernagel and Rees writing in 1993, stated that “basic human needs are not only physical in nature … but also psychological, such as dignity and self-esteem, love and social connectedness, self-realization and to have control over one’s life”.

And finally, a third internet page references the psychologist Henry Murray as identifying twenty human psychogenic needs. Again all of these can be broken down further into categories related to other and self.

Plants, animals and others

Plant survival does not require any relationship with other. The plants unique ability to utilize sunlight directly to synthesize organic tissue frees them from the need for others. This fact makes plants the independent class of life – independent of other.

Animal survival depends entirely on finding others to eat. The herbivores depend on finding plants to eat. The carnivores depend on finding other animals to eat. The animal’s inability to utilize sunlight to synthesize organic tissue means they must eat something. Animals survive by eating either plants or animals. Animals are completely dependent on other for survival. This fact makes animals the dependent class of life – dependent on other.

We humans share the animal body, to survive we must also eat. We are omnivores. We meet our basic needs and survive by eating both plants and animals. Physiologically, we humans are also a dependent class of life. But humans need more than basic needs. Sometimes we need other and sometimes other needs us. Some scientists have used the term “the social animal” in reference to these social-psychological needs of humanity. And it is these social-psychological needs that makes humans more than dependent upon each other. This means sometimes I depend on other and sometimes other depends on me. This fact makes us humans the interdependent class of life – interdependent on each other.

Stop reading

Take a few moment to examine the contents of your pockets or purse. …

Can you find any item there, that you obtained without the help of someone else? Look around you. What do you see? Did you make the clothes you wear? Did you grow the food you eat or the tools you use. Look around your home or workplace. Can you find anything that you made. Do you know the names of those who did make all these things? Do you ever know upon whom you depend. Can you find anything in your environment that was obtained without the help of someone else?

I am not talking about ownership here. I will grant that you own your possessions. But would you have them if they had not been for sale.I would argue that nearly everything modern humans possess was obtained with the help of others.

As I examine my world I discover that I depend on others to grow and produce my food. I depend on others to design and build my home. I depend on others to generate my electricity.

I depend on others to supply my water. I depend on others to deliver my mail. I depend on others to educate my children. I depend on others to entertain my family. I depend on others to manufacture my automobile. I depend on others to refine the gasoline for my car. I depend on others to care for my family when we are sick. I depend on others to protect us from crime and war. I depend on others to …. I depend on others. I depend.

Human interdependence is made less visible by our present economic exchange system. I go to work and help my employer. He depends on me. At the end of the month he pays me for my help. I depend on him. I can then take some of the money from my paycheck to pay my house rent. While I depend on my landlord for the roof over my head, he depends on me to pay the rent promptly. Sometimes I depend on others and sometimes others depend on me. When we buy and sell in the economic marketplace we are really exchanging help. When I help others they owe me. When others help me I owe them. Money is just the present accounting mechanism we use to settle up.

This will come as a surprise to most readers, but humans are not and can not be independent.

We are an interdependent species. We rely on each other for nearly all our wants and needs.

Independence from other is not available to the richest man with the most affluent life style. He is as dependent on the staff of servants who wait on him as they are dependent on him for their shelter and sustenance.

Independence from other humans is only available to the poorest of hermits. This hermit must gather and prepare all his own vegetables and fruits. He must hunt, kill, skin, dress, and cook all his own meat. He must find or build his own shelter using only the materials he can gather and prepare by himself aided only by the tools that he can manufacture by himself from the materials that he can find. He must shelter himself from all storms and natural disasters, and protect himself from all enemies. Only by committing 99+ percent of his waking time to basic survival can he achieve true independence from other humans.

And, what is the cost of this independence from other humans? His lot will be to live a life of abject poverty devoid of any meaning. His search for independence forces him to forsake his very humanness and de-evolve into an animal. And, even then, he can not achieve true independence. For, his body is still dependent on plant and animal tissue for its survival.

We humans are not an independent life form. Despite the common desire of most of us to be independent, human independence is not possible in any scientific sense. Our bodies do not contain chlorophyll and we cannot get our energy directly from the Sun. Other plants and animals serve as our source of energy. We are just as dependent on others for our survival as are the animals.

We can ignore this fact of science by calling the other plants and animals – food and cooking their bodies in ways so that we are not reminded of the source of our sustenance, but we are still not independent. When we further examine our relationships with other humans, we discover that even here we are not independent.

In summary then, we can say that in the lives of plants – the independent class of life, other plays no role .

In the lives of animals – the dependent class of life, other serves primarily as a source of food.And finally in the lives of humans, the interdependent class of life, other is very important. Our bodies are as dependent on others for food as the animals, but socially, psychologically and economically, we depend on others and others depend on us. We humans are interdependent.

Actions

All living systems act to meet their needs. Let us now examine action more carefully. Science1999 reveals that:

“What is most basic in universe is not material particles but activity. The older concept of a universe made up of physical particles interacting according to fixed laws is no longer tenable. It is implicit in present findings that action rather than matter is basic.” (1)

Science as of 1999 has discovered action to be fundamental in both nonliving universe which includes light, particles, atoms, and simple molecules as well as within living universe which is life itself – the living molecules, the plants, the animals, and we humans.

• Action implies motion, movement, animation – process.

• Actions require energy to occur. No energy – no action.

• Actions have location in space. Actions always begin somewhere and end somewhere else. No location, no space – no action.

• Actions have duration. Actions always have a beginning and an ending. While some actions may occur in a very short time, they all require some time. There are no instantaneous actions in universe. No time – no action.

Because actions require energy, location or space, and time, synergic science sometimes uses the term energy event to describe what we commonly call action. R. Buckminster Fuller explains:

“Two different energy events cannot pass through the same point at the same time. When one energy event is passing through a given point and another impinges upon it, there is an interference.

“We find experimentally that two lines cannot go through the same point at the same time. One can cross over or be superimposed upon another. Both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries misassume that a plurality of lines can go through the same point at the same time. But we find experimentally that two or more lines cannot physically go through the same point at the same time.

“When a physicist bombards a group of atoms in a cloud chamber with a neutron, he gets an interference.

“When the neutron runs into a nuclear component: (1) it separates the latter into smaller components; (2) they bounce acutely apart (reflection); (3) they bounce obliquely (refraction); (4) they combine, mass attractively. The unique angles in which they separate or bounce off identify both known or unknown atomic-nucleus components.” (2)

Therefore actions can not and do not occur in isolation. If they impinge on the environment, they will effect or impact the environment. If they impinge on others, they will effect or impact on others. Therefore:

Actions can effect or impact environment and others in a negative and harmful way.

Actions can effect or impact environment and others in a neutral or negligible way.

Or, actions can effect or impact environment and others in a positive and beneficial way.Therefore actions that effect or impact on others can produce the following results, using the language of games:

• Other can lose. They are hurt by the action. They are less after the action than before.
• Other can draw. They are ignored by the action. They will be the same after the action as before.
• Other can win. They are helped by the action. They are more after the action than before.

From the point of view of an individual effected or impacted by action, I can be hurt, I can be ignored, or I can be helped by the action.

• Actions that hurt are adversary.
  
• Actions that ignore are neutral.
  
• Actions that help are synergic.

Because of the effect or impact that action always has on the environment or upon other, we discover that action is always accompanied by two other phenomena – the reaction, and the resultant.

The environment or other reacts at the beginning of the action. And the effect or impact on the environment or other occurs at the end of the action producing a resultant.

Action, reaction, and resultant are always found together.

In the following illustration (3), we see the man act by jumping from one boat to another. As he jumps, he pushes off causing a reaction in the boat he left. As he lands his impact effects a resultant on the boat he lands on.

The reaction occurs at the beginning of the action while the resultant occurs at the end.

By understanding that these three phenomena always and only coexist, we should not be surprised that since actions can be either adversary, neutral or synergic. So too, reactions and resultants can have the same three effects. Reactions can be adversary, neutral or synergic. And, resultants can also be adversary, neutral or synergic.

And while this is not always the case, we would expect and discover that:

• adversary action usually provokes adversary reaction ending in an adversary resultant or loss, while
  
• neutral action usually provokes neutral reaction ending in a neutral resultant or draw, and
  
• synergic action usually provokes synergic reaction ending in a synergic resultant or gain.

Action implies a need for choice. The living system must choose which action or actions to take. The living system must decide when to act and where to act. Actions bring choices.

Choice

Choice is defined in the dictionary as deciding, picking, selecting. This would seem a type of pre-action, or for living organisms mental or intellectual action. The phenomena of choice begins even before the beginning of life. An Englishman, Thomas Young in 1803, focused science’s attention on the phenomenon of choice when he designed unique double slit light experiment. Some scientists interpret his experiment as demonstrating that photons make decisions.4 A photon of light seems to be making a choice as to where it will go in universe.

When a photon is released at a particular point in universe, one second later it can be anywhere within a sphere of 186,000 miles. We cannot predict where it will be at the end of that second, for its choice is random. But we see that it moves to only one place in that sphere. If we were to define choice mathematically, we would say that choice is that condition where a system moves from a point of multifaceted potentiality to a point of single actuality.

CHOICE –def–>

Multifaceted potentiality –becoming–> single actuality.

The photon, once released at some point in universe has the multifaceted potential to be anywhere within a sphere of 186,000 miles within one second. But, it only goes to one place – it selects a single actuality.

Light is the simplest of universe’s phenomena and humans appear to be the most complex. If photons choose, then they must have a form of consciousness. But, this is not the complex form of consciousness we see in humans, consciousness at the stage of light must be the simplest of consciousnesses.

Science in 1999 reveals that universe contains no ‘things ‘. All in universe is process. All in universe is flux. All in universe is change. And change means change in energy. Change in energy is change in information. Universe is full of change and universe is made up of energy and information.

We humans know that when we are confronted by change, we respond by making choices. Every event – be it birth of a child or loss of a loved one, feast or famine, poverty or prosperity, peace or war – represents change. Every idea – be it a discovery that cures cancer or a decision to commit a crime – represents change. Every situation – be it getting a new job or losing a job, marriage or divorce, childhood or old age – represents change.

We humans adapt to these changes by making choices. This is what all living systems do from the time of conception until they perish. They make choices. They make decisions.

The human brain is estimated to be capable of 10 raised to the exponential power of 800 thoughts (10 ⁸⁰⁰ ) – multifaceted potential. The human brain will have only one thought at the time of decision – single actuality. At any moment I am capable of an enormous number of behaviors but I will choose only one – multifaceted potential becoming single actuality. With the power of action comes opportunity for choice.In summary then, life can be examined from the point of needs and actions. All living systems have needs and they meet those needs through actions. Living systems meet their needs within a zone of survivability called the biosphere. Biospheres differ for different species and different classes of life.

There are three classes of life on earth – plants, animals, and we humans. The plants are the independent class of life. They have no relationship with others. The animals are the dependent class of life. They depend on others to survive. And, we humans are physiologically dependent, but psychologically and socially interdependent. Our animal bodies require we eat the plants and animals to survive. Psychologically and socially, our relationships with other humans are interdependent. Sometimes we depend on others and sometimes others depend on us.

All needs of living systems are met with actions. All actions require energy and have duration and location. All actions effect or impact both environment and other. These effects or impacts can be adversary – negative and harmful, or they can be neutral – negligible, or they can be synergic – positive and beneficial.

All actions are always and only accompanied by reactions at the beginning of an action and a resultant at the ending of the action. Reactions and resultants are also either adversary, neutral, or synergic. Usually adversary actions provoke adversary reactions and end in adversary resultants. Usually, neutral actions provoke neutral reactions, and end in neutral resultants. And usually, synergic actions provoke synergic reactions and end in synergic resultants.

And finally, with action comes choice. Choice is deciding, picking or selecting an action to take. Choice is a pre-action. Choice is multipotentiality becoming single actuality. Choice made without knowledge is random. Choice made with knowledge is controlled.

Life makes controlled choices.

^{2 R. Buckminster Fuller, SYNERGETICS – Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Volumes I & II, New York, Macmillan Publishing Co, 1975, 1979}

^{3 R. Buckminster Fuller, ibid}

^{4 Gary Zukav, Dancing Wu Li Masters, William Morrow & Co., 1979}