The Radical New Reality of Systems Science
Our Next
World View
New Worldview
Cultural Reality 'after Complex Systems Science'
The Necessary Shift to a Network Centered Worldview
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Both Nature and human society are created by the agency of purposefully self-organizing system networks
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We cannot understand these systems in terms of predictably predetermined, thus potentially controllable events
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Despite how we intend our systems to function, they will assert themselves in ways we do not expect
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Human behaviors are often driven by the purposeful agency of system networks that are not human
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The self-asserting networks of social and economic systems tend to control us more than we control them
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To understand how these networks manipulate us and direct events we require a new network-based worldview
Confronting Our Ignorance of how Networks Make the World
Learning to 'See Through the Visible World' to Perceive the Hidden Networks that Make It
To make this profound change in our behavior requires a new way of 'seeing' the world around us--and even our selves and societies. Systems science shows how perceiving the world as separate things and events that occur in mechanistic, linear sequences blinds us to most of what is actually happening. We must learn to 'see through' this obvious 'surface of appearances to perceive the networks of feedback-driven relationships which drive system behaviors. We must regard human as well as natural systems as purposefully adaptive networks that 'act as if they are alive' and interact in ways we are fundamentally ignorant about.
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Humans Create Systems that Create Unintended, often Disastrous Human Behaviors
Many complex adaptive system networks are composed of individual agents, from ant colonies to human societies. The collective interactions of these agents gives rise to the purposeful agency of the entire network. These have been termed "super organisms" because they behave like creatures -- even though they have not brain. But with human systems, their networks have vastly greater collective intelligence and power -- most importantly technological power. From institutions to governments and corporations, these super organism social networks are not human. They are incapable of empathic feeling or genuine ethical motivation. Thus their self-asserting impetus can work against the very values that humans create them to promote, such as equity, justice, and freedom. Their self-organizing, self-promoting 'drive' can manipulate the humans that compose them into assuming that their systems are synonymous with the purposes for which these were created. Thus, it is to be expected that human systems cannot be fully controlled and inevitably generate unexpected, even disastrous behaviors. From a mythological perspective, such systems are prone to becoming 'monstrous' -- to seek power and influence by exploiting other systems without regard to any consequences. To be realistic about human systems is to "live by the law of unintended consequences" and remain constantly suspicious of our own system's behaviors.
Reciprocally Un-Constrained Human Systems are Crippling the Self-Organizing Agency of Natural Ones
Modern industrialized civilization tends to create control-oriented, technologically leveraged systems that operate to exploit natural systems. These systems have evaded the mutually beneficial constraints of that ecological systems impose upon each other. The systems of industrial economies are not compelled by natural systems to 'give as much as they take' -- at least not in the short term. Consequently, our behaviors disrupt the capacity of the biosphere's component system networks that sustain their operations through their interdependent, mutually beneficial self-regulation. In other words, human systems do not act reciprocally with natural ones. Our system networks can 'ignore' feedback from natural ones about how their networks are being disrupted. The results include deforestation, desertification, soil infertility, habit destruction, species extinction, pollution, generating ecological collapse and chaotic climate system disruption. Our inherently psychopathic "super organism" human systems compete for advantage without regard for the effects upon the biospheric diversity and interdependency upon which we ourselves depend. 'They' can't do otherwise. Only we, potentially empathic, human individuals can resist their biocidal behaviors.
Inhabiting a World of Autonomously Self-Organizing Systems Beyond Our Control
In light of network science, we can no longer assume that our control-oriented behavior serves our own best interests. It has proved to be a disaster for the natural systems upon which we depend. The independent agency of natural systems cannot be controlled. And when we manipulate them in ways that disrupt their capacity to self-organize, they will eventually collapse, as is now happening. Thus we must now learn how to configure our systems so that these operate reciprocally with the networks of the biosphere, facilitating rather than exploiting these--from local forest ecologies to large scale ones such as the oceans and the global climate. We must impose mutually beneficial constraints upon the systems that emerge from our collective individual interactions.
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Imposing mutually beneficial constraints on our systems is what we have attempted to do politically for ourselves, with the creation of democratic institutions. But we behave in competitive ways that obstruct our own communal values of equality and liberty. That competitive bias and its hierarchical social network consequences act 'in service' to the inherently pathological self-assertion of our super organism governments, corporations, and economies. To effectively constrain these 'monsters' we must minimize their heirarchical structures and diminish their concentrated power over us. That means restructuring our system networks in a more horizontally interconnected manner with more localized nodes of operation which serve the reciprocal integration of human behaviors with local ecologies.
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WE DONT NEED MORE INFO. WE NEED A NEW WORLDVIEW
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