The paradigm strategy

Putting our proposal to test

So far we have given a fairly complete overview of an emerging approach to knowledge. What remains is to test it by applying it to a theme.

We could talk about anything

What theme do you find most interesting? Education? Or democracy? Or what to do about large contemporary issues? We can focus on any theme you choose. And still our conversation will be different from any one you've had.

What makes the difference is the overarching principle that defines our initiative – where education, democracy, religion, health and everything else is seen as inter-related pieces in a larger system or hierarchy of systems. And where those systems are perceived as gigantic mechanism, which determine how we live and work, and what the effects of our lives and work are going to be.

Let us focus on the key point

There is, however, a single theme, which – in this systemic approach to knowledge, and to institutions and issues – must be given priority.

Neil Postman gave us this hint:

The problem now is not to get information to people, but how to get some meaning of what's happening.(...) Even the great story of inductive science has lost a good deal of its meaning, because it does not address several questions that all great narratives must address: Where we come from; what's going to happen to us; where we are going, that is; and what we're supposed to do when we are here. Science couldn't answer that; and technology doesn't.

And Aurelio Peccei gave us this other one:

It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course.

And if our situation demands that we change course – in what way can that realistically be achieved?

Large change made easy

Donella Meadows talked about systemic leverage points as those places within a complex system "where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything". She identified "the mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise" as the most impactful kind of systemic leverage point. She identified specifically working with the "power to transcend paradigms" – i.e. with the assumptions and ways of being out of which paradigms emerge – as the most impactful way to intervene into systems.

We are about to propose – as an overarching theme for our various conversations – to approach our contemporary condition in this most powerful way.

These conversations are dialogs

Designing the social life of ideas

Notice this subtlety: A novelty in this approach to knowledge is that it cannot and doesn't want to tell how the things "really are in reality". Its purpose is to allow for free creation of a multiplicity of ways of looking at any single theme – and to let them act upon each other.

Communication in this new approach to knowledge is not and cannot be one-way.

By designing and evolving these conversations, we will be developing a new form of social life, where people and ideas interact and improve one another.

We are not just talking

Don't be deceived by this word, "conversations". These conversations are where the real action begins.

By developing these dialogs, we want to develop a way to bring the themes that matter into the focus of the public eye. We want to bring the insights of giants to bear upon our understanding and handling of those themes. And we want to engage us all to collaborate on combining those insights with everyone else's, and evolving them further.

The purpose of these conversations is to create a public discourse that works; which makes us collectively creative, knowledgeable and intelligent. We want to evolve in practice, with the help of new media and real-life, artistic situation design, a public sphere in which the themes, the events and the sensations are the stepping stones in our advancement toward a new cultural and social order.

The medium we'll develop will truly be our message!

Changing the world by changing the way we communicate

There is a way of listening and speaking that fits our purpose quite snugly. Physicist David Bohm called it the dialogue. We build further on his ideas and on ideas of others, we weave them together into another keywords we use, the dialog.

Bohm considered the dialogue to be necessary for resolving our challenges. Here's how he described it.

I give a meaning to the word 'dialogue' that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. 'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together.

Contrast this with the word 'discussion', which has the same root as 'percussion' an 'concussion'. It really means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others- but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

Real reality shows

Two people could be talking over a coffee table. If they turn on a smartphone and record, their conversation can already become part of the global one.

What we, however, primarily have in mind are public dialogs that begins in physical space and continue online.

We have a hunch that such dialogs could become true sensations!

What could be more real, and more downright engaging, than watching a new Renaissance emerge? Hearing its pulse, feeling its birth pains...

Already seeing our resistance to this emergence, our blind spots, our reluctance to make a step – could be sensational!

The Paradigm Strategy poster

A roadmap for guided evolution of society

We have developed the Paradigm Strategy poster as an evolving roadmap to the key point. As we suggested above, the key point is an overarching and collectively created and shared insight or gestalt, which clarifies the nature of a situation, and points to good ways to handle it. The key point of this poster, and of our conversations, is envisioned as a wormhole into a new social and cultural reality. The poster turns our conversations into a practical way to change course.

We recommend that you look at the poster as we speak.

You may imagine the left-hand side of the poster, which has the yellow background, as a roadmap for a collective ascent to a mountain top, from which the key point – which is in the middle of the poster – can be clearly seen. Four ways to reach the top are offered. You will recognize that they are thread – each joining three vignette together.

The right-hand side of the poster, which has white background, shows how to follow the direction the key point is pointing to.

The poster as it is now is a starting point for our dialogs. The dialogs will be federated (with the help of suitable technology such as the Debategraph), the map will be updated as necessary, and the overall result will be used as a starting point for the next dialog, which will develop it further.

The key point offered is in essence what we've presented on the front page, with the help of the bus with candle headlights or the Modernity ideogram. The idea is to challenge the paradigm, the way of functioning and evolving culturally and socially, where unwavering faith in "free competition" and "the invisible hand" has precluded the use of knowledge. Can we once again empower knowledge to guide us? Can knowledge once again make a difference?

Bootstrapping social-systemic change

The poster is conceived as an invitation to begin to bootstrap – and in that way join the emerging paradigm as an aware and active participant.

The poster is interactive; the QR codes open up files with further information (they are hyperlinks, so that also the digital version of the poster is interactive). The "bootstrapping" thread leads to the QR code and file with an interactive online version of the poster – where it's possible to post comments, and in that way be part of the online dialog, through which the presented ideas, and the poster itself, are developed further.

The core insights of giants (and also some other insights, as we shall see) are represented by icons, rendered as vignettes, and combined into threads. By weaving the threads into patterns, and patterns into a gestalt, the central "key point" is reached.

We use vignettes to render abstract and high-level ideas accessible. In this brief summary, we cannot possibly tell each of the 12 vignettes that are presented on the poster! And yet if we only describe them abstractly, we risk to lose the zest and the reality touch.

So what we'll do is a compromise: We'll sketch a couple of vignette in some detail; and we'll give only a gesture drawing of all the rest.

Wiener's paradox

No communication – no control

Let's begin with the first thread, in the upper left corner.

The focus here is on the steering system of "spaceship Earth" (as Fuller called our metaphorical bus). An issue of some interest if we indeed are living in a "runaway world" (as Giddens diagnosed); if we indeed must find a way to change course (as Peccei claimed).

The first giant in this thread is Norbert Wiener. Wiener studied mathematics, zoology and philosophy, and finally got his doctorate from Harvard in mathematical logic – when he was only 17! He went on to do seminal work in several fields, one of which was cybernetics.

The following excerpt is from Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics (cybernetics is the scientific study of steering).

There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process (...). Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory.

Interpret "homeostatic process" as "steering", and you got Wiener's point.

Or one half of Wiener's point, to be exact.

The other half has to do with the fact that control requires suitable communication – which is the core theme of cybernetics. Our communication is broken – is the second half of Wiener's point. For how else could we believe in this "simple-minded theory" (Wiener argues), considering what von Neumann and Morgenstern found by studying game theory (which they founded)? (Von Neumann and Morgenstern too are giants; among Von Neumann's seminal achievements is the design of the digital computer architecture that is still in use.)

Wiener then summarizes their insights, and explains how they are confirmed by everyday experience.

The invisible hand wins the dispute

We've talked about how Erich Jantsch continued this thread in Federation through Stories. So let us fast-forward to Ronald Reagan and to this thread's conclusion.

In 1980, the year when Erich Jantsch passed away, Reagan won the U.S. presidential elections, by running on an "invisible hand"-based agenda.

In our present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,

Theres's no need for censorship

How did Reagan win this battle of opinions?

We are back to the image of Galilei in house arrest. Today, four centuries later, there is no need for house arrest. Even censorship is no longer needed! In a society where powerful communication media are used to only broadcast messages, it's the campaign dollars and the "air time" they buy that decide what the people will believe in.

And what direction the "spaceship Earth" will take.

See this video snippet where Reagan says in a most charming tone

We believe then, and now, there are no limits to growth, and human progress, when men and women are free to follow their dreams

Wiener's paradox pattern

Already this single thread is sufficient to see the Wiener's paradox. We use this pattern to point to situations where academic research has no effect on public opinion.

Wiener did not formulate the paradox. He created it (created an instance of it) – by first claiming that the communication is broken; and then committing his own insights to that communication.

You'll have no difficulty noticing that Reagan had no qualifications to argue with giants – and also no need to do that. He simply ignored them! Just as he ignored thousands of articles of other researchers in cybernetics and in game theory.

As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved

How pervasive is this paradox?

When we do research to understand a problem – are we in a real sense contributing to its solution?

Or are we only re-instantiating the paradox?

How to dissolve the paradox

The answer is obvious – and it is spelled out on the poster. If the system is broken, and the system is us – then the only thing left for us to do is to bootstrap a new system, to create it with our own bodies!

We can already see why being "an objective observer" is "a crack in the cup" from the angle of looking we have taken (where we look at knowledge work as a system within a system, and estimate its value according to the impact it has on the larger system). We can see why it's essential to bring ideas to systemic impact – through systemic innovation, or bootstrapping.

Understanding evolution

Illuminating the way

But what if Reagan was right? Perhaps "the invisible hand" is our best guide?

What have we learned about our society from Darwin's theory? How well has the "survival of the fittest" served us so far?

What do we really know about this theme?

These questions are answered by the second thread on the poster.

What we've learned from Darwin

All we'll need from the theory of evolution is the core insight that Richard Dawkins explained in "The Selfish Gene" (which led to the development of "memetics" as a research field applying the theory of evolution to society and culture). According to Dawkins, Darwin's theory should not be interpreted as a way to perfection of any kind. To understand evolution, we must perceive it as favoring only the fittest gene – or meme or 'cultural gene', when the social and not the natural world is our interest.

What made us fittest

Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist, begins the second thread. When asked what in his opinion was a high-social-impact insight that the research in linguistics was about to produce, Chomsky pointed to an (still unorthodox, he qualified) conclusion that our language is not a means of communication but of worldview sharing. (We improvise this explanation: A bird may see a hawk and go "tweet, tweet, tweet" and other birds will go "tweet, tweet, tweet" and soon enough all of them will be either be tweeting about the danger or gone. But that's not how our human communication works!)

This may seem like an evolutionary error. But Yuval Noah Harari is there to explain why it's not – why this singularly human ability, to to create a story and make it a shared reality, made us the dominant species on earth. (Put a gorilla and a human being on a deserted island – guess who'll be more likely to survive. But if you put ten thousand gorillas on a football stadium – what you'll get is complete chaos! It's the shared story that literally gamifies our behaviour!)

Harari pointed to money as a prime example of a story that organizes our society. (Give a gorilla a banana – and he'll gladly take it. Ask him to trade it for a dollar – and he'll surely refuse. A human will, of course, be inclined to do the opposite. The reason why the value of a printed piece of paper exceeds the value of a banana is that we jointly believe it does.)

Fitness revisited

How has money, as our shared story par excellence, been directing our societal and cultural evolution? What sort of social organization, what kind of behavior did it favor?

David Graeber, as an anthropologist, will point to an answer.

The story we are about to share is adapted from Graeber's book "Debt; the first 5000 years". We'll simplify it and use it as a parable.

Imagine that you are living 23 centuries ago. You are an exceptionally gifted young king, who has received the best education available in your time. Your ambition is to rule the world.

You know that with an army of 100 000 men you have a good chance to succeed. But there's a logistical challenge: To feed and clothe an army of that size, you'll need an army of 100 000 supply workers.

You think of a solution: You'll print coins and give them to your soldiers as salary; and you'll request of everyone else to pay you those coins as taxes. In this way you won't even need any supply workers; your people will get busy taking care of your army!

Your business model, as we might call it today, is now almost complete; but you've still got one problem to solve.

Alexander the Great – the historical king we've asked you to impersonate – needed half a tone of silver a day to maintain an army that would satisfy his ambition! How could anyone secure such massive amounts of precious metals?

Alexander had, it turned out, two ways to do that. And he used them both.

One way was to raid foreign countries, turn free people into slaves, and have them mine silver and gold.

The other way was to raid foreign monasteries and palaces, and turn sacred and artistic objects of silver and gold into coins.

The business model is now complete. You might object that it's a kind of a Ponzi scheme; but for awhile it worked quite well.

Our theme here, however, is the cultural and human implications of this this way of evolving a society. Who is, really, the winner in this game?

We let you draw your own conclusions.

Reflection

The corporation

As the University of British Columbia law professor, Joel Bakan had an insight that, he felt, just had to be federated. It took him seven years. The result was not only a popular book, but also an award-winning documentary. Both are called The Corporation. You may watch the film by clicking here].

Bakan showed how through a legal-political evolutionary process, the corporation acquired the legal status of a person, and become the most powerful 'person' on the planet. What sort of character does this person have? Bakan's examination showed that it has all the characteristics of a psychopath.

Recall Erich Jantsch's insights about the preponderance of evolution (we shared them in Federation through Stories). Shall we become sustainable by swimming against the evolutionary stream? Or by intervening into its course?

We wrote the following in the abstract by which the paradigm strategy was announced:

The motivation is to allow for the kind of difference that is suggested by the comparison of people carrying buckets of water from their own flooded basements, with everyone teaming up and building a dam to regulate the flow of the river that is causing the flooding.