CONVERSATIONS

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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 real-life theme.

We could talk about anything

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

The difference is made by the overarching principle that defines our initiative – where education, democracy, religion, health and everything else are seen as inter-related pieces in a larger system or hierarchy of systems. 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. Where the reconfiguration of those systems, to suit humanity's new condition, is seen as humanity's next evolutionary step. And where the new information technology is conceived of as our society's new 'nervous system', which enables and also demands that our systems, and people, should communicate and collaborate in an entirely new way.

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.

What is the nature of our condition? Where are we coming from? Where are we headed?

Do we really need to change course?

We've chosen to put to test knowledge federation, and to set the stage for our dialogs, by shedding some light on these questions.

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 the resulting insights 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 organizing 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 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 keyword we use, the dialog.

Bohm considered the dialogue to be necessary for resolving our contemporary challenges. Here is 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, which begin in physical space and continue online.

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

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

Already our resistance to this emergence, our blind spots, our reluctance to make a step – are downright 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 shows how 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.

PSwithFredrik.jpeg

Fredrik Eive Refsli, the leader of our communication design team, jubilates the completion of The Paradigm Strategy poster.

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 threads – each joining three vignettes 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?

An invitation to bootstrap

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 will 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 will be possible to post comments, and in that way be part of the online dialog, through which the presented ideas, and the poster itself, will be developed further.


Wiener's paradox

No communication – no control

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

Its focus is on the steering system of "spaceship Earth" (as Fuller called our metaphorical bus) – an issue of some interest, if we should consider "changing course".

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

The following excerpt is from Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics, "control and communication in the animal and the machine".

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: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each aiming to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in (...) the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor, and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory.

Translate "homeostatic process" as "steering", and you got the point.

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

The other half has to do with the fact that control depends on communication. The second half of Wiener's point is that our communication is broken. How else could we believe in that "simple-minded theory" (Wiener argues), considering what von Neumann and Morgenstern found by studying game theory (which they co-founded)? (Von Neumann and Morgenstern too were giants; among Von Neumann's seminal achievements is the design of the digital computer architecture that is still in use.)

Wiener makes his point by summarizing their insights, and explaining how they are confirmed by everyday experience.

Evolution is the key

We've talked about how Erich Jantsch continued this thread in Federation through Stories. We'll here only highlight two points, which are two stages in the development of Jantsch's own ideas: (1) "The task is nothing less than to build a new society and new institutions for it. With technology having become the most powerful change agent in our society, decisive battles will be won or lost by the measure of how seriously we take the challenge of restructuring the “joint systems” of society and technology." (2) The most powerful interventions into a system are the ones that affect how the system evolves. The key is to understand how the way we ourselves are present in the system (our values, principles and actions) influences the system's evolution.

The invisible hand wins the dispute

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 the invisible hand agenda.

In our present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,
Reagan claimed. Which of course meant that "the individual selfishness" combined with the free competition is not only the only steering that spaceship Earth needs – but also the only one we can trust.

Theres's no need for censorship

How did Reagan reach this conclusion? In what way did he win this battle of opinions?

Notice that Reagan had no technical expertise to argue with giants. His expertise was as a media artist; he was trained literally as a role player.

But Reagan didn't really need to argue with giants. He could just simply – ignore them! Reagan, and the American public, ignored not only the giants, but also thousands of articles of other researchers in cybernetics and in game theory, who followed in the footsteps of giants.

We are back to Galilei in house arrest.

Four centuries later, there is no need for Inquisition trials; or for house arrest. There is no need even for censorship! In the society where powerful 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.

And what direction the "spaceship Earth" will take!

Take a look this video snippet where Reagan says, in a seductive 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

to get an idea how also the effects of The Club of Rome's "The Limits to Growth" study could have been annihilated.

And how our political discourse became as it is.

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 and policy. And to the systemic causes of this phnenomenon.

To see what the Wiener's paradox means in practice, imagine us academic researchers speaking to the political leaders and the public through a telephone line. But the line has been cut! And there is anyhow nobody on the other end listening.

Like good Christians, we turn the other cheek. We just publish more. And as we do, the insights of giants become dimmer. We ourselves may no longer remember them.

Wiener did not formulate the paradox. He just created it (he created an instance of it) – by first pointing out that the communication line was broken; and then committing to it his own insights.

The academic community to whose inception he contributed followed him.

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

warned David Bohm.

How pervasive is this paradox?

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

Or are we only re-instantiating the paradox?

Reflection

It's time to connect dots

What are the scientists to do next?

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.

Vannevar Bush was an early computing machinery pioneer, who before the World War II became the MIT professor and dean, and who during the war served as the leader of the entire US scientific effort – supervising about 6000 chosen scientists, and making sure that we are a step ahead in technology and weaponry, and the bomb.

In 1945 this scientific strategist par excellence wrote a scientific strategy article, titled As We May Think, from which the above excerpt is taken. The war having been won, Bush warned, there still remains a strategically central issue, which the scientists need to focus on and resolve – our organization and sharing of knowledge. Bush's argument was for collective sense making. He urged the scientists to develop suitable technology and processes that would enable us to think together, as a single mind thinks. (Our threads are inspired by Bush's technical idea called "trails".)

Norbert Wiener heard him. He cited Bush in 1948 Cybernetics, as part of his argument that our communication is broken. And of his warning that we were about to lose control. Wiener was making a case for cybernetics as the discipline that would inform the repair work.

Doug Engelbart also heard him. He read Bush's article in 1947, in a Red Cross library erected on four pillars, while stationed as an army recruit in the Philippines. He too carried Bush's project further, by providing the required technology. Doug foresaw (already in 1951!) that the enabling technology would not be the microfilm as Bush thought (microfilm too needs to be sent and broadcasted), but digital computers equipped with interactive interfaces and linked into a network. He physically created this "super new nervous system" for us, and showed it in his 1968 demo (see Federation through Stories).

Systemic Innovation

What should be the next step in this process?

You'll notice that the first design pattern on the right-hand side of the poster is systemic innovation.

If we should give the systemic insights the impact they need to have, and if we should use the information technology as it was meant to be used – we must now learn how to weave them together and apply them in real-life system design; or evolution.


Understanding evolution

Illuminating the way

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

What can Darwin's theory tell us about social evolution? How well has the "survival of the fittest" served us so far?

What do we really know about this theme?

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

What we may learn from Darwin

From the studies of evolution we'll adopt an 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. The idea is to understand evolution as favoring the fittest gene – or meme or 'cultural gene', when the social and not the natural world is our interest. Whether we may want it or not, evolution by the survival of the fittest will blindly make the fittest memes proliferate.

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 a (still unorthodox, he qualified) conclusion that our language is not a means of communication but of worldview sharing. (Here's an improvised 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 tweeting or out of sight. But that's not how 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 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, Harari explains, and guess who's more likely to survive? But if you put ten thousand gorillas on a football stadium, you'll get complete chaos! It is our shared story that organizes or gamifies our behavior!

Harari pointed to money as a prime example of such a story. Give a gorilla a banana – he'll gladly take it. Ask him to trade it for a dollar – he'll most surely refuse. The reason why a printed piece of paper has more value to us humans is that we jointly believe it does.

What price we've paid

How has the 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?

In the third vignette of this thread, David Graeber, the anthropologist, will point to an answer. The story is adapted from Graeber's book "Debt; the first 5000 years". We here use it as a parable.

Imagine that you are living 23 centuries ago, that you are an exceptionally gifted young king, and that you've received the best education available in your time. Your ambition is no less than 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.

So 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 no time everyone will get busy taking care of your soldiers, and supply workers won't even be needed!

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 could satisfy his ambition! How could anyone secure such massive amounts of precious metals?

Alexander had, it turned out, two options at his disposal. And he used them both.

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

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

Your business model is now complete. You might object that it's a kind of a Ponzi scheme; but as you know from history, for awhile it was quite "successful".

Our theme here, however, is the cultural and human consequences of this way of evolving. Who is, really, the winner in this evolutionary 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 became the most powerful institution on the planet. Most of us are working for corporations, directly or indirectly. The corporations organize us into super-organisms, which turn our daily work into real-world impact. Who are we really working for? What sort of character does this 'person' have? Bakan goes through a checklist and shows that the corporation exhibits all the characteristics that define the psychopath.

Connect Bakan's insight with the following Zygmunt Bauman's observation:

Modernity did not make people more cruel; it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people. Under the sign of modernity, evil does not need any more evil people. Rational people, men and women well riveted into the impersonal, adiaphorized network of modern organization, will do perfectly.

If you may not have the time to watch the whole film, have a look at these two minutes. Bakan shows the footage of a shark, while the commentator explains that a corporation is "a perfect externalizing machine" in the same way in which a shark is "a perfect killing machine". (The corporation maximizes its profit by externalizing its costs of operation – by passing them onto the public and the environment.)

Do you see where our chosen evolutionary stream is carrying us?

Do you think we'll become "sustainable" by letting it carry us ever further?

We must change course

This way of evolving was arguably the only one possible, while our tribes were competing for survival with harsh nature and one other.

Now that our global tribe is about to destroy its life-support system, this way of evolving has become simply impossible!

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.

Knowledge Federation

Bela Banathy wrote:

[E]ven if people fully develop their potential, they cannot give direction to their lives, they cannot forge their destiny, they cannot take charge of their future—unless they also develop the competence to take part directly and authentically in the design of the systems in which they live and work, and reclaim their right to do so. This is what true empowerment is about.

The first prototype on the right-hand side is the Knowledge Federation transdiscipline.

When after our first year of self-organization toward the transdiscipline we came to the Silicon Valley to break the news (at the workshop we organized within the Triple Helix IX international conference at Stanford University, in July 2011), we began by telling a springboard story called Knowledge work has a flat tire. Our point was that knowledge work has a structural defect; and that this structural defect must be taken care of before we can reasonably continue to speed ahead (by producing, and broadcasting more).

We then introduced Knowledge Federation as (a prototype of) a new kind of institution, roughly similar to a tailor workshop, where alterations to professions or institutions or systems can be made to better suit the people who work in them, and our society.

To be continued...

Furthermore what we are talking about is really the heart of the matter. What hinders us from recreating our systems? What hinders us from hearing our giants? Answers will be provided by weaving our remaining two threads.

A warmup thread

The bottom-left thread will give us a quick and easy start.

The thread begins with the excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche's Will to Power, which was quoted near the bottom of the Intuitive Introduction to Systemic Thinking. (This is a good moment to re-read that excerpt. Hear Nietzsche say that already in his day, we the people were already overwhelmed with impressions; that already then we were losing our ability to truly comprehend, and to truly act.) Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University biologist, environmentalist and "pessimist") telling how when in the 1950 when he was doing field research with the Inuits, he realized that each member of the community was closely familiar with all the community's tools. It ends with Anthony Giddens (Britain's leading sociologist and public intellectual) describing "ontological security":

The threat of personal meaninglessness is ordinarily held at bay because routinised activities, in combination with basic trust, sustain ontological security. Potentially disturbing existential questions are defused by the controlled nature of day-to-day activities within internally referential systems.

Mastery, in other words, substitutes for morality; to be able to control one's life circumstances, colonise the future with some degree of success and live within the parameters of internally referential systems can, in many circumstances, allow the social and natural framework of things to seem a secure grounding for life activities.

It is very easy to see how the distinct vignettes that form this thread enhance one another and lead to a larger insight.

We heard Nietzsche tell us that we are so overwhelmed by impressions, that we defend ourselves from taking anything deeply in, from digesting ideas. We then heard Ehrlich tell us that within the time span of a single generation, our tools – and on a larger scale our reality – have become impenetrably complex (just think of your smartphone – does anyone still possess the kind of knowledge that would suffice to put such a thing together?). The shared excerpt from Giddens' "Modernity and Self-Identity" then shows how we adapt to this situation – by "substituting mastery for morality".

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Symbolic power

We pick up the second thread with which the homo ludens pattern is woven at the middle, and then work our way to both ends.

[S]ymbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.

Let's consider this to be Pierre Bourdieu's gift to the world in a nutshell. In what follows we'll unpack this gift and see why symbolic power is a key piece in the big-picture puzzle of our condition we are now putting together.

As the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, Bourdieu was at the very peak of his profession, in effect representing the science of sociology to the French people. In the latter part of his career he would abandon his purist-academic reluctance to become a public intellectual, and become indeed an activist against the "invisible hand" ideology.

Our story begins, however, much earlier, in 1955, when Bourdieu was an army recruit in Algeria, where a war was about to begin. Our goal is to share an insight that made him a sociologist. Like Doug Engelbart and quite a few other giants, Bourdieu did not enter his field by studying it, but by first having an insight; by observing something that would make a large impact on that field, and potentially also on our understanding of ourselves.

During the Algerian war Bourdieu had no difficulty noticing how the official narrative (that France was in Algeria to bring progress and culture) collapsed under the weight of torture and all manner of human rights abuses. So he wrote a small booklet describing this in an accessible language, in the Que sais-je series.

Back home in France this booklet contributed to politicization of French intelligentsia during the 1950s and 60s. But in Algeria it had another effect. A contact would bring Bourdieu to an "informant" (who might be a man who'd been tortured) and say "You can trust this man completely!" What a wonderful way for a gifted young man to look into the inner workings of the society, at the point of buoyant change!

Having became politically independent, Algeria entered a new stage – of modernization.

With sympathy and profound insight, Bourdieu was 'a fly on the wall' in a Kabyle village house, deciphering the harmony between the physical objects and the relationships among its people. And how this harmony collapsed when the Kabyle young man was compelled, by new economic realities, to look for employment in the city! Not only his sense of honor, but even his very manner of walking and talking were suddenly out of place – even to the young women from his own background, who saw something different in the movies and in restaurants.

It was in this way that Bourdieu came to realize that the old relationships of economic and cultural domination did not at all vanish – they only changed their way of manifesting themselves!

Bourdieu was reminded of his own experiences, when after childhood in alpine Denguin in Southern France he joined the Parisian elite, by studying in the prestigious École normale (not by birthright, but because of his exceptional talents).

Theory of practice

Bourdieu called his theory "theory of practice" – a fitting name for a theory explaining our social practice, and practical reality.

His keywords "symbolic power", "habitus", "field" and "doxa" will suffice to summarize his insights.

We'll interpret them here somewhat freely (as it suits our overall main goal, to materialise the elephant) with the help of the following brief reflection.

If you would break into your neighbor's house, slaughter the family and rob their property, you would surely be considered a dangerous criminal and treated accordingly. If you wold make a speech on the main square inviting your fellow citizens to do the same to the people in a neighboring country, on a massive scale, you would surely be considered a dangerous madman, and incarcerated accordingly.

Unless, of course, this sort of behavior is part of your "job description", because you are your country's monarch or president. In that case you might even be remembered in history as a great leader – as Alexander the Great might illustrate

Whence this inconsistency?

Odin the horse

But before we revisit Bourdieu's concepts, let us sketch the other two vignettes that complete the thread.

Odin the Horse is a short real-life story about the territorial behavior of Icelandic horses. This excerpt will be sufficient for our purpose.

When Odin the Horse – an ageing leader of the herd – runs parallel with New Horse pushing him into the river, and away from his mares, he is protecting just the physical spot on the turf and the specific social role that he considers his own.

Imagine – in the manner of sharing a certain way of looking at things – our culture as a turf. Then the first thing you'll notice about this turf is that it's considerably more complex than the turf of the horses – just as much as our society and culture are more complex than theirs. There are the kings, and there are his pages; and there's the nobility. Furthermore you might be in king's favor, or in disfavor. You'll feel the difference by the way the king addresses you, as soon as you him. And even if you won't know consciously, something in you will know. You see everyone bow as the king enters, and you automatically do the same. How could it be otherwise?

Descartes' Error

Antonio Damasio completes this thread by helping us understand why symbolic power is so powerful, even when – and especially when – nobody's aware of its existence.

Damasio, a leading cognitive neuroscientist, explained in a most rigorous, scientific way a key element of our social psychology that you may not even have noticed – namely why we don't wake up wondering whether we should take off your pajamas and run naked in the street. Damasio showed that the content of our conscious mind is controlled by an embodied cognitive filter, which presents to it for deliberation only those possibilities that are "acceptable" – from the embodied filter's point of view, of course.

You might already be guessing how this all might fit together?

Socialization explained

We may now understand Bourdieu's keyword "field" as a symbolic turf, or metaphorically as a game with rules and distinct avatars, each having a set of capabilities. You may understand "habitus" as a distinct position on the symbolic turf, or as everyone's set of capabilities. Odin the horse has one. And so does Alexander the Great, and everyone else.

You don't bow to Alexander – off goes your head. Each habitus has a socialised collection of ways to negotiate its relative power with the owners of each other habitus.

And finally, doxa. The more familiar word "orthodoxy" signifies that there is one "right" social order, and one "right" story, the "right" way of conceiving of the world. Doxa is a further step in the same direction, where only one option is allowed to exist. Doxa is what we've been socialized to call "reality".

If I could convince more slaves that they are slaves, I could have freed thousands more.

We let Harriet Tubman's observation serve as an epigram pointing to the quintessential practical consequence of doxa; and of the the kind of power ("symbolic power") it has over us. Symbolic power is what makes us accomplices in our own disempowerment!

How can we ever be free?

(The Liberation book will be our attempt to give an answer to this enduring question.)


Reflection

Consequences

We offer the following four consequences of what's just been shared for reflection – and conversation.

Why we cannot see systems

An often used parallel – between our socialization and the Indian tradition of training an elephant to stay put when tied by a rope to a branch – can be used to explain why we ordinarily cannot even conceive of systemic innovation. The point is that we've evolved in such a way that our systems are not admissible to our conscious deliberation; they are a result of our socialization. Our obedience to systems is pre-conscious – just as is wearing clothes and saying "hello".

This explains a paradox that permeates this proposal – that larger-than-life benefits that become accessible when we allow ourselves this new degree of freedom of thought and action are habitually ignored.

The obstacles to our proposal are cultural and social. Overcoming them is an evolutionary step – which needs to be understood and handled accordingly.

Redefining politics

The second consequence of the homo ludens pattern is that it changes the conventional political game ceases, from "us against them" to all of us against the obsolete socio-cultural structures (for which our technical keyword is power structure).

We'll say more about this below, when discussing the religion for the third millennium – so let it only be said here that while it may appear that the kings are the winners in a social game, and their pages are the losers, this view radically changes as soon as we are able to see the game from the outside. Everyone is socialised into a certain role, or habitus. And systemic innovation can make everyone much better off. Odin the horse doesn't really need all those mares. He's an ageing horse, the farmer had good reasons for bringing New Horse to the farm. But Odin doesn't think in this way. In fact he doesn't think at all. He only feels that someone is violating his turf, he feels threatened, and just he wants to push him into the river.

Redefining reality

The third consequence is that the idea of reality – which in the traditional cultures occupied the most honoured position as the foundation on which our creation of truth and meaning is based – now becomes the heart of our problem. The reality, or more precisely Bourdieu's doxa, is perceived as what organizes the game, as the very structure of the symbolic turf – which keeps us disempowered without noticing.

Why giants are ignored

Have you been wondering why the giants tend to be ignored? In spite of the gigantic usefulness of their ideas? And their intrinsic beauty and value?

The problem with giants is that they're too large. If we would let them in, they'd occupy way too much space on the symbolic turf...


Religion as liberation

Buddhadasa's discovery

After just a couple of years of monastic life in Bangkok, barely in his 20s, Nguam Phanit (today known as Buddhadasa, "the slave of the Buddha", and celebrated as a reformer of Buddhism) thought "This just cannot be it!" So he made himself a home in an abandoned forest monastery near his home village Chaya, and equipped with a handful of original Pali scriptures undertook to live and practice and experiment as the Buddha did.

It was in this way that Buddhadasa found out that the essence of the Buddha's teaching was not at all as it was taught.

Buddhadasa further understood that what he was witnessing was a simple phenomenon or a "natural law", the rediscovery of which marked the inception of all religions; that all religions had a tendency to ignore this essence; and that his insight could be transformative to the modern world.

Liberation prototype

Buddhadasa’s insight is being fully federated within the book manuscript titled “Liberation” and subtitled “Religion for the third millennium”. This will be the first book in the Knowledge Federation trilogy, by which the ideas sketched here will be made accessible to general public.

Here we only highlight several points, which will help us weave together and complete some streams of thought that are central to our initiative.

Cessation of suffering

According to legend, Prince Siddartha, who later became the Buddha, left wealth and security to withdrew into the forest and find the cause of suffering. “Suffering”, however, is a rough translation of the Buddhist keyword “dukkha”, which denotes a specific kind of suffering.

This explanation will serve us well enough: dukkha is, simply, what drives Odin the horse to engage in turf behavior. Applied to humans, dukkha is that part of the human nature whose characteristic emotions are anxiety and worry; and which urges us to control and dominate.

Dukkha is so much part of our everyday life that we tend to take it for granted.

The isight into how much dukkha colors our daily experience and our relationships is life changing. Even more so is the insight into the exquisite way of being that the liberation from dukkha entails. The Buddhists talk about sukkha; other traditions talk about bliss or charity or unconditional love.

What is most interesting for us, in the context of knowledge federation and guided evolution of society, is the possibility of substituting our present naive or misguided pursuit of happiness with (what one might call) evidence-based or informed pursuit of happiness – which can take us incomparably further than our present one.

Way to cessation of suffering

The Buddha called it dhamma. Buddhadasa interprets this completely central keyword as pointing both to a certain natural law, and to living and practicing in accordance with this natural law. It’s like watering the plant – you engage in a certain discipline, and something grows. Asking “why” is beside the point. It’s enough to know that Odin the horse can be tamed; its whims don’t need to dominate our emotions, and our behavior.

The essence of this practice, of the ‘watering’, is to remain free from any sort of clinging – both to what is desirable and to what is not. The key is “mindfulness at the point of contact” – at the point when something we might be inclined to cling to presents itself to our senses or to our awareness, the mind is present and alert and says “no”. A natural way to train Odin is by serving causes that are larger than oneself.

Two points are most interesting from the point of view of “a great cultural renewal”, the possibility of which we have undertaken to illustrate:

  • The Buddhist practice is not just different – it is opposite from the ecology in which our modern culture emerges us. Meditation combined with “mindfulness” removes from us the overload of impressions; it allows us to become more sensitive (recall Nietzschje).
  • You may see how Peccei’s wish may realistically come true: dhamma is the natural law that links our capability to experience happiness with our work on improving our “human quality”!

Seeing the world as it is

Buddhadasa doesn’t use the word “enlightenment”. Rather, he describes the accomplished or elevated state of veing as “seeing the world as it is”.

Our discussion of the homo ludens pattern offers a ready explanation: The liberation Buddhadasa is talking about is not only the liberation from dukkha; it is also the liberation from our socialisation, and our socialised ways of looking at the world.

So interesting that those two things – our suffering and our socialization – might be closely related!

There are two ways to God

Buddhadasa describes the Buddha as a reformer and a rebel. The rebirth he was talking about is not the physical rebirth of the HIndus, but the rebirth of our ego-centeredness, which can happen one hundred times a day.

He describes how just a few centuries after the Buddha the belief system of Hinduism took over, and replaced the original teaching of the Buddha, the real way out of suffering, here and now.

This invites the following conjecture: That there are two approaches to religion, corresponding to what we’ve been calling the homo sapiens and the homo ludens evolutionary streams. That religions tend to begin when an especially gifted person, a true giant of religion, discovers the dhamma (or whatever this may be called in his or her language) and practices and becomes transformed. Other people see this result, and gather round him to see if they can reach it themselves.

But as the movement grows, and its forefathers are gone and forgotten, the “socialization” sets in and the institution suffers exactly the kind of transformation that we’ve described above on the examples of social and military organisation, and the corporation. Religion ceases to be an instrument of our liberation, and becomes an instrument of our socialization.

Federating religion

In most people’s minds the word “religion” is associated with a strongly held (clinged onto) set of beliefs.

When we compare those beliefs together, surely they appear to us as irreconcilable.

When, however, we consider religions to be world traditions within which most valuable experience has been developed – about inherent human possibilities, about the ‘seeds’ we carry inside and how to ‘water’ them – the religious scene becomes entirely something else.

You will now have no difficulty seeing how polyscopy and knowledge federation engender an approach to knowledge that can help us do the latter – just as our traditional approaches to knowledge focused on the worldviews of religions, and ignored their true gifts.

The point is simply this: When we focus on what's valuable and common in experience, and treat the worldviews as "syntactic sugar", then we can easily show that

  • a radically better realm of human experience (call it nirvana or nibbana or enlightenment or...) is accessible through a certain praxis
  • there's a strong agreement among the world traditions about the nature of this praxis

We are now back to where we started. Recall Heisenberg's observation about the "narrow frame" or narrow way of looking at the world that the 19th century science gave our ancestors, which was damaging to culture and in particular to religion.


Stepping through the mirror

Back to polyscopy

The last on the list of prototypes on the right-hand side of The Paradigm Strategy poster is the Polyscopy prototype. We've talked about polyscopy quite a bit in Federation through Imges, where we've seen it as the approach to truth and meaning on the other side of the metaphorical mirror. We reached the mirror from a fundamental interest, by exploring what the giants have found about "language, thought and reality", as Whorf's put framed it. Here we are once again standing in front of the mirror, but now with a handful of most practical or cultural interests – by exploring what the giants have said about success, happiness, love, values, religion...

On this side of the mirror the winner takes it all. And the winner – that's the traditionally the king. Or perhaps today – the millionaire. So everyone today wants to be a millionaire, just as in olden days everyone dreamed of being a king.

Can you imagine a radical change of values – similar in magnitude to the change from the values from the Middle Ages to the ones of modernity?

Can you see how Peccei's dream may now come true – about a "great cultural revival", where "human development is the most important goal"?

Religion on the other side of the mirror

All we need to do to get there, once again, is to see ourselves in the mirror. We then instantly realize that how we define winners and losers is all just part of our socialization, it's all part of the game we've learned and accepted as reality. We also realize how much what we experience as desirable and pleasant can be just simply our perception, a result of that collection of illusions (recall Einstein). We become ready to listen to the experience of others – and correct our ideas and our experience.

The Buddha (as the tradition portrays him) may well be seen as showing us the way (through the mirror) – didn't he leave the wealth and power of his royal existence, to pursue a whole other way from suffering to happiness? Christ may then be seen as pointing to the ultimate sacrifice – of one's "interests" or "happiness" or "ego" – for the sake of a larger good.

Emperor Alexander meets the Buddha

What would have happened if a great historical king, such as Alexander the Great, met an enlightened follower of the pursuit of happiness on the other side of the mirror?

The event – Alexander visiting Diogenes (who was sunbathing in front of the barrel he was living in) – is familiar. And so is this detail, quoted here from an ancient text.

So the king came up to [Diogenes] as he sat there and greeted him, whereat the other looked up at him with a terrible glare like that of a lion and ordered him to step aside a little, for Diogenes happened to be warming himself in the sun. Now Alexander was at once delighted with the man’s boldness and composure in not being awestruck in his presence. For it is somehow natural for the courageous to love the courageous, while cowards eye them with misgiving and hate them as enemies, but welcome the base and

like them.

This wasn't, of course, their entire conversation. Diogenes did not miss this opportunity to make his main point, that virtue and wisdom, rather than inherited social status, is what distinguishes true royalty:

... [Diogenes] went on to tell the king that he did not even possess the badge of

royalty. . ."And what badge is that?" said Alexander. "It is the badge of the bees, "he replied, "that the king wears. Have you not heard that there is a king among the bees, made so by nature, who does not hold office by virtue of what you people who trace your descent from Heracles call inheritance? " "What is this badge ?" inquired Alexander. "Have you not heard farmers say, "asked the other, "that this is the only bee that has no sting since he requires no weapon against anyone? For no other bee will challenge his right to be king or fight him when he has this badge. I have an idea, however, that you not only go about fully armed but even sleep that way. Do you not know," he continued, "that is a sign of fear in a man for him to carry arms? And no man who is afraid would ever have a chance to become king any more than a slave would."

Rebuilding the tower of Babel

According to an old myth, a very long time ago the humanity was well on the way to reach this other realm of cultural possibilities that the founders of religions and adepts of spiritual practice have been pointing to. But they got divided by their different ways of speaking and looking at the world, and the project failed.

We are now in a position to do it again.

Babel2.jpeg
A detail from the Earth Sharing installation (in 2018 in Bergen), where our dialog series began.

You'll find a brief report about this prototype in Federation through Applications. Further details will be provided also here.


Academic self-renewal

What the giants had to say

What are the scientists to do next?

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.

Vannevar Bush was an early computing machinery pioneer, who before the World War II became the MIT professor and dean, and who during the war served as the leader of the entire US scientific effort – supervising about 6000 chosen scientists, and making sure that we are a step ahead in terms of technology and weaponry, including the bomb.

In 1945 this scientific strategist par excellence wrote a scientific strategy article, titled As We May Think, from which the above excerpt is taken. The war having been won, Bush warned, there still remains a strategically central issue, which the scientists need to focus on and resolve – our organization and sharing of knowledge. Bush's argument is for collective sense making. He observed that we must be able to in effect think together as a single mind does – which explains his title.

Doug Engelbart heard him (he read Bush's article in 1947, in a Red Cross library erected on four pillars, while stationed as an army recruit in the Philippines) – and carried the project significantly further. Doug foresaw (already in 1951!) that the enabling technology would not be the microfilm (as Bush thought – microfilm too needs to be sent and broadcasted) but digital computers equipped with an interactive interface and linked together into a network. And he created the technology that was still missing (see Federation through Stories).

Norbert Wiener also heard him. Wiener cited Bush in the already mentioned last chapter of his 1948 Cybernetics (see Federation through Stories). Wiener took this initiative further by developing cybernetics – which is a different and complementary direction than Doug. The message we need to receive from cybernetics is that we the people act through systems. And that it is the structure of those systems that determines whether our action will be effective – or self-destructive. And that proper communication in a system is necessary if the system should have control over its effects on its environment – and on itself just as well.

A case for academic self-renewal

[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing the society’s capacity for continuous self-renewal.

Erich Jantsch, who gave us this most timely advice a half-century ago, understood that it is the evolution of our systems that is the key to changing our condition. That the only system that can be capable of bootstrapping this evolution is the academic system. And that to be able to do that, the academic system itself needs to self-organize as it might suit this new role.

The academic system is indeed already in charge of our society's evolution, or autopoiesis or self-renewal. Through research, this system creates the new knowledge that drives the evolution of other systems. And through education, it recreates the world with every new generation of students. The only question is whether we in the academia are also doing this job.

As we have seen, neither Doug Engelbart nor Erich Jantsch found a fertile ground for their ideas at a university. Also the core message of cybernetics, or the systems sciences, is yet to be heard.

Vannevar Bush's most opportune strategic initiative is still waiting to be taken up.

So why don't we at the very least have an honest academic conversation about this all-important theme?

What we would like to offer to this most conversation, what we'd like to put on the round table around which we are going to sit, is an academically solid case for academic self-renewal.

A careful reading of the material we've presented here will reveal three distinct arguments and three reasons for this course of action – focusing on technology, epistemology and ecology.

Here's a brief summary.

The technology argument

The printing press – which served as technological underpinning to Enlightenment – only automated the social process that was already in place, authoring and broadcasting of documents. The new media technology is, however, qualitatively different; it is properly speaking a collective nervous system.

To see why the new technology enables us to make a quantum leap in our collective intelligence – only if we self-organize in an entirely new way (if we learn to function as cells in a nervous system do), imagine what would become of your own intelligence if your cells would be using your nervous system to only broadcast data to your brain and to each other. You may be thinking your thoughts and walking toward a wall. Suddenly, you find yourself standing a meter from a wall, with full awareness of this fact. This would not have happened if your eyes were trying to signal this fact to your brain by writing academic articles in some specialized domain of academic interest!

And as we have seen – the new technology was conceived to enable the collective mind re-evolution, a half-century ago, by Doug Engelbart and his team.

Knowledge federation is by definition what a collective mind should be doing. Our technical prototypes we developed – in education, public informing, scientific communication and other core areas – show how different our systems now need to be; and what an enormous difference this can make.

The epistemology argument

There is a reason why the traditional university is not so interested in technology. Our most valued academic preoccupation is "basic research" – whose goal is to "discover" the mechanisms and processes by which the nature operates.

The epistemology argument is that the reasons for the traditional academic values – and mechanisms and processes – are historical. At the time when they developed, the esteemed goal of a philosopher was to distinguish truth from illusion, to find our how the things "really are" in reality. The solutions to this time honored challenge that the pioneers of science conceived were so vastly advantageous, that they quite naturally became the society's – and the university's – esteemed standard.

We have seen (in Federation through Stories) that this approach was, however, too narrow for supporting core elements of human culture. An erosion in culture took place. And then the naked narrowness of this approach to social construction of truth and meaning emerged as a hard fact in modern physics, and in other sciences and in philosophy as well.

We have seen in Federation through Images that modern science finds the whole "correspondence with reality" approach to truth and meaning unsound for two reasons: (1) it cannot be verified and (2) correspondence with reality tends to be a result of illusion. We have then seen how a foundation for social creation of truth and meaning can be developed which is triply sound and solid:

  • Because it is a written convention (and truth by convention cannot be disputed)
  • Because its fundamental conventions are the state-of-the-art epistemological insights, written as conventions
  • Because it is a prototype – and hence equipped with a mechanism for self-renewal, when new insights require that</p>

    We have seen how on this foundation a new paradigm for knowledge work can be developed, which gives us the people exactly the kind of knowledge we need.

    We have seen that in this new paradigm the work on the design of knowledge work principles, values, tools, mechanisms and processes rightly claims the status that the "basic research" now has.

    The ecology argument

    We use this word, "ecology", to point to the fact that the power of human systems has grown so much that we can now impact, even irreversibly, the bio-physical and natural systems, and ultimately endanger the very systems that have so successfully supported the emergence and proliferation of life on our planet

    We also use this word to point to the human-systemic ecology we've created, which now drives our technological, societal and cultural evolution.

    We have seen in this module that the ecology we've been relying on – uninformed self-interest, mediated by "the survival of the fittest" – has from the beginning of civilization, and into the modern times, favored the most aggressive societal structures (such as the Macedonian Phalanx, and the modern corporation). It is those erosive power structures that now coerce us to not only destroy our environment, but to even remain oblivious of that very fact.

    We have seen that the guided evolution of society has been pointed to as the natural remedy; and as the next large stage of our evolution. We have seen that the guided evolution of society crucially depends on an "evolutionary guidance system" or in a word, on suitable knowledge.

    Homo ludens academicus

    This brings us to the key issue of this conversation – the academic ecology.

    are our present academic value system, and the system of academic remuneration and promotion, still suitable for supporting this re-evolutionary new role of the university – whose urgency and importance is so rapidly growing? Will the university be able to give our society the knowledge it needs? Will it enable its self-renewal?

    We can answer this question in two very different ways. We can be "objective observers" of our system and its evolution. Or we can take a proactive stance toward this evolution.

    If we now tell you that the present-day academic ecology (the so-called "publish or perish", which so flagrantly favors routinized hyper-production in traditional academic fields) does not give us the ecology we need, that it favors a certain cultural sub-species at the detriment of others, we will not be saying anything that you don't already know. We propose to call this presently "fittest" cultural sub-species the homo ludens academicus.

    You will also have no difficulty seeing why the homo ludens academicus is an evolutionary miscarriage. And why his cultural subspecies should not even exist. Isn't it the very purpose of the academic system to keep us the homo sapiens track?

    Reviving the academic spirit

    Galilei, and Giordano Bruno and Copernicus, are of course exemplary figures. But if we should go back to the original academic spirit, we must go further back in time than that – all the way to Plato; and to Socrates, his teacher.

    It was Plato, as you'll easily recall, that created the Academy from which the modern academic tradition evolved. And it was his teacher, Socrates, to whom Plato gave the credit for creating the very spirit on which the Academy was founded.

    And Socrates was, by today's standards, a strange kind of academic indeed. HIs publication record, as you might recall, was all but impressive . His work was to engage people in – dialogs!

    His goal was to help his fellow citizens see that what they saw as reality was largely an illusion, which gave them illusion of power.

    Socrates was sentenced to death for impiety, and for corrupting the Athenian youth. But his spirit lived on. And it led to Plato's academy, but to its rebirth in the Renaissance, and ultimately to the modern-day university.

    Can we once again revive some of that original spirit, in this age?

    Occupy your university

    "The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future", wrote Aurelio Peccei.

    Not long ago, when it became obvious how intolerably wasteful and unjust our global monetary system was, people found themselves called to occupy Wall Street. Certainly we must leave our spectator position, we must learn to react and act. The question is – What strategy may be most promising? Where – in what system – can the re-evolutionary change of our society most naturally begin?

    When we begin to look into this question, we realize at once why the Wall Street may not be the answer. Those bankers wouldn't really know how to change their system – even if they wanted to! They too are just doing what they are paid for – making the rich richer. Isn't the growing income inequality an eloquent sign that they are doing their job expertly? And hasn't the banking elite acquired their expertise at our elite universities?

    Judging from what's just been told, occupying your local university would appears to be a more promising choice.

    And if you already are at a university – then there's nothing left to occupy!

    All that remains is doing what we are paid for – being creative. And yes, perhaps also being creative in new ways, when the circumstances require that.


The next step

It's important to start right

As Lao Tzu already observed, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It is all-important, however, to take that one step in a good direction.

It might surprise you now to hear that we see consider this first step to be an inward or ethical one, rather than a surge of action. And yet from what's been told you might have discerned that an embodied ethical stance will have to be the very root from which the contemporary cultural revival can grow.

As long as we remain competitive role players in a competitive world, our hands are soiled and we are bound to soil everything we touch.

If you've realized this, than you can also understand how we intend to handle this situation. We want to above all keep our intentions clear. And we want to leave a clean space for you to step in.

This is a very delicate path for us to walk. We'll surely make many mistakes. But we see no other way to go; and there's no turning back.

Being "nice" and accommodating each other's whims and foibles, and by extension the existing power structure, is obviously not a good direction. But neither is starting a turf strife – which can only create more of the dynamic that got us into trouble.

We will not change the world

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has", wrote Margaret Mead. (We mention in passing that as the first woman leader of the systems community, Margaret Mead championed the strategy that this community should apply systemic thinking to its own system!) You will find evidence of our thoughtfulness and commitment on these pages.

And yet it is clear to us, and it should be clear to you too, that we cannot change the world. The world is not only us – it is all of us together!

So if the world will change, that will be a result of your doing; of your thoughtfulness and commitment!

We've all been socialized to think and act within our systems. Deviating from this feels unnatural; it hurts – and yet that is the re-evolutionary next step that those of us who are able simply have to take!

All the rest will be just fun; just creative play!

Knowledge federation is not our project

See if you can see knowledge federation as your project, not ours.

From this point on we'll be implementing our back seat policy – holding onto an advisory role, and offering help to people and groups worldwide who'll want to take this initiative further. We'll do that because it is that very act, of taking initiative, and only to a lesser degree its results, that brings the new paradigm into being.

Collaboration is to the emerging paradigm as competition is to the old one. In Norway (this website is hosted at the University of Oslo) there is a word – dugnad – for the kind of collaboration that brings together the people in a neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon, to gather fallen leaves and branches and do small repairs in the commons, and then share a meal together.

It is the dugnad spirit that now needs to replace competitive career game play.

If there is any leadership you may expect from us, its extent is the creation this creative space and this invitation. If there is anything we expect from you, it is to be completely free to take the lead. We've passed you the ball, and it's now in your hands.

Surprise us with a creative move of your own. And if you'll want us to play along, invite us to a dugnad!

If our commitments allow and your idea feels resonant, rest assured that we won't be able to refuse.