Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it?

Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.

Modernity ideogram

Our proposal

The core of our knowledge federation proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.

What is our relationship with information presently like?

Here is how Neil Postman described it:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

Neil Postman

What would information and our handling of information be like, if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them to the purposes that need to be served?

By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would information be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype of knowledge federation, where initial answers to relevant questions are proposed, and in part implemented in practice.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and a real-life praxis (informed practice).

Our purpose is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

All elements in our proposal are deliberately left unfinished, rendered as a collection of prototypes. Think of them as composing a 'cardboard model of a city', and a 'construction site'. By sharing them we are not making a case for a specific 'city'—but for 'architecture' as an academic field, and a real-life praxis.

A proof of concept application

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting the proposed ideas to a test.

Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—Aurelio Peccei issued the following call to action:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Peccei also specified what needed to be done to "change course":

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

Aurelio Peccei

This conclusion, that we are in a state of crisis that has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".

In "Human Quality", Peccei explained his call to action:

"Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world."

The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".

Is it really true that we must "change course"? While this question may seem compelling, our focus will be on a related practical task:

The purpose of the Holotopia project is to restore our ability to "change course".

The fact that we must be able to "change course", when the circumstances demand that, can hardly be disputed. The fact that now, forty years later, The Club of Rome's call to action is still ignored and not even disputed—shows that there is some urgent work that needs to be done.

A vision

We begin by providing a guiding vision.

Holotopia is a vision of a possible future that emerges when proper 'light' has been 'turned on'.

Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. In view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.

As the optimism regarding our future waned, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.

The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It is a more attractive vision of the future than what the common utopias offered—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. And yet the holotopia is readily attainable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights, as explained below.

A principle

What do we need to do to "change course" toward holotopia?

The five insights point to a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things whole.

This principle is suggested by the holotopia's very name. And also by the Modernity ideogram. Instead of reifying our institutions and professions, and merely acting in them competitively to improve "our own" situation or condition, we consider ourselves and what we do as functional elements in a larger system of systems; and we self-organize, and act, as it may best suit the wholeness of it all.

Imagine if academic and other knowledge-workers collaborated to serve and develop planetary wholeness – what magnitude of benefits would result!

A method

"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole."

To be able to make things whole—we must be able to see things whole!

To highlight that the knowledge federation methodology described and implemented in the proposed prototype affords that very capability, to see things whole, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by the pseudonym holoscope.

While the characteristics of the holoscope—the design choices or design patterns, how they follow from published insights and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation, one of them must be made clear from the start.

Holoscope ideogram

To see things whole, we must look at all sides.

The holoscope distinguishes itself by allowing for multiple ways of looking at a theme or issue, which are called scopes. The scopes and the resulting views have similar meaning and role as projections do in technical drawing. The views that show the entire whole from a certain angle are called aspects.

This modernization of our handling of information—distinguished by purposeful, free and informed creation of the ways in which we look at a theme or issue—has become necessary in our situation, suggests the bus with candle headlights. But it also presents a challenge to the reader—to bear in mind that the resulting views are not "reality pictures", contending for that status with one other and with our conventional ones.

In the holoscope, the legitimacy and the peaceful coexistence of multiple ways to look at a theme is axiomatic.

To liberate our worldview from the inherited concepts and methods and allow for deliberate choice of scopes, we used the scientific method as venture point—and modified it by taking recourse to insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy.

Science gave us new ways to look at the world: The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that are too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. But science had the tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant—compared to all those large things or issues nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as a way to look at the world that helps us see any chosen thing or theme as a whole—from all sides; and in proportion.

A way of looking or scope—which reveals a structural problem, and helps us reach a correct assessment of an object of study or situation—is a new kind of result that is made possible by (the general-purpose science that is modeled by) the holoscope.

We will continue to use the conventional way of speaking and say that something is as stated, that X is Y—although it would be more accurate to say that X can or needs to be perceived (also) as Y. The views we offer are accompanied by an invitation to genuinely try to look at the theme at hand in a certain specific way (to use the offered scopes); and to do that collaboratively, in a dialog.

Scope

What is wrong with our present "course"? In what ways does it need to be changed? What benefits will result?

Five Insights ideogram

We apply the holoscope and illuminate five pivotal themes, which determine the "course":

• Innovation—the way we use our ability to create, and induce change
• Communication—the social process, enabled by technology, by which information is handled
• Epistemology—the fundamental assumptions we use to create truth and meaning; or "the relationship we have with information"
• Method—the way in which truth and meaning are constructed in everyday life, or "the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it"
• Values—the way we "pursue happiness", which in the modern society directly determines the course

In each case, we see a structural defect, which led to perceived problems. We demonstrate practical ways, partly implemented as prototypes, in which those structural defects can be remedied. We see that their removal naturally leads to improvements that are well beyond the elimination of problems.

The holotopia vision results.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here only summarize the five insights—and provide evidence and details separately.

Power structure

Scope

What might constitute "a way to change course"?

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. Imagine if some malevolent entity, perhaps an insane dictator, took control over that power!

The power structure insight is that no dictator is needed.

While the nature of the power structure will become clear as we go along, imagine it, to begin with, as our institutions; or more accurately, as the systems in which we live and work (which we simply call systems).

Notice that systems have an immense power—over us, because we have to adapt to them to be able to live and work; and over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in certain specific ways, they decide what the effects of our work will be.

The power structure determines whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions.

Diagnosis

How suitable are the systems in which we live and work for their all-important role?

Evidence shows that the power structure wastes a lion's share of our resources. And that it either causes problems, or make us incapable of solving them.

The root cause of this malady is in the way systems evolve.

Survival of the fittest favors the systems that are predatory, not those that are useful.

This excerpt from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as a law professor created to federate an insight he considered essential) explains how the most powerful institution on our planet evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, notably the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect predator. This scene from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how the power structure affects our own condition.

The systems provide an ecology, which in the long run shapes our values and "human quality". They have the power to socialize us in ways that suit their needs. "The business of business is business"; if our business is to succeed in competition, we must act in ways that lead to that effect. Whether we bend and comply, or get replaced—will from the point of view of the system make no difference.

A consequence, Zygmunt Bauman diagnosed, is that bad intentions are no longer needed for bad things to happen. Through socialization, the power structure can co-opt our duty and commitment, and even heroism and honor.

Bauman's insight that even the holocaust was a consequence and a special case, however extreme, of the power structure, calls for careful contemplation: Even the concentration camp employees, Bauman argued, were only "doing their job"—in a system whose character and purpose was beyond their field of vision, and power to change.

While our focus is on the power structures of the past, we are committing—in all innocence, by acting only through the power structures we are part of—the greatest massive crime in human history.

Our children may not have a livable planet to live on.

Not because someone broke the rules—but because we follow them.

Remedy

The fact that we will not solve our problems unless we develop the capability to update our systems has not remained unnoticed.

The very first step that the The Club of Rome's founders did after its inception, in 1968, was to convene a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, to develop a suitable methodology. They gave making things whole on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adapted that as one of our keywords.

The work and the conclusions of this team were based on results in the systems sciences. In the year 2000, in "Guided Evolution of society", systems scientist Béla H. Bánáthy surveyed relevant research, and concluded in a true holotopian tone:

We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These two are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.

In 2010 Knowledge Federation began to self-organize to enable progress on this frontier.

The method we use is simple: We create a prototype of a system, and a transdisciplinary community and project around it to update it continuously. The insights in participating disciplines can in this way have real or systemic effects.

Our very first prototype of this kind, the Barcelona Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism in 2011, was of a public informing that identifies systemic causes and proposes corresponding solutions (by involving academic and other experts) of perceived problems (reported by people directly, through citizen journalism).

A year later we created The Game-Changing Game as a generic way to change systems—and hence as a "practical way to craft the future"; and based on it The Club of Zagreb, as an update to The Club of Rome.

Each of about forty prototypes in our portfolio illustrates systemic innovation in a specific domain. Each of them is composed in terms of design patterns—problem-solution pairs, ready to be adapted for other applications and domains.

The Collaborology prototype, in education, will highlight some of the advantages of this approach.

An education that prepares us only for traditional professions, once in a lifetime, is an obvious obstacle to systemic change. Collaborology implements an education that is in every sense flexible (self-guided, life-long...), and in an emerging area of interest (collaborative knowledge work, as enabled by new technology). By being collaboratively created itself (Collaborology is created and taught by a network of international experts, and offered to learners world-wide), the economies of scale result that dramatically reduce effort. This in addition provides a sustainable business model for developing and disseminating up-to-date knowledge in any domain of interest. By conceiving the course as a design project, where everyone collaborates on co-creating the learning resources, the students get a chance to exercise their "human quality". This in addition gives the students an essential role in the resulting 'knowledge-work ecosystem' (as 'bacteria', extracting 'nutrients') .

Collective mind

Scope

We have just seen that our key evolutionary task is to make institutions whole.

Where—with what institution or system—shall we begin?

The handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons.

One of them is obvious: If information and not competition will be our guide, then our information will need to be different.

In his 1948 seminal "Cybernetics", Norbert Wiener pointed to another reason: In social systems, communication—which turns a collection of independent individual into a coherently functioning entity— is in effect the system. It is the communication system that determines how the system as a whole will behave. Wiener made that point by talking about the colonies of ants and bees. Cybernetics has shown—as its main point, and title theme—that "the tie between information and action" has an all-important role, which determines (Wiener used the technical keyword "homeostasis", but let us here use this more contemporary one) the system's sustainability. The full title of Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To be able to correct their behavior and maintain inner and outer balance, to be able to "change course" when the circumstances demand that, to be able to continue living and adapting and evolving—a system must have suitable communication-and-control.

Diagnosis

Presently, our core systems, and with our civilization as a whole, do not have that.

The tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed.

Our society's communication-and-control is broken; it needs to be restored.

To make that point, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush diagnosed that the tie between scientific information, and public awareness and policy, had been broken. Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising their communication their next highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.

These calls to action remained without effect.

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. Wiener too entrusted his insight to the communication whose tie with action had been severed. We have assembled a collection of examples of similarly important academic results that shared a similar fate—to illustrate a general phenomenon we called the Wiener's paradox.

As long as the link between communication and action is broken—the academic results that challenge the present "course" or point to a new one will tend to be ignored!

To an academic researcher, it may feel disheartening to see that so many best ideas of our best minds have been ignored. What's the point of all the hard work and publishing—when even the most basic insights from our field have not yet been communicated to the public? The insights that are needed for understanding the very purpose of our field—and hence the meaning and relevance of of all the nuances that we are presently working on?

This sentiment is, however, transformed to holotopian optimism, as soon we see 'the other side of the coin'—the vast creative frontier that is opening up. We are empowered to, we are indeed obliged to reinvent the systems in which we live and work, and our own, academic system to begin with—by reconfiguring the communication that holds each of them together; and enables them to interoperate.

And optimism will turn into enthusiasm, when we consider also this widely ignored fact:

The core elements of the information technology we now use to communicate were created to enable the developments and breakthroughs on that very frontier.

The 'lightbulb' has already been created—and for the purpose of giving our society the vision it needs.

But we are still holding on to our 'candles'!

Vannevar Bush pointed to the need for this new frontier already in his title, "As We May Think". His point was that "thinking" means making associations or "connecting the dots". And that given our vast volumes of information—technology and processes must be devised to enable us to "connect the dots" or think together, as a single mind does. He described a prototype system called "memex", based on microfilm as technology.

Douglas Engelbart took Bush's idea in a whole new direction—by observing (in 1951!) that when each of us humans are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network—then the overall result is that we are connected together as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system.

All earlier innovations in this area—from the clay tablets to the printing press—required that a physical medium with the message be physically transported.

This new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently, as cells in the human organism do.

We can develop insights and solutions together.

We can become "collectively intelligent".

Engelbart conceived this new technology as a key step toward enabling us (or more precisely our systems) to tackle the "complexity times urgency" of our problems, which he saw as growing at an accelerated rate.

But this, Engelbart observed, requires "new thinking": It requires that we use the technology to make our systems whole.

This three minute video clip, which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", will give us a chance to pause and reflect, and see what all this practically means. Think about the prospects of improving our institutional and civilizational collective minds. Imagine "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then he put his fingers on his forehead and looked up: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The improvement that is both necessary and possible is not just stupendously large; it is qualitative—from communication that doesn't work, and systems that don't work, to ones that do.

To Engelbart's dismay, our new "collective nervous system" ended up being used to do no better than make the old processes and systems more efficient. The ones that evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press. The ones that broadcast data, and overwhelm us with information.

This observation by Anthony Giddens points to the effects that our dazzled and confused collective mind had on our culture; and on "human quality".

Our sense of meaning having been drowned in an overload of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehension—we have no other recourse but "ontological security". We find a sense of meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.

But that is exactly what binds us to power structure!

Remedy

How can we repair the severed tie between communication and action?

How can we change our collective mind—as our situation demands, and our technology enables?

Engelbart left us a simple and clear answer: Bootstrapping.

His point was that only writing about what needs to be done would not have the intended effect (the tie between information and action being broken). Bootstrapping means that we consider ourselves as parts in our systems; and that we self-organize, and act as it may best serve to restore them to wholeness.

Bootstrapping means that we either create new systems with the material of our own minds and bodies, or help others do that.

The Knowledge Federation transdiscipline was conceived by an act of bootstrapping, to enable bootstrapping.

What we are calling knowledge federation is an umbrella term for a variety of activities and social processes that together comprise a well-functioning collective mind. Their development and dissemination obviously requires a new body of knowledge, and a new institution.

The critical task is, however, to bootstrap—i.e. to self-organize so as to enable the state of the art knowledge and technology to be woven directly into systems.

Paddy Coulter, Mei Lin Fung and David Price speaking at our "An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism" workshop in Barcelona

We use the above triplet of photos ideographically, to highlight that we are doing that.

In 2008, when Knowledge Federation had its inaugural meeting, two closely related initiatives were formed: Program for the Future (a Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Doug Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Global Sensemaking (an international community of researchers and developers, working on technology and processes for collective sense making). The featured participants of our 2011 workshop in Barcelona, where our public informing prototype was created, are Paddy Coulter (the Director of Oxford Global Media and Fellow of Green College Oxford, formerly the Director of Oxford University's Reuter Program in Journalism) Mei Lin Fung (the founder of Program for the Future) and David Price (who co-founded both the Global Sensemaking R & D community, and Debategraph—which is now the leading global platform for collective thinking).

Other prototypes contributed other design patterns for restoring the severed tie between information and action. The Tesla and the Nature of Creativity TNC2015 prototype showed how to federate a research result that has general interest for the public, which is written in an academic vernacular (of quantum physics). The first phase of this prototype, where the author collaborated with our communication design team, turned the academic article into a multimedia object, with intuitive, metaphorical diagrams and explanatory interviews with the author. The second phase was a high-profile live streamed dialog, where the result was announced and discussed. The third phase was online collective thinking about the result, by using Debategraph.

The Lighthouse 2016 prototype is conceived as a direct remedy for the Wiener's paradox, created for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences. This prototype models a system by which an academic community can federate an answer to a socially relevant question (combine their resources in making it reliable and clear, and communicate it to the public).

The question in this case was whether can rely on "free competition" to guide the evolution and the operation of our systems; or whether the alternative—the information developed in the systems sciences—should be used.

Socialized reality

Scope

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",

The job of political leaders is to keep 'the bus on course' (the economy growing) for yet another four-year term. Changing 'course', by changing the system, is beyond what they are able to do, or even imagine doing.

The COVID-19 pandemic may demand systemic changes now.

Who—what institution or system—will lead us through our unprecedentedly large creative challenges?

Both Erich Jantsch and Doug Engelbart believed "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But the universities ignored them.

Why?

There are evidently two ways in which the role of the university in our society can be conceived of: The role that the university must fulfill (claim the new-paradigm thinkers), if our civilization is to resolve its problems and live; and the role that the academic professionals consider themselves to be in.

We shall see that this dichotomy has roots in the way in which the university institution historically developed. And that the key to resolving it, and restoring the university to its all-important contemporary social role, is in the historicity of the academic values and procedures—which Stephan Toulmin pointed to in "Return to Reason"; and we summarized and commented in this blog post.

We have now come to the heart of our matter—the relationship we have with information.

We are about to see why changing the relationship we have with information is mandated on both fundamental and pragmatic grounds.

And why that is "a way to change course"—toward "a great cultural revival", and "a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world".

Diagnosis

This diagnosis will be an assessment of the contemporary academic condition and its causes.

We will come to understand this condition as a consequence of three developments or events in this institution's evolution. The first two will allow us to understand the origins of contemporary academic self-perception; the third one to see why this self-perception needs to change.

The first event was the university institution's point of inception, within the antique philosophical tradition; and concretely as Plato's Academy. John Marenbon described the mindset of the Academy as follows (in "Early Medieval Philosophy"; the boldface emphasis is ours):

Plato is justly regarded as a philosopher (and the earliest one whose works survive in quantity) because his method, for the most part, was to proceed to his conclusions by rational argument based on premises self-evident from observation, experience and thought. For him, it was the mark of a philosopher to move from the particular to the general, from the perceptions of the senses to the abstract knowledge of the mind. Where the ordinary man would be content, for instance, to observe instances of virtue, the philosopher asks himself about the nature of virtue-in-itself, by which all those instances are virtuous. Plato did not develop a single, coherent theory about universals (for example, Virtue, Man, the Good, as opposed to an instance of virtue, a particular man, a particular good thing); but the Ideas, as he called universals, play a fundamental part in most of his thought and, through all his different treatments of them, one tendency remaiuns constant. The Ideas are considered to exist in reality; and the particular things which can be perceived by the senses are held to depend, in some way, on the Ideas for being what they are. One of the reasons why Plato came to this conclusion and attached so much importance to it lies in a preconception which he inherited from his predecessors. Whatever really is, they argued, must be changeless; otherwise it is not something, but is always becoming something else. All the objects which are perceived by the senses can be shown to be capable of change: what, then, really is? Plato could answer confidently that the Ideas were unchanging and unchangeable, and so really were. Consequently, they—and not the world of changing particulars—were the object of true knowledge. The philosopher, by his ascent from the particular to the general, discovers not facts about the objects perceptible to the senses, but a new world of true, changeless being.

Any rational method must ultimately rest on premises or axioms that are not rationally proven, which are considered "self-evident from observation, experience and thought". An axiom here was that the purpose of the pursuit of knowledge is to know "reality". The only question, then, was How that was to be achieved.

The highlights we made in Marenbon's text allow us to formulate the first point of this diagnosis:

The university has its roots in a philosophical tradition whose goal was to pursue "true knowledge"—which was assumed to be the knowledge of unchanging and unchangeable "reality".

The second point is well known. We, however, honor its importance by illustrating it, however briefly, by revisiting our lead historical metaphor, "Galilei in house arrest" (we continue to use people stories as parables).

It was Aristotle, Plato's star student, who applied the Academia's rational method to a variety of themes. The recovery of Aristotle was a milestone in the intellectual history of the Middle Ages; but the Scholastics used his method to argue the truth of the Scripture.

Aristotle's physics was common sense: Objects tend to fall down; heavier objects tend to fall faster. Galilei proved him wrong by throwing stones of varying sizes from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He devised a mathematical formula, by which the speed of a falling object could be calculated exactly. To the human mind about to become modern, Galilei (and the forefathers of science he here represents) demonstrated the superiority of the scientific way to truth.

We may now interpret these Toulmin's observations as follows: How could the rational method of Galilei and Newton, conceived for exploring exploring cosmology—which "had no day-to-day relevance to human welfare"—assume such an all-important role, become the foundation and the model for our pursuit of knowledge in general?

At that time, the Church and the tradition had the prerogative of determining how the people should live and behave, and what they should believe in. And as the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest might suggest—they held onto that prerogative most firmly! The scientists were allowed to pursue their interests only when they "had no relevance to human welfare". But the basic axiom—that the goal of the pursuit of knowledge was to know the unchanging and unchangeable "reality"—was still taken for granted. So when the scientists demonstrated the ability to substitute mathematical formulas and experiments for the "earlier theological accounts of Nature"—that their way was the right way seemed obvious.

During the Enlightenment, science replaced the Bible and the tradition, and the classical philosophy, in the role of our society's trusted way to knowledge.

The above two events allow us to understand the self-conception of the academic professionals, the way they understand their social role: The university's traditional role is not to pursue practical knowledge, but the knowledge of knowledge or epistemology—based on which all knowledge is to be pursued.

This self-image is reflected in the structure of the traditional European university, which included only those fields on which practical knowledge was believed to be founded—such as philosophy, mathematics and physics. The more practical fields, such as architecture and design, were relegated to "professional schools".

Coming now to our third event, and the reasons why this academic self-conception needs to change, we observe that correcting the pursuit of knowledge, by keeping it in sync with knowledge of knowledge, is what the academic tradition has been about since its inception: Wasn't that what Socrates was doing when he engaged his contemporaries in dialogues?

The third event is that the fundamental axiom—that science is the way to know the "reality"—has been invalidated by the results of the 20th century science and philosophy.

While we federated this fact carefully, to see it, it is sufficient to read Einstein. (In our condensed or high-level manner of speaking, Einstein has the role of the icon of "modern science". Quoting Einstein is our way to say "here is what modern science has been telling us".)

It is simply impossible, Einstein remarked (while writing about "Evolution of Physics" with Leopold Infeld), to open up the 'mechanism of nature' and verify that our ideas and models correspond to the real thing. We cannot even conceive of such a comparison! Science is not the way to know "reality". According to Einstein, “Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought".

The results in the 20th century science and philosophy demand that we see the very idea of "reality" in a completely new way—not as something we discover, but as something we construct.

What we call "reality" is a result of a complex interplay between cognitive and social processes.

In "Social Construction of Reality", Berger and Luckmann described the social process by which "reality" is constructed. They pointed to the role that a certain specific kind of reality construction called "universal theories" (theories about the nature of reality, which determine how truth and meaning are to be created) played in maintaining the given social and political order of things. An example of a "universal theory" is the Biblical worldview of Galilei's prosecutors. By ordaining the kings, the Church made it clear to everyone that their absolute power was legitimately delegated from the Almighty Himself.

Other results allow us to understand more deeply the nature of "social reality construction", or socialization; and its relationship with renegade power.

We condensed them to the Odin–Bourdieu–Damasio thread (the thread is an adaptation of Vannevar Bush's technical idea for organizing the collective mindwork, which he called "trail"). Since we offered an outline of this thread separately, we here only highlight only those points that are necessary for reaching the socialized reality insight.

Through the metaphor of the turf behavior of horses, the Odin the Horse vignette points to an instinctive drive that we humans also share—to dominate and control; and to expand our 'turf'—whatever it may be.

The second vignette is about Pierre Bourdieu's experiences in Algeria, and his "theory of practice" those experiences led him to. Bourdieu's "theory of practice" allows us to understand the intrinsic nature of the human turf behavior; how it creates renegade power, and our conception of "reality".

Bourdieu's theory allows us to understand how 'turf strife' can happen without anyone's intention, or even awareness.

Bourdieu used two keywords—"field" and "game"—to refer to the symbolic or cultural 'turf'. By calling it a field, he suggested something akin to a magnetic field, which orients our seemingly random or free behavior, without us noticing. By calling it a game, he portrayed it as something that structures or "gamifies" our social existence, by giving each of us certain set of "action capabilities", which Bourdieu called "habitus", in accordance with our social role. "The boss" has a certain body language and tone of voice; and so does "his secretary". The habitus, according to Bourdieu, tend to be transmitted from body to body directly. Everyone kneels down when the king enters the room; and naturally, we do too.

Bourdieu used the keyword "doxa" to point to the "reality" that results from such socialization; and to the common experience—that the social order of things we have been socialized to accept as "reality" is as immutable and as real as the physical reality we are living in.

The third vignette, whose lead protagonist is the cognitive neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, completes this thread by explaining why this pre-conscious body-to-body socialized reality holds us in such a strong cognitive grip. Damasio showed that our rational decision making, and are consciously maintained reality picture in general, are controlled by an embodied cognitive filter, which determines what options are rationally considered.

Damasio's research allows us to understand why we civilized humans don't rationally consider taking off our clothes and walking out in the street naked; and why we don't consider changing the systems in which we live and work.

We are now ready to condense these cognitive or epistemological insights to a single point.

The relationship we have with information is a result of a historical epistemological error.

This fundamental error has been detected and reported, but it has not been corrected.

Its practical consequences include:

• Stringent limits to creativity. A vast global army of selected, trained and publicly sponsored creative men and women are obliged to confine their work to only observing the world—by looking at it through the eye lenses of traditional disciplines.
• Severed tie between information and action. The perceived purpose of information being to complete the 'reality puzzle'—every new "piece of information" appears to be just as relevant as any other; and also necessary for completing the 'puzzle'. In the sciences and in the media, enormous amounts of information are produced "disconnected from usefulness"—as Postman diagnosed.
• Reification of institutions. Our "science", "democracy", "public informing" and other institutions have no explicitly stated purposes, against which their implementations may be measured; they simply are their implementations. It is for this reason that we use 'candles as headlights'.
• Destruction of culture. To see it, join us on an imaginary visit to a cathedral: There is awe-inspiring architecture; Michelangelo's Pietà meets the eye, and his frescos are near by. Allegri's Miserere is reaching us from above. And then there is the ritual. This, and a lot more, comprises the human-made 'ecosystem' called "culture", where the "human quality" grows. The myths of old, including the myth that "truth" means "correspondence with reality", were mere means by which the cultural traditions pursued this all-important end. We discarded this 'ecosystem' because we discredited its "reality picture". But "reality" is not—and it has never been—what the culture is about. The 'cultural species' are rapidly going extinct. And there we don't even have 'the temperature and the CO2 measurements', to diagnose problems and propose policies.
• Culture abandoned to power structure. It is sufficient to to look around: Advertising is everywhere. And explicit advertising is only a tip of an iceberg. Variuos kinds of "symbolic power" socialize us to be unaware consumers, and more generally to conform to power structure. Scientific techniques are being used; the story of Edward Bernays (Freud's American nephew who became "the pioneer of modern public relations and propaganda") is iconic.

The following conclusion suggests itself:

The Enlightenment did not liberate us from power-related reality construction.

Our socialization only changed hands—from the kings and the clergy, to the corporations and the media.

It may seem preposterous to claim that the contemporary 'Galilei' (the ideas that point to a new evolutionary "course") is held in 'house arrest' by the very institution that was created to continue his legacy. But not when the nature of "symbolic power" is understood.

Not when we acknowledge that the university, and not the Church, is now in charge of the "universal theory".

Remedy

An organism incapable of adapting to it situation, and of evolving so as to restore that capability, is scheduled for extinction. So is a civilization.

The power to restore the severed tie between information and action is in academia's hands. But the academia's tie with information and action too is severed! Having evolved as a way to pursue "unchanging and unchangeable true knowledge", the academia has no systemic provisions for changing the way it pursues knowledge; for evolving as the environmental conditions demand.

The key is to return to academia's original ethos and activity, the Socratic dialogue. In the spirit of the holoscope, we characterized the academia's contemporary situation by a metaphorical image, the Mirror ideogram—which points to the way in which that situation needs to be handled.

The mirror reflects two large changes in the determinants of the academic profession, which developed after its institutionalization acquired its present form. When we look at a mirror, we see ourselves in the world. We see that we are not above the world, looking at it "objectively".

The world we see ourselves in is a world in dire need for creative action. We see that we have the key role in that world.

The mirror urges us to abolish reification, and restore accountability.

Mirror ideogram

How can we do that, without sacrificing the core values of our tradition—academic rigor; and academic freedom?

The message of the mirror is that we can, and must, restore both accountability and rigor and freedom. That seemingly impossible or 'magical' solution is symbolized by the metaphor of stepping through the mirror.

By walking through the mirror, we can both increase freedom and rigor—and step into our new role!

What makes this possible is what Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—and we adapted as one of our keywords.

Quine opened "Truth by Convention" by observing:

"The less a science has advanced, the more its terminology tends to rest on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding. With increase of rigor this basis is replaced piecemeal by the introduction of definitions. The interrelationships recruited for these definitions gain the status of analytic principles; what was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstrued as a convention of language. Thus it is that some flow from the theoretical to the conventional is an adjunct of progress in the logical foundations of any science."

If truth by convention has been the way in which the sciences improve their logical foundations—why not use it to update the logical foundations of knowledge work at large?

Truth by convention is common in mathematics: "Let X be Y. Then..." and the argument follows. Insisting that X "really is" Y is obviously meaningless. A convention is valid only within a given context—which may be an article, or a theory, or a methodology.

Truth by convention allows science to expand into its new and larger role.

Truth by convention allow for a new kind of rigor—where our work with information is liberated from reification and other unstated assumptions.

It is also a way to turn the foundation on which we create truth and meaning, and the very "relationship we have with information", into a prototype—and allow them to evolve. Simply, we turn the state-of-the-art epistemological insights into a convention; and we change that convention when new insights or new social purposes make it obsolete.

Truth by convention does not require consensus, or changes in the traditional sciences.

We defined design epistemology by rendering the core of our proposal as a convention.

In the "Design Epistemology" research article (published in the special issue of the Information Journal titled "Information: Its Different Modes and Its Relation to Meaning", edited by Robert K. Logan; see this blog highlight with a link to the article) where we articulated this proposal, we made it clear that the design epistemology is only one of the many ways to implement this approach. We drafted a parallel between the modernization of science that can result in this way and the advent of modern art: By defining an epistemology and a methodology by convention, we can do in the sciences as the artists did, when they liberated themselves from the demand to mirror reality, by emulating the technique of Old Masters.

As the founders of science did, and as the contemporary artists do—on the other side of the mirror we can create the ways in which we practice our profession.

Our main two prototypes, the holoscope and the holotopia, model the academic and the social reality on the other side of the mirror.

Two concrete examples—our definitions of design and of visual literacy—will illustrate some of the advantages of using truth by convention to found academic work. Each of them is an example of substituting truth by convention for reification in an already existing academic field—and thereby giving the existing praxis an explicitly stated and up-to-date direction and purpose. The fact that those proposals were welcomed by the target communities suggests that this line of work may not need a new paradigm to become practical.

The example of design illustrates how the approach we are proposing can be used to provide both a rigorous academic foundation and a timely new direction to an academic field (this chronological summary provides links for in-depth exploration).

The definition of "design" gives us also a way to understand our contemporary situation, and our proposal.

We defined design as "the alternative to tradition", where design and tradition are (by convention) two alternative ways to wholeness. Tradition relies on spontaneous and incremental Darwinian-style evolution. Change is resisted; small changes are tested and assimilated through generations of use. We practice design when we consider ourselves accountable for wholeness.

Design must be used when tradition cannot be relied on.

Design must be in place when the rate change is too fast; or when the traditional order of things is no longer respected and maintained.

The situation we are in, which we pointed to by the bus with candle headlights metaphor, can now be understood as a result of a transition: We are no longer traditional; and we are not yet designing. Our call to action can now be understood as a call to complete modernization—and continue to evolve in a new way.

Reification can now be understood as the foundation that suits tradition; truth by convention suits design.

The second example: Our definition of implicit information, and of visual literacy as "literacy associated with implicit information, for the International Visual Literacy Association, was in spirit similar—but its point was different (see this summary).

We showed the above ideogram to highlight that again and again, on our contemporary-cultural scene, two kinds of information meet each other in a direct duel: The explicit information, represented by the explicit, factual and verbal warning in a black-and-white rectangle, and the implicit information, represented by the colorful and "cool" rest. The implicit information wins "hands down", this ideogram shows (or else this would not be a cigarette advertising). Our larger point was that while legislation, ethical sensibilities and "official" culture are focused on explicit information, our culture is dominated and created by implicit information.

We need visual literacy—to

• understand our heritage
• understand how subtle messages affect us
• be able to create implicit information—and redeem culture from power structure

Narrow frame

Scope

We have just seen that the academic tradition—instituted as the modern university—finds itself in a much larger and more central social role than it was originally conceived for. We look up to the academia, and not to the Church and the tradition, for answers to the pivotal question:

How should we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it?

That role, and that question, carry an immense power!

It was by providing a completely new answer to that question, that the last "great cultural revival" came about.

Diagnosis

So how should we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it?

Nobody knows!

Of course, countess books and articles have been written about this theme since antiquity. But in spite of that—or should we say because of that—no consensus has emerged.

Since nobody felt accountable for supplying it, the way we the people look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it, shaped itself spontaneously—from odds and ends of science as they appeared to the public around the middle of the 19th century, when Darwin and Newton as cultural heroes were replacing Adam and Moses. What is today popularly considered as the "scientific worldview" took shape then—and remained largely unchanged.

As members of the homo sapiens species, this worldview would make us believe, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to comprehend the world in causal terms, and make rational choices. Give us a correct model of the world, and we'll know exactly how to satisfy our needs (which we also know, because we can experience them directly). But the traditional cultures got it all wrong: Having been unable to explain the natural phenomena, they put a "ghost in the machine", and made us pray to him to give us what we needed. Science corrected that error—and now we can satisfy our needs by manipulating the mechanisms of nature directly, with the help of technology.

It is this causal or "scientific" understanding of the world that made us modern. Isn't that how we understood that women cannot fly on broomsticks?

While it is undoubtedly correct that the 19th century "scientific" worldview enabled us to wash away a wonderful amount of prejudice—it is also true that we have thrown out the 'baby' (culture) with the bath water.

From our collection of reasons why this way of looking at the world is obsolete and needs to be changed, we here mention only two.

The first reason is that the nature is not a mechanism.

The mechanistic way of looking at the world that Newton and his contemporaries developed in physics, which around the 19th century shaped the worldview of the masses, was later disproved and disowned by modern science. Research in physics showed that even the physical phenomena exhibit the kinds of interdependence that cannot be understood in "classical" or causal terms.

In "Physics and Philosophy", Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, described how "the narrow and rigid" way of looking at the world that our ancestors adapted from the 19th century science damaged culture—and in particular its parts on on which the "human quality" depended, such as ethics and religion. And how as a result the "instrumental" or (as Bauman called them) "adiaphorized" thinking and values became prominent. As we have seen, it is those values that bind us together into wasteful and destructive power structures.

Hear Heisenberg say that he expected that in the long run the philosophical and cultural consequences of atomic physics—the change of how we see everyday problems, and of culture—would be more important than the technical ones.

Heisenberg believed that the most valuable gift of modern physics to humanity would not be nuclear energy or semiconductor technology—but a cultural change, which would result from the dissolution of the rigid frame.

The theme we are touching upon is more than the relationship we have with information; what we are talking about determines the relationship we have with the world, and with each other. A suitable context for understanding its broader import is what Erich Jantsch called the "evolutionary paradigm". Jantsch explained the evolutionary paradigm via the metaphor of a boat in a river, representing a system (which may at the limit be the natural world, or our civilization). When we use the classical scientific paradigm, we position ourselves above the boat, and aim to look at it "objectively". The classical systems paradigm would position us on the boat, and we would seek ways to steer the boat effectively and safely. But when we use the evolutionary paradigm, we perceive ourselves as—water. We are evolution.

The narrow frame determines the way we are as 'water'—and hence our evolutionary "course", and our future.

In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr (considered in Germany as Heisenberg's scientific "heir") co-wrote the Potsdam Manifesto, whose subtitle and message read "We need to learn to think in a new way". The reasons offered include scientific epistemological insights, and the global condition. The proposed new thinking is closely similar to the one that defines holotopia:

"The materialistic-mechanistic worldview of classical physics, with its rigid ideas and reductive way of thinking, became the supposedly scientifically legitimated ideology for vast areas of scientific and political-strategic thinking. (...) We need to reach a fundamentally new way of thinking and a more comprehensive under­standing of our Wirklichkeit ["reality", or what we consider as "true"], in which we, too, see ourselves as a thread in the fabric of life, without sacrificing anything of our special human qualities. This makes it possible to recognize hu­manity in fundamental commonality with the rest of nature (...)"

The second reason is that even complex mechanisms ("classical" nonlinear dynamic systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.

It has been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Research in cybernetics explained this scientifically: The "hell" (which you may imagine as global issues, or the 'destination' toward which the 'bus' we are riding in is reportedly headed) tends to be a "side effect" of our best efforts and "solutions", reaching us through "nonlinearities" and "feedback loops" in the natural and social complex systems we are part of.

Hear Mary Catherine Bateson (cultural anthropologist and cybernetician, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who pioneered both fields) say:

"The problem with Cybernetics is that it is not an academic discipline that belongs in a department. It is an attempt to correct an erroneous way of looking at the world, and at knowledge in general. (...) Universities do not have departments of epistemological therapy!"

Remedy

Truth by convention allows us to explicitly define and academically develop new ways to look at the world.

We called the result a methodology, and our prototype the Polyscopic Modeling methodology or polyscopy.

Polyscopy is a general-purpose methodology; it provides methods for creating insights about any chosen theme—on any level of generality.

Since the main purpose of the Polyscopic Modeling prototype is to point to the advantages of the methodological approach to general knowledge compared to both the narrow frame and the disciplinary approach, we here outline several of its design patterns.

• Polyscopy is a general-purpose methodology. As Abraham Maslow observed, to a person with a hammer in his hand everything looks like a nail. A scientific discipline is a 'hammer'. By virtue of being general-purpose, polyscopy allows for turning the traditional-academic approach to knowledge and to the world inside-out: Instead of having a fixed set of concepts and a method, and applying them where they can be applied (and thus sacrificing purpose to "objectivity")—we provide completely flexible concepts and methods, to be applied wherever reliable information is needed (while continuing to improve the methods). Polyscopy demands that we choose themes and ways of looking according to relevance; and that we create the corresponding information as well as we can. According to sociologists, we live in a post-traditional culture (where we no longer follow in the footsteps of our ancestors), in reflexive modernity (where we make lifestyle and other core choices rationally, by reflecting about them) and in risk society (impregnated by awareness of existential risks, which we don't know how to handle). Our situation demands that we create reliable information about life's basic issues. Reliability, and rigor, here are not in the process, but in (as Erich Jantsch called it) "process of process"—i.e. in the way in which the methods and processes evolve.
• Polyscopy is a prototype; it is explicitly defined by a collection of principles that are defined by convention. Hence it provides explicit guidelines for creating and using information. Those guidelines are themselves federated—and hence subject to change, when the society's needs or the knowledge of knowledge demand that. The formulation of a methodology gives us a way to spell out the assumptions and the rules—and provide the much-needed scientifically-based criteria and methods by which information is handled in our society.
• The method of polyscopy too are federated—by distilling and combining methodological insights in relevant traditions.

The methodological approach allows us to extend the project science to encompass all themes that are of interest—and give priority to the most urgent or vital ones.

A methodology is in essence a toolkit; anything that does the job would do. We, however, defined polyscopy by turning state of the art epistemological and methodological insights into conventions.

By doing hat, we showed how the severed evolutionary tie—between fundamental and methodological insights, and the way we the people look at the world—can be restored.

The polyscopy definition comprises eight aphorismic conventions called postulates; by using truth by convention, each of them is given an interpretation.

The first postulate defines information as "recorded experience". It is thereby made explicit that the substance communicated by information is not "reality", but human experience. Since human experience can be recorded in a variety of ways (a chair is a record of experience related to sitting and chair making), the notion of information is extended well beyond written documents.

The first postulate enables knowledge federation across cultural traditions and fields of interests; the barriers of language and method are removed by giving cultural artifacts a 'common denominator'—human experience.

To be able to say that we "know" anything, we must federate not only the supporting evidence, but also potential counter-evidence—and hence information at large.

As a principle or a rule of thumb, knowledge federation is a radical departure from the now common practice—where what information we consider useful and valid is determined by our socialized self-identity: A Christian will as a rule not feel the need to know about Buddhism and Islam, and vice versa; a scientist may consider it as part of his self-identity to ignore all three. The story of the Tower of Babel points to the nature of the situation we are in—which knowledge federation undertakes to overcome.

The change we are proposing is like the historical change to constitutional democracy, and to the legal ethos and praxis that resulted. Today even a hated criminal is given the benefit of a fair trial. Like a dutiful attorney, knowledge federation does its best to gather evidence, and back each potentially relevant cultural artifact or experience with a convincing case.

The second postulate is that the scope (the way we look) determines the view (what we see). In polyscopy the experience (or "reality" or whatever is "behind" experience) is not assumed to have an a priori structure. We attribute to it a structure with the help of the concepts and other elements of our scope.

The second postulate enables us to create new ways of looking at the world; and by doing that, extend the approach of science to all questions of practical interest.

The second postulate also enables us to state and justify or 'prove' scientific-like result in any domain of interest. Such justification has two parts. One of them is to show that the offered insight is consistent with the data, consistent with lower-level insights. But such consistency, the rewarding "aha" feeling we get when the details fit together, is not sufficient to establish a result. That things make sense is here treated as no more than a mnemonic device, a most useful way to condense information to an insight or principle. This insight or principle, however, must be shown to be a necessary element in a larger whole. We must also validate the scope used to create it as view.

The methodology definition allows us to state explicitly the criteria that orient everyday handling of information. We used this approach to define, for instance, what being "informed" means. We modeled this intuitive notion with the keyword gestalt. To be "informed", one needs to have a gestalt that is appropriate to one's situation. "Our house is on fire" is a canonical example. The knowledge of a gestalt is profoundly different from only knowing the data (such as the room temperatures and the CO2 levels.). To have an appropriate gestalt means to be moved to do the action that the situation at hand is calling for.

Are we misinformed—in spite of all the information and information technology we own?

Could we be living in a misapprehended "reality"—which obscures from us the true nature of our situation, and the way we need to act?

"One cannot not communicate", reads one of Paul Watzlawick's axioms of communication. Even when everything in a media report is factually correct, the gestalt it conveys implicitly can entirely miss the mark—because we are told what Donald Trump has said; and not Aurelio Peccei.

Polyscopy offers a collection of techniques for 'proving' or justifying, and also communicating, the gestalts and other general or high-level insights and claims. Those techniques are, of course, also federated:

• Patterns, defined as "abstract relationships", are federated from science and mathematics; they have a similar role as mathematical functions do in traditional sciences; by being generally applicable and defined by convention, they no longer constitute a narrow frame
• Ideograms allow us to adapt the techniques from the arts, advertising and communication design, and give expressive power to gestalts, patterns and other insights
• Vignettes implement the basic technique from media informing, where an insight or issue is made accessible by telling illustrative and "sticky" real-life people and situation stories
• Threads implement Vannevar Bush's technical idea of "trails", and provide a way to combine specific insights into higher-level units of meaning

In the manner of a fractal, the following vignette will further explain why we need to federate the we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it—both in the academia and in general; and illustrate the benefits that will result.

A situation with overtones of a crisis arose in the early days of computer programming. The buddying computer industry undertook ambitious software projects—which resulted in thousands of lines of "spaghetti code", which no-one could understand and correct.

The solution was found in creating "computer programming methodologies", of which the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Ole-Johan Dahl and Krysten Nygaard, is a prime example. The longer story is interesting but we already shared it, so here we only highlight its main point, and offer a conclusion.

Any sufficiently complete programming language will allow the programmers to create any application program. The creators of the object oriented methodology, however, made themselves accountable for providing the programmers the conceptual and programming tools that would enable them, or even compel them, to write comprehensible, reusable and well-structured code.

When a team of programmers can no longer understand the program they have created, their problem is easily detected—because the program will not compile or run on the computer. But when a human generation can no longer understand the information they have created, or the world this information is supposed to explain—isn't that exactly the situation that The Club of Rome and Aurelio Peccei have diagnosed?

We may conclude from this parallel, and from the socialized reality insight:

The academia too must consider itself accountable for the tools and processes it gives to its members; and to our society at large.

The structuring template the creators of the object oriented methodology conceived and gave to the programmers is called "object". The core purpose of an "object" is to "encapsulate" or "hide" implementation, and provide or "export" function. "Object" is a piece of code that interfaces with the rest of the program through a collection of functions it provides. A printer may provide the function "print"; a scanner the function "scan"—and only those functions are visible in the "higher-level" code. The code by which those functions are implemented is made available separately.

The solution for information structuring we proposed within polyscopy is called information holon (we adapted the keyword "holon" from Arthur Koestler, who used it as a name for something that is both a whole, and a part in a larger whole). An information holon is closely similar to the "object" in object oriented methodology. The information, represented by the "i", is depicted as a circle on top of a square. This suggests the structuring principle, where the square represents a multiplicity of ways of looking, and contributing data and insights, and the circle represents the point of it all (such as 'the cup is broken'). As the case is with the "object", the information holon "encapsulates" the data within the square, and makes only the function available to the rest of the world as the circle.

Information ideogram

When the circle is a general insight or a gestalt, the details that comprise the square are given the power to influence our awareness of issues, and the way in which we handle them. When the circle is a prototype, the multiplicity of insights that comprise the square are given direct systemic impact, and hence agency.

The information holon allows us to implement also the structuring principle, which the creators of the object oriented methodology conceived as the solution to their challenge.

Dahl's point, that "precise thinking is possible only in terms of a small number of elements at a time", must be federated and applied in our work with knowledge at large.

This means that we must be able to create small, manageable snapshots of "reality" (or whatever may be its part or issue we are considering), on any desired level of detail or generality; and that we must devise ways of organizing and inter-relating such views to compose a coherently structured whole.

We adapted or federated Dahl's insight by declaring a collection of principles that define polyscopy. We point to them by the metaphor of the mountain—and visually by the triangle in the Information ideogram.

To understand them, imagine taking a mountain walk: We may look at the valley down below, and see lakes, forests and villages; or at the trees that surround us; or zoom in on a flower and inspect its details. In each case, what we see is a simple and coherent view ("coherent" because it represents a single level of detail). It is in the nature of our perception that we are always given a coherent view—along with the awareness of the position our view occupies relative to other views, and to the world at large. The aim of polyscopy is to preserve that basic quality of our perception, which enables us to make sense of our views—by comprehending each of them and by contextualizing them correctly—also in the work with human-made and abstract information.

It is clear that this way of organizing and maintaining knowledge requires on the one side a new collection of social processes, by which the high-level views or circles are kept consistent with the corresponding squares, and with each other. And on the other side a general-purpose methodology, by which we can create new high-level concepts (corresponding to 'village', 'forest' and 'lake'), on any level of generality.

The required social processes are modeled by knowledge federation; the methodology by polyscopy.

The Holotopia prototype may now be understood as the circle that completes our knowledge federation proposal; which federates the proposal.

It is customary in programming methodology design to showcase the programming language that implements the methodology by creating its first compiler in the language itself. We applied the same approach and created a polyscopic book manuscript, titled "Information Must Be Designed".

In this book we described the paradigm that is modeled by polyscopy; and used polyscopy to make a case for that paradigm. The book's introduction provides a summary.

What we at the time this manuscript was written called information design, has subsequently been completed and rebranded as knowledge federation.

Convenience paradox

Scope

We turn to culture and "human quality", and ask:

Why is "a great cultural revival" realistically possible?

What insight, and what strategy, may divert our "pursuit of happiness" from material consumption and egocentricity to human cultivation?

We approach this theme also from another angle: Suppose we developed the praxis of federating knowledge—and used it to combine the heritage and insights from the sciences, world traditions, therapy schools...

If we used federated knowledge instead of advertising to guide our choices—what changes would develop? What difference would that make?

The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from worries about the original sin and the eternal reward, and they began to pursue happiness and beauty, here and now.

What values might the next "great cultural revival" bring to the fore?

Diagnosis

In the course of modernization we made a cardinal error—by adopting convenience as our cardinal value.

By convenience we mean the unwavering faith—now so common—in direct experience as way to determine what is to be considered as "good", "desirable" and "worthy of being pursued". We define convenience rather broadly, and let it subsume also the closely related value egocenteredness or egocentricity—which we use, for instance, to decide what parties and policies to vote for, based on how their stated agendas affect our own personal needs and desires.

This error can easily be understood as a consequence of the narrow frame—the fact that we've been socialized to mistake the rewarding "aha" emotion when we understand how a certain cause leads to a certain effect as a sign that we've seen the very "reality" of that phenomenon. And so naturally, what feels attractive or pleasant gets reified as "the cause" of happiness. The scientists have the experiment to provide them the reality touch and the data for reasoning and action; the rest of us have convenience.

But convenience is, of course, also a product of our socialized reality. Advertising may promote all kinds of products; but on a more basic level—it always promotes convenience, by appealing to convenience.

And so since we believe that we already know what our goals and purposes should be, the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom has no practical value for us, and no esteem. We not seek information to orient our choices.

Convenience orients even our choice of information!

Remedy

To comprehend the remedy we are about to propose, it is best to imagine that we are already living on the other side of the metaphorical mirror—that we handle information as we now handle other human-made things, by adapting it to the purposes that need to be served. That, furthermore, the narrow frame has been unraveled, and that we are capable of creating basic insights about all basic things in life; not the least—about values.

Imagine that the convenience paradox is common knowledge, that everyone learns it at school, as we now learn "Newton's laws".

We use the Convenience Paradox ideogram to explain the convenience paradox.

Like most of us, the person in the ideogram wants his life to be convenient. But he made a wise choice: Instead of simply following the direction downwards, which feels more convenient, he paused to see whether that direction also leads to a more convenient condition.

It doesn't.

The convenience paradox is a pattern, where a more convenient direction leads to a less convenient situation.

Convenience Paradox ideogram

The iconic image of a "couch potato" is an obvious instance of this pattern: Convenience as value separates us from the rewards that the cultivation of "human quality" can bring. And isn't that what "culture" is really all about?

The image of a child eating her favorite chocolate cake until her tummy hurts will points to another blind spot of convenience: It makes us ignore how our ability to feel changes as a consequence of our choices. When we stimulate our senses in a certain way, a certain pleasant emotion results. But with time, our senses also become desensitized. So for all we know, the cultivation of sensitivity, by abstaining from convenience, may be a better way to go.

The convenience paradox insight has, however, two non-obvious, game-changing messages. The first one is that there is a realm of happiness, or fulfillment, or simply a way to be human—which is incomparably more worth experiencing than what our present culture permits us to experience. We point to it by using wholeness as goal—and propose it as an informed, or further evolved, alternative to convenience.

wholeness feels better than pleasurable things.

We can see that when we set aside cultural biases, and federate relevant insights—across cultures, geographical regions, and historical periods.

To begin, we don't need to seek out the enlightened yogis on the foothills of Himalayas; a careful examination of almost any cultural tradition will do—including good old Christianity! Here is, for instance, how C.F. Andrews described the original Christian community (in "Sermon on the Mount"):

"[Through their practice, the early disciples of Jesus found out] that the Way of Life, which Jesus had marked out for them in His teaching, was revolutionary in its moral principles. It turned the world upside down (Acts 17. 6). (...) They found in this new 'Way of Life' such a superabundance of joy, even in the midst of suffering, that they could hardly contain it. Their radiance was unmistakable. When the Jewish rulers saw their boldness, they 'marvelled and took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus' (Acts 4. 13). (...) It was this exuberance of joy and love which was so novel and arresting. It was a 'Way of Life' about which men had no previous experience. Indeed, at first those who saw it could not in the least understand it; and some mocking said, 'These men are full of new wine' (Acts 2. 13)."

A closely similar message is reaching us from the biography of Muhammad that Martin Lings composed, also based on earliest testimonies. And of course from other cultures, geographical regions and historical periods. What we see again and again is that the origins of religious or spiritual traditions were not in erroneous beliefs about the origin of the universe—but in an experience that people had when they engaged in a certain kind of practice; or when they were around the people whose by engaging in practice came close to wholeness.

The evidence is overwhelming, and doubt seems unreasonable.

The second message of the convenience paradox ideogram is that the way to wholeness is counter-intuitive or paradoxical, and needs to be illuminated by suitable information.

In the ideogram this point is suggested by rendering the way as "yin" (dark or obscure) in the traditional Chinese "yin-yang" ideogram (which is a symbol of wholeness).

Here too already Christ's familiar messages in Sermon on the Mount (such as to "turn the other cheek") amply illustrate the paradox. But the reality of the paradox begins to shine only when we begin to federate those messages.

Since Lao Tzu is already credited as the founding father of Taoism ("tao" literally means "way"), we let him serve here too as the icon for this all-important message. The legendary sage is often portrayed as riding the bull—which signifies that he conquered egotism; that he held convenience by its horns!

In the Convenience paradox article we offer further points of reference that will illustrate the breadth and the depth of the creative frontier that the convenience paradox insights is pointing to—and here only highlight several prototypes that will illustrate some of the research directions on this frontier.

Convenience Paradox prototype

The Convenience Paradox was the very first prototype of application of polyscopy and knowledge federation, presented at the Einstein Meets Magritte transdisciplinary conference in 1995. This prototype has been evolving ever since. The conference, organized to mark the 25th anniversary of the Free University of Bruxelles, invited scientists and artists to share "an interdisciplinary reflection on science, nature, human action and society".

To the section titled "World Views and the Problem of Synthesis" we contributed two articles—a "prospectus" article explaining how Polyscopic Modeling or polyscopy undertakes to synthesize world views; and a "proof of concept application" article, with the Convenience Paradox result.

In Bruxelles we showed a variant of the above slide (with a fragment of Einstein's "epistemological credo" from his "Autobiographical Notes", and Magritte's "The Treachery of Images [This Is not a Pipe]") and explained that the point where Einstein and Magritte and so many other 20th century artists and scientists met was a shared key insight—that we can, and must, distinguish between "real" things and our representations of them. By coming back to human experience as "common denominator" on the one side, and developing generalizations and representations on all levels of generality on the other—we can overcome the differences of language and worldview and tradition, and finally 'complete that Tower of Babel'.

The Convenience Paradox was then offered as a prototype result of the research direction that this methodology makes possible.

The ideogram, as we explained above, only points to a question; its main point is to show that our natural and necessary direction is wholeness; and that we do not know how to get there, that direct experience will only deceive us; that we must use suitable information to show us the way.

The ideogram is, however, only the main point, the 'dot of the i' of a large information holon—whose details combine, in an orderly form, a broad variety of insights, ranging from heterogeneous sources and time periods and cultures, that both support the basic insight and show how exactly wholeness is to be pursued.

The Convenience Paradox result showed how polyscopy can be applied to synthesize culturally-relevant insights across cultural tradition—and use them to inform and further evolve our contemporary culture.

The details were organized in terms of four aspects of human wholeness: physical (effort and effortlessness), emotional (happiness), cognitive (creativity) and biochemical (nutrition and metabolism).

Already the physical aspect, in a fractal-like or parabolical way, illustrates the nature of this result, and the power of the approach it introduces: While we try to eliminate effort by developing the technology, the heaviest thing we ever lift up and carry we can never get rid of. We combined the insights of F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais and other pioneers of mind-and-body therapy, to show that a lion's share of our sensation of effort resides in our body as patterns of tension and tensing, which can be eliminated through suitable practice.

Nature-Culture-Health – Information Design

The Nature-Culture-Health – Information Design was a project developed in collaboration with the European Public Health Association, through Prof. Gunnar Tellnes who was then its president.

Aaron Antonovsky is usually considered as the iconic progenitor of "salutogenesis" (creation of health—where instead of seeking to find and eliminate "disease causes", research is focused on factors that contribute to health). Tellnes developed this research further, by applying its results to lifestyle change. In Norway Tellnes developed an organization called Nature-Culture-Health, whose goal is to further health by bringing people into nature, and through cultural activities and lifestyle habits. Our collaboration resulted in several prototypes:

• Together we initiated the Nature-Culture-Health International, see this strategy proposal
• Use of polyscopy to federate the salutogenetic insights, values and practices in everyday life, see this prospectus article
• We developed the key point dialog as a method for empowering awareness and lifestyle change, and applied it as a prototype in three Norwegian municipalities, see this article

Why is our "healthcare" conceived as curing diseases, not as curating health?

To the inaugural meeting of the European Scientific Holistic Medicine Association, organized in 2004 in Copenhagen (by Søren Ventegodt, who in Copenhagen established and led the Quality of Life research insstitute), we showed this information holon and explained that holistic medicine, just as any holistic approach, depends on a different approach to science—which can help us see things whole.

On the 2005 conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health in Paris we contributed a result called "Healthcare as a Power Structure", where the power structure theory is applied to elucidate this question. The historiographical data were vignettes about ignored research of Weston Price, Werner Kollath, Francis Pottenger and other salutogenesis pioneers. By describing our method, we offered also a methodological contribution—a way to complement the usual detailed and historiographic practice in this field by developing general "law of change" results. See this abstract.

Movement and Qi

Movement and Qi is a prototype course developed and taught through the University of Oslo PE Department. Since education is a theme of special interest to holotopia, and since this prototype introduced a number of innovations that could be developed further, we here mention some of its design patterns.

Body as medium. Education tends to focus on books and facts; it tends to favor verbal knowledge, and neglect the work with "human quality". This course works directly with the human 'instrument'. Movement is a keyword interpreted as doing something—anything—with the physical self, ranging from work with nutrition and values, to practices such as yoga.

Federating the heritage of the traditions. A vast body of knowledge relevant to "human quality" is waiting to be given citizenship rights in our culture. Qi here is a keyword, which allows for understanding in a simple way that the insights developed in disparate cultural traditions and therapy schools such as shiatsu masage, Alexander technique and qigong all point to the same simple image of human wholeness, and how to work with it. Each class meeting focused on a single technique. The goal was to both introduce a specific way of working with oneself, and often a tradition bringing forth a spectrum of insights—and also illustrate how the specific technique fits into the general qi model, in its own specific way. Notice that no "reality" claims are involved; qi is simply a created general concept, which allows us to make sense of and use the experience of cultural and therapeutic traditions in everyday life and practice.

Overcoming cultural barriers. Cultural barriers still need to be overcome; academic people still tend to consider all that fails to fit the narrow frame as "alternative". To bridge this gap, we devised a marketing strategy, centered around six posters—each bringing forth an entirely different aspect of this course, and work. We placed them in pairs, paired at random, on various bulletin boards around the university. The point here is that although most people who see the posters will not come to the course, their curiosity is still aroused, and the intended positive effect has been made.

Summary and conclusions

Aiming to find out how "a great cultural revival" could realistically enfold once again in our own time, we explored the analogy between our contemporary situation and the one at the dawn of the Enlightenment, when Galilei was in house arrest. The five insights resulted when we applied the holoscope to look at five aspects of that analogy, or at five pivotal issues—"pivotal" because each of them alone may be seen as determining a society's evolutionary course:

• Innovation (analogy with the Industrial Revolution, which revolutionized the efficiency of labor)
• Communication (analogy with the advent of the printing press, which revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge)
• Epistemology (analogy with the Enlightenment, which enthroned direct experience and reason)
• Methodology (analogy with the advent of science, as an informed and effective way to knowledge)
• Values (analogy with the Renaissance, which empowered our ancestors to seek happiness on the earthly realm)

For each of these issues, we found out that by 'connecting the dots' (combining already reported insights to reach a higher-order one), an insight results that calls for reversing the way the issue is now commonly handled:

• As long we let the competition steer innovation, the systems in which we live and work evolve as power structures—and organize us in ways that make us create problems instead of solving them
• As long as we use broadcasting—the communication that the printing press made possible—we forgo the possibility to use the new technology to self-organize as a collective mind, and co-create meaning
• As long as we continue to reify the worldview we've inherited, we continue to live in the socialized reality that the power structure created for us
• As long as we look at the world through the narrow frame that our ancestors concocted from pieces of the 19th century science, we ignore the possibility to create and revolutionize the way in which we see the world
• As long as we use direct experience and not information to make choices—we remain under the spell of the convenience paradox, and ignore the possibility to pursue wholeness, by developing "human quality"

We have in this way demonstrated the value and the power of the approach to knowledge we are proposing:

Knowledge federation can reverse our handling of core human issues.

The five insights also allow us to offer an answer to our main question: What do we need to do to become able to "change course"?

What makes this task easy is that the five insights are so closely related, that making any of the changes they are pointing to requires making all the others. We indicated that by the black and red arrows in the Five Insights ideogram. Following the black arrows around the circle will already suffice to reach that conclusion:

• Power structure – collective mind: The collective mind re-evolution is just a special case of systemic innovation; but as the Modernity ideogram suggests—the new approach to knowledge must be in place first, to illuminate the way to all other systemic innovation
• Collective mind – socialized reality: What keeps us using 'candles' as 'headlights' is that we've reified them as that; to begin the collective mind re-evolution, we need to change the relationship we have with information, in the manner pointed to by the socialized reality insight
• Socialized reality – narrow frame: It is only when we've changed the relationship we have with information—when we treat it as we treat other human-made things, by adjusting it to its purpose—that we become capable of creating the way we look at the world that empowers us to comprehend and handle it correctly
• Narrow frame – convenience paradox: It is only when we begin to use information to make choices, that we become ready to see the futility of convenience
• Convenience paradox – power structure: It is only when we can see beyond convenience, that we are ethically and culturally equipped to liberate ourselves from power structure, and create the systems in which we live and work

It follows that the five insights demand a comprehensive and coherent change—of our knowledge work and cultural paradigm as a whole.

To "change course" means to change the paradigm.

Norbert Wiener's keyword "homeostasis" can here be used negatively—to point out that an undesirable condition or configuration can also be held in check by the system's tendency to maintain a stable condition, by springing back and nullifying change. A pathological condition can be stable—isn't that what we call "disease"? And isn't that why we don't call a drug a "remedy"—unless it is strong enough to change the body's pathological condition, to reverse its downward course.

We have also seen that we already have the remedies; that the specific 'anatomic' and 'physiological' problems have already been diagnosed, and their cures have been found—often already a half-century ago!

We can now formulate this sixths insight:

A comprehensive change might be easy—even if small and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible.

Peccei's and The Club of Rome's strategy—to not focus on problems, but on changing the general condition from which they all stem—has in this way been vindicated.

This general strategy is further supported by the insight reached in systems sciences—that restoring the ability to shift paradigms is "the most powerful" way to intervene into systems, as Donella Meadows summarized.

Our quest has thereby been reduced to the question:

What do we need to do to restore our society's ability to shift paradigms?

What "systemic leverage point" should we 'put our shoulders on'?

So far we have two strong candidates for that all-important role.

One of them is the "human quality"—human ethical development, and the development of a culture that supports it. We have seen that the value of convenience, or "ontological security" as Anthony Giddens called it—where we acquire a sense of purpose and meaning by learning a profession and performing in it, by serving "our own" interests—is what binds us to power structure; and makes us part of the problem, hence incapable of being part of the solution.

The other candidate is "changing the relationship we have with information"; or in other words a fundamental, epistemological change. It follows from the five insights, and from the analogy with the Enlightenment and with "Galilei in house arrest" that we've been developing all along, that such a change is the key to the whole paradigm shift. Our, human, capacity to understand a situation and use that understanding to "change course" has repeatedly come to our rescue in times of need.

Each of the two, in its own way, can rightly be considered as something we must do to enable the paradigm to change—and hence as "the systemic leverage point". Which one should we choose?

Our point is that we need to choose both.

That answer is already woven in our knowledge federation proposal. The proposal is addressed to the academia—which we defined as "institutionalized academic tradition". By choosing Socrates and Galilei to represent that tradition, we made it clear that on the one hand breakthroughs were made in our tradition, which led to transformative social developments, when our forefathers used reason, and knowledge of knowledge, to examine the foundations of knowing and propose better ones; and that their "human quality", manifested as readiness to take risks and confront the power structure of the day, enabled their fundamental insights to have an effect.

Hence our proposal—to return to our tradition's original values; and to continue its evolution a step further—by once again correcting the relationship we have with information, as our knowledge of knowledge now requires, and our general situation demands.

A case for our proposal has thereby also been made.

We will not solve our problems

The Holotopia prototype is conceived as a co-creative space, where we make tactical moves toward "changing course".

A role of the holotopia vision is to fulfill what Margaret Mead identified as "one necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence" (in "Continuities in Cultural Evolution", in 1964—four years before The Club of Rome was founded):

"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our whole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene. One necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence is the creation of an atmosphere of hope that the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved—and can be solved in time."

Still more concretely, as we have just seen, we undertake to respond to this Mead's call to action, by federating the "tremendous advances in the human sciences":

"Although tremendous advances in the human sciences have been made in the last hundred years, almost no advance has been made in their use, especially in ways of creating reliable new forms in which cultural evolution can be directed to desired goals."

We, however, do not claim, or even assume, that "the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved".

Margaret Mead

Hear Dennis Meadows (who coordinated the team that produced The Club of Rome's seminal 1972 report "Limits to Growth") diagnose, recently, that our pursuit of "sustainability" falls short of avoiding the "predicament" that The Club of Rome was warning us about five decades ago:

"Will the current ideas about "green industry", and "qualitative growth", avoid collapse? No possibility. Absolutely no possibility of that. (...) Globally, we are something like sixty or seventy percent above sustainable levels."

We wasted precious time pursuing a dream; hear Ronald Reagan set the tone for it, as "the leader of the free world".

A sense of sobering up, and of catharsis, now needs to reach us from the depth of our problems.

Small things don't matter. Business as usual is a waste of time.

Our very "progress" must now acquire a new—cultural—focus and direction. Hear Dennis Meadows say, in the same breath:

"Will it be possible, here in Germany, to continue this level of energy consumption, and this degree of material welfare? Absolutely not. Not in the United States, not in other countries either. Could you change your cultural and your social norms, in a way that gave attractive future? Yes, you could."

Ironically, our problems can only be solved when we no longer see them as problems—but as symptoms of much deeper cultural and structural defects.

The five insights show that the structural problems now confronting us can be solved.

The holotopia offers more than "an atmosphere of hope". It points to an attainable future that is strictly better than our present.

And it offers to change our condition now—by engaging us in an unprecedentedly large and magnificent creative adventure.

Large change is easy

Peccei wrote in One Hundred Pages for the Future (the boldface emphasis is ours):

For some time now, the perception of (our responsibilities relative to "problematique") has motivated a number of organizations and small voluntary groups of concerned citizens which have mushroomed all over to respond to the demands of new situations or to change whatever is not going right in society. These groups are now legion. They arose sporadically on the most variend fronts and with different aims. They comprise peace movements, supporters of national liberation, and advocates of women's rights and population control; defenders of minorities, human rights and civil liberties; apostles of "technology with a human face" and the humanization of work; social workers and activists for social change; ecologists, friends of the Earth or of animals; defenders of consumer rights; non-violent protesters; conscientious objectors, and many others. These groups are usually small but, should the occasion arise, they can mobilize a host of men and women, young and old, inspired by a profound sense of te common good and by moral obligations which, in their eyes, are more important than all others.

They form a kind of popular army, actual or potential, with a function comparable to that of the antibodies generated to restore normal conditions in a biological organism that is diseased or attacked by pathogenic agents. The existence of so many spontaneous organizations and groups testifies to the vitality of our societies, even in the midst of the crisis they are undergoing. Means will have to be found one day to consolidate their scattered efforts in order to direct them towards strategic objectives.

Diversity is good and useful, especially in times of change. The systems scientists coined the keyword "requisite variety" to point out that a variety of possible responses make a system viable, or "sustainable".

The risk is, however, that the actions of "small voluntary groups of concerned citizens" may remain reactive.

From Murray Edelman we adapted the keyword symbolic action, to make that risk more clear. We engage in symbolic action when we act within the limits of the socialized reality and the power structure—in ways that make us feel that we've done our duty. We join a demonstration; or an academic conference. But symbolic action can have only symbolic effects!

We have seen, however, that comprehensive change must be our shared goal.

It is to that strategic goal that the holotopia vision is pointing to.

By supplementing this larger strategy, we neither deny that the problems we are facing must be attended to, nor belittle the heroic efforts of our frontier colleagues who are working on their solution.

The Holotopia project only complements the problem-based approaches—by adding what is systemically lacking to make solutions possible.

We will not change the world

Like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, the holotopia is a trans-generational building project.

It is what our generation owes to future generations.

Our purpose is to begin it.

Margaret Mead left us this encouragement:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Mead explained what exactly distinguishes a small group that is capable of making a large difference:

"(W)e take the position that the unit of cultural evolution is neither the single gifted individual nor the society as a whole, but the small group of interacting individuals who, together with the most gifted among them, can take the next step; then we can set about the task of creating the conditions in which the appropriately gifted can actually make a contribution. That is, rather than isolating potential "leaders," we can purposefully produce the conditions we find in history, in which clusters are formed of a small number of extraordinary and ordinary men and women, so related to their period and to one another that they can consciously set about solving the problems they propose for themselves."

Sagrada Familia (for the moment we are borrowing this beautiful photo from the Web)

This—capability to self-organize—is where "human quality" is needed. And that is what we've been lacking!

The five insights have shown that again and again. Our stories are deliberately chosen to be a half-century old—and demonstrate that the "appropriately gifted" have already offered us their gifts. But giants and visionary ideas no longer have a place in the order of things we are living in.

We live in an institutional ecology that gives us "competitive advantage" only if we make ourselves small, sidestep "ideals", and become "little cogs that mesh together". Through innumerably many 'carrots and sticks' we have internalized the little institutional man who fits in, and keeps our larger self on a leash (see this re-edited and pointedly repetitive excerpt from the animated film The Incredibles; its ending will suggest what we must find courage to do).

Our core strategy is to change the institutional ecology that makes us small.

We will not sidestep that goal by adapting to the existing order of things, treating the development of holotopia as "our project" and trying to make it "successful"—within that very order of things we have undertaken to change.

We insist on considering the development of the holotopia as our generation's project. And we offer it to you as your project as much as ours. Our core strategy is to inspire and empower you to make a difference.

We will not change the world; you will.

The Holotopia prototype is conceived as a collaborative strategy game, where we make tactical moves toward the holotopia vision.

To make this 'game' engaging and awesome, we bringing to it this collection of tactical assets.

The arts

Holotopia is an art project.

The transformative space created by our "Earth Sharing" pilot project, in Kunsthall 3.14 art gallery in Bergen, Norway.

The idea of "a great cultural revival" brings to mind the image of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in the midst of an old order of things manifesting a new one. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited the urinal, he challenged both the meaning of art and its limits. But the deconstruction of tradition has meanwhile been completed, and the time is now to construct.

What sort of art will manifest the holotopia?

In "Production of Space", Henri Lefebvre offered an answer—which we'll here summarize in holotopia's buddying vernacular.

The core problem with the social system we are living in, Lefebvre observed, is that our past activity, crystalized as power structure, keeps us "alienated" from our intrinsically human quest of wholeness. In our present conditions, "what is dead takes hold of what is alive". Lefebvre proposed to turn this relationship upon its head:

"But how could what is alive lay hold of what is dead? The answer is: through the production of space, whereby living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set of tools, nor simply a commodity."

As an initiative in the arts, Holotopia produces spaces where what is alive in us can overcome what is making us dead.

Five insights

While the role of the arts is to communicate and create, to put 'the dot on the i', the five insights model the holotopia's knowledge base. They ensure that what we communicate and create reflects the state of the art of knowledge in relevant areas of interest. Together, they compose a complete 'i', or 'lightbulb', or "headlights and steering", or "communication and control".

The symbolic language of the arts can condense the five insights to images and objects, place them into physical reality and our shared awareness—as the above paper models may suggest.

The elephant

Elephant ideogram

The role of this metaphorical image, of an invisible elephant, is to point to a quantum leap in relevance and interest, which specific academic and other insights can acquire when presented in the context of "a great cultural revival".

There is an "elephant in the room", waiting to be discovered.

Imagine the 20th century's thinkers touching this elephant: We hear them talk about "the fan", "the water hose" and "the tree trunk". But they don't make sense, and we ignore them.

Everything changes when we realize that what they are really talking about are 'the ear', 'the trunk' and 'the leg' of an immensely large and exotic animal—which nobody has yet seen!

To make headway toward holotopia, we orchestrate 'connecting the dots'.

By manifesting the elephant, we restore agency to information and power to knowledge.

The structuralists undertook to bring rigor to the study of cultural artifacts. The post-structuralists "deconstructed" their efforts, by observing that there is no such thing as "real meaning"; and that the meaning of cultural artifacts is open to interpretation. We can now take this evolution a step further.

What interests us is not what, for instance, Bourdieu "really saw" and wanted to communicate; with the post-structuralists, we acknowledge that even Bourdieu would not be able to tell us that, if he were still around. Yet he undoubtedly saw something that invited a different way to see the world; and undertook to understand it and communicate it by taking recourse to the only paraigm that was available—the old one.

We give the study of cultural artifacts new relevance and rigor—by considering them as signs on the road, which point to a paradigm that now wants to emerge.

Stories

These "stories" here are technically called vignettes. This in principle journalistic technique allows us to render transformative academic and other insights in ways that can be communicated to the public, or picked up by media artists and journalists. But they are also fractals—which display the essence and the nuances of a larger and more complex situation, by focusing on one of its details.

We here illustrate this technique and its potential by a single example—The Incredible History of Doug Engelbart. It is a story about a giant who foresaw and created significant parts of the emerging paradigm or the elephant. But it is also a story about a zeitgeist—and of a generation that became so busy and so dazzled with overloads of data, that it became incapable of recognizing a truly fundamental and game-changing contribution; even when that contribution offers to relieve it of overloads of data, and restore meaning.

We have told fragments of this story in different situations already. And we plan to federate Engelbart's ideas and contributions carefully, in the second book of the Holotopia series. So here we will only offer some 'dots'—for the reader to explore and connect together.

Let's begin with the smallest and least significant one.

"Prior to the demonstration, a significant portion of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot"."

This sentence in the Wikipedia article about "The Mother of All Demos"—the 1968 event where Engelbart and his lab demonstrated significant parts of the communication technology as we have it today—will, in the light of what we are about to say, serve as beautiful illustration of a culture that recognizes only things, only technology, and ignores the meaning and value of ideas.

The larger story may, however, begin from its chronological beginning, in December 1950.

A young man at the beginning of career is taking a critical look at his future: He is twenty five years old, has excellent engineering education, he's employed by (what would became) NASA, he is engaged to be married... He sees his career as a straight path to retirement; and he doesn't like what he sees. So right there and then he decides to give his career a purpose—the one that he will maximize its benefits to mankind.

Engelbart subsequently spent three month intensely thinking about the best way to do that. Then he had an epiphany.

We could say "the rest is history"—but the real story has not been told!

We sometimes introduce it by sketching an image of the Silicon Valley's "giant in residence"—whom our most creative innovation hub failed to understand, or even hear, after having recognized him as that! With apologies for the echo, we here share this recording of the springboard story, and this one that explains the vision.

Then there is this this true pearl, Engelbart's "A Call to Action" panel presentation at Google, where somehow, and yes, incredibly, the first slides—which were to explain Engelbart's vision and provide a context for understanding all the rest—were not even shown! And so on the Youtube page where its recording is shown, Engelbart is still holding only a (computer) mouse in his hand—while it was a full-fledged elephant that he was offering and holding.

Here are some of Engelbart's contributions to the cause at hand.

• The first methodology for systemic innovation; Engelbart published an ingenious methodology in 1962—six years before Jantsch and others created theirs in Bellagio
• The technology and the processes for the collective mind paradigm—they were demonstrated at the 1968 Demo
• The "open hyperdocument system"; Engelbart understood (see the argument we shared above, related to information holon) that we would need to evolve completely new information formats and processes; that the proprietary systems (which are common today) would be a hindrance; hence he envisioned and implemented a system that enables free hypermedia evolution
• Concepts and templates for systemic re-organization of knowledge work, such as "networked improvement community" and the "ABC model"

In case you might be wondering, What was really Engelbart's "call to action" all about? These clues might help.

When around 1990 Engelbart and his daughter Christina created an institute, to share Doug's vision to the Silicon Valley businesses and academia, they called it "Bootstrap Institute"; and later renamed it to "Bootstrap Alliance", because an aliance (or shall we call it a "federation"), and not an institute, was the right institutional template. They then undertook to disseminate the core ideas by offering the "Bootstrap Seminar" at Stanford University. Also Engelbart's last message to the world, recorded at the Stanford University's Studio, was titled "Bootstrap Dialogs". So yes—it was to bootstrap the collective mind paradigm, to begin it with our own minds and bodies and computers, that he was urging us to do.

The mirror

The mirror lands itself to artistic creation; snapshots from Vibeke Jensen's Berlin studio.

Let us begin with what is obvious: The mirror is a visual and symbolic object par excellence. In holotopia, however, its symbolism is vastly enriched by a wealth of interpretations—as we shall see here.

One of them is the holotopia's overall main message—that there is an unexpected, wonderful and seemingly magical way out of the "problematique"; a natural and effective way to transform our situation. We do not need to colonize another planet (anyhow we would carry to it our cultural diseases). The cure is here and now. We can move to an entirely different reality here on earthly realm—and indeed in our own offices, homes, and bodies.

Then there is this more concrete interpretation of the mirror as a symbol of cultural transformation—by discovering ourselves. By putting ourselves into the picture, through self-awareness, and self-reflection. By understanding that whatever we are feeling— our anxieties and desires, and our very happiness—is inside of us! And that's where it can and needs to be found, or created.

What are we really able to feel?

Love? Deep inner peace? Unity with all creation? Of course in an informed society, where "informed" means "seeing things whole", the "pursuit of happiness" will no longer be confined to acquisition of objects.

This, of course, is the theme of the convenience paradox insight.

Yet it also points to a way to resolve the power structure issue—by discovering, collectively, that the systems in which we live and work are largely unsuitable for making us whole. Here we see how the holotopia can result from a systemic revolution from within! The old "us against them" politics, and that very attitude, keeps us entrenched in power structures, and separates us from wholeness.

A still more subtle, but completely central function of the mirror, is perceiving and undoing what the power structure has done to us through socialization.

It has been repeatedly pointed out that Donald Trump does not believe in science. But when we carefully examine ourselves in the mirror, we see something far more to the point, and far more shocking:

Practically none of us believe in science.

Little Greta Thunberg does. She lives in the reality that the scientists created for us, and acts accordingly. But she was diagnosed of Asperger syndrome, so she doesn't count as a counterexample.

All of us "normal" humans live in a socialized reality created by the power structure.

That is what we see when we examine ourselves in the mirror—in the light of published theories and everyday experiential evidence.

The mirror reflects that we have two sets of values; and two worldviews.

We have the worldview and the values that we rationally uphold, as part of our self-identity. And we have a completely different embodied ones, which are the result of socialization. When we look at the mirror, in the light of the five insights, we see that there is a large discrepancy between them.

Healing the discrepancy between our rational values and our embodied ones is the key to cultural and social transformation.

The the work with embodied values requires practice—or more precisely praxis. The body is like a donkey—rational arguments don't work. Integrity (making our embodied values, and behavior, consistent with the values we uphold rationally) demands training. It requires a culture that socializes us in an entirely different way that the cultures we've known.

It is here, in front of the mirror, that "a great cultural revival" can earnestly begin.

It is in this context that we can fully understand the importance of the epistemological message we pointed to by using the mirror metaphor. The mirror shows us we must end reification—of not only emotions (which we have just talked about), but also of our worldview; of our institutions; and of our very concepts. And that we are also ready for such a step, because our knowledge of knowledge has already brought us the kind of self-awareness that is necessary and sufficient for such a step. What remains is to embody this self-awareness. And to act on it. .

The end of reification is the end of arrogance that breeds ignorance—and the beginning of true knowing.

When reification is removed, we are left with the question: "What do we really know, about the questions that matter?" The answer we'll reach may now seem preposterous, and shocking. So let us introduce it here by retelling and old story—told in Plato's "Apology". We offer this story as the story of inception of the academic tradition—which points to the true nature of this tradition. And to the role the academic tradition has had in our evolution, which follows from it.

In Athens, Socrates became a bit of a nuisance to some of the people in high esteem in power, by asking too many questions. So they accused him of "impiety" and "for corrupting the youth", and sentenced him to death. But the "corrupted youth", one of which was Plato, carried his work further by creating the Academy. In "Apology" Plato tells how Socrates instead of defending himself, adhered to the truth of the matter and explained what had happened.

An Athenian went to Delphi and asked the Oracle whether Socrates was the wisest man in Athens; and came back with the positive answer. When he heard that, Socrates was perplexed, because he did not consider himself a single bit knowledgeable or wise. So he endeavored to resolve this puzzle by seeking out and examining his contemporaries who were reputed as knowledgeable and wise. Surely he would find them superior! But in fact he didn't. He found that they knew just as little as he did. The difference was, however, that they believed they knew a lot more. In this way Socrates resolved the puzzle of the Oracle: A wise man is not the one who knows more than others—but the one who knows the limits of his knowledge.

We share this story to highlight the main point the mirror is pointing to:

The evolution of the academic tradition has brought us to the mirror.

It is the academia's prerogative to lead the oppressed—which include all of us, both "the 99%" and "the 1%"—through the mirror!

As we have seen (in socialized reality), the evolution of knowledge of knowledge—accelerated through the 20th century science and philosophy—brought us to this point.

Our exodus from the power structure–created reality must begin as an academic self-reflection. As change of academic self-perception, and self-identity.

The dialog

The dialog, just as the mirror, is an entire aspect of the holotopia. This keyword defines an angle of looking from which the holotopia as a whole can be seen, and needs to be seen.

The mirror and the dialog are inextricably related to one another: Our invitation is not only to self-reflect, but also and most importantly to have a dialog in front of the mirror. The dialog is not only a praxis, but also an attitude. And the mirror points to the core element of that attitude—which David Bohm called "proprioception". But let's return to Bohm's ideas and his contribution to this timely cause in a moment.

The dialog is a key element of the holotopia's tactical plan: We create prototypes, and we organize dialogs around them, as feedback mechanisms toward evolving them further. And this dialog itself, as it evolves—turns us who participate in it into bright new 'headlights'!

Everything in our Holotopia prototype is a prototype. And no prototype is complete without a feedback loop that reaches back into its structure, to update it continuously. Hence each prototype is equipped with a dialog.

This point cannot be overemphasized: Our primary goal is not to warn, inform, propose a new way to look at the world—but to change our collective mind. Physically. Hands-on.

The dialog is an instrument for changing our collective mind.

The dialog, even more than the mirror, brings up an association with the academia's inception. Socrates was not convincing people of a "right" view to see "reality"; he was merely engaging them in a self-reflective dialog, the intended result of which was to see the limits of knowledge—from which the change of what we see as "reality" becomes possible.

Let us begin this dialog about the dialog by emphasizing that the medium here truly is the message: As long as we are having a dialog, we are making headway toward holotopia. And vice-versa: when we are debating or discussing our own view, aiming to enforce it on others and prevail in an argument, we are moving away from holotopia—even when we are using that method to promote holotopia itself!

The attitude of the dialog here follows from the fundamental premises, which are part of the socialized reality and the narrow frame insights—and which are axiomatic to holotopia. Hence coming to the dialog 'wearing boxing gloves' (manifesting the now so common verbal turf strife behavior) is as ill-advised as making a case for an academic result by arguing that it was revealed to the author in a vision.

But what is the dialog?

Instead of giving a definitive answer—let us turn this keyword, dialog, into an abstract ideal goal, to which we will draw closer and closer by experimenting, and evolving. Through a dialog. We offer the following stories as both points of reference, and as illustration of the kind of difference that the dialog as new way to communicate can mean, and make.

David Bohm's "dialogue"

While through Socrates and Plato the dialog has been a foundation stone of the academic tradition, David Bohm gave this word a completely new meaning—which we have undertaken to develop further. The Bohm Dialogue website provides an excellent introduction, so it will suffice to point to it by echoing a couple of quotations. The first is by Bohm himself.

There is a possibility of creativity in the socio-cultural domain which has not been explored by any known society adequately.

We let it point to the fact that to Bohm the "dialogue" was an instrument of socio-cultural therapy, leading to a whole new co-creative way of being together. Bohm considered the dialogue to be a necessary step toward unraveling our contemporary situation.

The second quotation is a concise explanation of Bohm's idea by the curators of Bohm Dialogue website.

Dialogue, as David Bohm envisioned it, is a radically new approach to group interaction, with an emphasis on listening and observation, while suspending the culturally conditioned judgments and impulses that we all have. This unique and creative form of dialogue is necessary and urgent if humanity is to generate a coherent culture that will allow for its continued survival.

As this may suggest, the dialog is conceived as a direct antidote to power structure-induced socialized reality.

The dialog and epistemology

Bohm's own inspiration (story has it) is significant. Allegedly, Bohm was moved to create the "dialogue" when he saw how Einstein and Bohr, who were once good friends, and their entourages, were unable to communicate at Princeton. Allegedly, someone even made a party and invited the two groups, to help them overcome their differences, but the two groups remained separated in two distinct corners of the room.

The reason why this story is significant is the root cause of the Bohr-Einstein split: Einstein's "God does not play Dice" criticism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory; and Bohr's reply "Einstein, stop telling god what to do!" While in our prototype Einstein has the role of the icon of "modern science", in this instance it was Bohr and not Einstein who represented the epistemological position we are supporting. But Einstein later reversed his position— in "Autobiographical Notes". This very title mirrors Einstein as an artist of understatement; "Autobiographical Notes" is really a statement of Einstein's epistemology—just as "Physics and Philosophy" was to Heisenberg. While the fundamental assumptions for the holoscope have been carefully federated, it has turned out that federating "Autobiographical Notes" is sufficient, see Federation through Images).

The point may or may not be obvious: Even to Einstein, this icon of "modern science", the dialog was lacking to see that we just cannot "tell God what to do"; that the only thing we can do is observe the experience—and model it freely.

But Einstein being Einstein—he finally did get it. And so shall we!

The dialog and creativity

Bohm's experience with the "dialogues" made him conclude that when a group of people practices it successfully, something quite wonderful happens—a greater sense of coherence, and harmony. It stands to reason that the open and humble attitude of the dialog is an important or a necessary step toward true creativity.

And creativity, needless to say, is yet another key aspect of holotopia, and a door we need to unlock.

We touched upon the breadth and depth of this theme by developing our Tesla and the Nature of Creativity prototype—and we offer it here to prime our future dialogs about it.

The dialog and The Club of Rome

There is a little known red thread in the history of The Club of Rome; the story could have been entirely different: Özbekhan, Jantsch and Christakis, who co-founded The Club with Peccei and King, and wrote its statement of purpose, were in disagreement with the course it took in 1970 (with The Limits to Growth study) and left. Alexander Christakis, the only surviving member of this trio, is now continuing their line of work as the President of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras. "The Institute for 21st Century Agoras is credited for the formalization of the science of Structured dialogic design." (Wikipedia).

Bela H. Banathy, whom we've mentioned as the champion of "Guided Evolution of Society" among the systems scientists, extensively experimented with the dialog. For many years, Banathy was staging a series of dialogs within the systems community, the goal of which was to envision social-systemic change. With Jenlink, Banathy co-edited two invaluable volumes of articles about the dialogue.

The dialog and democracy

In 1983, Michel Foucault was invited to give a seminar at the UC Berkeley. What will this European historian of ideas par excellence choose to tell the young Americans?

Foucault spent six lectures talking about an obscure Greek word, "parrhesia".

[P]arrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.

Foucault's point was that "parrhesia" was an essential element of Greek democracy.

This four-minute digest of the 2020 US first presidential debate will remind us just how much the spirit "parrhesia", and of dialog, is absent from the oldest modern democracy; and from contemporary political discourse at large.

The dialog and the new media technology

A whole new chapter in the evolution of the dialogue was made possible by the new information technology. We illustrate an already developed research frontier by pointing to Jeff Conklin's book "Dialogue Mapping: Creating Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems", where Bohm dialogue tradition is combined with Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS), which Kunz and Rittel developed at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.

The Debategraph, which we already mentioned, is transforming our collective mind hands-on. Contrary to what its name may suggest, Debategraph is an IBIS-based dialog mapping tool. While he was the Minister for Higher Education in Australian government, Peter Baldwin saw that political debate was not a way to understand and resolve issues. So he decided to retire from politics, and with David Price co-founded and created Debategraph to transform politics, by changing the way in which issues are explored and decisions are made.

In Knowledge Federation, we experimented extensively with turning Bohm's dialog into a 'high-energy cyclotron'; and into a medium through which a community can find "a way to change course". The result was a series of so-called Key Point Dialogs. An example is the Cultural Revival Dialog Zagreb 2008. We are working on bringing its website back online.

The dialog as a tactical asset

When it comes to using the dialog as a tactical asset—as an instrument of cultural change toward the holotopia—two points need to be emphasized:

• We define the dialog, and we insist on having a dialog
• We design our situations, and we use the media, in ways make that deviations from the dialog obvious

When a dialog is recorded, and placed into the holotopia framework, violations become obvious—because the attitude of the dialog is so completely different! We may see how this made a difference in the Club of Rome's history, where the debate gave unjust advantage to the homo ludens turf players—who don't use "parrhesia", but say whatever will earn them points in a debate, and smile confidently, knowing that the "truth" of the power structure, which they represent, will prevail! The body language, however, when placed in the right context, makes this game transparent. See [this example, where Dennis Meadows is put off-balance by an opponent.

Hence the dialog—when adopted as medium, and when mediated by suitable technology and camera work—becomes the mirror; it becomes a new "spectacle" (in Guy Debord's most useful interpretation of this word). We engage the "opinion leaders", and use the dialog to re-create the conventional "reality shows"—in a manner that shows the contemporary realities in a way in which they need to be shown:

• When a dialog is successful, the result is timely and informative: We witness how our understanding and handling of core social realities are changing
• When unsuccessful, the result is timely and informative in a different way: We witness the resistance to change; we see what is holding us back

Ten themes

Everything in holotopia is a potential theme for a dialog. Indeed, everything in our holotopia prototype is a prototype; and a prototype is not complete unless there is a dialog around it, to to keep it evolving and alive.

In particular each of the five insights will, we anticipate, ignite a lively conversation.

We are, however, especially interested in using the five insights as a framework for creating other themes and dialogs. The point here is to have informed conversations; and to show that their quality of being informed is what makes all the difference. And in our present prototype, the five insights symbolically represent that what needs to be known, in order to give any age-old or contemporary theme a completely new course of development.

The five insights, and the ten direct relationships between them, provide us a frame of reference—in the context of which both age-old and contemporary challenges can be understood and handled in entirely new ways.

Here are some examples.

How to put an end to war?

What would it take to really put an end to war, once and for all?

The five insights allow us to understand the war as just an extreme case among the various consequences of our general evolutionary course, by "the survival of the fittest"—where the populations that developed armies and weapons had "competitive advantage" over those who "turned the other cheek". It is that very evolutionary course that the Holotopia project undertakes to change.

We offered the Chomsky–Harari–Graeber thread as a way to understand the evolutionary course we've been pursuing, and the consequences it had. Noam Chomsky here appears in the role of a linguist—to explain (what he considers a revolutionary insight reaching us from his field) that the human language did not develop as an instrument of communication, but of worldview sharing. Yuval Noah Harari, as a historian, explains why exactly that capability made us the fittest among the species, fit to rule the Earth. David Graeber's story of Alexander the Great illustrates the consequences this has had—including the destruction of secular and sacral culture, and turning free people into slaves.

We then told about Joel Bakan's "The Corporation", to show that while the outlook of our society changed since then beyond recognition—the nature of our cultural and social-systemic evolution, and its consequences, remained in principle the same.

We could have, however, taken this conversation in the making in another direction—by talking about the meeting between Alexander and Diogenes; and by doing that reaching another key insight.

This part of the conversation between Alexander and Diogenes (quoted here from Plutarch) is familiar :

And when that monarch addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, "Yes," said Diogenes, "stand a little out of my sun."

In his earlier mentioned lectures about "parrhesia", Foucault tells a longer and more interesting story—where Diogenes (who has the most simple lifestyle one could imagine) tells Alexander (the ruler of the world) that he is "pursuing happiness" in a wrong direction. You are not free, Alexander, Diogenes tells him; you live your life in fear; you hold onto your royal role by force:

" I have an idea, however, that you not only go about fully armed but even sleep that way. Do you not know 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."