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

A great cultural revival

The five insights have been chosen to reflect five aspects of the last "great cultural revival", to which we point by bringing up the image of Galilei in hose arrest. Our point is that when those five centrally important aspects of our society's 'drive into the future' are no longer looked at by using the inherited ways of looking at the world ('in the light of a pair of candles') but by a deliberately designed way (represented by the holoscope), or in other words when our minds and eyes are liberated from the habit and the tradition and we allow ourselves to create the way we look at the world—then once again the blind spots and the opportunities for creative action are seen that naturally lead to a deep and comprehensive change.

Hence the five insights together reveal a vast creative frontier, where dramatic improvements can be reached. And which together constitute "a great cultural revival"—each of them being a piece in the large puzzle, a mechanism that unleashes our creative potential on such major scale.

A revolution in innovation

By bringing a radical improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of human work, through innovation, the Industrial Revolution liberated our ancestors from the toil for survival, and empowered them to devote themselves to more humane pursuits such as developing their "human quality", by developing culture. Or so we were told. The real story may, however, be entirely different. Research has shown that the hunger-gatherers used only a small fraction of their time for hunting and gathering. The power structure insight shows that not only today—but throughout history the improvements in effectiveness and efficiency in human work have been largely wasted by the systems in which we live and work

We saw, by illuminating those systems and the way in which they evolve, that this age-old negative trend in our evolution can be countered by innovating differently—through systemic innovation, or by "making things whole". And how this socio-technical innovation can, finally, liberate us from toil and empower us to engage in cultural revival.

A revolution in communication

The printing press enabled the Enlightenment by enabling a revolution in literacy, and in communication. The collective mind insight shows that the new information technology enables a similar revolution—whose effects will not be only a mass production of volumes of information, but most importantly a revolution in the production of meaning. A revolution where information is considered and treated as the lifeblood of human society—and enabled to make all the differences it can and needs to make, in a post-industrial society.

A revolution in vision

The Enlightenment was a combined revolution; our ancestors were first empowered to use their reason to understand the world; and then to see that the royalties were not divinely ordained, but indeed part of a human-made power structure. The whole revolution, however, began as a relatively minor epistemological innovation in astrophysics. By putting the Sun into the center of the Solar system, a scientific explanation of the movement of the planets became possible. We have seen that a continuation of that revolution is now due, by which all reification is seen as obsolete and a product of power structure; and in particular the reification of our worldview, and of our systems. By liberating the academia from the pitfall of reification, we can both empower ourselves to adapt our systems to the purposes they need to serve and liberate the vast global army of academic researchers from the disciplinary constraints on creativity—and empower them to be creative in ways and on the scale that a "great cultural revival" enables and requires.

A revolution in method

Galilei in house arrest was really science in house arrest. It was this new way to understand the natural phenomena that liberated our ancestors from superstition, and empowered them to understand and change their world by developing technology. The narrow frame insight shows that the "project science" can and needs to be extended into all walks of life—to illuminate all those core issues that science left in the dark.

A revolution in culture

The Renaissance was a "great cultural revival"—a liberation and celebration of life, love, and beauty, by changing the values and the lifestyle, and developing the arts. The convenience paradox insight illuminates two dimensions of this most fertile creative domain we've neglected—the time dimension, and the inner one. When this is done, a completely new direction of human pursuits readily emerge as natural—where our goal is the cultivation of inner wholeness, by developing culture.

This new revolution perhaps finds its most vivid expression in re-evolution of religion—by which an age-old conflict between science and religion is seen as a conflict between two power structures, which hindered the evolution of both our understanding of the world and our understanding of our selves. And how a completely new phase in this relationship can now begin.

The sixth insight

The solution is a paradigm

Already this very brief sketch of the five insights gives us a glimpse of the anatomy and pathophysiology of the "problematique". And lets us anticipate why the "solutionatique" will not be a result of mere preoccupation with what we perceive as issues or "problems". And why its results will be a lot more than mere solutions to problems; why the solution will indeed be "a great cultural revival", or the holotopia.

The power structure insight showed that we cannot "solve our problems" without changing the systems in which we live and work—which organize us in ways that create problems; or make us collectively incapable of understanding them and taking care of them.

The collective mind insight gave us a natural place to begin. We need to first of all update communication—which is what turns us the people into a system. And which—the tie between communication and action having been severed—turns us into systems that make us collectively 'brain dead'—and hence scheduled for extinction.

The socialized reality and the narrow frame insight together pointed to a place where the not is tied, and how to untie it (or technically, to the "systemic leverage point" and to the natural strategy for change). As long as we consider the purpose of information to be giving us "an objective reality picture", or in other words as long as we reify our present knowledge-work institutions and practices and the information they give us, there is no hope for change, and vice versa. The reification results in mass production of "pieces", in the sciences and the media, which not only are unsuitable for seeing what each of us personally has to do—but indeed (having evolved within the power structure) systemically serve for (as Herman and Chomsky put it) "manufacturing consent".

What we are lacking—and the key element of solution—is the ability to create high-level insights, principles, rules of thumb, which can orient our action. Ways to federate the massive data into the kind of "pieces" that have agency and purpose.

As soon as we do that, the convenience paradox insight showed, our very values and our "human quality" is bound to change radically—and lead to exactly the kind of values and behavior patterns on which the restructuring our systems, and resolving the power structure issue, now depends.

Large change can be easy

As we have just seen, the five insights and their solutions are so closely interdependent, that resolving one requires resolving all of them. This first part of a, larger sixth insight follows.

A large and comprehensive change can be easy—even when much smaller and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible.

Comprehensive change, as the change of the system as a whole, has its own systemic way in which it may most easily be done.

Occupy the university

We have also seen that each of the five insights is really a result of federating published more specific insights. And that our collective capability to do that now requires that "the relationship we have with information" be changed. That this is the natural leverage point to the large and comprehensive change, just as the case was in Galilei's time. Hence the second part of the sixth insight results.

The systemic leverage point is the university

The relationship we have with information is no longer in the hands of the Church, but of the university as institution, as the contemporary representative of the academic tradition.

From the point of view of the holotopia, this is extremely good news. To make decisive headway toward "a great cultural revival", we do not need to convince the political and business leaders. We do not need to occupy Wall street. We, publicly sponsored public servants, have the key to solution in our hands.

Since upholding the standard of "right" knowledge is the core task of our academic occupation, there is really nothing to occupy. We only need to do our job.

To make a completely clear argument, we defined academia as "institutionalized academic tradition". And we represented the academic tradition by Socrates as the progenitor of the original Academia, and Galilei as a progenitor of science and the academic tradition's revival, which led to the larger cultural revival. Both Socrates and Galilei stood up to the power structure of the day, by representing new ways to look at the world, based on knowledge of knowledge. The question, then, is What does the contemporary university institutionalize? Is it supporting that sort of work—or maintaining status quo, through reification of the existing habits and structures?

When reiterating the call to action voiced by Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, Erich Jantsch, Doug Engelbart, and so many others—we do that by submitting a complete paradigm proposal; by showing that their call to action can be responded to based on the time-honored academic standards. And indeed that the time-honored academic standards demand that we do that.

Human quality

The critical resource is—and has always been—people who love knowledge, or truth, or humanity, beyond the comfort of fitting into the power structure of the day.

We have seen that the social and cultural ecology of the day is vehemently opposing it—so much so that we may be lacking even the critical amount that we need—even all other things being in place—to begin "a new course".

The Holotopia project may be understood as a strategic undertaking to create a space, and a system or social dynamic, in which a sufficiently strong remedial trend can emerge.

To be continued...