Holotopia

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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.jpg Modernity ideogram


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.

</blockquote>The systemic leverage point is the university</blockquote>

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.