Convenience paradox

The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowered them to seek fulfillment here and now. The lifestyle changed, and the culture blossomed. Have we followed this pursuit to its final end? Or could a surprising new turn, leading to the realms of fulfillment well beyond what we dare to dream of, still be in store for us today?

Scope

We look at the value that orients our "pursuit of happiness". We look at the very way to happiness: Are we walking it in the right direction? Does the way itself need to be illuminated with the right information?

We look at the way in which our choices influence ourselves—our ability to experience joy and fulfillment.

View

We've been pursuing happiness 'in the light of the candle'.

Not having any real information to rely on, we identified happiness with convenience—with what appears attractive. Needless to say, this naive way of choosing directions has been endlessly amplified by advertising.

What remained in the shadow is a wealth of possibilities to pursue joy and fulfillment—through human development!

Action

What the tradition gave us was far from perfect; yet through a plethora of myths, customs, rituals, social taboos...—the traditional culture had a way to provide guidelines, and an environment for human development. This we now need to recreate, in completely new ways.

Federation

The holoscope, and the holotopia, can now be seen as a concerted action to provide exactly that.

Already 25 centuries ago, Lao Tzu left us the message about the convenience paradox, which we are echoing here—that we must not "pursue happiness" by following the appearances, but by understanding the way that takes us there! We show how to illuminate this way by federating insights from a variety of ancient traditions, contemporary therapy schools, scientific disciplines... which have just recently become available to us.

Suitable prototypes show how this re-creation of basic culture can be integrated in academic research, and education.

Power structure

At the turn of the 20th century it appeared that the technology would liberate us humans from the drudgery of labor, and empower us to develop our finer human qualities, by developing culture. Yet we seem to be as busy and as stressed as people ever were. What happened with all the time we've saved, since the outset of the Industrial Revolution, by developing the technology?

Scope

We look at the systems in which we live and work. Imagine them as gigantic machines, comprising people and technology, whose function is to take our daily work as input, and turn it into socially useful effects. If now we seem to be more busy—should we not look at those 'machines', and see if they might be wasting our time? And if the result of our best efforts are problems rather than solutions—should we not see whether they might be causing those problems?

View

The bus with candle headlights is an understatement; all our large socio-technical systems are vastly misconstrued and dysfunctional.

The reason why we don't see that, why we don't adapt them to the functions they need to serve in a larger whole, is that they serve for us a different function—of providing us a stable structure for various forms of power strife. Within and without!

By referring to them as power structure, we emphasize both that they are results of power strife; and that they now have a decisive power over us, deciding what the effects of our work are to be, and what our lives will be like.

The power structures must now be seen as the environment, in which our "human quality" is taking shape.

Action

It remains to re-create the power structure, or the systems in which we live and work, as the Modernity ideogram suggests. The very way in which we use our creative powers needs to change. This upward scaling of our attention (from small gadgets to large and comprehensive systems), and the corresponding creative action, is what we are calling systemic innovation.

The key to this change is a change of values. No, we definitely cannot rely on "the invisible hand" to turn our narrowly conceived self-serving acts into a largest common good. We must see ourselves as parts in a larger whole—and act, and be, as it may best serve its wholeness.

Federation

Having given the opening keynote to The Club of Rome's inauguration meeting in 1968 in Rome, Erich Jantsch saw what needed to be done. We follow him through a sequence of steps—which are now to be continued. Jantsch was, of course, building on other vast bodies of knowledge, notably on the legacy of Norbert Wiener and the systems scientists.

On the non-technical side, we combine insights by Sygmunt Bauman with those of Bernard Shaw, to highlight just how much our professions or systems have become our 'evil masters'; and what can be gained by emancipating ourselves from this bondage.

Collective mind

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