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.

We show a collection of prototypes to complete this federation. Perhaps the most interesting ones are The Game-Changing Game—as a generic way to empower the young people to change the systems in which we live and work. And The Club of Zagreb—as our re-design of The Club of Rome, where the members (people in power positions) empower the young ones, through the agency of The Game-Changing Game.

Collective mind

The printing press revolutionized communication, and enabled the Enlightenment. Without doubt, the Internet and the interactive digital media constitute a similar revolution, which is well under way. Are we really calling that a 'candle'?

Scope

In the manner that we just outlined, we consider the people connected by technology as a gigantic system, a collective mind. And we look at the 'program' or process, which constitutes our collective mind's very principle of operation.

View

Once again we've adopted something from the past, without considering the options. By using the principle that the printing press made possible—broadcasting—we've failed to take advantage of their main distinguishing trait.

Far from giving us the awareness we need, the new technology is keeping us dazzled. Instead of empowering us to see and change our world, it keeps us overwhelmed, and passive.

A radically better way to use the information technology is now possible, and also necessary. To make it a reality, our relationship with information, and with technology, need an update.

Action

Just as the human mind does, our collective mind must federate knowledge; not merely broadcast information.

Federation

The new media were created to enable the change we are proposing—a half-century ago, by Douglas Engelbart and his SRI-based team. And Engelbart too was following the lead suggested by Vannevar Bush, already in 1945.

The non-technical, humanities side of this coin is no less interesting. Already Friedrich Nietzsche warned us that the overabundance of impressions is leaving us dumbfounded, unable to "digest" the overload of impressions and to act. Guy Debord, more recently, contributed far-reaching insights, which now need to be carefully digested.

The prototypes here include the knowledge federation as a transdiscipline—which is offered to serve as an evolutionary organ, and supplement the function our society, and academia are lacking.

Socialized reality

At the core of the Enlightenment was a profound change of our way to truth and meaning—from seeking them in the Bible, to empowering the reason to find new ways. Galilei in house arrest was our reason that was kept in check, and barred from taking its place in the evolution of ideas. Have we reached the end of this all-important evolutionary process, which Socrates and Plato initiated twenty-five centuries ago? Can the academia still make a radical turn, and guide our society to make an even larger one?

Scope

We look at the very foundations, that is—the fundamental assumptions, based on which truth and meaning are constructed. Being the foundations that underlie our thinking, they are not something we normally look at and think about. It is, indeed, as if those foundations were hidden under the ground, and now need to be escavated.

View

Without even noticing that, from the traditional culture we've adopted a myth incomparably more subversive than the myth of creation. This myth now serves as the main foundation stone, on which the edifice of our culture has been built.

By conceiving our pursuit of truth and meaning as a "discovery" of bits and pieces of an "objective reality" (and thus failing to perceive truth and meaning, and information that conveys them, as an essential part of the 'machinery' of culture), we've at once damaged our cultural heritage—and given the instruments of cultural creation away, to the forces of counterculture. In our present order of things anything goes—as long as it does not explicitly contradict "the scientific worldview".

While the counterculture is creating our world, the scientists are caught up in their traditional "objective observer" role...

Action

We show how a completely new foundation for truth and meaning can be constructed—which is independent of any myths and unverifiable assumptions. On this new foundation, a completely new academic and societal reality can be developed.

This new foundation can be developed by doing no more than federating the information we already own.

Federating knowledge means not just "connecting the dots", but also making a difference.

Federation

To show that the correspondence of our models with reality is a myth (widely held belief that cannot be rationally verified), it is sufficient to quote Einstein (as a popular icon of modern science). But since we are here talking about the very foundation stone on which our proposal has been developed, we take this federation quite a bit further.

An essential point here is to understand "reality" as an instrument that the traditional culture developed to socialize us into a worldview, and its specific order of things or paradigm. By understanding socialization as a form of power play and disempowerment, we provide in effect a mirror which we may use to self-reflect, and see our world and our condition in a new way. The insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Antonio Damasio are here central. A variety of others are also provided.

Narrow frame

Science replaced the faith in the bible and the tradition. The revolutionary changes that resulted gave us powers that people a few generations ago couldn't even dream of. We can not be calling that a 'candle'?

Scope

We look at science as an instrument that expands, but also determines and confines our vision. We take off our 'eyeglasses', and we take a closer look.

View

Science was never created for the role in which it now finds itself—the role which Benjamin Lee Whorf branded "the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture". Science found itself in that role by proving its superiority on a much narrower terrain—where causal explanations of natural phenomena are found.

Consequently science constitutes—as Werner Heisenberg pointed out—a narrow frame, a way of looking at the world that for some purposes served some purposes well (notably developing science and technology), and other purposes quite poorly (notably the development of culture, which would enable us to use the power of technology meaningfully and safely).

An even more basic problem is that science constitutes a fixed and narrowly focused way of looking at the world. It has been said that to a person with a hammer in his hand everything looks like a nail. Are even the best among us doomed to explore the world by just endlessly looking for the next 'nail'?

Action

By federating knowledge, a general-purpose methodology can be developed, which preserves the prerogatives of science, and avoids its disadvantages. This way to knowledge enables us to choose our themes according to relevance; and to create guiding insights in all walks of life—and on any desired level of generality or detail.

Federation

Again quoting Einstein is sufficient. Werner Heisenberg, however, provided us a direct formulation of the narrow frame insight; and also an explanation why the modern physics constitutes a rigorous disproof of the fundamental premises on which the narrow frame has been adopted as the method by which we pursue truth and meaning.

Our prototypes show how the narrow frame evolution can be reversed.

The five insights are inextricably related

By putting the five insights together, a larger, new, overarching insight results.

The black arrows form a vicious cycle

We may now follow the black arrows in the Five Insights ideogram, and see that the anomalies that are linked by those arrows cause or create one another:

• By using narrowly conceived self-interest as guiding light (which we here called convenience), we co-create, without seeing that, destructive power structures
• Our inability to see and reconfigure our collective mind is just a special case of the anomaly we called power structure
• Lacking information that can 'show us the way', we have no other recourse but to be socialized to accept the present paradigm as "the reality"
• Once we've adopted "mirroring reality" to be what truth and information are about—then it follows as a natural consequence to adopt the traditional science as the method by which truth and meaning are created
• Since the narrow frame tells us next to nothing about the possibilities of "human development", we had no other resort but to "pursue happiness" by pursuing convenience

The red arrows form a benign cycle

The red arrows show that we cannot really change one of the insights they connect together, without also changing the other.

• To step beyond the convenience paradox and develop the "human quality" (as Aurelio Peccei claimed we must), our collective mind must be able to federate the insights that illuminate the way; to begin to transform our collective mind (which we offered as the natural place to begin or the leverage point for transforming our situation), our values must enable us to forego turf strife, and begin to self-organize
• The power structure and the socialized reality are really just two sides of a single coin—which are the 'hardware' and the 'software' side of our societal order of things: The power holder (power structure) has once again acquired the prerogative to legitimize itself and make itself virtually invisible—by socializing us to accept it as "reality"
• Similarly, the collective mind and the narrow frame are the 'hardware' and the 'software' aspects of our knowledge work
• We cannot see through the convenience paradox, by including ourselves in the equation—unless our culture gives us the capability to 'see ourselves in the mirror'
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Large change can be easy

We can now see why a comprehensive change can be easy, even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible. The strategy that defines the holotopia naturally follows: Instead of struggling with any of the details, we focus on changing the order of things as a whole.

And here, changing the way in which we look at the world and see the world is of course the key.

So we may not need to occupy Wall Street. But we may need to occupy the university! It is immensely good news that our future is not in the hands of the professionals whose social function is to turn money into more money—but in the hands of publicly sponsored intellectuals!

The changes we want to see in the world, including all those holotopian ones that vastly surpass our highest hopes—can be triggered in the most natural way by carrying the evolution of knowledge a step further.

What is really going on

One of our prototypes is a book manuscript titled "What's Going On?", and subtitle "A Cultural Revival". The point was to re-define what constitutes the news; and the spectacle. What's presented in the book is a most spectacular moment in human history, which we are living through right now.

The "problems" we are experiencing are like cracks in the walls of a house whose foundations are failing. Indeed (when we dig a bit under the surface of things and take a look)—there aren't any foundations, really, to speak about. What's there has never been constructed. We are just building on whatever terrain things happened to be placed. Just building further. And higher.


What's Going on ideogram

Ten dialogs

The five insights here present us with a context within which age-old themes and challenges can be explored and understood in a completely new way—in the context of the emerging paradigm, the holotopia.

Hence we here, in this context, open the dialogs on fifteen most timely themes—which we label by the five insights, and their ten direct relationships. Since we've already seen the insights, only ten conversations remain to be described.

We provide here only the titles and some hints—and leave it to the dialogs to unpack their meaning, and develop it further.

Co-opt Wall Street—the Future of Business

The Co-opt Wall Street—the Future of Business conversation takes place in the context provided by the Convenience Paradox insight and the Power Structure insight.

How can the emerging re-evolution have enough power to overthrow the powerful? No conflict of power is needed; we can just simply co-opt them!

The power and the powerful, as we've come to perceive them, are both part and parcel of the power structure. The key is to see that our real interests, both personal and global, run counter to the interests of the power structure.

The Adbusters left us a useful concept, "decooling"; a decooling of the popular notions of success and power is ready to take place.

Cybernetics and the Future of Democracy

The Cybernetics and the Future of Democracy conversation has the Power Structure insight and the Collective Mind insight as context.

Cybernetics has taught us that to be governable, a system must have a certain minimal structure—which our systems, and notably our democracies, do not have. Can anyone be in control—in a bus with candle headlights?

Here belongs also the Wiener's paradox—the easily demonstrable fact that the information, as produced in academia has lost its agency (capability to be turned into knowledge, and action). The Wiener–Jantsch–Reagan thread, detailed in Federation through Conversations, provides a suitable springboard story (and we may make this conversation a jour by adding also Donald Trump).

Ludens—A Recent History of Humankind

The Ludens—A Recent History of Humankind conversation combines the Collective Mind insight and the Socialized Reality insight.

While we may be biologically equipped to evolve as the homo sapiens, we have in recent decades devolved culturally as the homo ludens, man the (game) player—who shuns knowledge and merely learns his various roles, and plays them out competitively.

The point here is to see that our collective mind being as it is (mostly only broadcasting knowledge), we have no other recourse but to deal with the complex reality in the homo ludens way—i.e. by being socialized into our roles.

The Nietzsche–Ehrlich–Giddens thread, detailed in Federation through Conversations, may provide a suitable start.

Future Science

The Future Science conversation combines the Socialized Reality insight and the Narrow Frame insight.

Here we take up the academic dialog in front of the mirror: Has science become a "plagiarist of its own past", as Benjamin Lee Whorf warned us?

Can the academia now make a decisive step 'through the mirror' (by redefining the relationship we as culture have with information)—and lead our society to the other side?




Liberation—The Future of Religion

The Liberation—The Future of Religion conversation has the Socialized Reality insight and the Convenience Paradox insight as context.

In the traditional societies, religion has played the all-important role of connecting the people to an ethical purpose, and to each other. Heisenberg made a case for the narrow frame insight by pointing the demolition of religion it caused, and the erosion of values that resulted. Can this trend be reversed?

Can we put an end to religion-inspired hatred, terrorism and conflict—by evolving religion further?

The story of Buddhadasa's rediscovery of the Buddha's original insight—in which he recognized the essence of all religion—might be a natural way to begin. The point here is to (create a way to knowledge that enables us to) perceive the liberation from any narrow frame—religions or scientific—and indeed from all forms of egoism and hence of power structure and power-based identity, as the very core of the Buddha's teaching, and as an enlightened way to happiness.

From One to Infinity—The Future of Happiness

The From One to Infinity—The Future of Happiness conversation combines the Convenience Paradox insight and the Collective Mind insight.

All we know about happiness is in the interval between zero (complete misery) and one ("normal" happiness); but what about the rest? What about the happiness between one and plus infinity?

This conversation is about the humanity's best kept secret—that there are realms of thriving and fulfillment, beyond what we've experienced and know it exists.

While (related to convenience paradox) we defined culture and cultivation by analogy with cultivation of plants, there is a core difference here that needs to be overcome through concerted action: The results of inner cultivation cannot be seen!

Could this insight constitute the very 'carrot' that Peccei might have been looking for?

How to Put an End to War

The How to Put an End to War conversation takes place in the context provided by the Power Structure insight and the Socialized Reality insight

Alfred Nobel had the right idea: Empower the creative people and their ideas, and the humanity's all-sided progress will naturally be secured. But our creativity, when applied to the cause of peace, has largely favored the palliative approaches (resolving specific conflicts and improving specific situations), and ignoring those more interesting curative ones. What would it take to really put an end to war—once and for all?

A combination of the power structure insight and the socialized reality insight will help us see why putting an end to is realistically possible: The war is only possible when we live in a worldview which we've been socialized to accept as "reality" by the power structure!

The Chomsky–Harari–Graeber thread, discussed in Federation through Conversations, will provide us a suitable start.

Largest Contribution to Knowledge

The Largest Contribution to Knowledge conversation has the Collective Mind insight and the Narrow Frame insight as context.

It is easy to see (and we've shown that already) why the systemic contributions to human knowledge (improvements of the 'algorithm' by which knowledge is handled in our society) are incomparably larger than specific contributions of knowledge. But there is a contribution to human knowledge that is still larger—the contribution of a way in which the systemic solutions for knowledge work can continuously evolve!

This conversation is, in other words, about our proposal to add knowledge federation to the academic repertoire of fields—and thereby the capability to evolve knowledge and knowledge-work systems by federating knowledge.

Such federation, of course, involves working with the collective mind as systems or 'hardware', and with the narrow frame as methods or 'software'

From Zero to One—The Future of Education

The From Zero to One—The Future of Education conversation is in the context of the Socialized Reality insight and the Convenience Paradox insight.

In the context of those two insights, it is easy to see why, as Ken Robinson pointed out, "education kills creativity": Education has traditionally been conceived as a way to socialize people into a "reality picture", and hence into a paradigm.

To change the paradigm, creativity must be liberated—on a massive scale. Can we develop an education which has "human development" as its primary objective?

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Future Art</h3> </div>

The Future Art conversation takes place in the context of the Narrow Frame insight and the Power Structure insight.

Marcel Duchamp exhibited the urinal, and challenged the tradition. Certainly, art has always been on the forefront of change. Now that we have effaced the old and must create anew—what will the new art be like?

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<h2>Restoring knowledge to power</h2>

Let us conclude by pointing to a possibility that is inherent in the proposed transdisciplinary approach to knowledge, as modeled by the holoscope—to restore knowledge to power.

<h2>We can see the elephant!</h2>

And here too, all we need to do is continue the evolution of knowledge a step further, by federating knowledge: Post-structuralism permitted us to interpret cultural artifacts freely, by showing false the supposition that they have a definitive meaning, which can be discovered. But if such interpretations may take us further away from giving such artifacts an agency—here we have a way to turn the resulting chaos into a whole new order!


Elephant ideogram

As the Elephant ideogram suggests—we can put those pieces back together; we can 'connect the dots', and see the 'elephant' (a whole new order of things that is ready to emerge.

Earlier we may have heard our most visionary thinkers talk about "a tree-trunk", "a fan", or "a water hose"; but they didn't make sense, and we ignored them. Now we can give their visions a whole new meaning—by interpreting them as the legs, the ears and the trunk of the elephant.

And this elephant is, of course, the "way to change course" that Aurelio Peccei was urging us to find.