Holotopia: Five insights
Contents
H O L O T O P I A P R O T O T Y P E
Five Insights
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'?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Our prototypes show how the narrow frame evolution can be reversed.</p>
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Action
Federation