Powered by ingenuity of innovation, the Industrial Revolution revolutionized the efficiency of human work. Where could the next revolution of this kind be coming from?

System ideogram

We look at the systems in which we live and work. Imagine them as gigantic machines, comprising people and technology. Their function is to take people's daily work as input, and turn it into socially useful effects.

While the ingenuity of our innovation has been focused on small gadgets we can hold in our hand—we have overlooked this incomparably more important creative frontier.

We will here be taking about the very heart of our matter: Innovation, understood as "using our creative abilities", is what drives our civilization or 'bus' or societal and cultural evolution forward. The value or the rule of thumb we are using to direct our creativity is to rely on free competition, or the market. How well does this serve us?

Power structure costs

A costly oversight

How much is ignoring "the systems in which we live and work" costing us?

On Page 4 of the article The Game-Changing Game–A Practical Way to Craft the Future we answered this question by a summary of our Ferguson–McCandless–Fuller thread, of which we here provide highlights.

The costs are systemically caused

A quick look at David McCandless' Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009 will show that the costs of two issues ("Worldwide cost of financial crisis" and "Iraq & Afganistan wars total eventual cost") dominate the image so dramatically, that the costs of issues such as "to lift one billion people out of extreme poverty", "African debt" and to "save the amazon" seem insignificant in comparison.

We tell the story of Charles Ferguson's two award-winning documentaries to highlight—as he did in his films—that those two issues were systemically caused. Or in other words "inside jobs", as the title of Ferguson's second film suggested.

Fuller may have been right

Having predicted that by the end of the century science and technology would have advanced sufficiently to enable us, the people on the planet, to "end scarcity" and scarcity-driven competition. The other two stories in this thread suggest that Fuller may have been right.

In which case our real problem would be the system by which the use of our resources are directed. And the very values or the rule of thumb used.

In 1969 Fuller was proposing to the American Senate his a computer-based solution called the World Game, whose purpose was to enable the global policy makers to see the world as one, and collaborate instead of competing.

Power structure devolution

Competition vs. collaboration

We rely on "the survival of the fittest" or the "free competition", to direct our creative efforts, give direction to our 'bus', and even decide how the systems in which we live and work are to be structured. How well does this serve us?

On The Paradigm Strategy Poster (which was one of the forerunner prototypes to Holotopia) we used the homsky–Harari–Graeber thread to provide a poignant answer to this all-important question. Once again we provide only highlights.

The "fittest" systems are not the best

The real-life history of "Alexander the Great", as told by Graeber, has all the elements we may want from a parable: The "fittest" system of its era (Alexander's army, with its corresponding "business model") was destroying freedom, culture, and life itself. It even had "financial innovation" as one of its core elements!

We supplemented a reflection on Joel Bakan's "the Corporation", to show that while today the most powerful power structure may look entirely different than it did twenty-five centuries ago, its essential nature has remain unchanged.

The stories of Noam Chomsky and Noah Yuval Harari allow us to deepen our understanding of the dynamics that underlie the power structure devolution. We'll return to them when discussing the socialized reality insight.

power structure as evil doer

The enemy is us

"We have seen the enemy, and he is us" said famously Pogo, Walt Kelly's cartoon hero. A funny-enough idea for a cartoon; but could it be real?

Cruelty has been modernized

The cruelty in modernity has changed its form, observed Bauman. It no longer requires cruel people; "normal" people, "doing their jobs"—within the structure of a modern organization, will do just fine.

Perhaps the most daring of Zygmunt Bauman's aring ideas is that even the concentration camps were only extreme cases of cruelty that resulted in this way.

This has not been understood

The movie "The Reader" allows us to extend Bauman's observations. And indeed in several most interesting ways.

By telling the story of a woman who, as a concentration camp guard, was part of an unthinkable cruelty because she was "only doing her job", and because "otherwise there would be chaos", the movie gives a vivid confirmation of Bauman's ideas.

Then there is scapegoating. As this film showed, while the order of things or the power structure was as it was, people simply adjusted to it and obeyed it. When, however, the order of things changed, they woke up as if from a dream—and started looking for a scapegoat. The culprit ended up being XX—perhaps the most naive and relatively most honorable of them all.

Finally, and perhaps the most striking, were the critical reactions to this film. While its Wikipedia page listed a number of descriptions, and quotations of critical responses, there is not a single word about this film's real and all-important theme. An issue to which we've given the name power structure—and endeavor now to legitimize it as an issue, and perhaps as the issue.

Systemic innovation as solution

Erich Jantsch's insight

Having delivered the opening keynote at the inaugural meeting of The Club of Rome, Erich Jantsch clearly saw what needed to be done, if the "problematique" was to be resolved (see it outlined here and here).

Our society needs a new capability—to update the systems in which we live and work. Jantsch called it "systemic innovation", and we adopted from him this keyword.

We let Jantsch be the symbol of a missing link between two bodies of work and lines of interest: cybernetics or the systems sciences, and the need to make our civilization "sustainable". In this present holotopia prototype, those interests are symbolized respectively by Norbert Wiener and Aurelio Peccei.

Power Structure ideogram

The Power Structure ideogram—as our ideograms tend to, points to an uncommon way of looking at the world and perceiving an issue, concretely the issue of power, which we now need to become able to develop.

The dollar sign in the ideogram represents the power as we are accustomed to perceive it—namely as the power of money, of a social class, a political party or a dictator.

The stethoscope stands for health or wholeness. And since in holotopia we are already accustomed to seeing our own personal wholeness as inseparable from the wholeness of our socio-technical systems and the wholeness of our biosphere, and of our lifestyle, we are ready to condense them all into a single entity and call it wholeness.

The book represents our idea world in a most general sense, which includes our laws, values, ethics, ways of thinking and perceiving the world, ways of creating and handling information...

The point of the Power Structure ideogram is that those three entities are closely related, but in ways that need to be illuminated by suitable information. And when we do, a whole new entity is seen in the light of day, which earlier seemed nonexistent—the power structure.

Power structure

Every genuine revolution—and the holotopia as the revolution in awareness is not an exception—is conditioned upon a new way of perceiving the issue of power. In the history of the world's oldest still living democracy, to name an example, giant leaps forward were made when the word "men" in its motto "All men are created equal" was seen as including non-European men, and also women.

We offer the power structure as a most interesting new turn in this evolution—where the traditional "power holder" is not necessarily a dictator, a powerful clique, "the 1%" or any of the traditional power holders, but a structure, through which power is extended into the order of things in our material world, and a corresponding one in the world of ideas.

You will now easily see how this perception once again leads us to the observation that the whole thing needs to be dealt with and changed—from which the holotopia strategy follows. Here, however, we see that "the whole thing" is far more inclusive than we may have originally anticipated. As we shall see, this gives us completely new challenges, and quite wonderful possibilities.

The most exciting possibility here is that while our political and ethical sensibilities may be directed toward the enemies of times gone by—we may be unable to even perceive the real enemy, our real threat. And to make things worse—our very perception may be part of the power structure, evolving in ways that make us obedient, and subservient, to our worst and most dangerous enemy.

To complete the power structure model, we would need all that is currently told in this outline of the holotopia, and even a bit more. A proper explanation is given in the last chapter, Chapter Four, of the book manuscript Information Must Be Designed (the password for opening the chapters is Dubrovnik)—where the first three chapters introduce the methodology we discuss with the narrow frame insight; and the fourth chapter shows why this new approach to knowledge is a necessary part of our society's 'immune system' (without it, we cannot even see the enemy).

Here, however, we'll simplify this presentation and bring it down to earth, by representing the power structure by two metaphorical images.

Power structure as 'cancer'

The first thing that needs to be said about the power structure is that it is not necessarily a recognizable entity, but a pattern. This idea, which will become more clear when we'll be talking about the methodology, can easily be understood if we imagine it as social-systemic cancer. Or in other words—as a deformation of the healthy tissues and organs, which continues to grow beyond bounds and sap the organism's vitality—while the organism's immune system is failing to recognize it as a threat, and treats it as it does the organism's healthy tissues and organs.

Our challenge and opportunity will then be to find remedies to this pervasive systemic illness.

Power structure as 'magnet'

Imagine us people as small magnets. Imagine that there is a "natural" orientation, how we need to be aligned—which is provided by the magnetic field of our planet. This would mean orienting our action as it suits the wholeness of our planetary and other systems.

Imagine that some of the magnets detached themselves from this field, and perceiving "their own interests" differently, decided to create a different field, by alining human 'magnets' accordingly. So there is now this other field, which—as more and more people align themselves to it—becomes so much stronger than the original field, that this latter cannot even be felt any longer.

The enemy is us

The power structure model turns the conventional idea of power and politics on its head. We see that we are "the enemy". Our social order of things, our culture, values, ideas...

However angry we may feel, there is nobody to blame. On the contrary—we are all in this together.

According to the conventional idea, in every political or power game there are winners and there are losers. In this emerging scenario, all of us are losers; those who see themselves as winners—do that because the power structure created their ideas of what winning is all about.

Systemic innovation

The systemic innovation is, simply, the antidote to power structure. It means re-aligning ourselves to the systemic purpose; it means "making things whole".

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