Holotopia: Power structure

H O L O T O P I A:    F I V E    I N S I G H T S

Power structure

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. If our work has become incomparably more efficient and yet we've remained busy—should we not see whether they might be wasting our time? And if our best efforts result in problems rather than solutions—should we not check whether they might be causing those problems?

Furthermore—as the above image may also illustrate—the systems in which we live and work determine our life quality most directly. How well are they serving us in that role?

Stories

Power structure wastes resources

A costly oversight

While the ingenuity of our innovation has been focused on small gadgets we can hold in our hand—those 'gigantic machines' constitute a proportionally more important, and yet overlooked creative frontier. How much is this oversight costing us?

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

As always, our stories are intended to vividly illustrate rather than rigorously prove the proposed views.

David McCandless: The Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009

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 ("to lift one billion people out of extreme poverty", "African debt", "save the amazon"...) seem insignificant in comparison.

The largest costs are systemically caused

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 that they were "inside jobs", as the title of Ferguson's second film suggested.

Fuller may have been right

In the late 1960s, Buckminster Fuller predicted that by the end of the century science and technology would have advanced enough to enable us, the people on the planet, to put an end to scarcity. And that our core challenge would be to reconfigure the use and distribution of those resources—which now sapped through scarcity-based competition.

What we have just seen suggests that Fuller may have been right.

In 1969 Fuller proposed to the American Senate a computer-based solution called the World Game. Its whose purpose was to enable the global policy makers to see the world as one, and collaborate on allocating and sharing its resources, instead of competing.

Power structure causes devolution

Competition vs. collaboration

But what is really the power structure? While our understanding will deepen gradually as we go along, what's we've just seen might already suggest that power structures are the systems in which we live and work, or "structures", that emerge when we compete instead of collaborating, and trust that "the invisible hand" of the "free market" will secure that the result is the best possible one.

This popular myth, that competition (rather than informed co-creation) leads to the best possible world, appears to follow from Darwin's theory of evolution. Isn't that the way in which nature uses her creativity?

"Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory", wrote Norbert Wiener.

On The Paradigm Strategy Poster (which was one of the forerunner prototypes to Holotopia) we used the homsky–Harari–Graeber thread to illustrate this point.

But what should we, really, have learned from Darwin? We preceded this thread by discussing Richard Dawkins' core insight, published in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". His point—which subsequently led to "memetics" as its application to cultural and societal evolution—was that the evolution must not be thought of as favoring utility or perfection of any kind, but the fittest or best adapted gene (or the fittest "meme", when it is cultural or social evolution we are talking about).

The "fittest" is not the best

So what does this mean, practically and concretely?

We answered this question by using the real-life history of "Alexander the Great" as a parable, as told by David Graeber, because it has all the elements we may want, to illustrate our points: The "fittest" system of its era (Alexander's army, with its corresponding "business model") was turning free people into slaves, destroying societies and cultures, homes, monasteries and palaces... and it even had "financial innovation" as one of its core elements!

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.

You may be working for a psychopath

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

As a law professor, Bakan explained how the modern corporation with time evolved to become the most powerful institution on the planet. And how—through a few centuries of legal maneuvering—it acquired the legal status of a person, but without the corresponding accountability. So Bakan asked—if the corporation is a person, what sort of person is it? In his documentary, and the corresponding book, Bakan showed that the corporation has all the characteristics that qualify a psychopath.

Power structure is us

The enemy is us

"We have seen the enemy, and he is us" said famously Pogo, Walt Kelly's cartoon hero. A funny 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, "just doing their jobs"—within the structure of a modern organization, will do perfectly.

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.

Bauman has not yet been heard

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 is the key to 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.

Ideogram

Power Structure ideogram

The Power Structure ideogram depicts the power structure as an entity of a completely new kind.

The dollar sign in the ideogram represents the instruments of power as we are accustomed to perceive them: money, weapons, censorship, dictatorship...

The stethoscope represents health or wholeness, to begin with our own—which, in holotopia, you've already learned to perceive as indistinguishable from the wholeness of our institutions and other systems in which we live and work, and from the wholeness of our bio-physical life-support systems.

The book represents our culture in a most general sense, which includes our ideas about the world, ethical principles, laws and ways of handling information.

The point made by the Power Structure ideogram is that those three entities are so closely related, that they need to be perceived as a single entity. But that their relationships are not discernible by the naked eye; and that therefore suitable information, or the holoscope, needs to be used to make them visible.

A bit simpler and still correct interpretation would be to consider the dollar sign as representing just power; and to consider the stethoscope and the book as representing the 'hardware' and the 'software' of our society-and-culture. The message of the ideogram will then be that—in subtle ways, which need to be carefully understood or 'illuminated'—the power interests are capable to corrupt, and in effect co-opt the systems in which we live and work, and even the values and ideas that directly govern our own behavior.

Keywords

Power structure

Our invisible enemy

Every genuine revolution—and the holotopia is not an exception—includes a change of the way in which the issues of power, freedom and justice are perceived. Even nuances can make a difference. Just recall, for instance, the difference that was made by changing the meaning of the word "men", in its motto "All men are created equal" of the world's oldest living democracy, to include also black men, and women.

The power structure, however, is not a small change. We are talking about changing the very idea of "power holder"; of our potential political "enemy"—toward whom our precaution, and political action, need to be directed.

To create a whole new entity, which is not a visible object but a construction—and make it the central theme of the age-old human quest for freedom and justice—may at first seem implausible; even preposterous. It will take more than a moment of thought, in the light of the evidence shared with all five insights and even a bit more, to fully comprehend why this is perfectly legitimate; and the sweeping consequences it is leading us to.

A signature theme in knowledge federation is to combine the most basic insights reaching us from distinct fields of interest, to create an even more basic insight. The power structure construction involved a combination of the most basic insights from artificial intelligence, artificial life and stochastic optimization, to show why spontaneously emerging structures can evolve to have characteristics of living beings, endowed with intelligence and purpose—even without anyone's intention, or even awareness of its existence. A more complete explanation is given in the book manuscript Information Must Be Designed (the password for opening the chapters is Dubrovnik)—where the first three chapters explain the construction of new 'headlights', or of what we here call the holoscope; and where the fourth chapter shows why this new approach to knowledge is a necessary part of our society's 'immune system'—because without it, we cannot even see our enemy!

Here, however, we will illustrate the basic idea and the dynamics of the power structure by two metaphorical images. And we already see some of the explanatory and predictive power of this new way of looking.

Power structure as 'magnet'

Imagine us people as small magnets. Think of the magnetic field of the Earth as providing a "natural" orientation for the magnets—symbolizing the way we need to be aligned, to support the wholeness of our planetary and other systems. To be "in tune with reality".

Imagine that some of the magnets detached themselves from this field, and having perceiving "their own interests" differently, created a different field, by alining themselves together. As more and more people align themselves to this new field, the field becomes stronger—so that ultimately the original orientation may not even be felt.

This simplistic image illustrates several properties of the power structure. For instance that the power relationships are not visible but subtle. The 'field' just subtly orients the seemingly random or free movement of the magnets. And yet after many such subtle redirections—the result is that everyone is aligned, without even noticing that.

Another point made is that the greater power that we get by aligning ourselves to the power structure is an illusionary power—we only get to partake in the power of the power structure, by surrendering our own power to it. We enjoy the illusion of power only as long as our behavior is compliant to the interests of the power structure. <p>This simple model also helps us understand how Erich Jantsch and (as we shall see again and again in this presentation) so many of the 20th century's leading edge thinkers got ignored: They did not align themselves with the power structure. They were not only aligned with another 'magnetic field'—but they were also doing their best to realign others accordingly. But alas—they just didn't have enough power to do that.

Power structure as 'cancer'

It needs to be carefully understood that the power structure is not a recognizable entity, but a pattern. This can easily be understood if we imagine it as social-systemic cancer—which is also not a distinct entity, but a deformation of an organism's healthy tissues and organs. A cancer can grow beyond bounds and sap the organism's vitality, because 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.

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. There's our side, and there is "them". In this emerging scenario, all of us are losers! Those who see themselves as winners—do so because the power structure created their ideas of what winning and losing are about. It is indeed difficult to imagine a rational argument where anyone's "winning" is compatible with the kind of futures that the power structures are now leading us toward.

Recreating ethics

From here the holotopia's "rule of thumb" logically follows, as ethical or evolutionary stance. <p>When we follow egotism, the ethics that the modernity teaches us follow, we necessarily co-create power structures. We become part of our "enemy". It's like having dirty hands—you soil everything you touch

The ethics of transcending egotism, of seeing ourselves as parts of something larger than ourselves and adapting what we do to its needs, is of course ethics as it has always been. "The invisible hand" of free competition, that ethical perpetuum mobile we still tend to believe in, is readily seen as just a ploy of the power structure, which it devised to bind us to it.

The rest, however, is a proper re-creation of the traditional ethics. If it may seen that "our job" or "our duty" is to earn money to our corporation, or to publish journal articles in our field of interest—we have now come to understand how our very understanding of what our job is and where our loyalties and allegiances are due is the key to being part of the solution. And so performance, and excellence, are seen in completely different light than they did before.

Reinventing politics

Even more than the ethics, the traditional idea of politics is turned on its head by the power structure view. The politics has always been conceived as one group against another: slaves against slave owners, workers against capitalists, one country against another, your interests against mine, us against them. But in the power structure view there is no "them", there is only "us"! So collaboration, rather than conflict and strife, become the means of choice to political ends. Self-organization against the power structure become the key new modality of political action.

Systemic innovation

The systemic innovation is the remedy to power structure. It means using our creative capabilities to make things whole. It means 'driving' in the new direction, which the holotopia's rule of thumb is pointing to.

Prototypes

Authentic Travel

Recreating tourism

As you may have understood, the power structure is not in itself bad. It's what organizes us together into a larger entity, and what has power—both over us, and through us over our environment. The key question is here is how the power structures evolve—by "survival of the fittest" (which, as we have seen, tends to favor the most aggressive and damaging ones), or by systemic innovation or conscious design.

The Authentic Travel prototype is indeed a collection of prototypes we've developed in tourism or travel—an important sector of economy and culture.

Since the beginning of time, people traveled to get to know other cultures, and in that way also their own culture, and themselves. But the market, or "the economies of scale",favored the "mass tourism". To see the variety of issues that our Authentic Travel prototypes aim to respond to, you may imagine "modernization" coming to some quaint fishing village on an exotic island, bulldozers raising the old architecture to the ground to make space for hotels and resorts. The local people serving drinks if they happen to speak English, selling cheap souvenirs on the beach otherwise. The ubiquitous "tanned couple on the beach" advertising erasing the very idea of what travel is really all about to all of us back home.

Within one of our prototypes, Dagali 2006, an entire 250-people company (SAP Netherlands, celebrating their anniversary) was brought as guests to a village called Dagali "in the middle of Norway". In the evening many of the visitors were guests sleeping in people's houses. During the day the visitors, divided into ten teans, were experiencing (as arranged by the locals, and guided by the members of the project's transdiscipline including its academic advisors disguised as team guides), what growing up and living "in the middle of Norway" might feel like. The first evening, of the arrival day, the locals made a wonderful party for them in a large barn, where everyone had a chance to meet and celebrate. The second evening the guests made a dinner party for the locals. When on the third day a boat tour through a spectacular scenery of the Samnanger Fjord brought us to perhaps the most authentic and exclusive Solstrand Hotel on the West coast of Norway—the comment was heard "What are we doing here; why didn't we stay one more day in Dagali?

Recreating the power structure

In the UTEA Franchise prototype, the challenge was to recreate the conventional tourism business model, to support authentic meeting of people and cultures, small and endangered economies and cultures, and reverse all the various negative trends we've pointed to above. We showed how conventional business resources can be combined; including even a McKenzie expert advisor helping us create a business plan for a venture cup competition. We even devised a method called [https://folk.uio.no/dino/ID/Articles/ME.pdf memetic engineering—for empowering endangered or remedial cultural memes by combining them with business ones. The genetic engineering idea adapted to business and culture.

The central meme was "authentic travel" as developed and practiced by Karina Fürst and her company Authenticore in Norway. A salient characteristic of this approach is that it is entirely based on supporting "authenticity" in every step (a core theme in holotopia, yet to be developed).

Unraveling a cultural genocide

The recent civil war in Bosnia and Hercegovina had all the characteristic elements of a genocide, with concentration camps and all. At its center, however, was an attempt at a cultural genocide. How does one restore a culture which has received a fatal blow—after the destroyed architectural objects have been restored? We developed the Authentic Hercegovina prototype as both a concrete instance, and a template.