Difference between revisions of "Holotopia: Narrow frame"

Revision as of 08:30, 13 May 2020

ETC...

At the 59th yearly meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, whose title theme was "Governing the Anthropocene", a little old lady was wheeled to the podium in a wheelchair. She began her keynote by talking at length about how, while in the cradle, we throw our pacifier to the ground, and mother picks it up and gives it back to us; and we say "hum".

Mary Catherine Bateson is an American cultural anthropologist and cybernetician, the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, two prominent historical figures in anthropology and cybernetics. The insight she undertook to bring home in this way is alone large enough to hold the socialized reality insight and the call to action it points to—if it can be understood. Her point was that from the cradle on we learn to comprehend and organize our world in terms of causes and effects—which makes us incapable of understanding things truly, that is systemically. Or to use the way of looking at our contemporary condition—from "seeing things whole" and "making things whole". And hence from "changing course".

The "problem" we are talking about underlies each of the five insights—and hence is a key to holotopia. Isn't our "pursuit of happiness" misdirected by our misidentification of happiness with what appears to cause it—which we called convenience. And more generally, by our supposition that we know what goals are worth pursuing, because we can simply feel that. And in innovation—our ignoring of the structure of systems, and abandoning it to power structure. And in communication—our ignoring of the workings of our collective mind, and abandoning that too to power structure. And even our socialized reality is a result of our supposition that the "ana feeling" we experience when things (appear to) fit causally together as a sure sign that we've discovered the reality itself. And finally in method—which is consistently focused on finding for instance "disease causes" and eliminating them through chemical or surgical interventions and so on.

Click here to hear Mary Catherine Bateson say, in her keynote to the American Society for Cybernetics:

The problem of cybernetics is that it is not an academic discipline that belongs in a department. It is an attempt to correct an erroneous way of looking at the world and at knowledge in general. And there are all sorts of abstruse and sophisticated things that can be done with it, but on some level, what we would like is to affect what people think is common sense. Things that they take for granted, in fact are problematic: about causality; about purposes; about relationships... Universities don't have departments of epistemological therapy.

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