"The Compatibility of Social Systems"

 

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Abstract

Using notions discerned in the Integrity Paradigm ( 1973,1992) global economics is treated as an integration of coordinated biological systems. People, organizations, firms, local economies, trans-nationals, the natural environment, etc are evaluated as requiring open optionspaces in which to thrive, mature, sustain and adapt. This means regarding each for their contributions to the whole while honoring their respective survival needs. It means literal re-application of the word "resources". I.e., money, people, skills, knowledge, materials, time, are re-'sources' equal with any in a Biotic matrix. They are crucial well-springs of energy/information/creativity which may be and indeed need to be used over and over again in order to sustain the "whole". This viewpoint also requires re-considering the nature of 'leadership' - at all levels - where responsibility to the broader welfare of peoples, organizations, the biota, supersede the raw quest for power and control - which tends to suffocate "survival" in the broadest sense.

Keywords: commerce, exchange, re-sources, Integrity, sustainability

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1. System is Process is Continuum is Communication

"Communication" is not just a convenience that humans use to share ideas. When you look at it deeply and with concern about: ‘What do information and signal exchanges accomplish for any systems which engage in these back-and-forth transmissions?’, suddenly something very extraordinary becomes apparent.  An exchange isn’t just some casual latency to be used or rejected at whim. The act/event "binds" - without exception - a receiver and sender into behavioral coherence and connection. Communication co-ordinates entities and organizations into systems. And not just people, but everything. This is the key concept from the Integrity Paradigm : the notion that communication - in one form or another - pervades every system imaginable and is indeed the foundation on which complexity - the formation of functionally integrated systems - is achieved in the universe. This isn't just some theoretical idea, but an observation of what is involved in system dynamics. Communication is the process is the transference of energy and/or information, applicable to all systems, whether bounded or not, whether closed or open, and whether thermodynamically or quantum mechanically described.

A system is a continuous dynamic through time, not a static configuration, and systems endure through the repetition of processes. An atom speeding through space may constitute a transmission of energy/information, and the atom itself may constitute a systemic identity, but its spatial motion can be irrelevant because it may not contribute to any other organizational process. However, have that energy - even it’s gravitational field - interact with other atoms, channel that through alternative pathways, and you have the beginning components of what is intrinsically meant by "system". Take that one step further and discern definite recursive energy loops and it becomes obvious to say that the recursion is in fact another level of process-system that has been created from component systems.

Once recursion - literally "re-occurrence" - becomes apparent as the primal characteristic/process of systems, we also become aware that sustainability is a fundamental corollary characteristic in the universe as well. Recursion and sustainability are merely different aspects of on-goingness.

In order to deal with sustainability in the applications we are most concerned with ... "sustaining" civilization, the full gaian biota, economies and cultures, it will help to explore the factors that contribute to successful re-cursiveness. Intuitively, we tend to think that one of the required factors is having all participating components in place at all times, like a clockwork mechanism or auto engine. But that is not necessarily the case.

2. Virtual is Transient is Real

It really doesn't matter if a system reflects all the steps of the process at the same time. It’s only necessary for the series of steps to repeat themselves at sometime - what in systems dynamics (even fractal organization) in known as retracing.

When processes loop through some conveniently observable time span - like watching the harmonic swings of a pendulum - it’s easy to recognize the "system" present. But most systems aren’t like that. Metabolic systems for example "destroy" molecules in order to make new ones. But what makes "metabolism" a recursive integrated system is the fact that somewhere along the sequence replacement molecules that match the ones destroyed are re-formed, to fuel and maintain the metabolic process. For example, in cellular metabolisms there is a sequence called the Kreb Citric Acid Cycle. Biochemists can chart an elaborate schemata of chemical interactions - ingested food, breaking down to important molecules, those molecules interacting with other molecules, releasing energy, driving the production of other molecules, eventually producing subsequent molecules which are needed in the re-enactment of the initial chemical mixture, to engage that cycle over again. This includes of course the concurrence of many corollary side reactions. But, not all the chemical components of the cycle have to be present at all times. The traceable cycle itself constitutes an integral robust system and "entity" just by recursion alone. It is such streams of electron and atomic communications configuration which form the basis of our living bodies.

Additionally, the health of systems processes depends upon the factors having more than one purpose. Not only do the factors or components have a utility at some point in the process, but at their inactive times they also represent potential... waiting to participate, and also, an impedance... being in the way of alternative transactions of immediacy. A car is great on the road or in the garage, but not in the kitchen ... assuming that it has to be parked "someplace". It may be useful to get us to the market to buy food, but it's no good if it blocks access to the refrigerator or oven. This may be silly and "obvious", but putting it into those terms instructs us about the underscoring relational organizations of systems. Appropriateness of time and place, shear availability of a product or mechanism, and even inadvertent competition can affect systems "health". For another example, it’s perfectly reasonable and normal to share the roadway with other drivers and cars, but when an ambulance comes barreling along, it’s become standard courtesy (and legal obligation) to move off the road and let the emergency vehicle pass. No one intentionally drives on roadways with the idea of blocking a rushing ambulance. No molecule "intentionally" floats in the path of another molecule involved in an alternate metabolic loop. It just happens. And whether car or molecule, being in an inappropriate place at an inappropriate moment effectively creates a barrier wall or gate that shunts some energy flow in progress. In another venue, we might label such barriers "trade tariffs", or "entrance exams" or "entrance fees" and so on. Systems of all sorts, shape, sizes and compositions, not competing per se, but coordinating their trends, momentums and abilities.

3. "Process" is the Criteria

Life -- the natural universe -- builds complex systems based on such communication activities, and so it also uses efficiency criteria, something artificially contrived organizations don't always take into account. The healthiest systems are those which are built up from prior assemblies. Their "work-space" isn’t cluttered with garbage or unusable materials. One way to preserve a system’s proficiency is by constantly disassembling and re-assembling molecules and organisms, using and creating, storing and applying energy along the way. Nothing completely "goes to waste". There are very few biochemical "end products". The majority of the elements get re-incorporated somehow on a bodily level, and anything that is "waste product" locally, is typically usable in companion and other biologic and biotic metabolic systems.

Sustainability, in the recursive communication of metabolically re-organisable molecules, is a systems process, something we all know well as symbiosis. Symbiosis can be viewed as the open commerce process used by the natural gaian ecosystem, such as the continual swapping of carbon dioxide for oxygen and back again between the animal and plant kingdoms. Nothing completely "goes to waste". Freeman Dyson did a masterful analysis of this system in action in "Infinite in All Directions" (Dyson,1988), discussing how the world's oceans - in the midst of this global chemistry swap - can act as a sump or holding tank for the enormous amount of carbon dioxide inordinately produced by industrial fossil fuel burning, thereby gaianly helping to compensate one form of human pollution. Some of this pollution goes into active metabolisms and increased populations, but some also gets shunted into and stored as calcium carbonate shells Of course, Dyson added the caveat that this burdening imbalance can't go on forever. He warns that increased oceanic CO₂ has a saturation limit and has probably merely bought us some time in which to somehow change our energy processing systems.

For 99.99% of human history there were few enough of us, along with enough living space, that we could make a mess now and again, and not have to suffer any dire consequences. But, just as x-parts per million of a gas may be detectable, even tolerable to our comfortable sense of smell, simply raising that to a larger more prominent density -- have those chemicals block us from experiencing other important scents, as it were -- and we become pressed to escape the situation or change it. Either that, or keep running to allergists to help mask the reactive symptoms and avoid the underlying problem.

We have a planet population of 6 billion people which is increasing every day. The overall quality of life - several billion years in development - is being diminished to threatening levels no matter how many test projects or partial technological fixes or hyperfertilized food farms there are contributing to manipulated artificial systemic communication improvements. We are benefiting from the artificial contrivances of industry, but there is a cost. Part of the cost has to do with the fact that those products and the systems we have created to get them and maintain "commerce" don’t reflect the hyperintegration of systems in the natural world. We have an incredible future to gain by continuing our establishment of a global human SomaPsyche (a coordinated polity of body, thought, material goods, services and information), but it must be an extension of biotic maximally integrated Gaian competence, not some functionally limited and edited incomplete model of it.

When we examine the cultures barely surviving on the borders of the world's deserts, when we look at civilizations like Shang-Xu - the real Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - that disappeared with climatic changes, or the coastal pre-Incan civilizations of Peru that dwindled because tectonic plate thrust took their cities beyond the reach of canalled mountain waters, when we consider the mass destruction of native animals in the 19th century United States western region, or the destruction of the Rainforests, or the draining of the Ural Sea, or the loss of human potential to narcotics and traumatically siezured and halted economies, we are looking at the same problem in different guises. As we look over the human population we are looking at an evolved animal which doesn't really 'get it' yet. Continued survival, not to mention the chance to improve, rely entirely and absolutely on human participation in the "on-goingness" of existence. Our survival will rely upon systemic processes and re-currences, applied to economic organizations as equally as ecological ones. It will require that we not be strictly "end user" consumers. It will require that we respect material goods and the environment and each other as valuable re-sources in the planetary flows of energy.

4. Information Transduced to Action

All resources need to be understood not only as here-and-now usable "source material", but truly as "re-plenishable sources in whatever systems are necessary". That means we must conscientiously act on all the ideas of sustenance, and apply them equally no matter what systems parts we are dealing with - biologic, economic or conceptual. Money has value because we gain it and give it, anticipating gaining and giving again in the future. Keep it forever parked someplace and it loses it's purpose, diminishing a healthy useful flow for economies and lives. Lock up information in libraries with short Open hours, or restrict students from quality schools, or don't re-educate or re-train working people, and reap the negative rewards. Yes, "reserves" and "accumulations" are necessary and important too. Such things in fact assist by allowing cumulative allocations to people, organizations and events that need extra funding. They induce a systemic gradient and focus of energy which can get things accomplished. So there must be a blend ...acquisition and re-distribution, cycling and changing and accomplishing ... the health of whatever soma-structure exists.. organism, person, community, nation, corporation, Gaia, et al.

5. A Systems Opinion:     Economy = Ecology

In 1990 Kenichi Ohmae (McKinsey & Co) published a book called "Borderless World" in which he examined the systems responsibilities of "managers" concerned with global economic maintenance. Ohmae made many insightful suggestions, using unrestrained free market dynamics as base. In other words, he favors open competition and reliance on the expectation that any holes in commercial needs will be filled. Someone, somewhere, sometime will always be there to rise to the occasion and produce goods or provide services that the general market place identifies as wanting or needing.

I admire Ohmae because he focuses sharply on what it takes to be a good global economy manager, whether on the fullest scale, or concerned with a local region, nation, or commodity. Management, including bureaucrats, make decisions which affect the quality of life of planetary companions. Ohmae brings the vision that global managers aren’t just job-doers, but direct contributors to the health and welfare of the body-biologic-economic.

I just have one caveat, which I wrote about in "Understanding the Integral Universe"(1992), (this particular section being available on the Internet at <ceptualinstitute.com/uiu_plus/uiuenvelopment.htm>). In my opinion the global economy should be treated as a natural ecosystem, bringing to bear similar concerns we approach the "natural" world with. The healthiest ecosystems require a balance in the flow and re-newal of their components. Unfortunately, this is not the current model economists use for commerce. Demand only puts pressure on Supply, even applying incentives such as financial compensation. But Demand doesn’t contribute to enabling the materials that go into Supply. In the natural organic world it takes time for crops to grow, it takes time to shift the required metabolic components ... hyperintegrated through levels upon levels of intermediary structures, plants and animals forms. Nitrogen fixing bacteria need time to metabolize it from the air and soil, and accumulate it where roots can use a competent supply in order to grow a healthy plant body, which in turn can produce the food products that animals and people need. In other words, as competent and efficient as management/bureaucracy is in manipulating the flows of goods and services, their vision is for the immediate and necessary where as it should include the extended and interrelated impacts... i.e., whether the larger network flows of cash, commodities, and services are systemically co-supportive.

Part of original civilization development relied entirely on this process. Historically, those involved with food production understood this process of balance and renewal. Land was periodically allowed to lie fallow... letting competent integrated nature - plants, bugs and beasts - re-charge the soil with nutrients. Even nomadic herdspeople accomplished the same thing by not over-grazing pastures and fields, moving to fresh pastures and allowing grazed ones to re-grow. In the 19th and 20th centuries farmers gained wealth by using artificial fertilizers, which produced more food and encouraged explosive population growth, and in the meantime totally by-passed the natural integration processes of the organic world. Financial incentives pushed the process, assuming that quality of life could be bought, rather than produced. And humanity drifted further from systemic competence, chasing the dream of "more is better" and "local utility is all that matters".

The popular business models today, in their manipulative points of view, do not understand the importance of this integration, nor the ethical and system-health considerations involved, nor the rush-to-judgement that happens when positive profits are the sole criteria of "value". They say that corporations and businesses are only good investments if there is unabated growth year in and year out. In this model Demand cracks the whip and says "produce more money" to pay investors. Furthermore, "the minute you stop or slow down your value disappears and we’ll get some one else, some other company in here to do your job for you."

There is no real competency in such a view. There is no understanding of what the long term dynamic health of a system depends on. There is only "local immediate utility". And that will spell the destruction of all well intentioned global plans. What’s required is an attitude shift, a shift toward and real growth in the fundamental understandings of systems dynamics. Teachers do not lose their value when they are not in school teaching, but at home tending to gardens and family needs. A factory does not lose it’s value when workers are at home on weekends. So, should a company be de-valued because it can’t "guarantee" a non-variable production rate? Should people be deprived of health care because they are 75 rather than 25 years old? Should we over harvest the sea and destroy natural vegetation because we demand more from the sea and the land than they can produce, refusing to maintain the vision of a coordinated systems-universe that has encouraged our existence over the course of x-billions of years.

The universe sustains itself and all its "possibilities" on the standard of re-cursion and cyclic re-source-ing, not on threat of devaluation and extinction because a "rate" isn’t adhered to. We must treat our ‘artificial’ systems as organically as possible, and in that way regain and uphold the real value of people, and cultures and social organizations and companion life forms. And that means on all levels of human endeavor.

If larger social structures are geared to deal only with large scale processes, then it's incumbent upon every thinking person to contribute to the health of their own local spheres of function: self, family, workplace, communities, and so on - participating however and where ever possible to maintain healthy communicative flows of food, energy, knowledge, commodities, medicines, recreational materials. I’m suggesting that we become attentive to and remain alert about the interactive process dynamics of sundry systems, rather than focussing on the "things" per se. Edible crops are valuable for the nourishment they provide and the finances they counter-circulate with. Money is of no use hoarded in a vault. Value accrues to it in the sense of "purchasing power"... and exchange of value for value, applicable in subsequent transactions.

Likewise, we can turn empathy from being simply an emotion of compassion into being a pragmatic tool, helping utilize what energy or materiel or idea flows are necessary in our world to keep it all the reticulated systems healthy. Enabling each aspect the time and the space to participate in future occurrences. A "giving" is also a "getting". Sharing is communicating. And communicating creates things that couldn't exist other wise, or be the platform upon which new possibilities and potentials are reached.

The systems-universe is a juggling act of extraordinary conscious proportions, if only because we can only hope that whatever we do, we haven't overlooked anything important. We can't predict with absolutely surety the worth or value of things, peoples, life-forms or ideas. Lungs were of questionable benefit to the first animals venturing out of the oceans and into the unknown environment of air. But we exist today only because they explored alternative metabolisms. The fundamental metabolic shift was not changing the respiration system from utilizing aqueous oxygen over to using aerated oxygen. The fundamental metabolic shift that permit animals to live on land was shifting from relying on salt-water to fresh water in order to hydrate cells (Sillman, 1967). You might even say that it took an amazing change in how life processed water in order for there to be eventually arise a life form which could sustain itself with fire.

6. Cherishing "Potential"

Something that may not be important today may be absolutely crucial for survival tomorrow. So we must go out of our way to value, cherish and protect all future re-sources ... human and otherwise. The ancient Greeks of Kyrenia, North Africa, commemorated on their coins a bromeliad plant called the Sylphium. It was a nutrient source, a medicine, and worthy of artistic rendering. But we will never know now, because the only Sylphium left are carved images on little metal disks, since the plants were exploited to extinction. If there were ever a warning from our relatives just 2000 years deceased it is this clear message: we are on notice: "Do not destroy the natural world".

The conceptual and practical extensions of all this are that we need to actively explore new social communications, like Bela Banathy's "conversations"(1992) and Heiner Benking's House of Horizons and Perspectives (1997), and Barbara Marx-Hubbard's Syncon Conferences (1971), Kenichi Ohmae’s global marketplace (1990), and all the global accessibility of the Internet. Without all levels and systems-processes communications, without integrations of community, individuals accomplish precious little. The efforts of companions improve life and create opportunities for individuals. Without the substance and presence of individuals - from bacteria to sapiens and all in between...with all their present and future potentials - communities evaporate into meaningless nonexistence.

If "communication" is the substance of Systems, "sustainability" is its soul. Sustainability is the recorporating of energy, of materials, of ideas, on a continual basis . It is re-sourcing in recursive integrated loops of accumulation and distribution. Sustainability is the only technique of survival, endurance and growth. And it is the hallmark dynamic of systems, imbuing valued qualities and even meaning. Recursive communication not only binds life into what it is, but also carries the significance that we do not and cannot exist "alone". We exchange the energies of the universe and so, exist together. Otherwise, we do not exist at all.

 

References

Banathy, Bela H. 1992. Building a Design Culture, Education Technology, XXXII:33-35
Benking, Heiner. URL ceptualinstitute.com/genre/homepageHB.htm
Dyson, Freeman. Infinite in all Direction. Harper & Row, New York.
Ohmae, Kenichi. 1990. The Borderless World. Harper, New York
Quinn, Daniel. 1992. Ishmael. Bantam/Turner, New York.
. 1973. Initial formulations of a Unified Theory. SUNY Stonybrook.
. 1992. Understanding the Integral Universe. Ceptual Institute.
Sillman, Emanuel.1967. "Course in Comparative Anatomy", Duquesne University, Pittsburgh.
Theobald, Robert. 1987. The Rapids of Change. Knowledge Systems, Indianapolis

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