Changing our collective mind

Changing the subject

You might consider, just as we do, the news about Donald Trump or some terrorists as nothing really new. Why give those people the attention they don't deserve? Why use the media to spread their messages? If you are entertaining such thoughts, then you might be ready for some really good news!

Also five centuries ago an abundance of daily spectacles occupied the people's minds. And yet when we look back, what we see is Leonardo, and Copernicus... We see the rebirth of the arts and the emergence of the sciences. We see those large and slow events because they give meaning and relevance to all particular ones. We notice them even from this distance because they were so spectacularly large – and that's also why the people living at that time failed to notice them! But how much more spectacular will it be to witness this sort of development in our own time!

Although we don't talk about him directly, the elephant in the above ideogram will be the main theme of all our conversations. It is a glimpse of him that we want to give and have by talking about all those people and things. And when we talk about the elephant, you should imagine the exotic large animal appearing in a room full of people – not today, but five centuries ago, when perhaps some of those people had heard of such a creature, but none of them had ever seen one yet. The elephant in the room is a breath-taking sensation! We use this visual metaphor to point to the whole big thing – the Renaissance-like change that now wants to emerge. The elephant is invisible, but we will have glimpses of him as soon as we begin to 'connect the dots'. And isn't that what we've been doing all along!

Be mindful of our challenge: A paradigm, a new "order of things", is nothing but an immense rearrangement of relationships. There are just about infinitely many dots to be connected! We can not, and will not, try to connect them all. As the above picture might suggest, our goal is to only connect sufficiently many, so that some characteristic contours of the whole big become discernible. And to make further connection making fun and easy, by providing guidelines, and by turning this work into a social game. Yet in spite of all that, you will have to make most of the connections yourself and in your own mind – and that's inevitable!

Changing the protagonists

By shirting our attention from Trump-style scandals and sensations to the elephant, we can also give attention and credit to our giants. We can begin to truly understand what they were talking about. If earlier we heard them talk about all sorts of different things like "the fan", "the hose" and "the rope", we can now see that they were really talking about the elephant's ears, trunk and tail. Given the spectacular size and importance of our 'animal', we will then not only appreciate our giants' insights as a new breed of sensations; we will also appreciate the fact that we've ignored them so long as a new breed of scandals.

"The human race is hurtling toward a disaster. It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course", Aurelio Peccei – the co-founder, firs president and the motor power behind The Club of Rome – wrote this in 1980, in One Hundred Pages for the Future, based on this global think tank's first decade of research. Regarding the specific way in which the course will need to change, he observed: "The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

Peccei was an unordinary man. In 1944, as a member of Italian Resistance, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for six months without revealing his contacts. Peccei was also an unordinarily able business leader. While serving as the director of Fiat's operations in Latin America (and securing that the cars were there not only sold but also produced) Peccei established Italconsult, a consulting and financing agency to help the developing countries catch up with the rest. When the Italian technology giant Olivetti was in trouble, Peccei was brought in as the president, and he managed to turn its fortunes around. And yet the question that most occupied Peccei was a much larger one – the condition of our civilization as a whole; and what we may need to do to take charge of this condition.

In 1977, in "The Human Quality", Peccei formulated his answer as follows:

Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world.

Let us note in passing that the all-important insights that were reached by Peccei and The Club of Rome a half-century ago have not been ignored only by "climate deniers", but also by the activists and believers. Already in 1968, at the point of the Club's inception, its founders decided that they would not focus on individual problems, but on the overall condition or "problematique" from which they all spring – which can of course only have systemic and "outside the box" solutions.

Changing communication

Connecting Peccei's observations with some of the insights of Neil Postman will help us understand more closely our strategy – why it is that we are putting this elephant into the forefront of our attention. Several years after Peccei passed away, in 1990, Postman delivered a keynote to the German Informatics Society titled "Informing Ourselves to Death", and then published the text as a chapter in the book "The Nature of Technology". We shall here only quote a few lines from the televised interview he gave to the PBS (a link will be provided).

We've entered thne age of information glut. And this is something no culture has really faced before. A typical situation is information scarcity. (...) Lack of information can be very dangerous. But at the same time too much information can be very dangerous, because it can lead to a situation of meaninglessness, that is – people not having any basis for knowing what is relevant, what is irrelevant, what is useful, what is not useful... That they live in a culture that is simply committed, through all of its media, to generate tons of information every hour, without categorizing it in any way for you, so that you don't know what any of it means. (...) This becomes a threat not only to one's peace of mind, but much more importantly to one's sense of meaning. The problem now is not to get information to people, but how to get some meaning of what's happening.(...) We are less coherent in our understanding of information. There was a time when the word "information" always had associated with it action. That is, people sought information in order to solve some problem in their lives. And information was the instrument through which they would solve this problem. Then beginning in the 19th century information became a commodity; beginning, actually I believe with telegraphy. Something you could buy and sell. So that action association began to diminish. So that now there is nothing but information – and we are not expected to do anything with it, just consume it. (...) To know what to do with information depends on having some sort of conceptual framework; I sometimes call it, and some of my colleagues do, some "narrative", some story, which will help you decide which information you will want to seek out, and why you want to seek it out, and what it's good for. (...) Even the great story of inductive science has lost a good deal of its meaning, because it does not address several questions that all great narratives must address: Where we come from; what's going to happen to us; where we are going, that is; and what we're supposed to do when we are here. Science couldn't answer that; and technology doesn't.

Changing the tone

If you hear us knowledge federators say such off-the-wall and Trump-like things like "the climate change is a red herring", we do not mean to belittle the excellent and necessary efforts of our friends and colleagues who work so devotedly on this issue. Our point is that the climate, or any other "problem", becomes a red herring when it diverts all attention from those deeper evolutionary tasks on which our ability to find lasting solutions now depends.

By focusing on the elephant, we will work on contemporary issues, both large and small, both global and local, without even mentioning them by name! Instead of struggling to coerce the people and systems who created the problems to create solutions, our strategy is to inform and empower us the people, so that we may co-create solutions – i.e. systems – ourselves. Instead of seeing our contemporary condition as a dictate to do what we have to do, we turn it into a mandate to do what we wish to do. What could be a richer source of opportunities for achievement and contribution, than a whole new paradigm being born!

The nature of our conversations

We are not just talking

Don't be deceived by this seemingly innocent word, "conversations". These conversations, with which we want to extend and continue our initiative, are where the real action begins; and the real fun.

When we say "conversations", we don't mean "only talking". On the contrary! Here truly the medium is the message. By developing these conversations, we want to develop a way for us to put the themes that matter into the focus of our shared attention. We want to engage our collective knowledge and ingenuity to bear upon understanding, and handling, of our time's important issues. We want to give voice to ideas that matter, and to people who merit our attention. And above all – by developing these conversations, we want to create a manner of conversing that works. We want to re-create our public sphere. We want to change our collective mind so that it can think new thoughts!

The guiding vision we are co-creating together will not only change our understanding of our world, but also the way we handle it. We will no longer be struggling to improve our candles; we will be creating light bulbs.

Conversations merge into one

This simple strategy, to federate a vision, and to self-organize differently, can make any conversation matter. Two people can be conversing across a coffee table; by just recording and sharing what's been said, they can make their conversation be part of this larger one.

What we above all have in mind, however, is to stage public conversations. Conversations that will enrich our large global one with the knowledge and insights of their participants. Conversations that will put important themes into our public sphere. Conversations which, when recorded and shared, will be real reality shows, showing the birth pains of a whole new stage of our evolution.

Dialogs not discussions

This re-evolution will be nonviolent not only in action, but also in its manner of speaking. The technical word is dialog. The dialog is to the emerging paradigm as the debate is to the old one. The dialog too might have an icon giant, physicist David Bohm. Let's hear what Bohm had to say about this matter.

I give a meaning to the word 'dialogue' that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. 'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together.

Contrast this with the word 'discussion', which has the same root as 'percussion' an 'concussion'. It really means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others- but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

Paradigm strategy dialogs

Paradigm strategy

The paradigm strategy dialogs are tailored for informed professionals (academic researchers, social entrepreneurs...) who have already recognized the characteristic global or contemporary issues as context in which strategies and priorities need to be forged; and who have already adopted systemic thinking as methodological foundation. Can we still say something, or better still – can we engage them in a certain new way – that will make a difference?

Here is how we introduced the paradigm strategy at the Relating Systems Thinking and Design RSD6 conference, in 2017 in Oslo.

The motivation is to allow for the kind of difference that is suggested by the comparison of everyone carrying buckets of water from their own basements, with everyone teaming up and building a dam to regulate the flow of the river that is causing the flooding. We offer to the RSD community what we are calling the paradigm strategy as a way to make a similar difference in impact, with respect to the common efforts focusing on specific problems or issues. The paradigm strategy is to focus our efforts on instigating a sweeping and fundamental cultural and social paradigm change – instead of trying to solve problems, or discuss, understand and resolve issues, within the current paradigm.

Another metaphor that may explain this strategy proposal is the one we've used already – the construction of a light bulb, as an alternative to trying to improve the candle.

Our presentation was both a strategy proposal, and an intervention into the RSD6 conference as a system. Our goal was to engage this community of academic change makers to transcend the conventional academic lecture and publication conference format, and to self-organize and collaborate in a new way. Our purpose was to apply everyone's collective intelligence toward co-creating an evolutionary guiding light for everyone else – and hence ignite a wave of change. (Yes, this sentence is a mouthful. But just read on, and its meaning will be clear.)

The Paradigm Strategy poster

The Paradigm Strategy poster is designed as a way to (1) communicate the paradigm strategy and (2) choreograph a small but significant set of first steps toward self-organization and co-creation of knowledge – and hence into the new paradigm.

The left-hand side, with yellow background, represents the current societal paradigm, that is – the current way of evolving culturally, socially and systemically. The techniques for weaving together core ideas of giants, which were outlined in Federation through Images – vignettes, threads and patterns – are applied to come to the main and central point or gestalt (represented by the circle in the middle), which is the wormhole into the emerging order of things. The right-hand side represents the space where the emerging paradigm is being co-created, by highlighting a small subset of the prototypes that we discussed in Federation through Applications.

In a nutshell, the poster weaves the findings of giants into two patterns – the Wiener's paradox and the homo ludens. The first one (which we discussed briefly in Federation through Stories) is there to show that academic publishing (specifically in systems research, and then also in general) tends to have no effect on public opinion and policy. The second one, the homo ludens, points to the way in which we've been conducting our lives and careers, and evolving culturally and socially – without suitable information and knowledge. (Technically the homo ludens is a pattern, so it must be understood as a way of looking at things, not as "the" reality – as we explained in Federation through Images. The purpose of formulating such 'side views' is to be able to look in a new way, and discuss degenerative tendencies, however small or large they might be.) The messages it conveys are central to our story line, and deserve a paragraph of its own.

The threads

We implement what Vannevar Bush asked for in 1945 – we link ideas and people associatively into threads, which roughly correspond to what Bush called "trails". The threads not only federate ideas (give them strength by linking them together into higher-order units of meaning) – they also add a dramatic effect, by combining the ideas so that they amplify one another. But here we take this process of "upward growth" of knowledge even further, by weaving threads into patterns, and patterns into a gestalt. We'll come back to that in a moment.

The poster presents a small selection of four threads, of which we have already seen one, Wiener – Jantsch – Reagan, in Federation through Stories. And we have seen also how this single thread already allows us to see one of the two patterns on the LHS of the poster, the Wiener's paradox. We here show another straight-forward thread, Nietzsche – Ehrlich – Giddens, which will allow us to already see the second pattern, the homo ludens. And these two patterns will then be all we'll need to reach the pivotal, paradigm-shifting insight.

The thread we want to show you begins with Friedrich Nietzsche looking at modernity from the point of view of digestion:

Sensibility immensely more irritable; the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever; cosmopolitanism in food, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to “digest” anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength partly in assimilating things, partly in defense, partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity: The historian, critic, analyst, interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader-all of them reactive talents-all science!

Artificial change of one’s nature into a “mirror”; interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a balance, a fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on which warmth, movement, “tempest,” and the play of waves are encountered.“

Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and weariness.“

Take a moment to digest the above excerpt, in the context of its background: What this daring thinker was observing, already in 1888, was that an overload of information and of impressions of all kinds is leaving us, the modern people, in a state of emotional and cognitive spasm – that is, in a condition where we are neither able to comprehend nor to act! But let's continue with this thread before we come back to this observation and draw conclusions.

The second protagonist in the thread is Stanford University's famed biologist, environmentalist and (as he likes to say) "pessimist" Paul Ehrlich. We'll, however, quote here only one of his personal observations we heard him make – that when he was in the 1950s staying with the Inuits as a young researcher, he noticed that every member of the community was able to understand and handle all the community's tools. A woman would perhaps not use the hunting knife, but she perfectly understood how it works. Compare this with the complexity of your smart phone, and the situation where you not only don't know how this thing works – but would even be challenge to produce the names the professions and specialties whose knowledge would need to be combined to answer that question. The point here is that – within just a generation or so – the complexity of our world has increased to the point where it's become practically impenetrable.

Add to this the fact – yes, we have to put it into this picture, it's our main theme after all – that we do not at all have the kind of information that would help us penetrate through this complex reality; that we've indeed used the modern information technology to let everyone just broadcast... and hence to vastly increase the overload of impressions... How do we cope? The third hero of this thread, Anthony Giddens, will help us answer that question. Here is how the famed sociologist formulated the concept "ontological security" in Modernity and Self-Identity:

The threat of personal meaninglessness is ordinarily held at bay because routinised activities, in combination with basic trust, sustain ontological security. Potentially disturbing existential questions are defused by the controlled nature of day-to-day activities within internally referential systems.

Mastery, in other words, substitutes for morality; to be able to control one’s life circumstances, colonise the future with some degree of success and live within the parameters of internally referential systems can, in many circumstances, allow the social and natural framework of things to seem a secure grounding for life activities.

So we can already see the pattern we are calling homo ludens (man the [game] player) – where we have given up knowing and understanding; where we simply learn our profession, and our various other roles as well, as one would learn the rules of a game – and we play our career and other 'games' competitively, just to increase (what we perceive as) our personal gain. But let's wait with the discussion of this pattern and its consequences until we've seen some of its deeper sides – which we'll turn to next.

Understanding evolution

Can we use knowledge federation to turn into a sensation even such a profane theme as "evolution"? (We are of course talking about our cultural and societal evolution, the one that now most truly matters.)

While we let ourselves be guided by our natural wish to save your time and attention, by showing you a crisp and clear picture of the elephant on a very high level that is, without too much detail – we risk missing the real point of our undertaking, which is to give an exciting, palpable, moving, spectacular, breath-taking... vision or "narrative". You might remember the vignettes we introduced in Federation through Stories? The point is to present abstract ideas through stories, which give them realness and meaning. And (you'll also remember) each of these stories, in a fractal-like or parable-like way, portrays the whole big thing. So let us here slow down a moment and introduce just one single giant through his story. Not because his story is the most interesting of them all – but because it alone points to what might be the very heart of our matter, that is, of the emerging paradigm or the elephant. And even so – all we'll be able to do is provide some sketches, and rough contours, but please bear with us – we are only priming this conversation. As we begin to speak, the details will begin to shine through, and so will the elephant.

So let's follow Bourdieu from his childhood in Denguin (an alpine village in Southern France) to his graduation in philosophy from the uniquely prestigious Parisian École normale supérieure (where just a handful of exceptionally talented youngsters are given the best available support to raise to the very top of a field). A refusal to attend the similarly prestigious military academy (which was the prerogative of the ENS graduates) led Bourdieu to have his military service in Algeria, which is where the real story begins.

Upon return to France Bourdieu would ultimately raise to the very top of sociology (he occupied the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France) – largely by developing the insights he acquired back in Algeria. notice that Bourdieu was not educated as a sociologist – he became one by observing how the society really operates, and evolves. And by turning that into a theory, which he aptly called "Theory of Practice". What did he see?

Two things, really. First of all he saw the ugly and brutal side of French imperialism manifest itself (as torture and all imaginable other abuses) during the Algerian War in 1958-1962. Bourdieu wrote a popular book about this, in French Que sais-je series, which very roughly corresponds to Anglo-American "For Dummies". In France this book contributed to the disillusionment with the "official narrative". And in Algeria it made him trusted (someone would take him to an 'informant', perhaps a one who has been tortured, and say "you can trust this man completely") – and hence privy of the kind of information that few people could access.

This led to the second and main of Bourdieu's observations – of the transformation of the rural Kabyle society with the advancement of modernization. It is with great pleasure and admiration that one reads Bourdieu's writings about the Kabyle house and household, with its ethos and sense of duty and honor arranging both the relationships among the people and their relationships with things within and outside their dwellings. And yet – Bourdieu observed – when a Kabyle man goes to town in search of work, his entire way of being suddenly becomes dysfunctional. Even to the young women of his own background – who saw something entirely different in the movies and in the cafes – the way he walks and talks, and of course his sense of honor... became out of place. The insight – which interests us above all – is that the kind of domination that was once attempted, unsuccessfully, through military conquest – became in effect achieved not only peacefully, but even without anyone's awareness of what was going on. The symbolic power – as Bourdieu called it – can only be exercised without anyone's awareness of its existence!

To compose his Theory of Practice, Bourdieu polished up certain concepts such as habitus (which was used already by Aristotle and was brought into sociology by Max Weber), and created others, such as "symbolic capital" and "field" which he also called "game". A certain subtly authoritative way of speaking may be the habitus of a boss. The knowledge of brands and wines, and a certain way of holding the knife and fork may be one's social capital – properly called a "capital" because it affords distinct advantages and is worth "investing into", because it gives "dividends". But let's explain the overall meaning of this theory of practice and its relevance, by bringing it completely down to earth and applying it to some quite ordinary social "practice" – which marked our social life throughout history.

If you break into your neighbor's house, kill the man and rob his property (in olden days you would probably sell his wife and children as slaves, but in this age you may decide what exactly to do with them), you will certainly be put to jail as a dangerous criminal. If you will instead stand on the main square with a microphone and a loudspeaker, and invite your fellow citizens to do the same to a neighboring country, you would certainly be considered a dangerous madman and put to a suitable institution. Unless, of course your "job description" (let's call it that) entitles you to do that (because you are the country's president, or in earlier times its king).

So isn't the fact that we've been socialized to accept certain kind of habitus or behavior from certain people that makes all the difference – that is stronger than our ethical sense, common sense, and even our self-preservation instincts? The question is – how can this be? And what sort of societal evolution has this given us? Those questions we may begin to answer in the context of the remainder of the thread in which Bourdieu appears; and with the help of a neighboring thread.

(Yes, this is really turning into a rather long story. But if you have preserved enough of that old homo sapiens spirit to appreciate what we are really talking about, and its importance, then you'll forgive us that. And anyhow, the current version of this website is meant to appeal to you who basically already "get it" – and engage your help, administered through the medium of these dialogs and in other ways, to transform and communicate it further. )

The name of the Odin the Horse vignette, with which this thread begins, is a bit of a private joke, whose meaning will best be appreciated in the context of the next conversation we'll describe here, which is called "Liberation". For now it's enough to say that this vignette is intended to be a poetic and moving description of the turf behavior of Icelandic horses. We are now creating a way of looking at things (recall polyscopy), which is this: Imagine if we the people also have in us a territorial animal. Imagine that we too are driven by endless "turf battles" – but that our "turfs" are as much more complex than the turfs of the horses, as our culture and society are more complex than theirs. Wikipedia says that, According to Bourdieu, "habitus is composed of:

[s]ystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them".

The last vignette – that bears the name of Antonio Damasio, who is a leading cognitive scientist – is there to explain why it is that we are incapable of "seeing through" this game, and take the power to consciously create the systems in which we live and work, instead of letting them determine our lives in arbitrarily meaningless or dysfunctional ways. Damasio's key insights is that Descartes (read "modernity") got it all wrong, all upside down. It is not our rational mind that determines our choices; it is our embodied (read "socialized") predispositions or 'filters' that determine what our rational mind is capable of thinking and believing.

So now you must see the elephant emerge from the fog he's in one step further. You'll know that you are beginning to discern its contours when you our modern begin to seem to you as the period between the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance.

The Chomsky – Harari – Graeber thread, which we'll only mention here and elaborate in conversations, is there to point to the evolutionary moment, and situation, we find ourselves in. To put it very briefly: Chomsky, when asked "what sort of insight will emerge from the research in linguistics that may make a large difference" answered that our that is human language did not really evolve as a means of communication (about what's relevant out there to know), but as an instrument for worldview sharing. Harari, in Sapiens and related TED and other talks, described this – the ability to create a story and believe in it as reality – as the competitive advantage of our species over others, which enabled us to conquer the planet and become the dominant species. David Graeber – that is, the vignette to which we have given his name – will explain why this way of evolving (whose inner workings are taken up in the just mentioned other thread) could have given us dramatically wasteful and dysfunctional societal organizations without us properly noticing. (The vignette is actually about Alexander the Great; Alexander's "business model" where he turns free people into slaves to work in his mines, and turns sacred and artistic objects of precious metals into coins, and thus acquires sufficient funds to be able to finance his military operations and "conquer the Earth" – and as a result becomes "the Great" – is used as a parable for how our systems have been evolving since the beginning of civilization.)

And now the point: While we could – albeit with enormous costs and sacrifices – let our evolution be guided in this way, today our situation is different. We have conquered the planet. Now there remains just about one single thing for us to conquer; a single main challenge.

During the past century we humans have conquered or learned to subjugate to our will the power of the rivers, the waves, the winds, the atom and the Sun. Our challenge in this century is to conquer (subjugate to conscious evolution) what has become the greatest power of our planet – the power of our socialization. It is the greatest because it determines how all those other powers are going to be used.

Back to epistemology

Let us observe in parentheses that while here we've undertaken to place our initiative into the context of the society's basic needs – we've come a full circle and back to epistemology. The reason is that while in the earlier societal order of things a shared "reality picture" was essentially just the reality – in the emerging order of things those reality pictures are really the product of the power structure; they are the "turf" which determines the structure of our "turf battles". It is therefore essential that our very approach to knowledge does not rely on the "reality" of such 'turfs' (...).

Homo ludens

In the spirit of knowledge federation, we can now put what's been said into a nutshell – and that's what The Paradigm Strategy poster does, by talking about two distinct patterns. The homo ludens here is a simplification of the more comprehensive and more precise power structure theory – but still good enough to bring the main points across. This here is a sketch of some of the conclusions and consequences, of a deeper analysis where the nature of our socialization is explained by weaving together some of the core insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Damasio, Zygmunt Bauman and other leading researchers in the humanities.

The scope or way of looking here is look at our socio-cultural evolution in two ways instead of just one – which we delineate by the corresponding two keywords, homo sapiens and homo ludens. Although both are always present in degrees or as tendencies, you may think of the homo ludens as a cultural species, which has (most interestingly) been acquiring supremacy in the recent period. The homo ludens has successfully adapted to the social condition where the complexity of our world combined with the overload of information and of impressions in general has made our reality impenetrable. The point is that the homo ludens is not the homo sapiens; he does not seek knowledge or use knowledge. He ignores the larger purpose of his work, and all other larger purposes. Instead, he simply learns his profession as a social role, as one would learn the rules of a game, and plays competitively. The homo ludens is guided by what's been called "social intelligence" – he has his antennas tuned to the "interests" of the powerful players around him; and by accommodating them, he acquires his own power position.

Some consequences of the homo ludens evolution seem worth highlighting:

• The systems in which we live and work can be arbitrarily misconstrued, wasteful and dysfunctional, without the homo ludens even noticing that.
• This theory explains why politicians like Donald Trump may raise to highest positions of influence – the homo ludens perceives them, perhaps rightly, as the kind of people who "get the things done" in our present order (or dis-order) of things.
• The two evolutionary paradigms are – to use Thomas Kuhn's useful keyword – incommensurable (each has its own epistemology, and sees and organizes the world in its own specific way). The homo ludens knows from experience that the homo sapiens is on the verge of extinction; and that one has to be the homo ludens if one should be successful. The homo sapiens looks at the data and the trends, and reaches the opposite conclusion – that the homo ludens must morph into the (cultural) homo sapiens if our civilization, and our species, should have a future.
• This theory predicts the existence of a most curious cultural sub-species – the homo ludens academicus – which should not at all exist according to conventional logic (isn't the very purpose of the academic institution to guide us along the homo sapiens evolutionary path?). The existence of this subspecies still needs to be confirmed by field research, of course. If, however, this species is discovered in reality, this would explain the un-academic resistance of the academic people to update their own system, when the available knowledge is calling for such updates. The homo ludens ignores the larger societal purpose of his institution. He just sticks to the rules – which provide an "objective" and "fair" frame of reference in which his career game is played.

The next step

What is to be done in this sort of situation? The poster indicates that the key step – from this paradigm into the next – is in the simple act of bootstrapping (we need to re-socialize ourselves, by daring to co-create the systems in which we live and work). A small but significant act of bootstrapping is then choreographed by the poster – which provides an invitation to take part in re-creating the poster itself. A virtual space is provided where the poster is the background, and where one can add verbal and visual comments to its various parts.

Liberation dialogs

This conversation is not about religion

At the dawn of the Enlightenment our ancestors liberated themselves from a stringent religious worldview, and we ultimately became free to "pursue happiness" here and now. But what if in the process we have misunderstood both religion and happiness? What if at the inception of our great religious traditions we will find a phenomenon, we may even call it "a natural law", which brings with it a possibility to create an incomparably better human life, and society?

If we now tell you that this conversation is about religion, in a way we would be telling the truth – and yet you would get a completely wrong idea of what it's really about. So it is best to consider this theme, religion, as just a uniquely revealing way of looking at the whole big thing, the paradigm, or the elephant. Here too the whole big thing will be reflected in a single theme in the manner of fractals. Our story will both be a snapshot, a picture of an essential piece in the puzzle – and a parable, displaying the structure of the whole paradigm in a nutshell.

To set the stage, revisit what's been said about Aurelio Peccei at the top of this page. It is the man's cultural and ethical development on which now our civilization's future will depend, claimed Peccei. Then read pages 8 - 10 of theintroduction to the book manuscript titled Liberation and subtitled Religion for the Third Millennium (this book, when finished, is intended to serve a background and a starter for this conversation), especially the page-and-a-half excerpt from Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy. The narrow frame of concepts that the 19th century science gave us was damaging to culture, the celebre physicist observed, – and in particular to its ethical / religions aspects. How lucky we are that the modern physics disproved this narrow frame!

So the question is – can we (in the context of the knowledge federation paradigm and paradigm proposal) handle this matter in a radically better way? Can we fix the "narrow frame" problem – and provide a foundation for exactly the kind of development that Peccei was wanting us to begin?

Observe, further, that in the traditional societies religion (whose etymology suggests re-connection) was the major factor connecting each individual to a purpose (which was often seen as "God's will or command"), and the people together into a community. In modernity, however (as Heisenberg observed in the quoted passage), the belief in uninformed self-interest has assumed this role. The question is if we can do better than that.

Can religion be a cause célèbre?

There are several reasons why we chose this book, Liberation, and this theme, "religion for the third millennium", to serve as the 'Trojan horse' with which we will break the news about Knowledge Federation and the emerging paradigm to general audiences, and ignite the general dialog. To most people, "religion" means believing in something, typically in "the existence of God", and then usually in some specific variant of this belief, such as that Jesus was the son of God, or that Mohamed was God's last prophet. The related beliefs – both when they are religious, and when they are anti–religious – tend to be strongly and passionately held, and often maintained against counter-evidence. (Is it because those beliefs have been a product of our socialization?)

In a way we want to play a Judo trick on the current narrow scope of interest of the people and the media – by offering a story that they won't be able to refuse. Which will at the same time bring forth insights and ideas that can radically transform those interests.

The space is open to us to resolve the issue of religion – but in a new-paradigm way. The presented evidence (which will be submitted to prime this conversation) will challenge the beliefs of all those camps – both the people who consider themselves as religious, and those who may be devoutly anti-religious. It has turned out that we can do that in the most innocent way imaginable – by just telling stories (once again those real-life ones, the vignettes). Or in other words, by federating giants.

While as always insights of a multiplicity of giants are combined to make a point, here too the story has a central hero. His gave himself the name Buddhadasa, which means "the slave of the Buddha" – and thereby made it clear that he too was just federating the insights of an earlier and more worthy master.

The essence of Buddhism

So here's a very short version of Buddhadasa's story: After two years of monastic life in Bangkok, while in his early 20s and almost a century ago, Buddhadasa thought "This just cannot be it! We are chanting sutras and observing the precepts, but if one looks deeper really much of what goes on has to do with the monks' personal ambitions and the prestige." So he learned enough Pali to be able to understand the original scriptures, established a dwelling in an abandoned forest monastery near his home village Chaya in Southern Thailand, and undertook to discover and repeat the Buddha's way (or "experiment", as we sometimes like to frame it) himself.

In this way Buddhadasa found that the essence of Buddhism was not really what was taught. It was, rather, simply a phenomenon, a kind of a natural law that the Buddha discovered 25 centuries earlier. Buddhism, in Buddhadasa's interpretation, is a kind of a science – by which innate human possibilities for a radically better life, not an afterlife but a life here and now, are pursued through a deep inner transformation. Seeing this, Buddhadasa made a leap of intuition – and postulated that all religions share the same essence. And that all of them suffered from the same problem of misunderstanding of this essence, and deformation of the practice. We'll come back to that in a moment.

Perhaps you'll understand the larger relevance of this insight if we frame it in the context of The Paradigm Strategy dialog above: While it is true that we the people have a strong "Odin the horse" component that governs our private and communal life, that is not at all the whole story. Odin is also the divinity. The horse can be tamed – and the divine side can become the ruler. But this is of course using once again the religious language, which may be unappealing to some of our readers. So let us now bring this conversation completely down to earth, by talking about an issue that everyone can relate to and understand – the pursuit of happiness.

Redirecting the pursuit of happiness

With religion XXXXXXX <p>The issue here is at the core of the paradigm shift. Sketch: Today our religion is a combined belief in the naturalness / value of selfishness, which is turned into the best world for all by the survival of the fittest. In this sort of ideology it is difficult to find a place where systemic innovation can truly blossom. And vice versa...

A conversation about science

The liberation book quotes a whole page-and-a-half from Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy" – the excerpt that tells how the 19th century science created a "narrow and rigid frame of concepts" (a way of looking at the world) which marked not only science but also the worldview of the majority of people. And "how lucky we are" that the modern physics disproved this "narrow frame" and the corresponding worldview. This sets the stage for science giving the people back what is due to them – a broader worldview, that will help them rebuild whatever in culture has been damaged. Heisenberg pointed to religion as the prime candidate.

The "liberation" we are talking about is not only the essence of religion; it is also what may be needed to put science on a new and better track. Buddhadasa talks about "seeing the world as it truly is" as the goal of Buddhism. Athletes work on themselves, on their own material. It appears that the scientists don't need to, that "the scientific method" and being "objective observers" are enough to secure the best results. The nature of human creativity, however, turns out to be something else, not how we see it today (...). The development of creativity, of humans with clear vision, has its dynamic and its "natural laws" that underlie it. Do we know them? Can we harness them?

Knowledge federation dialogs

A theme that matters

The theme is about the organization, role, direction... of creative work – innovation in the commercial world, research in the academia... And specifically about the organization, purpose and direction of development of knowledge work.

The rationale is that this – innovation, and knowledge work – is what drives and gives the direction to our society's evolution, or as Engelbart framed it the "common economic-political vehicle" in which we ride into the future. The crux of our proposal is that we need a public dialog about the direction in which this key system has been evolving, and most importantly about the way it may now need to be evolving – so that our direction, or evolution, may acquire a new direction. This is the new leadership role of the university that Jantsch has been talking about a half-century ago.

But we won't be only talking. We strike this conversation by presenting a prototype. This allows us to avoid talking about how to improve the 'candle' – and begin talking about how to create the 'light bulb'.

Notice that this public conversation, about the prototype presented on these pages, at the same time completes the prototype. Our proposal is for a knowledge-work system that is capable of self-reflecting and evolving – by engaging everyone's insights, or our 'collective intelligence', to co-create an (as Bela H. Banathy called it) "evolutionary guidance system" that can guide us toward a good, desirable or meaningful future.

An academic result of a new kind

An academic reader may have recognized that our knowledge federation presentation on these pages is in fact a careful presentation of – and a case for – a new paradigm in creative work. On the front page we motivated this proposal by three changes that developed during the past century (in our understanding of epistemology, what knowledge and meaning are all about; in information technology; and in societal needs). We provided four pages that elaborated the details, where we showed how the knowledge federation prototype

• provides a new methodological foundation for creating truth and meaning, which allows us to repair the reported fundamental anomalies and align knowledge work with contemporary needs of people and society
• provides a platform for taking advantage of contemporary information technology that fixes the core anomaly we have in this domain – namely that the information technology we have was created to enable re-configuring of knowledge work that we are calling knowledge federation, and yet we used the technology to merely re-implement the old patterns that emerged based on the printed text (or to use Engelbart's metaphor – he created the technology to give our 'vehicle' a whole new source of illumination, the light bulb – and we used this technology to merely recreate the candles)
• provides exactly the kind of information, the "evolutionary guidance" that can help us "change course" – by doing no more than just taking advantage of the knowledge we already own (by fitting the pieces into the new emerging reality, the metaphorical elephant, instead of fitting the pieces in an old and outdated paradigm – and throwing away or ignoring whatever fails to fit in

Thomas Kuhn pointed to two key characteristics of a new paradigm: It (1) resolves the reported anomalies and (2) opens up a new frontier to research. We have seen in the first two modules, Federation through Images and Federation through Stories, how the new approach to knowledge resolves a variety of anomalies – core research insights that were reported but never really integrated into daily live, or even into academic praxis! We showed how knowledge federation can dissolve those anomalies and provide a vast frontier for new kinds of results, and new kinds of interventions into our academic and social reality (Federation through Applications and Federation through Conversations).

And so we are now able to submit to this conversation our paradigm proposal as a way to enable, or trigger, a sweeping change – by doing no more than what we anyway need to do, namely align knowledge work with the relevant knowledge. Self-reflect and act. Use the academic mirror to create an even larger mirror where we the people may see the world we are creating, and ourselves in it – and adapt our way of being in the world accordingly.

A conversation that matters

With this we are opening a dialog that truly matters – the one about the role, the organization and the evolution of the university. "[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing society's capability for continuous self-renewal", Erich Jantsch wrote in 1969. And he gave a concrete proposal, how the university needs to be organized to fulfill this role. We now undertake to extend his proposal by an entire paradigm – and to reinvigorate this most timely conversation.

If we understand that we cannot and should not trust "the market" to turn our candles into light bulbs (give us institutions or systems that are capable of using the new technology and the best of our work and intentions toward our true benefit) – then it must strike us as to put it mildly ironic that the only institution that is publicly sponsored to allow people to be freely creative has organized itself according to the survival of the fittest model (which is here called "publish or perish"). And yet – whatever has remained of true academic freedom has made this work presented here possible. We now want to offer our prototype and our related experience as an experiment – or as a model 'light bulb' – to ignite the next step of our society's illumination.

Can university reform itself and provide the most needed leadership role? We believe that it can, and that it has to. By creating this conversation that matters, we hope to give a new impetus to this most needed evolutionary direction

See

The dialog

David Bohm saw the "dialogue" as simply what we must do in order to shift our present paradigm (or put even more simply "what we must do") – see On dialogue. Two volumes edited by Banathy and Jenlink deepened and refined our understanding – download a copy of one of them here. Bohm's dialogue is a slow and completely unguided process. We experimented with turning Bohm's dialog into a 'cyclotron' by increasing vastly its energy – see the project's web site.

Issue Based Information Systems were conceived in the 1960s by Horst Rittel and others to enable collective understanding of complex or "wicked" issues – see this Wikipedia page. Dialog mapping tools such as the IBIS / Compendium, and Debategraph have been conceived to empower people and communities to tackle "wicked problems" of people to co-create knowledge – and even to turn the usual debate into a genuine dialog. See Jeff Conklin's Dialog Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems.

The Paradigm Strategy

Poster, abstract, blog post

The Liberation

Book introduction; background in blog posts Garden of Liberation and Science and Religion