Intuitive introduction to systemic thinking

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Attention as a resource

What a giant had to say

A long, long time ago, when the teachers were still in charge of their students' and our children's character development, here is what William James had to tell them about this matter.

In what does a moral act consist? It consists in the effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies that are there. To think, in short, is the secret of will, just as it is the secret of memory.

Attention has a purpose

Attention, and the emotion of interest which naturally directs it, are there for a purpose. Interest is what may move our youngsters to explore and understand the world they live in. It's what might make them exercise their minds and bodies.

But our industries have been able to separate this emotion from its purposes. They have created games in which "the effort of attention" that might sustain a moral act is never experienced; which keep our children's attention away from where it might be due; which exercise no more than their thumbs and their rear ends; whose ethical message is no better than "kill or be killed"; and which are so "immersive" that they make everything else – and school in particular – seem dull in comparison. Why not simply live in the virtual world, where success is so easily experienced? And where even the ultimate failure can be erased by pressing the restart button.

It's a complex world

For all we know, we may have created a complex and dangerous world which will demand of our children the audacity of spirit that we ourselves haven't been able to muster. What have we done to help them live up to its demands?

We say "for all we know", because we don't really know. While some of us have done research and concluded that our civilization may just barely make it, provided we make changes promptly, the rest of us continue to live and work just as we did before. Notice that we are not saying that our civilization is in trouble; others have said that. All we want to say follows from what we've just said, and it's anyhow obvious – it's that we do not know what our situation is and what we need to do; that the way in which handle knowledge is keeping us from knowing.

And that also our attention has been mishandled.

The economy of attention

The journalists are not to be blamed. They are just trying to make ends meet in a competitive world.

Our friends who innovate in journalism told us that there's just about one business model left to the journalists, to compete with abundant free information. They call it "attention economy", but it's not what you might think. The journalists are not economizing with our attention as a resource, and allocating it as it might be needed. On the contrary – the attention economy means attracting people's attention by whatever means might still be available, and selling it – as a commodity, measured in thousands of readers or viewers – to the advertisers.

We don't need to tell you that it's those advertisers – that half-a-trillion-dollars-a-year global industry that combines state-of-the-art science with state-of-the-art communication design – that are now in charge of everyone's character development! But the advertisers too are just doing their job; it's just their way to make a living in a competitive world.


Pleasure as a resource

Pleasure has a purpose

We, parents, cannot be blamed either.

We wish our children our best. We just want them to be happy! It's just that we believe (or more precisely that we've been socialized to believe) that happiness means doing whatever feels attractive or pleasant at the moment. How can we deny our kids those games, if they are the only thing that still interests them?

The sensation that something is attractive or pleasant too has a role in the larger scheme of things. It's what the nature created to make us do what is good for us. But our industries have been able to separate also that emotion from its purpose! Think, in the manner of a metaphor, about white sugar: the pleasurable substance has been extracted from the nutritious rest. We can now fool nature; we can add sugar (physically and metaphorically) to virtually anything. We can make anything taste attractive!

The economy of pleasure

Around the time when William James was writing the above lines, Friedrich Nietzsche was looking at modernity "from the point of view of digestion" and jotting down notes:

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.“

Interesting to observe that this was written well before the radio, the TV, the worldwide travel, the computer and the mobile phone. And before the computer games, of course!

Imagine if this is really true! Imagine if we've been "pursuing happiness" by seeking stimulation – and losing our very ability to feel!

Sometimes we are reminded of Nietzsche when we hear some of the music that our children have been listening to. Don't know about you, but to us some of it really does sound like doleful howls of some youngsters ho have lost some of their subtlety and gentleness – created in an ardent effort to stimulate the senses of their brethren even a bit further.