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| − | <div class="page-header" ><h1>Holotopia</h1></div>
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| − | Starting anew. For the old text see [[Old Holotopia]].
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| − | <div class="row">
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Imagine...</h2></div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-6">
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| − | <p>You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? <em>As headlights</em>? </p>
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| − | <p>Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it? Because <em>on a much larger scale</em> this absurdity has become reality.</p>
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| − | <p>By depicting our society as a bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity <em>ideogram</em> renders the essence of our contemporary situation.</p>
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| − | </div>
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| − | [[File:Modernity.jpg]]
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| − | <small>Modernity <em>ideogram</em></small>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>We need new 'headlights'</h2></div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-7"><h3>The way we see the world</h3>
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| − | <p>The COVID-19 crisis and its fallout reminded us once again of the connectedness and the vulnerability of the human world. And of the importance of those 'headlights'. This crisis is relatively minor—compared to the <em>irreversible</em> changes that are expected to result from, for instance, the climate change. Shall we, in absence of true understanding, resort to age-old scapegoating and blame "lazy people on welfare", immigrant workers, the 1%, the whites or the blacks? Or shall we see our situation in a way that will empower us to comprehend it truly, and resolve it by finding a <em>new</em> course?</p>
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| − | <h3>We have 'candles' as 'headlights'</h3>
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| − | <p>How exactly we ended up with a dysfunctional and obsolete way of comprehending the world is illuminating, and we must return to it, however briefly.</p>
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| − | <p>Around the middle of the 19th century, our societies began to change by a landslide: Our countries became democracies, our worldviews became scientific and secular, and our lifestyles became mechanized and modern. The way we looked at the world also changed—and then for about a century remained frozen!</p>
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| − | <p>During that century, our academic understanding of things of course continued to evolve. But it remained confined to disciplines, which grew and got fragmented into subspecialties, until they lost contact not only with the world at large, but also with one another. <em>Entire academic fields</em> failed to communicate to the world even their <em>most basic</em> insights.</p>
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| − | <p>Massive academic publishing made things worse.</p>
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| − | <p>And so did the new media, which got appropriated by commercial and superficial actors—who used them to appropriate the public's attention.</p>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <p>[[Neil Postman]] described the situation that resulted as follows:</p>
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | "The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | </div>
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| − | [[File:Postman.jpg]]<br><small>Neil Postman</small>
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| − | </div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>The KF proposal</h2></div>
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | The goal of <em>knowledge federation</em> is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | <p>Imagine us as a collection of academic 'cells' who mutated in a new way. Having perceived our society as a bus with candle headlights, we perceived ourselves as (part of) those headlights. Naturally, we began to self-organize differently—to become 'lightbulbs', not 'candles'!</p>
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| − | <p>We understood, in other words, that we must use our creativity in a new way; not by merely observing and reporting—but by being and acting differently.</p>
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| − | <h3><em>Knowledge federation</em> concretely</h3>
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| − | <blockquote>We are proposing to establish <em>knowledge federation</em> as a new academic field, and a real-life <em>praxis</em>.</blockquote>
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| − | <p>As a new academic field, <em>knowledge federation</em> will (as "applied research") <em>be</em> the 'headlights', and turn academic and other relevant insights into shared vision; and also (as "basic research") <em>create</em> the 'headlights' (the way information and knowledge are handled in our society), and continue to create them continuously, to keep them in sync with relevant insights, technology, and our society's needs.</p>
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| − | <p>As a way to operationalize this proposal, we offer to</p>
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| − | <ul>
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| − | <li>establish <em>knowledge federation</em> as a <em>transdiscipline</em>—for which the <em>prototype</em> detailed on these pages is offered as a detailed explanation, and a template ready for implementation</li>
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| − | <li>develop the <em>holotopia</em> <em>prototype</em> as a real-life initiative to change the way we as society see and handle our larger situation at hand, and information and knowledge in particuar—as described here</li>
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| − | </ul>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>An application</h2></div>
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| − | <p>The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for developing the Holotopia <em>prototype</em>. Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—[[Aurelio Peccei]] issued the following warning:
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | "It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | [[File:Peccei.jpg]]
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| − | <small>Aurelio Peccei</small>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <p>Peccei also specified <em>what</em> needed to be done to "change course":
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | "The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | This conclusion, that our present crisis has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss for instance, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".
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| − | </p>
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| − | <p>In "Human Quality", Peccei assessed our contemporary situation as follows:</p>
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | "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."
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | <p>
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| − | The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".</p>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>A vision</h2></div>
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| − | <p>What new 'course' shall we see, when we use <em>knowledge federation</em> to 'illuminate the way'?</p>
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| − | <p>The <em>holotopia</em> is an astonishingly positive future scenario.</p>
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| − | <p>This future vision is <em>more</em> positive than what the familiar utopias offered—whose authors lacked the information to see what was possible; or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. </p>
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| − | <p>When the evidence offered on these pages has been considered, it will be clear why <em>holotopia</em> is not only "the new black"—but also <em>the new red</em>; and <em>the new green</em>!</p>
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| − | <p>Unlike the utopias, the <em>holotopia</em> is readily realizable; we already have all that is needed for its fulfillment. </p>
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| − | <p>All we need to do to realize this vision, all that remains for us to do to "change course", is to follow a principle or a rule of thumb, which is suggested by the <em>holotopia</em>'s very name.</p>
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | We must <em>see ourselves as parts in a larger whole</em>; and act in ways that make this larger whole more [[Wholeness|<em>whole</em>]].
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | <p>But this is exactly the direction the Modernity <em>ideogram</em> is pointing to!</p>
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| − | <p>This direction is a radical departure from our current course—which <em>emerges</em> as a result of everyone pursuing "his our own interests"; of everyone trusting that "the invisible hand" of the "free competition" will turn our self-serving acts into the greatest common good.</p>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>[[Holotopia:Five insights|Five insights]]</h2></div>
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| − | <p>
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| − | [[File:FiveInsights.JPG]]
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| − | </p>
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| − | <p>The <em>holotopia</em> vision is made concrete in terms of [[Holotopia:Five insights|<em>five insights</em>]].</p>
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| − | <h3>We are living on a brink of a cultural renewal</h3>
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| − | <p>When Peccei talked about "a great cultural revival", he was obviously referring to the the Renaissance—as the historical moment when the last comprehensive change of the human systems began. We refer to it by using the symbolic image of Galilei in house arrest—and carefully develop an analogy between that pregnant historical moment and our present times and conditions. The <em>five insights</em> explain why a similar change is ready to take place once again in our own time, by elaborating on the analogy between our times and conditions with each of the five specific changes of which the historical comprehensive change was composed:
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| − | <ul>
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| − | <li>the Industrial Revolution</li>
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| − | <li>the revolution in communication made possible by the printing press</li>
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| − | <li>the empowerment of human reason to explore and comprehend the world</li>
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| − | <li>the vast improvement in our ability to explore and comprehend the world, through science</li>
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| − | <li>the liberation from the preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowerment to "pursue happiness" here and now</li>
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| − | </ul>
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| − | </p>
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| − | <p>By radically improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of human work, the Industrial Revolution liberated our ancestors from toil, and enabled them to engage in a <em>cultural revival</em>. The <em>power structure</em> insight shows that in this process a peculiar oversight was made; and that a new wave of change with similar consequences is possible.</p>
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| − | <p>By radically improving communication, the printing press enabled a rapid dissemination of information, and growth of knowledge. The <em>collective mind</em> insight shows that the new media enable a similar revolution—where the improvement will not be only in the production of the volume of data, but also and most importantly in the <em>organization</em> of information; and in the <em>quality</em> of knowledge. </p>
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| − |
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| − | <p>What Galilei before all stands for is a change of the <em>foundations</em> on which information and knowledge are created and handled—from an unreserved faith in the Scriptures, to an empowerment of reason to explore and understand the world. The <em>socialized reality</em> insight shows that an error has been made, and also academically discovered. The situation that resulted <em>obliges</em> us to once again liberate and empower the human reason—to make the kind of difference that now <em>must</em> be made.</p>
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| − | <p>Galilei also stands for the onset of science—as the <em>method</em> by which the human reason was empowered. The <em>narrow frame</em> insight shows that the scientific revolution remained confined to the <em>natural</em> world; and why the evolution of science can continue, and enable a revolution in the <em>human</em> world. </p>
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| − | <p>The Renaissance is, of course, most vividly remembered as an emancipation of the arts, and of the joy of living and human quality. The <em>convenience paradox</em> insight shows that once again our "pursuit of happiness" got stalled by a <em>myth</em>. And why a <em>new</em> Renaissance is ready to begin.</p>
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| − | <h3>The sixth insight</h3>
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| − | <p>The anomalies the <em>five insights</em> point to, and the corresponding solutions, are so closely inter-related that taking care of one necessitates resolving the others. In this way the sixth insight is reached:
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| − | <blockquote> Comprehensive change can be easy—even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible.</blockquote>
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| − | </p>
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| − | <h3>A view of the next Renaissance</h3>
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| − | <p>Together, the <em>five insights</em> constitute a breath-taking sight of a spectacular development taking place presently. It escaped the attention of the media, because a variety of academic and other insights need to be put together, for it to become visible.</p>
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| − | <p>The <em>five insights</em> combined together enable us to see our own time in a similar light as we see the historical moment when Galilei was in house arrest. It is a time of deep and shocking incongruences. Time when what once appeared as "normal" can no longer continue. The moment when the ideas bringing change were still out of the focus of the public eye; when 'Galilei was still in house arrest'.</p>
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| − | <h3>A case for new 'headlights'</h3>
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| − | <p>While sharing the pieces of evidence that make the <em>five insights</em> palpable and clear, we also present the evidence and make a case for our proposal—to <em>create</em> 'new headlights'</p>
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| − | <p>The simple yet striking image those pieces compose together is of science emerging (from 'house arrest') as a radically better way to explore and understand the natural phenomena; and demolishing the very mechanism of cultural reproduction (as a side effect of its successes, and without intending to)—by disproving the fundamental assumptions and the worldview on which it was based (the faith in the Scripture, and the age-old myths of the tradition); and with no deliberate attempt to restore what was damaged (the scientists most conscientiously do what they consider as "their job").</p>
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| − | <p>The overall result, spectacular albeit potentially tragic, is that we the people have no information that would 'show us the day'—in the moment of our history where our civilization's very existence may depend on it.</p>
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| − | <h3>A case for <em>academic</em> revival</h3>
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| − | <p>The image of Galilei in house arrest is a snapshot of an instance where an age-old tradition was about to become alive again—and make a difference.</p>
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| − | <p>Socrates, whom we honor as the founding icon of the academic tradition, did not leave us a new worldview, or a theory. His work was to ask questions—and by doing that, empower the human reason (which tended to be then, as it is now, put to rest by the comforting belief that we already know, which suits our self-esteem and power positions) to question the very foundations of our beliefs. It is not practical knowledge the <em>academia</em> stands for, bu the <em>knowledge of knowledge</em>; and the <em>foundations</em> of knowledge. In Galilei's time, this all-important <em>praxis</em> (of using the reason to examine the foundations) was about to become alive again; and make a difference. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?</p>
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| − | <p>The arguments advanced in association with the <em>five insights</em> show in a most careful <em>academic</em> way that the state of the art of <em>knowledge of knowledge</em> once again <em>demands</em> such development. The age-old assumptions on which the ideas about knowledge and reality, which the <em>academia</em> is the keeper of, have been once again been proven false. </p>
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| − | <p>Traditionally, the <em>academia</em> does not stand for useful knowledge, but for "right" knowledge. We show that the time is ripe for merging those two sets of criteria into one. We show, in a way that honors the time-tested values of the academic tradition, that the change of the relationship we have with information, which we are proposing, is also a way to resolve the reported <em>fundamental</em> anomalies in our conception and handling of information.</p>
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| − | <h3>This issue is political</h3>
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| − | <p>Every genuine revolution is also a revolution in justice; not only in the way in which justice is handled, but also in the way in which it is conceived of. Galilei was in house arrest not only because his ideas were "heretical", but also and perhaps primarily because he was questioning the <em>foundations</em> on which the existing power relations depended. </p>
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| − | <p>Each of the <em>five insights</em> contributes a new piece also to <em>that</em> puzzle. When those pieces are put together, <em>a completely new idea</em> of justice and freedom, and what tends to obstruct them, results. We see who, or what, 'holds Galilei in house arrest' once again in our own time—even though the form and the <em>means</em> of oppression are entirely different than they were then. </p>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>A strategy</h2></div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-7"><h3>We focus on "changing course"</h3>
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| − | <p>What can make a <em>large enough</em> difference to <em>really</em> make a difference?</p>
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| − | <p>The <em>holotopia</em> strategy follows from the <em>five insights</em>, and is suggested by its name—it is to focus on changing the entire <em>order of things</em> from which our problems emanate. As we have seen, that is also the strategy that The Club of Rome recommended.</p>
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| − | <p>Such a strategy can and needs to be pursued through radically changed awareness and values. And through collaboration, not conflict.</p>
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| − | <h3>We foster new thinking to <em>enable</em> solutions</h3>
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| − | <p>Our value proposition is not to replace the most worthwhile initiatives that are focused on specific problems, but to complement them. And by doing that—to vastly augment their chances to succeed.</p>
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| − | <p>The COVID-19 crisis and its fallout reminded us of the connectedness and the vulnerability of the human system. This was a relatively minor disturbance—compared to the <em>irreversible</em> changes that are expected to result from, for instance, the climate change. </p>
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| − | <p>In this situation, the question of strategy is of paramount importance.</p>
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| − | <p>The problems, such as the coronavirus epidemic and the climate change, of course have to be dealt with. But is that sufficient? Einstein's familiar observation, that we cannot solve our problems by thinking as we did when we created them, is implicit in every step that our initiative has made.</p>
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| − | <p>We need <em>different</em> thinking to avoid riots and conflicts. In the absence of deeper understanding, the age-old scapegoats will be blamed: "the lazy people on welfare"; the immigrant workers; the 1%; the Jews or the Muslims. </p>
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| − | <p>And we also need different thinking to direct the <em>remedial</em> efforts productively. Pecei wrote:</p>
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | <p>The Club of Rome also realized that our generations, swollen with pride in our technological triumphs, must regain <em>the sense of human responsibilities</em> that I have already mentioned. On this point, let me digress briefly.</p>
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| − | <p>For some time now, the perception of these responsibilities has motivated a number of organizations and small voluntary groups of concerned citizens which have mushroomed all over to respond to the demands of new situations or to change whatever is not going right in society. These groups are now legion. They arose sporadically on the most varied fronts and with different aims. They comprise peace movements, supporters of national liberation, and advocates of women's rights and population control; defenders of minorities, human rights, and civil liberties; apostles of "technology with a human face" and the humanization of work; social workers and activists for social changed; ecologists, friends of the Earth or of animals; defenders of consumer rights; non-violent protesters; conscientious objectors, and many others. These groups are usually small but, should the occasion arise, they can mobilize a host of men and women, young and old, inspired by a profound sense of the common good and by moral obligations which, in their eyes, are more important than all others.</p>
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| − | <p>They form a kind of popular army, actual or potential, with a function comparable to that of the antibodies generated to restore normal conditions in a biological organism that is diseased or attacked by pathogenic agents. The existence of so many spontaneous organizations and groups testifies of the vitality of our societies, even in the midst of the crisis they are undergoing. Means will have to be found one day to consolidate their scattered efforts in order to direct them toward strategic objectives.</p> </blockquote>
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| − | <h3>We begin with information</h3>
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| − | <p>Just as building a house must begin with the foundations, changing the whole <em>order of things</em> has its own natural order in which it needs to proceed. As the Modernity <em>ideogram</em> suggested, to change course, we must begin by changing the illumination source, so that the new course may become visible. In the "Age of Information", now turning into "Anthropocene", we urgently need the kind of information that can illuminate the way. </p>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Tactical assets</h2></div>
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| − | <p>
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| − | [[File:Elephant.jpg]]
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| − | </p>
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| − | <h3>The <em>elephant</em></h3>
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| − | <p>Imagine the 20th century's visionary thinkers as those proverbial blind-folded men touching an elephant. We hear them talk about things like "a fan", "a water hose" and "a tree trunk". But they don't make sense, and we ignore them.</p>
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| − | <p>Everything changes when we realize that they are really talking about the ear, the trunk and the leg of an imposingly large exotic animal, which nobody has yet had a chance to see—a whole new <em>order of things</em>, or cultural and social <em>paradigm</em>! </p>
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| − | <p>The effect of the <em>five insights</em> is to <em>orchestrate</em> this act of 'connecting the dots'—so that the spectacular event we are part of, this exotic 'animal', the new 'destination' toward which we will now "change course" becomes clearly visible.</p>
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| − | <p>A side effect is that the academic results once again become interesting and relevant. In this context newly created, they acquire a whole new meaning; and <em>agency</em>!</p>
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| − | <h3>Stories</h3>
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| − | <p>We bring together stories (elsewhere called <em>vignettes</em>)—which in attractive and accessible ways share the core insights of leading contemporary thinkers. We tell their stories.</p>
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| − | <p>They become 'dots' to connect in our conversations.</p>
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| − | <h3>Keywords</h3>
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| − | <p>The Renaissance too, and also science, brought along a whole new way of speaking—and hence a new way to look at the world. All along, and with the <em>five insights</em> in particular, we introduce the <em>keywords</em> which are newly defined. It is in terms of those <em>keywords</em> that we come to understand the core issues and our time in completely new ways.</p>
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| − | <h3>Prototypes</h3>
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| − | <p>Information has agency only when it has a way to impact our actual physical reality. A goal of the Holotopia project is to co-create <em>prototypes</em>—new elements of our new reality. All along we share the <em>prototypes</em> we've already developed, to put the ball in play.</p>
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| − | <h3>Dialogs</h3>
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| − | <p>This point cannot be overemphasized: Our goal is not to warn, inform, propose a new way to look at the world—but <em>to change our collective mind</em>. Physically.
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| − | <p>We organize public dialogs about the <em>five insights</em>, and other themes related to change, in order to <em>make</em> change.</p>
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| − | <p>Here the medium in the truest sense is the message; by developing those <em>dialogs</em>, we re-create our <em>collective mind</em>—from something that only receives, which is dazzled by the media... to something that is capable of weaving together academic and other insights, and by engaging the best of our "collective intelligence" seeing what needs to be done, and directing and coordinating action.</p>
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| − |
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| − | <p>The <em>five insights</em>, and the ten direct relationships between them, provide us the points of reference, in the context of which some of the age-old challenges are understood and handled in entirely new ways (for a complete list see [[Holotopia:Ten conversations|Ten conversations]] — change the name into DIALOGS):
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| − | <ul>
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| − | <li>Our ways of serving the all-important cause of peace have largely remained palliative, not curative; what would it take to truly make an end to war, once and for all? Can we now turn conflict-based politics into collaboration?</li>
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| − | <li>Education—as our society's very 'reproduction system', which creates a new world with every new generation—is an obvious <em>leverage point</em> for enabling change. How education may need to change, to <em>enable</em> instead of inhibiting the larger societal transformation</li>
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| − | <li>It has become modern to consider religion as a source of prejudice, as dogmatically <em>believing</em> in something, in spite of evidence; and as a source of conflict. But in traditional cultures religion has played an essential role—of binding each person to a purpose, and all of them to a community. Can we, in the light of the <em>five insights</em>, re-invent and re-evolve <em>religion</em>? Have it play a similar role for us as it played in the past—but in a <em>completely</em> changed way?</li>
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| − | </ul>
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| − | </p>
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| − |
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| − | <h3>Art and new media</h3>
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| − | <p>
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| − | [[File:KunsthallDialog01.jpg]]<br>
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| − | <small>Snapshot from our pilot project in Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen.</small>
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| − | </p>
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| − | <p>The Holotopia project combines contemporary art with contemporary media (tools for "augmenting our collective intellect", creative video recording and editing etc.), to change our <em>collective mind</em>.</p>
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| − | <p>The <em>dialogs</em> we expect to have are a re-creation of the conventional "reality shows"—which show the contemporary reality in ways that <em>need</em> to be shown. The relevance is on an entirely different scale. And the excitement and actuality are of course larger! We engage the "opinion leaders" to contribute their insights to the cause. When successful, the result is most timely and informative. When these conversations fail—they reveal to us, in a spotlight, our resistances and our blind spots, our clinging to the obsolete forms of thought. Which is, of course, not any less exciting and relevant.</p>
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| − | <p>Occasionally we publish books about those themes, based on our <em>dialogs</em>, and to begin new ones.</p>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="row">
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Completing the KF <em>prototype</em></h2></div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-7"><p>
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| − | The academic cause is presently obstructed ('Galilei is held in house arrest') by a most interesting challenge, which we have called the Wiener's paradox: Our <em>collective mind</em> is <em>structured</em> in a way that leaves the <em>academia</em> disconnected, from the public opinion and from the policy. As we have seen, the core mission of our <em>knowledge federation</em> initiative is to remedy that split.</p>
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| − | <p>This paradox, however, means that <em>whatever we may say</em> in an academic publication—<em>is likely to remain without effect</em>! But what else can we do? The Holotopia project is our <em>prototype</em> answer. Its purpose within the Knowledge Federation <em>prototype</em> is to complete the <em>prototype</em> by <em>federating</em> knowledge federation!</p>
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| − |
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| − | <p>Imagine us as a collection of 'cells' in our 'collective mind', which mutated in a new way. Having perceived our society as a bus with candle headlights, we perceived ourselves as (part of) those headlights. And we began to self-organize differently. So that we may <em>become</em> 'lightbulbs', not 'candles'!</p>
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| − |
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| − | <p>We understood, in other words, that we must use our creativity in a new way; not by merely <em>observing</em> and reporting—but by <em>being</em> and <em>acting</em> differently.</p>
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| − |
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| − | <p>And so we made a small snowball, and began to roll it downhill. Will it gather snow? Will it grow? Will it have the effect it needs to have?</p>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="row">
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"></div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-7">
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| − | <p>Margaret Mead wrote in Continuities in Cultural Evolution, already in 1964:</p>
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | "(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our shole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene."
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | <p>Well before The Club of Rome said their word, Mead pointed to the critical task at hand:</p>
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | "Although tremendous advances in the human sciences have been made in the last hundred years, almost no advance has been made in their use, especially in ways of creating reliable new forms in which cultural evolution can be directed to desired goals."
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="row">
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"></div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-6">
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| − |
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| − | <p>Mead's best known motto is encouraging:
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| − | <blockquote>
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| − | "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
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| − | </blockquote> </p>
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| − |
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| − | <p>We leave her more sober words, regarding what constitutes "a small group of... citizens" that are capable of making such a large difference, as her challenge to the Holotopia initiative:</p>
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| − | </div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-3">
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| − | [[File:Mead.jpg]]<br>
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| − | <small>Margaret Mead</small>
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| − | </div> </div>
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| − | <div class="row">
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| − | <div class="col-md-3"></div>
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| − | <div class="col-md-7">
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| − |
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| − | <blockquote><p>"Although lengthy discussions about different kinds of leadership in different situations serve, indirectly, to explain why science has not solved the problem of identifying leaders, they serve no further constructive purpose.</p>
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| − | <p>Instead, we take the position that the unit of cultural evolution is neither the single gifted individual nor the society as a whole but <em>the small group of interacting individuals</em> who, together with the most gifted among them, can take the next step; then we can set about the task of creating the conditions in which the appropriately gifted can actually make a contribution. That is, rather than isolating potential "leaders," we can purposefully produce the conditions we find in history, in which clusters are formed of a small number of extraordinary and ordinary men, so related to their period and to one another that they can consciously set about solving the problems they propose for themselves."</p>
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| − | </blockquote>
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| − | </div></div>
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