Systemic Design
“Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.” — Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008 (published posthumously)
I know (or know of) hundreds of humans who have posterity concerns, and existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere, who are aware that we modern humans have an Apollo 13 ‘we have a problematique’ situation.
But I know of only three other humans on the planet with any interest in designing systems (and subsystems, e.g. of global management/governance, financial/monetary, ecological, and societal/civilizational) that might actually work to replace the current non-viable dynamic we are all products of and serve.
The First Principle of Systemic Design
We humans cannot control the nonhuman. —see Charles Fowler, Systemic Management, 2009 [“Can humans manage other species, ecosystems, or the Earth…? No.”]
Full stop. What we can do is design/control human “actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources.”
The deeply held (by Anthropocene enthusiasts, we hubris ones) view that we modern techno-industrial (MTI) ones can control the nonhuman, the Gaian world system, is belief-based. True believers can save time by clicking the back button.
To repeat what Nature is trying to tell we humans who are slow on the up take, some hundreds of humans can foresee posterity’s ghastly future, the one that involves paying the overshoot debt we have been enthusiastically incurring; many can opine about why and how bad it is/will become, but few (count them on one hand?) can focus on “real” alternatives that might actually work. The short of it is that 99.9999% of we MTIed ones are true-believing political animals…, but details are a distraction.
To have some foresight intelligence and be sane implies recognition that before hitting the wall of biophysical, societal, cognitive and civilizational limits, that we who are on the great MTI Overshoot Train to Nowhere consider getting off, i.e. consider systemic change. But doing so is uncomfortable, so never mind. Sorry about your future. I’m old, I’ll likely die in comfort. What has posterity ever done for me?
Don Chisholm, now retired, envisioned not only the need for global management/governance, but endeavored in the 1990s to make it so. His book, A 21st Century Steward’s Handbook, went unpublished. But Gaia be preserved is a need more than a want, and Blue Planet Governance (systemic management) is the condition that will come anyway if humans come to persist on the planet.
Ted Trainer is a systemic designer of viable communities where people live The Simple Way, you know, the one that works, that selects for renormalizing humans to become consumers of enough in a conserver society.
Jack Alpert, since the 1970s, persists in envisioning a design for a viable civilization based on mass-joule limits, one in which the largest possible remnant of modern techno-industrial urban society could be supported (30 to 50 million people living in three hydropowered megacities). His books remain unpublished. “The most important session at any academic meeting this decade” (2010s) lacked significant attendees (read papers posted, e.g. on Carrying Capacity). Jack is still working for a viable future for humanity (someone should).
So one human endeavoring and counting (one that I know of, there may be more) is working (systemically) to design a system that might work. One. Not good news for 10 year olds. Political animals view viable alternatives to business-as-usual (BAU) as of no interest (as the existential threat to their complacency).
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Systemic Design
If anyone else was interested in actually designing systems that might work (apart from Jack), I could go on at book length, but as there are not, the short of it is the systems view: that we cannot design solutions to problems we are the cause of, nor control systems that not only more complex than we know, but more complex than we can know.
What we can do is endeavor to understand the dynamics of our non-viable overshoot pathway, and then design (test and redesign) systems based on what we can know about socioeconomic-political systems that worked (e.g. the last 6 million years of hominin evolution, excluding the last 50k years, and from such few remaining non-expansionist humans as remain).
What worked (as evidenced by over 6 million years of persistence) is to consider, and then apply the information to manage ourselves, to limit our demands upon Nature’s resources to such mass-joules as the world system (Gaia) can provide long term (as the millennia pass). Having guessed, we can then test and scale up by spreading information about what works such as Nature (not us clothed apes) determines.
Everyone having concerns for posterity and the biosphere should design a viable civilization (so, for posterity’s sake, I‘m doing what I can, it’s easy if you try). One design, or more likely elements of many designs, might work. Or humans go extinct after maybe 10–13 billion humans (some to most humans alive today plus the billions yet to be born this century) die a Malthusian death. Sorry about that. Not good news for 10 year olds. There seems to be a shortage of systemic designers (but not of neoclassical economists or astrologers).
What Systemic Design Is Not
No matter what the problem, humans cannot design a solution for it. In all cases, we evoke Sevareid Law, the greatest intellectual discovery of the 20th century:
“The chief cause of problems is solutions.” — Eric Sevareid, CBS News, December 29, 1970
Systemic design offer no solutions. All systemic designers know they have none, nor could any they imagine, actually work because they designed them. By chance, a solution could work, the designer could take credit, a 300m statue of the designer could be build, 300k followers could gather around it to celebrate the sacrifice of the three virgins each year, but none of this would be more than a distraction.
Systemic design limits humans to not trying to solve problems, wu wei, so that in a functioning system, everything is done by the system that selects for what works without the interference of would-be human agency and putative free will with a dollop of choice added. Systemic design (and sanity) is based on choiceless obedience to the nature of things (Nature), the condition of freedom that comes from the recognition of necessity, which forces one to do what is needed (as distinct from wanted).
Those who believe in solutions (issuing from human agency) are the source of our problems, to which Nature has the solution (extinction). We all too clever ape marching morons celebrate human exceptionalism and techno-domination:
“The solution for technological problems, will be more technology; and if that causes other problems, the solution for those will be the same, more technology.” — Kevin Kelly, futurist, founder of Wired magazine
To understand our hubris is to be delivered from it, is to stand down (in all choicelessness)