Can we Design a World that Works?
How much worse do things have to become before we start to truly invest in the economic, financial, and political changes that are fuelling crisis after crisis? Never before have growing disparities and the impacts on health and systemic resilience become more apparent as now. The Global Nutrition Report 2020 indicates:
“Today, one in every nine people in the world is hungry, and one in every three is overweight or obese. More and more countries experience the double burden of malnutrition, where undernutrition coexists with overweight, obesity and other diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The trend is clear: progress is too slow to meet the global targets. Not one country is on course to meet all ten of the 2025 global nutrition targets and just 8 of 194 countries are on track to meet four targets. Almost a quarter of all children under 5 years of age are stunted. At the same time, overweight and obesity are increasing rapidly in nearly every country in the world, with no signs of slowing.” ~ The Gobal Nutrition Report 2020
This report was written prior to the coronavirus crisis. Now add to this reality the impacts of the COVID crisis and we seem to have the recipe for wide-scale collapse. Or, not? There is another possibility, if we listen to what this crisis is revealing about the way we run our economies, drive our societal goals, legitimize business as usual, and more…
Why settle for a world that does not work, if another world is possible? Division, conflict, and suffering are the result of choices we make, not because life is designed that way. Let’s explore…
- Principles and qualities of worlds that work — nature is a wonderful teacher, and;
- Principles and qualities of worlds that do not work — we seem to have normalized those.
How to design a world that does not work
The dominant human growth pattern has become one of growth via extractive expansion and zero-sum game competition in ways that run contrary to the coherence and informational dynamics of life. Complex living systems, including our own bodies, are evolutionary coherent systems. The evolutionary coherence of a systems is part of how a system is able to regulate, adapt, and evolve through change by honoring the systemic interdependencies over time — through attuned systemic boundaries.
When the evolutionary coherence of a system diminishes, the informational dynamics of life become disembodied and disjoined from the wholeness out of which they emerged. Accordingly, the system loses its innate integrity and different kinds of orders and structures start to emerge, which make it possible for certain elements within the system to dominate by imposing their goals. The rest of the story is all too familiar. Dominating elements overtake the system in the pursuit of their goals, which turns the diversity of the systems against itself, and cycles of division, violence, and conflict begin.
This pattern is similar to the way a virus overtakes the communication and growth resources of a system, by hijacking the system to propagate its growth pattern of rapid extractive expansion leading eventually to collapse. The evolutionary coherence of a system ensures that the changing diversity of a system remains collaborative and attuned to the wholeness realization of the system. Evolutionary coherence is like the music conductor of a system, reminding each of the elements in the system of their beat and rhythm within the larger symphony that emerges from the dynamic wholeness of the system.
When the evolutionary coherence goes down, we can no longer hear, experience, and attune to the beats and tunes of each other and the system as a whole. The dualistic polarization in our world and worldviews is the result of a long process of erosion of our evolutionary coherence.
Viral patterns and self-destruct mechanisms rise and increase when our evolutionary coherence diminishes. The physical destruction and erosion of our biodiversity is another component of this same degenerative growth pattern. All of this teaches us how to design worlds that do not work, unless of course we deliberately want to design for collapse and destruction.
Sustainable development through degrowth as a sole focus is in my humble view, not the solution. The impulse to grow and expand is part of life — even cosmologically. The problem is not with growth per se, but with growth that becomes decoupled, extractive, and divisive. That type of growth is not responsive to the systemic boundaries that regulate and safeguard the systemic interdependencies and the health of the system as a whole.
The evolutionary coherence of healthy living systems ensures that the growth dynamics of a system and its elements remain in touch with the evolutionary process of life. From a design perspective, we have been hugely ignorant (or abusive) of this fundamental life principle where it concerns the design and architecture of mainstream economic, financial, and political systems.
To summarise:
- Systemic boundaries emerge from the evolutionary coherence of living systems and regulate the systemic interdependencies in service of the thrivability of a system as a whole;
- Systemic barriers emerge from imposed goals and dynamics that harm the evolutionary coherence and systemic interdependencies of living systems, which dualistically polarizes the systemic complexity and undermines the thrivability of a system as a whole.
- The sustainability crisis — including the political, economic, social, climate change, biodiversity, and value crises — are the result of unaddressed systemic thrivability barriers that result from dualistic and unsustainable growth models.
In short, unless we learn to integrate the informational dynamics and intelligence of life in our human operating systems, we will continue to design for death, war, violence, and collapse (see also Smitsman, 2019).
How to design a world that works
Living systems evolve in ways that are evolutionary coherent, because they embody systemic sensing capacities for remaining finely tuned and in-formed cosmologically (implicate order), while simultaneously responsive to changes in the outer environment (explicate order). The terminology implicate and explicate order was coined by physicist David Bohm, who described this accordingly:
“We proposed that a new notion of order is involved here, which we called the implicate order (from a Latin root meaning ‘to enfold’ or ‘to fold inward’). In terms of the implicate order one may say that everything is enfolded into everything. This contrasts with the explicate order now dominant in physics in which things are unfolded in the sense that each thing lies only in its own particular region of space (and time) and outside the regions belonging to other things.” ~ David Bohm (1980, p.225)
Systemic sensing capacities help us to attune and evolve with life. Making the informational dynamics of living systems visible in the design of our societal growth systems will, among other factors, require whole new measurement systems. The r3.0 transformational blueprints are a good example of such new measurement metrics, as well as the 10 capitals model for regenerative economics.
Here are some further design principles for a world that works:
- Design holarchically (and not hierarchically) with the informational dynamics and fractal patterns of life that in-form and guide evolution.
- Nurture, strengthen, and mature evolutionary coherence, or else systemic complexity may turn destructive and become dualistically polarised. Give time for roots to develop before expansion and diversification, this prevents unnecessary stress on interdependencies.
- Respect interdependencies of living systems by honoring the feedback of systemic boundaries — including the boundaries of our own bodies as a living system.
- Enable systemic goals to form and emerge from wholeness and unity, rather than by imposing and forcing agendas.
This is the greatest and most challenging transition time humanity has ever lived to experience. Transitions are known to come with periods of crisis, which offers important learning opportunities to shifting assumptions, and testing our resilience and regenerative capacities. During crisis periods there is also a risk to polarize issues at hand, and get trapped into dualistic stances.
How to avoid this? Adopt a ‘third way’ approach by working with potential dualistic polarities towards a new (third) middle ground. Become conscious of systemic barriers, including your own — which always emerge when we deny or damage systemic boundaries (both inner and outer). Invest in our collective capacities for becoming the systems that are needed for resolving our world crises. Stop walking in the wrong direction, let life be your guide.
References
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Routledge.
Currivan, J. (2017). The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company.
Smitsman, A. & Currivan, J. (2019). Systemic Transformation — Into the Birth Canal. Systems Research and Behavioral Science (January 2019), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2573.
Smitsman, A. (2019). Into the Heart of Systems Change. PhD dissertation. Maastricht University. https://bit.ly/2DnbHuP
