The Fatal Flaws in Our Operating System
We need to design a new one.
The New Mindscape #T1–3.
The dominant Human Operating System (HOS) is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. More and more people are questioning it. But we have to get away from the idea that you need a revolution to blow up the dominant HOS. That doesn’t work.
Rather, what we need is to build something in parallel. Different groups are developing alternative operating systems. They try them in one domain, until they work better and better, and apply them in new domains. Different alternative OS in different domains overlap and cross-fertilize each other, expanding into more highly developed OS with wider domains of application. Through an iterative and evolutionary process, the increasingly interconnected alternatives gradually become the main HOS, replacing the dysfunctional dominant one.
We’ve entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which human beings are influencing the physical nature of planet earth. Traces of human activity are now visible in the physicality of our planet. The influence we have on planet earth, however, has become negative and destructive. It seems that we’re incapable of doing anything about it. That’s because the dominant HOS is a system that destroys the earth and does not heal. The program does not allow us to do anything else, because that’s not what it was programmed for. It was programmed to extract, not to heal. It wasn’t programmed to be sustainable. The operating system is lamentably defective, and it’s falling apart. Many societies in the world are falling apart because fatal flaws in the dominant HOS causes the division and destruction of societies.
Fatal flaws in the dominant operating system
What are some of the fatal flaws? One of them is dualistic materialism. The dominant operating system is based on the assumption that the only thing that exists and matters is matter (note that, in English, “matter” is the same word as “what matters”, i.e. what is important) — our material wealth and resources. Material accumulation is the only thing that matters, and so that is what the operating system is designed to develop and exploit.
The result is the world that we live in.
Another flaw is individualistic utilitarianism — that everything should be focused on individual self-interest. The dominant operating system is designed in a way to drive people to only pursue their own individual self-interest, and to understand and relate to themselves primarily in terms of self-interest and material wealth.
The result is the world that we live in.
And a third flaw is the fetish of collective identities. We identify with the part rather than the whole. I’m Chinese, I’m American, I’m a Hong Konger, I’m a Mainlander, I’m White, I’m Black, I’m liberal, I’m conservative, I’m in the yellow camp, I’m in the blue camp… I’m this, I’m not that. I’m with you, I’m against them. We’re good, they’re bad. They’re dangerous.
The result is the world that we live in.
This reveals another, critical flaw in the dominant HOS, which is that it’s based on dichotomies. This means that if something is this, it is not-that. If this is good, that is bad.
So, when I say materialism is the problem, people always say “how could we survive without meeting our material needs?” “You mean that you want to live in a spiritual world, escaping material needs?”
No, I didn’t say that. In a dichotomist mindset, “materialism” is real, therefore “spiritualism” is false; matter is important, therefore spirit is unimportant.
So if I criticize materialism, they think I mean the exact opposite: that spirit is real and matter is false; that spirit is important and matter is unimportant.
But that’s not what I’m saying. Both matter and spirit are real, and both are important. The fatal flaw in the dominant operating system is that it programs our minds to always separate the whole into two, to say that one is good and the other is bad, and then to choose one to the exclusion of the other.
So we’ve got to learn how to build an operating system that doesn’t contain those fatal flaws.
Whole person, whole society
Now here’s where we reach the limits of the HOS metaphor. When you’re talking about an operating system, it sounds like you could be a designer who programs a machine, then it’s going to work after it’s switched on. But human beings aren’t an engineering project. You can’t simply think up an operating system, write it up, plug it into someone, and then flick it on.
Within a maturing vision of humanity, we don’t simply format people like machines into a single operating system. We need to enter an organic process of learning, action, reflection on action, and consultation. The understanding of a new operating system, designing and cultivating it, will happen with people who are working collectively and gradually. They aren’t designing something in the abstract, and then implementing it like engineers. The emergence of a new operating system needs to be more of a process of collective growth and cultivation.
Another aspect of building a new operating system is that it needs to incorporate the whole person. In my essay on body, mind, and spirit, I talked about how the current dominant HOS focuses on developing and using limited capacities of the mind — our rational capacities. It thus weakens the body and the spirit. In other words, those parts, our body and our spirit, don’t matter so much in the dominant HOS. You can use them, but what matters in this system is the intellect. That’s all that really matters. We need an operating system that incorporates our whole person. Everything about us, all our capacities, all our powers, those of the body, mind and spirit — holistically.
And it needs to incorporate the whole of society. An operating system is not just for an individual, but it’s social. It needs to be able to integrate all of society. All of humanity has to have a place in it. In the dominant HOS, most programmes are based on a nation-state, or imperial extensions of the nation-state. The HOS integrates one nation and its dependencies, extracting all capacities and resources of all the people within a certain nation-state against other nation-states. Or they engineer the domination of one economic or racial group over others. Instead, we need a whole-of-society operating system — one that is inclusive of all of society, of all of humanity.
The Role of Spirituality and Religion
To avoid the fatal flaw of materialism, the HOS needs to integrate the spiritual dimension. In religious traditions, there are two ways to look at the spiritual dimension. One is in a highly dualistic, dichotomist way: us vs them, believer vs non-believer, material vs spiritual. Such an operating system seeks to integrate one group and protect it against another group, or even organise it to fight against the other group. We can find a very strong dualism in some religious traditions and in some forms of spirituality. That kind of religious operating system has its uses in some contexts, but, when it becomes core to the operating system, it can be very dangerous.
But in all the religious traditions, there’s another way of integrating things, which is non-dualist. The focus here is oneness, or what we could also call relational non-dualism. It’s about how you recognize the reality of difference in the world. The reality that I am different from others, and I fully accept the radical differences. But at the same time, I transcend the differences, so that we move from radical difference to oneness. Radical difference is something that we acknowledge — that’s the foundation of love. Love arises from difference, and transcends and unites difference. An operating system based on relational non-dualism generates relationships between different elements without setting them up into a conflict, and integrates them without eliminating differences.
A New System Rooted in Experience
As I mentioned above, there are many different groups exploring how to build a new human operating system. They might not be using the term “new operating system,” but that’s basically what they’re trying to so. Whether it’s in the field of ecology, new technologies, the environmental movement, or different social or spiritual movements, there are more and more people who realize that our operating system is broken down, and they’re looking at how to do things differently.
New ideas and systems come out of their experience of action. They aren’t abstract philosophies. A new operating system is not just something that one person thinks up. It’s something that is rooted in, and grows out of experience and community.
One of the main sources of experience that I draw on is my experience in the Baha’i community. This is a community that believes in the need for a new operating system at a time when humanity is in a transitional phase, from its collective childhood to its collective maturity. We need to have a new way of ordering our lives, a new way to understand our spirituality to live our lives in society. We need to learn all of this together. Millions of people around the world, in their communities and with their friends, in villages and cities all over the world and in countries on all the different continents, are trying to develop a new HOS by drawing on the Bahá’i teachings, and they’re learning from each other. They’re sharing experiences and growing in this process. I have written about the Baha’i vision here.
The new operating system needs to be something new, but it also has to be rooted in the spiritual traditions of humanity. You can’t just cut off your roots and the roots of human culture, our religious roots. So, what will our indigenous cosmologies bring to a new operating system? What will Chinese cosmology bring? What is the role of the tradition of Abraham — of the Jewish, Christian, Islamic traditions in the new operating system? These are the roots of our human civilization. How do they grow and transform in a new operating system? All of the collective experience of humanity will need to come into and be transformed to a new level in a new operating system.
I have written more about the ingredients of a new HOS here. The idea of a new operating system is utopian: it’s in our imagination. But turning a utopian imagination into reality, we need to root ourselves in experience.
The New Mindscape series is a practical exploration of spirituality rooted in the critical perspectives of anthropology and sociology.
Click here for the previous essay in the series: Human Operating Systems
Click here for the next essay in the series: A non-dualist operating system?
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
