Joanna Macy, "Futures", ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University, Thursday, July 13, 2006, 10:45 a.m.
Social systems design
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[Intro by Debora]
[Joanna Macy]
Complexity, Democracy, Sustainability
- Appropriate to be addressing these three messes
- Alternatives or descriptions?
von Bertalanffy: systems theory is not a theory, but a way of thinking
- Seeing things not visible to the eye
- Require imagination and visualization
- Lenses
in complexity, democracy and sustainability, see them in erosion, both
progressive and accelerating decline and outright loss
- The great unravelling: emergence from breakdown
- Breakdown, emergence
Going into a world where, by media and census, we are confronted by more than we want to take in
- Erosion of democracy
- Loss of sustainability
- Assault on living systems, through economy
Living in this, we are committed to living the emergence
- Easy to overlook, it's not in the evening news
- Less there than the breakdown
- Emergence of the new
The third revolution of our species
- Lester Brown, Dana Meadows
- The great turning
- William
Runckles: equivalent only to the agricultural revolution and the
industrial revolution: spontaneous and unconscious
Written 17 years ago, and we've lost the tools of democracy
- Progressive in climate change and militarism that we didn't foresee
Most dangerous: deadening of the heart and mind
- Shutting down, for cynicism
The Great Turning
- Can ally with the great revolution
- Transition between the industrial growth society, and the life sustaining society
- Industrial growth society is doomed, since its rules are the maximation of a single variation
- Systems with a maximization of a single variable will collapse
- Not health, longevity, it's corporate profits, comparison to previous quarters, enslaving us to short term thinking
Opportunity to see the revolution
- This revolution will not be televised
- This financial economy will not reward you for taking it apart
- Positive feedback loop, not sequential in reinforcement
First, holding actions, slowing down the growth of the industrial economy
- Don't confuse with the slow turning, but it saves some species and gene pools
- Need the seeds of new structures and organizations, that are sprouting
Third dimension of the great turning: heart and mind
- Holistic thinking
- Shift in consciousness
- We're alive in a living earth
Protecting the rainforest, versus being the rainforest
Anguish of not knowing, uncertainty
Poems: last sonnet to Orpheus
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Questions
Future throught the five stages of grief: denial, anger, and then bargaining. Bargaining as a safety valve.
- Use five stages when thinking about creating change
- Creating change is another thing that futurists do, e.g. planning
- Change means taking our world away
- The generation of the bifurcation will be angry, and will curse us
- They will think that they have progressed beyond where we are now, because they don't want to come back and relive this now
- Want to prevent catastrophe, but we also can't hang onto our world
- We don't have to have a miserable life, because it's sustainable
- The destruction has to happen before the creation
Similar to economic models. Making a story about how agents interact with each other. What differences?
- First text in systems course is System One, System Two
- No free lunch
- You can't just do one thing, will create some things we like and some we don't
- Working towards a preferable future, consequences
- Tradeoffs
- Can't do just one thing
Appreciate,
but confused. What are developmental studies, conflict studies,
.... See a common set of concerns. When we apply General
Evolution Theory, and understand laminar periods of change and
bifurcations .... we can still influence the future, not by
engineering, but by creating scenarios, to shift our probabilities into
possibilities. False dichotomy
- Emphasizing the similarities, and in this talk, only emphasizing the differences
- A differentiated family of two branches, and you're talking about an integrated family
[Debora Hammond]
Creativity, imagination
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