Re: Грегори Бейтсон ↑

metanymous 02 октября 2004, 06:01 в посте Openmeta (оригинал в ЖЖ)

Now consider the world-wide efforts and movements for peace, sustainability, health, human rights, gender equality, social justice, etc., from this perspective. Insofar as our approach is limited to attempts to control the symptoms of our global dis-ease, all we are really doing is trying to do modify the behaviour of those whom we may perceive to be responsible for the various problems we want to solve. This pre-Cybernetic way of thinking reinforces the perceptual splitting of Humankind into complementary antagonistic groups: the economic globalisers versus fair traders, environmentalists versus polluters, peace makers versus war mongers, human rights activists versus fascists, progressives versus conservatives, political party A versus political party B, religious fundamentalists versus their enemies, terrorists of the left versus terrorists of the right ,"us" against "the system," and vice-versa! Enormous amounts of energy, money and time intended to make things better are wasted by both sides in a mutual cancelling-out process of complementary antagonism, guaranteeing that the overall situation will continue to worsen, while time runs out.

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But the global problems we face are not really separate from each other, nor from the whole of Humankind which needs to resolve them before it is too late. As of 2002, that's over 6 (heading for 10 or 12) billion people, each one of whom is part of the whole interconnected biosphere-humankind-culture-technology which constitutes the "system" in question, including you and me and all of our conscious and unconscious assumptions, expectations, and beliefs.

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As Bateson said:

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"To want control is the pathology! Not that the person can get control, because of course you never do... Man is only a part of larger systems, and the part can never control the whole...

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So what to do if you want to change the world? Start with a systemic perspective:

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The problem of how to transmit our ecological reasoning to those whom we wish to influence in what seems to us to be an ecologically good direction is (thus) itself an ecological problem".

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Carl Jung made the same observation in psychological terms:

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"To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it. What we can improve in others is of doubtful utility as a rule, if, indeed, it has any effect at all."

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The US government's so-called "war on terror" is perhaps the most outstanding example of a total lack of Cybernetic wisdom. Rather than examine and change its brutal foreign policy which, as Noam Chomsky so exhaustively documented, has repeatedly attempted to control other nations – and nourished the resentment and Islamic fundamentalism which apparently resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center – the US-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are certain to produce precisely the opposite of the results intended, increasing the support for terrorism whilst simulataneously degrading the democratic principles of the USA itself and of the United Nations system so painstakingly built up for the sake of peace.

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Cybernetics today is still rarely taught in universities, and wrongly presumed even by the educated public to be some rarefied pursuit of interest only to esoteric epistemologists. In China however, in the 6th century BCE, the poet and philosopher Lao Tsu recognised the self-organising principle immanent in nature, which he called the Tao. Eloquently described in his masterful work, the Tao Te Ching this essentially cybernetic idea became the General Systems Theory of Chinese culture. Through the mythopoeic vision of the Tao's self-organising function, cybernetic principles were put into practice – in government, medicine, agriculture and religion – and influenced the culture of that country for thousands of years thereafter. Another taoist insight from China comes to us through the ideogram for "crisis", which as is well known, is a combination of the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity".