Order,Chaos and Sanity 2.

Before we start, I should point out that everything I say ought to be preceded with the letters AFWK - shorthand for "As Far As We
Know" - since there are very few certainties and our knowledge of the world is constantly being revised. Competing beliefs in certain truths have caused more people to suffer and die than all other causes combined: in fact,as we shall see when I deal with perception, it affects everyone's life every day, yet few of us ever question our own beliefs though we are incessantly question- ing everyone else's! so - AFWK.
One of the few certainties is that change is the only constant. We all know from our own experience that the world - of which we are parts - swings between order and chaos, and either end of this range taken to extremes will mean that whatever we are faced with will be completely beyond our control. Everything that exists between the extremes can do so successfully only if there is some way that it can detect the changes in its environment and a mechanism that enables it to adapt to the changes. In other words it has to be a system of a type that will ensure its survival and the better we understand systems the better our chances. So what is a system? It is a collection of components that relate to each other in a very specific way to accomplish certain functions. And that, of course, sounds both simple and obvious, but as soon as we start examining the way we humans deal with our environments it becomes startlingly obvious that we act as though such an idea had never occurred to us. As we shall see,we pay lots of attention to the components of, say, a cell but we often pay no attention at all to the relations between the parts, with are as essential for the workings of the cell as are the parys.
If this should sound ridiculous - well, it is. But the entire history of scientific investigations is riddled with examples of just how capable we are of doing so. Take the 'paradigm', or world view of how the world works, which has changed over the last dozen or so thousand years. The view that has dominated increasingly since the renaissance, and what is referred to as the scientific revolution, is that the world operates like a huge machine in which all the components operate together as interacting cogs. Scientists focussed their efforts on producing techniques that enabled us to discover how specific parts of the machine work, and one of their most effective processes involved analysing first the nature of the components of the external world and then how they worked together. This then enabled us to control, or at least adapt more effectively, whatever was being investigatged. Analysis therefore was one of the bedrocks of scientific research, and the success we have had in learning how to control our external world has been truly amazing.
But though infinitely more sophisticated in dealing with the external world, we continue to demonstrate that our understanding of the nature of human beings, either as individuals or in groups,
is responsible for the possibility of self-extinction changing to being a probability. I shall deal at more length with this later
but I am concerned to show that the very methods that have been so successful in our gaining so much control over much of our natural
world is due largely to the failure to recognise the relentless laws imposed by the nature of systems. I introduced the role of analysis as having been so important in dealing with the external world. One of the most vital features of what is referred to as General Systems Theory is that if we confine ourselves to analysis of events and thereby learn in great detail about the
components involved, and then fail to re-integrate that informat -ion we may cause the eventual destruction of any system we are studing. Finding that a lack of glucose is creating symptoms, then taking in a lot of glucose to deal with the symptoms could produce serious results if other factors are not considered and dealt with. It is essential therefore to understand the basic features of systems theory, for if we don't, we will go on making the same mistake repeatedly.

BASIC SYSTEMS THEORY.
1. Everything that is not chaotic is a system.
2. A biological system is dynamic (changing), not static.
3. Each system consists of components and their relations.
4. Each system has two aspects:
- it consists of sub-systems which are themselves components
- it is itself a subsystem/component of a larger system.
5. Between the components of a system specific relations must exist
(see 'autopoesis' later for details) thus relations are as
important as the components and are ignored at great peril.
6. The role each subsystem plays in the larger system is its
particular niche in each of the levels of the whole - this is
the case with all organisms - they fulful a role in the larger
ecology to which it belongs and without which the ecology wont
function as it should. Wolves without prey die out.

Order,Chaos and Sanity 1.

Today is 'armistice day' - at least that was what I recall it being called the first time I attended a service in 1924 at the small church school I had entered 2 months earlier. It referred, of course, to the first world war 'to end wars', but when that turned out not to be true and it happened all over again, but on an even larger scale -62 million dead according to the most recent figures I've seen - the name was changed to Remembrance Day, and without the boast that this was really the war to end wars. Even at age 15 I realised that Hitler's recent control of Germany and the burning of the Reichstag boded ill for Europe. So the dominoes fell over one by one, entirely predictably until the only order left in Europe was that imposed by guns. I experienced the devast-
ation in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Germany as part of the British war machine, but at the end I had no illusions that this would be the war to end wars. Each 11th November I am greatly
saddened at the memories of the loss of so many friends and colleagues, made all the more poignant by the awful sense that humans seem to be no nearer an understanding of how we can live together in a peaceful, friendly, supportive way.

The questions that started for me when I was 5 years old have not
abated or been resolved, and my life ever since then has been a search for the reasons we behave so destructively on a collective level, and so frustrated and alienated individually. And should you think this does not apply to you, consider how different your life would have been had WW II indeed been the last war. The energy, activity, relations with one another, sense of purpose,
greater consciousness of the true joys of life - and your physical
well-being: all now replaced by a sense of struggle against all kinds of threats, from economic inadequacies to chronic illnesses.
What are we doing to being this series of plagues on ourselves, for make no mistake - only we could have done this. To blame a god of some kind is so utterly contrary to the qualities and power we assign to our gods.

Why then are the possible explanations for all this? A good place to start is the violence in France - or anywhere else for that matter, but France offers some clear possibilities for discussion. Two of the most conspicuous features in the reports from Paris etc., are: 1. The explosive nature of the actions of a
large number of people that quickly recruited other areas. 2 The
inarticulate nature of the comments by the participants combined with an absence of any kind of organisation, though leaders begin to appear spontaneously as time goes by. It is obvious that this was a powder keg ready to explode after accumulating emotional energy for some years with a spark that in itself was innocuous.
The response of the French authorities was entirely predictable:
suppress the violence ruthlessly and restore law and order and only when this is done will theytake a look at the causes.

Now I know nothing at first hand of precisely the trouble in
France at this particular time. But the pattern is identical to all the other similar incidents - those past and those inevitably to come. I don't need to know the details to understand that given the situation in France this behavior was entirely predictable, an although the details of the actual events was not. What we are observing is a distressing example of the ignorance of the dynamics of humans actions, individual or collective. This provides me with the basis for the next blog on the biological factors that are so powerful in affecting the way we live our lives.1

Clarify

My apologies for the delay in getting this site going, which I hope will dispel any concerns that I may have become extinct. Three of the four comments I received wanted to be sure what this blog site is all about so I' try to do that now.
To put things in perspective look at today's news. The theme that comes through to me is consistent with yesterday's news and probably tomorrow's: specifically it screams loudly that the world we humans have created is extremely dysfunctional and there is no viable plan at any level to convert that to 'functional'
The violence in France has set off alarm bells throughout the world, coming as it does as the wars in the Middle East reach new levels of violence, when elections are declared fraudulent by the UN observers, when natural disasters seem to be reaching record levels of destruction in Kashmir, when the American Economic
meeting rejected the attempt by the US to push the member states into establishing a free trade agreement.

These levels of dysfunction are the result of actions by individuals and by collections of individuals of various shapes and sizes and with the exceptions of some organisations such as the UN, there seems to be little interest in all the major players in the international game in changing their behavior. When there
.is an attempt made to create agreements that work for the benefit of all concerned, personal and governmental, the national policies
invariably find ways to prevent anything significant happening unless it coincides with additional benefits for them.
So if these individual or collective actions are directly responsible for these growing threats it is obvious that it is they that must be changed. But that is not possible without a profound understanding of the motives that result in such destruct-
ive behavior: why do they do what they do? And then, what can be done about it that won't make matters worse.
That is what this blog site is all about: Why do we do what we do and how can we change it? In any language or culture that is a formidable task which makes the Labors of Hercules look like child's play, and without awareness of the processes involved at all levels it is impossible.I am going to explain in non-technical language what we know so far, and what else we need to know, to accomplish something like a sane world, which is at this moments a long way off. This will be, of course, my personal views of such a task, but one of the purposes of this blog site is to initiate a feedback system from anyone who is interested and concerned enough to provide comments on anything I say, or the validity of my view point. Though I don't envisage any joint action - though I wouldn't
oppose it - these blogs may of be some help in clarifying other points of view, which may be more valid than mine. I am not interested in convincing people to agree with me - or anyone else: I am interested in helping anyone interested to learn more about how we function and in developing their own points of view
.