Relevance

Before starting on the main meal I think I should talk about what I've written so far, and though there's not much of it yet it's enough to raise the question: what's all this got to do with the shambles called humanity as it is today? This was prompted while I was watching a DVD called The Corporation, which is one of the most devastating exposures of the roles of corporations in shaping this utterly dysfunctional world. Joel Bakan, author of the book on which the DVD is based, refers to it as pathological and one short segment compares the behaviour of corporations as comparable to the well-documented characteristics of individual psychopaths. This is precisely how I have regarded corporations for many years, though there are some vital differences, particularly in identifying the origins of this kind of behaviour in individuals compared with those of the corporation. This is not a criticism of Bakan or his DVD for which I much admire, but in dealing with either we have to be very clear about just how they develop. If we are not clear about the processes culminating in these kinds of behaviour we are not likely to have much success in dealing with them - either preventing or changing them. That's precisely why I am so insistent on understanding the nature of the processes involved in both individual and collective behaviour, which necessarily means identifying the way things work at the different levels of complexity, from one person to the United Nations.

Put it another way: if you try to use the same method with a family or a group as you would with an individual,it just wouldnt work. Likewise if you tried to deal with trade unionists intending to go out on strike by appealing to their better nature they would regard you as naive and simple-minded.

With their unfailing genius at creating confusion the lawmakers in the U.S. and U.K. decreed that corporations have the same legal rights under the constitution as individuals with all the advantages that this gives them. Later I shall deal with this plainly impossible situation in detail, but for now I just want to
point out that no systems thinker would make such an elementary mistake as to confuse the individual with the corporation or vice versa since no such system can continue indefinitely. It is becoming more obvious as the days go by that this confusion is a
major factor in creating the decline of the structure of modern industrial societies and it has to change. There are more advanced thinkers who are aware of this in various fields and they talk about the need for a new 'paradigm ' (a jargon term used with increasing frequency since T.S.Kuhn's book on 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' in 1962) - ie, a different model of the way the world works.

So, far from being uninteresting, dry, irrelevant the study and use of an understanding of Systems Theory is essential in making sure that whenever a new model arises it will be able to avoid the inevitable self-destruction we are all now participating in.In fact if we ignore the rules that enable natural systems to work we will have no way of stopping, let alone reversing, our present drive to destruction.

Hereditary or Learned: Genetics or Environment.
I need to introduce this here, because it is a central issue in any discussion about human characteristidcs, personality or behaviour. This has been a battle ground for millenia between those who believe that whatever we do is determined either by what we have inherited from our parents or because we have learned it from the time we we born. It's not just a theoretical exercise that provides jobs for hordes of academics who spend incredible amounts of time, money and energy trying to prove one side or the other. It pervades the attitudes of just about everyone who is looking for the causes of behaviour we either approve of or reject. In medicine, for example, any discussion about a particular disease/illness automatically includes a statement about its possible hereditary origins. The answer will inevitably have much to do with the management of the condition. Same applies in law, education and pretty much every aspect of our daily lives. So let's shed some light on this.

Everything we do is a result of the interaction between what we were born with and what we learn. In other words it's not a question of whether what I do is due to a built-in feature of my body-mind: it is always both. The only question is not either or, but how large a part of my behaviour is due to my genes and how much to what I have learned since - or before - birth. The greater the role of genetic factors, generally speaking, the less the effect of treatment. However, our knowledge of the way genes work is increasing at a phenomenal rate, which of course changes profoundly our ways of dealing with hereditary problems.

There are, though, some dubious consequences, the nature of which we are just beginning to be aware of much to our chagrin. The last several weeks there has been a profusion of reports on the latest figures on the threats posed by Diabetes. According to the NY Health Dept, 8% of the population of New York suffer from a form of diabetes and this is being referred to as an epidemic. The overall figure for the U.S. is 7% and health authorities everywhere are becoming alarmed at the impact this is having on society. These figures represent a truly dramatic leap since I was a medical student in the forties and a quite shattering rise since the discovery of insulin in 1921-23 by Banting, Best and several others in Toronto. Prior to that time almost everyone with Type 1 Diabetes died within a few years. In fact diabetes is now regarded as a scourge and with its complications is the fourth most frequent cause of death in the U.S. and comparable numbers in most of the developed nations. It constitutes a potential menace for those who are diabetic and ignoring the need for proper control of blood sugar is a sure way to developing serious complications.

So the question of genetics versus learned factors is clear in the case of diabetes: the life style one adopts plays a very significant part in the outcome, and trying to put numbers on the relative significance of these two factors is an exercise in futility in most cases. The exceptions, as with some other diseases, are sometimes due to the fact that a certain genetic predisposition may be so great that treatment has little or no effect on the outcome. It is clear that our interference with natural processes, however well intentioned, can lead to unforeseen consequences.


We shall see later how these two factors interact to produce what we become.

More basics

FEEDBACK
To continue with the basis of systems theory, there are two more concepts that are indispensible: feedback and hierarchy, both of which are obvious but are ignored all too often with disastrous results.
A Touch of Reality
Before continuing I'm interrupting the flow after having just watched the BBC News Review of 2005, when two events were shown which are highly relevant to this blog's purpose. First was the bombing of the London Transport system by what appears to have been suicide bombers. The review showed with stark clarity the utterly insane manner in which we behave to one another. In a comparison with some other events the sheer numbers and the range of devastation don't look so large, but it seemed to me to have as great an impact as the U.S. experiences in 2002 in the sense of bewilderment and alarm that human beings can act with such utter lack of consideration of the devastation and death performed in cold blood. And all because of a clash of belief systems. Where does such insanity start, and what is going on in the minds of the killers, which ever side they come from? A brief reflection of the train of events related to this and other bombings show very clearly that they are not isolated acts: they are always part of a process, a series of actions and reactions that go back a long way. And they are always done by people and groups who claim to be justified and often enough use identical authorities - God etc - to prove the other wrong. The history of Europe is full of this - the Thirty Years War which turned everything upside down. This was a war due, at least in part, to the conflict between Catholicism and the Reformation forces of Lutherism and Calvinism each proclaiming that their version of the teachings of Jesus Christ was the correct one. A not dissimilar struggle - at least in principle - is the the modern confict between the Sunni and Shia sects of the Muslim world, each claiming to be the true authority.

Water Depletion and Sinking Land
Item 2. Mexico City is sinking in parts by about 3 cms per year, due to the massive reduction in the aquafer beneath the city and with the size of the population increasing by the day this will increase rather than decrease. Doing the arithmetic shows an dwcrease of 30 cms or more every 10 years. There are very significant places like this scattered around the globe in addition to the ever increasing changes in water levels in the major fresh water lakes and this can only increase as the population rises.




The first is an example of violence due to clashes of belief systems: the second is occurring because we have not yet found a way to control populations especially in the undeveloped countries.
Both are due to the actions of humans, and there are many other examples, the total of which is truly alarming. This is the kind of thing that eventually convinced me of the need to change this trajectory, which cannot be done without a far higher level of understanding by the majority of the world populations. This in turn depends on making the necessary information available in more accessible ways than we usually employ. It's a safe bet that any-
one reading this can think of plenty of examples, but don't fully understand just how it all happens.


Back to Basics
How do you know when your actions are the correct ones? Clearly the effects of those actions should tell you all you need to know. If the action was appropriate it will confirm that your perception of the problem was accurate and your response was correct.So the principle is that information of the consequences of your actions is indispensible in finding your way around your world and without it you could continue actions which could have disastrous effects. This applies to all systems and it's virtually impossible to imagine a system of any kind being able to survive for long with-
out feedback.
Some simple examples. When driving a car your ability to keep to the correct side of the road depends on you knowing what happens when you turn the steering wheel. I wouldn't recommend experiment-
ing to prove it unless you have an urge to find out what happens if you were to close your eyes and eliminate feedback. No doubt you would quickly be faced with the consequences of the absence of feedback - if you were in any condition to know anything.

More sophisticated, but just as instructive is knowing how your thermostat works. The feedback here is from the temperature of the room to the heating device, depending on how it is set. Below the set temperature it switches on: above it switches off. Again - very simple but indispensible if you have such a system, and to repeat the principle: the output of the heater can only maintain a steady temperature if the results of the output are sensed and cut off the output when a desired level has been reached.
Incidentally, one of the first mechanical examples which was devised was the Watt steam engine and its twin-balled governor, and this was one of the pioneering feedback devices 200+ years ago

Talk of a governor suggests that the purpose of the feedback is to enable a degree of control over any system involved, and in fact that is so. An important feature is that it is automatic: it does
not depend on external intervention for it to work and the benefits of this can be seen in biological systems which could not function without some measure of automatic feedback. There are so many events happpening in our surroundings that it would be absol-
tely impossible to pay attention to all of them at the same time. So, if you are climbing stairs you need more oxygen, your heart will have to beat more quickly and you will need to breathe more rapidly and deeply to supply it and there are many other functions that have to change rapidly so that you will be able to continue climbing. If this depended on taking the decisions to change all these functions you would never get them done. In an emergency you would be dead before you could start thinking: doing it automatic-
ally is the only possible way to survive.

There is, however, a catch. There has to be a controller which sets the levels of the various functions outside the system itself, such as setting the temperature at which the feedback shuts down the heater. There are unsuspected ways in which this principle operates at the higher biological levels such as humans
which I shall deal with in more detail later.

Now for the problem of hierarchy. This is a real bone of contention
in many ways, from denial that there should be hierarchies of any kind, to those who say that one of the fundamental aspects of ex-
istence is hierarchy and the battles between these contestants is legendary.

Well what is it anyway? It refers to the fact that if there are
collections of anything there needs to be some kind of organised relations between them that enables them to maintain their identity
because otherwise they will just be a collection. And we know that relations are at least as important as the items that are related.
If we were to take all the items that make up human beings, slap them on the table and try to make a human being, we wouldn't even be able to get started: it is the manner in which they relate to one another that makes the identity. But it goes further than that.
Take a cell in, say, the liver, or any other organ. The proper function of the organ is determined by the way whole collections of cells work together in an integrated way: the individual cells cannot organise the manner in which the organ works as a whole. That is the function of the organ. In other words there is a higher level of control of the organ as a whole to which the act-
ivities of the cells are subordinated without which it would be simply a collection of cells. From that simple example it is obvious that some kind of hierarchical control system is a critical factor in the way it works. And stepping up a notch or two the same thing applies to the subordination of the organs to the control of the body as a whole.

Take our use of glucose as a very basic need for all organisms. We
humans have a very sophisticated system for getting glucose in various forms, liquid or solid, into our bodies, breaking down the substances of which glucose is a vital part, transporting it to all our cells, getting it through the cell membrane, using it in the cells to provide energy and dealing with the left overs from its breakdown. The process is very complicated and it is still clearly known still, eighty odd years after the discovery of insulin and the role of the pancreas. So here we have specialised cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the secretion of this into the circulation by the organ (pancreas0. But the output must be controlled by the body as a whole - including the brain - and this is a fine example of systems theory at work for if this process did not function according to the rules I introduced ealier this extremely complicated system would break down and glucose would not reach the tissues.
No matter what level of functioning of any organised system we look at, the same basic rules apply, and as we go through increasingly complex of layer on layer the consequences of ignoring the rules will, whether consciously or unconsciously, cause increasing dysfunction leading to total destruction. From molecules to minds to collections of countries in the U.N. they must all operate according to the rules. These are not rules we invent: they have been discovered over the centuries and we ignore them at our peril - which is exactly what is going on at every level throughout the world. And it is the reason for my doing this blog and whatever else I can in the hope that it will arouse the anger of enough people to do whatever they can do, in their particular circumstances, to change things.

Having gone through most of the necessary basics, I shall begin to deal with the details of how they apply in our lives and hopefully what we can do about them. And from no on the blogs will be more regular and possibly more interesting.