USF Understanding
UNDERSTANDING SYSTEM FUNCTION
This is an invitation to help me tell the story of how humans came to live in peace and plenty. It starts with one community figuring out how to obtain all that they needed to thrive while healing their local environment. What does it mean to "thrive" as a community? Can we merge human and natural systems so that we live in healthy ecosystems rather than preserve them elsewhere? Can we recreate the garden of eden?
There are parameters to the story. It is about discovering what is missing in the "typical" community - what do we need so that people here can live a decent life? How do we make more places for more people to fit in? We can only supply what is missing by employing members of the community to realize unused human and biological potential that already exist in the community.
In the story everyone gets to make their own choices. The future is the cumulative result of all the choices each of us make - but we each choose based on what is best for us and our families. We cannot force what we think are better choices for the community - we can only create options that work better for the members of the community - otherwise they will not choose them.
In the story there is no one else to blame. Our community is the result of our choices and only we can choose to make it different.
And the story goes on with another community around the world hearing about what that first community did - and they improved how it was done. How to we make this a story with more and more people helping to write it?
And then more communities heard about it and tried their own methods - until everyone in the world had the opportunity to contribute value to the system and lived in a healthy diverse environment.
That is the story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty.
OUTLINE
- We can understand the system, and our community, as a pattern of flows. Flowing through the system is energy, materials, nutrients, information, knowledge, wisdom, entertainment, emotional support, belonging and contributing. These are the things that we humans value and therefore, I am using value as the generic term for those flows. The goal of the story is a way that every member of the community - and every species in our ecosystem - are contributing value to the flows.
- Civilization is a structure composed of bridges that we use to direct the flow of value. We could say connections, bonds, relationships, agreements or contracts for different ways that value flows between humans. We use bridges in the sense of structure where an exchange of value between two humans creates a bridge, the volume of the exchange determines the width of the bridge and the duration of the exchange determines the strength of the bridge. Civilization is the sum total of all the bridges each of us chooses to maintain. Poverty results from the inability to maintain adequate bridges - not producing the value necessary to maintain the required bridges - and the system's inability to obtain the value that those people could have contributed is a waste of human potential.
- Creative destruction - expanding choices - diminishing choices - increasing opportunities - decreasing opportunities - upward spirals - downward spirals. Market limitations - systems to complement the market.
- We also maintain bridges with the ecosystem - Environmental degradation - permaculture - waste of biological potential
- People will live in poverty until such time as we have systems of production in which everyone can contribute value and thereby maintain adequate bridges into the value flows. The environment will be at risk until such time as humans obtain what they need and desire through systems of production that cooperate with natures processes - enhancing diversity rather than diminishing it.
- We are awash in information. When we are able to assimilate information into our understanding of how the world works, we call that knowledge. Some of us are more knowledgeable than others. When our knowledge is accurate, and we are able to predict how a particular choice will play out in the world, we call that wisdom. Some of us are wiser than others but I do not think any of us can be satisfied with where we are but, it is also said: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." What can of world do we want?
- Growing from birth to death
- If we are going to create a future conducive to human life, we must first understand how the system functions. Next we must understand that we create the future with every choice we make. Finally, we must set about creating those choices that will lead to an inclusive and abundant future.
- Nothing exists that does not depends on the existence of something else for its own existence. One thing is always dependent on another thing and all things depend on everything else. All things are systems and ultimately there is only one whole system. So we cannot change one thing without affecting everything else. We cannot solve problems one at a time because they are systemic.
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Comments
You frame it an invittion to help craft a story... the invitation itself is more storylike than the outline that follows 11:39 PM
Can we in fact make the outline more story like and less tratise and series of defintiions? This is a challenge 11:39 PM
I do like the invitation a lot