Lewis Works

This open, on-line Newsletter is published weekly, every Friday Afternoon at 4:30 PM PST. It is updated with new announcements and articles each week.

The E-zine of Applied General Systems Science

By Hugh M. Lewis, PhD, MA, general editor

Vol. I, No. 6

03/12/04 Copyright 2004 ©, Hugh M. Lewis.  Facsimiles of this page or parts of this page may be printed and distributed for non-profit research, consulting and educational purposes only, as governed by fair use policy.

On Top

Please Note, we have added a new Non-Profit Section Below

Please visit our updated "Products/Services" Section below. We have added a new range of options for your consideration.

We have closed our Senior Partner ranks, though there is also always room for one more eager soul. 

We are announcing the opening of our recruitment program for our Junior Partner framework, as of March 12, 2004. 

A Junior Partner position is more focused and exclusive than that of a Senior Partner. In many respects, a Junior Partner position would be seen as more plausible and inviting to a broader range of people. It will demand mostly a generalist, shifting-focus specialization of interests and involvements that are primarily oriented on a level of research, design and development. If you feel you are creative, active and inventive with new ideas, then consider the possibilities that a Junior Partnership with Lewis Works would afford for you. 

Lewis Works has largely "branded" the "Lewis" name by this stage, but in spite of this branding, Lewis Works is dedicated to the promotion and empowerment of a diverse range of people. In other words, in spite of the brand name "Lewis Works," we are not just about Lewis--we are about helping others to achieve their visions, to better define and realize their goals in life, and by this means, to achieve greater success and happiness in constructive and adaptive ways. Therefore we doubly invite you to consider the prospect of becoming a Junior Founding Partner with Lewis Works, not just for the added value, benefits and opportunities this will provide you, but for the potential for self and other-achievement that it will also bring with a dedicated position.

We work strictly on a first come, first serve basis, and at this stage we are not being too picky. There are no costs or fees, nor any initial obligations for any working contributions beyond learning more about our framework and systems based approach, and regularly attending the conference call meetings that will be arranged in the forthcoming weeks, in order to assist us in the further planning of the framework that will proceed through until the end of May.

Benefits for joining us are considerable, and will increase as we grow ourselves. This is a true ground floor opportunity, and you will have the chance to directly influence the direction and outcomes of our new company. Inquire with Hugh about becoming a senior founding partner and its benefits.

If are interested even slightly, or you know of anyone who may have such an interest, or who might even remotely benefit from such partnership, you are strongly encouraged to inquire with Hugh

We invite you to submit any kind of information you would like to see published on these pages.

Suggestions, Criticisms, Comments, Advertisements & Feature Article Submissions are most welcome.

All submissions or other materials must be received by me by e-mail attachment no later than Thursday Evening, the day before publication, otherwise they will be posted the following week.

If you would like to submit your own feature article, please inquire.

Mission Statement

Lewis Works is dedicated to realizing new human adaptive possibilities as the result of the global systems knowledge revolution in order to create alternative long-term frameworks for human & biological systems development, both on earth and beyond.

The primary mission of Lewis Works is to fundamentally empower all human beings, without regard or reference to their individual or cultural differences, so that they may function in a more constructive and non-violent manner by means of their integration within an applied systems framework that enables them to contextualize and focus their independent developmental efforts toward comprehensive solutions to common problems in resource distribution, environmental adaptation, and social-structural interaction.

• 1. Lewis Works seeks alternative meta-systems based development through applied general systems with the main goals of:

• a. Achieving a mutually stable and harmonic balance between future human systems and earthbound biological systems.

• b. Providing all human beings in unbiased structural or cultural contexts the alternative systems-based frameworks for their individual & social development by means of increased opportunities, productivity, security and resource availability that they would not otherwise have in conventional frameworks.

• c. Developing the infra-structural context and means for the regular extension of human and biological systems beyond the boundaries of the earth.

• 2. Lewis Works is dedicated to achieving a better world for all people and for all life-forms through the implementation and articulation of an applied general systems framework to general and specific problem sets that occur in the adaptive organization of human behavior in a shared natural environment.

• 3. Lewis Works is non-exclusive, open, non-authoritarian, philanthropic and pacifist in orientation.

• 4. Lewis Works pursues a combination of both profit and non-profit programs and projects to the achievement of its main goals.

• 5. Lewis Works protects and promotes universal human rights and human responsibilities throughout its various programs and projects by the systematic pursuit of human development strategies.

• 6. Lewis Works is law abiding and honest in all its dealings and transactions in all contexts, and respects and honors the customs and manners of all peoples and all ethnocultural groupings.

• 7. Lewis Works protects and promotes the confidentiality and legitimate interests of its clients and customers under all circumstances and in all cases.

• 8. Lewis Works seeks to efficiently provide a comprehensive range of profit-based services and related product lines within an open, web-based forum of exchange that is global in scope, regional in character, and local in focus, and that serves as the basis for the development of a structurally open meta-systems based context in the world transcending local, regional and national identities and affiliations.

• 9. Lewis Works seeks to promote non-profit programs in alternative human development for the sake of alleviating human suffering, educating people openly and in an unbiased manner, and promoting pro-social human development.

• 10. Lewis Works seeks to create trans-national meta-cultural orientations in the world through various organizational frameworks that promote open, democratic principles of government, fair-play and the rule of just law, and through the development of anti-structural multi-media based systems that provide humanity a common symbolic context for their meta-cultural integration.

by: Hugh M. Lewis

Deep in our remote past, hominid groups were scattered across Africa and Asia in small and relatively isolated groupings. Survival rates were probably poor for most of these groupings, compared to standards today. These groupings exhibited a vast range of cultural adaptations that evolved more or less in isolation, though from fairly early on local and regional exchange networks developed, especially tied to mate-exchange and possibly warfare and slavery. No doubt, fire was rediscovered in many different times and places by many different peoples before it became "common knowledge" for all humankind. Similarly so with almost any invention or discovery of noteworthy significance to our shared human cultural heritage.

By the dawn of the Age of European "Discovery" and colonial imperialism in the world, around the 15th Century, the picture of the Non-European world especially was that of literally thousands of human cultural groupings, spread across the entire earth's surface, each locked in its own relatively separately little world, with its own evolutionary trajectory. Thousands of parallel worlds were assumed to be  either frozen in time, "as peoples' without history" or alternative as each evolving in its own independent trajectory. Racial and religious beliefs tended to reaffirm and validate this impression of human culture.

Attention to closer detail demonstrates several things not quite right about this kind of anthropological picture of the world. Human civilizations had been developing from early on in many independent regions, tying together and integrating larger and larger areas and regions, and even fusing on occasion at inter-regional levels in the form of imperial state civilizations. From fairly early, pre-Neolithic periods, evidence demonstrates the development of exchange networks and transportation systems that were far-flung and far-reaching in their cultural diffusive impact. Finally, it is now a known principle that human cultural transmission systems are horizontal and diagonal as well as vertical, and that they do not necessarily completely recapitulate genetic information transmission systems. This is primarily the result of the environmental factor and influence in human learning and adaptation. Though tradition-bound cultures have tended to be conservative, they were also quite adaptive and flexible in their requirements for survival. The consequence was a basic openness to new inputs of resources, upon multiple levels, in a controlled and appropriated manner. Even European "Discovery" and the resulting phases of imperial colonialism on a global scale represented these self-same principles, in spite of the ideological justifications and symbolic rationalizations used to legitimate unfair policies and exploitative violent practices against other human beings.

The argument of this brief article today is that the cultural processes that were occurring 100,000 thousand years ago in the development of human systems, continue in the same basic way today, albeit in a manner that is transformed and entirely more sophisticated.

Fewer and fewer are the "parallel" worlds of yesteryear, in relative isolation developing along their own conservative trajectories, prone to sudden acculturative disruption and historical "accidents." More and more are the roles of horizontal diffusion/transmission systems of cultural knowledge and information dissemination, with the consequence of the emergence of increasing frequency and increasing distribution of what I would call local-to-global simultaneous E-Culture. This simultaneous e-culture is the cross-weave that ties together the diverse tendrils of human group or ethno-cultural/ethno-national development.

In a structurally stratified world, parallel worlds continue to evolve in their own directions, but these directions are decreasingly independent of one another, increasingly relativized to a larger global context of systemic relationship to one another, and increasingly "individualized" or modularized on an individual level in the sense that individual sets of interests and trajectories of development are becoming of greater significance than predefined group trajectories.

The overall consequences of this developing pattern of human systems development appear to be manifold, and include the following points:

1. Sharing of information across conventional/traditional group boundaries, upon multiple levels, has the outcome of rendering these boundaries more porous, more flexible, and "fuzzier"--perhaps even more than many political interests and leaders would like when their power-base depends upon cultivation of strongly chauvinistic ethnocentric orientations and projective prejudice in the maintenance of internal hierarchical control and solid in-group/out-group boundaries. In short--collective human consciousness expansion due to such open and free global transmission has the tendency in the long run to undermine the structural basis for social authoritarian institutionalization and symbolic legitimization.

2. Individual needs and interests, versus the needs and interests of the small or intermediate collective, tend to rise in proportional importance and valuation compared to the latter sets of interests. This is due in part to the new possibilities for empowerment and possibility for becoming being realized at the individual level as a consequence of newly emergent "simultaneous networks" that cross-cut and transcend conventional or traditional knowledge and social relational boundaries. 

3. Socio-structural patterns of stratification and relation on multiple levels (individual, familial/face-to-face, local, regional and global) are becoming at once more horizontally displaced, and more complexly embedded. This will reflect and be reflected in systems relation to shifting patterns of resource distribution, and shifting management and methods of resource management. Conventional bureaucratic/administrative systems are becoming increasingly costly and dysfunctional to maintain, and many of its control functions can be easily automated as intrinsic to intelligent computer-based systems.

4. Traditional and conventional systems will become increasingly strained across generational boundaries especially, as well as across communal cleavages separating ethnocultural groupings, albeit in complex socio-grid patterns of stratification. The rise of simultaneous e-culture should not be received as an all good thing--it is a mixed blessing by any definition, and betokens a futuristic Pandora's box of many new diseases and problems people will have to deal with. One of the central problems will be e-alienation, increasing anomie, atomization and isolation of a highly individualized global E-society. There are as result increasing degrees of freedom for the exercise of human manipulation, exploitation and violence, especially of aberrant and counter-cultural forms. There is general derepression of many libidinal impulses of the ego, stimulated by an "Las Vegas-Tokyo" style glitz, as well as the lure of almost totally vicarious relationships and behaviors as the result of leading "virtual" (i.e., unreal, non-material) lives.

5. The emerging Simultaneous E-culture will be prone to attack, to deliberate, concerted and idiosyncratic efforts at "over-control" or "under-control" by gaining access to the hubs of such systems, and to region wide or possibly even global catastrophic failure--"global digital black-outs." It will beget a global human society that will share many of these same attributes, albeit in behavioral and non-virtual ways.

In closing, I would suggest that if warfare has traditionally been "economics by another means" then world-wide digital integration of human systems may result in the possibility of "waging" war by other, non-violent means. What we can say about Global E-Culture is that gone forever is the sense of isolation that separates people into competing groups, and gone for ever as well is the symbolic basis for the sense of relative ethnocentric rationalization that separated groups of people into parallel little worlds. If all people have not yet hooked onto the information highway, and have not yet caught up with the modern world, the proviso should be kept in mind by everyone, including Bill Gates, that the faster this happens, the better for everyone involved (i.e., the entire species of Homo sapiens).

The Rise of Human K-Civilization: Trans-culturation & Cultural Convergence

by: Hugh M. Lewis

Unlike genetic and gene-culture theories of human adaptation and transmission, historical & archaeological evidence demonstrates amply, in multiple independent instances, and therefore unequivocally, that the primary mechanism of human cultural development and the rise of human technological and cultural civilization, has been the consequence of the horizontal and diagonal transmission of knowledge between people due to the capacity and need of human beings to learn from their environments and adapt to what they learn. Acculturation, defined as the contact and transmission between cultures, can therefore be defined as the principle agency of human cultural change, development and evolution, in very distant, remote times of a forgotten past, as well as in contemporary times of the immediate present.

I have upon multiple instances claimed that the predominant process of human development has been what I've called "trans-culturation" based largely on the diffusion and horizontal transmission of ideas, knowledge and technologies, between different groupings of people, and the selective adaptation and adoption of these "things" to new contexts. Trans-culturation is a pan-human process, and though people may seek to control its outcomes, in the long run it serves to benefit all people equally in the same way. The streamlining of systems and the disappearing sky-line of the future is based upon this central process of trans-culturation, and it identifies the central mechanism underlying the development and evolution of human civilization, whatever the respective or divergent cultural patterns may be of different ethnocultural groupings of humanity relative to particular time and place.

Trans-culturation can be defined clearly from a systems-based perspective in terms of the realization of alternative human culture-based systems, symbolic by design, and the resulting patterns of structural integration of larger and larger human systems, more complexly organized and stratified, and the emergence of epigenetic human adaptive behaviors that are the result of these processes.

In spite of the natural historical tendencies for cultural-linguistic divergence of groupings in relative isolation, and the overall tendencies of human differentiation at individual and cultural levels of integration, the rise of Simultaneous E-Culture is having a long term consequence of overcoming these naturally divisive tendencies with the result being that there is an increasing convergence of human cultural systems along various prototypical lines of patterning, even to the point of the emergence of a single global e-based lingua franca, or e-trade language, or at least set of languages. The convergence of conventional cultures upon a common implicit model of a single, Simultaneous E-culture has the consequence, in trans-culturative terms of inducing global social and structural integration of a single system, and the rise of what I would call Human K-Civilization--which is a form of multi-state system of post-imperial civilization that is better adapted to the long term behavioral and evolutionary needs of the human species in global context. 

K-Civilization can be described as a global infra-structural framework of integration of human beings into a single working system that is capable of transcending all cultural differences and thereby incorporating effectively many diverse groupings of people at the same time. It is a style of human civilization that would, by definition, be K-adapted to the long run of human survival and reproductive success on earth--which means it would be capable of sustaining indefinitely into the future a dynamic equilibrium with the bio-geophysical context upon which human civilization is based.

This sense of civilization exists already in patterning that people are adopting, even if the structural framework for integration on its basis has not yet been fully achieved. It is based upon a framework of cultural reconstruction and resymbolization of reality that requires several generations of people to be fully accomplished and made to take hold in a fully symbolically cohesive manner and in a way that is behaviorally naturalized in terms of their everyday life-worlds.. 

Human K-civilization can be regarded as an expectable outcome of the long term trajectory of trans-cultural and transformational processes of human social development and cultural evolution in general. There is increasing realization that long-term human development and evolution is a non-zero sum game in which non-exclusive control and human cooperation, in selective contexts, pays off in the long run. Nation states, defined along conventional premises, are realizing that they cannot afford to commit their resources to total war, as such a consequence would be entirely self-destructive. Conventional Nation states are becoming increasingly integrated upon structural and social levels, and this process of integration proceeds at a vary rapid pace, in spite of the ossification of authoritarian power structures and obsolete symbolic ideologies or paradigms that have little adaptive bearing to the current and rapidly changing world situation.

by: Hugh M. Lewis

High-lighting this week the concepts of Simultaneous E-Culture and Trans-culturational, systems-based K-Civilization underscores and defines the foundation for understanding the emergence of global human systems as a single, imperfectly integrated meta-systems framework. It was from an anthropological and cultural point of view, always this, only never self-consciously so, as human beings, bound within fairly narrow group contexts, came to define themselves as unique, as uniquely human, compared to all other peoples and all the symbolic-behavioral possibilities that different people represent.

If we look back upon the long history of human achievement and record of technological progress in the world, we see that all human beings ultimately share the fruits of civilization, or else fail to as a consequence of unfair human relationships and social practices. No group held for ever a monopoly upon a design or invention that has been fundamental to human civilization--not silk, nor fire, nor the wheel--Americans are coming to increasingly understand that their monopoly for instance on Nuclear weapons is quickly giving way. And this process is inevitable. We cannot say, after the fact, as a counterfactual form of historical abduction, that it would have been better if we never invented the bomb in the first place (which it would have been). One of the first acts in the invention of the bomb was espionage, instigated among the inventors themselves, to give secrets to the "enemy" to prevent there being an exclusive monopoly upon such a dangerous technology.

Human meta-systems development, given the structure and dynamic patterning of human acculturation and cultural development processes, can be construed as an historically inevitable process, in the long run, in spite of dooms-day prognostications or dark utopian projections. This process is neither good nor bad in any intrinsic sense, but it does have both positive and negative consequences and possibilities that we must face in the future. The outlines of these patterns, as they emerge on our current historical horizon, are becoming clearer and clearer with each passing year. Understanding the systems-framework within which this outline makes the most sense does point to some fairly specific and clear-cut moral precepts that can be claimed to be meta-ethical and pan-human in application. These include a commitment to human equality, human rights and responsibilities, human democracy, open human systems of structural stratification and economic exchange, as well as a pacifist orientation to human violence and a commitment to stemming and controlling human authoritarianism, exploitation and violence at its sources. This is a tall order to fill for anyone to fill--but if we are to have a more stable and secure world, we must all rise to the occasion. 

Another way of looking at this issue is to see that for the first time in human history, the possibility for global communications and infrastructure exists on which to build a globally integrated framework that is non-exclusive and comprehensive. This possibility never really existed before in times past, not at the level and scale possible or imaginable today. The conditions of social constraint and structural restraint that remain in the world, that are largely a carry over of bygone eras, serve to impede progress from being achieved on most fronts except in very narrow lines of development.

It is somewhat Anthropologically naive to assume that human cultural differences can be rendered overnight, or even in a decade, insubstantial and inconsequential to the human patterning of things. It is more enlightening to understand the degree to which human beings depend upon the cultural organization of their shared experience, and the constructive processes that culture brings to their world in adaptation and achieving success in the course of their lives. The processes of reconstruction that need to occur trans-culturally have a long way yet to go, and will take a long time yet, before they can achieve the level of integration between diverse peoples that would result in a stable and somewhat pacified global meta-system.

It is expected that the integration and rise of a meta-systems framework, to be effective, can neither be forced or made to happen in conflict to the basic cultural value orientations and patternings that different ethnocultural groupings of people maintain. It must be provided as an alternative framework for people to voluntarily contribute in, to be available and easily accessible to people to participate within, and not to fear or suffer the consequences of threat of violence or punishment by their participation. Overall, individuals can be brought to the framework, not groups. Groups are what will be left behind.

Our Consolidation efforts continue on different levels. 

We went E-commerce on November 1st, 2003.

On February 1st, 2004, we are entering a second period of consolidation. This period should be marked by considerable structural and content development of our web-system, by network development and by further script-based integration of the system. 

During the month of February, we expect to go on-line with several store fronts.

During this same month we hope to go on-line with the following networking frameworks:

• An affiliate program 

• An open membership program

• A home-based business partnership program

• A strategic e-business partnership program

Pending further development and restructuring of the central web-system, we have postponed our advertising campaign by at least one month, and intend to launch this in April rather than March, and this campaign should run until the end of the consolidation period on the first of June, 2004.

We expect to become officially incorporated in June of 2004.

We act both as a reseller for other providers, and we also are increasing the product range that we actually own or buy ourselves wholesale and then resell. We also provide a range of peripheral options through associate/affiliate accounts.

We will soon be adding a comprehensive product service catalog link here.

We will be offering an increasing array of type of service and product we can make available to our clientele within the consolidation period. This services will include:

• Systems-based Consulting & Troubleshooting
• Systems-based Meta-scientific research & development services
• Systems-based Digital Publication and Production Services
• Systems-based Development Services in a range of areas, including Non-profit, Consolidated Business Services, Education & Human Development, Organization, Production & Engineering

• is based on the meta-systems framework

• is holistic and integrative

• will accommodate any appropriate venture willing to join us

• Note: the mission of Symbiotic Systems is not to invest in ventures, but collaborate with them in a symbiotic way! We are interested in "joining forces" with energetic, dynamic, and persevering entrepreneurs!

• please find our new forum at: http://www.symbioticsystems.org/phpbb/                                                                       
• the web-page for Symbiotic Systems can be found at: http://www.symbioticsystems.org/

We also recommend our current Link Palette for related links & portals, though most of these are as yet unfinished.

For external topic-organized links, we recommend Hugh's Hot Links

For popular, top-search links, we recommend Haut Lynx

Query us for advertising on our Advertising Pages that are shown throughout our web-system on more than a eleven hundred distinct URLs.

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