Preface

Preface

The Global Systems Project

We can win the war for world peace without having to fight all the battles.

We live within a global system whether we wish it or not. We cannot escape the modern imperative this system imposes upon all our lives. It increasingly penetrates every aspect of our collective reality. There is no single entity that controls the entire system, nor should there ever be. And yet the system as a self-organized reality is nearly totalizing in its control aspects, in its complexities and in its consequences for all our lives.

I propose a single new experimental organization the primary function of which is the achievement of alternative development on earth, through applied systems integration and distribution.. This organization must be construed as a living creature, in a superorganic and corporate sense. It is not so much living but it is a form of artificial informational patterning that is the basis for a new order of behavior and socio-structural organization in the world. It has profound implications for the functioning of a new order of informational patterning that transcends the human system and constitutes therefore a fourth level in the tiering of natural information systems.

The system would become a self-replicating organization that grows and develops and differentiates and naturally extends itself to embrace a wider framework. It is a working and productive organization, that defines itself around a certain basic set of standards of productivity as these are construed primarily in human and in environmental terms. The closest form extant to this kind of organization is the modern industrial product/service corporation. Unlike this conventional business organization, styled as it has become around capitalist business culture, this is something else and something more. Its productivity is defined within an overarching framework of intelligent productivity by human beings in a global context.

The original organization will be the stem progenitor of an international system. As such it will be the headquarters of the entire organization until the larger system reaches a critical mass at which stage the headquarters would then be distributed across multiple nodes. The system can be construed as one that can differentiate in any number of possible directions in its subsequent development.

The concept is to create a trans-cultural system within the larger system, as a structural reinforcement and antidote to the self-organizational side-effects of the overall system. It would therefore systematically embrace the principles in trans-culturation to promote a global human civilization that is genuinely trans-cultural and panhuman in scope and character.

The system begins as a single seed organization. If planted in the appropriate place, it grows and can be cultivated. It will thus replicate itself in multiple systems, once it has streamlined itself in a sufficient manner. It will evolve to adapt itself in numerous contexts at multiple levels.

It will cultivate its own resource base, and its expansion will be within the framework of the resource base of the system. It will augment the resource platform of the predominant global system, and in time, come to displace the dependency of this host system upon destructive resource exploitation. Being structurally self-sufficient and alternative in a noncompetitive manner with the host system, it should for the most part not be construed as a threat to the articulation of the former system in most contexts and cases that it would occur within.

This system, by its design, should provide a template for the mutual coexistence and development of multiple cultural realities, and for peaceful arbitration and conflict resolution ocurring at all levels within the system, both socially between people, and socio-environmentally, between human systems and the natural bio-geophysical systems that they occur within. Its long-term value would be the following:

1. Allow systemic global integration to proceed, albeit in a controlled and intelligent manner, rather than in an chaotic, self-organized way.

2. Co-opt and undercut, and therefore effectively prevent the rise of globally hegemonic and totalitarian systems that are founded upon violence and resource exploitation.

3. Foster greater structural stability of the entire world system at all levels of its articulation.

4. Create a stable democratic platform for the human system that permits and allows the human social competition within the parameters of such a global system.

I consider now the elaboration of such a system a matter of time. If Homo sapiens does not achieve such a system, which is now within its means to so achieve, then the consequences in the long run are likely to be dire. Such a system is the logical and natural outcome of the patterning of development of natural informational systems as they occur on earth. The challenge at this fourth level of alternative systems is that they are by definition trans-cultural and artificial constructions. Therefore, they cannot be allowed to be totally self-organizing in the same manner as other naturally occurring systems are.

Control itself can be made automatic and structurally intrinsic to the system by its design and pattern of indirect and built-in constraint. Such control would not abnegate or preclude realization of human free will. It would emancipate people and permit the wider range of implementation and manifestation of human self-control in the world. Its alternative implementation would tend in the long run to preclude the rise and destructive effects of human authoritarian systems in the world based upon the threat of destructive violence and would lead to the dissolution of such extant systems over time and to the gradual reform of their socio-cultural substrate in a measurable way.

Last Updated: 03/08/05