Chapter Four

Human Systems Theory

Human systems may be clearly stratified at two levels, and though this has been the cause of some consternation for those seeking paradigmatic unification of the human & social sciences, it must be understood that these two levels interact in a fully complementary manner. We may observe human systems upon two levels primarily--the individual human organism within its variable adaptive contexts, and the social group also within its variable adaptive contexts. Both levels exhibit patterns & emergent properties that are unique to that level. In fact, the same characterization in general may be made for any biological system upon a species level, distinguishing between the individual organism on one level and the social group context upon another level. Human systems take on another set of emergent properties, that are said to be symbolic and cultural.

A great deal of controversy and somewhat misplaced theoretical development has been based upon the confusion of human biological and symbolic-cultural levels & properties, with the erroneous attribution of characteristics of human behavior or social organization to the former level without taking into account the causal or determinative factors of symbolic-cultural integration of human reality. Such conceptual systems that confuse levels and causes of properties in human system are frequently proffered and passed along in the name of science, though they largely represent pseudo-scientific and amateurish attempts at human systems theorization.

Human systems therefore cannot be completely or sufficiently described in terms that are primarily appropriate for the description of biological systems. It is apparent that human systems must be described on several levels simultaneously, and the interactions and patterning of relations between these various levels must also be described in a systematic and coherent way. It is not surprising that human systems remain extremely complex and intransigent of general description and it is not surprising therefore that no genuinely comprehensive theory of human systems has yet been developed or accepted paradigmatically as true and characteristic of all such systems.

What are some of the unique characteristics of human systems that are not found in the same form or to the same degree in any other species of living animal? 

The following sets of attributes are appropriate to the minimal definition of human systems:

1. All human systems are or become culturally patterned--there is no coherent corporate human grouping that cannot be characterized in terms of its cultural patterning. Cultural patterning is universal to all corporate human groupings.

2. The cultural patterning of human groupings depend primarily upon the horizontal social transmission of information within cultural constrained and constructed contexts. The horizontal transmission of cultural information from person to person, and group to group, is tied to the environmental conditioning, learning capacity and behavioral response patterning of the individual human being, and by extension, to the entire social grouping.

3. The transmission of cultural information is primarily mediated in terms of human language, and human language is unique in its symbolic structure and informational carrying capacity to the human species.

4. Human reality is linguistically & behaviorally mediated, and symbolically structured through the cognitive filters of human experience and understanding. Human behavior is by definition symbolic in structure and constructive/destructive or adaptive/maladaptive in its behavioral outcomes. We speak of the symbolic transformation of human experience and of human cultural reality in a shared sense, such that human beings are capable of behaving in ways not strictly dictated by biological constraints, and possibly in ways that deliberately violate such constraints. Human beings can be motivated to violent action or even systematic, deliberate self-destruction, through symbolic-behavioral manipulation, even if it is ultimately or in any larger rational sense contradictory to the primary dictates of adaptive survival.

5. Human social groupings upon a corporate level develop institutionalized structures of relation and behavior, symbolically & behaviorally reinforced, that transcend the capacity of the individual to control or determine, and hence can as a system acquire a life of their own, with their own state-path trajectory, irrespective of the variable interests or orientations of the individuals composing such a system.

6. In any such human social system, human role-players and actors will emerge who will carry through the structural relationship of the larger system to its logical and extreme symbolic conclusions, no matter what the contradictions to lived behavioral experience or the final destructiveness or mal-adaptiveness of the outcomes. These role-players can be considered "captives" of the cultural system of which they are a part.

7. Cultural systems become paradigmatic in the sense that they tend to describe a symbolic worldview that is as complete and comprehensive as possible and as satisfactory to the average culture bearer as necessarily to maintaining equilibrium and consonance of values upon an individual level. Such symbolic systems tend also to be "transparent" and therefore objectively invisible as such to the culture bearer because they are self-reinforcing of both received collective belief and behavior, and the symbolic facets of cultural reality, especially the everyday, habitual facets, become "naturalized" as if a necessary part of biological adaptation and survival.

8. Human beings organize their experience upon a symbolic level, and this provides them an arbitrary means of controlling and manipulating their behavior in relation to their environment in what can be described as self-fulfilling ways. Human beings have no choice really but to organize their experience in these ways, and this experience in general serves their interests in achieving basic adaptive and reproductive success, albeit in terms defined primarily by their socio-cultural milieu.

The organization of human experience upon symbolic levels of articulation are referable to as the anthropological construction of human reality, and it is the systematic structure of these processes, evident across individuals and across various cultural boundaries, that is amenable to empirical scientific investigation and theorization in terms of general human systems theory. Symbolic framing has been offered as the general and primary scientific methodology for such empirical, comparative examination of human systems upon both individual and collective levels of human behavioral response, with the operational definition of culture being in terms of the shared patterns of response by people of similar cultural configurations.

Human Systems

Human systems theory comprehends knowledge from all the social and human sciences, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related special fields of study, and it is focused upon a central albeit complex model of the interrelationships of human behavior, human cognition, human language, and socio-cultural relationship and organization.

The foundation of method and theory in human systems science, or meta-science, is in the articulation of the methodology of symbolic framing in relation to the framework of the anthropological construction of reality. In its most straight-forward terms, symbolic framing consists of a large variety of "framing" tasks that provide under experimental and controlled conditions the necessary context and stimuli for the elicitation of different kinds of behavioral response patternings of informants and participants. Tasks as these were originally employed in symbolic framing included inkblot tasks (Harrower, Rorscharch); thematic apperception tasks (SAT, CAT); sentence completion and sentence frame tasks; perception tasks; various inventories; dichotomous tasks; grids; color tasks; rank-order tasks; drawing tasks; pattern recognition tasks; memory tasks, etc. These tasks all share a similar framework of interpretation and deployment in field settings in a manner divested of psychoanalytic or deeper psychic interpretation or in terms of inferable personality characteristics, and were treated rather in both nomothetic and idiographic designs to elicit common patterns of response among different sets of informants that were grouped along various distinguishing factors (sex, age, socioeconomic background, similar life-experiences, cultural background, etc.)

Critical to symbolic framing is the mapping of subjective experience upon the external environment, or the transference of subjective content upon symbolic stimuli the locus of which exists in the external world. With human beings, this process is an automatic and built-in one. We cannot avoid our sense of symbolic attachment to the world, for it is not only how we relate to the world, but it forms the foundation for even how we perceive and think about the world and remember it afterwards. This process can be called one of symbolic experience and forms the basis for the anthropological relativity of human reality, of all knowledge of reality and our most basic experiences in the world. At the same time that we are projecting symbolic content upon the world, we are internalizing the sense of order and symbolic topography of our experience, incorporating and embodying this experience in a manner that allows us to maintain a sense of psychological and behavioral coherence about the world within the framework of certain personality and character configurations that have been developed within us. These configurations are reinforced and modeled to a great extent by cultural models and mappings of experience, especially as these are inter-subjectively reinforced by significant others and by reference groups with which we have some sense of identification or affiliation. What is achieved with these complex symbolic processes is an overarching sense of symbolic integration of experience that can be said to be as inclusive as possible, and that involves the coordination and congruence of internalized symbolisms with externalized constructions.

Symbolic framing provides a methodological and empirical bridge between the cognitive sciences that are preoccupied with the mental functioning of the human brain, and a plethora of symbolic theories and frameworks that are primarily concerned with the articulation of human symbolization in the larger world. It rests upon a testable definition of cultural pattern as being significant shared correlational configurations of response to a wide range of symbolic framing tasks within a variety of experimental settings, and this in turn provides a foundation for a systematic means of comparative, cross-cultural research.

Symbolic framing methodology proved successful in establishing significant non-random patterns of difference and sharing between groupings and sub-groupings of people, patterns that were consistent and even predictable between different kinds of tasks. These patterns became especially apparent with the application of computer-based inter-correlational and cluster analysis, and demonstrated the existence of underlying complexes of structural relations that guided symbolic behavioral response.

They were broadly interpreted within a general Gestalt framework concerning the perception and articulation of part-whole and figure-ground relationships, and what can be called the perceptual-cognitive-behavioral continuity of human experience The implication is that cultural reality is symbolically situated in the mind of the informant, and behaviorally articulated in terms that are socially identifiable. According to this methodology, culture is defined in an operative manner as a set of shared patterns, however complex and inexplicable in a deterministic manner.

Efforts in China were 1. To systematically extend these methods to a new and historically unconnected sample population; 2. To extend the methods to embrace linguistic, and especially, oral-based patterns of response among informants; 3. To apply such methods in a systematic manner to issues of acquisition, human development and education in trying to devise and test alternative teaching and instructional methodologies that might improve rates of learning and retention.

Projective tasks are important to the implementation of symbolic framing methods because they provide part-whole stimuli the ambiguity of which can be systematically controlled, and because they provide a direct demonstration of a symbolic theory of human cognition that serves to bridge the gap between knowledge of cognitive functioning of the brain on one hand, and knowledge of symbolic articulation and communication in social life, on the other hand. Recent criticism and abandonment of many previous projective tasks has been in my opinion unwarranted and has led to a loss of almost a century of productive research in these areas. New methodologies based almost exclusive upon inventories fail to take the complexity of symbolic-cognitive stratification and cultural bias into account, and in general fail to deal adequately with the problems of using literate and linguistic based methodologies. This retrenchment of American psychology, which is seen as both a response to a political-economic structuration that has lead to a conservative closure of the psychological mind and methodologies, and to a reaction to the stark and unproductive behaviorism and empirical academic psychology of previous decades. It was the interpretive, largely psychoanalytic framework in which these projective tasks were conventionally employed that was suspect, and not the reliability and efficacy of the tasks themselves.

Efforts on my own part of late, less systematic and thorough but more applicable to meeting various educational standards, needs and goals, have been to the revitalization of these methods in relation to the development of teaching and instructional techniques and strategies that is based upon a theory that learning is achieved through patterning recognition and meaningful symbolic relation between the object-stimuli and the pattern of response. Success of methods employed in China provide substantive evidence for the conclusion that learning can indeed be accelerated and promoted in the right conditions, and it depends upon students bringing to realization and overcoming internal repression and unconscious patterns of symbolic organization of experience that may interfere with the acquisition and adaptation of new information and adoption of new patterns of behavioral response. Learning requires a kind of symbolic openness and "in-tuneness" both to the external environment as well as to the internal machinations of the psyche. This latter phenomenon appears most often as a delicate tight-rope or balancing act, and it is not uncommon with exaggerated behavioral or mental disorders that one becomes hyper-developed at the expense of the other.

Of course, the science of human systems theory extends beyond a symbolic framing methodology, as it must both in theory and operationally, to consider human social systems as transpersonal and corporate institutional phenomena. In this case, individual symbolic functioning is seen to functionally reinforce and to more or less mediate the interpersonal relationships and transactions that occur at different levels and in different behavioral settings in society. We may extend the hypothesis embedded in symbolic framing methodology systematically in a number of different directions to explain more fully human language and related linguistic phenomena, human communication and cybernetic systems, human social patterning and patterns of institutional structuration, human cultural and cross-cultural and intercultural exchange processes, as well as patterns of natural development of human systems upon various levels of articulation of these systems.

One critical issue in consideration of human systems theory can be said to be the symbolic mediation of human stress and response under conditions of extreme or prolonged socio-environmental circumscription or crowding, or alternative under conditions identified by Robert Jay Lifton as "desymbolization" or the symbolic deculturation of a social framework. Anthropology has tended to shy away from the study of patterns of human violence and authoritarianism, as replete and all pervasive as these patterns have been, which has followed a tendency towards the romanticization of the other as a symbolic projection of the unconscious psyche of the self.

The entire notion and validity of symbolic framing methodology rests upon a revised and refined understanding of the anthropological relativity of human experience and knowledge, filtered as this is always through a symbolic strainer that for most intents and purposes remains transparent to our own consciousness. It is necessary that the human mind presents to itself experience as consistent, non-contradictory and in a coherent way that has no interruptions, ambiguities, gaps in our experiential fields, or unexpected consequences. 

This process of smoothing over the bumps of our experience is equivalent to watching a film without seeing the frame-by-frame flicker on the screen. We notice this only when the film jumps off its track in the projector, which would be equivalent to some forms of mental illness and perceptual-behavioral incompetency. The mind smoothes over perceptual experience even upon a very basic level--we never see the blind-spot in our perceptual field, or notice its presence. Traumatic events can be temporarily or permanently repressed from consciousness in a similar attempt to maintain the symbolic integrity of experience and to block out "noise" or other contradictory signals that would possibly result in destructive interference.

The human mind requires some sensible form of externalized field of stimuli by which to frame and test its sense of experience--otherwise, like a child blind and deaf who is cut completely off from the world, the mind cannot achieve the integration that it requires to function in even a minimally normal manner. That the externalized field should be a culturally contextualized one, carpentered and constructed by people in consistent social interaction, seems to be important as well, and this leads to the first hypothesis of the anthropological construction of reality, namely that human beings have evolved to become symbolic creatures who are entirely dependent upon cultural forms and frameworks for the integration and organization of their experience. We cannot fully comprehend or explain human nature or human behavior outside of the contexts that culture provides for the framing of human experience and the elicitation of human response.

The second hypothesis of cultural dependency has two corollaries--a.) the corollary of the symbolic dependency of the human psyche upon externally framed constructions, and b.) the corollary of the social dependency of the human personality upon socially defined and sanctioned institutions to guide and channel the expression of appropriate behavior.

A second hypothesis regarding human nature follows from this first, and it is the claim that human beings were originally predatory (type 3, selective predation) animals and are fundamentally competitive in their social relationships, as well as in all their environmental relations. This competitive nature of human beings is a function of basic drives rooted in biology for adaptive survival and reproductive success. A corollary of this hypothesis is that human beings, being socially and culturally dependent creatures, primarily define competition in socially defined ways, and most often form cooperative social institutional frameworks for the control and channeling of competitive behavior. Cooperative institutional frameworks constrain free and open human behavior by defining role-explicit and role-appropriate constraints and sanctions for appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

A third hypothesis relates the first two together, and regards what can be called the symbolic transformation of basic human drives and experiences into forms that are indirectly related or displaced from their original evolutionary frameworks. The symbolic transformation of human experience enunciates the anthropological relativity of human knowledge and behavior, and entails that people act "out" in forms of symbolic displacement, projection and repression, these fundamental feelings, drives, impulses, insecurities, anxieties, that are deeply rooted in the basic biological foundation of human nature. We can say that symbolic transformation of human experience is necessary, and is usually attended to systematically through years of primary and secondary development of personality involving socialization and education.

A fourth hypothesis is based upon this third, and derivative of it, and it is the hypothesis of the anthropological construction of reality that seeks through cultural frameworks to achieve a degree of symbolic closure and integration of experience, which it can never completely achieve, because in an evolutionary sense human beings in terms of their human nature are unfinished business. The anthropological construction of human reality has both psychological and social components and manifestations, as previously alluded to in reference to symbolic framing methodologies. Our world-openness which has freed us evolutionarily from the chains of natural bondage has also rendered them helpless and naked in the face of nature without the mediation and intervention of cultural devises and frameworks that serve to achieve the sense of closure and integration not otherwise allowed. Religion can be seen in this manner, especially when it comes to an understanding and coping with fundamental issues like death and marginal episodes that serve to create human suffering.

The fifth and final hypothesis of this theory of human systems is again derived from the previous hypothesis of the anthropological construction of reality, and it involves the concept of the continuous function of cultural and symbolic mediation and interpretation of experience to effect the integration of reality that is otherwise non-existent. Behaviorally and socially, this process is vital in serving to transact human relationships and interactions, and to channel and repress natural tendencies towards aggression and violence. In this model, violence that is the result of arbitrary human behavior is an unfortunate consequence of the symbolic transformation and mediation of experience that has become anti-social in character.

Human beings, anthropologically and scientifically speaking, are neither good nor bad. They are complex creatures who are the by-product of a long and complex evolutionary history. We have clearly a proclivity and predisposition to aggression, which aggression is a sign of our innate biological drives, and which frequently leads to violent and anti-social behavior. We have a related tendency towards authoritarian compulsion and character, which can become socially articulated in institutional frameworks--this latter tendency is a function of our symbolic and culturally dependent natures. We are quite capable of both very creative and very destructive acts, and there has been no creature on earth who has murdered so shamelessly for no other reason than the perversity of the act. It has not been very difficult in the course of human history to mobilize entire populations for the purpose of commitment mass genocide or ethnocide upon another group of people. From a culturally relative point of view, symbolic systems would reinforce rationalization that served to legitimize such behavior in a seemingly non-contradictory manner.

The object of alternative design in human systems is the construction of alternative institutional frameworks that will accomplish several things at once--the maximization of human developmental potential on the one hand, and the minimization of the risks and expressions of human aggression and violence in counterproductive ways. The role of government becomes to effectively implant controls and sanctions over human behavior that serves to constrain and limit such behavior in directions that are constructive rather than destructive. The responsibility of any form of human government becomes in theory and ethically to keep people as responsible as possible, including especially people who have governmental authority and power, and balancing this with assuring the greatest latitude of freedom possible to all human beings.

We cannot say psychologically that all human beings want to necessarily be or to do good, even in a fundamental or misplaced manner. Neither can we say that all humans are naturally violent. Violence is learned just about as much as goodness must be learned. Human beings can be said to be naturally aggressive, more or less, and this aggressiveness is defined fundamentally as the expression of innate drives towards biological survival and achievement of reproductive success. 

The latter form of drive lends some credence to a Freudian psycho-sexual framework of the human psyche, although I do believe that sublimation and compensation of the sexual drive into other channels of expression is normally achieved through symbolic transformation of experience, and also that aggressive drives associated with basic needs and biological survival instincts are easily coupled, and just as easily dissociated, from fundamental sexual based libidinal drives. The world openness and transformability of human beings through symbolic conditioning demonstrates a tremendous phenotypical plasticity of the human personality, manifest in human behavior, that tends to gain its greatest expression through socially sanctioned institutions. We can say that psychologically all humans have some sense of choice, whatever their cognitive condition or social circumstances, and that humans must act in some manner that serves to fulfill their basic drives. 

People are quite capable of rationalization of their experience and behavior to suit their own profiles of needs and drives, but they are not judged by their words rather than by their deeds or even possibly a failure to act when a choice to act was upon them. What we can say psychologically is that all people, even those afflicted with mental illness, strive to make sense of their world in a manner that allows a coordination and integration of both internal symbolizations and external constructs of their environment. Whether they achieve success or not with this is a function of their adaptive conditioning and behavioral niche they come to carve out for themselves in the world. A sign of mental illness, of whatever kind, is an inherent narcissism of personality that precludes the possibility of non-spurious social relationships and that is to be seen as being psychologically and developmentally regressive for the personality.

 The complexity of the human brain and personality demonstrates that people can show such signs in some areas of their life and activity, and not in other areas. In this case, I would say, the complete process of symbolic transference and transformation of experience is somehow blocked or interfered with, and such people have difficulty with social relations not only for a general lack of responsibility or a proclivity towards inappropriate behavior, but because, especially in human social relationships, they are unable to achieve the degree of symbolic internalization/externalization of relationship and integration that is normally attained. Such individuals would lack a genuine sense of empathy or consideration for the condition, well being or suffering of others in the world.

The basis for understanding symbolic framing methodology is in terms of the functional partitioning of the human brain, which is unique in the animal kingdom, and as a consequences its capacity for memory, learning, complex pattern recognition, planning and ratiocination, creative productivity and for symbolic understanding of reality that is mediated linguistically.

Emblematic pattern recognition that is characteristic of the cognition of very young infants is based upon a very rapid rate at which neuronal connections are being formed in the young brain, and how these connections form between different loci of brain tissue that are functionally interconnected by nerve pathways. If the brain is a neural network, it is a remarkably adaptable network. Perceptual and cognitive constancy of pattern affects our understanding and comprehension of new experience. The rate of learning, of laying down new neural pathways for adults is much less than that for young infants, but the measure and complexity of understanding and integration of experience is much greater for adults than for children.

The brain provides what can be called a phenomenological continuity of human experience that is based upon its symbolic organization. The brain functions at all times to maintain a symbolic unity and integration of conscious reality. It acts to smooth over holes and rough spots at multiple levels, and to present reality as if always harmoniously integrated. This integrity of experience is socially mediated, primarily through the oral function of language. Human linguistic capacity is the foundation of the symbolic organization of human consciousness, and makes possible the degree of conceptual abstraction of which human cognition is capable. The basis of this is what I would refer to as the process of symbolic displacement and transference of deposited cognitive patterns onto external stimuli or patterns that were not the original source of the patterns. This is the symbolic framing of experience, and the management and processing of incoming information, always chaotic, in a manner that is chunked into meaningful units and organized into meaningful assemblies or gestalts. We can say that this process of organization is linguistically mediated. The sharing of experience, information, and response patterning between people becomes very important.

It is evident that contradictory external stimuli can lead to a short-circuiting of internal functional pattern, and can result in the effective blocking or shutting off of the normal symbolic framing experience. A marked field dependency develops in which the input-output loop becomes foreshortened. Alternatively, there can occur internal dissociation of functional pattern, driven by deep and primitive impulses, that can override the adaptive and external mediational framework. Either way, the result is a kind of noetic disequilibrium between the brain and its symbolic-behavioral context.

Human Systems

by Hugh M. Lewis