by Hugh M. Lewis

All the world around, the main obstacle to problems of modern development, and the persistence of the structural diseases of chronic underdevelopment, remains the inveterate and embedded authoritarianism of local social institutions that tend to reinforce with the coercive threat of violence and consistent violation of human rights, the unequal distribution of natural and cultural resources and the continuing exploitation of human productive and reproductive resources. It does not matter what the cultural form or national label we stamp on it--it is consistently the same pattern of social anthropological authoritarianism the world over. In general a standing army or military/paramilitary force serves to protect and promote the interests of an established elite, institutionalized through bureaucratic mechanisms that control and govern the flow of resources and serve to manage people in pre-structured and mandated ways. Any development effort aiming at targeting development of the very poorest runs up against these institutionalized structures, such that they become systematically stymied and frustrated, with the resources available through such programs generally being siphoned off and ending up in the pockets of the elite who manage and control the underdevelopment of the poor in the first place.

The critical and straight forward question becomes therefore, given this general situation worldwide, how to effectively circumnavigate these kinds of structural obstacles and boundaries to human development. We must understand that a direct confrontation approach would result in most instances in considerable violence and relatively small gain for the cost in terms of human life and destruction. We must see this dilemma as part of a complementary problem of how we go about promoting human development in the world, and what we even mean by human development. 

It is especially in the creation of alternative systems within a meta-systems structure that falls outside the normal operating system, and serves to positively reinforce the positive attributes of the host system, while as much as possible abnegating or effective counteracting the negative attributes of the host system that lead to violation and violence. We would expect gradually a revolution of equality coupled with a revolution of rising expectations that coincides with alternative human and meta-cultural development. This kind of revolution is basically a pacifist groundswell movement that tends to obviate the need for deployment of armed forces, and tends to cooptate the role that the bureaucracy normally plays in the restriction and channeling of resources.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I