by Hugh M. Lewis

Humankind is reaching a cross-roads in the first half of the 21st Century. This challenge imposes upon us as a species, as a single race, to either alter our methods and manner of adaptation on earth, or to risk the consequences of creating a global system that is in ecological dis-equilibrium. A certain complex of basic factors is claimed to underlie this state of affairs, and this traces back to certain intransigent conditions of human systems, upon both individual and social behavioral levels, that appear to be widely shared by most people and by most groupings of people. Any coordinate program of alternative development intending to meet the challenges faced by this central problematic must develop a means for systematically dealing with and resolving the consequences induced by this complex of human factors.

By far the greatest challenge to the alternative development of human systems is the inertial resistance to structural change of pre-established institutional patterns of existing systems frameworks that serve to work against the long term interests of human adaptive change. And yet it is these very institutional structures that require modification if adaptive alternative development is to be allowed to take place, and the average human being who is a member of such a system is to become empowered.

In complex and highly stratified societies, different institutional structures intersect and cross-sect in terms of the life of the individual member of the system, and thus control and inertia is always felt in a partial, though from a composite sense, in a complete and totalizing way.

This is manifest in many forms, in many ways, in many places around the world, and the differences between developed and underdeveloped regions of the world are diminishing such that they are increasingly a difference of degree and amount, rather than one of kind in any substantial sense. To highlight some of the more obvious and significant dilemmas increasingly shared by all humankind, can be counted the following factors:

1. human overpopulation.

2. imbalanced distribution of resources

3. chronic, structurally reinforced poverty characterized by lack of productive/educational opportunity, the social syndrome of failure, 

4. the maintenance, perpetuation & promotion of closed ideological systems serving the perpetuation of human ignorance, symbolic closure & ideological prejudice.

5. pandemic disease patterns

6. pandemic patterns of human exploitation and violence.

7. pandemic patterns of social a-moralism of varying kinds.

8. pandemic patterns of social-structural authoritarianism serving to reinforce the asymmetrical distribution of resources & stifling the human freedoms & opportunity structures upon which human development is based.

This complex of factors is furthermore exacerbated by the general inter-group context that most groups face, and that indirectly bear upon the lives of individual members of such groups, which contexts serve to constrain and pre-structure relationships within the group and by the group between other groups in certain ways. The larger global system may be said to have a self-organizing structure that is somewhat hierarchical and complex in terms of the number of different cross-cutting relationships that are involved in its daily and yearly articulation. Individual relationships may change, but the overall profile of relationships will remain more consistent and stable, including the facts of hierarchy. We may state that different ethnocultural groupings develop ethno-niches within the larger framework that are to some extent pre-determinative of their material and adaptive situation in the global context, and that is to some extent consistently reinforced in an ethnocultural manner both within the group between individual members and between different groups and members of different groups.

We are faced with a fundamental dilemma as well--human ethnoculture and its diversification has traditionally and prehistorically served humankind well in its progressive development and adaptation on the earth, but increasingly we are coming to a scenario where continuing conservation of tradition-bound orientations may increasingly interfere with processes of integrative development. 

Overcoming the inertial resistance of contemporary contexts requires boot-strapping new meta-system frameworks from the ground up, in a manner consonant and coordinate with the local/regional circumstances characterizing a given group of people or area. The profile and meta-problem set presented by any given group of people in any given particular time and place will tend to be unique in its complexity and requirements. Different kinds of solutions will therefore be required for different peoples in different contexts. But all groupings encounter the same basic sets of core issues, in varying configurations, that are listed above. Overcoming the dilemmas that are the consequence of these problem sets becomes therefore the main challenge of any alternative development program

We can seek the articulation of a general purpose, generic development framework in terms of a program that is broad enough to cover the entire spectrum of human contexts in a sufficient manner and flexible enough to be adapted to broadly varying variables on the human social landscape. It becomes necessary in this regard to somehow bypass, circumvent or hold in check the controlling or debilitating influences of some kinds of phenomena, for instance, negative bureaucracy blocking access to people or conditions and parasitizing the funding structure that is part of this access.

The challenge becomes to try to implement in a wide variety of developmental contexts a complete meta-systems framework that is adaptive to whatever context it is fit within, and that is capable of providing a quasi-independent production framework that can be extended and elaborated indefinitely, and that incorporates a complete cycle of production/consumption within its internalized structure.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I