by Hugh M. Lewis

To focus on the problem of General Systems, and in a sense to celebrate a systems-based orientation, is not to necessarily support the idea that we all live, more or less, in the embrace of an impersonal, often tyrannical "System" that controls many if not all aspects of our lives. Indeed, the purpose of a General Systems framework is not the symbolic legitimization of such a "System" but the means to bring such a system under greater human control, and to provide us a way of gaining our own individual and social independence, in relative ways, from such control. We put forward and develop a systems-based orientation in the world in order to rehabilitate the world from the evil consequences of its "Systems" and in order to prevent such "Systems" in the future from either getting out of control or getting the upper hand upon humanity. If we wish, as a collective framework of humanity, to finally create common conditions in the world in which all humankind can seek their own independence, their own happiness and their own prosperity, without achieving this at the expense of other people, then we must be clear to construct the kinds of frameworks that serve our interests in the first sense, and not we the systems interests. Further, such frameworks should be capable of functioning beyond the purview of influence and control of such "Systems" wanting as these are to be totalitarian and all controlling in their reach and power.

Science has indeed become an old whore, and it is especially "whorrific" when it not only sells itself to the highest bidder, for practically any purpose, but even compromises the paradigmatic integrity of its own methods and theory in service of its "funding structures." In my mind the only sure method of preventing the prostitution of science in service of private or arbitrary interest is through its contextualization and operationalization in terms of a meta-systems framework, thereby providing the moral and strategic charter for scientific praxis as well as the necessary resource structure for its implementation and thus obviating the requirement for scientists to place themselves and their research programs on the auction block.

The resistance to development of a paradigm in systems theory is due not only to a lack of a clear methodological framework for general systems theory, but also and primarily it is due to a self-justificatory mindset of scientists and the scientific community at large to any orientation that would even remotely threaten the hierarchical and political-economic structures of the scientific community. Not only jobs, but status, play an important role as ego-factor, somewhat inflated, serves to symbolically rationalize restrictive involvement in rather narrowly defined scientific methodological paradigms, and to ignore or even deny the possibilities of involvement and interconnection between different problem sets and different areas of knowledge. This built-in social and psychological resistance to systems-based approaches can be found at all levels and in all fields of scientific endeavor, and it is almost quite natural, as if instinct, that individual scientists should respond in a closed minded manner to such approaches.

It has not been my purpose in this brief essay to mock the achievements or the great respect that science in general demands and deserves in the world. It has accomplished far more good than bad in the world, and not all scientists can be bought for the highest bidder, though most would like to think they are immune to such considerations. But this has been my way of bringing attention to bear on a background issue, one that concerns the appropriate contextualization (or decontextualization) of any particular endeavor or field of scientific praxis, within a larger framework that governs human thought and action.

The development therefore of a genuine meta-systems framework as a general systems paradigm for the contextualization of all the sciences is perhaps a thing that is overdue in our shared world. It will require beforehand that general systems come into its own both theoretically and methodologically in terms of a body of methods and a set of rules & hypothesis that can guide its adaptation and application in any field of study or research that we may be involved with. Individual scientists who claim expertise in specific areas of research will not yield readily their research prerogatives or territories for the sake of involvement within some larger operational paradigm if that paradigm is poorly defined and does not serve in a sufficient way the interests of their professional work or identity in relation to their work.

I believe it will require as well a major reformulation of many of our conventional scientific models in a manner that will allow them to fit into a meta-systems framework in a manner coordinate with and compatible to other related or unrelated fields of scientific endeavor. There is a fundamental sense of homology operating in a meta-systems framework, and this sense of homology should define the basic operational and theoretical parameters within which various scientific models can be effectively and efficiently articulated.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I