philosophy

Humankind's transition to a sustainable future requires a level of collaboration without precedent in history. The prerequisite is prior agreement on the goal, for as Confucius said, when people share a common goal their natural tendency is to co-operate in realising it. Defining and communicating this goal is the big cultural and artistic challenge of our time.

"The [industrial] world begins by making splits, then drawing boundaries, then solidifying these boundaries. Then we fool ourselves into believing what we have made ourselves see. Solidifying boundaries is very comfortable, because it allows us to deny our experience... We miss the whole system."

– Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

"We can't even think of solutions without correctly recognising the problems, and it is now commonplace to pose our problems incorrectly. We tend to focus on what's seen, rather than on our way of seeing... Instead of focusing on how we produce and consume, we must focus on how we perceive and on how we communicate."

– Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

"If everybody would agree that their current reality is a reality, and that what we essentially share is our capacity for constructing a reality, then perhaps we could all agree on a meta-agreement for computing a reality that would mean survival and dignity for everyone on the planet, rather than each group being sold on a particular way of doing things."

– Francisco J. Varela

"The truth that can be spoken is not the truth." – Lao Tse

"The new age of education is programmed for discovery rather than instruction. Art as radar environment, radar feedback, early warning system: the antennae of the race."

– Marshall McLuhan

"I want to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" – James Joyce

In order to develop a sustainable civilisation while we still have the time and resources to do so, we must first be able to imagine what sustainability would mean – concretely – at the global, regional and local levels. We thus need to catalyse the emerging global consensus on solutions to world problems, express this vision in symbolic ways that can be meaningful to the global public, attract the attention of individuals and organisations, stimulate their interest, arouse their desire to participate, fire up their imagination, and empower them to find out for themselves what they can do to make a difference.

Imagining a positive global future is not easy, since 50% of the world population now lives in cities, and few (if any) urban civilisations have ever enjoyed sustainability as part of their history, their mythology, or their experience. In terms of resource depletion, urban civilisation is like a 7,000-year credit card binge, in which cities need to expand their ecological footprint just to keep going in the short term - while consuming the resources and destroying the ecosystem services on which their long-term survival depends. The limits of the Earth's carrying capacity are now becoming visible for all to see.

We suffer from a kind of information overload, in which the implementation of parallel breakthroughs and viable solutions to global problems in almost every field of human endeavor is typically obstructed by ignorance, corporate vested interests, obsolete governance, dysfunctional education, and irresponsible mainstream media. We live in what the artist Guy Debord named the Society of the Spectacle, where most people feel like passive spectators of history, as if they were powerless to deal with global issues that affect them all. To overcome this information overload, we need to expand our societal pattern recognition capability, to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in the what Teilhard de Chardin described as the Noosphere - the collective consciousness of Humankind.

In response to this crisis, Global Vision proposes a strategic approach based on a new evolutionary theory of cognitive processing in self-organising biological and social systems, developed by Michael O'Callaghan. To put it in a nutshell, the theory shows that the well-being and survival of human societies essentially depends on their capacity to maintain an equilibrium between the pattern-recognition capability embodied in their shared worldview or "consensus reality map", and the complexity of the eco-social environment on which their survival depends and to which they must adapt.

This theory explains how the diverse and fragmented worldviews we have inherited from our "separate pathways through history" can no longer provide the level of agreement that is so urgently needed to deal with global issues such as climate change, security, food, energy, communication, science, economics, business and governance. The theory also demonstrates how individual common sense is now the greatest untapped resource on the planet.

The futurist and economist Hazel Henderson described this theory as "one of the most succinct descriptions of the transformation of human cultures now underway, and why this new worldview must be fostered".

Research by the Club of Rome and other organisations strongly suggests that Humankind still has sufficient resources, technology and knowledge to develop ways of living that can be ecologically sustainable, socially equitable and fun to live in within the limits of the Earth's carrying capacity.

Consider the international agencies, governments, corporations, faith-based groups, civil society organisations, media and other institutions through which Humankind manages its collective concerns as the nervous system of the global body politic. Empowered by decentralised communications and the untapped potential of the internet and the world wide web, this nervous system is creating a rapid cultural learning process that may move the emerging global consensus on a sustainable civilisation toward a tipping point that can bring forth its realisation far more rapidly – and less expensively – than most people now believe to be the case.

The future ultimately depends on our way of seeing it.

fear of the future

"The greatest danger is that we could lose hope for the future" – the Dalai Lama

However, as the stock markets show, people's expectations about the future often influence their behaviour in irrational and self-destructive ways. The global crisis is exacerbated by the growing psychological difficulty of being able to distinguish between the real but avoidable dangers we face, and projected assumptions of inevitable future chaos.

Michael O'Callaghan explored this theme in 1982 in his book When the Dream Becomes Real: The Inner Apocalypse in Mythology, Madness and the Future. This anthropological text provided an early warning signal about the fundamentalist response to neo-liberal economic globalisation which manifested as 9/11, and the military industrial reaction which followed via the so-called "war on terror". [We are currently re-formatting this text for publication as a PDF file here.]

The book traces the Apocalypse motif through history, mythology, and religion, to the archaic depths of the collective unconscious. In addition to the Judeo-Christian Book of Revelations, images of world-destruction-and-renewal are legion in shamanic narratives, in dreams and spontaneous non-ordinary states of consciousness, in psychedelic experiences, in the hallucinatory visions of the world's 60 million "schizophrenic" people, and in the minds of religious fundamentalists, intelligence operatives, military planners, politicians, stock market traders, investors and ordinary folk who wonder what horror might await us at the "end of history".

Evidence from comparative mythology, anthropology, psychiatry, inner spiritual traditions and related practice shows that the Apocalypse is a psychologically built-in metaphor of personal renewal, which can emerge and overwhelm the minds of individuals and societies in times of crisis. It is also the shadow of the Myth of Progress, for as Jung said, "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate." (Jung regarded the advent of Nazi Germany as a "psychic epidemic" of this kind, and described the acute schizophrenic state as one "when the dream takes the place of reality" – hence the title of the book.)

The book explores the psychological meaning of this ancient symbol of transformation. It includes a brief historical review of the violent suppression of Old Europe's shamanic traditions under the Roman Empire and Christianity, an interview with the late psychiatrist Dr. John Weir Perry who described his successful non-drug approach to "schizophrenia" as a natural healing process, and an account of the conception of the Global Vision Project during an astroarcheological field-trip to one of the ancient megalithic artworks built by the pre-Indo-European Tuatha Dé Danaan (People of the Goddess Danu) in Ireland in the fourth millennium BCE.

the myth of power and linear control

The Global Vision project was greatly inspired by Gregory Bateson, the late anthropologist, biological philosopher, and author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, and Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred.

Bateson developed Systems Theory and Cybernetics to investigate the self-organising aspects of biological and social systems, and he showed how most of the threats to our survival and well-being are the direct result of misguided attempts to apply linear control to biological and social systems whose mode of organisation is essentially non-linear. He may yet be regarded as the most important thinker of the 20th century. As he put it:

"The myth of power, is of course, a very powerful myth; and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it... But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to all sorts of disaster... To want control is the pathology! Not that a person can get control, because of course you never do... Man is only a part of larger systems, and the part can never control the whole".

More information on our philosophy and strategy may be found below.

related papers

Changing Images of Man
Joseph Campbell, Duane Elgin, Willis Harman, Arthur Hastings, O.W. Markley, Floyd Matson, Brendan O'Regan and Leslie Schneider, Centre for the Study of Social Policy, SRI International. Pergamon Press, 1982. download (268 pages, 4.1MB PDF)

This highly recommended seminal book is a slightly updated version of Changing Images of Man, Research Report No.4, issued by SRI International (the former Stanford Research Institute) in 1974.

A conversation with the psychiatrist Dr. John Weir Perry
Michael O'Callaghan, 1982. download (19 pages, 1MB PDF)

This is a chapter from "When the Dream Becomes Real: The inner Apocalypse in mythology, madness and the future".

Global Strategy: Promoting the concept of sustainability as a global goal
Michael O'Callaghan, 1994. download (19 pages, 400kb PDF)

NGO Position Paper for the Second Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) May 16 - 28, 1994. Updated November 14, 2000. By Michael O'Callaghan, Global Vision Corporation.

Sustainability: Positioning the concept as a global goal
Michael O'Callaghan, 1998. download (23 pages, 484kb PDF)

NGO Position Paper for the International Conference on Environment and Society: Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability, organised by UNESCO and the Government of Greece at Thessaloniki, 8 - 12 December 1997. By Michael O'Callaghan, Global Vision Corporation. Published in "Environment & Society : Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability", proceedings of the Thessaloniki International Conference organised by UNESCO and the Government of Greece, University of Athens, 1998, ISBN 960-86312-0-3. Re-published in "Sustainable Development: Education, The Force of Change", Transdisciplinary Project "Educating for a Sustainable Future", (EPD) UNESCO, 1999, Paris, ISBN 92-9143-039-0.

The Pattern that Connects
Michael O'Callaghan, 1982. download (4 pages 154kb PDF)

Introduction to the participatory planning manual for Global Vision, our proposed feature film conceived as a collective self-portrait of Humankind and the biosphere.

By Michael O'Callaghan, Global Vision Corporation, New York, 1982.

How do you feel about the future? Global problems such as climate change, the population explosion, overconsumption, resource depletion, tropical deforestation, desertification, the ozone hole, weapons proliferation, the debt problem, globalisation, unemployment, growing inequity, regional economic and political turbulence, and the possibility of terminal resource wars – amount to an impending crisis of planetary proportions. They threaten us all, and yet we have all contributed to their creation. Viewed in the context of evolution and of history, it seems that Humankind is approaching the moment of truth when its rapidly growing population will either destroy the eco-social system on which its survival depends, or learn how to adapt in a sustainable way to the realities of our planetary biosphere.

Because the crisis is global, is in everyone's self-interest to solve it. And if certain groups behave as if they have a vested interest in seeking gain at the expense of the world, they need our help and compassion for they are surely suffering from a dark illusion. The development of a sustainable society would benefit us all. But most people – especially the 50% of the world population that now lives in cities – find it hard to imagine what a sustainable society would be like. And with good reason, since ecological sustainability has never been part of their history, their mythology, or their experience. Indeed, the ecological, economic and social benefits of a sustainable society almost defy description.

So far, the first steps along the path to sustainability have taken the form of issue-specific movements for the environment, sustainable development, appropriate technology, renewable resources, preventive medicine, humanistic psychology, human rights, women's issues, fair trade, peace, and so on. Like allopathic medicine, however, this type of response is an attempt to control the symptoms, without treating the underlying cause of the disease. What's needed is a cure. Without a paradigm shift towards a more systemic healing approach, these movements offer little hope of reversing the accelerating long-term trend towards eco-social chaos. For despite the local and global efforts currently underway, we are now creating more climate change, losing more biodiversity, destroying more rainforest, eroding more topsoil, poisoning more water, increasing the rich-poor gap, sinking deeper into debt, creating more resentment, fostering more fundamentalism and terrorism, losing more civil liberties, squandering vast sums oncapital on out-dated military approaches to security, and coming ever closer to the brink of self-annihilation.

Until we recognise the part each one of us is playing in this problem, it may only now be a matter of years until the crisis becomes irreversible. If that happens, the historic opportunity for an ecologically sustainable, democratic form of civilisation may be lost forever. But as the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu said: "The only way to prevent a disaster is to deal with it before it happens".

This conceptual framework for the participatory planning of the Global Vision Project presents a clearly-stated, scientific way of looking at the global crisis which very strongly suggests that the transition to a sustainable form of civilisation could come about much more rapidly – and less expensively – than most people now believe to be the case.

A whole systems approach

The language of this conceptual framework is that of General Systems Theory, and Cybernetics. Before we get into the first chapter of the Manual, a few words about these subject are therefore in order here.

General Systems Theory is a body of scientific knowledge which makes use of a common vocabulary to discuss matters that were previously described in the specialised vocabularies of separate disciplines such as ecology, economics and so on, because as Buckminster joked, "God does not have separate departments of physics, chemistry and biology" to describe the Universe.

The word Cybernetics comes from the Greek for helmsman – one who steers a ship. Cybernetics is defined as the science of communication and control. It maps the pathways of information by which systems may either be regulated from outside, or regulate themselves from within. The science thus has two main branches: the first one deals with the control of machines, and led to the development of things like anti-aircraft guns, spacecraft navigation systems, and computers. This branch does not concern us here.

The second branch of Cybernetics deals with the more complex control processes through which self-organising biological and social systems regulate themselves, maintain homeostasis (stability), and adapt to the changing environment on which their survival depends.

This field was developed by a small number of thinkers including the late anthropologist and biological philosopher Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980). He played a major role in the early formulation of Cybernetics, and helped introduce Systems Theory and Communications Theory into the work of social and natural scientists. He was the author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology [1], Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) [2], and Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. [3].

In Bateson's view, "There is latent in Cybernetics the means of achieving a new and perhaps more human outlook, a means of changing our philosophy of control, and a means of seeing our own follies in wider perspective". [4]

Observing that the Earth's biosphere (including Humankind) is a self-organising system, Bateson remarked that "no part of (such a) cybernetic system can have unilateral control over the whole or any other part." This cybernetic law holds true not just for human attempts to control nature, but also for individuals, social groups, organisations, corporations and governments which – for whatever reason – would like to change the behaviour of others. As Bateson said:

"The myth of power, is of course, a very powerful myth; and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it... But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to all sorts of disaster... If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also come to see the world in terms of God versus man; élite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at the world can endure...

The whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable during the Pre-Cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way." [5]

Now consider the world-wide efforts and movements for peace, sustainability, health, human rights, gender equality, social justice, etc., from this perspective. Insofar as our approach is limited to attempts to control the symptoms of our global dis-ease, all we are really doing is trying to do modify the behaviour of those whom we may perceive to be responsible for the various problems we want to solve. This pre-Cybernetic way of thinking reinforces the perceptual splitting of Humankind into complementary antagonistic groups: the economic globalisers versus fair traders, environmentalists versus polluters, peace makers versus war mongers, human rights activists versus fascists, progressives versus conservatives, political party A versus political party B, religious fundamentalists versus their enemies, terrorists of the left versus terrorists of the right ,"us" against "the system," and vice-versa! Enormous amounts of energy, money and time intended to make things better are wasted by both sides in a mutual cancelling-out process of complementary antagonism, guaranteeing that the overall situation will continue to worsen, while time runs out.

But the global problems we face are not really separate from each other, nor from the whole of Humankind which needs to resolve them before it is too late. As of 2008, that's over 6 (heading for 10 or 12) billion people, each one of whom is part of the whole interconnected biosphere-humankind-culture-technology which constitutes the "system" in question, including you and me and all of our conscious and unconscious assumptions, expectations, and beliefs.

As Bateson said:

"To want control is the pathology! Not that the person can get control, because of course you never do... Man is only a part of larger systems, and the part can never control the whole...

So what to do if you want to change the world? Start with a systemic perspective:

"The problem of how to transmit our ecological reasoning to those whom we wish to influence in what seems to us to be an ecologically good direction is (thus) itself an ecological problem". [6]

Carl Jung made the same observation in psychological terms:

"To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it. What we can improve in others is of doubtful utility as a rule, if, indeed, it has any effect at all." [7]

The suicide bombings of Islamic fundamentalists and the so-called "war on terror" waged by the USA and its military allies are the emblematic example of a relationship between two groups that share massive untapped potential for Cybernetic wisdom. Rather than re-examine and re-define its conception of "security" and its related military policy, the USA (as Noam Chomsky has exhaustively documented) repeatedly attempts to control other nations by coercion and force, thus nourishing the anti-American resentment and terrorism that threaten its interests and citizens. The US-led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are thus certain to produce precisely the opposite of the results intended, increasing the support for terrorism whilst simulataneously degrading the democratic principles of the USA itself and of the United Nations system so painstakingly built up for peace by the international community of nations.

Cybernetics today is still rarely taught in universities, and wrongly presumed even by the educated public to be some rarefied pursuit of interest only to esoteric epistemologists. In China however, in the 6th century BCE, the poet and philosopher Lao Tsu recognised the self-organising principle immanent in nature, which he called the Tao, meaning Nature's way or path of least resistance. Eloquently described in his masterful work, the Tao Te Ching, this essentially cybernetic idea became the General Systems Theory of ancient Chinese culture. [7] Through the mythopoeic vision of the Tao's self-organising function, cybernetic principles were put into practice – in government, medicine, agriculture and religion – and influenced the culture of that country for thousands of years thereafter. Another taoist insight from China comes to us through the ideogram for "crisis", which as is well known, is a combination of the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity".

Bateson's philosophy proposes a way of describing the global crisis – and the manner in which it came about – in a way that reveals opportunities for non-adversarial actions which could prove more effective in healing the underlying source of the problem than the many efforts at controlling the symptoms currently underway.

This optimistic-sounding premise is based on a simple model of the self-organising pattern-recognition process immanent in every living system, including the unconscious part of those human beings whose behaviour other groups want to change, which I have developed as part of the plannnng manual for a feature film conceived as a Collective Self Portrait of Humankind and the Biosphere, which I hope to make a few years from now. This model permits a Cybernetic description of societal evolution which leads to a realisation which may seem naïve until one understands the reason for it: namely, that individual common sense is now the largest untapped resource on the planet! The real naïveté however, is to imagine that our existing adversarial modes of political action are going to be able to solve our crisis for us. Rather than attempting to control the symptoms of the world problematique in a piecemeal and adversarial way, it will be far more effective, less costly, and more fun to empower people to see for themselves what they can do to make a difference, or – as Gandhi put it – to be the change you want to see in the world.

The challenge is to be more mindful of the hidden effects of our own perceptions, words, and actions as they travel around the global synergetic geometry of communication circuits within the larger system of which we are all a part. Bateson expressed the hope that by becoming more conscious of such connectivity, new information can emerge, and the larger system will, in fact, change subtly.

As Bateson said: "There is something called learning at a rather small level of organisation. At a much higher gestalt level, learning is called evolution".

Endnotes:

1.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps To An Ecology Of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Ballantine Books / Random House, New York, 1972. Republished with a foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson, University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN-10: 0226039056. ISBN-13: 978-0226039053.

2.

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences). E.P. Dutton, New York, 1979. Bantam, 1980. ISBN-10: 0553137247. ISBN-13: 978-0553137248.

3.

Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Bantam, 1988. ISBN-10: 0553345818. ISBN-13: 978-0553345810.

4.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (see note 1 above).

5.

Bateson, Gregory. Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization, in Steps To An Ecology Of Mind (see note 1 above).

6.

Jung, Carl. Man And His Symbols. Dell, 1968. ISBN-10: 0440351839. ISBN-13: 978-0440351832.

7.

Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, 6th. century B.C.E.; translated from the Mandarin by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Wildwood House, London, 1972. Republished by Vintage, 1997. ISBN-10: 0679776192. ISBN-13: 978-0679776192.

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