EXPLORING GREAT CHANGE

Imagine that the way we see the world determines how we live in it,

and that our basic social & scientific worldviews are about to undergo a dramatic change.

Our goal is to provide a gathering place to explore this “Great Change”

using Energy Systems Sciences to help us understand what comes next.

OUR CREDO: We believe the same Energy System Sciences[1] (ESS) that explain health in living systems and ecosystems can, with a few extensions, be used to explain health in human systems too. Our goal is to show how the resulting laws of systemic health create a more logical, practical, rigorous and even heartwarming path to a durably vibrant civilization.

We also believe the full story of energy dynamics will create a seismic shift in our scientific vision of our everyday human world. In this view, for instance:

• Humanity is a collaborative learning species (that’s why we talk and build scientific theories)
• Intelligence is a natural, if emergent outcome of energy’s physical role in information.
• Economies are metabolic networks whose health requires constant reinvestment in the health and development of the human beings that make them run.
• Evolution is an energy-driven process that follows predictable laws and measurable patterns.

The resulting scientific framework provides a solid foundation for many of the societal reforms already emerging in our time. Here, economic vitality requires developing healthy human networks, which in turn requires empowering education, common-cause values and regenerative investment. Here, systemic health is measurable; a great deal of systemic behavior is predictable; and the best way to become “sustainable” is to improve our ability to learn rapidly, wisely and in ways that serve the health of the whole, not just a few individuals.

Our goal in “Exploring Great Change is to improve our chances of achieving this better world by connecting the scientific concepts and measures with real-world practice in fields ranging from education and economics to politics, spirituality and science itself. These blogs will lead to a MOOC in the fall of 2021 that will help individuals develop their understanding of particular issues and how they connect to the broader system of today’s Great Change. Let us start by exploring ESS’ role in today’s broader societal change already underway.

ON THE CUSP OF GREAT CHANGE

What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while doing it? Those trees were felled by rational actors who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization…Societies aren’t murdered. They commit suicide, they slit their wrists and in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

Jared Diamond, Collapse, 2006

Societal collapse is the ultimate form of un-sustainability. Furthermore, though each collapse has unique aspects, anthropologists have discovered a common pattern of collapse across a wide array of societies both ancient and recent. After studying this pattern, sociologist Jared Diamond came to the conclusion voiced in the opening quote: Collapse is form of social suicide, a result of people continuing to act in a self-destructive manner while their society dies.

Why would sophisticated societies like our own allow the signs of self-destruction to go unheeded, when more primitive societies like the Australian Aborigines survive sustainably for thousands of years? We will argue that passive acceptance of self-destruction is cultural; it is a result of what the society teaches its own people about “the way the world works.” Furthermore, we believe the common reason for collapse is a dysfunctional system of hierarchical power that we will call oligarchy.

Now imagine that the full story of energy dynamics overturns this oligarchic belief system and replaces it with a more logical story of humanity as a collaborative learning species. Here, oligarchy is inherently unsustainable because unrelenting extraction violates the rules of systemic health, which we now realize are more accurately understood through energy dynamics. Here, our collaborative learning nature allows us to learn better ways particularly in crisis times like we face today. Today’s main challenges are to learn: 1) how to overcome oligarchic obstacles; and 2) how to take an integrated approach to today’s systemic problems.

So, if we are a sophisticated learning species, why are we still passively watching our society die? The two big reasons for this are, first, that we are facing a systemic crisis armed with issue-specific solutions. America epitomizes the problem. As I write this, it is winter 2021 and the world as I once understood it seems to be crumbling. It’s not just Trump’s attempted coup on American democracy, or the thousands dying from an incompetently handled pandemic, or even the economic crisis we face. Instead, my concern is with the general state of affairs that allowed these things to occur. America’s for-profit healthcare, for instance, costs more and works worse than virtually any other developed country because it is designed to make money first, and maintain health second. Profit-maximizing media endlessly broadcast Donald Trump’s lies because vitriol makes more money. Politicians give obscene tax breaks to their wealthy patrons, which leaves little money for the infrastructure, education and healthcare that the 99% need for a decent life. Even our schools are designed to improve elite profit by creating obedient workers for tiki-tacky jobs in corporate America.

Yet, while the systemic nature of today’s global crisis requires a transdisciplinary synthesis, our world is built of siloed specialists focused on their piece of the puzzle. For 50 years, the sustainability movement, for instance, has fought a determined battle for environmental health against trickle-down’s take-make-waste practices, but this pursuit has had little direct effect on the root cause of these crises, which is clearly cultural.

Hence, our deeper problem is that we are trying to apply technical band-aids to a crisis caused by a cultural system that promotes socially-destructive behaviors. So, where the issue-specific approach of Planetary Health and its more famous cousin, Sustainability, focus on how environmental health impacts humanity, we reverse the order; we see environmental devastation and our inability to adapt as symptoms of a deeper human cause.

To be specific, all of the above situations are a direct result of an oligarchic culture so obsessed with maximizing wealth for a few elites that it rationalizes the harm done to the rest of civilization and the planet as a whole. Our problems are systemic because oligarchy is an equal opportunity corrupter, it infects fields from education, economics and religion to science itself. Economists tell us that economies run best on amoral self-interest, while biologist say evolution runs best on selfish genes. We are watching our civilization die because oligarchic apologists have turned our Enlightenment ideals into elite-serving rationales. Democracy has become oligarchic government run by and for elites. Freedom has become the right of the rich to be free from government oversight, and free enterprise has become plundering free-market profiteers liberated from law. Even today’s main measure of economic health, GDP, tacitly promotes obscene concentrations because it only monitors how much money has been exchanged, not how it is made (value-add activity or Wall Street gambling) or where it goes (roads or CEO salaries).

So, the stock market booms, the real economy crumbles and the planet goes to hell in a hand basket because, we are told, these are the automatically-optimal outcomes of laissez-faire markets. In fact, they are the unsustainable outcomes of a cleverly cloaked cultural system designed to maximize elite power and wealth regardless of the damage done. Unfortunately, most of us are so deeply indoctrinated that nothing much different seems possible. So, while upheavals from Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street to the Hong Kong protests indicate pressure for systemic reform is growing, neither public pressure nor issue-specific remedies appear be slowing global civilization’s rush toward oblivion. Instead, most people hunker down and wait as the specters of fascism, political-economic instability and a global pandemic set the stage for a societal storm of historic proportions.

What else could there be? A number of years ago I wrote a nice academic book describing how the pressures generated by today’s systemic crisis were driving a Great Change, a societal metamorphosis much like the one 400 years ago, when the medieval society of kings, priests, and commoners morphed into the modern world of capitalists, scientists, and employees. Now as then, pressing problems are driving a search for better ways that, if successful, will create a profound shift in our civilization. Now as then, better ways emerging in science support those emerging in society at large. Like a second Enlightenment, today’s societal reformers are developing the real-world specifics, while like a second Scientific Revolution, today’s scientific shift provides the concepts and tools needed to connect those shards of solution.

In other words, we believe the societal answers to “what comes next?” are already being developed by people all over the world and in every field imaginable. Each reform started with someone facing a thorny problem in their area of concern – in business, education, finance or agriculture. As a result, most of the issue-specific reforms we need already exist. Unfortunately, the diversity of issues leaves a plethora of piecemeal solutions, unable to achieve critical mass on what needs to be deeply systemic reform.

Happily, today’s new “Systems” stage of science is about to connect disparate reforms into a coherent path to a more durably vibrant civilization. Science as a whole is undergoing a quiet metamorphosis as fields from math and physics to biology and economics come to grips with the systemic (i.e., interconnected) nature of all things. The ecology movement is the most famous of these disciplinary transformations, but the same shift is also visible in integrative medicine, circular economies, resilient agriculture and multi-stakeholder approaches in business.

If these system-centered reforms in science and society at large join forces in time, they will ignite a massive Great Change. If they don’t come together in time, we will face the possibility of societal collapse as current crises deepen into calamities. Unfortunately, on the cusp of Great Change, history may slide either way. Our goal is to improve our chances of a successful transition by showing how the Energy System framework unifies and advances socio-economic practice in a way that increases rigor, hope and heart at the same time.

WHAT IF ENERGY IS AT THE ROOT OF EVERYTHING?

How can the dynamics of energy systems create a new scientific worldview? Let us start with a bit of history. The study of how “systems” work in general[2] – i.e., across all types of systems – began in earnest in the early 20th century. While many early researchers focused on how specific systems, such as ecosystems or economies, were connected internally, others built a General Theory around universal patterns (such as, fractals) and principles (such as, pressure) that are found in all kinds of systems.

Because Systems research applies to a wide variety of fields, it has taken root under a wide variety of names: Systems Ecology and cybernetics to resilient cities and the mathematics of Chaos theory (nonlinear dynamics). System Science’s most famous offshoot, Complexity Theory, uses computer simulations and algorithms to discern patterns in vast complexes of data. The branches we bundle under the term Energy System Sciences use energy dynamics because these provide an empirical explanation for the patterns and principles found across systems.

Using energy as a basis for transdisciplinary science of systems makes sense because energy dynamics are universal, they apply equally to living, nonliving and supra-living systems such as ecosystems and economies. Energy provides the fuel for activity and the pressures that drive change regardless of whether the system is a living organism, a cannonball or an economy. Indeed, according to Einstein, everything is made of energy, including matter, and nothing moves without it. Energy’s lawful, predictable, measurable nature also makes it a good candidate for scientific study.

Yet, energy’s universal nature is only the tip of the iceberg. The full story of energy suggests:

ECONOMIES ARE METABOLIC NETWORKS whose health requires constant reinvestment in the health and development of the human beings that make them run. Where classical science sees life as an accident, ESS sees all forms of organization – living, nonliving and supra-living ones, such as economies – as the natural, if emergent outcomes of an energy process called self-organization. Self-organization drives new organizations into being and pushes existing ones to develop greater internal connections according to four key rules: pressure drives; diversity seeds; energy fuels; constraints channel (Figure 1). New organizations emerge spontaneously if all four conditions are met. But if it lacks sufficient diversity, energy or the correct constraints, pressure will grow to dangerous proportions. The system won’t self-organize, it will explode.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1. Self-organizing energy processes. Turning up the heat on a pot of water creates pressure which pushes molecules to move faster and faster until they can go no faster via random collisions. Impurities in the water become seed crystals for little bubbles that move up the side of the pot. Some eventually reach the top, lose their heat, and sink back down, triggering a circular flow. If the heat continues, the process will repeat. The circular flow will go faster until it reaches the limits of the current pattern and some bit of diversity will because the system to re-organize into a faster, more intricate pattern, like a figure ‘8’. On the other hand, if you remove all impurities (i.e., diversity), the system won’t self-organize. Instead, pressure will build until the system explodes.

The universal nature of these rules explains why they have been found in everything from the emergence of life to the latest cycles of civilization. Pressure’s role in driving change can be seen in today’s political-economic crises and in life’s origins in the fiery furnace of primordial earth. Naturally occurring diversity provides the catalyst that channels pent-up energy into a new pattern of organization. In living systems, a genetic mutation provides the seed crystal of change. In economies, a new technology may do the trick.

The energetic origins of organization also explain why systems are best described as flow-networks, organizations whose existence arises from and depends on circulating energy, resources and information throughout the entirety of their being. Your body, for example, is an integrated network of cells kept healthy by the circulation of water and nutrients. Ecosystems are networks of plants and animals connected by flows of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, etc. Economies are interlinked networks of people, businesses, communities, and governments that depend on the circulation of money, information, resources, products etc. (Figure 2). By their nature, flow-networks are open; they are profoundly connected to and dependent on give-and-take flows from the broader environment including other living, nonliving and supra-living systems, such as ecosystems and economies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2. Some common flow-networks.

From a flow-network perspective, an economy serves the same role in a society as metabolism does in a living organism – it is an energy-, resource-, information-processing system that produces and circulates all the products and services that the system needs to survive as a whole. In this view, money is like blood, it is a vehicle for circulating information and resources into all parts of the whole.

Key implications: This metabolic view changes our vision of the basic laws of economic health. Its main implication is that the best way to remain economically vibrant is to invest in people because they make the system run. Here, for instance, fact that flow-network functioning depends entirely on circulation means that money, resources and information need to circulate thoroughly throughout because all levels of our economic metabolism need to be nourished because all play important roles. Here, regenerative investments, ones designed to fuel the future and maintain the present (such as health, education and infrastructure), do more to increased systemic vitality than giving tax breaks to the rich. Indeed, the excessive extraction and exploitation promoted by oligarchic economists produce economic necrosis, the dying off of large swaths of economic tissue due to poor circulation of money, information and resources.

INTELLIGENCE is a natural, if emergent outcome of energy’s physical role in information. In an energy view, “information” began as patterned energy-trails, a photon of light or a chemical gradient that triggers what we call smell. “Intelligence” began as a fruitful, if accidental physical response to those trails. For example, an early living cell swallowing a photon of light might be accidentally propelled toward a new energy source, which we now call “food.”

Intelligence became central to the evolution of life from the first cells on up because, by definition, every increase in fruitful response increases the chances of survival. Hence, survival pressures gave rise to increasingly intelligent organisms whose survival depended on perceiving, communicating, and processing information accurately in order to improve their chances of surviving a given situation. Living systems even began preserving lessons learned. In living systems, genes store information; nerves communicate it; and brains process it. In societies, belief systems – from scientific theories to religious creeds – preserve information. Media communicates it, and organizations, from parliaments to scientific conferences, process it.

Key implications: Naturalizing intelligence is important because it explains the critical role belief systems play in socioeconomic health. So, just as living organisms use genetic information to construct proteins, so societies use information preserved in their belief systems to construct their “social realities.” These social constructions of reality allow us to change our behavior rapidly by changing our beliefs.

Incorporating intelligence is also important because it clarifies the central role learning plays in socioeconomic health. Thus, the ability to adapt rapidly only helps if our beliefs actually embody better ways. Indeed, because economic flows, information flows and social constructions are inseparably linked, inaccurate information can promote dysfunctional behavior that may lead to collapse.

Today’s looming crises suggest today’s oligarchic capitalism is failing. Our failure to address critical problems also suggests we are struggling with two key rules of societal learning. First, we must be willing to re-examine and reform our beliefs when rising pressures and looming crises suggest they are no longer working as they should. Secondly, our collective ability to “learn”, i.e., improve our worldviews, depends on accuracy of information and the integrity of the processing system.

We survived the medieval to modern transition largely by, as Joseph Stiglitz puts it, “learning to learn,” together for the good of the whole. That meant developing the more rigorous, fact-based approach to collective learning that we now call science. The same learning process needs to repeat today. Classical science’s core vision has reached its limits because its assumptions were developed in the time before computers, when calculations still had to be done by hand. ESS takes up where classical science left off. It represents Science 2.0, a new stage of science more able to deal with the complexities of a dynamically interwoven world.

HUMANITY IS A COLLABORATIVE LEARNING SPECIES. In this view, therefore, humanity is primarily a collaborative learning species. We thrive by pooling information, forging new hypotheses about “how the world works,” and then changing our behavior by changing our beliefs.

One of energy’s laws of growth and development also explains the collaborative side of human learning. In this view, collaboration is central to the evolution of life because cooperative organizations are more powerful than separate individuals, and because the rules of growth say the only way to get bigger while staying coherent and connected is for smaller entities to join together in larger, more synergetic wholes linked by an ever-expanding meshwork of connective tissue.

So, why are larger systems always built of smaller systems, which are built smaller ones still? Molecules are built of atoms, which are built of subatomic particles. Animals are built of organs, which are built of separate living cells. Societies are built of individuals linked in families, communities, nation states and civilizations. The energy reason big systems are always built of smaller ones is that, as a system grows bigger, the bonds (forces) holding it together get stretched to a precise breaking point.[3] This means the only way for the system to grow larger is for smaller entities to join together in larger wholes joined by ever expanding levels of connective tissue. Failure to increase internal “intricacy” leads to regression and/or the possibility of collapse.

Growth pressures and the need to stay collaborative connected and in sync periodically pushed living systems to develop the connective tissue we call nerves, nervous systems and brains. They also pushed human systems to increase the intricacy of internal social, economic and communication connections. Figure 4 shows the result in the punctuated evolution of nervous systems and socioeconomic systems from hunting tribes to hierarchical civilizations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7. Growth pressures drive the evolution of collaborative organizations linked by an ever-more intricate meshwork of “connective tissue”. As organizations grow bigger, the need to stay collaboratively connected and in sync drove the development of nerves, nervous systems and brains. Similar growth pressures also drove human groups to develop more intricate forms of organizational structures, economic patterns, and cultural mores that help large groups live and work together.

Key implications – The fact that societies are collaborations held together by the bonds of common beliefs and values explains why common-cause values, such as fairness, reciprocity, and justice, are critical to long-term health. It also explains why tribalism comes to the fore in times of high pressure when bonds of trust and belonging are stretched thin.

In this view too, growth requires constant vigilance because, as Jane Jacobs put it, “It’s not how big you grow, but how you grow big.” This in turn explains why oligarchy is failing, not because of hierarchy per se, but because oligarchs use hierarchical power to extract, exploit, distort and generally serve themselves regardless of damage to the health of the whole. Trumpism epitomizes the dangers of using self-serving deceit to fuel tribal emotions.

EVOLUTION is an energy-driven process that follows predictable laws & measurable patterns. – Self-organizing processes, repeating over and over at every level of existence, lead to an energy-driven theory of evolution that begins before and extends beyond biology per se. This Dynamic theory says oscillating pressures drive recurrent cycles of increasing complexity from the first bits of matter to the latest cycles of civilization. Here, life, intelligence and increasing complexity are natural parts of a profoundly connected, ever-evolving, energy-driven cosmos.

Energy’s lawful nature allows us to predict certain aspects systemic growth and development (though not all). Pressure, for instance, allows us to predict systemic behavior in much the way that a weatherman predicts hurricanes. High pressure fronts crashing into low pressure areas drive new organizations into being – be they tornadoes or economic demand. Better systems, however, only emerge when there is a proper blend of diversity, fuel and constraints.

Energy systems also tend to produce “snowflake” patterns, ones that are geometrically-precise, universal and individually unique at the same time (Figure 3). Physicists believe these recurring shapes and patterns are the result of the push-pull dynamics of “forces and flows.” So, while energy drives change, attractive/repulsive forces, such as electromagnetism, shape the organizational structures and behavioral patterns that result.

These patterns provide surprisingly precise measures of health and development because they represent optimal patterns selected over long periods of time. For instance, the hierarchical-branching patterns (we now call fractals) are found in everything from lungs and river deltas to predator-prey relationships because their particular ratio of small, medium and large entities helps optimize circulation across scales. Even though no two lungs or ecosystems are ever exactly the same, we can use fractal math to measure systemic health because some particular power-law ratio of sizes embodies an optimal balance for that system. The same logic also applies to cities and banking systems. (Figure 4).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3. Energy forces create geometrically-precise “snowflake” patterns. Scientists since the ancient Greeks have observed that our world is filled with patterns that are geometrically-precise, universal and individually unique. The fact that each instance is unique matches our experience of the real world. The fact that they are geometrically precise and represent relatively optimal patterns means we can use them as precise targets and measures of systemic health.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 4. Fractal hierarchies are ubiquitous because they optimize circulation across scales.

Key implications – Energy’s predictable laws and measurable patterns provide the tools we need to chart a more judicious path through our complex world. Nature’s geometries, for instance, teach us that healthy structures require a fractal balance of small, medium, and large entities. In turn, the importance of balance explains why today’s problems lie not with hierarchy, elites or profits per se, but with the extreme self-service by which we are taught to pursue these.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS TO HUMAN SYSTEMS

Energy dynamics revises our vision of the laws of systemic health. So, how do we build a sustainably vibrant civilization?

• The laws of growth and development teach us that the key to long-term vitality lies in developing healthy human networks.
• Our learning nature says long-term health requires constantly revising our hypotheses about how the world works. In turn, improving our hypotheses requires: accurate information; honest communication; diverse perspectives; and fair, open, fact-based processing.
• Our collaborative nature says vitality depends on common-cause values such as fairness, reciprocity, and justice for all.
• The metabolic nature of economies explains why nourishing all levels with robust circulation is essential, and why regenerative investment – i.e., where money goes, to education and infrastructure or CEO salaries and Wall Street gambling – is vastly more important than how much has been exchanged (GDP). The need for circulation also explains why gross inequity creates necrosis, which eventually produces the kind of high-pressure conditions driving social and economic change we face today.
• Energy’s predictable laws and measurable patterns open the door to a more rigorous targets and measures of systemic health and development than most people believe is possible. Figure 5 shows our top 10 quantitative measures of systemic health.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 5. Our top 10 measures of systemic health

This theory of systemic health supports a number of current societal reform movements:

REGENERATIVE ECONOMIES – The oligarchic capitalism (neoliberal) that dominates boardrooms and elite political circles judge his wealth by how much is spent (GDP), not where money goes or how it is made. It promotes deregulation, privatization, tax breaks for the rich, and austerity for the public at large because it believes that private profit is always optimal. Because practices are designed to exploit & extract more than circulate & regenerate, they generate obscene concentrations, as well as widespread misery and instability caused by necrosis spreading throughout the middle- and lower-levels of the economy.

How do we remedy these problems? Many of the economic reforms we need are well-known, e.g., Invest regeneratively, in health, education, and infrastructure; and Curb excessive concentrations of wealth and power by breaking up monopolistic dominance and making sure the wealthy pay their (fractal) fair share of taxes.

This regenerative logic is already apparent in a number of reforms movements. Following the New Deal’s infrastructure-building strategy of the 1930s, today’s progressive reformers argue for a “Green New Deal”, an infrastructure investment project that would create millions of good jobs retrofitting buildings and developing new transit systems for the transition to clean, green renewable energy. Because this Green New Deal would increase monetary circulation while adding constructive infrastructure, it would not only save the planet, it would revitalize the economy and reduce societal pressures by putting vast numbers of people to work in jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.

Other aspects of economic health are less standard. For example, any society that wants to remain vibrant for long periods must make sure its information sources are accurate and easily accessible to all. It must also make sure that its main forums for processing-information are fair, open, honest and based primarily on fact. These rules represent learning challenges that require we find better ways for: 1) developing accuracy in media while retaining diversity of opinion; and 2) creating truly fair elections by eliminating all forms of voter suppression and unequal access, and reducing the excessive influence of big money.

EMPOWERING EDUCATION – Long-term health also requires a more empowering type of education. Today’s traditional “factory-model” of education was developed in Prussia in the early days of industrialism, when companies needed factory workers whose chief characteristics were the ability to read and follow directions. These factory-model schools stuffed facts into young brains; taught discipline, conformity and the ability to work alone on isolated tasks; and incentivized the competitiveness that was thought to make all things good.

These practices, however, don’t produce the kind of collaborative, problem-solving, civic-minded citizens a Learning society needs. Instead, in today’s fast-paced world, teamwork is critical, as is fairness, camaraderie and the ability to make connections across fields. Commitment to one another is often the saving virtue of a team and the chief virtue of an empowering leader is the knack of helping others be successful. How do we instill this? Table 1 contrasts the empowering practices we need and the factory-model schools we have. This list is based on research in: brain-based learning; cooperative education; service learning; experiential learning; community reintegration; and progressive education.

Table 1 Empowering Education vs Factory-Model Schools

Empowering Education emphasizes:

Meaning-making & problem-solving

Critical thinking & generative learning

Mastery

Collaborative striving for excellence (teams)

Common-cause

Self-confidence

Thoughtful questioning

Honors diverse ideas that advance collective well-being

Factory-Model Schools emphasize:

Abstractions & rote

Authority-approved ideas & pre-packaged truth

Ranking

Win-lose competition

Self-interest

Inadequacy

Obedience

Promotes conformity & submissiveness that support dominant beliefs and groups

COMMON CAUSE BUSINESS – The same techniques that animate committed, collaborative, critically-thinking citizens in schools also create empowered workers for businesses of all shapes and sizes. De Geus (2002), for instance, shows that distributed empowerment, and fiduciary management tends to produce greater creativity, productivity, loyalty and adaptive intelligence.

As a result, variations on such techniques are being applied by a wide range of reform groups. Marjorie Kelly (2012) describes numerous experiments in common-cause culture, stake-holder ownership and distributed empowerment ranging from an employee-owned department store chain in London to a foundation-owned pharmaceutical company in Denmark.

Fractals also suggest we need more distributed empowerment in multiscale organizations. Farmers, for example, are banding together in stakeholder-owned food-networks that provide the “economies of scale” that come with size, while leaving the distributed empowerment of local ownership intact.

Fractals balance also created more judicious way of looking at the distribution of rewards among top, middle and bottom. Oligarchic capitalists tend to believe owners have a Divine Right to maximize their own profit by minimizing workers’ share by cutting wages and outsourcing jobs. Left leaning groups, in contrast, tend to emphasize small and local as sufficient for our needs. ESS sees the need for both big and little, and argues for a fractal distribution of rewards. We call this the “Goldilocks rule,” instead of “too much” for the top and “too little” for the bottom we need a system that is “just right” for every level and type of contribution. Fractal math can help us determine how much is ‘too much’ and how much is ‘too little.’ Policies such as: inheritance taxes and excess-wealth taxes, which apply only to the uber-wealthy can help achieve a healthy balance.

Long-term business health also requires regenerative investment, including both the research investment that fuels the future, and the investment in people and infrastructure that maintains the present. Such regenerative investment should be a priority for both private and public entities. Public institutions should make sure that individuals and small and medium-sized entities our adequately nourished monetarily and have adequate access to such critical infrastructures as health, education, information, and energy (fuel).

FAIR-ENTERPRISE DEMOCRACY – This brings us to an important observation. While high-value, common-cause enterprise differs dramatically from oligarchic capitalism, it clearly reflects the original Enlightenment vision of free-enterprise democracy. Here, the invisible hand of markets do tend to produce optimal outcomes, but only if that market meets the criteria for self-organization, that is, it must have: 1) Sufficient diversity, i.e., competition on a fair, level playing field; 2) Adequate fuel, i.e., a finance system designed to provide adequate seed capital for small business; 3) Proper constraints including, for example, adequate protection from predation by large-scale monopolistic entities; and 4) Fair, open access to accurate information, as already predicted by mainstream economists. In short, for markets to work, enterprise must be fair as well as free. For markets to be fair, democracy must the similarly diverse, widely nourished, properly constrained and committed to common cause. In other words, it must truly become “government of the people by the people and for the people.”

SYSTEMIC (INTERNATIONAL) DEVELOPMENT– The rules of collaborative culture and the laws of economic metabolism also help development practitioners provide a more systemic approach to building durably vibrant human networks. Perhaps the biggest difference lies in practitioners’ awareness of the need to link local cultural systems (“biases”) in a way that sustains mutual benefit and enhances the development of local networks, while maintaining fair exchange with the broader world.

Traditional approaches to international development tend to focus on specific projects that add jobs, improve health, expand education, increase equity or reduce poverty. Their funders judge their success using measures, which show how well the project has accomplished its specified goal. Unfortunately, most of these projects are separate, one-off efforts whose improvements only last for short period of time. Others end up incorporating local organizations into global supply-chains, which serve more to extract local resources, than develop local networks.

Frustration with these realities has driven a number of development practitioners to develop more systemic approaches that seek practical ways to align local economic and cultural issues in a more naturally self-sustaining fashion.

For instance, in many places, tribal groups give kinsmen and cronies preferential treatment, which leads to corruption, cronyism and friction with other groups. In contrast, developers using a systemic approach might work to engage local groups with, for instance, a system of quality standards and monitoring for a value-chain system that benefits them all. Practitioners might also advertise on local radio stations to create public interest, and/or sponsor venues for exchanging ideas on how to go about implementing this system fairly. They might also support public-banking systems that finance local enterprises growing up around the new opportunities, and/or develop educational systems for teaching new ways. Such integrated approaches increase the longevity of improvements by building mutually-beneficial alliances among previously disjoint cultural groups.

WHAT ELSE COULD THERE BE?

Like an optical illusion that can be seen in two ways, the full story of energy dynamics radically revises our picture of the cosmos, humanity, evolution and the laws of systemic health while retaining all the facts that everyone sees. The result is a post-oligarchic vision that is logical, rigorous, practical and heartwarming at the same time. It is our hope that this new vision of “how the world works” will also help change how we behave.

In this view, oligarchy is neither inevitable nor optimal. It is a dysfunctional form of hierarchy that undergoes calamitous falls because the way elites concentrate wealth violates the laws of systemic health. Unrelenting extraction drains wealth from the bottom, which creates necrosis, and sucks wealth to the top where it creates bubbles. Meanwhile, remorseless exploitation of people and planet eviscerates the bonds trust and reciprocity that hold us together in common-cause. Economist Mark Blyth calls the result, Angry-nomics, widespread misery fueling growing pressure, and an angry populace looking for a place to vent its rage.

Today’s vision of a Learning Civilization brings a glimmer of hope to this dismal situation because it says we are designed to learn our way out of crisis situations – that’s why we talk and build scientific theories. Today’s challenge here lies in advancing our ability to learn collectively in today’s high-tech conditions by improving the accuracy, diversity, openness, and trustworthiness of information and our collective processing of it. Much of this will involve overturning oligarchic incentives that work against all of the above.

The laws of Regenerative Economics also add hope by illuminating a practical path to sustainable vitality. The goal here is to develop healthy human networks by investing in the health and the development of the human beings that make them run. A systemic approach to sustainable vitality rests on three main factors: 1) restoring common-cause values by realigning incentives toward mutual benefit; 2) enhancing collective learning through empowering education and more distributed empowerment; and 3) incentivizing cross-scale circulation, regenerative investments and a healthy fractal balance of sizes and distributions of monies. This path is heartwarming because it requires restoring common cause values. It is rigorous because we now have precise targets and measure to chart our progress towards vitality.

Hope also comes from the idea that, beneath the ups and downs of our chaotic world, our self-organizing cosmos is at work pushing us to find better ways. This vision actually suggests an energy-based understanding of God. Here, life is not simply an accident proceeding through a nature red in tooth and claw, it is an ineffable outcome of what Plato called, the Great Ordering Oneness, an omnipresent creative force that gave rise and still shapes all things from atoms and life to civilizations and consciousness in all their wondrous forms. Its invisible hand has woven all things together in an unfathomably intricate design, which is visible to us in an amazing array of exquisitely-precise patterns and forms. It is now up to us to use our new abilities to understand and better approximate its laws for living in harmony and balance with all. It’s

In short, energy’s full story changes today’s usual answers to some of our deepest questions:

Table 2:

A Regenerative Learning Society

Oligarchic Capitalism

Who are we?

A collaborative learning species

Selfish competitors

What is life?

A natural part of a self-organizing universe

An accident

How should we relate to one another?

Common-cause values such as fairness, reciprocity & accountability.

Selfishly; superiors over inferiors; domination, subjugation & exploitation;

How do we make the world a better place?

Build healthy human networks around common-cause; Learn to learn rapidly, wisely and for the good of the whole;

Maximize profits for elites; Promote self-interest;

Where is the cosmos headed?

Toward greater intricacy, intelligence, synergy & balance.

Toward increasing complexity

Is a rigorous science of human systems possible?

Yes, energy’s predictable laws and geometrically-precise patterns create relatively exact measures of health.

No, complex systems are inherently unpredictable.

What is the nature of the cosmos?

A Great Ordering Oneness, a creative force that gave rise to and still guides all things.

A pointless swirl of purposeless material bits

How do we fit in this cosmos?

Members of a great unfolding

Masters of the universe

 

Together these revised views create a rather shocking retrospective. How could we have ever believed that economies run best on amoral self-interest and evolution runs best on selfish genes? The lesson here is that we must constantly be on guard for new oligarchic corruptions to our most cherished values and essential beliefs. Paying attention to where pressure is building will help point the way.