Brain Cancer

There is a culture war of biblical proportions underway.

The frontier of the battle line lies between the 4th and the 5th rung of Kohlberg's Ladder of Moral Reasoning.

The DoJ is operating no higher than the 4th rung, corresponding to the Law and Order Model, also known as the Crime and Punishment Model.

The 5th rung is called the Social Contract Model. It is not yet very well known outside of academia. I reckon it won't gain a foothold until at least 25% of the population become well-educated in the STEM disciplines.

The 4th rung has an inherent affliction that we might characterize as "brain cancer."

The more familiar name for that particular type of cancer is corruption.

Brain cancer is an insidious killer.

But it's not the only scourge afflicting the Body Politic.

Chaotic Drama

Mathematical recursions can have any of four trajectories.

1) The sequence of iterates can converge to a fixed point (including zero).

2) The sequence of iterates can generate a finite repeating cycle.

3) The sequence of iterates can march off to infinity.

4) The sequence of iterates can yield a non-repeating pseudo-random or chaotic pattern.

Life generally corresponds to the fourth case. Cancer generally corresponds to the third case. War and other tragedies also correspond to the third case. Extinction corresponds to the first case, where the limit of the sequence vanishes to zero (the dying breed).

The 10 systemic problems which plague civilization — Conflict, Violence, Oppression, Injustice, Corruption, Poverty, Ignorance, Alienation, Suffering, and Terrorism — are currently operating in the recursive regime of cancer, war, and tragedy (meaning they are not a sustainable pattern of over-consumption of scarce planetary resources).

To see an example of how these ten plagues feed back on each other, see this story:

VA Tech Shooter Diagnosed as a
'Collector of Injustice'

Alone Together

Title: The Sound Of Nonsense
Artist: Barsoom Tork
Composer: Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Barsoom Tork Associates
MP3Tube: The Sound of Silence — Simon and Garfunkel

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to truck with you again,
Because a mission softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And sedition that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the rounds of nonsense.

In restless dreams I picked a bone
Narrow thoughts down paths alone,
'Neath the shadow of a candid note,
I turned my dolor to the vague inchoate
When my eyes were stunned by the flash of a fleeting Tweet
That snapped the beat
And touched the bounds of nonsense.

And in the naked night I saw
Ten thousand comments, maybe more.
People typing without speaking,
People reading without listening,
People righting wrongs that choices never dared
But no one cared
Disturb the rounds of nonsense.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Nonsense like a cancer grows.
Hear my blurbs that I might teach you,
Click my links that I might reach you."
But my blogs like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of nonsense.

And the people snerked and japed
On the Facebook walls they scraped.
And Sherry flashed out her grave warning,
In the words that she was still forming.
And Sherry said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the Facebook walls
And Twitter calls.
And whisper'd in the sounds of nonsense."

CopyClef 2011 Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Barsoom Tork Associates.
Resurrection Hackware. All songs reused.
"At Resurrection Hackware, our annoying song parodies are your everlasting earworm."

The Sound of Silence — Simon and Garfunkel

Solving Systemic Problems Requires Systems Thinking

As many of my colleagues and online acquaintances may know, my professional work has largely been grounded in the application of systems theory, to analyze and solve problems calling for a systems approach.

Now that I'm mostly retired, I've increasingly begun to reflect on the larger class of problems that plague humankind, above and beyond the more tractable class of problems that a person of my educational background in the STEM disciplines might have been recruited to work on at research venues like Bell Labs, BBN, Stanford, or MIT.

About eight years ago, I began to chronicle my thoughts about the ten biggest and most intractable problems, observing that, from a systems theoretic point of view, all ten of them had a common underlying structure.

As I assay it, the ten most intractable plagues of western civilization are conflict, violence, oppression, injustice, corruption, poverty, ignorance, alienation, suffering, and terrorism.

Whack-A-Mole

All ten of these hellish problems have something in common. Like cancer, they tend to reseed themselves, round-robin, from one instance to the next, in a never-ending cycle of recursion.

Systemic problems call for a systems approach to problem-solving. But that’s not going to happen until we elevate our collective problem-solving skills to near-genius levels.

I would like to see President Obama convene a national problem-solving congress, staffed with the best and the brightest systems thinkers our society has to offer, to systematically address, analyze, and solve the interlinked systemic problems of conflict, violence, oppression, injustice, corruption, poverty, ignorance, alienation, suffering, and terrorism.

How can those of us who share and promote the systems approach elevate this idea and organize an effective community of forward-looking problem solvers?

Challenges for the 21st Century — Jay Forrester