Peace and the myth of man the individual

Computer-aided Visualization of Psycho-social Structures (Part #14)

The suggestion in the previous section appears to bear some similarity to discredited theories of social evolution or "Social Darwinism".[43] These theories mere rejected because of their many racial and class implications. The latter arose from the implication of "once-an- underdog-always-an-underdog" because the evolutionary unit was assumed to be the individual. The suggestion here, however, is that the evolutionary unit is the role in the psycho-social system.

It is through a multiplicity of roles that an individual may participate simultaneously at many different levels (as top-dog, under-dog, etc.) in any of the energy chains in the system. Each role has a certain probability of being activated at a particular point in time. Only the roles are participants, however, never the undivided individual. The locus of identity or individuality may be assumed to be extrasystemic at some hyperspace position at the "centre of gravity" of the role complex. The integration of roles is currently of such little general interest that the individual as a whole human being may be considered as an abstract, if not already mythical, concept.

Because individuals are fragmented in the psycho-social system into roles of different levels of sophistication, the dynamic of the psycho- social system is essentially the projection, aggregation, interaction and concretization of the inter-role dynamics within each individual. Each individual develops role species forming an eco-system in which inter-species conflict at many levels within himself is the norm. This cannot be eliminated except possibly by evolving each such system into states about which little is as yet known -- the lion in the individual can only be made to lie down with the lamb under rather special circumstances. Nor can it be bottled up inside the individual who wants to see a reflection of his internal eco-system, however violent, in the psycho-social environment -- circuses and television, whilst feeding the growth of the desire, are in the long run unable to satisfy and contain it.

It may well be that, until men can individually achieve a "peace of mind" for themselves, countering their psychological fragmentation and loss of identity, there will be no peace. The violence which is deplored is due to healthy attempts, often misguided, to attain such a peace of mind within an impenetrable and twisted context which forces each man to treat his neighbour as a throat. The attempts are misguided because practically zero effort is made to guide the individualin the improvement of the quality of his psychological life -- to thepoint of ignoring it as 'subjective'. The "quality of life" aspect of the environment issue, and the social aspects of development, for example, are confined at governmental level to matters of physical well-being or else surface for consideration as mental illness. (UNESCO's views on the non-economic aspects of development, were not incorporated into the program for the 2nd United Nations Development Decade.)

Peace in the world is therefore not simply a matter of juggling with the objective features of the psycho-social system -- organizations, concepts, problems. Unless each person's psycho-ecology becomes less spastic and more integrated; all objective measures will be unstable and of short duration. As the Constitution of UNESCO puts it "since wars begin in the minds of man, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed....a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments mould not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world".

Inter-specific conflict will continue to lead to violence to the human person -- as a necessary controlling process in the psycho-social system -- for as long as individuals are encouraged or forced to identify themselves and others with the roles by which they participate in the sub-system in question. The dynamics of the psycho-social system require the destruction of some roles and relationships to protect and further the growth of others. In other words, individuals are currently obliged to find their identity in what is scheduled for destruction. Currently this destruction is often liteally done over someone's dead body because of the attachment and commitment of the individual to the role and the organizations which constituted its habitat. The role, the individual and his body are perceived as an amalgam -- any change or evolution must therefore result in violence to the body.

This is particularly important in the case of social structures such as organizations. These are the concretization of behaviour patterns and abstract relationships. Because the latter are more ambiguous and less visible, the identification is with the visible (often literally "concrete") features of the organization. Change is blacked because the relationships are identified with physical features whose physical relationships cannot be flexibly or continually developed. Emotion and energy ideally available for system transformation go into system maintenance.

If transformations cannot be accomplished "from the outside" by hygienic, transcendental interference in system processes. The remaining possibility is to take the psycho-social system seriously and deliberately "evolve" it -- evolution becomes internalized, conscious and self-directing as suggested by Julian Huxley. [44] It ishowever more a question of catalyzing its evolution as a learning system than of developing it in terms of some central policy. The catalyzers must go 'meta' with respect to the discovered systems, prodding them to develop evaluative processes conducive to learning, and linking them in learning networks. [2]

The problem of this evolution is determining what is to be maximized -- but this in itself is part of the learning process. Biologists have tried and discarded many definitions of biological progress -- Kenneth Boulding considers that what evolves in some sort of information or improbability of structure whether in natural or psycho-social systems. Perhaps the answer is to be found in a strategy common to development, evolution and permanent revolution39 possibly, following Margalef's approach, the growth of total maturity (GTM), conceived in dynamic psycho-social terms, and as a generalization of GNP.

To approximate progressively to the most appropriate strategy, peace must be treated as a four-fold ecological problem -- not a matter of designing new organizational dinosaurs as memorials to non-critical problems. (Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety states that the variety or complexity of a given situation can only be dominated adequately by using strategies having at least as great a capacity to generate varietythemselves -- simplistic models do not have this.) It requires a far more sophisticated appreciation of the variety and complexity of the entities in the psycho-social system and their inter-relationships. This appreciation can only be widely provided by using a more powerful means of information handling and presentation. The visual display technique offers a means of supplying a dynamic visual representation of the knowable complex psycho-social relationships. This representation is intermediate between the abstract and the concrete. Once the psychological center of gravity is shifted from the concrete to the visualized relationships, system self-transformation can take place without physical violence.

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Peace and the myth of man the individual