“What does Trump and atoms have in common?” (Warning:
this is my only original joke) The answer: “They both make up
everything.” My son offered a better
answer. “They both have tiny protons
surrounded by a cloud of negativity”.
In a peace conference three years ago, I had a conversation
with a U.S. government nuclear engineer whose job was inspecting US nuclear
power plants and weapons facilities. He
was there to convince peace activists to enlist engineers to support the peace movement
because many of the engineers making weapons had signed a pledge to protect the
public health and safety. The leaders of
the peace conference ignored him.
But as our conversation deepened, he enlightened me on a simple
perspective that I should have known as a biologist and I’ve never seen the
world, politics, science, or religion the same way since then. He said, “everything in the Universe is made
up of systems, structures, and fundamental principles.” And they are all connected. And, if anything goes wrong (anything!) with
a system or structure, you can be certain that somewhere, somehow, someway a
fundamental principle was not followed.
Wow! Profound cubed (to the
third power).
I love making and fixing things. Having tripled the original floor space of my
home by building mostly with used and recycled materials I learned a lot about
the laws of nature (gravity, wind force, material strengths, decomposition of
wood exposed to the elements…) and city laws (building codes). Other than a leaky basement the walls,
floors, windows, doors, wood stove, ceilings and 1000 sq ft roof deck have had
no systemic or structural failures.
As a professional grass roots organizer, I built a small
grass roots organization of US based health and medical professionals to tweak
the US government system (earmarks) and structures (USAID) to earmark an
appropriation of millions of tax dollars devoted to saving the lives of poor
women and children beyond US borders (a fundamental principle of the
organization consistent with the laws of nature and nature’s God?).
As a volunteer I returned to Haiti to reinforce a rural K-7 school
building I’d assisted in building prior to their catastrophic quake (more
Haitians died in that 15 minutes than Japanese that died from both the bombings
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined).
Haitians rarely use re-bar in their cement structures. The earth quake didn’t killed them. It was flawed political, economic and
education systems that killed them. Re-bar
was simply too expensive. And the
fundamental principles of physics and geology used to forecast earthquakes in
the area two years earlier were ignored.
Before the quake there were other systemic failures in Haiti
that I pointed out to my Haitian friends. They were defensive until I listed the
systemic weaknesses of my own government.
Like the lack of justice. And, our own resistance to doing what we know
needs to be done. It’s nothing new. Our nation’s founding fathers wrote in the Declaration
of Independence that we prefer suffering to changing our form of government as
long as the evils are sufferable.
One human minds are laziness (energy conservation?) related
to our prehistoric evolution. Deep
thinking takes time and energy. Our
brains were hardwired for quick answers in a dangerous environment. We look at immediate threats not systemic
flaws. George Lakoff explains it as “Direct
causation” and “systemic causation”. It
wasn’t the earthquake, or the lack of re-bar that caused the massive death toll
from Haiti’s quake. It was their flawed
economic, political, education and building code systems. Liberals see someone killed with a gun and
they want to take away the 2nd Amendment. Trump supporters see
immigrants and want to build a wall.
Peace activists see a war and want to take away the weapons systems or money
to the military. Conservatives see a war
and fear motivates them to demand more money for the military and more advanced
weapons. When it is the profound flaws
in both our national and international political system that need to be
corrected.
The profound concept is how everything is connected and
interdependent. We basically understand this
but don’t spend much time making the irreversible connections between war,
poverty, infectious disease, climate change, politics, environment, loss of
species, WMD proliferation, terrorism, international law, peace, lack of
education, mental illness, public health, and the US debt (just to scratch the
surface of a planet and universe that influence every aspect of our quality of
life, and life itself.
"A human being is part of the whole, called by us
'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest
us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its
beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such
achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner
security." -Albert Einstein. As quoted in
Quantum Reality, Beyond the New Physics, p. 250.
- Connect the dots (everything is connected)g is connected!).
- See the web
(of life).
- Insist on
justice for all (17 Sustainable Development Goals).
- Or prepare
for the catastrophic consequences (Global Catastrophic Risks2018 https://globalchallenges.org/en/our-work/annual-report/annual-report-2018).
If you listen to C-span, read national security reports, or listen to experts attempting to explain how to solve a particular problem, you will often hear the words ‘holistic’, “comprehensive” or “whole of government approach.” Rarely will enough funding be appropriated to actually prevent extremely costly problems, so there is usually one other word these experts will offer “resilience”. They know what our founding fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “…all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Our form of government is based on the concept of independence. We have independent agencies working problems that are completely dependent on things that happen in multiple issue areas, nations and oceans.
After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the US government first
broke down the barriers between the CIA and the FBI that could have detected
the plot before it happened. Later Congress created the Department of Homeland
Security which consolidated over 20 other ‘independent’ federal agencies to improve
our nation’s security. But DHS doesn’t
include the Department of Defense or the EPA which are each “independent”
agencies but all equally dependent on tax dollars from a tax system that is
unjust and dependent on Political will…. I think you get the point. If not, read Einstein’s quote above, again.
Before
you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half
of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its
interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize
this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality. MLK.
"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one
thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are
bound together. All things connect." - Chief
Seattle, Duwamish (1780-1866)
- Connect the dots (everything is connected)g is connected!).
- See the web
(of life).
- Insist on
justice for all (17 Sustainable Development Goals).
- Or prepare
for the catastrophic consequences (Global Catastrophic Risks2018 https://globalchallenges.org/en/our-work/annual-report/annual-report-2018).
So what are fundamental principles? Read the first paragraph of the Declaration
of Independence for the best introduction.
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are the most
comprehensive and holistic solutions created by humans since the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. Unfortunately, it was never made enforceable. Failing the SDGs will require investing in our
resilience. Given that some global threats
are inevitable, and others we could prevent, won’t be, resilience investments are
the next best plan.
But chances are that will NOT happen without some catastrophic
suffering. Even then, we might not spend
on what’s needed. Our minds and
political factions work in mysterious ways. Things change.
Maybe these should too.
For additional thoughts on System thinking:
https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/systems-thinking-can-help-build-sustainable-world-beginning-conversation/#disqus_thread This article was originally published in the July 2018 Edition of The
Solutions Journal “For some, the development of systems thinking is crucial for the
survival of humanity.” – John Sterman
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