Clumsily STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE towards an EVOLUTIONARY VISION

Dear Friends,

Two ?epiphanies? in last few days (November 16th to 19th) are at the basis of this reflection.

1.      Situating this posting in context

Amidst the thinking about a fundamental reorienting my “crossroads announcement” is a good start. Recovering from 8 years of hardship. 

Many readings, words and quotes have informed “thinking with” and pushed me to start moving.

The idiot’s Cry, is based on “thinking with” many authors (readings), encounters, and multifarious experiences[1]

Everydy words are appearing everywhere[2] and all the time? Yet aren’t they carrying ever new meanings, depending on the person using[i] them, provoking a sense of disarray, disputes often. 

Are we not very many to be perplexed and worried by the contradictions that life confronts us with, pushing us (consciously or not) to perceiving things in ever new ways.

Are we not increasingly facing ever growing uncertainty, unpredictability, insecurity, contradictory certainties often[3] due to the multitude and nature of life’s “surprises”?

This phenomenon has probably been going on forever. Today it seems to intensity and it becomes destabilizing…: As if the very foundation of our living is shaken, disrupted.

Nothing is simple any more. But yet we are caught with the idea that simplifying things is effective and efficient. We split and divide things up, in ever smaller entities, believing that it is the only possibility to keep track of things. And we organize, plan, and “control”, establish hierarchies, and structure, in a vain search for predictability and security, achieving the very contrary of what we intend.

May it be that this drive to simplicity is totally wrong-headed, counterproductive, misguided, and sorcerous? May it be so wrong that it has provoked Ga?a’s intrusion?

Might it not have provoked the youth calling for Extinction Rebellion 

What’s the future if even two farmers cannot agree to “compose” and solve minute disagreements?

How were we educated? How did we and are we educating our youth? What heritage are we leaving them?

What has prevented people from learning the “Process of Understanding”? Ii is freely available at the click of a mouse, the World over, in very many languages?

This ‘Process of Understanding’ is indeed what Edgar Morin describes so masterfully in Chapter 5 of his “Seven complex lessons for the Education for the Future”[4]?

 Is it not high time to ‘thinking with’ him (and with so many others) about the very foundation[5] on which our (Western) education (and since “globalization” our life and the future of life on Earth) rests?

Wouldn’t it acquire even more sense if UNESCO’s booklet had been entitled “Seven Complex Lessons for living the Future (or for Being the Future)[ii]? Why did this initiative not open up our minds and hearts and learn us to live symbiotically as a species amongst many other species (living or not), composing respectfully and peacefully a sympo?etic way of living between ever more “modes of existence”[iii]

Let’s take a pause

What do we learn, how do we learn, and what do we achieve??

“Always learning, never getting t right”

Michael Thomson

How do we think? How to be effective?

“Think we must, we must think” and “stay with the trouble”.

Donna Haraway

 “The Idiot’s Cry’s idea and purpose was to first start thinking with scientists. It was a speculative bet.

Two epiphanies are confirming that this intuition, albeit not representing the easiest path[6], might not be so misguided. They are “additive” to the “Idiot’s Cry”.

They are evoked here to illustrate how new ways of relating, improving, stimulating can contribute to the task of changing the present “order of things”.

The present has evolved to block any and every creative evolution. It has increasingly made change “impossible”. Or not? Cannot, against all odds, this impossibility be altered and dissolved?

 Is not this task and responsibility awaiting us. Breaking the spell: yet starting bottom up, altering one by one every “thing” that goes against the grain of evolution. In order to become “other”, so that gradually but increasingly “common sense” emerges out of an ever greater diversity of modes of existence. “Common sense” so that even the “wickedest[7]” and most desperate situations, handled according to an evolutionary vision and cosmopolitical sympo?etic dynamics, can lead to the still invisible and inconceivable metamorphose (Edgar Morin).[iv] 

2.      The Evolutionary Vision[8]

 The first epiphany concerns manifold and insight provoking thoughts[9] hidden in a book edited by Erich Jantsch, covering the AAAS symposium ‘”The Evolutionary Vision: Toward a Unifying Paradigm of Physical, Biological, and Sociocultural Evolution”.

Attached a copy of (i) Ilya Prigogine’s “in memory” homage to Erich Jantsch, (2) Erich Jantsch’s Introduction and (3) his concluding remarks as these three sections appear in the book[10] 

The wisdom and the scientific foundation of the “Evolutionary Vision of Life[11]” clearly shows nothing less than the “direction” and the “possibility” for succeeding in transforming many “wicked” situations into as many opportunities for dissolving them, transforming (metamorphosing) them, charting effective and dignified pathways capable of leading towards a dignified future.

Hereafter a few extracts, together with some comments as appetizers and encouragements for reading the full text in annex:

Erich Jantsch’s introduction Page 5,

“The ultimate importance of the Evolutionary vision lies not just in its power to unifying scientific thinking and stimulating a truly transdisciplinary approach, but also in the philosophy it expresses – a philosophy close to life and its creativity. The alienation of science from life, which, which has become a matter of growing concern, is out to be overcome by the evolution of science itself.”

Can this be read as a confirmation that “The Idiot’s Cry” was addressed to the right audience[12]?

On page 212, Erich Jantsch’s concluding remarks end with:

“A deeper understanding of the relations between the dynamics of the human mind and the dynamics of the socio-cultural reality – the evolution of the sociosphere and the noosphere – will also open up an entirely new perspective for the social sciences. A future theory of a creative and a evolving human world will take a fresh look at such phenomena as social and institutional change, value dynamics, competition and cooperation , conflicts, crises and revolutions (as potentially creative fluctuations furthering evolution); social and cultural pluralism and “symbiosis, and the “planetarization” of human interaction in a technological age.

It will do away with any “optimization” according to utility or other economic and static criteria and emphasize dynamic criteria instead.

It will realize the basic openness of evolution and that there are usually many ways into the future.

It will also emphasize active and creative responsibility over the currently popular passive “consumption” of human rights.

“Vaste Programme, Messieurs”, as Général de Gaulle used to say – but not with reference to the implementation of such vast change, but to the resistance against it

The evolutionary vision is itself a manifestation of evolution. The academic reward for its elaboration will not only be a new (or partly revived) natural philosophy or an improved understanding at all levels, but also an immense radical philosophy to guide us at a time of creative instability and major restructuration of the human world, of both the socio- and the noosphere.

With such an orientation, science will also become more realistic and meaningful for the concerns of human life. It will be not merely an end product of human creativity, but a key to its further unfolding in all domains.

This was written less than a year before Erich Jantsch premature death (December 1980).

What do we need more to undertake?

 It will sounds like music in the ears of those who are aware of Michael Thompson’s life work. He wrote his thesis and a book “Rubbish Theory” and actually published it in 1979. BUT the unbelievable fate of this book was to be banned at its release[v] by its very publisher (Oxford University Press in1979 ??? )

Erich Jantsch could not have known Michael, nor been aware of these circumstances. He would have understood them, since both of them their faced somewhat similar fates on a number of accounts – see next paragraph for Erich Jantsch’s? Can we think with this here? Had what Erich Jantsch was predicting not already “emerged” (…) [13]

Magoroh Maruyama wrote a eulogy for Erich Jantsch describing his “fate”[14]:

Jantsch succumbed at the age of 51 to the material and physical hardships that worsened progressively during the last decade of his prolific and still young life. This makes us realize again the harsh and brutal conditions of life some of the innovators must endure. ... Let us face squarely the fact that Jantsch was given no paid academic job during a decade of his residence in Berkeley—a town considered to be a foremost spawning ground of scientific and philosophical innovations." Jantsch penned his own epitaph: "Erich Jantsch died on __ in Berkeley after a painful illness. He was almost 52 and grateful for a very rich, beautiful and complete life. His ashes have been scattered over the sea, the cradle of evolution."

No words here!

Jantsch's Design for Evolution is described as "a seminal work on general evolution theory (GET)" by Ralph H. Abraham in "The Genesis of Complexity". Synthesizes the Mind boggling “rhisomic” process and result and of 30 years transdisciplinary relating! 17 (on the web downloadable) very revealing pages about how GOOD science beyond boundaries achieves progress.

3.      Linking Additive Empirical Humanities and Evolutionary Vision?

The second epiphany, occurring almost synchronically with the first, came from Bruno Latour’s “The scientific Fables of an Empirical La Fontaine” attached. He wrote his powerful reflections as  a foreword to the English translation (2016) of Vinciane Despret’s breathtaking and path breaking book entitled “What Would Animals Sat If We Asked the Right Questions”[15]

Both epiphanies 1 and 2 come at the right time. Is it because they were needed? Or the other way around? Is it the act of serendipity? Synchronicity?

Is it the speculative act of daring to reveal and exchange intuitions?

Is it not incredibly powerful when we allow ourselves to freely “think with” one another about our intuitions and take seriously what fellow Intuitors have to say (composing intuitions?)[16]? Unanswerable question? Is unanswerability characterizing the better questions?

Whatever the reason, this reading of some of Latour ideas is powerful, and complements wonderfully the meeting of minds with Erich Jantsch.

Let’s share his ideas in a mode of “not telling”, just citing some abstracts (and maybe sharing afterwards what resonates (now and later) in us reading them)[17]:

“You are about to read scientific fables, true ways of understanding how difficult it is to figure out what animals are up to”

This immediately brings following question into mind: “what if we can dream of these fables also as novel ways of understanding what humans are up to?”[18]

“Scientific Humanities: all the resources of science AND of the humanities put to work for understanding”[19]

How to integrate Alfred North Whiteheads quip in this perspective: “Not ignorance, bit ignorance of ignorance, is the dead of knowledge?” Is intuition knowledge? Can it be transformed into knowledge? How?

Follows a beautiful account of

”the way science distanced itself from alternative accounts of observations derived from totally different preoccupations and experiences of dealing with them”

How do these different preoccupations and experiences come by? : Empirical observations of Phenomena? Experiences? Ideas? Mores? What other preoccupations? Modes of existence?

“The way scientists claim to study in an objective, disinterested, and distant way (free from emotions, attitudes, and mores) to protect knowledge production from the pitfall of “anthropomorphism” leads to a humorous paradox:

“Only by creating highly artificial conditions of laboratory conditions of experimentation will you be freed from any artificial imposition of human values and beliefs onto them[20]”

This paradox leads to the question:

“Is the fight against anthropomorphism so important that it should give way to “academocentrism[21]”?

 This is leading to the somewhat humorous rhetoric question:

“Is it not a little bizarre that naturalistic descriptions are supposed to be obtained by artifices, whereas the naturally occurring situations are considered a source of artificial fiction?”

Is there a punchier summary of science gone mad?

·      How can it come about that even scientists become boiling frogs?

·      Or are they just living “fatalistically”, reassured behind a “After me the flood”? 

 Is it Michael Thompson who can provide us the answer to this last question?

I believe Yes: With his “theory of plural rationalities” he describes fatalism as being one of the 5 ways of organizing and relating in the world (each being indissociable of the other 4 that his theory proposes)

My hope is the Michael and Isabelle Stengers bridge the gap between their “worlds” end embark on a genuine “process of understanding” to develop new “proposals, about how hope new ways of thinking and relating can bring “further epiphanies” to clear the way to the metamorphosis Edgar Morin is hinting at and hoping for. My “intuition” and “situated experience” is indeed that Isabelle Stengers’ life work (leading to her “cosmopolitical proposal”), and Michael’s lifework (leading to his Theory of Plural Rationalities - let’s qualify it here diplomatically as “speculative additive, empiristically grounded, humanistic philosophical proposal), should both be taken and “thought with” together very seriously, with many others[22]. Hope can have many meanings: maybe one of them is clumsily expressed in these wishes published in 2017.

 These two rather clumsily formulated paragraphs may be getting some meaning, and introduce where Bruno Latour leads us to:

 The subject of empirical philosophy.

He sees two main varieties of them:

 “The Subtractive ones are interested in grounding their claims by decreasing the number of alternatives and limiting the number of voices: simplification by eliminating accounts and silence their storytellers.”

“The Additive ones are also interested in objective facts and in grounding their claims, but they like to add, complicate, specify, slow down, hesitate so as to multiply the voices that can be heard[23]. “

“Rather than purveyors of “either-or”, additive philosophers are great proponents of “and-and”[24]”

Hence his conclusion:

 “Science debases itself when it argues from its success to eliminate other accounts”

 Follows a few magnificent paragraphs that answer the question:

“How to be a consistent additive empiricist?[25]

The core of Latour’s response is expressed in following extracts:

“When you are an additive empiricist, it is all forms of subtraction that have to be resisted: eliminativism of those who wish to kick he amateurs out, but also eliminativism of those who wish to dream of bypassing science altogether – two forms of competing and complementary obscurantism”

“… moving from the question of anthropomorphism to the much more interesting one of “metamorphosis”[26]: by exploring the protean nature of what it means to be “animated”

4.      Towards wrapping up

Can we feel reassured that Erich Jantsch vision in section 2 , remains fully compatible with the most modern thinking of Latour and Vinciane Despret in section 3, and with what “The Idiot’s Cry” tries clumsily to express?

Can we remain aware of the immense gap that still needs to be overcome, for bridging it?

Can we become even more aware where current thinking and doing brought us to?

Can we become aware of what was already “known” in 1980 and why it remained hidden to us?

Can we become more aware also that the gap between what was done since and what was known since seems not to have shrunk, and that possibly this gap may even have widened.

Can our answers to these questions provide a measure of the task ahead?

Donna Haraway words “Staying with the Trouble” are intruding again (and it might convince us to read – again - her seminal book carrying the same title)

What has blinded us, lost us amidst false illusions, pushed us to laziness and fatalism, prevented us to perceiving the trouble ahead, retained us from taking a” fresh look at such phenomena as social and institutional change, value dynamics, competition and cooperation, conflicts, crises and revolutions (as potentially creative fluctuations furthering evolution); social and cultural pluralism and “symbiosis, and the “planetarization” of human interaction in a technological age”. (Erich Jantsch above)

Is it not about time that we awaken ourselves, that we get the measure of what lies waiting?

 Don’t we have everything that is needed for us to take our responsibility, to start the immense task of “dissolving” the resistance we will have to face?

·      Can we compare this resistance to David facing Goliath the invincible?

·      Should we then not be well advised to follow David’s tactic to avoid defeat: changing the rules of the game without Goliath noticing it?

·      Can we maybe introduce some novelty, some humanity, some wisdom to David’s tactic; some new vision about the purpose of our undertaking: Can we add a new “surprising element” in David’s strategy?

·      Could that change our view of what a fight is all about?

o  What would we achieve if we were out to killing Goliath?

o  What would we achieve in rather converting him to think and act differently also, in changing the rules of the game also, infusing in him the Evolutionary Vision???

 Can we think with this in new ways, with and between manifold situations, diversity and contradictory certainties, composing beyond the diversity of modes of existence?

Can this lead is to think and act in new ways, to “dissolve” the complex and wicked problems facing us, metamorphosing them into possibilities for metamorphoses?

5.      Following Up

Whilst the ideas herein stem from many scientific domains (but not only) it demonstrates how perversely the system in place has captured and keep enslaving the overwhelming majority of scientists and researchers in its sorcerers grip

Not only scientists: also a great many others, maybe everyone, everywhere, at any level, in the majority of “modes of existence” have been “infected“ by the “sorcery”

Many are the obstacles to overcome. Is not the first one for us to become aware of the chains enslaving us/the many/everyone? Should we find the ways to free ourselves, us, and others from these chains? 

Isn‘t it the worse perversity of the sorcerers system’s workings to convince well meaning and sane people to willfully work at their own and their fellow human’s bereavement for the sole benefit of the sorcerer’s system to keep going, thereby destroying their and their offspring’s future[27]? 

Two references here are sufficient to highlight the issue, enabling understanding, allowing to become aware of the depth of the issue, so as to allow “thinking with” others to find out how to transform and dissolve these perverse effects (both in singular individual situations and in general).

The first reference lies in David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs[28] ?

The second in Philippe and Stengers description “minions - petites mains”: see Catastrophic Times (p 119)

·      If we are to envisage our role in the future as one of taking responsibility for helping the emergence of an “Evolutionary Vision”, in whichever capacity for each of us this responsibility will be taking place and may materialize, 

·      If it is our ambition to reorient situations - for people, institutions, all living and non living beings (our cosmos), or the relationship between them - to evolve collaboratively (sympoietically), we will need to question impossibly wicked situations whose origin stem from wrongheaded thinking, systems and processes.

·      If we are to catalyzing situations to transition towards a healthy and responsible situation, alongside a civilized path, we may need to allow all to very practically bridge the divide that they/we are faced with.

·      We then need to prepare ourselves/them to face the Liminal experience of moving from our/their situated present towards our/their evolutionary vision of the future, along unknown paths.

We will need to mobilize attention, energy, time and resources for ourselves and everyone.

How to mobilize people who are often unaware of the capture that prevents them to devote the necessary time, attention, energy and resources to what could change their life and life in general, for the better? How to free them from their spell?

How to alter and dissolve the wicked situations the sorcerer’s system is putting well-meaning people into. How to transform these situations (described by David Graeber and Pignarre & Stengers - and so many others)?

Is this not a precondition for the rest to follow and succeed?

How can the “cosmopolitical proposal” and the “Evolutionary Vision” provide guidance for thinking and acting in new ways, prevent falling into the trap of “doing the same thing over and again, hoping different results”[29]? :

·      “Not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke thought”;

·      “Work according to a process that requires no other verification than the way in which it is able to “slow down” reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing it”.

·      “Distinguishing thinking, action and purpose from issues of authority and “generality” currently articulated to the notion of “theory”, “dualistic thinking”, and “exclusion” by adopt instead a posture of additive speculative empiricism at the service of the common good[30].

This document is an unachieved draft that is meant to start “thinking with”, developing exchanges and conversations with/between a small selective core group of daring citizens.

The document and the “thinkers” will vary “Sympo?etically.

Welcome!

Grez-Doiceau 25 November 2019

Charles van der Haegen

[email protected]

The Idiot’s Cry (Page 1) , 

Extracts from Erich Jatsch’s “The Evolutionary Vision” as mentioned (Page 3)

Bruno Latour’s Epilogue “The scientific Fables of an Empirical La Fontaine” as menioned (Page 5) 

will be promptly sent upon request to the mail above.

Other referenced documents can be made available for interested readers.

 Info about the author:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/charles-van-der-haegen-5854872/

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/here-i-am-crossroads-you-see-benefit-can-team-partner-van-der-haegen/

[1] Some received my CRY. To many it was “available”. New readers, curious enough to go through a simple Google search, will have no difficulty in getting it. This Cry was kept purposefully somewhat hidden. Indeed it was written as a “clumsy speculative proposal” for “thinking with science dwellers”, on the academia.edu platform.

[2] news, quotes, pamphlets, articles, books television, movies, internet dwellings

[3] The core of the work of Michael Thompson: decision making under contradictory certainties DMCC.

[4] Together with 6 other mind boggling chapters. It came out 20 years ago and is since freely downloadable on UNESCO’s website, translated in many languages. What was its impact? It almost seems to be a “forgotten book”. Maybe it had to wait? Is it not an essential to guide enlightening people on their way to the future? Might its time have come? Why now?

[5] Presuppositions, paradigms

[6] “Ad Augusta per Angusta”. As I think and write words down they acquire new and ever deeper meanings.

[7] Wicked in Collins dictionary: “You use wicked to describe someone or something that is very bad and deliberately harmful to people”. From Collins dictionary

[8] “We are evolution, and we are to the extent of our power responsible for it” (Erich Jantsch see the attachment on page 4).

[9] I serendipitously (or is it synchronicity rather) bounced upon this book recently in my library. It was only (already?) in 2012 that I discovered Erich Jantsch’ book “The Self-Organizing Universe”, as Gunter attended me on its path-breaking Chapter 19 entitled “Ethics, Morality and Systems Management”. I probably then acquired “The Evolutionary Vision of Life”. It remained a sleeping princess for 7 years.

[10] It represents an invaluable summary 30 years transdisciplinary scientific thinking and research “at the outer edge”. A very Incredible scientists and philosophers of many different domains exchanged on this. Erich Jantsch has “digested” and condensed them into 14 very readable and fascinating pages. See also hereafter Ralph Abraham top of page 5

[11] Illustrating the incredible foundation of Isabelle Stengers life work as (very partially) condensed in her path breaking “Cosmopolitical Proposal”

[12] Which does not mean that is was correctly formulated, to attract the outliers there. A timely illustration of “always learning, never getting it right”

[13] Michael Thompson indeed precisely had started tackling the challenge that Erich Jantsch saw as “a necessary entirely new perspective for the social science”. After being first banned, Rubbish Theory came out later: first In Germany in 2005, then, in 2017 in English. And in between Michael’s mind-boggling and path-breaking “Dynamic and Non Linear Theory of Institutional Emergence and its Implication”, timidly came out in some (excellent at that time) but “outlier” publishing house under the title “Organising and Disorganising” (2008). I cite this book and its breakthroughs amply in my Cry: I am convinced we need to be thinking (and working) with Michael in any undertaking guided by the “Evolutionary Vision”. The predicaments Michael endured are a clear symptom of the power of resistance to change and explain why his ideas remained so far “either neglected”, or “considered ridiculous”, or increasingly becoming very “uncomfortable knowledge” and altogether banned in numerous ways to “reaching the stage”. It still remains outside of the vast majority of social scientist’s and philosophers intellectual and educational horizons.

Work ahead for us thus, opportunities ahead also. It should be easier today to follow through, as the “composing alchemy” has timidly started and is gaining results and traction. Still, a long and difficult road awaits us ahead as the subject implies a fundamentally different way to consider our very ‘being” on this World. See my second epiphany hereafter.

[14] Magoroh Maruyama and Ralph H. Abraham are cited in Wikipedia

[15] Surprisingly Available as a free download in its English version. For me her first path breaking book ‘Quand le Loup Habitera avec l’Agneau” is neither available in English, nor available second hand in print for a fortune!

[16] Not sure if the word existed, I found following “definition in a Google search on the term: I can live with the definition I found, albeit I see much more in the concept and its power than what it contains here:

“Intuitor: (noun) a person with a passion for learning and innovating that is so strong it is often more powerful than the desire to eat, sleep, or seek personal wealth”

[17] Appealing the reader’s free reflections: In black : the writer’s comments/insights, in blue Bruno Latour’s ideas (sometimes paraphrased for simplification – the original text is attached, so no harm and no “undue interpretation” can be claimed

[18] In the end, aren’t we animals also?

[19] Hinting at empirical observations of Phenomena? Experiences? Ideas? Mores? And what about intuitions?

[20] these experimentations

[21] Administrators and planners are often guilty of academocentrism, that is, they focus to such an extent on theories generated by their own logic and methodology that they fail to recognise the existence of other logics. In practice this can produce a much distorted view of social reality. The author illustrates how a truer picture can be obtained when the purpose of the researchers converges with that of the people in the community studied.

[22] I feel it is NOT the case for both, as they are still considered outliers. Does Isabelle Stengers not endure the same fate as Michael Thompson, Erich Jantsch and so many other innovators? In this case it may imply that a task lies ahead of us! More even, the additive exercise may comprise many other empirical oriented additive humanists cum scientists.

[23] In the fashion of William James: they want nothing but what comes from experience, and certainly don’t want less that experience

[24] Stengers and Despret: science debases itself when it argues from its success to eliminate other accounts

[25] Pages IX and X

 [26] Shape-changing: constantly trying to avoid ‘deanimating’ or ‘over-animating’ those beings with whom we constantly change shapes. Shape-changing is the English equivalent of metamorphosis. For French speaking readers Edgar Morin’s text “Eloge de la Métamorphose” in “Les Cahiers de l’Herne” is wonderfully inspiring (can be send it on request).

[27] This phenomenon is better described in the Idiot’s Cry

 [28] After his monumental mind boggling book : “Debt : The first 5000 years”

[29] Einstein of course

[30] Words borrowed from Isabelle Stengers’ “Cosmopolitical Proposal”

[i] Those Writing and those reading them

[ii] Indeed, personally I have difficulties with the word “education”. It can lead us:

·      away from our responsibility to self-determine our (life-long) learning process,

·      away from being informed by what we encounter in life

·      away from the essential questions: the why, what and how we think about, decide, and act upon situations we face in life

·      away from the “always learning, never getting it right” of Michael Thompson and from “Experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you” of Otto Scharmer

[iii] Reviving those that have been overruled, welcoming new-ones to freely emerge. Modes of existence - see Souriau, Bruno Latour. Actually as you will read hereafter, we should stop remaining prisoners of the categories in which we happen to get into and in which we are expected to follow predefined furrows. Prisoners in as far as we remain comfortable living in them. NOT to have to face the enormous complexity of life. Happily avoiding having to facing often very surprising, very different, and contradictory and the always particular “ethos and oikos” proper to each of the other multiple (still exiting) “modes of existence”. If we are up to dissolving the conflicts and emerging discrepancies and to enable ourselves to transforming them into new life transforming situations, we will have to compose beyond the widely dominating dualisms and presuppositions and mindsets. We will have to look at situations in fundamentally new and multifold ways. We cannot remain “insane in doing (and thinking, perceiving) the same way over and again, expecting different results”. We will instead have to approach situations in much more complex and inclusive ways: quite an undertaking. 

? La vie reconna?t comme penseurs ceux qui pensent leurs évidences, alors que penser est en rupture avec les évidences de la tribu ? Edgar Morin

[iv] I am paraphrasing much of Edgar Morin’s paragraph in La Voie as quoted on page 18 of the Idiot’s Cry:

On every continent, in every nation, a whirlwind of creative activities, a multitude of local initiatives are happening. They are directed towards economic, or social, or political, or cognitive; or educational, or ethical, or live enforcing regeneration. (What should be connected is still isolated, separate, scattered).

These initiatives don't know about each other, no administration count them, no political party takes account of them.

They represent however the breeding ground for the future. Salvation will originate from the ground.

They should be acknowledged, identified, registered, collected and combined into a variety of reform paths.

In each and in all, it is required to relate, improve, stimulate.

When jointly evolving, these multiple path-ways may combine to chart a new course, to alter and dissolve the one we are following, leading us to the yet still invisible and inconceivable Metamorphosis.

 [v] See the unbelievable - yet so instructive story - of this banning in the idiot’s Cry bottom of page 3 and 4 in His “Rubbish Theory”. It was published in 1979 and faced a fate that mirrors its author’s. As the book was just being published, the editor in chief of Oxford University Press got a letter from a board member of his prestigious institution, a professor in economics, instructing him to “dump” the book. As the editor in chief refused, he got fired, and the book was indeed literally dumped (taken off Oxford University libraries and records, diffusion stopping immediately). Michael was even refused to recover his intellectual rights on the book. The book had to wait to be re-published in 2017 in English, with both an illuminating new introduction and new afterword, under the title “Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value”. Mindboggling: as this books fate compares to what its author and its lifework faced during much of his career: The same fate for him and for his “Theory of Plural Rationalities”[v]: “Down and then Up”.