Science with conscience: 50 years of the foundations of a wellbeing and sustainable society

"The enormous mass of quantifiable and technically usable knowledge is nothing but poison if it is deprived of the liberating force of reflection."?

– Edgar Morin

"Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature."

– John of Salisbury

An Introduction

In the construction of possible paths on a paradigm based on Wellbeing (personal, social, planetary), I usually approach ideas, articles, and books of the present because, by the heuristic rule of not spending too much time, there is a good chance that these already more or less contain or have taken into account the main ideas of the past. However, sometimes in history, some bifurcations leave certain authors or ideas on a road not so well travelled (I can remember how the research, among others, of Gregor Mendel in Genetics or Lev Vygotsky in Child Development, was rediscovered many years later hidden in other languages or faraway places).

In my opinion, a somewhat similar case could be that of the Argentine humanist scientist, polymath and responsible thinker (critical, systemic, paradoxical) Carlos A. Mallmann from whom I borrowed his ideas of human needs for the normative model of sustainability that I built in 2012. To tell the truth, at the time I was writing it I could not find much information about Mallmann on the internet, so the needs part of the model was based on Mallmann's graph at the top of this article (translated into English and coloured by me to fit the 4 quadrants of my framework). However, I was more familiar with the ideas on human needs of the alternative economist Manfred Max-Neef. As we will see later, Max-Neef stood on Mallman's shoulders to build his vision of human needs. The first time I saw that Mallmann infographic, possibly around 2007, I was smitten. It was so concise about what it is to be human and how to develop that when I was subsequently thinking about the foundations for a sustainability model I knew it had to be included. About five years ago I started a more active search for the basis of his ideas. Two years ago, I got a Spanish draft entitled "Sobre las necesidades del ser humano y su relación con las teorías del Mundo” (1972) (On human needs and their relation to theories of the world) (and the paper (in English and Spanish) of February 1973 "On the satisfaction of human aspirations as the development objective" that gave rise to the above graph that he presented in Mexico (July 1973). As we will see later, about 50 years ago, a fundamental page began to be written about science with a conscience to make a fairer and better world. In 1972, we also have the publication of the book "The Limits to Growth" which is probably one of the most important milestones in any sustainability debate. However, few people know that from the South, from the Bariloche Foundation in Argentina, where Mallmann was his great leader, another model was created, the Latin American World Model (LWM) (aka Bariloche Model). A model that began to be thought of in 1970 after a meeting of several representatives of the Bariloche Foundation in Rio de Janeiro sponsored by the Club of Rome. That meeting had been held to analyse and discuss "World3 Model", which had been built by a group directed by Dennis Meadows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Four years later, in 1974, the Club of Rome invited the Bariloche Foundation to Austria to present the preliminary results of the LWM. Finally, in 1976, the book "Catastrophe or new society" (downloadable here) was published, which was the response, mainly based on human development and international solidarity, from the South to the 1972 book "The Limits to Growth" proposed by the North.

This article aims to bring back to the table, i.e., to rediscover as it was done with Mendel and Vygotsky, those ideas of Mallmann in that period in which I researched some of his papers (1972-1986) on Human Development, Wellbeing, Quality of Life, Social Development, Social Justice, Happiness (personal and social) and Libido Economy. These ideas may be the basis of that new paradigm that is trying to emerge in the face of the contradictions, paradoxes and personal, social and environmental crises of the present paradigm in which we live. After an exhaustive reading of all these papers that I did not know about and comparing them with the last ten years in which I have immersed myself like an anthropologist in the global ideas on sustainability and Wellbeing, I have been left with a feeling of "Déjà vu". The ideas about the importance of sustainability, wellbeing, the change of indicators (beyond GDP), relevant material degrowth in Western countries, direct democracy and the construction of a new, fairer and healthier paradigm had already been systematically taken up by Mallmann and the group of scientists of the Bariloche Foundation. As we will also see later, the 40 years of neoliberalism that emerged in the 1980s through Thatcher and Reagan obscured these ideas. The Overton window of acceptable ideas moved towards a certain neoliberalism that we still live in today and most people accept it as a matter of course.

As George Box said, models are approximations (the map is not the territory) and Mallmann's vision and model that I am going to try to describe, contextualise and evaluate is also an approximation with its lights and possible shadows, but it can be useful for those who are new to these issues (not reinventing the wheel) and for those more experts who in my opinion will connect some loose ends and perhaps say Eureka! to this perspective based on human needs. Personally, as I will propose in the epilogue of this article, this new and more nuanced re-encounter with Mallmann's model will make me stand on his shoulders to continue with his philosophy of human needs. His idea and approach to the Libido Economy* (Economía lúdica*) seem to me sexy, playful and lovingly desirable for the next 50 years and more. Today, his ideas would fall under the umbrella of what we call the "Wellbeing Economy".

*[The translations of that 1973 paper that I have read interchangeably in English and Spanish surprisingly start from different linguistic roots 'Lúdica' (from Latin ludus: to play) is interchangeably translated as 'Libido' (from Latin: lust, desire and from Indo-European language leubh (love)]

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MALLMANN & Science with a conscience

“For the secret of human existence lies not only in living, but in knowing what to live for.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is very difficult for me to separate Mallman's works (even if they are signed by him) from the synergy with which they are written thanks to all those scientists with whom he lived. In many of his writings, there are acknowledgements of the discussions he had with them to create those papers. On the other hand, I have analysed about fifteen papers and drafts between 1972 and 1986 in which he dealt with an ecosystem of human, social and habitational issues with so many nuances that it is very difficult for me to summarise without going into simplifications and even adding my projections. Mallmann's systems thinking was full of ramifications, elaborations, diversity, transdisciplinarity, convolutions...

In the above-mentioned 1972 document, a working paper of the “Bienestar” (Wellbeing) group of the Bariloche Foundation, written by Mallmann which was to be the basis for the paper he presented in 1973, one can see the transparency and conscious philosophy of this group of scientists.

And its objective as indicated in 1973 was:

To quote John Galtung they saw the world as:

a)???a collection of individuals with different qualities (residence, origin, race, health, activity, sex, age) who carry out activities alone or in groups, forming governmental, productive, home, creative, critical, etc., organizations (families, institutions, nations, associations, etc.) in order to satisfy their aspirations.

b)???a set of relationships between individuals and collectivities and between them and nature - animals, plants, matter -. The former determines the social habitat and the latter the physical habitat.

As we can see, he was a triadic thinker and played with the relationships of the individual-society-habitat triad, where habitat included society and society included individuals. In that same 1973 document that gave rise to the needs chart in this article, he transparently set out this important framework and the big picture of processes in which to place those nine needs.

I will spend some time explaining some of these elements because by doing so we will grasp the rather simplified "reality" of this framework and subsequently understand why "needs", properly framed in this framework of processes, are the key element for a libido economy and how the other eight types of complementary economies he proposed fit into the framework. Subsequently, the nuances of needs, that proposal of 9 fundamental human needs, will be key to all the work that Mallmann continued (and I will continue) in his attempt to move towards a socially just and ecological theory of Wellbeing. Mallmann considered that it would take no less than 50 or 100 years to obtain it and would require interdisciplinary teams.

Taking into account the above-proposed objective on humanity or its subgroups, Mallmann distinguishes between the different elements of the processes (corner of the graph), structure and performance of a given group:

Structure: Changes slowly and last a long time.

Performance: Changes rapidly and may last a short time.

Next, we go to the first line of the input graph, Needs and Nature, which Mallmann explains accurately with this paragraph that I am going to frame as it gives us a holistic view of the human species as nature and integrated into what we normally consider nature.?

Then, he adds "All the other elements of the processes are the result of human activities".

Therefore, Needs (which are "human" nature) together with the larger Nature itself are the primary inputs and he will call the satisfactions (or frustrations) produced by each person the "final product". This 50 years later may sound very similar to the idea of Doughnut Economics, i.e. “meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet.”

The first big difference between "Needs" and "Aspirations" is that the former is a small and invariant list (he considered that minimum of 9 needs within the intrinsic physiological and psychological characteristics of the human being). On the other hand, aspirations are variants because they are determined by the present and prior perfomance and structure of the social group (aggregation of the psychic state of its members) . They are what motivate activities (time) and they can be a big list. Therefore, it is already considered an intermediate product.

Finally, from the second column (organisational) to the third (Nature) we find the multitude of activities or "tasks" that we humans carry out with our time through different organisations according to the social group taken into account (family, institutions, nations...) and with their corresponding impact on Nature. Some of the manufactured products are consumed in activities that give us the consequent satisfactions or dissatisfactions if we so judge. Other manufactured products are combined for use in activities and further transformed into a manufactured environment. As there are other groups than the one studied, some of these manufactured products are exchanged. Finally, there are wastes generated during activities that can be considered as some type of manufactured products that accumulate (pollution) or are processed by nature or humans. For example, knowledge is a manufactured product that humans process into new activities, one could say that we stand on the shoulders of giants to see further.

Returning to the first column, the feedback on the process is given here through the modification of the aspirations resulting from the degree of satisfaction or frustration obtained. As these are psychic states, they are personal elements (individual structure).

As has been explained in a simplified way, this framework of processes is what develops in any human group and the needs (expressed through desires or aspirations) are the motivations that move a large number of activities with repercussions in Nature and other human groups. That nature, as we will see later, has its limits and it is at that frontier where a set of infinite aspirations collide with the spaceship "Earth" itself. Gandhi mentioned it before in one of his famous quotes.

A possible and complementary response to the physical limits of the planet (outer) is to focus on the social limits (inner) that keep feeding back as we can see through the behavioural dynamics of keeping up with the Joneses... and then with the Kardashians, the Bezos and so on.

Libido Economy: Human needs as the key element

We have seen with the previous graph the functioning of the human activities of a group linked to the needs of its individuals and their repercussions on Nature and other groups. Before going into the definition of the libido economy, let us look at the nine-economy ecosystem proposed by Mallmann in 1973.

For Mallmann the above processes starting with primary inputs (Nature or from our dualistic perspective Human Nature vs external Nature) could be classified into 5 types: generation, maintenance, distribution, exchange and use of:

1 Population

2 Safety

3 Physical Environment

4 Goods and services

5 Recreation

6 Knowledge

7 Personal relations

8 Impersonal relations

9 Satisfactions

And from these nine categories with which Mallmann simplifies the five types of processes we arrive at what he calls the nine sciences (or economies) that study them from a performance and structure point of view.

And here comes Mallmann's Copernican point about why to focus on the libido economy.

And taking the definition of libido economics as

"The study of the needs, values and aspirations of human beings; the time they devote to various activities; and the resulting satisfactions and frustrations.”

We can observe 6 key elements: needs, aspirations (wishes), values, time, activities (most of them having repercussions on Nature) and the result (a greater or lesser degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction).

Seen 50 years later, from this 2023 and with the term "poly-crisis" or "meta-crisis", we can see how these 6 elements appear in the roots of this new construct. That is to say, and from my perspective as an anthropologist, I observe a great dissatisfaction of people (biopsychosociocultural part) evidenced in the increase of physical and mental illnesses with their consequent taking of anxiolytics or immersing themselves in activities (pseudo-satisfactory) to calm that discomfort, an increase of polarisations, clashes between different groups and the consequent cultural wars, etc. A diagnosis that indicates that these human needs are not being satisfied globally or are being partially satisfied but at a great cost in terms of time used (e.g. bullshit jobs) by the population and activities that in the short and medium term are beginning to damage us as a society (local and global). On Nature's side (biophysical side) we observe how these Nine Planetary Boundaries proposed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre are being exceeded or how each year the Earth Overshoot Day (EOD) reaches us sooner. In other words, to achieve a minimum of satisfaction we are using, as the Spanish expression says “Matar moscas a ca?onazos” (Killing flies with cannons), an enormous amount of energy, resources and time. We have to look into that “black box” of human nature where we have those two intermediate elements, aspirations and values, which lead me to these questions:

What do we aspire to? Why do we aspire to what we aspire to? What are the values that are behind our motivations and aspirations? How could we assemble those aspirations to fairly satisfy our needs without harming Nature so much?

Despite not being a psychologist, sociologist or anthropologist, Mallmann tried to answer similar questions and to go towards a "Wellbeing theory" by holistically analysing the human being and society from an "internal" perspective.?As Archimedes said:?

Mallmann found that lever in the "needs" and their internal ecosystem. I also came to a similar conclusion through my FMT in which I ended by saying that the approach to solving "this poly-crisis", mainly of our western society, should be mainly internal, focusing on global ethics and responsible wellbeing which were the internal quadrants of my framework. We can see examples of this change of focus in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, which in the face of our Western malaise brought from the East methods, ideas that focused on the internal part. There has also been a revival of methods and ideas from more Western philosophies such as Stoicism, and Aristotelianism... Recently, in the face of the 2030 development goals (mostly external), the Inner Development Goals (IDG) movement has arisen. In front of the visible and cold data, we have the invisible and internal relationships that Nora Bateson calls Warm Data. The U-theory proposed by Otto Scharmer and the focus on virtues (Positive Psychology, Jubilee Centre…) are further examples of an approach that starts with the internal, the invisible. One of St Exupery's best-known quotes foreshadowed this.

Thus, we are beginning to see holistically. The external and the internal are one.

When I analyse Mallmann's writings (and he has many more that I have not been able to access) I realise that he was a man with a conscious, holistic and essential way of thinking (that goes to the being). Moreover, he surrounded himself with people whom he influenced and allowed himself to be influenced to continue motivating himself and aspiring to leave a better world.

In this central part of the article, I have left three of the ideas (with three graphs, needs, processes and economies) that I find most important to continue towards his theory of wellbeing. As I indicated in the introduction, it is very difficult to summarise Mallmann in an article that is not too long, as his holistic view tried to detect all the important details (and they all are).

To continue with the article, I will present Mallmann's vision in a little more detail on that "black box" between needs and satisfactions (key in the libido economy) to move on to the other major project that emerged under his leadership, the response from the South to the "Limits to growth" and finally a set of more practical ideas that Mallmann suggested during that period (1972-1986) that he mostly devoted to the topic of needs, wellbeing, development and quality of life.

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Human nature: needs, aspirations and satisfactions in an infinite cycle

Mallmann had the habit of specifying with definitions what he was going to deal with to narrow down the perception or the narrative of the subject. We all know that words can evoke different things, as Alfred Korzybski said with his aphorism, "The name is not the thing", and Mallmann focused on framing it so that we don't get lost. Here are some of his definitions:

Two important characteristics of human needs that Mallmann pointed out were that they are “insatiable” and “relative”.

Insatiable: This is based on the observation that when human beings succeed in satisfying some of their needs, they replace them with others and struggle to satisfy them, and when they succeed, they begin a similar process and continue in this way until infinity (or death).

Relative: Above certain absolute minimum vital values, needs are relative or comparative, consequently satisfaction, in the same way as perception, is always relative to a point of observation - the individual - and to reference groups - the collectivities she/he knows. The absolute minimum vital values are, of course, those necessary for an individual to have the physical and mental vigour to be able to perceive differences concerning reference groups.

And from this arises a new and important term that did not exist in Spanish, “bienlograr” (well-achieve). Mallmann said that its opposite, “malograr” (poorly achieve), did exist. Therefore, from this "relative" perspective, individuals are always dynamically well achieving (sometimes going beyond social and cultural limits or going against certain natural limits).

An example that can bring together all this complexity of both definitions and characteristics of needs was Mallmann's example of the type of food as a satisfier of hunger, which I complement by elaborating a more nuanced paragraph to broaden the nuances of needs.

First of all, a need arises in a person, to be hungry (maintenance) and from there arises the desire to eat and for this, the satisfiers that are around the context of the person who has that need are used (he will get sick if he or she does not satisfy it). For example, if you live in Argentina, as Mallmann did, there is a culture where beef, which is very abundant, is a way of satiating it, that is to say, it is one of many ways of satisfying that hunger. In that country and due to its vast grassy plains, in the past cows were raised and a diverse industry was created where many people started to work (spending time). At that time, a culture began to develop that had meat as its identity base. It is well known that on Sundays and holidays, there are many barbecues (“asados”, “parrillas”) with meat in Argentina. That person in that context has many possibilities to satisfy his or her need, wanting to eat meat instead of another type of satisfying food such as cereals. Meat is appreciated and valued. If we go to India we can observe the opposite, the value of beef is minuscule. Because of their cultural context, they do not eat beef. Therefore, if a person is hungry, to satisfy that need for maintenance, he or she will opt for other types of satisfiers maybe rice, maybe vegetables, fruit... Both people (From Argentina or India) after a certain time will be hungry again (characteristic of insatiability) and will start again the cycle of need – the satisfaction of that specific need.

If we extend the complexity, a person could have two needs at the same time (maintenance and affection). One is hungry (and seeks a satisfier in food) and one craves affection for some emotional reason (and may want to hug his mother to satisfy that need). In that personal context, one may well assess which of the two is more important. One can wait to eat after hugging one's mother, or one can eat first and then go and hug her (babies synergistically do it at the same time when they suckle). If we extrapolate this to the nine needs, we observe collectively in Maslow's way a hierarchical importance of these needs, but individually and for personal, contextual or even pathological reasons, one can skip this hierarchy, i.e. one can satisfy one's need for meaning before, for example, one's need for maintenance or affection. Take for example people who put a bomb on their body and explode it near the "enemy" to satisfy their need for meaning even if it goes against the important earthly need for maintenance. Or the case of the passengers on the plane that crashed in the Andes in the 70s, where the issue of eating came up and possibly some of them wanted to satisfy their need for meaning before eating their companions. Finally, and as a curiosity, Mallmann's son, Francis Mallmann, much better known internationally than his father, is an international chef who probably became famous for his grilled Argentinean meat. While writing this article, I came across an interview in Spanish where he talks about the secrets behind his first meat-free cookbook, "Fire Green: Extraordinary ways to grill fruits and vegetables, from the Master of live-fire cooking" (2022), This book was translated into several languages. In that interview, he commented on the desire that some of his readers had to make some of his recipes but that they had meat in them and they were vegetarians. I don't know how far this U-turn in his career as a chef goes, especially from meat to vegetables, but looking at the table of needs that his father designed in 1973 and with the context of the interview I can intuit that he has synergistically used many of the needs on the list: the needs of maintenance and participation of those who asked him for different recipes, the need for the love of Nature and food (Francis tells in that interview about his life as a teenager in the beautiful enclave of Bariloche where he grew a vegetable garden at the back of the house where he lived with his parents); the creative need to innovate in his speciality or the need to give meaning, understanding to the protection of the planet by giving visibility to a vegan diet. This would be a proposal that George Monbiot, with his latest book, "Regenesis: feeding the world without devouring the Planet”, would fully endorse.

These nine needs, which Mallmann selected, could in turn be divided into extra-human (or access) and intra-human (being) needs. The former was mostly satisfied by Nature (goods and services), the latter mostly from human relationships. For example, the needs for “maintenance” and “protection” usually use more goods and services than the needs for “love and “participation”. This is probably the main reason why GDP, as Robert Kennedy famously told us in his 1968 speech, measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.

If you have read anything by Erich Fromm that classification may sound similar to his book "To have and to be" and no wonder because Mallman confessed that it was one of his major influences (the shoulder of the giant he climbed on) as we will later see from Mallman's use of healthy or unhealthy society or with the dilemma of love and alienation. Malmman also read Maslow’s books whom he quoted in his writings. The question may arise, why these needs and why nine?

Mallman answered that it was only a proposal, a first proposal that would continue to evolve but what was clear to him was that needs were few and wants and satisfiers could be infinite (perhaps as much as the imagination can create). He arrived at that set of nine needs as the minimum set of needs different from each other covering the spectrum of human activities.

The next section in this article is about Mallmann as the leader of the Bariloche Foundation who presented the answer to the limits of growth proposed by the North. This proposal started from Argentina could be extrapolated to the Global South. Perhaps that meeting of the Bariloche Foundation in Brazil with the MIT group in 1970 before they published the book on the limits to growth in 1972 brought to the surface all this research on “wellbeing” and “needs” to respond to the limits to growth.

A place in the world: The Latin American World Model (LWM). Bariloche Model

"I would like you to tell me how to know one's place. I don't have it at the moment. I suppose I'll realise it when I'm in a place and I can't leave. I guess that's how it is. It's going to show up. I still have time to find it." (From the movie: A place in the World (1992)

In the successful Argentinian film "A Place in the World" (Top 100 Greatest Films of Argentine Cinema), the main character says the above quotation. This is a quote that reminds me of 50 years ago when the report on the limits of growth appeared and later the response from the South through the Bariloche Foundation. We cannot leave this planet, not because we are really satisfied, on the contrary, we are dissatisfied but the most important thing it is impossible for 8 billion people to leave it (There is no planet B). Moreover, the time to find a solution has been greatly reduced. Fifty years ago, we had plenty of time before the warnings of the limits to growth, but different circumstances, among them the influence of the neoliberal governments of Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s, made the Overton window move in the wrong direction.

Mallmann's dream of a place in the world began in the 1960s when he dreamed of creating a small university centre in a beautiful place, Bariloche. It would bring together the exact sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, i.e., Interdisciplinarity. In the presentation of the brochure, a quote from the book "The University of Utopia" by educational philosopher Robert Hutchins was mentioned. Hutchins used to say that the object of the educational system was not to produce hands for the industry or to teach the young how to make a living but to produce responsible citizens.

This dream was not fully realised because of a factor that we humans, in our desire for control and certainty, forget to take into account: chance. This failed project could have been indirectly channelled later through the Bariloche Foundation as an intellectual centre or think tank which, as we shall see, exerted a strong influence at the world level until, once again, chance, the 1976 dictatorship left it badly wounded.?

Carlos A. Mallmann, a physicist-mathematician, was the first president of the board of the Fundación Bariloche in Argentina, which was founded in 1963. This organisation became famous in the 1970s for its Latin American World Model (LWM) or Bariloche model which was the alternative to the MIT model, the World3 model whose data were used to write the book "The Limits to Growth" (1972). This book has greatly shaped the environmental and political agenda to this day. New versions of that book have been written 20, 30 and 40 years later. Similarly, revisions of the Latin American World Model have been written 30 and 40 years later, appealing to the validity of that model.

Therefore, what were the main differences between the two models? Which was the path that was proposed from the South and which became the less travelled one? As both models were based on mathematics, on the technical, which adds complexity for those who do not understand, I will focus on giving a brief outline of the philosophy behind LWM and thus give it a voice so that it can at least be heard. Similar to Edgar Morin's proposal in his book Science with Conscience, the authors of LWM started from an ethical-political stance. Thus, Scolnik, one of its authors, pointed out how mathematical techniques can and should be used as tools for policy design. In other words, science is not aseptic, and once this has been assimilated, it is necessary to make the whys and wherefores of a choice, transparent and conscious. If possible, give a moral sense to what is being done.

Gallopin, another of the authors of the LWM, clarified in 2016 (40 years later), together with other authors, the differences between the models and the consciousness of that project. This took place at a conference at the Universidad Nacional Litoral (UNL) in Argentina under the question "What kind of world do we want?”

In an interesting investigation of the relevance of the LWM four decades later, they pointed to four fundamental assumptions that they considered to be the minimum desirable and achievable, given the capacities that existed in the 1970s.

At the same conference in 2016, it was stated that the LWM emerged as a critique of the capitalist and socialist models as they had evolved and its proposal was the foundations of a desirable society where basic human needs for the entire population would be met in the foreseeable future, possibly around 2060. Gallopin stated:

"In this proposal, participation was central, both as an end in itself and as a mechanism for establishing the legitimacy of needs in the new society. Thus, the proposal was more socialist than capitalist, although the central emphasis on democratic participation differentiated our proposal from the then-existing socialist countries. Today, it would be 'post-capitalist'".

That which, according to Gallopin, could have been achieved in little more than a generation, was not realised because of the path or agenda taken at the global level. However, sadly, although it was not achieved, its central message remains:

"There is at least a viable path to a sustainable and desirable future, but it requires fundamental institutional changes and a transformation of the prevailing value system. Business-as-usual strategies will lead to unnecessary and widespread human suffering and environmental unsustainability".

An interesting connection and curiosity between the two models were that the Club of Rome was behind the financing of the presentation of LWM in Vienna in 1974 to a large community of illustrious people including the later Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus. He made a research memorandum of the meeting where he mentioned this:

Also in the 1979 report of the Club of Rome “No limits to learning”, Malmann appeared as one of the rapporteurs of a work chaired by Ervin Laszlo. That was the first Report to the Club of Rome written by authors from socialist and Third World countries as well as from the West. There, Mallmann left us these pearls on education and global issues:

As I said before, chance intervened and a new dictatorship in Argentina (1976) almost mortally wounded the Fundación Bariloche both economically and politically, and many of the scientists who were there left the place.?Mallmann left the executive presidency of the Fundación Bariloche around 1985. In the 1980s, with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA, economic and development issues took on a more neoliberal shade and those progressive ideas about development became more peripheral than they had been.?However, Mallmann who worked as Programme Director of United Nations University in Tokyo (1973-1985) probably participated in meetings with the United Nations so that the concept of Unmet Basic Needs (UBN) was adopted as the main criterion for assessing human development and it is also possible that in these debates, he left his mark by highlighting the life expectancy index as a very important index for human development. As he used to emphasise, GDP (a more economistic index) should not be the king of development indicators.

Human needs & Wellbeing Economy

As Bernard of Chartres said, we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants. The alternative economist Manfred Max-Neef followed the road less travelled and left the easy road to take the arduous path of making this world a better world. After the coup d'état in Chile (September 1973) where he was working, he went into exile and, at some point arrived in Bariloche where the Foundation led by Mallmann was one of the shoulders he stood on to create the barefoot economics. The only paper I have found where the names of Mallmann and Max-Neef appear together was "Human Synergy as the ethical and esthetical foundation of Development" (1978) in which R. A. Aguirre also participated since they formed a group associated with the Bariloche Foundation called "Synergy development group". A beautiful paper with a musical composition structure (allegro, andante, allegretto, scherzo) which perhaps evoked Mallmann's dream of the artistic subjects of the University of Utopia. Apart from Erich Fromm, Mallmann was inspired by Mahler, which is why the Bariloche Foundation had among its departments a music department with a group called the Bariloche Camerata that toured many countries. That is to say, Mallmann's holistic view influenced the Bariloche Foundation to dedicate itself not only to the exact and social sciences but also to Art, aligned with the triad of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

In this table, we can see how Mallmann's proposals compare with those of Max Neef.

In my research on where Mallmann's nine needs could have come from, I have come to see support in Maslow's needs and Fromm's needs (Fromm also had a list of 8 needs). On the other hand, the nine needs chosen by Max-Neef can be seen to stand on the shoulders of Mallmann's needs. For Max-Neef Leopold Kohr and the Bariloche Foundation led by Mallmann were his great inspirations. An interesting contribution of Max-Neef was the creation of five types of satisfiers and his manifesto for a new economy based on five postulates and one fundamental value principle.

We live in a world of interdependencies where we rely on each other. Almost five years ago I came across the game "Less is Max", which I announced in an article as probably the best educational game in the world for the wellbeing of society and the planet. The authors of the game were inspired by Max-Neef’s ideas.?

Years before, at the end of 2012, in my first stage in the UK, I met Inez Aponte who also relied on Max-Neef and whom I consider one of her greatest experts. In my next article, complementary to this one, I will stand on her shoulders to indicate possible ways to, as I usually say, cushion this civilisational collapse and walk on healthier paths.

Before moving on to a short chapter on Mallmann's work after 1986 and the epilogue, I will leave links to three documents and a selection of Mallmann's quotes that have exerted on me a kind of deja vu on what I had researched on Wellbeing and Sustainability from a more Northern point of view. Although North and South, like the similarity of Yin and Yang, seem to be integrated into a complementarity where one of them stands out over the other, that is to say, exerts a more central vision than the peripheral one of the other. In my opinion, I would say that our present western view on global issues is more yang and there is quite an imbalance, so we should turn towards a more yin view which I feel can be in this view of the South and the indigenous peoples.

These three documents available online (in English) can be very useful for those who want to investigate Mallmann first-hand. I would frame them as the 3 L's (LIFE; LOVE; LATIN AMERICA)

The first one (LIFE) I discovered 5 years ago, lost in UNESCO's digital library, was also for me Mallman's first complete document I read. It is also in my opinion one of his best papers.?In it, you can find the bases and foundations of his first documents 1972/73 that I have tried to show here, his past, but it also has the seeds for that dream of a better future world, a kind of human constitution with its rights and responsibilities. My advice is to "download" it here “Research priorities and holistic knowledge” (English, French, Spanish), and "print" it. Yes, I say print it (spending natural resources) because it is not an expense, it is an investment that if you go deeper in its reading will not only give future benefits for the natural environment but for society and oneself. Personally, every time I read it again, I find details and insights that nourish you to go towards a good life.

It is worth highlighting:

“The following table gives a list of living needs satisfaction problems arrived at from a worldwide perspective and described in a very aggregated way. The problem mentioned in it should certainly have the highest priority in the Research and Human Needs program.”

He adds that of those five, “Only one is practically universal and affects all of the world population: the authoritarian, women-discriminating, male-females love relations. This problem has, as a consequence, the advantage of giving a common motivation to less-developed and developed countries, with is one of the necessary conditions for the implementation of a solution.”

The second one (LOVE), is a lovely, utopian text of society in 2100 "Moving towards Sinergy" (1977) which is worth reading (and printing) because, in my opinion, it is a manifesto to live a good Life (4 pages downloadable here). In it, he emphasises the two events that have moved from a society centred on the paradigm of alienation to a society centred on the paradigm of Love. The two events that changed this perspective were the inner revolution where humanity at large is gaining knowledge of itself and everyone is engaged in self-interrogation becoming more conscious and the women's revolution, something that he thought would be over by 2070 and which at that time 2100 from where he writes it seems so obvious that no one thought that such a thing could happen before. The article ends with two proposals, to always keep that inner reflection of each one, even if it brings certain afflictions and his proposal of happiness that deserves to be framed.

Finally, the third one (LATIN AMERICA), a paper that is not written by Mallman but by several researchers (Ana Grondona, Mara Glozman, Victoria Haidar, Paula Lucía Aguilar, Pablo Pryluka and Pilar Fiuza). It takes us back to those more social and ecological ideas of the development of the 1970s, exercised from the South through the Bariloche Foundation and Mallmann, as opposed to the more economistic developments that were later taken to greater extremes with the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. This may remind us of those voices from the South, in this case, the Latin American philosophies of buenvivir, which in the last decade have tried to come out of the periphery to draw attention to proposals from the North. You can download it here: “Towards a genealogy of ‘Good Living’. Contribution from materialist discourse analysis”

It is also worth noting from this paper:

And this:

Looking at the research that Mallmann carried out in the 1970s on human needs in the context of libido economy, quality of life, human development, and seeing it from 2023, it can be said that he was ahead of his time. Today he could be framed in what we call the Wellbeing economy according to the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEALL).

I would add that if 50 years ago the limits to growth were a major milestone for sustainability research, then the work of Bariloche Foundation and Mallmann's search for a theory of Wellbeing are a foundational milestone towards the Wellbeing Economy.

Mallmann had great ideas for changing the present paradigm and turning towards that new paradigm which, among other names, could be the "Wellbeing Economy". Although he humbly said that everything he wrote had already been said, his intention in repeating these concepts was that they should be implemented, emphasising the obstacles to be overcome in order to solve the problems.

A wonderful piece of writing he left in one of the chapters of the book (in Spanish) "Visiones de sociedades deseables" (1979) (“Visions of desirable societies”) edited by Masini, Barbieri and Galtung (you can read it here) writes about alternative societies oriented towards the satisfaction of needs. I think it is a text that deserves a summary (in English) to offer some of those practical suggestions (perhaps for a wellbeing economy) that he detailed there.

Firstly, and again with humility, he apologises for what we would today call WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) people and although he lived in the South, he had studied partly in the North. Moreover, we would add that he was a man (and perhaps that is why he could easily have had such a great research career in the 1960s). I think he was very conscious of the position of women as mentioned above, and even this chapter begins with inclusive language which may seem surprising if it is written in 1979 "...to disseminate 'alternative visions of desirable societies' for the development of men and women."

The metaphor he employs is that of health:

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"DIAGNOSIS AND HEALING”

He said that: “the diagnosis of our disease immediately points to a general statement about the social or inter-human strategy we must follow to cure the disease:

We must eradicate the inequalities of existing and, in doing so, we will also eradicate the inequalities of having".

Then, he continues with medication and focuses on identifying the processes that reproduce cultural characteristics from generation to generation, and consequently perpetuate them over time if there is no break. These processes occur with the socialisation, psychologisation and environmentalisation of children. The main key, Mallmann points out, is to focus on children because they are the new and unacculturated people of each generation and because of the psychological fact that character traits acquired during youth are more difficult and painful to change later on.

For Mallmann,

"Good societies are those in which their members satisfy their needs in a synergistic way with themselves, have a synergistic relationship with society and have a synergistic relationship with the environment".

Finally, the proposals for action proposed by Mallmann must be presented for a specific socio-cultural framework. In his case, and by way of example, since he lived in Argentina, he proposed for that specific society and in that context of time, among other measures:

(These ideas will be detailed in a few posts on Linkedin in the near future).

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Advanced studies: studies of the future or when the desirable comes to the present and meets the path of the past

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A review of Mallmann's professional career around 2002, shortly before he retired, showed us this photograph of the road he had travelled.

Carlos A. Mallmann. Centre for Advanced Studies of the University of Buenos Aires. Argentinian. He has carried out research in Low Energy Nuclear Physics, 1951-1966; Science and Technology Policy, 1966-1972; Human Development, Quality of Life, Social Development, Long-Term Societal Dynamics and Future Scenarios, 1972- 2002. He has taught, researched and directed at the University of Buenos Aires, the Atomic Energy Commission and Balseiro Institute of Physics, Argentina; the USA Atomic Energy Commission; Bariloche Foundation; and United Nations University. In the 90s he participated in the founding of Green Cross Argentina, associated with Green Cross International, in which he held the position of President of the Board of Directors.

We have already referred to his studies on human development, quality of life, social development and his cooperation in the Latin American world model. From his initial training as a physicist-mathematician, we can see how he started his professional career focusing on physics issues until he took a path towards human development and quality of life issues. As a physicist the variable "Time" revolved in his head: Time for the "activities" that give us "satisfaction"; the 8760 hours per year he had in mind for his annual cycles; in the early 80s Mallmann was inspired by the Development theories of psychological development psychologist Erik Erikson to mix his own Need's Framework with Erikson's (probably for a future article); and finally, his broader look at the time not only personal but also historical and societal where he tried somehow to find patterns.

In this last part of his career, he used intensively the mathematical part to try to find a cyclic model. This was one of his most complex works. Together with Lemarchand developed a mathematically formalised model that could explain the origins of the self-organising phenomena that somehow generate temporal patterns in societies. Within each cycle they found four phases which they identified as:

When asked whether this model was deterministic concerning societal evolution, the authors argued that yes and no:

“Yes, in terms of the predictability of the sequence of societies’ economic and political motivational concerns. No, in terms of the answers to those motivational concerns because they will be determined by the struggle between the social actors of one society and their interaction with other societies’ social actors. They are not predetermined.”

EPILOGUE

As I mentioned in the introduction, the support on Mallmann's shoulders was essential for the creation of a holistic human sustainability model that I developed during my Master in Sustainability in Spain. For semantic or linguistic reasons, I have chosen to change the human capacity of "Perfection" to "Consciousness", maintaining the needs of transcendence and maturity as elements to reach it. Although I called it the Normative model, in recent years I have renamed it MAMA, (Mallmann, Martin) as a tribute to the influence that the 9 needs have on the "invisible" part of those 16 quadrants. Likewise, following a less travelled path, I have been able to construct a network with 10 nodes or elements that in one way or another, depending on whether or not they are based on a holistic ethical or moral perspective and following Mallmann's nine needs, can lead us to a desirable society (Good life) or a sick society (Poorly Life).

In my next article on possible ways forward in the next 50 years, I will explain, what for me are the 16 most important elements to move towards a new paradigm of Wellbeing (personal, social, planetary). It will be headed by the following quote from Ostrom.

?"Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we're helping one another in ways that really help the Earth". Elinor Ostrom

It will be an article that looks to the future and will complement this one that looks more into the past. As André Malraux said "The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be", taking Mallmann's thinking, one could say that the 21st century will be feminine or it will not be. If this article, which starts 50 years ago and in which these four male figures and their writings seem to fit into these four keyframes,

the following article on the next 50 years will have a more feminine influence. I will rely on the present ideas of Vandana Shiva, Inez Aponte, Kate Raworth, Anna Coote, Nora Bateson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Janine Benyus, Martha Nussbaum… to guide us through the next 50 years.

This new comprehensive review of Mallmann’s life and Work (he died in 2020) has led me to discover new giants such as his companions in the Latin American World Model and the inclusive vision of it prioritising the basic human needs of the global population. The road less travelled is often hard, but if it is morally chosen it is very meaningful. A science with a conscience, reflective of the steps being taken, is a global human need. One such place where science is done with a conscience is Schumacher College (a kind of the University of Utopia) in the UK, a place where Max-Neef was lecturing on his new economy. But perhaps Daniel Wahl in a magnificent article he wrote in Spanish entitled "Ciencia con Conciencia. Schumacher College, education for the 21st century" gave us a first-hand account of the holistic experiences that take place there and he said:

"What we need are sciences with conscience, which focus on appropriate participation in the processes of life and do not follow the outdated goal of the 19th-century sciences, which was to establish humanity as master of nature through prediction and control".

Twitter:?@ResWellbeing?@BienestarRespon

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The first, second and third part of the complementary article to the previous one are now available.

Next 50 years (Back to the Basics): Science with Conscience for a Planetary Wellbeing Society

1) A proposal for walking: The energy that moves the world

2) Of maps and adventures towards sustainability and wellbeing: Building a transition in 4 dimensions

3) Everything everywhere all at once and the feminine multiverse of the good direction: Conscious, vital, responsible and solidarity paths.

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MALLMANN'S REFERENCES