After BAC 2001==>Unity through Diversity (1)

Dear colleague,

An International Conference on Systems Thinking Globally Concerned BAC 2001
occurred November 1-4, 2001 in Technische Universit�t Wien, Vienna, Austria
as a culmination of actions carried out in order to celebrate the 100th
Anniversary of Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy's Birthday,

You have participated in this event or expressed some weeks ago your
interest to attend it or at least you heard that it would happen

After few days of unavoidably being motivated to reflect upon some
controversial aspects that emerged (though not always explicitly enough)
during the manifestation of this conference, it seems convenient to examine
what was finally accomplished. But it is not an easy task due to
multifarious assumptions, interpretations and even criticisms that were
only partially expressed.

Before unilaterally trying to identify what inevitably would be a biased
judgement it seems better and even necessary to recapitulate what were the
original intentions which, one way or another, generated interest to
participate in order to debate the merits and failures in Bertalanffy's
work, and also to explore a few other advances of systems thinking derived
from his heritage or independently.

The Conference was on one side the culmination of exchanges of views about
seven main subjects, that were assumed could be considered some of the main
Bertalanffy's concerns, which due to various causes have become very
urgent questions to deal with - at the dawn of one 3rd millennium.

The main original intention was to recognize once again that Bertalanffy,
more than three decades ago, identified some sources of the causality that
has generated numerous and always larger problems which altogether, in the
year 2001, are clearly recognized as the worst crisis ever faced by
humankind. Today, it is already urgently indispensable to create, in our
magnificent but also incongruous homosphere, radically new cultural
circumstances and social conditions for helping all humans, one way or
another but humanely, to create in every society a New Image of Man and
Woman that may propitiate the gradual integration of a very new HUMANELY
minded Anthropology. This new conception of man is necessary because most
humans are increasingly facing the danger of being decerebralized through
all kinds of technologies invented in order to convert masses of people
into happy automatons that will 'behave' in the ways prescribed by the
industrial-military-political establishment as f it were the scientific
culmination of many different kinds of empiric actions, carried out during
the last civilizing millennia, in order to use the common people as slaves,
serfs, servants, lackeys, workers, soldiers,... human resources for
building one civilization after another that had unexpectedly collapsed.

This New IMAGE is needed for encouraging everywhere the emergence of humans
learning to individually develop their personalities - in accordance with
ethical, ethological, biological and ecological criteria - for building a
WAY FORWARD for humankind towards the Creation of a Sustainable Society.
From now onward, this is the main challenge for humans who voluntarily
accept to play a responsible role on the Earth, willing to learn to be
conscious enough of the terrestrial possibilities that make possible to
design, implement and maintain human purposes, and to be sufficiently aware
not only of the fact that these possibilities are not granted forever, but
firstly for recognizing the growing tragedy that is causing the impact of
civilizing actions on the Ecosphere, where it is located the Biosphere that
until today, but certainly not tomorrow, has supported the anarchistic
aggrandizement and nonsensical expansion of one homosphere where billions
of human resources are employed for sustaining a civilized way of life that
has become, during the 20th century, frankly unsustainable, due mainly to
the growing number of people living in miserable conditions.

The possible collapse of the whole civilization will unavoidably become
soon a real perspective, unless humans reverse the trends of the prevailing
civilization through a very new Entrepreneurship Spirit that may emerge
from Business based on Bertalanffy's General Systems Weltanschauung;
complemented by public services engaged in rebuilding a new homosphere
where decision makers and common people must cooperatively and effectively
contribute to deal with the global problems: unemployment, emigration,
misery, hunger, starvation, drug-addiction, modern slavery, sexual abuse of
children and women, transplantation of organs of people that were condemned
to death... which altogether are the causes of a very quick disruption of
civilizing requirements. and degeneration of the dynamical features of
intended civilizing processes.

The crisis that humankind faces at present, which is de facto the extreme
degradation of the human conditions engendered by the colonization that
started 500 centuries ago has been very seriously aggravated in this year
2001 by the reaction of some gentlemen (comprised ladies and dames who keep
supporting the men's performances) that have decided to use the
super-modernized warfare in order to eliminate all the terrorists who
presumably have made up their mind in order to re-create the conditions for
a ritual purification of patriarchal societies. The warfare that has
determined the sanguinary course of the whole civilization from its very
beginnings continues being the stimuli that increases the depravity of
modern strategists searching how to develop new and more effective
chemical, biological, nuclear,... weapons for destroying the enemies of the
human society, but these enemies are already inside the human society.
Peace Research as a particular application of general systems thinking is
the option that may widen the views of responsible scholars in their search
to comprehend the dynamics of conflicts, aggresiveness and eventually wars
in order to cooperatively cope with them.

elohimjl

30 November 2001
Received on Fri Nov 30 21:53:22 2001