About the urgent need of using the Bertalanffy's Systems Thinking

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In my view the notion of SYSTEM is something intrinsic to the kind of
mind that the members of our species, comprised their immediate
ancestors, managed to create and build without knowing in advance
what they would achieve. I dare to assume that such a concept is what
has always allowed every human to notice how he or she may or should
deal better with everyone of his or her concerns, comprised the cases
when he or she aims at disrupting or breaking or destroying something
that had become a field or object that in her or his view should not
exist.

However, quite probably along many millennia every one of our
ancestors during his or her nomadic life did not distinguish right
away neither well enough what might be their concerns, being excepted
the assumption that he or she was increasingly interested in
surviving as best as possible till the following instant. In those
years every individual usually had only a very short time available
for reacting spontaneously when facing the various difficult
circumstances that were unexpectedly arising continuously in the
immediate surroundings.

Therefore it could be argued that our ancestors hominids, who were
practically engaged in organizing almost exclusively their daily
survival, could - only very slowly - learn firstly to identify well
and secondly to recognize better and better the questions that would
allow them to carry out successfully those tasks conceived for
determining what could be interesting for them, apart of taking care
of their immediate survival.

Consequently I dare to believe that suddenly, as soon as every human
being could start organizing his or her personal life in the domain
of one or another of the settlements constituted, it became possible
for every individual to learn how to integrate gradually the
knowledge of something else that had become in his or her mind an
additional concern to deal with; In recent times such a knowledge has
been singled out as the whole of the system "de facto" that has been
identified in the mind of somebody.

Along the twentieth century, since the concept of system was
introduced quite successfully in the system community, most systems
thinkers and cyberneticians search how to identify their concerns
using the concept of system. Every systemist being: (1) necessarily
conditioned by his or her perceptual possibilities and (2) under the
influence of his or her biased interpretations of the reality,
unavoidably apprehended peculiarly by every individual - therefore
without being able to avoid the pressure of his or her own prejudices
- almost always aims in practice at making sustainable the
functionality of only some of the features that apparently
characterized the civilized way of life.

But today in the year 2002 it is clearly evident that the future
panorama for humankind is already a tragic perspective for billions
of people: the masses composed by human resources and the unemployed
workers and their families who are trying to survive in miserably
conditions because quite efficient systems are organized and
maintained in operation for increasing the gap between wealthy
fellows and the poor masses, for making more effective the unilateral
exploitation of natural resources everywhere,...

We might wonder why usually most scientists, practitioners and
educators who use this concept do not care in learning that the so
called Systems Science has been integrated de facto by three
contradictory and conflicting interpretations of Systems Thinking:

1. the Analytical Stream, which has evolved as Systems Engineering
and Systems Management

2. the Technocratic Stream, which is essentially concerned with
Technological Cybernetics, Information and Communication Technology
Artificial Intelligence, etc.

3. the Holistic Stream, which is the Bertalanffy's Systems Thinking
(BST) as the approach that may reveal the Gestalten properties that
characterize the higher levels of organization, the so-called living
systems.

Therefore, from now onward what is urgently needed is the explicit
evolvement of this (BST) as a

Top � Down approach

strictly necessary for learning to identify better and better the
concerns of a human being increasingly aware of his and her role on
Earth, it is

The Systems Thinking globally engaged based on
ethical, ethological, biological and ecological criteria

which has become indispensable

for dealing with those tasks that

may increase effectively

the survival chances

of Homo Sapiens Sapiens

I. 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.

II. To conceive a WAY FORWARD for humankind towards the Creation of a
Sustainable Society.

III. To generate a very new Entrepreneurial Spirit that may emerge
from Business based on Bertalanffy's General Systems Weltanschauung

IV. To organize Peace Research in order to widen the views of every
human obliged to comprehend the dynamics of conflicts and
aggressiveness in human minds and to find out how every human entity
may cooperatively cope with them.

-- 
elohimjl