Adam and Eve revisited

Limitless growth cannot be sustained in a world of finite resources and with a limited capacity to absorb waste. This means that we must develop a society that is not geared to ever increasing growth, which is thereby less dependent on resources and which generates correspondingly less waste. It doesn't matter whether industrial society can be maintained for 10, 50, 100 or 200 years. The fact is that it is moving in the wrong direction and at an exponential rate and the sooner the direction is reversed the easier will be the transition. This movement is accelerated and encouraged by much of modern scientific research.

One doesn't need any experiments to show that one cannot build a perpetual motion machine, since such a device would defy the second law of thermodynamics. Still less is it regarded sensible to advocate their large scale manufacture.

Neither does one need experiments, even if relevant ones could be devised, to show that chemical pesticides will not. eliminate pests, that you cannot get rid of poverty by slum clearance, that industrial growth cannot be sustained for very long.

In each case, basic principles, some not yet properly formulated it is true, but nevertheless very difficult to deny can be invoked, as they can to demonstrate the illusory nature of the main tenet of the religion of industrial man: that science, technology and industry can combine to create a materialistic paradise on earth from which can be eradicated all the ills man is supposed to have suffered from since the beginning of time, such as poverty, unemployment, disease, homelessness, crime and famine.

On empirical grounds alone, it is clear that our society is failing to achieve this paradise, as far from being eradicated, these ills are everywhere on the increase, not only in the non-industrial countries but also in the richest industrial ones such as the United States. Thus in America, there are now 25 million people who are officially regarded as poor while an equal number of Americans are displaying symptoms of malnutrition, which one would have thought impossible in so prosperous a country. Indeed, if America cannot solve such problems with all its science, all its money, all its technology, how can any other country be expected to do so?

Current scientific methodology cannot solve the problems of a modern industrial society. On the other hand, if we wish to interpret and understand such problems, the study of general systems is the approach most likely to provide an overall view.

Human society, it is essential to realise, is but a unit of behaviour or a system, and it can only be understood in terms of the behaviour of other systems at different levels of organisation. What one requires therefore is a general model of behaviour in terms of which one can attempt to understand the behaviour of an industrial social system. This is a big undertaking. I shall limit myself to stating what must be some of the basic principles of behaviour common to all systems, some of which have not previously been formulated.

If these principles were accepted that if it were generally realised that they applied to all behaviour, including that of industrial societies, then it would become clear how in industrial societies all we are doing is trying to build perpetual motion machines. Indeed, practically all the major undertakings of our industrial society are unsustainable in terms of these basic principles.

1.The principle of a system

A natural system is best defined as a unit of behaviour, and by its nature must be made up of differentiated parts in dynamic interrelationship with each other. Systems, regardless of whether they be cells or societies, have a great deal in common. The generalities, hence the basic principles, of their behaviour are the same. [1]

2. The unity principle

The biosphere developed as a single process; and must be regarded as a single system. This means that we should not study its parts in isolation or for that matter in terms of the different disciplines we have developed. Another implication is that human beings, their families and the societies into which they are organised are not above nature, nor are they exempt in any way from any of the principles governing other natural systems. This means that the same methodology must be used to understand the behaviour of humans and their societies as is used to understand the rest of the biosphere. [2]

3. The 'man the hunter' principle

It is significant that for nearly 99 per cent of man's tenancy of this planet he has earned his living by hunting and gathering and his activities have been limited to the fulfilment of his normal ecological functions in his particular environment without in any way upsetting its balance, i.e. he has until extremely recently behaved as a normal differentiated part of the biosphere. It may seem strange but when we generalise about man, we must mean 'man the hunter'.

If man has existed for two million years, then his experience as an industrialist is not more than two days in the life of a man of 70, in fact quite negligible, certainly far too short a sample on which to base any generalisations about the behaviour of man. [3]

4. The 'Original Sin' or niche principle

The hunter-gatherer mode of life appears to be the only one compatible with the maintenance of a climax ecosystem. Any departure from it must mean at least a measure of biological and social disruption. The greater the departure the greater the disruption. (See the optimum environment principle.)

5. The principle of economy

Behaviour takes the line of least resistance or of least effort. It is probable that the origin of life can be explained on this principle alone. Matter organised itself the way it did because it was the easiest course for it to take. Nature is consequently very efficient. In the correct sense of the term it makes the minimum effort: necessary to achieve its goal (stability, as we shall see). Efficiency in the technosphere is a very different thing. It means achieving the maximum output for the minimum input measured arbitrarily in terms of their market price which has nothing to do with their real biological and social, cost.

One of the most important implications of this principle is that systems and their mechanisms which are no longer made use of, i.e. for which there is no longer a niche, tend to atrophy-they can, in fact, be destroyed by depriving them of their function. [4]

6. The teleonomic principle

Behaviour is goal-directed. Empiricist philosophers and scientists who insist that all knowledge is derived from observation refuse to accept this because no experiment can be rigged up in a laboratory that will either prove or disprove it. Unfortunately this also holds for most of the general principles governing behaviour on this planet. It is also conveniently ignored because it justifies the deductive method. It establishes a generality from which particularities can be deduced without resorting to experimentation. It is ironic that if behaviour were random, i.e. if it displayed no order, and hence was not directive, the behaviour of dynamic systems (and all natural systems are dynamic) could not be interpreted or predicted (and it is the function of science to interpret and predict) and science would simply not be possible. [5]

7. The principle of stability

The goal is the achievement of stability which can be defined as a course or trajectory on which discontinuities, i.e. disequilibria and their corrections, are reduced to a minimum, hence that ensures survival taken in its broadest sense. Human societies until recently satisfied this requirement. Their culturally determined goal was the maintenance of traditional norms, which were upheld by public opinion, the council of elders and the ancestral spirits. Stability is another word for continuity. It does not mean immobility as an immobile system would not be stable since it would not be capable of adapting to a changing environment.

The importance of this principle is that it provides the only possible criterion for judging behaviour at all levels, i.e. in accordance with its contribution towards the achievement of stability. [6]

8. The principle of self-regulation

Stable systems must be self-regulating. They are maintained on their course by a control mechanism which in all systems regardless of their level of organisation functions on the same principle. Data are detected and organised (cybernised) to constitute a model of the relationship of the system to its environment. (In a social system this is usually referred to as its world-view.) The responses are mediated in terms of it, otherwise they are random and the system unnoticed is out of control.

Also essential is that each of the constraints a self-regulating system is subjected to is subject to the constraints of the system as a whole, which means that the latter acts as a unit. As soon as a system is regulated from outside (asystemically), the mechanism which is alone capable of assuring that the system's responses satisfy all environmental requirements breaks down. It can no longer be kept on its optimum course, the course being determined arbitrarily by the external controller.

It is significant that the behaviour of human societies has been until very recently entirely self-regulating. Primitive societies had no dictators or bureaucracies. They were run by tradition. They are often referred to as gerontocracies, government by the elders. I prefer: 'neocracrocies', government by the dead. As soon as institutionalised government takes over, the arbitrariness of the society's behaviour is painfully manifest.

Note: Perception is not an objective measure as empiricists seem to think it is. What one sees depends on one's model of one's relationship with one's environment. Since everyone will have developed a slightly different model, so different people will see different things. This is also true of different societies, which have developed different cultures in terms of which they will interpret (see) their environment in a different way. [7]

9. The probability principle

The cybernism, by which term I refer to all organisations of information to constitute models made use of by control mechanisms, can be regarded as probability calculators. The brain is no exception. What one sees, i.e. the hypothesis one formulates to explain one's relationship to a particular environmental situation, is the most probable one in terms of one's model. The notion of evidence, i.e. of an interpretation that is 100 per cent certain, is totally unknown in the natural. world.

Scientists, whether they know it or not, are also part of the natural world and none has ever formulated a hypothesis which is more than probable. One's policies and actions must therefore be based on those hypotheses which in terms of existing knowledge appear to be the most probable. One cannot do better than that. [8]

10. The continuity of information principle

Systems must be looked at four dimensionally. They exist in time as well as in space and their continuity can only be assured if the information transmitted from one generation to the next (i.e. the generalities of the system's behaviour pattern) reflects the experience of the system as a whole, i.e. which temporally speaking means as far back in its evolutionary history as the experience acquired is relevant to the conditions of the day. Only in this way are the constraints subjected to those of the system as a whole (which as we have seen is a sine qua non of self-regulation).

In this way a system is adapted to dealing with situations whose nature and the probability of whose occurrence can be predicted on the basis of the greatest possible experience and not just on that of the preceding generation. We know that this is true of genetic information. It is not generally realised that it has until recently also been true of cultural information. Education has until recently consisted in imbibing youth with the traditional wisdom which will enable them to fulfill their functions as members of their families - and communities and ecosystems.

By breaking away from tradition, by elevating our scientists and other improvisers to the status of the priests of our industrial society, by putting a premium on change and originality, we are violating this basic principle which we only do at the cost of decreasing stability. At the other end of the scale, only the particularities of a system's behaviour pattern are developed on the basis of its own experience and constitute thereby differentiations of the original instructions designed to ensure adaptation to specific, possibly short term, environmental conditions. For us, the most important implication of this principle is that there is no substitute for the traditional society. It is only in this type of society that the continuity of information principle is not violated.

11. The optimum environment principle

The optimum environment for any system - that in which it will be the most stable - must be that to which it has been adapted phylogenetically and ontogenetically. The inescapable conclusion is that as industrial society proceeds, as the technosphere replaces the biosphere, so must instability increase at all levels.

12. The limits principle

A system can be maintained along its optimum course only if change both to itself and its environment occurs with, in acceptable limits. It cannot re-respond adaptively to situations of which it has had no experience during the course of its evolution and whose nature and occurrence it is thereby incapable of predicting. It is significant that societies have only been, able to maintain their stability in relatively unchanging or slowly changing environments and few primitive societies have been able to withstand dramatic changes such as those induced by contact with industrialised man. The limits can be organised hierarchically in accordance with their degree of generality (see the hierarchical constraints principle).

13. The counter-intuitivity principle

As a system's environment departs more and more from that which it was designed to deal with so must its interpretations and predictions become ever less accurate. Our normal intuitions, i.e. the mechanisms we developed to determine our basic responses to our environment in such circumstances are increasingly unreliable. As Forrester puts it, our environment is increasingly counterintuitive. As a result our responses are correspondingly counter-productive.

14. The ecosystem principle

A system does not develop in a random manner but as an adaptive response to a particular environmental situation. It must follow that it cannot be understood apart from this situation. The two must be studied together as constituting a larger, slightly less orderly system, one that is normally referred to as an ecosystem. This must be true regardless of the level of complexity of the system one is examining i.e., whether one is trying to understand the behaviour of a molecule, a cell, an organism or a society.

An essential implication is that if one destroys the specific environment to which a system is an adaptation, i.e. deprives it of its niche, then it must die. As the biosphere deteriorates this is rapidly happening to the world's larger mammals, including man. The converse of this principle is that if a niche is available a system will evolve to fill this niche. Our sprawling urban areas and huge stretches of monoculture must give rise to large populations of micro-organisms and insects adapted to them and in terms of which epidemic diseases are alone explicable. (See the principle of selection.)

15. The levels of complexity principle

Behaviour does not proceed in a continuous way but in jumps. Critical points are reached when specific systems cannot further increase their complexity (see the principle of complexity) without going unstable except by associating with others to form a new one at a different level of complexity; thus atoms joined to form molecules, molecules to form cells. Also in the same way families join to form small communities (clans or villages) which in certain circumstances will join to form larger ones. The limit to the size of a particular type of system is probably set by the extendibility of the bonds used to link together its constituent parts.

In a social system these appear to be extensions of the family bonds and they will not extend very far. There appears to be a limit to the size of a society capable of acting as a self-regulating and hence as a stable system, and such a system appears to be quite small. A monolithic nation state is a relatively new institution and it does not satisfy these conditions in any way (see the ecosystem principle). Since the unit of study is the ecosystem, we should think of levels of complexity as those ecosystems comprising molecules plus their respective environment, cells plus their respective environment, organisms plus their respective environment, etc.

16. The generality principle

Behaviour proceeds from the general to the particular. As most scientists today are concerned with particularities, generalities (being difficult to study in laboratory conditions) tend to be ignored and are often referred to disparagingly as "value judgements". Nevertheless it is they which are important. If the British army invades China what is important is not whether Sergeant Snooks has polished his bayonet but whether the basic principle of invading China is right. It is the first and most general stages of any process which should concern us most. The implications are obvious in medicine, psychology and education. It establishes the mother as the basic educator and not the school, let alone the university. [10]

17. The differentiation principle

Behaviour proceeds by differentiation. A behavioural process cannot be understood solely in terms of the original instructions (except in the hypothetical situation of absolute order). These are adapted to local conditions at each stage, determining correspondingly differentiated behaviour. This further emphasises the importance of the early stages which will control all subsequent stages in terms of which they are differentiated. It also implies that subsystems are designed to fulfil different complementary roles. To suppose that the members of a family, for instance, are equipotential and that the bonds linking them together are symmetrical either genetically or culturally (in a stable society) is to misunderstand the forces that determined the development of the family unit.

18. The principle of self-reliance

In order to ensure necessary supplies a system will not allow itself to become dependent on external sources of nutrients and other resources unless it can predict that supplies can be maintained. Ecosystems tend to become more and more autonomous as they develop.

Our industrial society, on the contrary, in order to exploit the so called economies of scale, becomes more and more specialised and hence more dependent on external sources of supply, sometimes very unreliable ones, usually increasingly so, and on external markets for the funds with which to purchase such supplies, thereby violating this fundamental principle. [11]

19. The principle of diminishing production

As a system develops towards higher stability and eventually reaches adulthood-or a climax situation, the rate of biological production decreases. This means that to maximise production as in marine agriculture - it is necessary to maintain the system artificially at a lower phase of development and hence at a more unstable one. The result is and must be great discontinuities, i.e. more droughts, floods, pest outbreaks, etc.

20. The sequential principle

Responses must occur in a particular sequence (succession). This is so because each one must be triggered off by the occurrence, or the prediction of the occurrence, of a situation which will be influenced by the preceding one. The more orderly the process (as in the development of an embryo); the more essential it is that the sequence be respected.

Education or socialisation is a normal behavioural process and, as a child grows up, it acquires its basic information from the family unit. Subsequently it is subjected to the influence of its peer group and it is later let out in the community as a whole. Information is received from these different systems in the correct order. This order is critical if the child is to be properly socialised. In a stable society information from random sources extraneous to the system in which socialisation occurs (from television, personalities, films and most educational establishments) can only interfere with socialisation.

The idea of education as subjecting a child to a massive barrage of non-selective data in no particular order, simply on the principle that the more knowledge the better, is indefensible and an educational policy such as ours that is based on such a notion must be fatal to the survival of a society. [12]

21. The accumulation principle

Behaviour is cumulative. When new levels of organisation are achieved the previous ones don't simply disappear nor do they fuse with the new. They are modified by virtue of the fact that they are subjected to new sets of constraints but they are still there. This means that it is of little use to study behaviour at different levels of organisation by themselves. Its main implication is the following.

22. The hierarchy of constraints principle

All systems are subject to constraints. This is the same as saying that they are increasing order or reducing randomness. As each level of complexity is achieved a new set of constraints becomes operative. These can be organised hierarchically. The lower the level of complexity to which they correspond, the more they are important because the greater their generality (see the generality principle).

Thus physical constraints apply to all systems. Everything obeys the laws of gravity, also the laws of thermodynamics. Biological constraints apply not only to biological organisms but to families and societies. Social constraints apply to all societies, however artificial. Our society is non-sustainable, principally because its priorities are wrong. It puts economic constraints, i.e. those that are supposed to favour the distribution of resources within a system, before those that ensure the survival of the system itself and even subordinates to them physical and biology constraints.

The principle of "Consumer Sovereignty", for instance, which states that everything must be subordinated to the satisfaction of - on the whole artificially induced material requirements of individual consumers, reflects this lunatic state of priorities, as does that of permissiveness, which implies that it is actually advantageous to ignore that set of constraints that individuals are subjected to, to enable them to fulfill their differentiated functions within their family and social systems.

23. The cyclic principle

One of the most important ecological constraints at the physical, chemical and biological level of complexity deserves to be stated separately. Indeed in order to prevent the running down of our world and to permit the increase in order that has characterised the last few thousand million years, during which time our biosphere has developed, the raw materials of life have been exploited in an extremely subtle way, each one of them being recycled via complicated processes permitting their constant re-use and avoiding the accumulation of waste.

It is significant that our industrial society has ignored this key constraint. The development of the technosphere has been largely a one-way process, the biosphere being systematically transformed into the technosphere and the waste matter of the technosphere, both of which from the point of view of the biosphere constitute waste, randomness or entropy.

24. The rate of "cybernisation" principle

The rate of change which a system is capable of dealing with depends among other things on the rate at which the control mechanism can function, i.e. the rate at which it can detect data, transduce it into the informational medium used by the model, organise it in the model (or cybernise it), permitting interpretation or prediction and responding accordingly.

In the case of a population whose model is contained in its gene-pool, this rate is very slow. The phylogenetic changes or responses are slow, especially as generations become longer as in man. In order to in. crease the rate of cybernisation, a new set of responses is developed based on a new informational medium, that used by the brain. The information in terms of which one can understand the behaviour of a human social system is formulated partly genetically, partly culturally (neuro-genetically), its generalities in terms of the former, its particularities in terms of the latter.

The particularities of a model are easier to change than the generalities. Their role is to permit petty short-term adaptations which are justified on the basis of small short-term experience, whereas the generalities reflect the long-term experience of the species (see the continuity of information principle).

25. The principle of variety

The improbability of the environmental change to which a system can respond is directly proportional to its "variety". The concept is applicable to a gene-pool as well as to a brain, i.e. to all cybernisms. It is also applicable to cultures which we are systematically destroying in order to spread our own industrial culture. It is also applicable to ecosystems which are everywhere being simplified as monoculture replaces mixed farming and as herbicides, fungicides and insecticides eliminate "unwanted" species.

One does not need any laboratory experiments to tell us the result can only be to increase instability and hence discontinuities such as "pest" epidemics.

26. The principle of complexity

The precision with which a system can adapt, is the extent to which oscillations (disequilibria and their corrections) can be reduced in a given situation which in turn depends on its complexity (both temporal and spatial). For instance, in an ecosystem, by increasing the number of trophic levels or levels of predation, new qualitative and quantitative controls become operative which must reduce the size of population oscillations occurring through disease and famine - hence increasing stability.

It is to he noted that society, in accordance with the principle of economy, will display the minimum complexity required to deal with environmental challenges. Also its complexity is limited by the levels of complexity principle - thus if increasing complexity is at the expense of its basic structure into families, small communities, etc. it will cease to display order and will become unstable. (See the principle of order.)

It is significant that the technosphere which we are substituting for the biosphere is not as complex as we think. In fact, by nature's standards it is rudimentary. The most sophisticated piece of equipment devised by man is far less complex than an ordinary virus.

27. The principle of order

The most adaptive situation when no predictions concerning environmental changes can be made is randomness (which I shall take as synonymous with entropy) or an absence of order. As it becomes possible to discern some order in the environment and hence make interpretations and predictions concerning likely changes, so does order build up. Order is organisation, a departure from randomness. Not any organisation but that which most favours the goal of stability.

The technosphere does not display order as its organisation is not homeotelic (see the homeotelic principle) or self-regulating and hence tends towards increasing instability. In the same way a modern state, however centralised, does not display 'order'. The most adaptive organisation when predictions can be made with total accuracy (assuming this were possible) would be a system in which the steps succeeded each other without change of any sort, i.e. in which a pre-established response were replicated.

I regard this latter situation as displaying the highest possible order. Needless to say, it can never occur. But order will increase as we move from the situation of no prediction to the theoretical situation in which infallible predictions are made. We think of order as synonymous with centralisation.

This is apparent in the case of a system displaying high temporal complexity using an informational medium permitting rapid cybernisation and responses, such as the day to day behaviour of a human organism with a centralised nervous system, or that of an army. It is less apparent but equally so in a system made up of generations of amoebas in a stagnant pool or, for that matter, of Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies. It could also be regarded as displaying high centralisation since the original instructions were handed out a long way back and have scarcely been modified since. This fits in with the normal criterion of order-the extent to which a system can be understood in terms of its generalities or basic instructions.

It is to be noted that a large society will be made up of communities subjected to different environmental pressures in order to respond adaptively to which they must evolve divergent behavioural traits thus a centralised society is likely to be unadaptive.

28. The principle of the optimum strategy

There must be an optimum value to every variable representing a strategy exploited by a system to achieve stability. No such strategy is desirable per se. Therefore there is no possible reason for maximising any one of them. On account of the principle of economy, the optimum will in fact coincide with the minimum required for dealing with environmental challenges. Only a self-regulating system which is linked by feedback loops to all those parts of its environment whose behaviour can affect it, is capable of maintaining itself along the optimum course that provides the best compromise between environmental requirements.

Our society, needless to say, is geared to the maximising of such things as education, prosperity, number of housing units, productivity, etc. Such aims (even were they tending in the right direction) would be incompatible with the maintenance of a stable social system.

29. The principle of competition

Competition is a mechanism whereby systems organise themselves hierarchically in accordance with their ability to fill available niches. It permits thereby the establishment of order within the larger system. If a system is tending towards stability, the greater the competition the greater the hierarchy (which is synonymous with order). If, on the other hand, it is tending towards instability, the greater the competition the greater will be the extent of the organisation tending in the wrong direction and the faster will it move towards its ultimate collapse. In our industrial society, the greater the competition, the more long-term biological and social considerations are subordinated to short-term 'economic' ones.

30. The principle of selection

Selection is competition looked at from the point of view of the environment. It does not only occur among mutants or random changes. It occurs also and primarily in fact - among adaptive, i.e. controlled responses. Such responses can be regarded as selected by the environment in the sense that their role is to satisfy an environmental requirement and if there is no such requirement there will be no response. It is precisely because there is no environmental requirement for the mutants, accidents or random responses that they tend to be eliminated (see the Niche principle).

The operation of this principle within a society or a population may appear disagreeable to us. We tend to refer to it as discrimination against the genetically and culturally unadaptive. Yet there is no alternative save the development of a population or a society displaying increasing entropy and eventually breaking down. To encourage the latter appears to be far more immoral than to accept the basic principle that man is subjected to selection like all other forms of life.

Measures tending to prevent the operation of selection by feather-bedding the unadaptive, i.e. via the welfare state, must correspondingly reduce social stability by increasing entropy or randomness. If we decide to take them, then we must be prepared to pay their cost.

31. The homeotelic principle. From the Greek homeo (same) and telos (goal))

If a system is capable of running itself, then its parts or sub-systems at all levels of complexity must be tending towards the same goal. If they were tending towards different and incompatible goals, the system would break down, unless of course, an external force were introduced to hold it together. However, it would then cease to be self-regulating, would become unstable and eventually collapse.

If the parts are capable of behaving homeotelically, it is because they were designed that way by differentiation. This applies equally well to human beings who have been designed phylogenetically and who in a stable society are trained culturally to fulfil their different functions as differentiated members of family and community systems. It can only be expected that a man will obtain the maximum satisfaction by fulfilling such functions as a husband, a father, a son and a member of different social groups.

This explains the counter-productivity of 'progressive' education, which is based on Freud's totally mistaken notion of society as frustrating and inducing neurosis. It is also clear that it is only if its members behave homeotelically in this matter that a system such as a family or a community can survive.

In our society, everything is done to impair homeotely at both the family and communal level. Women are encouraged to take jobs, put their children in crèches and so neglect important maternal functions. Worse still, they are subjected to an education which places no store on the fulfilment of such functions (in which many of the household tasks that have previously provided people with undoubted satisfaction are classified as 'drudgery' by those who wish to draw the housewife more directly into the orbit of the cash economy). Also the father is prevented from fulfilling his essential functions as protector of and provide for the family by the all-pervading welfare state that takes over the education and the health problems of his children.

Similarly, homeotely is being impaired at the communal level, since people are being systematically taught that it is the duty of the State to satisfy all their requirements including the most superficial, while the spirit of duty and participation in social affairs which alone insured the survival of stable societies in the past is discouraged in every way. In other words, the introduction of external controls on the massive scale that they now operate in a modern national state must impair homeotely and hence disrupt the self-regulating mechanisms which are alone capable of insuring stability in our family and social systems. [13]

32. The heterotelic principle (from the Greek heteros (different), and telos (an aim or goal))

As a system disintegrates, so it fails to provide the appropriate stimuli required to trigger off the homeotelical responses on the part of its members. The responses that the latter will trigger off will be heterotelic, tending towards different goals from that of the system as a whole and incompatible with them. Thus, to return to the family as it disintegrates the husband might leave his wife for a mistress or resort to various forms of retreatism such as alcohol or drugs, all of which might provide him with personal satisfaction but do nothing to hold the family together.

As a result, the family will disintegrate still further until it eventually ceases to constitute a system capable of autonomous behaviour. This is what is happening today. The extended family which displays complexity and order has already disintegrated into the unstable nuclear family, which in turn is further disintegrating into its constituent parts, the process being most advanced in the suburbs of the large urban agglomerations in America and elsewhere.

33. The accommodation of trends principle

A heterotelic response is not solving a problem, only suppressing one of its manifestations, thereby rendering it more tolerable, and contributing to its perpetuation. Thus the tranquillisers that are now dispensed in astronomical quantities do . no more than render man's plight as a member of a disintegrating family, community and ecosystem that much more tolerable, serving thereby to perpetuate the process of industrialisation that has actually put him in this plight.

Most of the so-called services provided by industrial society fit within this category. Houses for the old are only necessary with us because the family unit has broken down and people have lost their sense of responsibility towards their parents, which leads them to exile them to such institutions. To provide them is simply to accommodate this tendency and so it is with crèches for children who should be looked after by their own mothers.

So it is with most of the welfare which, in a stable society, is dispensed at the family level, where it must cause the minimum disruption. So it is with most of the consumer goods people are acquiring in ever greater quantities because their acquisition satisfies a heterotelic goal structure, a substitute for that which is normally provided culturally by the family and communal environment.

34. The problem multiplier principle

Heterotelic responses, by tending towards the satisfaction of single requirements to the exclusion of all others, must give rise to more problems than they solve. In addition, external or heterotelic controls, by their very nature, must render systemic ones redundant, which in accordance with the principle of economy must cause them to atrophy. Pesticides will thus destroy the natural controls on insect pests; artificial fertilisers nitrogen-fixing bacteria; in social systems centralised bureaucratic controls such as those operative in Western type nation states must destroy social structures and consequently society's capacity for self-regulation. [14]

35. The solution-multiplier principle

On the other hand, by setting about to reconstitute or imitate the environment to which a system has been adapted phylogenetically and ontogenetically, one is ensuring the increasing stability and hence the better functioning of very many more than one specific system. Homeotelic responses will thus do far more than solve those problems with which one may be temporarily concerned.

In fact, as they are adopted so must other systems temporarily in disequilibrium fall back into place, for so will the biosphere function that much more closely to the way it has been designed by thousands of millions of years of evolution.

Only homeotelic measures, which reduce rather than increase man's impact on ecological systems (physical, organic and social) thereby reducing systemic disruption at all these levels, can provide real solutions to the problems of man.

36. Conclusion

Induction and experimentation do not permit us to understand the world we live in. This can only be done by arguing deductively from basic principles. If we do this, it becomes apparent that man's problems have been totally misinterpreted by the scientific world. They are not due to a 'lack of development' calling for further research, technology and industrial development. The opposite is the case. They are the result of a systemic deviation from man's optimum environment - that to which he has been adapted by millions of years of evolution.

This deviation started with the Neolithic revolution and has been accelerated with the development of industry. Further development, i.e. further deviation from the optimum, can only increase these problems while their solution must reside in developing that way of life, and reconstituting that environment which, in the very unfavourable circumstances in which we find ourselves today, most closely imitates the optimum.

References and further reading