Crisis? What Crisis?

The first part of this chapter brings together material suggesting that the current financial “crisis” may well have been engineered to strengthen the hand of a relatively small group of people who use international financial institutions to manage the planet more generally. It is concluded that, behind the financial crisis lies a public management crisis. The second part discusses the interlinked crises in our habitat. It seems that we have to radically innovate the way we live if we are to survive as a species. In part three it is suggested that these interlinked crises are even more deeply embedded in human societal organisation than had been suspected. The trend toward centralised command-and-control management of human societies appears to have been proceeding inexorably since time immemorial. This itself appears to require the invention of more and more useless work to create the divisions which compel people to participate in the destructive activities which pre-occupy most societies. The financial and management crises then appear as symptoms of dysfunctional social organisation, not as crises that can be addressed directly. Most of Part III is devoted to outlining ways in which the socio-cybernetic processes involved may be studied and the results used to design more appropriate socio-cybernetic (governance) systems.

Keywords: Authoritarian leaders, auto poiesis, civil liberties, comprehensive evaluation, destruction of open research in universities, dysfunctional social arrangements, ecological crisis, ecological footprint, “educational” system, financial crisis, gaia, milton friedman, money creation, murray bookchin, neoclassical economics, quality of life, reductionist science, socio-cybernetics, social hierarchy, social forces, systems analysis.