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Hi, Karen,

Karen Fu wrote: "start from the basic simple mico level : 'self' and don't think too much."

While I appreciate the intention behind this reply, I do not see how this offers much help. A model of behavior based on these two principles -- 1) start with self as a basic, simple entity, 2) don't think too much -- is what got us to where we are.

If this model worked at all, it worked in a world with fewer than two or three billion people. The 2-billion-person world ended in the late 1920s, and the world passed 3 billion in 1960. I'd argue that this model did not really work very well for all the people who suffered at the hands of those who thought only from an image or perspective of a simple, micro-level self, but the environmental and ecological consequences of human behavior might still have been contained had we made a serious shift in behavior sometime between those two points. This would not have saved that 90% of the population of native Americans destroyed by the post-Columbian invasions, nor a similar percentage of indigenous Australians, let alone the 60,000,000 or so killed in World War II and the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the planet would have remained capable to sustaining human life and most other forms of life.

If the planet is to remain hospitable to human beings, we must see ourselves as social creatures nested in an environmental web. While simplicity and emergent order works well as a heuristic principle, we need to think more deeply than we do today to understand the simple actions that will create the emergent order we seek. And then we must act on what we learn.

Some of this is simple. None of this is easy.

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia