For what end? LO23457

AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Wed, 1 Dec 1999 17:09:57 +0200

Replying to LO23397 --

Dear Organlearners,

Chuck Wallace < CHUKAMYJAS@aol.com > writes:

>Tricia,
>
>You had commented...
>
>> I have been asking myself why it is that organisations seem
>> to be getting more and more toxic as time goes on.
>
>My response is a slightly different question.....
>
>Why does entropy production in an organization in some cases
>leads to "evil" and in other cases lead to "good"? The energy of
>entropy production is the driver but what determines the path of
>the outcome?
>
>What cause "evil" to manifest itself in the world?
>
>Looking forward to your responses...

Greetings Chuck,

By now you should be able to guess my answer. So let me put it in a
different form.

Jan Smuts, the father of holism, would have said a lack of wholeness
causes the evil to manifest itself. Jan Smuts published his system of
holism in 1926 with "Holism and Evolution".

The words wholeness and holy derive from exactly the same root word.

Jan Smuts saw wholeness as the cause/reason/mechanism for the
one-to-many-mapping by which reality unfolds itself. As such he broke
radically with Darwin who offered natural selection or Lamarck who offered
external factors as the cause. (Jan Smuts, nor Goethe, Lamarck, Darwin,
Ilya Prigogine, Maturana or Kauffman used the phrase
"one-to-many-mapping". It is a descriptive term which I borrowed from
mathematics to describe the fact central to all theories of evolution and
even the accounts of Creation in Genesis as well as in other ancient
documents.

Jan Smuts died in 1950 at a ripe old age. Ilya Prigogine, still a young
man, had uncovered the equation for entropy production a couple of years
before. The subject Irreversible Thermodynamics had not yet seen the
light. Nobody yet paid any attention to Prigogine's remarkable insight in
the /_\ (the change or increase) of the entropy S.

Everybody else thought of /_\ as a singular thing, but Prigogine had the
insight to see that it consists of two parts. The one part of the change
in entropy is the result of exchanging energy with the surroundings in a
reversible manner. (Remember that although energy and entropy are not the
same thing, they go hand in hand as a man and a woman.) So, with energy
going in or out, its associated entropy which expresses its organisation,
goes in or out also. But the other part is the entropy produced
irreversibly within the system so as to change its internal organisation.

As I far as I could ascertain, Jan Smuts did not know anything about
"entropy production"-- the movie. Neither did he wrote any comments on
"entropy" -- the picture. In fact, he often longed to have more time to
write on his scientific insights, but he considered his calling as a
statesman of higher priority.

I think Jan Smuts would have been most astonished to learn that the
greater the wholeness in a system and with its surrounding systems, the
greater the production of entropy. He often wrote on cooperation in a
sense much deeper as others. I think that he tried to uncover in his
concept of cooperation the link between wholeness and evolution. The link
is that wholeness acts through "entropy production" on evolution
(actually, the one-to-many-mapping part of evolution).

If wholeness is the only factor influencing the one-to-many= mapping
(evolution) of reality, then Jan Smuts's name would have been a household
word. But other xxxxNESSES also contribute like wholeNESS. What are they?

For me the toxicity of any system is not a fundamental cause, but an
outcome of something else. As an output it does exclude that this toxicity
can serve as an input to other destructive immergences. When Compex
Adaptive Systems CAS become so easily toxic, it is a sign that such
systems cannot handle ordinate bifurcations. These ordinate bifurcations
fork easily into destructive immergences rather than constructive
emergences. It is these immergences rather than the impaired
essentialities like wholeness which we perceive as the toxicity of the
system.

The CAS school of thinkers under the leadership of Stuart Kauffman
maintains that it is impossible to determine the future evolution of a
system. It is AS IF they accept the "one-to-many-mapping" of evolution,
but deny any cause/reason/mechanism to exist and rather try to describe it
as closely as possible in terms of novel concepts. This deconstruction, in
this case of effect-cause, is typical of the present era.

Show me an organisation which is toxic according to Tricia's fine
description and which yet honours wholeness AS DEEP AS POSSIBLE, then I
will admit I have been completely wrong and retract all my writing as one
big fallacy. I stress the DEEP AS POSSIBLE because wholeness alone, even
to the highest possible degree cannot prevent destructive immergences and
their toxicity. Nobody else than Jan Smuts can witness to this. His
insight into wholeness was profound, yet he lost the election in 1948 to a
party who offered apartheid as their ideology (theory) and policy
(practice). Apartheid is that systems thinking which results when
wholeness is purposefully denied on all walks of human life. Thus,
because of its profound immergences, apartheid became an extremely toxic
system.

Apartheid is a denial of the role played by wholeness in the complexity of
reality. The dismantling of apartheid since 1994 did not make South Africa
less toxic as all the optimists hoped. The pessimists predicted greater
toxicity which they eventually got. But they based their prediction on
apartheid preventing the explosive increase in toxicity. The fact which
which we ought to try and understand, is that denying apartheid is not a
logical double negation on wholeness. In more symbolic form:

Since from 1048-1994
apartheid = NOT wholeness
we have since 1994
NOT apartheid = NOT NOT wholeness

The Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) says that
NOT NOT statement = statement
Thus we expect according to LEM that
NOT NOT wholeness = wholeness.
However, since 1994 South Aricans experience
NOT NOT wholeness IS NOT EQUAL TO wholeness.
In other words, to deny a denial will not always rectify a denial!

The first man in recent history to rediscover this great truth that
not always
NOT NOT statement = statement
was the mathematician Lutzen Brouwer early this century.
Through his efforts the intuitionistic and constructivist
movements in mathematics emerged.

Why? LEM does not hold when a system reaches a certain level of
complexity. The lesson which it holds for LOs is that LEM (the "either ...
or... but not both" reasoning) cannot be used to detoxicate complex
organisations.

This is a reason why I do not like to participate in debates in which it
is assumed that LEM will provide for a fair outcome despite the complexity
involved. This is the reason why so many students struggle with chemistry.
They do not have the pratical experience to know when LEM does not hold in
chemistry. Perhaps it is also the reason why people struggle to understand
the concept of a LO.

Best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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