GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY:
CHARTING THE FUTURE

Adapted from
The Urban Centers Consortium Network Master Plan
draft copy of a work in progress
December 21, 1987
by the Global Data Corporation


Explanation

Horizons of opportunity show "limits to growth" as a function of the language used to map out the global economy. LAWCAP is constrained to some point along the innermost curve. Its most realistic science fiction looks violent and grim. As resources are committed to LAWCAP's scenarios, GST measures the margin of wasted opportunity i.e. unnecessary pain and suffering attributable to ignorance, greed, fear and selfishness. USA OS militates against this kind of waste.

LAWCAP (RBF's coin for post-FDR 'lawyer-capitalism') traces its language boilerplate's origins to the East India Company circa 1600 and to that Company's London School of Economics, where professor Malthus helped formulate some of the basic tenets of Economics, the so-called Dismal Science, still used to bolster LAWCAP's big picture analyses, which form the backdrop for its Great Tragedy scenario programming.

In contrast, General Systems Theory (GST) has an opportunity horizon that is able to take in the fact that circa the 1970s we crossed a critical threshold such that intelligent deployment of resources will now allow us to move beyond war by eradicating the conditions that cause it. GST's science fiction, in contrast to LAWCAP's, is about brainstorming a World Livingry Service Industry (WLSI) around the kinds of artifacts that will allow us to live well even while caring for our environment.

GST's maps of the future 'do not compute' in LAWCAP's legalese, which has only a weak science component. GST, bolstered with stronger science, is a source of realistic storyboards leading to the kinds of dramatic World Game scenarios that would net us the kinds of livingry required to avert the various dark future scenarios the LAWCAP directors are planning for us.

GST is therefore in competition with Economics, which latter discipline has long asserted monopolistic ownership and control over big picture resource allocation forecasting and strategizing. GST, which recognizes the Earthian economy as an open system powered by solar fusion energy and its derivatives, sees human intelligence in the assets column of the global balance sheet and potentially making the biggest critical difference to our net worth, versus mindless reflex-conditioning (empty 'going through the motions'), which keeps us stuck in old thought patterns which have little relevance to meeting today's challenges, and hence falls under the heading of Liabilities.

The Pentagon is shown in both directions because some in the military have largely freed themselves from LAWCAP's obsolete reflex conditioning and have a more GST-informed outlook.

For Further Reading


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