How to change course

The big question seen in the context of the big picture

It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course.

Can knowledge federation be helpful in finding a way to change course?

But isn't this exactly the right question for us to put to test our proposal – of a new paradigm in knowledge work, the "big picture science", the "natural approach to knowledge", the provider of "information as we may need it"?

Naturally, we look at this big question by developing a big-picture view of the course itself – which is of course the course of our societal and cultural evolution. Can we see it in the light in which we now see the zeitgeist of the Middle Ages?

We approach this theme by challenging the "religion" that the modernity has given us – the unwavering belief that all we need is to be conscientiously and consistently self-serving; and that "the invisible hand" will secure that the world that results will be the best possible one.

Isn't this the "universal theory" that is now commonly used to legitimize our social order, and subordinate us to it? And isn't this "religion of selfishness" also been orienting our "human development" – which, according to Peccei, "is the most important goal".

There can be no doubt that "the invisible hand" now guides our evolution – not as a magical force capable of turning our favorite character fault into a perfect social order; but as a political ideology ratifying our ignorance.

So what do we really know about this theme?

Understanding evolution

We look at our cultural evolution from an angle we haven't used before – by federating the insights of giants in the humanities (sociology, cognitive science, anthropology, history, psychology and linguistics). And by weaving them together with the insights of the giants of world cultural traditions (Buddhism, Sufism, martial art and qigong).

By doing that we also illustrate how a big-picture view of any core issue could be developed by combining or federating insights of giant across time and space, cultural boundaries and disciplinary divisions.

Evolving beyond paradigms

Have you noticed how different traditions have tenaciously held on to their worldviews or paradigms as the only right ones? How ready they were to wage wars – against the people who upheld a slightly different variant of the same creed! And against the divine command that forbade killing!

We are about to see that a quantum leap in the very nature of our evolution has become possible – where we'll transcend paradigms (as they have been traditionally) altogether! Where we'll liberate ourselves from any fixed way of looking at the world, and of conceiving "reality" – and become enable to acquire new forms of awareness responsibly yet freely.

It is to ignite this way of evolving that is the core purpose of these conversations.

These conversations are dialogs

Changing the world by changing the way we communicate

There is a way of listening and speaking that fits our purpose quite snuggly. Physicist David Bohm called it the dialogue, and we'll build further on his ideas and the ideas of others, and weave them into the meaning of another one of our keywords, the dialog.

Bohm considered the dialogue to be necessary for resolving our contemporary entanglement. Here is how he described it.

I give a meaning to the word 'dialogue' that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. 'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together.

Contrast this with the word 'discussion', which has the same root as 'percussion' an 'concussion'. It really means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others- but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

We are not just talking

Don't be deceived by this word, "conversations". These conversations are where the real action begins.

By developing these dialogs, we want to develop a way for us to bring the themes that matter into the focus of the public eye. We also want to bring in the giants and their insights, to help us energize and illuminate those themes. And then we also want to engage us all to collaborate on co-creating a shared understanding that reflects the best of our joint knowledge and insight.

And above all – we want to create a way of conversing that works; which makes us "collectively intelligent". We want to evolve in practice, with the help of new media and real-life, artistic situation design, a public sphere where the events and the sensations will be the ones that truly matter – i.e. the ones that are the steps in our advancement toward a new cultural and social order.

In a truest sense, the medium here really is the message!

A real reality show

Two people can be talking about these themes over a coffee house table. If they turn on the smartphone and record, their conversation can already become part of the global one.

What we, however, primarily have in mind is public dialogs, which begin in physical space and continue online. What can possibly be more real, and really relevant and interesting, than watching a new Renaissance emerge? Observing our blind spots and subconscious resistances; feeling its pulse, its birth pains...

Conversations that matter

Imagine now, if you have not done that already, that you are facing this task – of choosing just a handful of themes that matter; the ones that will be most suitable for us to initiate this process. What themes would you choose? We have tentatively chosen three themes, to begin with. In what follows we'll say a few words about each of them.

The Paradigm Strategy dialog

The paradigm strategy

The theme we chose for The Paradigm Strategy dialog appeared to us as perhaps the most natural one, which had to be represented in this showcase of knowledge work that illuminates the way: How to respond to contemporary issues.

We wrote the following in the abstract where this idea was initially shared

The motivation is to allow for the kind of difference that is suggested by the comparison of everyone carrying buckets of water from their own basements, with everyone teaming up and building a dam to regulate the flow of the river that is causing the flooding. We offer what we are calling The Paradigm Strategy as a way to make a similar difference in impact, with respect to the common efforts focusing on specific problems or issues. The Paradigm Strategy is to focus our efforts on instigating a sweeping and fundamental cultural and social paradigm change – instead of trying to solve problems, or discuss, understand and resolve issues.

A roadmap for guided evolution of society

At the same time this dialog introduces a roadmap for guided evolution of society – and it develops further by engaging and weaving together our collective knowledge and ingenuity. Can we perceive our own time, our own blind spots and evolutionary entanglements, in a similar way as we now see the dark side of the Middle Ages?

This too is a natural theme – because what could be a better way to showcase the new approach to knowledge, than by providing what's been lacking – as Neil Postman insightfully observed:

The problem now is not to get information to people, but how to get some meaning of what's happening.(...) Even the great story of inductive science has lost a good deal of its meaning, because it does not address several questions that all great narratives must address: Where we come from; what's going to happen to us; where we are going, that is; and what we're supposed to do when we are here. Science couldn't answer that; and technology doesn't.

The Paradigm Strategy poster

It will be best if you'll be looking at The Paradigm Strategy poster as we speak.

What you see on the left is a presentation of our current way of evolving (culturally and socially), drafted on a yellow background. What you see on the right is the creative frontier where the new paradigm is about to emerge, represented by a couple of design patterns and five prototypes. The large dot or circle in the middle is what we call "the key point" – it is the insight (or gestalt) that can take us from one social reality and way of evolving to the next.

Close to the dividing line, on the new paradigm side, you see "bootstrapping"; it's that very singular act that takes us out of our old paradigm and makes us part of the new one.

The poster is conceived as an invitation to begin to bootstrap – and in that way join the emerging paradigm as aware and active participant. The poster is interactive; the QR codes open up suitable files with further information (they are also hyperlinks, so that also the digital version of the poster can be interacted with). The "bootstrapping" thread leads to the QR code and file with an interactive online version of the poster – where it's possible to post comments, and in that way be part of the online dialog, through which the presented ideas, and the poster itself, are being developed further.

The core insights of giants (and also some other insights, as we shall see) are represented by icons, rendered as vignettes, and combined into threads. By weaving the threads into patterns, and patterns into the gestalt , the central "key point" is made accessible.

By now you know why we use vignettes: They bring abstract and high-level insights down to earth, make ideas palpable, and real. We cannot possibly do that with 12 vignettes in this very brief summary! And yet if we only describe them abstractly, we'll lose the solid ground under our feet, and we'll never reach that metaphorical 'mountain top' from where the naked Middle-agedness of our present way of being and evolving can be seen with clarity and precision.

So what we'll do is a compromise: We'll sketch a single vignette in some detail; and give a gesture drawing of all the rest.

Symbolic power

[S]ymbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.

As the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, Pierre Bourdieu was at the very peak of his profession, in effect representing the science of sociology to the French people. In the latter part of his career he would abandon his purist-academic reluctance to become a public intellectual, and he would become indeed an activist in the strife against the growing "invisible hand" ideology, which as we shall see he perceived as damaging to people and society.

Our story begins, however, much earlier, in 1955, when Bourdieu was an army recruit in Algeria, where a war was about to begin. Our goal is to share his insight that made him a sociologist. Like Doug Engelbart and quite a few other giants, Bourdieu did not enter his field by studying it, but by first having an insight; by observing something that could make a large impact on the field, and on the human condition more broadly.

During the Algerian war Bourdieu had no difficulty noticing how the official narrative (that France was in Algeria to bring progress and culture) collapsed under the weight of torture and a variety of other human rights abuses. So he wrote a small book about this in an accessible language, in the Que sais-je series.

Back home in France this booklet contributed to politicization of French intelligentsia during the 1950s and 60s. But in Algeria it had another effect. A contact would bring Bourdieu to an "informant" (perhaps a man who'd been tortured) and say "You can trust this man – completely!" What a magnificent way for a gifted young man to look into the nuts and bolts of human society, at the point where they were buoyantly transforming!

As it became "independent", the Algerian society entered a new phase – of modernization.

With sympathy and keen insight, Bourdieu spent days as 'a fly on the wall' in a Kabyle village house, recording the harmoniously-intricate relationships that existed between the physical objects the relationships among its people. And how painfully this harmony collapsed when the Kabyle young man was compelled, by new economic realities, to look for employment in the city! Not only his sense of honor, but even his very way of walking and talking was suddenly out of place – even to the young women from his own native village, who'd seen something different in movies and in restaurants.

It was in this way that Bourdieu came to realize that the old relationships of economic and cultural domination did not at all vanish – they only changed their manner of expression!

He was reminded of his own experiences, when after having grown up in alpine Denguin in Southern France he moved to Paris, and then joined the elite, by studying in the prestigious École normale – not by birthright, but because of his exceptional talents.

Theory of practice

Bourdieu called the theory that resulted "theory of practice"; a fitting name, because it's really a scientific theory of the manner in which human society evolves and operates in practical reality.

Bourdieu's keywords "doxa", "symbolic power", "habitus" and "field" will suffice to summarize this theory. We'll highlight as its core insight that the renegade power – which once manifested itself in prisons and torture chambers – can functions just as effectively by only symbolic means. It is in the nature of symbolic power that it's most effective when neither the victors nor the victims are aware of its existence. Everyone's socially sanctioned and embodied manners of speech and behavior or "habitus", the subtle "field" they compose together, and the shared "reality picture" or "doxa" – turn out to be sufficient to structure everyone's behavior and even awareness according to the subtle power play.

Beading the thread

But before we revisit those concepts, let's just briefly sketch the other two vignettes in the same thread – which will help us see Bourdieu's theory in even a bit different light than what he may have intended.

Odin the Horse

Odin the Horse is a brief real-life story about the territorial behavior of Icelandic horses. But it's also a bit of a private joke, whose explanation we shall see a bit later.

Let's just go straight to the point. Remember that what we are really after is a way of looking at things, and specifically a way of looking at our socio-cultural condition, and evolution, and our present-day point in that evolution.

When Odin the Horse (an aging leader of the herd) is pushing New Horse with his body, physically, away from his mares, he is protecting just that one physical spot on the turf and the one single role in the herd that can be protected. Imagine – in the manner of looking at things in a certain way – our society and culture as a turf. Of course this turf is incomparably more complex than the turf of the horses – just as much more complex as our society and culture are more complex than theirs. There are the kings and their guards and pages; and then there's the nobility. Furthermore you could be in king's favor, or out of favor. You can feel the difference in his body's demeanor, as soon as you approach him; and in the tone of his voice as he speaks. Then there are of course also different contemporary variants of those categories and behavioral patterns, even more nuanced.

The word "habitus" in Bourdieu's theory of practice stands for embodied predispositions, which are transmitted through bodily interaction. The king steps in, and everyone bows. Naturally you bow your head as well – as he looks down upon you all from his throne.

In our modern world the turf is of course not at all that simple. There are all kinds of interests one must be sensitive to. Imagine them as composing together a kind of a field, akin to a magnetic field, which naturally orients our behavior. Different positions carry different power – as in a computer game, you acquire certain capabilities when you step into a certain role. But there are no guards and no chains; everything is just subtle play of embodied predisposition, just symbolic.

Antonio Damasio and the Descartes' Error

Antonio Damasio steps in within the third and final vignette in the thread, to help us understand how the keyword doxa fits into this picture. Damasio, a leading cognitive neuroscientist, explained in a most rigorous, scientific way something you may not have even notice, not to speak about considering it as a question to ponder about – namely why it is that you don't wake up wondering whether you should take off your pajamas and run out naked into the street. As Damasio showed, the content of our conscious mind is controlled by an embodied cognitive filter, which presents to our prefrontal cortex only those possibilities that are "acceptable" – from the embodied filters point of view. You may be getting how this all fits together?

So let's go back to doxa. The more familiar word, "orthodoxy", signifies that there is one "right" social order, and one "right" way of conceiving of the world. Doxa is a step beyond that, where the prefix "right" disappears, and where only one social order and one way of conceiving of the world is considered possible. It's what is called "the reality"!

How our systems have been evolving

Let's just mention one more thread on the left-hand side of the poster, the Chomsky – Harari – Graeber thread. The point of it is to see the societal structures that this has given us – and exactly the manner of evolving them – by engaging the Charles Darwin's or more precisely the Richard Dawkins' angle of looking at it.

Instead of going into the details – which we offer to unpack in our conversation – we offer only this intuitive reflection. If you would fancy to break into your neighbor's house, kill him and rob him of his property and treat his wife and kids in some suitably unthinkable manner, you would surely be considered a dangerous criminal and treated accordingly. If you would stand with a loudspeaker on the main square and invite your fellow citizens in a fiery speech to do similarly to the people in your neighboring country, you wold surely be considered a dangerous madman, and treated accordingly. Unless – of course – your fellow citizens have been socialized into accepting from you this manner of behaving, because it's part of the habitus that corresponds to your social position (because you are a king, a dictator, or the country's president) – in which case you may even be recorded in history as a great leader. Like Alexander the Great (whose story is told in the Graeber vignette)!

Four consequences

With apologies for just throwing all these ideas on you in this way, and the offer to develop them leisurely in our conversation, let's just illustrate what all this means by pointing to a couple of consequences or corollaries of this ad-hoc theory. (You'll recall that it's making our understanding of the world consistent with the findings of giants, and being able to understand what we perceive, that we are aiming at.)

The first consequence is that we may begin to understand what might otherwise (when one does the rational thinking part) seem completely incredible – namely our inability to see and improve our systems. To engage in systemic innovation, in other words. The point is that we've been socialized to accept them as "the reality". This socialization is pre-conscious – and we cannot conceive of doing that just as we cannot conceive of running out into the street. What is ahead of us is, in other words, precisely an evolutionary issue...

The second consequence is that the whole political game ceases to be "us against them" – and becomes all of us against the obsolete socio-cultural structures (for which our technical keyword is power structure).

The third consequence is that the idea of reality – which used to be the foundation for knowledge work – now becomes the heart of our problem. The reality, or more precisely Bourdieu's doxa, can now be perceived as what organizes the game, as the very structure of the symbolic turf – which keeps us in disempowered positions without us noticing that.

And finally the fourth consequence is an explanation of our other core theme – what's been going on with those giants, why they tend not to be heard. The problem with giants is, of course, that they occupy so much space (of the invisible symbolic turf)...

Liberation dialog

Testing a paradigm

There can hardly be a better benchmark for testing an emerging paradigm in knowledge work than religion.

The Enlightenment liberated us from a religious outlook on life, and empowered us to use our reason and pursue happiness here, in this life. Or so it seemed. But what if in the process we've misunderstood the true nature of religion and of happiness? What if a whole new chapter in both of those pursuits is now available to us?

In Federation through Stories we've witnessed Werner Heisenberg point to religion as a core element of human culture that's been eliminated by our "narrow and rigid" worldview. And we've seen Aurelio Peccei point to the improvement of "human quality" as our key strategic goal.

Can renewed religion empower us to achieve that goal?

Engaging the public

There can hardly be a better choice of theme for engaging the general public into an impassioned dialog than religion.

Strong opinions about religion are common on both sides – both among those who believe, and those who don't. Have you noticed how ready people have been to wage wars on people whose religion was a variant of their own – even when their religion forbade them to kill?

We are about to see a view on religion that reconciles all such opinions with one another – and at the same radically differs from all of them.

Completing the paradigm

The view we are about to share is that there is a phenomenon or a natural law or a meme), which is both essential for understanding the phenomenon of religion – and which can be a key element in the emerging paradigm. Something that might truly tip the scale...

Striking a conversation

It is for the above three reasons that we decided to begin the Knowledge Federation trilogy – a series of three books with corresponding dialogs, by which the ideas sketched on these pages will be shared with the general public – with this theme.

The first book will have the title "Liberation" and subtitle "Religion for the Third Millennium". All three books will have "the Third Millennium" in the subtitle; the idea is to suggest that if we want to be around for another millennium – then here is what might prove useful, or even necessary.

The Liberation turns out to have a real-life story, which weaves the core insights together and makes them accessible.

Buddhadasa's rediscovery

After just a couple of years of monastic life in Bangkok, barely in his 20s, Nguam Phanit (today known as Buddhadasa, "the slave of the Buddha", and celebrated as a reformer of Buddhism) thought "This just cannot be it!" So he made himself a home in an abandoned forest monastery near his home village Chaya, and equipped with a handful of original Pali scriptures undertook to live and practice as the Buddha did.

It was in this way that Buddhadasa found out that the essence of the Buddha's teaching was not at all as it was taught.

Buddhadasa further understood that what he was witnessing was a simple phenomenon or a "natural law", the rediscovery of which marked the inception of all religions; that all religions had a tendency to ignore this essence; and that his insight could be transformative to the modern world.

So with a growing community of like-minded monks who gathered around him over the years, Buddhadasa created the Suan Mokkh forest monastery, with a separate international extension, to make his insight available to the world.

Three life-changing insights

What did Buddhadasa experience? What did he understand? In what way can this be relevant to us?

To the conversation that we want to start by telling this story, we can offer indeed three insights, each of which alone can be life-changing. So let's highlight them by talking about each of them separately.

We'll point to them by using the traditional Pali terminology. But we could just as well use the terminology of Sufism or of any other tradition whose essence is personal transformation, not a theory about the world.

Our emotional and social life is just "suffering"

The goal of Buddhism, you might recall, is to eliminate "suffering". According to the legend, Prince Siddhartha, determined to understand suffering and eradicate its very roots, withdrew into the forest and practiced and meditated until he found the answer. The word dukkha however, which the Buddha used and which is commonly translated as "suffering", turns out to have a precise, subtle and indeed technical meaning. Dukkha is the kind of psychological suffering that is so much part of our lives, that we tend to consider it as just as unavoidable as "birth, old age, sickness and death".

This insight – to what degree worries, cravings, unconscious control strategies... mark our emotional life and our relationships with others – is profound and life-changing!

The "noble truth" that the Buddha discovered, and Buddhadasa rediscovered, was that <dukkha can be eliminated through a certain praxis which we'll call here dhamma (the Pali word for dharma).

We can here point to the nature and the role of dhamma with the help of Odin the Horse metaphor that's been introduced above: Odin the Horse is not only the territorial animal he appears to be. As his name might suggest, he also has a "divine" nature. The key is "tame the horse" – by developing a certain attitude, a certain way of looking at the world, and a certain set of habits, by which not only selfishness but even the very identification with oneself and with one's "personal interests" is erased!

You'll have no difficulty seeing how Christ's "turn the other cheek" could be an instance of that same paradoxical praxis.

Nibbana is more than the absence of sufferingdukkha

The second insight we want to highlight is that dukkha – however life-changing its elimination might be – is only part of the story, and perhaps even a relatively smaller part. This is something that the Buddhist don't emphasize, but the Sufis do.

The point here is that the same praxis that eliminates dukkha with time brings one to a certain blissful state of being, characterized not only by the absence of dukkha, but also by the presence of exalted emotions described by words like "charity", "unconditional love", "bliss" and "rapture" . The communication problem here is, of course, that the gist or the taste of it cannot be described, just as the color "green" cannot be described to a color blind.

When a person enters that state, other people may not only see it as something desirable, but also be "infected" by it. It feels so good! It should not be difficult to imagine how this could be a common inception point of world's great religions.

Our lifestyle is opposite from dhamma

"Lifestyle" may not be the best word here. So let's rather talk about the systems that define the ecology in which our lives are lived: the competitive economy, the advertising, the entertainment industry... Compare them with the life in a forest monastery and you might get the idea.

Our point is of course not that we should all move to a forest and become monks.

Our point is that we can, and need to, develop a body of knowledge about the nature of the human condition, and about its various possibilities

And then use that knowledge to develop our systems, and our culture, and its ecology.

Seeing the world as it is

Buddhadasa does not use the word "enlightenment". He points to the effect of the mentioned praxis as "seeing the world as it is".

You might now revisit what we've told above, why we are not those "objective observers" and those "rational choice" makers as Descartes and others believed and made us believe. Recall now Damasio: There's a socialized, embodied cognitive filter that controls what we are able to rationalize and conceive of.

Imagine if dhamma is – in addition to what's been said above – also a way to reprogram or erase this filter – a way to liberate ourselves from socialized "cognitive commitments"?

Imagine if it turns out that what we believed to accomplish by looking at the world through the "objective" prism of "the scientific method" – cannot really be accomplished without some of this quintessentially "religious" practice, of serving the world instead of just serving ourselves!

And wouldn't this then also explain the vignette about Doug Engelbart and other giants? Imagine if the "creative genius" is in essence not a person who is so much more intelligent than others – but a one who can "see the world as it is" – because his priorities, and hence his embodied filters, are set differently!

Religion beyond belief

You'll have no difficulty putting these two stories together: A person discovers dhamma (or whatever this is called in his or her region), becomes "enlightened", a magnet attracting people, manifesting a better way to be. The movement turns into an institution. Our social ecology turns the institution into a turf, and a belief...

In the Liberation book we show how a roadmap for an informed "pursuit of happiness" can be developed by simply federating relevant experiences from a variety of ancient and modern traditions – including modern psychoanalysis, and what F.M. Alexander taught and various others. What transpires is that a whole range of human experience is possible, which we've nicknamed "happiness between one and plus infinity", to signal that what we've known and pursued so far is only between "zero" (no happiness at all) and "one" ("normal" happiness, as we see around us, and as we've experienced it).

When the insight of the Buddha, as explained by Buddhadasa (and also the teaching of Christ, and of other giants of religion) are liberated from the 'worldview puzzle' and placed into that one, they turn out to complete it quite perfectly. So that it all makes perfect sense!

The details are beyond this short essay and left to our conversations. For now just observe how beautifully this completes our larger vision, of an Enlightenment-like change triggered by an up-to-date approach to knowledge.

Discerning the elephant

Utility was the watchword of the time. (...) Confidence in the scientific method and in rational thinking replaced all other safeguards of the human mind.

When that is corrected, when "utility" becomes informed in a proper way, it comes – as we have seen – to quite similar ethical principles as the ones that were upheld in traditions and by "other safeguards of the human mind"; and now perhaps much more stably and securely.

We can now begin to see not only how new understanding of religion, social justice, democracy and other institutions becomes within reach – but also how this all may fit together snuggly into a coherent new order of things.

And how "utility" may perhaps later even be transcended – when the reason understands that developing the kind of ethics we've just been talking about is the securest way to both personal and societal wholeness.

Isn't that a natural way how Peccei's "great cultural renewal" may become reality?

Knowledge federation dialog

Large change made easy

Donella Meadows talked about systemic leverage points as those places within a complex system "where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything". She identified "the mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise" as the most impactful kind of systemic leverage points. She identified specifically working with the "power to transcend paradigms" – i.e. with the very fundamental assumptions and ways of being out of which paradigms emerge – as the most impactful way to intervene into systems.

We are proposing to approach and handle our contemporary condition in this most powerful way.

If you've been through some of the details of our proposal, then you'll be aware that we are not proposing a "new paradigm" that would be a new worldview and a new method for creating truth and worldview. Rather, our proposal is quite literally what Donella was advocating – namely an approach to knowledge that transcends holding on to any fixed way of looking at the world. And introducing instead a mindset and a set of assumptions and practices that empower us to evolve our knowledge and our institutionalized practices, in knowledge work and beyond, freely – by building on existing knowledge.

In addition to being far more potentially effective than the conventional problem-based or issue-based approaches (where we wrestle with a specific issue such as the climate change or the poverty), this approach has the added advantage of being far more potentially effective in engaging our enthusiasm, entrepreneurial spirit and creativity.

A case for academic self-reflection and self-organization

The proposed strategy has, furthermore, a natural way to begin – namely by academic self-reflection and self-organization. And that is, of course, the cause to which this website is dedicated, and this specific dialog is offered.

The website – whose role is to prime the dialog – is there to show that (just as the case was in Newton's time) all is ready for a fundamental and thorough change in the way in which knowledge is conceived of, created and used.

The pragmatic reasons for taking such a step are overwhelming.

What are the scientists to do next?

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.

Vannevar Bush was an early computing machinery pioneer, who before the World War II became the MIT professor and dean, and who during the war served as the leader of the entire US scientific effort – supervising about 6000 chosen scientists, and making sure that we are a step ahead in terms of technology and weaponry, including the bomb.

In 1945 this scientific strategist par excellence wrote a scientific strategy article, titled As We May Think, from which the above excerpt is taken. The war having been won, Bush warned, there still remains a strategically central issue, which the scientists need to focus on and resolve – and he described what we've been calling knowledge federation quite precisely.

Subsequent to 1945, the academic publishing virtually exploded in intensity and volume (see the "Largest contribution to knowledge" vignette in Federation through Applications).

And we became aware of the global issues, which demand that come out of our boxes and think and behave differently. Who will give the humanity the orientation it urgently needs? Who will create and ignite the new ethos of systemic self-organization, beyond what the reliance on "the invisible hand" has given us? Quite exactly a half-century ago Erich Jantsch submitted (to the MIT authorities, urging them to embrace this agenda) his proposal for the "trans-disciplinary university", pointing to the urgent need that

the university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing the society's capacity for continuous self-renewal.

Our counter-argument

There is a usual argument that the academic people use against transdisciplinarity – that it is not in a proper sense academic (well-founded epistemologically, performed with rigorous and well-founded methods, building on existing knowledge, academically "deep" or non-trivial etc.).

We have demonstrated that a fundamentally new transdisciplinary approach to knowledge can be created which is

• more solidly epistemologically founded than conventional disciplinary research
• builds more properly on existing academic insights
• invites the depth and creativity that characterized early science (unlike "plagiarizing the past")

We are not starting a turf strife

Please observe that – when submitting our proposal as bluntly as we just did – we remain most careful not to start a turf strife. That would only burry us deeper in the paradigm we have undertaken to leave.

Our reason for speaking in this way is, rather, that our global and human condition is such that it demands clarity. And because the accommodating way of being we've created, where "anything goes", is just what the turf strife way of working and being has given us, what we learned to do in order to be able to claim "our" part of the turf.

The revolution we want us to be part of is unlike all revolutions in the past. It is a revolution in awareness; and in the way our ethics and action interact; and above all – in the way we present ourselves as cells to the intricate tissues that form our society.

We offer our very best to this revolution. And we leave a no-strings-attached space for you to step in. We apply the best of ourselves to setting a stage – which will invite the best of yourself to manifest. And we bring our toys to share. How will you present yourself on this stage? Which toys will you pick? In what way will you play? We leave all that entirely to you to decide.

We will not change the world

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has", wrote Margaret Mead. You will find evidence of our thoughtfulness and commitment on these pages.

And yet it is clear to us, and it should be clear to you too, that we cannot change the world. The world is not only us – it is all of us together!

So if the world will change, that will be a result of your doing; of your thoughtfulness and commitment!

We've been socialized to think and act within systems. To conform to the worldview we've been socialized to accept as "reality". Deviating from this feels unnatural; it hurts – and yet that is the re-evolutionary next step that those of us who can now simply must take!

The rest will be just fun!

So see if you can see knowledge federation as your project, not ours.

We shall from here on be implementing our back seat policy – holding onto an advisory role, and offering our insights and experiences to people worldwide who'll want to step in and take initiative along this most timely of agendas.

Collaboration is to the emerging paradigm as competition is to the old one. In Norway (this website is hosted at the University of Oslo) there is a word – dugnad – for the kind of collaboration that brings together the people in a neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon, to gather fallen leaves and branches and do small repairs in the commons, and then share a meal together.

If you'll invite us to a dugnad – whose purpose is to enkindle society-wide renewal through suitably conceived situated local action – we shall be recognisant that you've taken the torch we are passing to you from the historical giants, and glad to accept.