changed for all of humanity.
safe ground.
the World Trade Center as an act
of war, others have called it a
crime against humanity.
preparation for publication. The words were written
can evaluate the eternal contest of weapons as anything but the sheerest waste and
the sheerest folly. It has been simply our only means of final arbitration. Any man
can suggest reasonable alternatives to the judgment of arms. But we are not
creatures of reason except in our own eyes.”1
today. This organization might perform all the positive functions of present government
with none of the negative consequences. It might exist to serve humanity as community as
well as humanity as individuals.
this new system of synergic governance might be called the Life Trust
Guardians. It could seek
as its primary goal to provide safety from crime for all of
humanity.
homes or their cars. And when no one worried about public safety.
the garage and then finally setting the house alarm. If I park downtown in our larger cities,
or find myself on any public street at night I have concerns for my safety and I am a
healthy 6’3” male weighing over 250 pounds. Whenever I park my car I code in the
ignition lock, place and lock the “The Club” on the steering wheel, then exit and lock the
doors. And still I worry about safety.
Robert Ardrey, African Genesis, 1961
for locks — on homes or cars. Imagine a world where children are safe anywhere and
everywhere — a world without crime — a world without war.
but I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us
and the world will live as one.”2
behavior is adversary action and it cannot be contained and eliminated by adversary
action by the state. The means must be consistent with the ends. A synergic future will not
include “Robocop”. The solution to crime and war is not more powerful weapons. It is
the elimination of weapons.
education and more effective rehabilitation applied synergically to an erring humanity.
science. Punishment of evil and badness has been the human way for all of the 5,000,000
years of our history. It clearly does not work. If it did, we would have noevil or badness
in the world. We are misunderstanding the human condition.
and the Adversary
versus Synergic Processing of Mistakes. These principles serve as preamble to an
understanding the synergic mechanismsfor public safety.
John Lennon
speaking in his famous public television series the Ascent of
Man3said:
material world. One achievement of physics in the Twentieth Century has
been to prove that that aim is unattainable. There is no absolute knowledge
and those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the
door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.
This is the human condition; and that is what Quantum Physics says. I mean
that literally.
microscope, where the rays are so concentrated that we no longer know
whether to call them waves or particles. Electrons are fired at an object, and
they trace its outline like a knife-thrower at a fair. The smallest object that
has ever been seen is a single atom of thorium. It is spectacular.
fair, even the hardest electrons do not give a hard outline. The perfect image is
still as remote as the distant stars.
we devise more precise instruments with which to observe nature with more
fineness and when we look at the observations, we are discomfited to see that
they are still fuzzy, and we feel that we are as uncertain as ever.
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Little, Brown & Company, New York, 1976
every time we come within sight of it.
contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars.
Gauss’ observatory at Göttingen was built about 1807. Throughout his life
and ever since (the best part of 200 years) astronomical instruments have
been improved.
seems to us that we are closer and closer to finding it precisely. But when we
actually compare our individual observations today, we are astonished and
chagrined to find them as scattered within themselves as ever.
ourselves have God’s view. But it turns out that the errors cannot be taken
out of the observations. And that is true of stars, or atoms, or just looking at
somebody’s picture, or hearing the report of somebody’s speech.”4
Nature. This in fact is theonly cause of mistakes.
teaches us that every human belief is an assumption. We can
never know for sure. We can never know ALL.
You did not check under the chair to see if it had broken since its last use. When you
ate lunch at your favorite restaurant last week, you assumed the waitress had washed
her hands. You assumed the cook did not have hepatitis. If you had assumed
otherwise, you would not have walked into that restaurant. You would not have eaten
your lunch. We humans assume. Herein lies our uncertainty— that’s all we humans
can do. There is nothing wrong in our assuming, we are simply obeying a fundamental
‘law’ of Nature.
of Non-Allnessmeans that we humans make all of our decisions with incomplete and
imperfect knowing. We make every choice without all the information. All humans live
and act in state of ignorance.
those who make mistakes are bad. They are stupid or careless — lazy or incompetent
— just no damn good. If they were good, they wouldn’t make mistakes. Everyone knows
that. Decent people don’t make mistakes. This is nearly a universal belief.
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man,, 1976, ibid
5Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, The Colonial Press Inc., Clinton, Mass., 1933-48
Korzybski coined the word space-binding to describe the world of the animal. In the
world of the animal, causeand effectcan not be distinguished from each other. They
are the same — they equaleach other — they are identical. If the effectof a
mistake isbad, then the causeof a mistake is also bad. Human intelligence is build
on animal intelligence. All humans have a space-mind. It is a powerful and often
dominant part of our human intelligence. As children the space-mind is primary. The
uniquely human mind creates what Korzybski called the world of Time-binding. The
time-minddoesn’t even begin to become operational in children until they reach the
age of four.
mistakes as small children. If I stumble while running, I get hurt and that isbad. If
an animal is running for its life and stumbles, it dies and that isbad. For space-
binders, mistakes are a part of bad space.
space-binder, but also the lives of others in the group — pack, pride, herd, or troop.
Therefore the result of a mistake was often bad, and not just for the individual, but for
others in the group as well. Since 99.9% of all human history has been adversary—
99.9% of our history dominated by space-binding, it is no wonder that we humans have
believed for countless centuries that mistakes arebad.
by our human religions. God is good. God is omniscience— ALL knowing. God
makes no mistakes. He is perfect. We humans are admonished to be as God-like as
possible. If making no mistakes is ‘good’, then obviously making mistakes is ‘bad’.
Our religions institutionalized the adversary processing of mistakes — Sin, Hellfire,
and Damnation.
the ‘objective science’ of Galileo, Kepler, Hooke, and Newton was a ‘perfect’ Universe.
Newton’s System of the Worlds described a precision clockwork perfection that
controlled all in Universe. If the Universe is perfect, then humans too must evolve
towards perfection.
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