Walking and chewing gum at the same time in Ukraine: A Modest Proposal
A Modest Proposal: Building a National Conversation of Change for Ukraine’s Disaporia
THE FORUM on Democracy
Lowell.ChristyPhD@gmail.com 301 529-0474
This is not a classic propaganda broadcast or even America’s Radio Free Europe or Radio Liberty during the Cold War; it is the work of a Nation. This Modest Proposal models itself after the conversations leading up to America's Revolutionary War and struggles to build a Nation.
Building upon Edmund Burke’s insight “A Nation is a Conversation between THE PAST, THE PRESENT & THE FUTURE” this Modest Proposal, utilizing today’s advanced technologies, is designed as a two-way, participatory system of trusted identity formation and envisioning of linkages between Ukraine’s past, its present realities and its future possibilities. Linking the 8 million refugees outside Ukraine with those displaced within Ukraine, the proposal is designed to catalyze conversations of learning about their vision of a Ukraine with its unique form of governing, prospering and paving the way to the Ukrainian Experiment in Democratic processes
Design considerations for a Modest Proposal:
This is a Global Conversation of Ukrainians to design the home they will live in and be governed by
The Conversation with, among and between Ukrainians, will be established with help from America assisted by American and Ukrainian non-profits and international universities facilitating the conversation
Discussion focuses on the fourth branch of Government, Citizens; the power paradigm does not include Citizens
Descriptive not prescriptive; a medium is required instead of propaganda channels; the
importance of language and culture must be recognized because this is about how a people grind the lens of identity and make sense of the worldDon't confuse Russia with Putin; however, the Russian heritage in language and history cannot be ignored e.g., Democracy, Russian, Slavic
The 250 year conversation between Americans and their history in the design of a nation will be shared as Ukrainians design their own unique democracy
There is a continuum from authoritarianism to democracy where the questions of the conversation are Who are We? Where are We? Why are We?
A Global Conversation between Freedom Seeking People finding the paths from Slaves to Serls, from Serfs to Subjects building bridges to move from Subjects to Citizens
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Walking & Chewing Gum at the Same Time in Ukraine: A Modest Proposal
Lowell F. Christy Jr. Ph.D. & Valarie C. Lamont PhD
THE FORUM on democracy
"The myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth.... It is a myth, which, if everyone believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various forms of disaster. (G. Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind")
Introduction
American Foreign Policy has proven that it can provide the tools of War to Ukraine (Walk) but can it simultaneously plan Peace with the necessary multitasking of a successful democratic society (Chew)? Our recent history with over professionalization of how we conduct wars and linear, over politicized thinking says, "the Fog of Peace arises from poor thinking in the Fog of War." The problem of individuals and institutions to see & think beyond a single minded, mission orientation in a complex world is THE central national security concern constituting an existential threat not only to America but those allied and supported by the United States.
Understanding the nature of the cultural conversation before, during and after a fight for freedom distinguishes America's Revolutionary Generation from mere archaic total domination and empire building. This distinction makes all the difference in the world - a world of dynamic, evolving forms of governing that led to Peace.
The way Ukraine approaches the complexity of modern warfare and is fighting for a different, more open future, could, ironically, remind America what is so different, yes exceptional, about how democratic individuals and institutions see and think. Ukraine’s fight requires all Americans and those we aid to learn the hard-fought lessons of how the seeds of peace are born in the conduct of wars.
A Modest Proposal*
In the genuinely just cause of defense of Ukraine, America, in partnership and coordination with the Ukrainian Diaspora and those remaining in-country, requires expanded, clearly articulated objectives about how we conduct the war AND the paths of peace. A narrow drip-feed of western military equipment accomplishes Austin’s “bleed Russia dry” and Blinken’s limited objective of returning Ukraine to a misshapen map of 24 February 2022. The core idea is a structured two-way interactive Citizens Conversation about peace and democracy whose Ukrainian uniqueness will emerge as the conversations evolve.
This is a strategy, together with Ukrainians, beyond providing weapons and intelligence to clear the Fog of War, which clears a path to democracy. What is proposed is mobilization of the millions of the Ukrainian Diaspora into a technology enabled, networked Commons engaging in a global conversation of what a democracy would look like for their country. The six million Ukrainian refugees in Europe and the over one million refugees and those of Ukrainian ancestry in the United States would begin a Global Conversation of Change. This is what a self-organizing civic education would look like for the RIGHTS and ESPONSIBILITIES of the Ukrainian CITIZEN. They would be asking the identity and unity questions of “Who are We (Ukrainians)? Where are We? and Why are We? similar to what America did in our two Revolutions that created the American Experiment.
What would A Modest Proposal be like?
This is not a classic propaganda broadcast or even America’s Radio Free Europe or Radio Liberty during the Cold War. This is not about the news or the marketing angle of "Go Democracy"; it is the work of a Nation. Classic news channels as one way "feeds" is inappropriate and ultimately destructive unless designed as a two-way, participatory system of trusted identity formation and envisioning of the linkages between the past, present and future.
Design consideration for a Modest Proposal:
This is a Global Conversation of Ukrainians to design the home they will live in and be governed by
The Conversation with, among and between Ukrainians, will be established with help from America assisted by American non-profits and international universities facilitating the conversation
Discussion focuses on the fourth branch of Government, Citizens; the power paradigm does not include Citizens
Descriptive not prescriptive; a medium is required instead of propaganda channels; the
importance of language and culture must be recognized because this is about how a people grind the lens and make sense of the worldDon't confuse Russia with Putin; however, the Russian heritage in language and history cannot be ignored
All Ukrainian voices of the Ukraine must be recognized e.g., Democracy, Russian, Slavic
The conversation between Americans and their history in the design of a nation will be shared as Ukrainians design their own unique democracy
There is a continuum from authoritarianism to democracy presenting a full spectrum of observation, orientation, decisions, and action but the media focuses only on the binary
The questions of the conversation are Who are We? Where are We? Why are We?
How to Initiate:
The Senate Armed Service Committee and the intelligence agencies must be convened with the Ukrainian Embassy facilitated by The Forum on Democracy ensuring that we move from Information Age thinking to a democratically based Communication medium
Convener of conversation must be Ukrainian
Communication nodes by region and country must be identified, e.g., the questions to be asked, the processes of moderating conversations and the information technology to summarize and feedback the fruits of conversation
These conversations are conversations of generations whereby this Modest Proposal sets the stage for generational democracy and requiring incorporation of the voices of the voiceless
Technical assistance to be selected includes networks, audio, video and the AI and ML grouping of conversations (ChatGPT) enabling learning of how to construct the home wherein they will live
Why the Proposal Requires Different Thinking
As Rudyard Kipling once said, “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” Marshall McLuhan's statement that the medium is the message has been lost in today's rapid cybernetics advances invalidating our own senses and necessary conversations in a democracy to make sense of the world. As McLuhan emphasized, we can know the nature and characteristics of anything we conceive or create (the medium) by virtue of the changes that result from it (the message).
McLuhan warns us that we are often distracted by the content of a medium, which blinds us to the character of the medium that forms it. Thus, the message of a newscast is not the news stories themselves, but a change in the public attitude towards a subject of the news or the creation of a climate of fear as a result of the news. Language shapes our senses. Language is the context in which we see things and give meaning and significance. The medium of language extends our thoughts from our mind out to others. Language is a complete package of content and context; through the context you are able to unpack the sentence but we do not see how the lens forms the information. Therefore, in conversation we can unwittingly be manipulated by others placing new or different ways of unpacking the same sentence. Critical conversation must criticize its own lens which may warp it.
Marshall McLuhan’s phrase sums up that the medium through which we choose to communicate holds as much, if not more, value than the message itself. How we communicate with each other defines who we are and constitutes so much of what makes a culture and an individual unique. It was McLuhan who first spoke about technology and communication having the ability to create a “global village.” But this global village is a primitive one of drumbeats and singular thinking via the power paradigm. The form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.
Cautionary Tale of the Deficiency of Current Media and Journalism
The design of the Modest Proposal must beware and be aware of Mediatization. Mediazation is the progressive process whereby "our senses have gone outside us; Big Brother goes inside." ("The Gutenberg Galaxy") What is happening with the weaponization of the internet as a half formed Cybernetic Revolution gone bad, is that it is becoming a tool of control by Big Business and Big Governments.
Beyond the crude attempts at propaganda and its repetitious "Big Lie", advanced technologically enabled State(s) of Control has learned its lesson. The lesson is “Why control the body with external force (very bloody) when all we need is a bloodless revolution of a "civil" mind trip to the Disneyland of our future Dystopia.``
Deficiencies of the theories and designs of an infantile Age of Information (1.0) with its emphasis on Artificial Intelligence and Mechanical Learning are not conducive to democracy's requirement of Natural and Collective Intelligence of, by and for the People. The proposal is based on a more advanced age of thinking of the 1700s when the Founders of the American Experiment created the designs for the Age of Communications 2.0. The proposed Conversation of Change requires us to Re-discover how the architecture of the 800-year march from Slaves to Serfs from Serfs to Subjects and Subjects to Citizens. Only in the advanced state of how to think and counter power and its evil offspring can we hope for the evolutionary and transformative exceptionalism of democratic framing of our cultural context, alias the Medium.
Instead of us outsourcing our senses to those behind the red curtain of power, a democracy demands pragmatism and empiricism of grounding of senses in both experience, individual experience going through the value-added processes of conversations of learning. The Unfinished Revolution of Cybernetics is a formula for disaster, placing simple, reductive, analytic thinking in the hands of the state and the powerful. It is as though we are driving on a linear map in a universe of curves and changes.
This is NOT a Governmental function of the State with its tools being that of abstraction, external imposition and dynamics of power. This distinction that America learned with great difficulty but rapidly was the conversational building of a Nation. This requires a unique form of a National Conversation of Change. This is Edmund Burke's "A Nation is a Conversation Between the Living, the Dead and the Unborn”.
McLuhan’s concern of the coming global village and the concern behind this Modest Proposal is for the voices of the voiceless of Ukrainians (We the People) to orchestrate the vision and framework of a working democracy.
A Conversation Preventing the repetition of the State and Authoritarianism repeating the history of the devastation of Ukraine in the 1920’s and 1930’s
Above is a statue of a little girl that symbolizes Holodomor**, the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. Holodomor cuts deep into Ukraine’s psyche. The sculpture "The bitter memory of childhood", also known as "the girl with five ears of grain", stands outside the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide. It symbolizes the memory of 3.5 million children killed by starvation during the genocide of the Ukrainian nation in 1932–1933, as well as of those who survived but did not have a childhood. The famine was caused by Stalin, who exported Ukraine’s grain to earn hard currency, leaving millions of Ukrainians to starve to death. This occurred in the breadbasket of Europe.
The story of the famine was brought to the rest of the world by a young Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, who single-handedly reported on the widespread starvation in Ukraine. This is the proper role of journalism. But the proposed National Conversation of Change requires us to move beyond journalism into creation of technologies of empowerment, enablement of and by everybody. The task of this Modest Proposal is creating the governing cultural context and home wherein Ukrainians will live. A democracy demands a Revolution of the Mind via a global conversation of change. Americans and Ukrainians in conversation can learn from one another. It demands no less.
Countering the “powernic” Ideology and the narrowing of Intelligence with a global conversation on democracy
Those who wear red stained glasses of the power paradigm cannot see the invisible dynamics of a democracy. What is it about democracies that can flip the odds against power? What are the blind spots of the multiple "intelligence" agencies busy counting tanks while the Soviet Union collapsed as Kennan predicted in the US "Containment" Strategy. Looking through the lens of power we see two recent failures including supposed resistance of the Afghan military to hold back the Taliban and the news comments reaffirming the idea "It's a walk in the park for Russia. The Russian army is simply driving to Kyiv literally unopposed." What about those who only see the organization and force of "arms" when the Mind of a People is equally important in the path to peace. This Modest Proposal must be discussed and acted upon.
Discussion of the Proposal
This global Citizens Conversation would be creating expectations, guardrails and guideposts defining the union of individuals into an operational democracy. The thrust and parry of dialogue with others establishes the necessary conversation Commons for both the work of a Nation and a State to be feasible. This global "design of our New Democracy" network embodies a maxim about social change from Margaret Mead, one of the co-founders of whole Cybernetics dealing with living systems.
The power of social movements speaks to the power of people mobilization; deep change requires the voice of the people from a diversity of places mandating the necessary variety of a well-functioning democracy. This focuses on deep conversations about nontrivial subjects over a long period of time. The Art of Organization implied by Mead’s conversations counters Nature’s entropy of chaos and dissolution. The art of a democratic conversation is the ability to create new rules and exits from dysfunctional patterns and the consequences of designs gone astray.
This organizing process among trusted individuals seeking the union of the parts and the whole of a nation, is part and parcel of this medium for building or rebuilding a new democracy. It leads to a clear platform for change and sustainability of change, incorporating the diversity needed to create a "more perfect union”. Without this, the contrarians, challengers, and disruptors devolve into total chaos.
Self-organizing giving voice to the voiceless was the radical foundation of both the first American Revolution against physical oppression and the Second American Revolution of Mind against tyranny. This is the collective barn raising of complex conversations, interactions, and building of the institutional habitat all democracies must live within. It is a globally enabled Citizen’s Conversation of Peace enabled through democratic processes. The collective intelligence of the Ukrainian People and their example may indeed create their own fledgling democracy and maybe even reinvigorate one that has grown old, and fragile after 250 years.
Why was Democracy Created as a Social, Political and Cultural Therapeutics?
We must answer the question, "Why Democratic forms of governing?”
The needed global dialogue is not the rhetorical question of "Where do you stand? That is only asked by superficial pollsters and passion manipulating politicians. That question freezes a People into inanimate objects so easily played in the Ponzi game of ideas and pawns in the bloody wet dreams of politicians.
The question of Walt Whitman of the New Americans was, "How do you move? The choreography, the dance of governing, is not as an audience watching with passive prurient interest the clash against today's enemy or the fear inducing clash of civilizations. The movement of a democracy is activation of the latent agency and possibilities of new forms in the Art of Assembly.
In a democracy, self-governing creates the CITIZEN. Yes, freedom of individual atoms, to do any damned thing one pleases, is seductive. But that is only a steppingstone to the revolutionary thinking demanded in a democracy. For Freedom is never enough. Individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms have absolute freedom, but their freedom is actualized only when they self-assemble into a union of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms forming a new level of creation capable of doing so much more. Water is life giving and can change into vapor, liquid and solid. A democracy that is healthy and thriving acts as a catalyst whispering to those bathed in freedom to be so much more than your isolated freedom.
A healthy Democracy is a whisperer to the People to learn de Tocqueville's Art of Assembly. This is not the smarts to be social engineers controlling what is real or not but a god like capacity of the intelligence of a system of governing to act like Nature and create living systems, not artificially, genetically modified life.
There is a reason why the Founders of the American Experiment wrote the Declaration of Independence which in its first sentence based the case for freedom upon "The Laws of Nature And the God of Nature" not upon dependence on human made laws. But as the Founding Generation understood in ten short years (1781-1791), freedom from England was not enough. It required democratic flexibility of laws and regulations to allow the movement from the absolute State to a conversation listening to the voices of both the powerful and powerless Citizens to meet the ever changing demands in the Zone of Survival.
A democracy requires checks and balances through the three branches of government needed to see dangers to its identity and integrity from both internal and external sources. The Citizen is the fourth branch of government to see the dangers ensuring the integrity of both internal and external sources. This creates an advanced immune system of Citizens to see what is missing in the fabric of society and what will do harm to the sacred commerce between the parts and whole of complex living systems. The Founders, who understood Joyce’s "History is a nightmare from which we do not awake", placed "We the People" front and center before the Constitutional details of the sacred processes of government.
The People's tool of choice is the deep conversation of a democracy. It is weaving the dependencies and one's independence into each generation’s whole living tapestry of interdependence. Peace can only arise through conversations based on confirming real states both inside and outside the halls of power.
Gradually democratic change, like water against granite, will move mountains. As written on the stone of the Martin Luther King Memorial, “We will be able to hue out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” Each word in a democracy is that pebble to wear away our despair and muddled thinking. When the conversations of a People flow, like a mighty river, the barriers that once stood to a different future fall. Only then can the collective intelligence of conversations allow us to dance away from impending doom and pivot with new answers to old questions.
The challenge is to build human living systems amidst all other living systems, not in the walled citadels of words and eyes covered with horse blinders. Put simply, poorly designed government requires truth to be dumb downed, so reality is controlled. It is an engineer's task to first throw out complexity, so the manufactured mechanistic context is under absolute control. Thereafter all the content, lies and demands make perfect sense.
If we think that we are acting like gods with all our tools of power, we are fooling ourselves if we do not start thinking like gods. A democracy, by flipping the script of power over to the empowering questions of power OF, Power BY & power FOR of empowering governing processes, frees People from the Medusa like stare that freezes you and me into ivory pawn.
So, what is a democracy? Why should citizens labor when the easy path of being consumers, of outsourcing our minds and bodies to others who profess wisdom, is so seductive?
A democracy is a whisperer of a People's agency to right wrongs, to pass over the barrier of death a legacy worthy of inheritance by our children and children's children. For the Founding Generation of the American Experiment in self-governing, it transformed the atomistic "I s" of individuals into an organic, living systems of "WE". It replaces the smarts of the powerful, who can corrupt the world by engraving yesterday's answers into the graveyards of today. The Art of Assembly requires a necessary intelligence capable of evolving into new, complex lifeforms.
So, these transformative processes of a DEMOCRACY turn the power-driven alchemist dream of turning lead into gold into the political alchemy of transforming the Common Man and Woman into the Uncommon, and the ordinary into the Extraordinary. The Exceptionalism of democratic processes are not a recipe or a formula to control Nature and the world; it is a whisperer of the potential of human intelligence.
We need more tools in our foreign policy toolbox, not fewer
We lack an integrated strategy arising from the way Ukraine is uniquely fighting this war of attrition forgetting how America pursued peace during and immediately after our Revolutionary War, Civil War and World War II. One-dimensional wars, focusing solely on the physics of power, detrimentally impacts the long-term survival of Ukraine and, ironically, America's experiment with democracy.
Today, there are only two viable strategies both solely focused on winning the physical war. The US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, stated: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kind of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” This is the military option of bleeding Russia dry with its one dimensional, opportunistic, revenge school of thought. The other school of "Stop the world and return to before this all began" is embodied in Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, outlining limits of US support, “Our focus is on continuing to do what we’ve been doing, which is to make sure that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself, what it needs to push back against the Russian aggression, to take back territory that’s been seized from it since February 24th.” Sorry, Crimea and former Russian areas may be a bridge too far. Both strategies may be necessary in the short term but ultimately insufficient to create a beacon of democracy with its authoritarian neighbors to the East and North.
Neither strategy embodies building the infrastructure for peace. Both strategies ignore the whole living system of individual minds and the collective cultural Mind undergoing the trauma of war. What is needed is a deeper, whole systems change in thinking, enabled, and grounded by the way a healthy democracy functions. The fallacy of one-dimensional thinking is that power embodied in our war machines and deficient information technologies spinning out of Silicon Valley are sufficient for deep systems change to democratic societies. These deficiencies are evidenced in modern failures.
As was said in Congressional testimony by Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of U.S. Command in Africa, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2017: “ Many people, especially those in uniform, have said we can’t kill our way to victory here.” What was true concerning ISIS and Boko Haran terrorism also is applicable to an autocrat like Putin who is willing to commit not only unlimited Russian lives but the whole country to "win."
Simple Force and Complicated Government and the Conversational Arts of Complex War & Peace
How can we make sense of the "against all odds" Ukraine still standing a year after the Russian invasion and why the American Revolution and its Experiment in democracy is still around 250 years on:
Why Ukraine and Zelensky could survive for so long when the pundits and odds makers gave them five days like the ill-fated Afghan fall of Kabul.
One surely could not comprehend how a ragtag Minuteman Militia of thirteen colonies hugging the Atlantic coast could take on the greatest military, political and economic power of the day and win.
One would be labeled crazy to believe that an American Declaration of Independence leading to a destructive war would lead to a Constitution and radically new form of self-governing based on sovereignty of the People and still exist 250 years on.
These facts of history do indeed go against the normal, everyday expectations and ways we see & think where "Might Makes Right".
It also takes Uncommon Sense to realize that simplistic, linear thinking infecting political decisions combined with quantitative business efficiency markers of body counts and overwhelming force complete with technological superiority would result in:
The graveyard of Empires in Afghanistan for the British, the Soviets and the US Allied Powers. When military brass was asked at a Congressional Oversight hearing how many tanks the Taliban had, the response was "none”, how many airplanes? “none"; advanced computer and information technology? "they did have their cell phones."
In the long wars of choice in Iraq or Putin's invasion of Ukraine, rational expectations of installing a democratic beacon in the Middle East or the new Soviet empire in Ukraine are characterized by simplistic thinking by neocons on both sides. Their hubris was exposed by a lack of understanding the complexity of systems so different than their mindset.
Understanding the complexity of different systems so different from one’s mindset is the keystone of a democratic way of thinking.
A way of thinking about patterns and how those patterns or circuits become embedded in the way we see and think requires a Systems Academy for foreign policy development and, more importantly, this must be grounded in the deep conversations of a people rebuilding their nation. These conversations allow us to see the limits of our thinking and the new possibilities out of renewing our perceptions…the work of democracy.
A Timeline of Thinking Differently
How we learn from history determines the possibilities of a more equitable and just future. It was the core insight of George Orwell who understood that history was on the forefront of the cultural wars of today. Those seeking to seduce the human mind and yoke it into a forced march into a monochromatic history is embodied in his insight that those who control the present control the past and those who control the past control the future. Tyrannical history forms our identity which then becomes our destiny unless we understand how to break out of current cybernetic systems embedded in time.
We are all Children of the Enlightenment. The question is which one? Continental Europe pledged allegiance to rationality and linear progress. Anglo-Saxons forged with an eight-hundred-year march from Serfs to Subjects. The pragmatism of the Scottish Enlightenment saw the human body as a self-regulatory whole living system. These ideas informed the American Experiment, moving the bar from subjects with a few rights to self-governing citizens of the body politic, creating a radically different form of perception and whole systems thinking that is hard to comprehend. Three words explain the processes behind these antidotes to raw power - Cybernetics, Systems & Design.
It is beyond the scope of this article to go into the different forms of thinking in Cybernetics, Systems & Design but three stories will point to the radical shift from externally imposed power and empowerment of the agency of a whole living system of People in a democratic form of governing.
Story One: The Mindset of Zelensky and the Ukrainian People
Ukraine exemplifies a form of warfare separating the physics of power and force on the battlefield from the equally important other half of the equation, of peace and seeds of peace. Zelensky has been labeled an actor, as he once was. But the script he is creating and the script behind the People's colored revolution is distinguished from the default European historical reliance on the power paradigm of wars and colonization. The challenge that Ukraine and US face goes beyond the normal world where the physics of power is the way a State gets work done and wins wars. The Russians exemplify the old way of thinking and the Russian reliance on the power paradigm. The State gets work done through force of laws and deadly force but a Nation, as seen in the unique American Revolution, redefined the Nation-State. Two paradigms are being played out to the surprise of “Might is Right.”
In the American Experiment, the democratic turn of Mind. went beyond mere “freedom from” physical constraint into the realm of the Mind of a Nation. This redefined the Nation-State relationship. The mindset of the power paradigm based in physics suffers from mission creep to think that the laws of physics apply to the realm of the mind. As we move from physics to how chemical reactions occur, to how biological systems form and evolve, to how humans design their culture and institutions, the way each differing systems operates, changes the frame of mind. The state becomes stuck in the tangible yet universal laws of physics which may define galactic forces and microscopic elements; but a democracy moves beyond the absolutism of physics. A democracy understands differences that the human consciousness denies in its everyday experiences of kicking stones. In complex adaptive living systems, those supposed stones kick back.
Zelensky understands this way of thinking; he grew up around the kitchen table with two parents who are scholars of how information systems are designed - Cybernetics. He is innovative on the technology side, but technology alone is not sufficient to move into the realm of peace and rebuilding a democratic nation. He and the Ukrainians have the need of innovations about information and cybernetics imbedded in drones and other new forms of warfare. The challenge is to go beyond this necessary thinking creating a conversation about peace and their form of democracy. In part, Ukraine needs to understand the successes and failures of how America both thought and fought before our recent legacy of winning wars and losing the peace.
Story Two: The Tale of Two World Wars and Thinking Patterns that Made all the Difference.
How America thought and fought in world wars is a study in contrasts: a lesson in thinking about consequences when the power paradigm is the only option and a counter example of when and how America learned how to think.
For people visiting Washington DC in the Spring, it is mandatory to not only see the Japanese Cherry Blossoms around Thomas Jefferson's Tidal Basin but to visit ten acres of the finest horticultural displays created by the Bliss family in the heart of Georgetown. The history and vision of Robert & Mildred Bliss was and is a model of multitasking in foreign policy.
The core metaphor is the “different form of thinking” of former diplomat Robert Bliss, who was at the State Department during WWI, observing the negotiations and end results. He gave his Dunbarton Oaks Mansion and gardens to the US government (during WWII) on one condition: one half of the facility would be used to win the war, e.g. building concrete pill boxes and bombing them on what is now the Congressional Country Club; the other half focused on the Fog of Peace, where the Dumbarton Accords became the template of the United Nations and the design of stabilizing the post WWII world. (Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time).
Two different patterns of foreign policy thinking, at the end of WWI and WWII, show the difference that made a difference. And require a different form of thinking of Cybernetics, Systems and Design. It is the difference that resulted in the unnecessary death of millions of lives and thorough destruction of Europe.
Gregory Bateson, one of the pioneers of the midcentury Cybernetic revolution gave a lecture entitled "From Versailles to Cybernetics". He asked himself what were the most important events in the 20th Century? He did not mention the A-bomb, World War II or the spread of the automobile, radio and TV.
"It seemed to me that I had really only seen two moments that would rate as really important from an anthropologist's point of view. One was the events leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, and the other was the cybernetic breakthrough.” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind)
Treaty of Versailles. "The War to end all Wars", theme of the WWI Peace Conference was, poetically, held in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. What was mirrored was a form of Power thinking creating the unintended consequence of bringing about WWII due to not understanding the complexity of living systems. "The story is very simple. World War I dragged on and on; the Germans were rather obviously losing. At this point, George Creel, a public relations man --- and I want you not to forget that this man was a granddaddy of modern public relations --- had an idea; the idea was that maybe the Germans would surrender if we offered them soft armistice terms. President Wilson of the US proposed the Fourteen Points. There were to be "no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages..." and so on. And the Germans surrendered."
The treaty was vividly described by Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) as perfectly "rational" from a one-dimensional perspective. The Treaty was drawn up by four men: Clemenceau, "the tiger," who wanted to crush Germany; Lloyd George, who felt it would be politically expedient to get a lot of reparations out of Germany, and some revenge; and Wilson, who had to be bamboozled along. Whenever Wilson would wonder about his Fourteen Points, they took him out into the war cemeteries and made him feel ashamed of not being angry with the Germans."
The Treaty of Versailles demonstrated a living example of forgetting that “Power Over” only solves certain types of problems and not those of governance, change and regulation: a case study in how not to end a War. Understanding the inadequacy of the power paradigm and the fallacy of thinking that “Power Over” could contain social systems ultimately lead to the collapse of Wilson's Fourteen Points, the assumptions behind Treaty of Versailles and the seeds of WWII, not the seeds of peace.
Atlantic Charter and Marshall Plan: Thinking Differently. There is a contrast between the one dimensional "The Walk of War" that leads to subsequent wars when power infects our seeing and decision-making vs a form of thinking exemplified with the Atlantic Charter by Roosevelt/Churchill, giving self-determination of governing for those who joined in the Allied side before the US entered WWII. This was the model of power With, power For, and power By for defeated Europe and Japan through the Marshall Plan (the United States provide economic assistance to restore the economic infrastructure of postwar Europe and help rebuild Japan).
Revenge and reparations were not part of the conversation; rather, US foreign policy learned the lessons of the Treaty Of Versailles. Yes, it was necessary to fight and win a war against fascism and authoritarianism, but the seeds of peace were sown even before that war ended. The thin red line between the necessary form of intelligence needed to win both wars of Freedom and the conversations of a Nation around Peace requires us to appreciate the "Greater Generations" who founded the principles and processes of Revolutionary America and which were reimagined in the “The Greatest Generation" of our fathers and grandfathers of WWII.
Americans redefined the ideas and ideals of the Nation-State by flipping the script on the classic State being over the Nation of its People. As Edmund Burke, parliamentarian during America's War of Independence and supporter of our independence, clearly understood, a Nation was built through the "sacred" process of the Conversation of a People, stating "A Nation is a conversation between the Living, the Dead and the Unborn." This is a conversation of the birth of a Nation and how it renews itself. This is how both Ukrainians and Americans must reevaluate and rethink how to revitalize itself through the conversation of how a nation is born and how it renews itself.
Story Three: Yankee Doodle Dandy and the Art of Walking and Chewing Gum at the Same Time
Factoid: The song Yankee Doodle Dandy is from the Revolutionary War. Why does Yankee Doodle call it macaroni? To be a “macaroni” was to be sophisticated, upper class, and worldly. The British were mocking what they perceived as American's lack of class. The first verse is satirical because a doodle—a simpleton—thinks that he can be a macaroni—fashionable—simply by sticking a feather in his cap. With the reversal on the battlefield, we American Doodles -simpletons - sang “Yankee Doodle” as British soldiers retreated. It was as if the Americans were singing, “How do you like us Yankee doodles and dandies, now. “Yankee Doodle” soon took hold as an unofficial anthem for what became the American Continental Army.
The National Conversation of Systematic Change in America was forged out of the two Revolutions against both physical oppression and tyranny over the minds of the People. The Declaration of Independence (1776) formally severed ties with Great Britain, and launched the First American Revolution, a military revolution against physical oppression, a revolution founded on the colonies' grievances and putting forth the radical notion that "...governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the "consent of the governed." Achieving victory against a superior military force, the 13 colonies, achieving freedom and independence soon learned that, moving from dependency as a subservient colony to total independence was not enough to govern, as seen in the ensuing collapse of the colonies and in all other half-revolutions where the simple goal was freedom. The Founders met amid chaos, riots in the streets, shortages of goods and attempts by other countries to force a wedge among the colonies. Freedom was not enough. There was not yet a unified Nation.
The stage was set for the Second American Revolution, a Revolution of the Mind, a revolution against the Tyranny of the Mind, and as a very different way of thinking about
power, checks and balances to power, tyranny, and its antidotes to power
purpose of Government informing a healthy union organizing the Many (the people) into One instead of the dictatorial One to Many
both rights and responsibilities of Citizens in self-governing processes of solving problems at the lowest possible levels
mediums of exchange and assembly for the full health of communications, information, intelligence
whole systems thinking about the Governed, Government and Governance
This revolution did not take place on the battlefield, in skirmishes on back country roads, or on the seas; it took place in conversations, deep and fierce, in small groups and large, in meeting rooms and taverns, a constant threshing of taking apart and putting together, ending in the first written constitution based on cultivating the People's voice (Similar processes occurred earlier in Iceland).
The nature of building a Nation is a conversation and paradigm shift from dependency to independence breaking the manacles of enslavement but the critical step that is missed in the path to peace that American history so well exemplifies is the higher level of complexity of interdependence.
Interdependency requires a radically different way of seeing and learning that is not like the obvious theatrics and pomp and circumstance of “normal power politics”. It is the exceptionalism of democracy which unifies in contrast to authoritarianism which disengages us from the conversation with our environment and each other. Without the intelligence of the whole, repeated through the unifying medium of conversations, collapse is inevitable. We downgrade the collective intelligence to simple smarts where all efforts are to stop change and control the world.
The Body Politic, like the human body, must retain its identity and integrity as it goes through changes; otherwise, the parts, thinking themselves all powerful, dissolves the union and becomes deadly. When the part has the hubris of thinking it is the whole, which is the driver behind the power paradigm, communications with other parts ultimately kill the host, much like a cancer.
With its opening words, "We the people..." the U.S. Constitution completed the journey of peoples from slaves to serfs to subjects to Citizens, countering the legitimacy and authority of the state’s power over the people by creating a Nation “...of the People, by the People and for the People". The document, for all its brevity, is not prescriptive of what government should do as seen in many constitutions, e.g., the Soviets; rather, it provided the scaffolding on which to build a Nation with our unique form of democracy. The following depicts the journey from Freedom to Liberty.
1st American Revolution - 2nd American Revolution -
FREEDOM from Oppression Liberty of the MIND
Type of Revolution
Declaration of Independence Declaration of INTERdependence
Objective
Freedom from Oppression (body) Collective Vigilance against Tyranny (Mind)
Purpose
Rebellion against Oppression (Colonialism) Antidotes against Power & Powerlessness
Time Frame
1760-1781 (War) 1781-83 (Collapse) 1783-1791 Constitutional Congress/Frame of Government
Organizing Concept
Based on Principles (Words) Design of Processes (Interactions, Information, Initiative)
Advocates
Adams, Washington, Paine Madison, Jefferson, Dickenson, Wilson
Form of Consciousness
Common Sense (empirical perception) UnCommon Sense, Mind of the People, Cybernetics
Results
Freedom from Oppression Vigilance against Tyranny
What emerged from conversations embedded in the Republic of Letters (mid-1700’s), leading to, during and after the American Revolution, was an experiment in democracy and republican government with ideas that added to knowledge about early attempts at democracy. This peculiar form of thinking about the health of the individual parts and the unity of the whole required both individual freedom and the unity of the design of the whole living system (Cybernetics 2.0).
The rediscovery of these ideas in Cybernetics, Systems and Design in the mid-1900s ushered in the Information Age (Cybernetics, System and Design 1.0) which included how humans made sense of the world as a cybernetic circuit moving from a focus on things to relationships, from power to empowerment, that allowed the transition from normal consciousness to a consciousness which could interact with a complex emergent world.
Moving beyond the raw freedom of individuals, their conversations, interactions, and creation of the appropriate institutions allows for de Tocqueville’s Art of Assembly and work of a Nation. Ironically, the design of complex human regulatory and governing systems springing from Cybernetics, Systems and Design thinking in the 1700’s was more advanced than the thinking devices of today’s Cybernetic Information Revolution.
Their Cybernetics 2.0 was based on whole living systems, dealing with the deeper and more complex issues of carbon systems vs. the silicon systems arising from the Valley. Taking the powerful sophisticated design thinking of today’s 1.0 wedded to a primitive power paradigm results in the Treaty of Versailles and the inability to develop peace and democratic societies. Conversations via other means (war) and conversations of the people must resonate simultaneously to lay the seeds of peace in the bloody fields of war.
The American Revolution of the Mind completed the Natural Revolutions that started with the Reformation and continued to the English Civil Wars. The American Experiment ultimately changed the lens and cultural context through which to see and act in the world from centralized authority of the powerful to whole systems thinking.
Today, the lens is out alignment with the needs of a changing environment and whole living systems. What was intelligent in a stable world is downgraded to only being smart within a context we must control. In a constantly changing reality we require intelligence which is grounded in real states, and which can learn, not the power paradigm task of trying to freeze the world to its benefit. The challenge of a democracy is continuous relearning of the changing context (medium) so that answers previously appropriate are not rendered into the new problems we face. Our military thinking overseas and cultural wars at home are just another casualty of America corrupted by the linear, cause/effect Power Paradigm. This is the culturally based power paradigm we fought against in our Revolution. We have become that which we fought against in 1776 and in both World Wars.
America was built and succeeded, and Ukraine will be rebuilt and succeed only by making clear distinctions in the organization of our images, narratives, symbols, ideas and ideals that make the peculiar form of Democratic governing a powerful force in a changing world. Full knowledge of its peculiar forms of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting meant it could dance with complexity winning both wars and the peace.
If there is a case to be made of American Exceptionalism, it is in the peculiar ways we see and think as a People, not by identity politics boasting our self-importance. In the American Revolution we learned a hard lesson quickly; freedom from external oppression was not enough. It was citizens, true citizens, that had a vision and pledged their ideas, lives, and sacred honor to literally change the world order they fought then, and we fight now.
Art of Assembly
Tocqueville's insight on our exceptionalism is based on a Democratic Citizen’s Art of Assembly. of units (individuals) allowing for the whole to be more than the sum of its parts. This transformative Art of Political Alchemy turns raw freedom of parts into innovative organizations and answers to the life and death questions. This allows renewal of parts creating wholeness of a productive union assembling innovative forms of remapping our relationship to real states.
Human language and our instruments of words are frozen and alienated from living processes by the corrupting influence of power and thinking in linear, mission-driven pathways. This ultimately leads to the context and paradigm within which we see, orient, decide and act to “damn the torpedoes “of contrary information leading to some supposed individual hero. But politics and our society are not a “Hero’s Arc of Triumph”.
Individuals may learn but it is a species of animals or plants or forms of government, as well as the design of a species of ideas, that evolves. Authoritarian and democratic species of ideas, meaning and construction are tested over time and development. Bet on a variety of democratic ideas that learn, succeed or fail and prepare new ideas over time. There is a difference between development that loops back to its founding assumptions and designs more strategic options versus those that see only linear progress of the same model of reality.
We as a People and Nation are being tested "of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations." These concluding wise words from the X telegram impel us to seek antidotes to unreasonable power through democratic processes. Our task is to Re-discover, Re-think, Re-imagine & Re-build the American Experiment in concert with the Ukrainians discovering, thinking, and imagining their future Nation.
Conclusion
The task of war and peace is to counter the implicit and embedded circuits evident in ‘the sins of the fathers’, for they have “given us a bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge”
The last line of George Kennan's famous "X" telegraph established the US national strategy for the Soviet Union. The telegram was based on “containment" countering Soviet expansionism yet did not go directly against a system fated to collapse from within. As Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
A similar approach is needed as Russia and other authoritarian regimes like China pursue their models of ultimate political suicide from within. The last line of Kennan's X telegram, which helped form US foreign Policy for half a century, reads "To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation." Those same words can help guide us in a different yet similar world where models of living systems of evolutionary potential are matched against the human-centric hubris married to the sole instrument of force.
Allowing the poor political design of systems of the State, violating living systems with abstractions designed merely to control, may require a containment strategy. The Containment strategy of Kennan was brilliant because the internal and external interaction and conversations bled the vitality of a People dry, leading to its collapse. What centralization of power does is create a toxic environment polluting the Commons with human hubris and dreams of crystal walled palaces in the sky. These DOA (Dead on Arrival) organizational designs highlight the use of human thinking that embraces the ultimate disorder of entropic processes where organization of the system forgets it is in commerce with reality in the Zone of Survival. In other words, these authoritarian designs create an ecological crisis of alienation from all living processes.
The opposite is required in building a Nation. Instead of “containing” the conversation by governments allowing entropy to dissolve the union of parts of containment strategies, democratic infrastructures of conversation and interaction empower the agency of the parts (individuals). Without guideposts and guardrails within the conversational infrastructure of words, symbols, habits of mind in a healthy democratic process in GOOD ORDER, the organizational design of human interactions and its home will render us helpless.
What is worth fighting for are processes in the organization of how we explore bias, assumptions and untruths answering the question of “Where are We? Construction of our laws and political configurations are confluences of civic conversations, producing the collective intelligence that the King has no clothes; your solutions and silos forgot something; our maps for the ship of state will run aground.
* “A Modest Proposal” was originally written by the satirist Jonathan Swift in 1729 as a proposal to reduce poverty in Ireland “…by butchering the children of the Irish poor and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords.” The full title is “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick”.
**Our updated “Modest Proposal” is based on the reality of the satire of 1700’s Ireland. The satire of the reality of Ukraine in the 20’s and 30’s when the breadbasket of Ukraine witnessed starvation and killings, the result of the logic of the pathologies of power.