Today we hear such metaphors as "making it to the top of the ladder of success."
"Higher" also meant closer to heaven and to God. Yet, it was only a few thousand years ago that God was put up in the sky. For hunter-gathers, the power of Divinity was everywhere - in the earth, the water and in all living and inanimate things.
In the hunter-gatherer societies, the hunter wooed his prey, begged its forgiveness, danced in gratitude to it for having allowed itself to be killed so he or she might live. The hunter and his prey were apparently experienced as parts of the same organic whole.
In sum, authoritarianism created a divided world. It is a universe permanently split into warring elements founded on irreconcilable strife. It included assumptions concerning the "strong" and the "weak." (We can notice Donald Trump's obsession with these terms.)
Symbols of unity were rejected, and conquest was expressed by the myth of slaying the dragon, which was a universal symbol of wisdom. Our authoritarian heritage makes it difficult to see beyond dualities to the totality that embraces them.
David Bohm
As Juliana Genevieve Souza Andre and Raisse Rocha Bombini say in their discussion of "David Bohm and the Challenge of a Fragmented Society."
"Fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.
"We are not used to seeing a totality, but only small parts of it. Practically speaking, people separate into groups and defend their ideologies and their egos in opposition to other groups, other ideologies and other egos, preventing humanity from working together for the common good and for survival."
General systems theory aims at meaningful integration of all knowledge. Its goal is unification of social science knowledge, as well as scientific analysis.
Obviously, secrets and lies that are an inherent component of dominance social structures radically disrupt a systems perspective in at least four ways. We can speak of (1) the rigid compartmentalization of information, (2) duplication of efforts, and (3) inefficiency due to lack of cross-disciplinary inquiry and (4) the destruction of trust and sharing.
Fragmentation is another underground paradigm we must become aware of and find ways to address, if we hope to survive the 21st century.
(Article changed on Sep 11, 2022 at 12:19 PM EDT)
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