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June 22, 2015

Transcript: Fritjof Capra--Applying Systems Theory to Making the World A Better Place

By Rob Kall

The 2nd half of my interview with Fritjof Capra, one of the world's leading thinkers in systems theory. He's authored numerous books including: The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living, and his newest book that ties together all of his previous writings is The Systems View of Life which he co-authored with Pier Luisi.

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(Image by Fritjof Capra)   Details   DMCA

Rob: My guest tonight is Fritjof Capra, this is a continuation of an interview that was broadcast last week. This is just the second half of the interview. Fritjof Capra is one of the world's leading thinkers in systems theory. He's authored numerous books including: The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living, Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks and his newest book that ties together all of his previous writings is The Systems View of Life which he co-authored with Pier Luigi Luisi. His website is fritjofcapra.net t

And as I said at the beginning of the first half of the interview, this is a huge book for me. It has really changed my thinking and it's probably the book that has influenced me the most since I would say Naomi Klein's book that she wrote about five, six years ago. So, I want to continue - we've been talking about systems theory and -

FC: Yeah, thank you for having me back on the show, it's a great pleasure.

Rob: Okay, the - now you say in the book, you described how systems theory integrates four dimensions of life: biological, cognitive, social, and ecological. Can you touch a bit on each of those?

FC: Yes, this is the very essence of my synthesis and as I mentioned in the previous interview we did, I was trained as a physicist and became very interested in philosophical aspects of modern physics and the shift from a mechanistic to a holistic world view which happened in quantum physics, relativity theory and our newer theories. And I compared this to basic ideas in spiritual traditions, eastern mysticism and then also ideas in Christianity in another book that I wrote with a Benedictine monk, David Steindl-Rast, which is called Belonging to the Universe. And so, I got interested very much and have been for a long time, in philosophical aspects of modern science beginning with physics and then I realized that most of the problems we have today concerned with living systems, living organisms, individual organisms, ecosystems, or social systems. And so my research interest shifted from physics to the life sciences and I began to look for a conceptual framework where I could talk about these various aspects of life. About the social dimension of life, the ecological dimension, the psychological dimension or as we say today the cognitive dimension, and so for the last thirty years or so, I developed a framework that puts all these dimensions of life together and integrates them. And I published the results of my synthesis as it evolved in various books. So, my book The Web of Life published in 1996 was the first attempt of synthesizing various dimensions of life. It does not include the social dimension. An improved version I published in 2002 in the book The Hidden Connections, which includes the social dimension and then the you know, the final synthesis is now in the book that I call The Systems View of Life which is co-authored with Pier Luigi Luisi who is a biologist at the University of Rome. So there are these four dimensions of life. The biological dimension is pretty obvious. You know biology is the science of life. And the systemic view of living organisms in biology is the view in terms of networks. Systems thinking means thinking in terms of patterns, in terms of relationships, in terms of connectedness, also in terms of processes and the basic pattern that was discovered in the development of this systems view of life is the network. So all the parts of living systems interact with one another and organize themselves in terms of networks. So the simple living system is a biological cell a microbe or, you know, bacterium. And this cell consists of a network of molecules. Then an organism, a multicellular organism is a network of cells. Ecosystems, networks of organisms interrelated by feeding relationships and we talk about food webs today, food cycles and food webs. So again, we have networks of organisms and of course social systems, as everybody knows, social networks and networks of communication. So we have networks of feeding relationships in ecosystems, networks of communication in social systems, and networks of metabolic processes in biological systems. And when it comes to social systems, communication is of course something that involves the cognitive dimension of life; in other words, mind and consciousness. So this is how the cognitive dimension comes in and we need to understand the nature of mind and consciousness in order to integrate the cognitive dimension with the biological, the social, and the ecological dimensions. So that's sort of in very broad outlines the essence of my synthesis.

Rob: So I think where we need the most additional help is the understanding, the cognitive dimension.

FC: Yes because that goes beyond - and I have a background in psychology, so I used to think of cognitive psychology as self talk and the inner dialogue but cognitive, in terms of the systems model is far more than that.

Rob: Yeah, can you get into that?

FC: Yeah, there's a huge expansion of the term cognitive. Well, let's talk again with the mechanistic worldview that we discussed in quite some detail in your previous program. That was developed by Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Bacon and when we come to mind and consciousness, Descartes played a crucial role because Descartes postulated in the seventeenth century a fundamental division between two independent and separate grounds: that of mind and that of matter. And he called mind the thinking thing res cogitans in Latin. He wrote in Latin like scholars did in those days. The mind is the thinking thing and matter he called the extended thing or res extensa. And then following Descartes, scientists and philosophers continued to think of the mind as some kind of a thing; an intangible entity and were unable to imagine how this thinking thing is related to the body. Now the decisive advance of the systems view of life has been to abandon this Cartesian view of mind as a thing and to realize that mind and consciousness are not things but processes. So that is the huge advance and this novel concept of mind was developed during the 1960s by Gregory Bateson who was an anthropologist and cyberneticist and one of the most important systems thinkers of the twentieth century. And also by two Chilean neuroscientists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. And they both worked at the University of Chile in Santiago and their theory is now known as the Santiago theory of cognition. They focused on the term cognition, which is the process of knowledge and seeing mind as a process, the process of cognition, then sparked a whole new scientific field which is now known as cognitive science and it is a multidisciplinary field including cognitive psychology, which you mentioned, but also biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive linguistics and a lot of other fields. So, again the key advance is to see mind not as a thing but as a process. And then Maturana and Varela linked this process, this cognitive process with the very process of life because when you see life in terms of networks, we haven't talked about this before, but the key characteristic of these networks, of these living networks is that they are self-organizing, they are self-generating, self-maintaining, self-perpetuating and all this can be summarized by saying that they're self-organizing and the cognitive process is the very -

Rob: Just one thing. The word that is used for that is autopoiesis?

FC: Yes, yes the word is autopoiesis which means self-making. Poiesis is the Greek word with the same root as the word of the root poetry. Poie in Greek means to make. And so autopoiesis means self-making. So the very process of self-organization or self-generating of these living networks is a cognitive process and this is how the biological aspects and the cognitive aspects unified and integrated. When you talk for example about the brain and this problem which has plagued scientists and philosophers for centuries. What's the difference between the brain and the mind and how are they related? And this has led to countless confusions and in the Santiago theory, this is very simple and clear. Mind is a process, the process of cognition and the brain is a structure through which this process is carried out. So the relationship between mind and brain is the relationship between process and structure. And moreover, the brain is not the only structure through which cognition is carried out; every biological structure of every living organism is engaged in this process of self-organization or process of cognition, whether or not the organism has a brain and a nervous system. So plants for instance, a tree is engaged in cognitive activity and the activity of its self-organizing networks and there's no nervous system and no brain, but there's intelligence there is cognition. So this is a huge revolution in science and I have to tell you that it took me years and years to really understand and absorb it so I don't expect our listeners to just accept this and understand it. Overcoming the Cartesian divison of mind and matter is a huge step in science.

Rob: That's - let me just repeat what you just said. Overcoming the Cartesian model in science is a huge step, did I get that right?

FC: Right. And in particular the Cartesian fundamental separation between mind and matter because we know that within the living world, within the world of living beings, mind and matter are always inseparably connected and are always in the relationship of process and structure.

Rob: So, we've already discussed, in the previous interview, how the mechanistic model has created the metaphor on which economics are based. We haven't really talked about religion and so many other aspects of culture but what I took away from your book is that the mechanistic model of science is basically the metaphor that all kinds of different major cultural elements operate upon.

FC: Yes, yes that is correct and in the whole first part of the book there are many many pages where I go into great detail how this has affected medicine and our view of health, the body working as a machine, management of human organizations, the organization being a machine that can be controlled, designed, engineered, and so on. And the systems view, this integrated holistic view of life has great similarities with the spiritual conception and awareness of life. And this is of course how I began to become a writer by comparing concepts of modern physics to concepts of Eastern spiritual traditions. And so, my friend and co-author Pier Luigi Luisi is also very interested in spirituality, he has been engaged very much with the Dalai Lama in the context of something they call the Mind Life Institute, which is a series of dialogues between the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan monks and Western scientists. And so in the book we co-wrote a whole chapter about science and spirituality and I should say that you know, the things I've been talking about to you were mostly things I wrote myself in the book, like the history of science and then the applications to health management and economics. And Pier Luigi contributed the sections on biochemistry, on evolution, on genetics. And then certain chapters we wrote together and the one on science and spirituality's one that we wrote together. And what we say in this chapter is that it is very important to distinguish between spirituality and religion and this distinction often get's lost in contemporary discussions and that's why there's a lot of confusion and you know there a lot of books now about religion and science, books called God and the New Physics and so on, and many of the authors are confused because they don't distinguish between spirituality and religion. And to make this distinction, I find it useful to go back to the original meaning of spirit, which comes from the Latin spiritus that means breath and its meaning is the breath of life and I found it very interesting that the Latin word for soul, anima is also related to breath. The root meaning linguistically also means breath. So, spirit or soul are really the breath of life and our spiritual moments are the moments when we feel most alive. And you can read literature on spirituality or mysticism from around the world and you will find this spiritual experience wherever it happens and whatever culture and whatever historical period has some very distinct common characteristics and the central experience is the experience of belonging to a larger whole, an experience of unity of mind and body, and also of say self and the world of belonging to a larger universe, a larger world, and being integrated in it. And so this is independent of cultural or historical traditions, and people throughout history who have had very profound spiritual experience, often called mystics because this experience of going beyond mind and body, beyond the self and the world is experience of something mysterious and wonderful and this is why it is called a mystical experience. And then there - throughout history there has been the strong desire, not only to communicate this experience, which is difficult in ordinary words, but also to help other people, fellow human beings, have similar experiences. And this is how you know, mystics began to organize communities in order to have these experiences and this is what we know as religion. Religion is the organization of mystical or spiritual experiences into institutions and what happened very often in history was that these institutions then became institutions of power where the spiritual core was forgotten. And so then we can have religion without spirituality and this is also what we call fundamentalist religion, where religious texts like the Bible or the Koran or the Buddhist and Hindu texts interpreted literally, without realizing that these writers who were mystics used metaphors and symbols to express their experience. So, then when it comes to fundamentalist religion, the dialogue with science becomes very difficult.

Rob: Okay I want to keep moving along because we're going to run out of time soon. You mentioned in the first part of the interview and you talk about how a central characteristic of the systems view of life is nonlinearity, which complexity theory is based on -

FC: Right.

Rob: - you said all living systems are complex, in other words nonlinear networks. Could you just explain a bit about nonlinear?

FC: Yeah, well you see when you - the way you mention this is I think the best way of introducing readers or listeners to this idea of complexity that once you realize that life is networks, that all living systems are organized in terms of networks, then you know that a network is a pattern of relationships and it's a nonlinear pattern of relationships. Already, before going to networks we can talk about cycles which are also an important property of all living systems. We have ecological cycles, we have in our bodies the blood cycles and so does the lymphoid and we have you know brainwaves. We have all kinds of nonlinear patterns, but -

Rob: What is nonlinear mean?

FC: Well, linear is in - well there are actually two meanings, it's good that you ask that. In terms of geometry, it's a straight line and so anything that is not a straight line, anything that is a curve is nonlinear, and especially a circle or cycle is nonlinear and a network is nonlinear because a network goes in all directions, not just in one straight line. And in mathematics, linear equations, and here we'll have to get a little bit technical. Equations where the variables appear in the first power. So, for instance the - very simple if you have an equation you know Y equals two X, the variables are these letters Y and X, that's a linear equation. If you have an equation Y equals X square or X to the power of five, that's a nonlinear equation. Now the nonlinear equations we're dealing with when we describe living systems of course far more complex, they are differential equations, which means they use differential calculus and higher mathematics. And in fact in the book, in the chapter on complexity theory, I go into some of these details and I explain -

Rob: Yes, great detail.

FC: - linearity and nonlinearity in more detail.

Rob: You know I want to nail down one thing and that is this aspect of the nonlinear nature of life, of network systems. It's the core point that forces us to reject a mechanistic model of science because that model totally sails to address those dimensions of life and subatomic particles, and things like that.

FC: Yes, for instance when you think of a very simple machine, think of a bicycle, alright? So a bicycle has a linear chain of cause and effect. When I push the pedals of a bicycle, this motion, this force is transferred through the chain to wheels and maybe gears and finally to the wheels of the bicycle and through the friction with the ground, the bicycle is pushed forward. So, this is all a linear chain of cause and effect, but in living systems when you influence a living system, the effect goes around in circles and they're so called feedback loops which means that things come back to you. So whatever we put out in the environment, eventually will come back to us and so we say we build cars and factories that use fossil fuels and they emit greenhouse gases that change the atmosphere and that increase the energy in the atmosphere which then has many consequences like droughts, like hurricanes, like forest fires, the melting of glaciers and so on, very severe consequences of climate change; which is a feedback of our actions, of our human actions. And that is because the whole planet gaia is a living system and it is a nonlinear system. And it is well known today that to model these linear systems is exceedingly difficult to construct mathematical models of climate change is highly complex and very difficult.

Rob: And virtually impossible using mechanistic science.

FC: Right.

Rob: So, let's go a little bit further into this and let's talk about chaos theory where you talk and discuss strange attractors and bifurcation points and fractals, how do they fit in?

FC: Well, the nonlinear mathematics that was developed in the 1970s and 1980s with the help of computers is really a mathematics of relationships and patterns, which is critical when you deal with nonlinear systems. And the central task was how to solve nonlinear equations, and mathematicians and scientists developed certain techniques based on computers which solved equations, essentially by trial and error. Let me say that when you a mathematical equation, and our listeners will remember this from school, that you have a mathematical equation and you manipulate it, and there're certain techniques and certain rules how you can manipulate an equation. You know you move things from left to right and from right to left, you multiply everything by five or whatever, and there're certain techniques and at the end you have a formula. And that's the solution of the equation is the formula. Now, nonlinear equations you cannot solve in this way. You cannot manipulate them until you get a formula as a result. What you have to do is you solve them by trial and error. You assume that the variables have certain values and you try it out and if it doesn't work, you try something else. And there are again certain tricks and certain rules where you can do that. And that - this is called solving an equation numerically. And these techniques existed long before computers, but you can imagine solving an equation by trial and error takes a lot of time and a lot of patience. And so what happened with computers that the time was reduced dramatically and where you had to work for two months to solve an equation by hand, by trial and error, you could do it now in a few minutes or even in a few seconds. And so, this was a huge advance that computers brought us and the solution is not an equation, but is a pattern and that's the crucial point here. A geometric shape, a pattern which represents the dynamics of the system, the way the system behaves, and these patterns are called attractors. And there are certain attractors called strange attractors that describe chaotic systems which are systems that don't have regularities, that are sort of random, and then there are other attractors like point attractors or periodic attractors that describe periodic systems. So, this is the relationship attractors are geometric patterns that describe the dynamics of the whole system.

Rob: And bifurcation points?

FC: And bifurcation points are - well, these strange attractors can be stable or can be unstable. When they are stable, that means the system behaves in the same way and continues to behave in that way. When they're unstable it means that a totally new behavior can emerge and that is called a bifurcation because the system branches off into a new behavior and a new branch of the attractor. And this is to me one of the most important results of complexity theory, the discovery of emergence. That there can be a spontaneous emergence of new forms of order.

Rob: Now this gets into your friend Ilya Prigogine.

FC: Yes, Prigogine based his theory off systems far from equilibrium, which are all living systems are from equilibrium because there's a continuous flow of energy and matter through the system. And he called this dissipative structures. And I'm afraid I have to take a break now, can I call you back in a couple of minutes?

Rob: Yeah, we can - I'll keep going and you just put it on hold. I'll talk a little bit and we'll continue this okay?

FC: Okay, okay.

Rob: Alright, so I am going to kind of cover this air time with the discussion, some of my notes of this book; which I have to say, I love this book. This book is an amazing book, it is the combination of Fritjof Capra's life's work I believe, as he said in the first part of the interview and this summary is a unifying vision and it is incredible. If you're going to buy one book this year, buy this book and read it from cover to cover. As I hold Fritjof, there were points when I was reading about the science where I just couldn't wait to get to the next chapter, it was like the anticipation like you might have watching a very exciting movie, but it's science. It's an incredible book, just incredible. So, I - there's some fun stuff in here. I don't think we're even going to get to it, but he goes into evolution and he talks about how there are two violent primates: human and the chimpanzee. But, there's another primate that's just as smart as the chimpanzee that separated on the evolution tree about the same time as humans and it's called the bonobo B-O-N-O-B-O and the difference is they're not violent, they're friendly they're loving. Matter of fact, one of their primary characteristics is they have constant sex. And the book explores the idea that perhaps aggression is a human trait, I hate to think that and maybe I'll talk to him about that.

FC: Okay, I'm back.

Rob: Alright, good, great. I was just raving about your book.

FC: Thank you.

Rob: So you were talking about Ilya Prigogine -

FC: Yeah and I would like to -

Rob: - and about bifurcation points and -

FC: Yeah and I would like to put this into a broader context so that our listeners can relate this with our previous conversation. We have talked a lot about networks and living systems being networks, but that's not all there is to the nature of biological life. In fact, one of the best ways of defining biological life is to say that the central characteristic of a living organism is metabolism. And metabolism is defined as the ceaseless flow of energy and matter through a network of chemical reactions, which allows the system to continually generate itself, maintain itself, and perpetuate itself. And we have talked about the network aspect, autopoiesis or self-generation, self-making, but there's also the flow aspect. So there really these two phenomena that are at the very basis of biological life: flows and networks. And both have been studied extensively over the last thirty years and the study of flows was mainly led by Ilya Prigogine, a Russian born physicist and chemist who worked at the University of Brussels in Belgium. And these studies of metabolic flows led to the very important discovery that first of all, that these constant flows keep the system far from equilibrium; in other words there's always a lot of chemistry going on, the system changes all the time, although the network pattern is maintained, there are continual structural changes. And every now and then the balance of the system is disturbed and a new form of order can emerge spontaneously. So this discovery of this spontaneous emergence of order is one of the key discoveries of Prigogine's and of complexity theory and it has been recognized as the basic dynamic of development, of learning, and of evolution. So -

Rob: And he got a Nobel Prize for this work.

FC: That's right, yes.

Rob: Now I got to say that I learned about Prigogine back in the late 70s early 80s reading Marilyn Ferguson's Brain/Mind Bulletin.

FC: Yes, yes.

Rob: And to me, what I took from that was almost a kind of a mantra that I've talked about and repeated for decades. And that is that out of higher levels of chaos can also come higher levels of order.

FC: Yes and in fact, one of his books has the title Order Out of Chaos and that's precisely the emergence of new forms of order that happen at those bifurcation points.

Rob: So, where does this tie in to economics and our world today? And the third part of your book?

FC: Well, it ties in because complexity theory has shown us that there is a certain dynamic of this phenomena of emergence and Prigogine built a whole theory about it; which is that there's a disturbance of the system and a small disturbance can go around feedback loops and can be amplified as it cycles around the system. And it can be amplified to such an extent that the entire system becomes unstable and then breaks through to a new form of order. That's the basic process. And that can happen also in the social realm, for example in a human organization, people may have discussions of how they work together and somebody says something and it's a new idea, but the person doesn't even consider it as very important, just an idea, but it disturbs the system and it disturbs the system in such a way that the other people in the discussion you know, throw it around back and forth in their network and it cycles around the organization and it gets amplified because everybody contributes something, a new interpretation, a new comment, and it may get it amplified to such an extent that people realize that if this is really true what they have developed and agreed upon, they can't go on working like they did and they have to do something new and to have a new form of organization, a new order, new behavior. So that's the phenomenon of emergence. And in economics it can happen that - or in society at large, that the small group, say a small NGO, nongovernment organization comes up with a different way of viewing things and it spreads and it changes the system.

Rob: I like to say that small actions can make huge changes.

FC: Yes.

Rob: You talk in the book about the butterfly effect.

FC: Yes and that is a characteristic of nonlinear systems. In the linear world, which you know, classical science dealt with and promoted. In the linear world, small causes have small effects and if you want a large effect you have to add up a lot of small causes to get a large effect. But in the nonlinear world, a small cause can have a huge effect because it gets cycled around the feedback loops of the system, that's the nonlinearity of the system, and it gets amplified.

Rob: Okay -

FC: Alright.

Rob: Now, alright I know I'm taking you way past where you said.

FC: Yeah.

Rob: But let me kind of rap - let's get into the third section of the book and talk about that. Why don't I hand this over to you and talk about how all this applies to making our world change. I'll throw some of the words that I thought we could have conversations about. Ecoliteracy, agroecology, sustainability generative versus extractive, the needs for a unit five framework for material in social worlds, decentralized energy generation, ownership versus rental, service and flow economy, ecological democracy, biomimcry and there you go, I hand those ower to you.

FC: Well I won't be able to talk about all that because -

Rob: I know, I know.

FC: - that's two hundred pages of the book, but let me begin with sustainability. The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities and in order to understand that and it's often misunderstood, I think we need to ask what is sustained in a sustainable community? What is sustained is not economic growth or competitive advantage or things that corporate economies like to talk about. What is sustained is the entire web of life on which our long term survival depends. So a sustainable community must be designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. One of the big discoveries of ecologists over the last hundred years has been that the biosphere has sustained life for billions and billions of years, you know about three point six billion years to be more precise. So there's an inherent ability of nature to sustain life. In order to understand that, we need to move from biology to ecology because sustained life is a property of ecosystems and so we need to understand how ecosystems organize themselves and we need to understand in other words, the basic principles of organization of ecosystems, for example, the principle that one species waste is another species food. So that matter cycles continually through the web of life. That the energy driving those ecological cycles flows from the sun. That diversity assures resilience and that life from its beginning, more than three billion years ago did not take over the planet by combat but by networking. So this understanding of the basic principles of ecology is what I have called ecological literacy or ecoliteracy. And this is in my view, the most important part in education today, to become ecologically literate. And then the next step is to apply this ecological knowledge to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions so that the current gap between human design and the ecological and sustainable systems of nature is breached. And so, to practice design in such a way requires a fundamental shift in our attitude toward nature and this is expressed in the book Biomimicry by Janine Benyus who says that the shift is a shift from finding out what we can extract from nature to finding out what we can learn from her. And so the good news that I'm ending with in the book is that there has been a dramatic rise in ecologically oriented design practices and projects over recent years. And so in the book I review those practices and projects in some detail and in particular, I discuss three different, but mutually compatible strategies for designing an economy without any fossil fuels and for achieving this goal by two thousand and fifty. And I can just name the strategies, I can't go into any detail but they are also the type of the corresponding books by these authors. The first one I mentioned in our previous program is the book Plan B by Lester Brown, the second one is called Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute. And the third one is called The Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin. So these are three roadmaps for going beyond fossil fuels and they all involve systemic or eco design solutions which means, as I mentioned before that they solve not only the urgent problem of climate change, but also many of our other global problems: degradation of the environment, food insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and others.

Rob: Okay, thank you. That's - you really covered a great deal there. So just to rap up, this book was written as a textbook for students. How is that going?

FC: Well, it's going well, although it's a little early to tell because you know the book came out in England in May and in the United States, the same addition was available here in August so it's really only with the beginning of the academic year, this last September that it has been used. But I've heard from various professors that are using it and I should say that I don't necessarily expect courses based on the entire book because it's a multidisciplinary book and it's not so easy to teach multidisciplinary courses although I've done so many times. But, the book can be used as a supplementary textbook in virtually all the disciplines because if you think of it, most of what our students study at our colleges and universities has to do with life; whether we talk about economics or health and medicine, or you know management, or even you know, design, architecture, urban planning, and so on. And of course you know biology and the life sciences, ecology, cognitive science, it all has to do with life. So there are parts and chapters of the book that are relevant to all these disciplines. Or you talk about the history of science, the philosophy of science. The whole first part of the book is about that so I think it can be very valuable as a supplementary textbook in many many fields.

Rob: How about health? I mean I'm just trying to squeeze a little bit more out of this conversation. You said some amazing things about the systems approach to health and health care, could you discuss that?

FC: Well again we could go back to the mechanistic approach, which goes straight back to Descartes. Descartes said to me a healthy body is like a well functioning clock and an unhealthy body is like a clock that doesn't work well, a certain piece is faulty and has to be fixed or replaced and that has been the approach of mechanistic medicine; to concentrate on small parts of the body and you know, going from the whole organism first to cells, then to molecules, to genetics and so on. And forgetting the whole over the parts. The systems view of health sees health in terms of processes and relationships. In other words, it sees health as a state of dynamic balance that involves various parts of the organism and the relationship of the entire organism to its social and natural environment. And when you see health as a consequence, an experience of well-being, as a consequence of the organism's functioning in a balanced way, then that also includes the self-organization of the organism and its ability to find back to a balanced way when it has become unbalanced. And this is a very important notion that is present in many traditional systems of health, the notion of natural healing forces; that the organism can heal itself and the idea that the doctor or therapist is an assistant or an attendant to these natural healing forces. That's actually the root meaning of therapists. The Greek verb therapeuein means to assist or attend.

Rob: Now when you say traditional forms of healing, you're talking about more indigenous kinds of -

FC: Yes, right. Right, non you know, scientific medicine.

Rob: What about, do you have a take on the model of healthcare that we have in the US versus let's say a single payer healthcare?

FC: Well absolutely, no I'm European and when I grew up in Austria and then I worked at the University in London and in France I never had to pay for any healthcare, no, that's understood in Europe that we have a single payer or social medicine where you don't pay when you go to a doctor. It's taken care of in monthly contributions, which are not high. So the United States is the only industrial country that doesn't have that.

Rob: But how does that fit into a systems versus a mechanistic model?

FC: Well it's a mechanistic model in the sense that the health system is dominated by corporations, by you know hospitals and insurance companies that see it as a business. For them the most important part is to make a profit, not to heal people or to keep them healthy, so it's again an individualistic profit-oriented model. Well I'm afraid I have to leave it at that because -

Rob: It's been great, thank you so much -

FC: - very long conversation, thank you very much for having me on both shows.

Rob: Thank you very much, it's an amazing book, this is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, I've been speaking with Fritjof Capra the co-author of The Systems View of Life. His website is fritjofcapra.net F-R-I-T-J-O-F-C-A-P-R-A dot net. To get the whole interview, which is in two parts go to iTunes and look for my name Rob Kall K-A-L-L and it'll be up shortly. Thanks again Fritjof -

FC: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.

[End Audio 00:53:21]



Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.


His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.


Join the conversation:


On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution


and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation





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