Putting care on "cruise control"

There is a difference between "care" and "caring".

Today's news illustrates that on several fronts.

In Arizona, an unmanned "drone" aircraft crashed after the pilot, located safely 60 miles away, failed to update his "game console" correctly. ( NTSB cites lax safety controls, Pilot Error in Ariz. Drone Crash, Washington post 10/17/07)

The pilot's computer console locked up, investigators said. He started to transfer control to a backup console used by Customs agents to operate the drone's cameras but did not follow a checklist that required him to make sure the engine controls on the second console matched the ones he had been using.

Because the second console's controls were in the fuel shut-off position, investigators said, the Predator-B's engine quit when control was switched.

The pilot told investigators that he didn't follow the checklist because he was in a hurry, said Pam Sullivan, an NTSB investigator.

Steven R. Chealander, a board member and former Air Force pilot, said that regulators and operators need to ensure that proper procedures are followed in drone operations because pilots may not realize the consequences of their actions if they are not in a cockpit. "You have to change the mind-set from someone operating a computer Game Boy to being the pilot of an aircraft," Chealander said.

I've discussed before the rise in "passive observer" syndrome, almost certainly trained by 1000 hours a year or more on the equivalent to a flight simulator, a "life simulator" (Television) where passive observing is the trained behavior, regardless what is going on around you. Now, with full-life-size TV figures, that has got to be getting even stronger.

The other major behavior training simulator in use today is video games. I'm not sure what the intentions are of the creators, but the impact is desensitization to killing other people or crashing the car/boat/plane one is operating, because all becomes well again by pushing the "reset" button. I tend to believe I pass such drivers - or they pass me - almost every day, as they weave in and out of traffic at high speed. Again, the message for 1000 hours a year is that "it doesn't matter" and "there are no actual consequences of what you do."

And, my regular readers know its about time for my rant on the upcoming "Ice causes pile-up on Interstate X!" headlines. Actual pilots almost never blame "accidents" on "bad weather"-- the NTSB blames "continued operation by the pilot into conditions beyond their skill and experience." "If the ice and snow "causes" crashes, I mean, what can you do? We're helpless in the grip of this outside force! There I was, I hit the brakes, and nothing! It's not my fault! (Of course, I was going 85 mph on icy roads and weaving around all the idiots who were poking along at 30 for some reason ...)" Yeah. Right.

I want to carry over that thought to the second item of the day, on the inexorable progress that "superbugs" or antibiotic resistant bacteria are making at returning us to the days when there were no antibiotics. (Actually, as Carl Sagan once pointed out, it will be much worse this time.)

The headline in today's Washington Post is "Drug Resistant Staph Germs toll is higher than thought". Here's the essence:

A dangerous germ that has been spreading around the country causes more life-threatening infections than public health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported yesterday.

The microbe, a strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated.

Although mounting evidence shows that the infection is becoming more common, the estimate published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association is the first national assessment of the toll from the insidious pathogen, officials said.

"This is a significant public health problem. We should be very worried," said Scott K. Fridkin, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC.

Other researchers noted that the estimate includes only the most serious infections caused by the germ, known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

"It's really just the tip of the iceberg," said Elizabeth A. Bancroft, a medical epidemiologist at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health who wrote an editorial in JAMA accompanying the new studies. "It is astounding."

This has the same ring as the items I've posted in the last few days regarding the drought and water emergency in the South ("The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly...") or the economic woes of Southeast Michigan (""Our" Hurricane "Katrina has been out on the horizon for a generation, and we just watched it come," said Rick Snyder, ") or Global Warming.

In fact, in 1990 we had a whole wall covered with scholarly papers at Parke-Davis warning of this coming catastrophe and the failure of antibiotics. I alluded to Carl Sagan, who told us once that "bombing us back to the stone age" would be far worse than that. At that time, people were very bright (they had to be) and could track animals, both prey and predators. They knew how to survive. Now we think food comes from the grocery store or the golden arches and if those are out of business we have no idea what to do next.

In particular, if we go back to 1900, two things stand out. First, people understood about the importance of hygiene - a word that seems so out of place in our modern world that Johns Hopkins, almost in embarrassment, took it out of the name of their "School of Hygiene and Public Health"). People understood about handling food, and washing hands, and knew this because they grew up in families where half of the children died by age 10 from infectious disease.

It wouldn't have been hard to get people to wash their hands then. Now, it seems a massive burden to even get doctors to wash their hands without constant reminders. Again, the myth of godhood and the facts of infection don't sit happily together, so one has to go - and is is usually the facts of infection and the reminder that death is really not under control at all.

These days, death of a child is an extreme event. Hasn't "modern medicine" conquered death at last? Well, the brochure and video may imply or say that, but the truth is, no, it hasn't, and death by plague is scheduled to come back to visit us again.

We don't like the idea of death - part of the theme of my last post on T. S. Eliot's message. We particularly don't like the idea of death that comes despite our best efforts and makes a mockery of our egos and sense of personal and societal godhood.

"We are gods!" is the basic social myth, and if facts disagree, well -- get rid of the facts.

In fact, in 1918, more people died of infectious disease than world war I. In fact, healthy men of age 20 would go to work in the morning and be dead by sunset. It made a mockery of our sense of control of death. And so, we have silently expunged this, deleted it, from both our memory and our textbooks. A recent study showed that the Flu of 1918, which was the biggest story of the day by far, has now become either a one-sentence note in passing, or been left out entirely of all the new history books. Interesting.

Houses had "parlors" which is where the dead family members would be laid in state, and "living rooms" were given their name as a place where the remaining, living members of the family could spend their time.

And, even more so, we had an ethic and religion that allowed us to accept this kind of damage and keep on going in the morning.

It's astounding to us. If 20 percent of our children and young adults were to die tomorrow, it's not clear this society could pick up the pieces and go on, as our grandparents had to, and did. We seem to be devastated when 3000 people die in a terrorist attack, as if that's the end of the world, not just the end of another myth of invincibility and godhood.

That ethic and religion has been jettisoned, and that is perhaps the scariest fact of all - far more so than loss of the sense of hygiene. The society is already on massive anti-depressants for life being hard, and that doesn't include losing family members right and left.

Yes, Tom Welsh's article had it right - "culture" is the core problem here. And, my root-cause analysis continues to point to our pleasant core myth of our own godhood as the core problem with the culture. If we don't learn what humility means the easy way, we'll learn it the hard way. But either way, death is coming to visit.

We can, and should, revise our mental model of Life to include Death as part of it, as a natural part, not something that is unusual. This is akin to the Japanese making houses of bamboo and flimsy paper, that could survive hurricanes and only need slight repair, or that could fall on you in an earthquake without killing you. Instead, we build concrete block towers of unreinforced masonry, because we have already put the past earthquakes out of our minds. We rebuild new houses on the flood plains and coastal barrier beaches, discarding the inconvenient truth that this won't work. Then we build our whole society up on that base.

The meaning is that most of the damage to our society and ability to go on when the epidemic comes, as it will, is of our own making. We can't go on thinking that "We didn't need all that God stuff, it was just in the way, those days are over, we have modern medicine and technology that will protect us."

Hmmmm. More likely, our modern social myths will blind us, paralyze action, and make us incapable of even thinking about these problems in a sane and rational fashion.

Death is part of life. It's just that, for this concept to work, we, as individuals, need to focus on the lives of our children, our schools, and our society, and all the things outside ourselves we have invested our lives in that will go on with life after our own individual death. Then death becomes tolerable and is not such a big deal. Everything becomes easier again, and far less frightening.

We can save the 50% or so of our "health care" bill that is spent in the last two weeks of life, trying to avoid death "at all costs." That's not "life" anyway.

It's only when the here and now, materialistic, hedonistic, selfish culture faces the stark reality of death of the individual that terror, fear, and irrational behavior result.

We can't control the ground rules of life and death, in the end. We can only be "adaptive" and adjust our culture to fit that reality. We can "get over it" as a whole society. In many ways this is simply agreeing to wear our psychological seat belts instead of refusing to install them at all. Or it's refusing to wear a life-jacket when setting out white-water rafting, because it makes us think we might end up in the water. Yes, you might.

The odds your society will end up "in the water" in that sense is 100%, and the only uncertainty is the date.

So far, we're still hoping that selective perception of parts of reality that support our myth will win the day. That's not adaptive and will not serve us well. It's not "leadership" to let that go on.

"Science" has rejected all our social flotation devices (a.k.a. religions), and said they're not "scientific" and we should get rid of them. I double checked and my current biology textbook doesn't even list "death" in the index, and "death" is not listed as a property of all living things. Isn't that strange? Why is that?

Science is pretty tone-deaf when it comes to recognizing its own blind spots, or accepting responsibility for the downstream consequences of what it does. There are some bright spots, but as a society we seem to think technology will prevent death, and try our best to hide all the old people out of sight somewhere.

That isn't coping with living - it's avoiding the subject. Science says, in large part, trust us, we'll get to that sooner or later.

OK. How about sooner? The more terrified we are of death, the more we amplify the impact of "terrorists" who only have the threat of death to scare us with. If we can look on unafraid, they will have lost all their power over us, and, again, we can get on with living.

The Rock - as told by T. S.Eliot

In answer to Tom Walsh's question in my last post of who will lead us out of this economic disaster, no, I don't think it will be state universities that will take on that task.

Looking at the employment scene in Southeast Michigan, again I'd turn instead to T.S. Eliot's "Choruses from 'The Rock'", written in 1934 in the depths of the last worldwide depression.

I have extracted some verses from the full poem, and then rearranged them for a faster one-pass reading of his message that I think captures his point, which very crudely summarized without mentioning God for the atheist scientists reading this:

This "LIFE" thing that spawned us humans stretches out of sight above and below us. It dominates our lives, not our own constructs. Either we belong to it all, or we deny it all. To claim we are "on top" and break the connection with the half above us is to cut ourselves off, to pull out our own plug out of the walls socket, and it won't "go" any more. Decay is everywhere, when we are subject to the closed universe and laws of thermodynamics, but in LIFE, and only in LIFE, we are in an open system again, where there is continual rebirth and re-creation. Without that living context, both above and below us, nothing makes sense, the center doesn't hold, and our health, our mental health, our lives and our cities and great schemes fall apart as we watch, baffled, helpless to stop the process. Plug it back in, children, and it will start up again.

====== Here's Eliot's much more eloquent statement:

But you, have you built well,
that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?
Where many are born to idleness,
to frittered lives and squalid deaths,
embittered scorn in honey-less hives?
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor,
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.

Will you leave my people forgetful and forgotten
To idleness, labor, and delirious stupor?
In a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs,
Where My Word is unspoken.

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.

We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.
Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?
A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city?'
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'
What will you answer? 'We all dwell together
To make money from each other'? or 'This is a community'?

O weariness of men who turn from GOD
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action...
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator.

Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

There are those who would build the Temple,
And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.

If humility and purity be not in the heart, they are not in the home:
and if they are not in the house, they are not in the City.

Why should men love the Church?
She tells them of Life and Death, of all they would forget.

They constantly try to escape
from the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good.

But he man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.

Man without GOD is a seed on the wind:
driven this way and that, and finding
no place of lodgement and germination.

The Church disowned, the tower overthrown,
the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?

Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,
to men of faith and conviction.
Let us therefore make perfect our will.
O GOD, help us.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
Out of the formless stone,
when the artist united himself with stone,
Spring always new forms of life.

The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service.

The lights fade; in the semi-darkness
the voices of the WORKMEN
are heard chanting.

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
and clay for new brick
and lime for new mortar.

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone

Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers

Where the Word is unspoken
We will build with new speech

There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

The river flows the seasons turn
The sparrow and starling have not time to waste.

If men do not build
How shall they live?

They shall not die in a shortened bed
and an narrow sheet. In this street

There is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end
but noise without speech, food without taste.

Without delay, without haste,
We would build the beginning and the end of this street.

We build the meaning:
A Church for all
And a job for each.
Each man to his work.


( Two weeks ago, the news:

SHUTDOWN TAKES EFFECT State legislators failed to reach a comprehensive budget agreement, so the partial shutdown of state government is in effect as of 12:01am, Monday, October 1. All non-critical employees - those who received a notice of temporary layoff on Friday, September 28, are asked not to report for your regularly schedule shifts until further notice. Please continue to check this website and monitor media outlets for further updates, and please urge your legislators to agree to a comprehensive solution to Michigan's budget crisis that will end this shutdown as soon as possible. Thank you.

As a whole country, it is as if we ran out of gas a decade ago, and have been burning the furniture and now ripping up and burning the flooring of the boat, hoping against hope we can figure out why the magic "doesn't work" anymore before we all sink.

I'll retell the story of the man on the roof in a great flood. A boat came by and asked if he wanted a ride, and he said no, his God would save him. The water got up to the second floor and he turned down a second boat. The water got uup to his feet, and he turned down a third boat. Finally he drowned, and dripping water, in heaven, marched down to the pearly gates and asked Saint Peter what had happened. "Why didn't you save me?!!!!" he asked angrily. "Well, we sent three boats..." was the reply.

We can go on dreaming of systems so perfect that no one needs to be good, or we can return to accepting the yoke of a morality that both requires us and rewires us to take good care of each other and the poor. I put that solution on the table.

Cynics may argue we don't have the strength to do this. I'd counter that there is a "sweet spot" that their scientific measurements have left out, captured best by the motto of BoysTown: "He ain't heavy father, he's my brother."

That's the spot that the Toyota Way, and the best side of every religion tries to move us towards and into. Then, there will be enough to "go around" and some "left over."

Reflections on a higher level

As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade

Should the FDA regulate tobacco?

According to the New York Times today, "Report Seeks FDA regulation of Tobacco",

A report from the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, urged Congress and the president to give the Food and Drug administration the authority to regulate tobacco.

Use of tobacco is recognized in Public Health as the second largest cause of premature death in the world today. The World Health Organization estimates that half of the smokers will be eventually killed by that habit, with the death toll 5 million people per year now, and rising.

So, this is a surprising thing. The USA launches a whole occupation army and spent over a trillion dollars because 3000 people were killed. But the same country sits by and watches the tobacco industry kill 5 million people a year, every year, and that's no big deal.

We really need to pause and make sense of these observed facts, and what they can teach us about ourselves.

There is a very long history of attempts to regulate tobacco, which has a specific exemption put in place by our very own Congress, specifically to prevent such regulation. Any consideration of that kind of regulation also has to look at the dismal results when the US tried to regulate the sale of alcohol during "prohibition" with a constitutional amendment.

The Times story continues:

The report said cigarettes contained carcinogens and other dangerous toxins and would be banned if federal laws did not exempt tobacco. A bill before Congress would give the F.D.A. regulatory authority, but the agency’s commissioner, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, expressed skepticism, saying that if nicotine levels were reduced, smokers would change their habits to maintain current levels. The report also called for higher tobacco taxes and a national ban on indoor smoking.

The Johns Hopkins Institute for Tobacco Control estimates that 1 billion people will die prematurely, in the 21st century, from use of tobacco. According to that site, "The Institute for Global Tobacco Control works to prevent death and disease from tobacco use through research, education and policy development."

Apparently, "research, education, and policy development" have not been very successful and solving this problem.

In fact, while non-smoking areas are now commonplace in places wealthy Americans hang out, the companies have only moved operations abroad and expanded them tremendously. The death toll is expected by WHO to double in by 2020, to 10,000,000 people - a year, each year.

I would like to suggest that "research, education, and policy development", while helpful locally, will never solve this problem.

There are two reasons I think that, related to the whole theme of this weblog.

First, our ability to reason about such things is poor. The fixation on numbers in much of Science, and explicit belief by many that only numeric results are meaningful, has short-circuited our ability, as a society, to reason correctly about things that cannot be measured with numbers. Even for things that can be measured with numbers, the fixation on linear statistical models has short-circuited our exploration of feedback models.

In the perverse way of complex systems, our biggest problem is now of our own making. Like the blades of a helicopter, we must travel in our own wake. The very success of the mechanical view of the universe, of Science and technology, and of linear statistical models have made it almost impossible to now move forward from there. These techniques have, effectively, become religions, defended with blind religious zeal against perceived enemies at the gates.

So, when we are confronted with a problem which shimmers and changes with the size and scale of the observer, we are effectively paralyzed. Do tobacco companies kill people? On the scale of populations, the cause and effect is clear and unambiguous, and satisfies all the requirements of causality, except one we'll get to. Raised marketing efforts by tobacco companies precede and have a dose-response relation to the number of people smoking and the number of people dying. Etc. The problem is that if we shift lenses, on the scale of individual humans, this relationship is no longer "causal." Individuals have free will. Any particular individual may or may not respond to marketing efforts by the tobacco industry. The solidity dissolves.

It's not that there is no solidity to the causal argument - it's that the solidity depends on scale, which is a concept that is not yet recognized as pervasive and important.

I go on about this at great length in some other posts. ( Search "scale" or "causal" in the search window above to find them. ) See "Ten most important lessons from physics" for a discussion of how even water pipes have this property. From a human scale, there are entities called pipes, and water towers, and faucets and there are measurable factors like pressure and volume and flow-rates. These seem very solid. But if you drill down to the molecular level, this solidity dissolves. Molecules don't think, or act, or respond to any of that. Those words are meaningless to molecules. Molecules just respond to their local environment, and their neighboring molecules. A given molecule may linger at the pipe wall forever, it doesn't matter.

A few more such examples are given in my post: Amazing devices to impress your friends.
These include hollow tubes that cause air to separate into boiling hot air and air so cold it creates frost, pumps that pump water uphill with no power source and essentially no moving parts, hollow spaces that convert battery power to microwaves in one step with no moving parts, etc. These are all commercial, off-the-shelf devices, not my imagination gone wild.
They also all have the property of being globally causal and locally non-causal. Like the photo of Marilyn Monroe or Einstein, depending on how far back you stand from your monitor, they are both at once and fall into a space we are not taught about in school.

The second reason that "research, education, and policy development" have not been very successful and solving this problem of tobacco-related deaths is that this is a spiritual problem, and it will never yield to technology.

As T. S. Eliot noted, in Choruses from The Rock (1934):

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

Or, more precisely, the society that is shall shadow the society that pretends to be. Any individual effort to change the situation with respect to tobacco use will fail on two fronts.
First, the industry will fight back, and that is a cross-scale fight that pits corporations against individuals and guess who will win. Second, human weakness will fight back against our best intentions for our own behavior, and we will give in, as we did with alcohol. The latter is what the FDA Commissioner was referring to, in that regulations limiting tobacco per cigarette would only increase the number of cigarettes smoked until the same physiological hit was obtained, making the industry even richer.

In the contest between an individual and a multi-billion dollar corporate marketing campaign, it is not likely the individual will win.

There are exceptions. For instance, the population of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) in Utah has a well-documented life expectancy ten years longer than the average for the US, and one reason is that they prohibit smoking and drinking.

Look what is going on here. It is not the individuals that are fighting off the temptation to smoke or drink, but the larger scale entity, the, gasp, organized religion, that has succeeded where
"research, education, and policy development" have all failed.

One of the youth in our community asked one day "Why do we need organized religion? Why can't we all just worship God on our own?" The answer is visible in Utah -- larger scale entities can do things that smaller scale entities cannot possibly ever, ever, ever do on their own.

This is not a "cognitive" thing. Yielding to temptation and losing ability to deliver on one's own intentions is a function of being disconnected from a larger entity that helps shape and define and support you, and provides you what structural engineers call "active strength." The simple fact is that human beings are heavily influenced by peer pressure, whether they like it or not, or believe it or not, or have IQ's of 200 or 20.

It's not so much a question of which entity to belong to. Pick one that looks good. What matters is belonging to something larger that supports the values you desire your "self" to have.

Life is too complex to go it alone. We've seen to that. The one church that does not work, and will never work, is "rugged individualism." Whether you believe in God or not, or evolution or not, the math is the same - no individual will ever be as strong as a strong group. In the end, strong groups will win. Multi-celluarism always wins out, in the end - it's just a better solution. The fact that you're reading this shows that multi-cellular architecture can work, because that's exactly the operating principle your body uses to orchestrate a trillion cells and get one body. We're swimming in examples of this working.

Wrapping up the social thought - tobacco deaths continue because we accept them. If we, as a society, collectively, decided we didn't want our companies killing 5 million people a year, we could stop that cold. Such an action requires moral conviction and group solidarity of a type that will not come from "research, education, and policy development".

Such an action requires a change of heart.

Change everyone's heart, and the "problem" will dissolve. Suddenly, "we" will be at the same scale as "the problem", and the "problem" will simply evaporate.

So, I'd suggest that focus as the most likely to succeed. It demands that we come to grips with larger questions of society, morality, religion, science, and our own nature. It's not a simple thing to do, but, from the reasoning above, it looks to me like the easiest thing to do that has a chance of working, based on fundamental principles of what's going on here and the evidence at hand of what works and what doesn't.

Religion, like gasoline, is volatile. It releases tremendous energy in people, for good or bad. It can be misused, and it can kill. It can also power our lives with non-polluting ability to cope.

We don't need to throw out religion. We need to understand, when it works, why it works. There is no shorter path to the solution to the problems we've now made for ourselves, and no path that doesn't involve these questions.

The Sixth Discipline for Learning Organizations

There are some things common to the diverse fields of medicine, public health, business, religion, science, and the military.

• They all tackle problems which result in "success" or "failure" in a changing world.
• Failure can cost property, lives, or even entire nations and cultures.
  
• "Success" depends on how well they can detect failure and adapt to it.
• They all have bright people, but really operate more at the organizational level
  
• Adaptation depends on how good the organization is at seeing and learning.

So, a book like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is very important to us all, and impacts us on many fronts.

Senge points out an extremely pivotal insight: there are two different kinds of complexity, and most of what we do is focused on the wrong one.

He describes "detail complexity", which is the type we are familiar with, where there are thousands or even millions of details to be kept track of and managed. That one we're pretty good at, with the help of computers.

But then he goes on (on page 71 of the 2006 revision):

But there is a second type of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where the cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity...

When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in a different part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce non-obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.

He adds

"The real leverage in most management situations lie in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity."

This understanding comes from "system thinking" and that, in turn "starts with understanding a simple concept called feedback."

Of course, to say feedback is "simple" is misleading. The impact of feedback is wildly subtle, counter-intuitive, perplexing, and paradoxical to most of us. Some simply refuse to accept the concept at all because it overturns so many cherished notions of how the world works and how things "should" be.

Senge goes on, echoing many others and American Indian culture, "Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines."

The point is that when people or things form a causal loop, where each thing influences the next one down the chain, and the chain is closed, then all our notions of "causality" are thrown out the window. Every actor in that loop is both the cause and the prisoner of the effects of the entire loop. In many ways, the shape of the loop becomes the dominant "cause" of what unfolds, far more so than the people caught up within it.

Senge describes a person filling a glass of water. As seen by a person, their hand is controlling the level of water in the glass, and adjusting it as the glass fills. A perfectly valid alternative description is that the level of the water in the glass is controlling the hand, causing the hand to close the faucet as the level reaches the right place.

Both descriptions are partially correct. The hand affects the water level, and the water level, in turn affects the hand. There is a feedback loop in place. Both are "causes" and both are "effects," and "which came first" is an irrelevant question.

It is the intrinsic property of complex systems to be dense with such feedback loops between the people inside them, making everyone a cause and everyone a trapped recipient of effects.

This means bad news and good news.

The bad news is that, if the output of "the system" is wrong, then the blame should be shared among everyone in the system, not just the last person to touch something that failed.

The good news is that every person in the system therefore also has the opportunity to change the flows and impact the system's output. In conflict situations, either party has the ability to increase the tension or decrease the tension.

In fact, in most conflict situations, the whole reason for the conflict in the first place is that there are feedback loops that are reflecting each sides actions into later behaviors by the other side, which are misinterpreted as new "actions", not "reactions."

Thus, in 2006, when Hezbollah forces in Syria reacted to Israel's capture of many of their own, they captured two Israeli soldiers in return. However, Israel saw this not as a reaction, but as a new "unprovoked action", which therefore demanded a new massive "reaction" and counter strike - a 34 day assault by Israel. The counter strike, in turn, was perceived by Hezbollah as a new "unprovoked attack", and the cycle simply continues to feed itself.

This is a classic no-win situation, where each side downplays the value of lives of the other side, and feels that the loss of one of their own should be responded to by killing two of the "others",
in order to "get even" and also "be even." By that flawed match, the conflict spirals out of control because there will never be an "even" situation.

On a smaller scale, within organizations, the same phenomenon occurs - but generally without actual explosives and death. The vast majority of conflicts can actually be traced back to people, or teams, or departments, or divisions, or managers blaming others for behavior that is simply the downstream result of their own earlier behavior, reflected and sometimes amplified through the structure of "the system" of feedback loops and lags. Similarly, management and labor can get into the same endless loop of conflict over "getting even" for behaviors that are the result of their own, forgotten, earlier actions.

In a bizarre sort of hallucinogenic dance, at all levels from personal to national, we are fighting demons that are simply the delayed reflections of our own earlier behavior, which we fail to recognize and blame instead on the "others" being "bad."

Senge mentioned the problem with dynamic complexity over space and over time, but he missed the third dimension, namely, over scale, or location in the hierarchy of life. Actions or interventions may look very different, ranging from great to wretched, as we rotate the lenses in our microscope stage and view different time-horizons, different space-horizons, and different perspectives from the bottom of the organization to the top.

Worse, actors in one place who perceive, at their location, time, and scale that their own actions are "good" may be completely baffled by hostile responses coming from actors at other locations, times, or level who are only responding to the "terrible" thing being done to them by that obviously uncaring and bad person somewhere else. And, of course, this would mean that those people responding with hostility must be "bad people" and need to be fired, neutralized, or killed, depending on the context of the conflict.

Dennis Severance describes the same kind of error being made by a mythical management in the book Making I/T Work. That management tries to impose an an enterprise-wide computer system, runs into "hostility", tries to "deal with" the "opponents" by firing them, and then is blind-sided when the computer system, "out of the blue, with no notice", fails to operate as intended, and they can't grasp why no one ever warned them of problems. The fact that those who raised these issues at the start were fired for their "hostility" is completely lost. This is a very common problem across industries.

These problems are not, as they might seem, problems of perception, but are actually problems of the intrinsic properties of systems. The people in these systems are all well-intended, doing "good jobs" locally, and yet, like M.C. Escher's pictures, taken together form an impossible loop that simply can't operate.

The variables that depend on the horizon of space, time, or scale are the keys here, and are as surprising as seeing an object that is red close up turn to look green when you back up several steps. This seems "impossible". Actually, New Scientist published a marvelous picture a month ago that, if viewed close up, was Albert Einstein, but if you backed up across the room, changed into Marilyn Monroe.

( Hybrid images: Now you see them…

• 31 March 2007
• NewScientist.com
• Gregory T. Huang )
  

These system effects are much more prevalent than people realize, and are the things that are "to blame" for most of the conflict and corporate dysfunction and national conflict around us.

It is clear to me, and I'd say to Peter Senge, that these effects need to be somehow made visible and accessible to everyone, at every level, from every country, so that we can get enough comprehension for people to see that, in Walt Kelly's Pogo's words, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Of course, many scientists, working a small scales, would have a hard time accepting wisdom from theologians, working at large scales, who see different pictures in the same world. Biomedical researchers, used to looking down the microscope for the cause of problems, are not prone to look out the window instead, and even less to consider that their own scientific culture could be implicated in producing the conditions that produced the cancer that they are now working to "cure".

Still, the logic of Senge's arguments is sound. "All" that is required is for people to stop blaming others for all the pain and recognize that the others are just as good people and are just as trapped in the pain, and, in any case, as with Jimmy Buffet in Margaritaville, they might realize that, yes, maybe, they themselves might be partly to blame.

If this looks remarkably like the basic golden rule of most religions ("Do unto others what you would have them do unto you") that's because it is. Other really annoying commandments like "Forgive us our sins as we forgive others" also come readily to mind.

Like the "Marilyn Einstein" photo, reality is multi-scaled, and the scientists have the fine-detail or high-frequency detail right, and the religions may be wrong on details but have the long-wavelength, larger picture right.

All of this should be something that can be animated, simulated, and taught in K-12 school, as well as in continuing education. And it should be.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot