Elements of society in which changes must be made
One might easily be led to a kind of despair by this analysis. It would seem that changing the institutions I have listed, requires a wholesale making over of much of society. Yet it has to be recognized that the system of mechanized social relationships, rules, and bureaucracy, which was invented at the beginning of the 20th century, does work, almost inevitably, against the creation and unfolding of living order.
The very methods that render bureaucracy efficient — whether in banking, or planning, or manufacturing, or accounting, or construction — namely, the application of fixed rules in the wrong kind of way, and the early 20th-century version of systematization of rules and procedures so that people can be replaced — work against the processes which are necessary to allow accurate unfolding to occur and which allows a living structure to appear.
The advent of computers has changed some of that. For the first time, mechanized procedures are available which are inherently flexible, context-sensitive, capable of responding uniquely to differences, and thus approximating, in human-created fashion, the organic living processes of nature and of traditional society. It is now for the first time sometimes possible — to seek context-sensitive modification of procedures — to replace mechanized bureaucracy with a new, more organic form of human organization that is more capable of creating living structure — because it allows individual processes and sub-processes to be free — that means, to respond appropriately to what is happening in the whole.
But this noble purpose, is extraordinarily difficult to implement, difficult even to conceive. That is because the form of social organization, and the structure of social processes we created during the 20th century, again and again create a mental catch-22 situation where the means needed to escape from the anti-living process, are prohibited by the very process we are trying to replace.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/19 Massive process difficulties#