Timothy Wilken, MD writes: As a synergic scientist I study how systems work together. How the
parts composing a system relate to each other. Those parts that work
against each other produce the weakest whole systems. Those parts that
ignore each other do better, but still are quite limited producing only
average or fair systems. Those parts that work together to mutual
benefit create the post powerful whole systems.

Parts that hurt each other and work against have lose/win or lose/lose relationships. One fox plus one rabbit equals only one fox.

Parts that ignore each other and work independently have draw¦draw relationships. We trade things of equal value. We have our anonymous great market. One plus one is always equal to 2 or a little less for our fair profit.

Parts that help each other and work together have win-win relationships. One plus one is always more than two, sometimes many more than two.

Synergic scientists are strongly biased towards win-win engineering. For many years I imagined what would a win-win economic system look like? What kind of money or currency would it use?

Imagine my suprise, to discover that a win-win economy transcends money. (05/06/08)
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: There are three types of humans to be found
in our present world. Which type you are depends on what you believe
about how the world works.

Adversaries believe there is not enough for everyone and only the physically strong will survive. They believe humans are coercively dependent on others, and they best understand th language of force.

Neutralists believe there is
enough for everyone, if only you work hard enough and take care of
yourself. They believe humans are financially  independent and should be self-sufficient unless they are too lazy or defective. They best understand the language of money.

A new type of human is emerging called synergists. Synergists believe there is enough for everyone, but only if we work together and act responsibly. They believe humans are interdependent
and can only obtain sufficiency by working together as community.
Synergists best understand the language of love.

But, to be successful in our present world,
the synergist must understand all three languages and know when to use
them. Synergists must sometimes use the language of force, and sometimes the language of money, it depends on whom they are talking to. However, when synergists are seeking allies—when synergists are seeking to build community—they must speak the language of love.

Synergists are trying to heal the wounds
inflected by those who don’t understand how the world could work. This
then is the essential challenge to the synergists.

Can we work together and act responsibly in time to save our ourselves on this planet ?
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Not without levers! (05/20/05)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: As the West’s industrial regime sputters toward a
cheap-energy-crackup conclusion, there have been attempts to recast
what our economy is actually about, how to account for whatever wealth
we manage to produce, and project what our society will actually be
organized to do in the years ahead.

For a while in the 1990s,
the idea was a “service economy,” kind of like the old fable of the
town whose inhabitants made a living by taking in each other’s laundry
– only in our case it was selling hamburgers to tourists on vacation
from their jobs making hamburgers elsewhere, or something like that.

Then came the idea of the “information economy” in which making
things of value would no longer matter, only the processing and
deployment of information (sometimes misidentified as “knowledge”).
This model seemed to suggest a yin-yang of software engineers who made
up games like “Grand Theft Auto” serving the opposite cohort of people
who bought and played the game. If nothing else, it certainly explained
how lifetimes could be frittered away on stupid activities.

That illusion yielded to the housing bubble economy, which
actually did produce a lot of things, but not necessarily of value –
for instance, houses made of particle board and vinyl 38 miles outside
of Sacramento. It was a tragic and manifold waste of resources, as well
as an insult to the landscape. But the darker side of the housing
bubble lay in the world of finance, where a vast empire of swindles was
constructed to support the Potemkin facade of production homebuilding.

Now we are in a strange period when those swindles are unwinding.
The people who run the finance sector — the Wall Street investment
banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies, the Federal Reserve, and the
US Dept of the Treasury — in desperately trying to prevent the unwind,
have rapidly ramped up another new economy based entirely on the buying
and selling of risk. Risk, as a pure abstraction unconnected to any
real capital activity, is all that’s left to buy and sell after all
other plausibly practical vehicles for finance have failed. (05/06/08)
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