Part 1
First I look at the Human Activity System at its highest level, this means looking at its components: Knowledge and Ways of Acquiring Knowlede about our place in Nature, our Minds, Body and Culture. Much of this is a recent development and has not yet entered mainstream culture. My hypothesis from this review is that a large portion of Human Behaviour should be considered as an emergent property of the Human System system. Looked at in this way there are implications: the sort of political economy we have will influence our behaviour, similarly changes to the political economy will result in changes to our behaviour.
To anticipate the following sections on the practice of holistic economy (a new politics); there is both an opportunity to make positive change and a huge challenge for those those who want to bring it about.
Opportunity
The opportunity it presents is simply to grasp the implications and use the knowledge we have to catalyse the mindset change and paradigm shift that will bring change in its wake.
Challenge
The challenge arrises because if the inherent difficulty of the task: although a mindset change and paradigm shift is the most effective place to intervene and change a system it needs:
- The articulation of a vision - the status quo is all round us - proposing something different must be convincing. The left does not have a good record here. However we are also fortunate to have many real world examples from cooperatives to partnerships (and all sorts of things in between) to help show the alternative in action, we don't need to depend on abstract appeals.
- The inclusion of people at all levels in running society, the trends that need reversing are those that centralise and scale up, getting people to share power is never going to be easy.
- The politicians and activists who support it to be credible. indulging in the rough trade of politics with gusto makes a mockery of appeals to more cooperation and collaboration and the electorate senses it.