by Dr. Peter Meier, Meaning Giving Informatics, BGI (BedeutungsGebende Informatik) AG Zürich

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This site has been in response to Problems of Participation and Connection, the title of a Conference to which I was invited in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Monday April 5 to Friday April 9, 1999, supported by the UK Cybernetics Society, the Dutch Systems Group, the Center for Innovation and Co-operative Technology, University of Amsterdam and RC51.

Focus: This paper is written in view of the reality that  economics is using politics to globalize the simplification of its economic imperative and post-normal science is attempting the ultimate fragmentation of what is essential - LIFE. Unless you are post-normal, you must agree that a jump, or at least some fundamental rethinking is required, before the point of no return, chaos, which is instigated by simplifying fragmentation with high tech. I shall call the agents who knowingly or unknowingly are heading in this direction of anti-life-fulfillment, chaos, "The Enemy". Important concerns in relation to coping with the Enemy include the necessity of the observers to first observe themselves in terms of who's lifefulfillment is served with what they have in mind. Only then can the adaptation of self-centered collectives to the basic necessity of the life-fulfillment of as many beings as possible, become possible. Then the corresponding need for individual entities to maintain sufficient space to shape their lives in their local realities inside and outside such collectives with Timely Exchange of Project-Orientated Competence, TEPOC©  can be accordingly deregulated and revitalized. Traditional forms of research do not appear to provide sufficient modeling complexity to deal with these real concerns and often work into the hands of the Enemy. He wants to prevent men from reaching a state of mind, in which they cannot just design and realize, say the best cathedral in the world, but simply fulfill their lives as a Creature of the Creator in his Creation. And in that state of mind the Enemy takes a great deal of trouble to prevent men rejoicing whenever anyone meets a companion who is on the path where the truth leads to a fulfilling life. According to the Enemy nobody should be free from any bias, especially not of that of Ce, the politically correct Communication patterns already established. In modern terms, the Enemy plants Ce-viruses in the mental operating system, so that nobody can rejoice in his or her talent as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor's talent - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall for that matter; the sunrise is spoiled by air pollution, the elephant shot for its tusks and the waterfall channeled by concrete.

Path: The above focus then asks for the restoration of a new kind of self-love - based on an essential understanding beyond charity and gratitude for all selves, including one's own. When we thus relearn to love our neighbor as ourselves, we will be freed from the Ce-viruses to love ourselves as who we are, e.g. meant to be by our Creator, giving ourselves the same credit as our neighbors and for that matter to Ce. The argument to be presented is that the frameworks needed to successfully deal with this path of getting the prime need met, that of lifefulfillment. This requires continuous redefinition and learning from our life experience. On the other hand the Enemy wants us to mimic the Ce-trend, the dead past or the imagined future with the promise of the second best, the satisfaction of bringing wishful thinking to its self-fulfilling dead end; that is the unavoidable consequence of any Ce-based reasoning within a closed, denotational mental operating system. There is no way out with all the countless generalizing words merely used in the collectively established communication patterns! However, by using the 1728 open-ended generative principles, OEGP upon which Applied Personal Science APS® is based, the light at the end of the tunnel comes into focus. It reveals the truth that enlightens the path towards life-fulfillment even in participation and connection with the Enemy! This raises the question why frameworks such as the Platonian mental operating system based on denotational thinking with words, as old as 2500 years are still in use, with only minor updates considering that they haven’t achieved what they proclaimed in terms of lifefulfillment and why hardly any scientific body seem to care about their dangerous inadequacy. The answer is, the Enemy has mobilized and cultivated his useful idiots for centuries in such vast numbers, that their quantity seem to utterly override the quality we all strive for, lifefulfillment. But don't lose heart; half of all the humans - who have ever lived - are still alive and if you just look at those with a scientific mind, it is over 90%. That means the past and its tradition are really not as overwhelming as it appears. Thus if we find ways to deregulate and revitalize the minds of those still alive, we can C3-redesign the future in tune with C3, rather than fail with Ce-reengineering life. Thus it is no longer a question of "red" or "dead", but simply of lifefulfillment in opposition to the Enemy and with God, the Creator within the order HE has set up for us Creature in his Creation, or self-righteous Ce-damnation and wasting one's life in man-made, self-destructive virtual reality, for that is all we can create following the Enemy! Considering what our minds have had to go through in c3-terms of adapting to new ways of command - control - communication since World War II and the means thus made available for representing new insights and disseminating them, the necessary task ahead is not out of reach. It is comparable to the Manhattan Project that led to the atom bomb, by which humanity lost its innocence forever, or bringing a man to the moon, through which mankind began to understand its living space Earth. We now know how precious our living space is, that we have no alternative and that the Enemy, in his one-track mind cannot handle sustainability. Thus we cannot afford to give it up to the Enemy! Gorbatschov has set the example of not giving in to the facade of the Enemy, which at that time was the "Evil Empire" of communism. We know what Luther and Martin Luther King achieved in terms of opening up what always seemed an end Ce by generating, in accordance with their lifefulfilling innate principles. Obviously the Enemy prefers Platonian Ce-denotations and utterly hates the OEGP concept of  APS®. Thus without confronting that hate, realizing its death and burying it in your mind, you will never understand Applied Personal Science whatever your IQ is, or your intellect knows or imagines.

Upheaval in the Conventional Scenario: Participation in common human activities normally takes the form of one or more members (or representatives) of a community, a company, a committee or a group of deprived or deprivileged people, being targeted as customers perceived as preceding the Ce state of the art of living together being invited to join the club. If they don't join in by learning fast or buying in as customers and refusing to open up their minds to what seems to be a self-evident benefit, they are considered primitive and end up being criminalized and forced to learn it (Ce) the hard way or excluded, first from the job, then from money, then from Ce-consideration and ultimately from life through the various forms of death sentences available in "human" culture which aims to keep Ce closed. The aim within collectives that assemble around their Ce-identity (consisting of the established Communication patterns in their intranet such as the state) is to keep its members sufficiently connected to solve what Ce dictates to be their problem (usually some kind of non-Ce-enemy). And, that is where it gets tricky, to contain the enemy within the established mental Ce-based operating system. Members are coerced (by what money can buy in the market) to  make a decision, and turn it into a set of action plans to be executed like a program in a computer operating system, aimed at fulfilling the marketing plans and the budgets aimed at a return on the investment into the share holder values. The work of the thus engaged managers and workers may take a few days or weeks, while the effects of such man-made endeavors are expected to persist for months, years or even decades. In the Ce-dominated context, a large variety of approaches to improving on such participation are identified by rules, on how to choose participants, get responses, combine and evaluate them and hopefully make it all converge towards the desired result. Some approaches aim to use objective criterions to judge the participants and their participation, to limit that variety where it seems to threaten to make the process either fall back into the pre-Ce state of the art, or to transcend it. The Ce-system priests (intellectuals) are afraid of either; perhaps of the later even more than the former, since it is less tangible to the masses they have managed to subjugate, e.g. the empty minds they have stuffed up to fit into their hidden agendas. This Ce-protection mechanism was named by Ken Wilbur as the pre-trans-trap; it tries to compensate for any unethical and undemocratic effects in the process of allowing people some degree of freedom about what is not essential. Of course "un" refers to non-Ce political correctness. But what if the pre-trans-trap thus filters out the solution? We all know that the Platonian based mental operating system, the result of the Enemy's thinking catastrophe, has achieved just that for centuries, at the cost of hundreds of millions lives wasted at the stake, in economic blunders, wars and genocide! Admittedly based on its underlying philosophy important questions have been raised. But they remain unanswered, at least in essence within Ce, by default! This way the desire for life is excited to a greater degree, while its fulfillment is moved more and more outside men's reach and closer to the point of no return. This major "scientific" achievement of fragmenting life from its fulfillment, creates a field for fascist politics based on simplifications such as reengineering life with man-made power. And this keeps the Ce-pot boiling at the cost of Life and its Living Space, Earth, as a whole.

And that threat keeps Ce-aware, conscience people busy asking, what kind of exchange among participants could give rise to not just politically correct participation in view of socially acceptable results (money) but to Timely Exchange of Project-Orientated Competence, TEPOC, in view of the lifefulfillment of as many as possible. The fact is, lifefulfillment is progress in answering this very question! And this unavoidably leads to a deregulation of Ce, which means that entities capable of lifefulfillment can fulfill their life by revitalizing Ce.

That is the proper focus for the science of the 21^st Century:

If you are uneasy about the emerging chaos in both our world and in your own mind, but not yet ready to give up the Ce-position power, even though it is dwindling, in favour of  your eternal life-fulfillment, you might be tempted by the Enemy to ask questions like:

1. Can the desired effects be guaranteed to occur?
2. How does the exchange among the participants relate to how they later participate in their organizations, networks and communities?

Other questions concern the relation to research:

3. Does the lifefulfilling approach constitute a form of research in itself, or is it to be the basics for doing research?
4. Is it the result of research, or can it be improved by research, thus positioning wishful thinking beyond lifefulfillment?
5. Does its development require a new research paradigm ("beyond" path-truth-life), and if so, which one?

Truth: Conventionally what is sought by managers is a more "constructive" framework within the Ce-paradigm that "helps" people limit their horizons to the point where, as a collective, they perform tasks effectively. Alternatively, "new" paradigms are either claimed to be "constructive" towards achieving even better results or "deconstructive" in overcoming the undealt with rest risks inherent in any closed-system approach in its essentially self-destructive nature inherent to man-made products and systems...

In either approach those who control budgets ask how people participate in the, nowadays often computer supported, negotiations leading to ‘constructed’ social events to make sure they can maintain their position in any foreseeable outcome. Within that precondition studies are possible about how the interactions guiding participation can be strengthened so they function as Ce-support systems in serving clients with a wide variety of aims. As long as the structure of the established positions are not challenged. There is even an interest in what permits social and other horizons to continue to evolve and adapt.

Reflecting on these issues seems opportune for at least two important reasons. The most pressing one is the observation that

1) Ce-confined research on social phenomena has not led, and will never lead to sufficiently transferable and useful knowledge to resolve collective problems such as pollution, conflict, misuse of power, or to achieve desired forms of change, where there is hope that ‘proper’ forms of participation may provide what is needed. Another reason is

2) the increasing awareness that Ce-based research has reached a plateau where the necessities demand a concentration on the study of strongly connected collectives before they drag us all into the abyss, as the communist- or the nazi-regimes have already demonstrated, and as the global financial institutions are about to do, and also a study of the (technological or other) interfacing that is needed to keep humanity from degenerating in using all its wonderful  achievements.

Ce-High-Life: Thus meetings of leading edge scientists convene to explore ways of studying participation and its role in research where it can be improved upon without making the pre-trans-trap snap. Results and outcomes must be propagated as being important to many areas of contemporary interests to get the budgets aimed for, to be allowed to stimulate new studies and to get heard among mutual admiration societies. This seems to simply mean that in order to have a right to live, you have to pay your tribute to Ce. Contributors to such meetings are expected to present research - both empirical and theoretical - in which the notion of participation and not the lifefulfillment of those concerned is explored. Contributions should deal with participation as a tool in research, or consider its practical effects to side-track from applying science personally. Areas of interest include community development, innovation, adaptive systems, health and social care, Internet use, managing strong social actors, but not individual cases; they leave aside individuals in their struggle for lifefulfillment - here is the least protected minority group - even below drug addicts, refugees! Another important area is information technology and its use in constructing interfaces. The meetings on ‘Problems of .....’ aim to provide opportunities to reflect on general concerns of research rather than on special and particular cases in fear of, and as a safeguard against the pre-trans-trap snapping. The organizers of such socially constructed events aim to facilitate high quality, e.g. politically Ce-correct discussions and thought: To make the above-mentioned, severe Ce-limitations to living together successfully, attractive: the timing and structure of meetings have to facilitate productive (emotionally gratifying) interactions at all levels among participants. Conference organizers thus have to provide - as will be familiar from past comparable mass events   - a special and appropriate milieu and ambience, organized around, and embodied in, four constituents.