The first part of this chapter brings together material suggesting that the current
financial “crisis” may well have been engineered to strengthen the hand of a relatively small
group of people who use international financial institutions to manage the planet more
generally. It is concluded that, behind the financial crisis lies a public management crisis. The
second part discusses the interlinked crises in our habitat. It seems that we have to radically
innovate the way we live if we are to survive as a species. In part three it is suggested that
these interlinked crises are even more deeply embedded in human societal organisation than
had been suspected. The trend toward centralised command-and-control management of
human societies appears to have been proceeding inexorably since time immemorial. This
itself appears to require the invention of more and more useless work to create the divisions
which compel people to participate in the destructive activities which pre-occupy most
societies. The financial and management crises then appear as symptoms of dysfunctional
social organisation, not as crises that can be addressed directly. Most of Part III is devoted to
outlining ways in which the socio-cybernetic processes involved may be studied and the
results used to design more appropriate socio-cybernetic (governance) systems.
Keywords: Authoritarian leaders, auto poiesis, civil liberties, comprehensive
evaluation, destruction of open research in universities, dysfunctional social
arrangements, ecological crisis, ecological footprint, “educational” system,
financial crisis, gaia, milton friedman, money creation, murray bookchin, neoclassical
economics, quality of life, reductionist science, socio-cybernetics, social
hierarchy, social forces, systems analysis.
