The Global System: Conditions for Peace, Stability, and Social Justice

Achievement of peace, stability, and social justice on a global scale are seen to require fundamental whole-system change. At the deepest level this involves change in the basic premises underlying modern industrial society. Forces that could bring about such a fundamental change are evident. Appropriate use of new understandings of the power of inner imagery and affirmation could help keep the change from being as disruptive and as generative of human misery as have been some such changes in the past. James Miller has identified some of the ubiquitous characteristics of ``Living Systems'', including human societies [1]. Maxwell Maltz, in writing about ``Psychocybernetics'', has used a simple systems analogue to explain the power of affirmation (``self-fulfilling belief'') to heal and to achieve other goals [2]. Gary Schwartz has proposed a multi-level systems model for understanding the power of inner imagery to contribute to healing of the human body [3]. Gregory Bateson includes the concept of ``a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem...(that) is immanent in the total interconnected social system and includes the planetary ecology'' [4]. The following paper extends these concepts to explore conditions for healing the planet and achieving a ``cooperative security system'' [5]. One of the most significant characteristics in understanding the behavior of social systems is the presence of feedback.