Modern money-information, a sustainable civilization and systems pedagogy

Money-information is a powerful form of communication in modern societies. Its evolution parallels that of civilization itself. In fact, modern market-based societies could not exist at the level of complexity they exhibit without the simplifications provided by money-information. The sustainability of modern civilization, consequently, depends in no small degree upon the continuing evolution of money-information and upon an understanding of it by an increasingly greater portion of the human population. This paper discusses money-information in the context of its evolution as it contributed to advancing human cognition and to introducing higher-level human systems. The paper asserts that money-information-based market societies offer the best chance of sustainability because they are relatively recent emergents that simplify human perceptions of the evermore complex interactions within and among modern societies. Modern money-based societies are the result of a long evolution away from top-down toward bottom-up control of societal decider subsystems. For that evolution to continue, individual humans composing societies must comprehend more societal complexity in order to make decisions that, in fact, sustain civilization instead of those that destroy it. Systems concepts and the knowledge tools developed in the systems framework offer the best hope of educating individual humans to comprehend the complexity needed to sustain rather than destroy modern civilization.