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I have just come across the incarnation into words of a beautiful positivist and humanist mind of the highest caliber: F Buckminster Fuller. Apparently he is 50 years ahead of my timid attempts at using the converged wisdom of complexity, design and systems to contemplate our society’s potential pitfalls and ways to overcome them. And so, my initial list of foundational thinkers (Ackoff, Jaques, Prigogine and Vester) has just been expanded. I will be studying the implications of Fuller’s profound insights in the near future, but, for now, here is a quotation that takes the duality of my caution-opportunity message in the discontinuity disorder and post-causality pieces even further:

“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war“. – F. Buckminster Fuller