The Unicist Research Institute


The Crisis of Ukraine – A Functionalist Approach to Scenario Building

Ukraine has basically evolved in a transition stage for centuries. Transition stages are such when there is more than one cultural nucleus seeking dominance in a culture. Transition stages drive naturally towards a need to survive to avoid being submitted to alien values.

In Ukraine there are now two different cultures in conflict. Now, this conflict assumed the extreme state of war, which in fact is the consequence of external interests that are associated with one of the archetypes of the population of Ukraine.

When there is a transition stage, the dominant values that ensure survival are individualism and materialism, which generate social dysfunctional behaviors. Dysfunctionality is always hidden behind fallacious cultural myths that avoid the perception of being endangered.

The chaos produced by war might generate three different consequences that cannot be predicted, because there is chaos, the influential forces are unclear, and there is an actual conflict of archetypes:

  1. Solving the problem of the internal cultural dispute.
  2. Generating an excision of the country
  3. Degradation of the culture to a deeper survival stage without solving the conflict.

A social mutation is produced when the functionality of a social entity has been lost, and there is the necessary available energy to generate a change.

The values of cultures are implicit in the values of their elites. Therefore, the understanding of the archetype of a culture implies researching the evolution of their establishment and the facts that were produced.

If you enter deeply in the history of a country, which is the way to try to discover the nature of a culture defined by its archetype, you will see that most of the changes happen at an operational level and not at a structural level.

But you can find turning points in culture like the one that was produced in Sweden more than 100 years ago. It might or not be the case of Ukraine. It fully depends on its establishment.

Peter Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute has been, since 1976, the world-leading research organization that introduced the functionalist approach to science to manage the functionality of the real world. www.unicist.org


Exercise: How do Fundamentalists build Sects?

Sectarian behavior is the dominant characteristic of fundamentalism. Sects are not necessarily religious. There are all kinds of sects: religious, military, political and social sects.

SectTo understand fundamentalism it is necessary to find our own fundamentalist behavior. The one who considers that never behaved as one should buy a mirror, because he is probably endangered by the question and is acting as one at the moment.

First step:

The need of a parallel reality

The first step to build a sect is to understand that one needs to create a parallel reality and find people who have the need of the particular reality one is creating.

Second step: Finding the members

The second step is to identify the potential members of the sect. They must be “survivors”. Survivors are individuals who cannot adapt to an environment because of psychological, spiritual, organic or materialistic reasons.

Survivors are everywhere, beginning with marginal individuals and ending in the upper class. One has to know that a survivor is a person who acts like a “black hole” absorbing all the energy he can.

Survivors are “infinite” takers. Nothing ever suffices. To avoid the fear of death, which dominates survivors, they are keepers; they take just for the pleasure to have. Their fear of failure is so dominant that they gather everything, “just in case…”

Third step: Defining the sect model

There are many possible models. The success of a sect is given by the consistency of the sect model with the needs of its members.

The unicist ontology of a sect describes the nature of sects. They all have in common one simple characteristic:

Fundamentalism

Sects are fundamentalistic and fundamentalists always belong to a sect, including the individualistic ones.

Sects are functional to themselves and their members. They create a parallel world with parallel rules. This parallel rules make them powerful if they succeed in the “survivors-raising” process.

Sects require the management of four central concepts:

  • Power
  • A superior moral
  • An Education – indoctrination model
  • A benefit sharing model

Peter Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.


Donald Trump: The Era of Sustainable Globalization

The elections won by Mr. Donald Trump might represent a turning point in America’s economic positioning as a response to the consolidation of several influential poles in the world, after the division between capitalists and communists ended.

This implies a change in the rules for global businesses. If it is a turning point, it will generate the opposition of all those who live in a comfort zone. Based on our forecasts USA is moving towards a “Sustainable Globalization Model”.

The core of this stage is the diplomacy of the participants because in fact it is a war between economic interests that now are totally different. The “war in peace” begins because USA finally decided to move from being the one who pays the bills to foster economic freedom and now decided to assume the leadership of its own interests.

The first step will be a confrontation of dissuasion powers in order to establish the new positions. This can adopt multiple shapes considering that if diplomacy (as a “war in peace” action) fails, real economic war will begin.

Those who have a positive trade balance are being threatened by the change of the positioning of USA and might become more threatened if the exports from the USA begin to be fostered.  This cannot be expected in the short term because of the investment and time needed to install automation to compensate the low wages of the developing countries.

From now on the globalization will be limited by the national interests of all countries including the USA. The United States have no more benefit from adopting the role of the “tutor” of freedom because the battle between freedom and security, capitalism vs. communism, ended. The confrontation between interests adopted a new shape.

This changes the way international companies need to design their business which implies that many of them will have to make their nationality prevail over the short term interests of the business.

Unicist Press Committee

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute has been, since 1976, the pioneer in using a unicist ontological approach to deal with complexity. It introduced a paradigm shift in sciences emulating the triadic intelligence of nature, integrating complexity sciences with systemic sciences. This research allowed developing unicist technologies to manage the complex aspects in the social, business and individual fields.
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The use of dualistic logic to deal with the here and now

While the unicist double dialectical approach requires investing energy to apprehend the nature of reality, dualism provides the most energy saving approach to manage the “here and now”.

The dualistic logic implies using Hegel`s or Marx`s dialectics. This use has a specific functionality in order to allow dealing with aspects that require an operational approach to deal with the here and now.

It allows accepting “absolutes” in order to separate what is true from what is false. This gives dualistic thinkers the perception of inner freedom while they move within the boundaries of the absolute.

Dualistic thinking also allows avoiding uncertainty. Uncertainty is an unbearable feeling for people that forces them to use dualism to analyze reality until they are able to eliminate the uncertainty from the environment.

It has to be considered that while analysis requires the use of a dualistic logic, synthesis requires the use of unicist double dialectical logic.

The energy conservation functionality of a dualistic logic is given by its capacity to avoid ambiguity. It provides a spontaneous solution that confirms the “absolute” individuals have in their mind.

It has to be considered that dualistic thinkers cannot infer the future and need to forecast it using any kind of extrapolation. This implies assuming that the past and the future are symmetric which is “an aprioristic” fallacy.

Peter Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
http://www.unicist-school.org/future-research/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/turi-1.pdf


Future Research: The Nature of Economic Freedom

This work deals with the conceptual structure of economic freedom and its integration with economic democracy. It includes no ideological considerations or influence. It is based on the unicist approach to complexity science, which uses a pragmatic, structural and functionalist framework.

The Nature of Economic Freedom

The reach of one’s globalization is defined by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

There are prejudices and fallacious myths installed in the world dealing with the concept of economic freedom.

Unfortunately, no literature could be found that approached economic freedom based on its concept to define its nature (the “stem cell” of economic freedom).

The existing approaches are strongly influenced by ideological positions.

This introduction, based on an excerpt from the book “The Future of Democracy and Capitalism” by Peter Belohlavek, provides a conceptual approach to capitalism, going beyond the beliefs deposited on facts by people to understand the nature and dynamics that define the present and future of Capitalism.

It can be said that Greece was the origin of political democracy in the West but was not an economic democracy because in those times the expansion of cultures was driven by military actions.

The Unicist Logic of DemocraciesIt can also be said that the United States of America are a paradigmatic example of evolutionary democracy that integrates social democracy, economic democracy and political democracy to manage the domestic affairs.

As an evolutionary democracy, the United States of America could be taken as a paradigmatic example of Economic Freedom and Capitalism. But Economic Freedom and Capitalism cannot be imported or exported. The unique structure of values that are implicit in a culture’s archetype are the demonstration that it is meaningless to copy any model to a foreign culture that has different structural values.

The understanding of the nature of economic democracy and capitalism allow defining the particular way in which a country can deal with economics and economic democracy considering its own characteristics.

This complete document includes:

  • Economic Democracy Ethics
  • The Structure of Capitalism
  • The Nature of Justice: The Catalyst and Entropy Inhibitor of Capitalism
  • The Future of Capitalism
  • Annex 1: The Nature of Economic Democracy
  • Annex 2: Corruption: The Anti-concept of Capitalism

Economic Democracy Ethics

Ethics defines the accepted rules of an environment. These rules satisfy the functional needs, the morality that is accepted in the environment and the ideology that underlies this ethics.

Economic Democracy EthicsIn the economic democracy, we have structured the four basic ethics that are accepted as existent:

  • The Statism
  • The Protectionism / Dirigisme
  • The Pre-capitalism
  • The Capitalism

The ontogenesis of these ethics is homologous to the phylogeny of the human growth processes.  This is to say that Statism implies the childhood of economic behavior, protectionism / dirigisme is its adolescence, Pre-capitalism is its youth and Capitalism is its maturity.

Anarchy is the stage previous to these ethics. It implies that individuals develop their economic activities eluding the rules of the environment.

Statism

Economic Statism is based on using the drivers of rational morality to guide economic actions. As economic or materialistic behaviors belong to the field of individualistic attitudes, Statism necessarily needs to make others responsible for the results to be achieved.

It is a low productivity economic ethics, in which the fulfillment of the established rules prevails over the achievement of results. Statism installs economic behavior in the rules of childhood, which means that the “family” prevails over the individual desires. It achieves a superior level of productivity in environments that have a superior ethics driven collective intelligence and are highly disciplined.

This is not the case when dealing with the social aspects of Statism. Statism in economic behavior requires authoritarian dirigisme in order to define what needs to be done and is driven by the need to make people align in an environment where the property belongs to others.

Protectionism / Dirigisme

Economic protectionism / dirigisme is based on installing autonomous entities that live based on the exchange with other protected entities in order to survive and provide adequate living conditions for the members.

Protectionism is a typical adolescent organization that corresponds to an economic stage where the environment has not been organized as a democratic entity.

It is based on the self-sufficiency of the productive entities that cannot deal in an adapted way with the environment because the control on their protected organization prevails over the productivity that can be achieved.

As there is a need to be self-sufficient, there is no possibility of introducing innovations or adapting to the change of the external environment. Their productivity suffices for survival and their horizon is limited to the reality of their “private” entity. Economic protectionism achieves a superior level of productivity when it is driven by a superior ethics driven ideology.

Pre-capitalism

The economic pre-capitalism ethics implies that private property prevails over any other consideration in economic behavior.

Pre-capitalism implies, on the one hand, that the private initiative should prevail over governmental or State interventions and that all that hinders economic freewill is dysfunctional.

It is naturally the capitalist logic of non-democratic environments and, paradoxically, it represents the prejudices that non-democratic and non-developed countries have about capitalism.

Pre-capitalism is homologous to the behavior in youth where the voluntarism, omnipotence and energy prevail over a rational use of resources. It is a typical model for primary industry driven countries that have not known the meaning of a true democracy.

The productivity of pre-capitalism is based on the power of transferring costs to the participants of the economic activity.

Capitalism

Capitalism is the ethics that corresponds to a superior economic democracy, which is natural in democratic countries and not natural in countries that are developing towards a democratic environment.

Economic capitalism implies, on the one hand, the existence of a social economy where the society participates in the ownership of the productive entities through the stock market and, on the other hand, the existence of a newcomer’s place in which pre-capitalist rules apply within the general rules of capitalism

Capitalism is sustained by justice, which is the catalyst and entropy inhibitor of the system. Without a functional judicial system, capitalism degrades towards a pre-capitalist ethics.

The level of productivity in capitalism is catalyzed by the need to integrate shareholders and clients within the entities. Thus, those who achieve an adequate level of productivity succeed and those who do not, disappear.

The educational system is the driver to provide the necessary resources for R&D to maintain the competition at a superior level.

Unicist Future Research Lab

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
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Introducing the Ethic of Foundations

Knowing what one is talking about is not a matter of professionalism. It is a matter of good education. Click on the image to access.

Knowing what one is talking about is not a matter of professionalism. It is a matter of good education. Click on the image to access.

Every cultural change is firm when it is integrated into the habits of the community. A change has to be a custom in a community before becoming a habit. But customs must be supported by ethics. It all begins with a new ethic, then it develops into a custom and finally it becomes a habit. Ethic, as a concept, is a functional rule based on moral values and an ideology.

The “Ethic of Foundations” establishes the basic rules to manage reliable knowledge in order to generate value. It transforms epistemology into rules for action.

The epistemology is based on the development of logical foundations and empirical justifications to sustain human knowledge. This epistemology is a pragmatic, structural and functionalist approach to knowledge that replaced knowledge falsification processes by destructive testing processes.

The schism in science that integrates the “know-how” and the “know-why” requires having the fundamentals of facts and not only justifying a knowledge using empirical confirmation. That is why, almost 30 years ago, the Ethic of Foundations was introduced in The Unicist Research Institute to establish a framework for the activities with the context. It was the basic step for the development of the Unicist Epistemology.

The ethic of foundations represents a moral code related to the respect for others and their authority. Respect for others is necessary in order to discuss our own arguments. Respect for others’ authority is the only way to accept their fundamentals as valid.

Benefits of the use of fundamentals:

Supporting of synergistic leadership

Synergistic leadership is possible when it is based on the fundamentals of the participants. The democratic aspects of organizations are provided by the consideration of the fundamentals of all the members of a working group.

Balancing the small with the big, the weak with the strong

The fundamentals of an argument are worth their own weight, regardless of who is arguing. The “ethic of foundations” requires that arguments are worth their own value without considering the subjective qualities of the one who is arguing. Therefore fundamentals have no rank because they are only functional knowledge.

Promotion of the value of work as a source of richness and personal fulfillment

As a concept, work is an activity to produce an added value for others and a benefit for the one who generated such added value. Synergy is the basis of working in groups, and there is actual added value whenever the operating knowledge is valid. Fundaments are the basis of valid knowledge

Promotion of science and technology

By definition science and technology requires knowing the fundamentals. The ethic of foundations is the basic driving force for technological development.

Promotion of justice as equality of opportunities

It has to be considered that fundamentals are worth their own weight, and allow generating value while the personal value of an individual is measured by the value added. The ethic of foundations sustains the equality of opportunities.

It is the necessary basis for synergy

Synergy means to be capable of doing something by oneself, and be a member of a group in search of a higher added value to be achieved in a more effective way. The integration to a group requires sharing the fundamentals of actions.

It allows leveling upwards

The lack of foundations naturally leads to an autocratic leadership with a manipulative attitude, while the existence of foundations naturally leads to a synergistic leadership.

Autocracy and manipulation are based on fallacious fundamentals. In this sense, foundations destroy autocracy and manipulation. Foundation is an antidote to fraud, and drives the participants of a working group to multiply their capacity of generating added-value.

Academic Committee

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
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The 20-Year Future Scenario of Adaptive Leadership

Conceptualization: the Core of Adaptive Leadership

In April 2011 the Unicist Future Research Lab, led by Peter Belohlavek, began a process to define which will be the possible evolution of the types of leadership in the world. The objective of the research was to find the trends in leadership that are driven by the upgrade of technologies.

The 20-Year Future Scenario of Adaptive Leadership

The reach of one’s globalization is defined by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

The unicist approach to future research applied to leadership is based on an inferences based methodology to describe possible scenarios based on the knowledge of the concept of leadership and the laws of social evolution considering the evolution of the technologies and their consequences.

To access the basics on Unicist Future Research please enter:
www.unicist.org/sdp.shtml

Trends in Leadership

The influence of technology generates a strong segmentation of leadership. This segmentation implies a differentiation of cultures and activities based on the dominant collective intelligence.

Three different levels of functional leadership are expected to evolve which will establish differentiated habits that make them work as clusters. This means that there will be dominant types of leadership based on the culture and the available technologies.

The three dominant clusters will be:

  • Manipulative Leadership
  • Operational Leadership
  • Adaptive Leadership

The Cluster of Manipulative Leadership

Leadership maturityThis cluster is functional to segments that are driven by the need of survival.

This segment is based on over-adaptive behavior which implies rotating the roles of dominance, opposition and submission.

The acceptance of over-adaptiveness as a habit requires a strong subjective support for the participants that naturally drives towards manipulation in order to sustain the integrity of groups and avoid disgregation.

The Cluster of Operational Leadership

This cluster is functional for the massive operational activities in all fields. It is based on the development of two alternative leadership styles: the charismatic and the authoritarian roles. These roles are functional and accepted to influence operational environments.

Both roles are implicitly conservative and therefore functional to lead in stable environments where there is no need for change, innovation or expansion. The integration of both roles sustains the integrity of groups and avoids disgregation.

The Cluster of Adaptive Leadership

Adaptive leadership begins to be the “star” based on the need of assuming a role that supersedes the use of technology and allows expanding activities towards a superior level of productivity. It is driven by the need to save energy to develop sustainable groups and organizations.

This cluster is based on having the concepts of what needs to be done in order to use the available technologies or develop new technologies integrating peopleware with software and hardware to generate added value. They are constructive and creative leaders in their environment.

This role is basically occupied by doers who exert their leadership based on the functionality of their solutions and the building of peopleware to build sustainable groups and organizations.

Conclusion:
Adaptive Leadership – The Next Generation of Leaders

In 20 years the technologies that are now incipient will have become mature and will have changed the way leaders have to exert their role.

Technology is making the operational aspects fully transparent, which implies the appearance of a new scenario in which there is a need of having the personal reliability and the capacity of adjusting the behavior to the requirements of the problems that are dealt with. This is the definition of adaptive leadership.

Conceptualizing and having a mature strategic approach are the core aspects that are needed to be adaptive. Conceptualizing allows focusing on solutions and the mature strategic approach allows transforming concepts into reliable results.

Adaptiveness requires having the concept of what one is doing. This concept, installed in the long-term memory allows integrating the information received from the outside and transforming it into adaptive actions within the functional concept of the situation.

The new role of leadership requires going beyond the “preaching by example” approach, because now it is necessary to have the concept of what is being done and have the mind open to the different alternatives the available technologies enable.

It implies dealing with the complex aspects that are implicit in any conceptualization and transform them into simple operational processes that can be either automated or handcrafted.

When dealing in developed or emergent environments, adaptive leadership needs to be focused on organizing peopleware, software and hardware using a role driven model that allows establishing responsibilities for results while the technology generates most of the operational solutions.

But there will be always room for operational and manipulative leadership in the world depending on the culture and type of activities. These types of leadership will remain dominant in many regions of the world.

Access the complete report at: http://www.unicist.org/repo/#Future

Unicist Press Committee

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
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The Nature of Justice: The Catalyst and Entropy Inhibitor of Capitalism

The purpose of justice in a culture is to provide a safe environment to allow that roles fulfill their objectives within an institutionalized environment. In other words, the purpose of justice is to foster and inhibit the dysfunctional activities of institutionalized environments.

The reach of one’s globalization is defined by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

Justice can either work as the catalyst or as the entropy inhibitor of social behavior. Justice only exists as an external entity in a community and ensures the functionality of those institutions that allow the society to work as a system.

The concept of Justice does not refer to the judicial system of a culture. It includes all the individual, social and institutional actions that are developed to sustain the functionality of the system.

Justice is naturally driven by “common sense” which implicitly includes the values of the cultural archetype, the life-style and the moral of a culture. Justice works as a rigid framework that defines what is functional or dysfunctional in an environment.

Justice has two different roles that need to be integrated in order to sustain institutionalization: justice as a catalyst and justice as an inhibitor.

On the one hand, there is a catalyzing justice that has the responsibility of fostering the equality of opportunities that allow expanding the boundaries without endangering the institutionalization.

But, on the other hand justice has the role of inhibiting dysfunctional actions, which drives towards ensuring equal rights to all the members of a community. This avoids the entropy in institutions and establishes the framework to develop minimum strategies.

The Ontogenetic Map of Justice

The purpose of justice is to foster the existence of transcendent roles in a society in order to make institutionalization possible and avoid its corruption. An institution becomes corrupt when it needs to degrade the environment in order to profit from it.

The Nature of JusticeInstitutions are driven by transcendent goals. Therefore, the driver of justice is to confirm the achievement of the transcendent goals of a culture. These transcendent goals are included in the Constitution of a country.

This process is materialized when justice provides the framework to sustain the functionality of the country as a system. However, this is only possible if both the individual roles of the entities and the individuals of the culture are protected.

When the legal framework and the social and judicial system have solved these aspects, it becomes possible to deal with the active function of justice to provide equal opportunities for all.

The final purpose of justice is the fulfillment of the transcendent roles of a society and ensuring the functionality of society as a system. This is only possible if the individual roles have been assumed in order to make the institutionalization real.

It has to be considered that the judicial system of a society only punishes those aspects the society considers punishable.

The Maximal Strategy

The maximal strategy is given by the catalyzing justice of a culture that needs to provide equal opportunities for the members of a community.

Equal opportunities require the existence of a democratic environment that fosters cooperation. That is why justice is an essential part of democracy and democracy is the necessary environment for justice.

When the intention of ensuring equal opportunities has been confirmed, it becomes necessary to accept that there has to be a social repair to respond to the deviations produced by injustices in the real world. Therefore, social repairs need to be sustained by the judicial system in order to make them functional.

Equal opportunities become possible if they include the social repair for the dysfunctional actions that hindered the possibility of an individual or group to access such opportunities. Social repair needs to recognize the opportunities lost and not only the costs that were produced.

When social repair exists, it becomes possible to confirm the existence of social sanctions that sustain the equal opportunities. This implies that the society punishes those who limit others to achieve goals.

The catalyzing justice requires the existence of social sanctions for all those behaviors that endanger equal opportunities. These social sanctions sustain equal opportunities and are the catalyst for the existence of justice. In democratic environments legal justice does not sanction what is not sanctioned by society.

The Minimum Strategy

The equality of rights, as the purpose of the minimum strategy, needs to achieved in order to sustain the institutionalization of a society. This requires individual repair for all the dysfunctional actions an entity has suffered.

The individual repair has to fit into the limits of acceptance of a society. If it is below, it has no effect as a dissuasive object, but if it is above, it generates a “judicial profitable business” that produces paradoxical results in the judicial system.

The legal sanction is the entropy inhibitor of justice. Legal sanctions imply that they need to be in accordance with the dysfunctional behavior and its consequences. Legal sanctions are a way to punish actions and to dissuade their repetition.

The legal framework and its application establish the entropy inhibitor that avoids the corruption of the institutionalization of a culture. The entropy inhibitor is the basic price to be paid to ensure the functionality of justice.

The Types and Levels of Justice

We have synthesized the different levels of justice in four segments. These segments are:

  1. Defensive Justice
  2. Protective Justice
  3. Social Justice
  4. Adaptive Justice

Level 1) Defensive Justice

The Nature of JusticeThe first level of justice is the defensive justice that allows providing individual repair through the different alternatives the judicial system provides. This justice provides every member of the community with a defensive system to sustain the right the individual has according to the legal framework of the community. Defensive justice seeks individual repair in order to ensure that individuals have the right to recover part of the damages produced by someone’s dysfunctional behavior. Defensive justice allows individual to recover from unfair damages produced by third parties.

Level 2) Protective Justice

It includes level 1. The second level is the protective justice, which provides a framework that allows protecting individuals and entities from the dangers of the environment. Protective justice implies a legal framework to protect from direct actions or the collateral side effects of actions. Protective justice is simple to install when providing support for unprotected people, like children, but needs to include all the participants of a community in order to provide a safe environment to live in. It is based on providing protections for individuals to prevent the existence of dysfunctional behaviors. Protective justice is natural in the field of crimes but difficult to apply in civil and commercial affairs.

Level 3) Social Justice

It includes level 2. The third level implies the existence of social justice to exclude socially all the members who behave beyond the rules of a community. This justice exceeds the limits of the legal framework and deal with the acceptance of the social rules to limit the actions of individuals. Social justice implies both the existence of social sanctions and social repair to equilibrate the actions and ensure social institutionalization.

Social justice implies the existence of a social sanction produced by dysfunctional behaviors that have social consequences. It implies that the private damage is considered in terms of its social consequences in order to dissuade its repetition. Social justice implies considering the greater good when dealing with dysfunctional behaviors.

Level 4) Adaptive Justice

It includes level 3. The fourth level implies the existence of a justice that is able to interpret the spirit of laws and the spirit of a society in order to provide equal opportunities for all including the equality of rights. Adaptive justice is the justice that allows institutions to evolve towards a superior level by accepting and fostering behaviors that are beyond the standards of a culture but foster the expansion of the community. Adaptive justice implies paying the prices of individual felonies considering the greater good and the consequences in the environment. Adaptive justice implies considering the field of individual actions as part of social dysfunctional actions in order to find the better way to manage justice.

Peter Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
http://www.unicist-school.org/future-research/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/turi-1.pdf


Future Research: the Era of Participation is changing the habits

The objective of people in the Era of Participation is to find a better place in the world, conserve it, expand it and avoid losing it. This era changes the way people deal with others. It generated a major change of habits that gives access to influential roles to all those who feel that they have something to say and drives towards an increasing transparency of public and private actions.

The reach of one’s globalization is defined
by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

The unicist future research on the displacement of the “Era of Knowledge” by the “Era of Participation” was triggered by the need of knowing how to influence people in an adapted way. The notorious change in communication technologies, that gave most of the hidden villages in peripheral countries an access to the world, made evident that a new ideology was being introduced.

The research was led by Peter Belohlavek at The Unicist Research Institute using the Unicist Complexity Science Methodology. The research began in 2001 and included: Algeria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, India, Israel, Korean Republic, Mexico, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Norway, Peru, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, UK, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA.

The closing of the conclusions was possible based on the experiences with Google, Greenpeace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

To access the basics on Unicist Future Research please enter: www.unicist.org/sdp.shtml

Which technologies have given birth to the Era of Participation?

Internet (Sharing)

The sharing capacity of Internet changed the world of communication in the field of work and of pastime activities. Although it began as a tool to work it evolved towards a tool to access and share.

Cell Phones (SMS – Short Message Service)

The communication and influential capacity of messages when they are used to share weaknesses transformed cell phones into a weapon to generate both adaptive and over-adaptive participation.

Facebook – Twitter (Social networks)

Social networks became the natural tool to be used by all the segments of participants (publicity driven, bragging driven, utopia driven, recognition driven, action driven). They made the building and managing of superficial relationships possible, which were not possible before.

Linkedin (Professional Networks)

Professional networks became a way to position individuals in hypothetical roles in order to make them become real personal roles. Their use is based on providing hope to the participants who want to find or improve their place in the world.

Consequences of this New Era:

  1. The change of the depth of relationships making them basically superficial and based on fallacious myths
  2. The increasing importance of the word of mouth communication to install ideas
  3. The increase of the value of charismatic leadership and its dysfunctional counterpart: the “manipulative leadership”
  4. The substitution of structural participation (institutions) by conjunctural participation
  5. The loss of credibility of formal authorities and the empowerment of authoritative roles
  6. The increase of egocentrism and the demand of permanent sensorial and materialistic stimuli
  7. The increase of addictive behaviors to escape
  8. The increase of fundamentalist groups to ensure survival (religious, civil, military)
  9. The multiplication of sectarian movements
  10. The installation of over-adaptive behaviors as a standard in the world
  11. The existence of multi-minorities
  12. The installation of active inaction as a standard in underdeveloped environments

The Increase of the Influence of Public Opinion

Public opinion became the central power in democratic countries. Public opinion is now driven by the new technologies that are available and tends to install a dualistic approach in cultures defined by those who accept something and those who oppose to it.

Era of ParticipationAs public opinion is intuition driven, this conflict becomes extreme when untrue information or disinformation is used by the parts.

Public opinion has always integrated the structure of the governmental power integrated by the legislative power, the executive power and the judiciary power.

The role of the legislative power is that of the driver of maximal strategies. In this role, it needs to be compatible with the public opinion but at the same time foster expansion and equality of opportunities.

The executive power has two alternatives in this Era: covering both the needs of expansion and distribution or focusing on distribution becoming a populist government. The extreme situation occurs when Distributism prevails absolutely to sustain the power of the government itself.

The judiciary power equilibrates the conflict between the public opinion, the legislative power and the executive power.

In the Era of Participation, the direct influence of people in governmental decision becomes dominant.

The End of the Era of Knowledge

The Era of Knowledge implied that the access to personal and social evolution was basically sustained by the knowledge individuals had and was demonstrated by their credentials.

But the Era of Knowledge came to an end. An “ERA” is such when it establishes an imperceptible “gravitational force” that sustains the behavior of an environment.

It has to be considered that knowledge began being ruled by religions in order to avoid the deviation of human behavior from the moral rules, but became a value in itself with the appearance of the Industrial Era in the world.

The paradox is that industrialization empowered knowledge but at the end, the Era of Industrialization was exceeded by the Era of Knowledge. Nevertheless, knowledge is still an appendix of religions in pre-industrialized societies.

Internet opened a window that allowed making the access of knowledge massive. It expanded the use of data and information that gave access to any person who lives in a non-marginal environment.

Era of ParticipationInformation can be defined as any data that can be transformed into a meaningful entity and thus can be stored in the long-term memory of an individual. Knowledge is such when the information one has can be used to produce something.

Google, as a concept, made the access to information basically free for everyone. The paradox is that people now have all the information they are willing to search but the value generation, which is based on knowledge, depends on the concepts they manage.

This explains why the open access to information did not produce a significant increase in productivity and quality of work.

Thus, the functionality of knowledge as a driver for personal evolution became fallacious. Education became a hygienic key; it was necessary to open doors but did not suffice to drive personal evolution and provide a meaningful place in the world.

The occurrence of economic crises in the world was the trigger to the end of the Era of Knowledge. Every economic crisis generates the lack of opportunities for many and the degradation of the ethical intelligence of a culture in order to survive. When crises are not cured, but only palliated, they plant the seed of the next crisis and the degradation of cultures continues.

A consequence of these crises is a growing individualism, which drives people to develop a surviving attitude that diminishes the generation of value and installs an unstable social environment.

Another consequence is the exclusion of youth, the newcomers in societies, diminishing their possibilities to find a social role to evolve.

These consequences gave birth to the Era of Participation, which can be synthesized in a shout:

“I need a better place in the world”

What is the Era of Participation?

The objective of participation is to find a better place in the world, conserve it, expand it and avoid losing it.

What needs to be established is the social role an individual looks for, which can imply a structural or an incidental positioning. It implies that there has to be an acceptance of the reference group the individual accepts as a rule maker.

This reference group can be real, virtual or super-natural. All what matters is that it has to exist in order to make a participative process possible. Without a superior reference group’s acceptance, there is no true place in the world and the participation degrades towards achieving a role of active or passive opposition.

The social role individuals fight for needs to have a belonging group where the individuals feel at home. Belonging groups are what make a place in the world safe. Therefore, participation implies fostering the existence of belonging groups who share similar utopias while they share the same weaknesses they need to cover.

Era of ParticipationThe participation process becomes redundant when a place in the world, accepted by the reference groups and the belonging group, has been gained. However, as the satisfaction of needs generates new needs this is a never-ending process at an operational level. This process generates social evolution when individuals have a role in the world that allows them to evolve based on the value they add.

Adaptive Participation

Evolutionary participation requires beginning with a conscious adaptive process where the individual is looking for a place to be who s/he is. This makes the individual a differentiated person that needs to begin by participating through value adding actions (participation to do) while sustaining the identity of the role by having the necessary image that allows others to tag him/her properly (participation to appear).

Participation is only possible when the members who participate are able to recognize each other as part of the same group. In fundamentalist groups this tagging might include tattoos or similar timeless marks but in social groups individuals need to have the necessary “look & feel” in order to be tagged and recognized as members.

This appearance is extremely notorious in social and professional networks that establish the basics of the profile that need to be covered in order for the group to accept a possible member. That is why appearance, which is given by the personal brand or image, is the entropy inhibitor that makes expansive participation possible.

When the image has been positioned, the final objective of being a real member becomes possible.

Over-adaptive Participation

The apparent paradox is that over-adaptation is the minimum strategy. This requires an explanation. Adapting implies influencing while being influenced to achieve a goal, which in this case is to have a place in the world. Influencing is what we call adaptive participation and being influenced is what in this case is named over-adaptive participation.

Over-adaptiveness implies accepting the rules of the environment, which implies submission but beginning with a dominant participation in order to feel that one is not submitting but establishing the rules.

When the self-esteem has been conserved by this dominant participation, which mostly implies active inaction that allows judging the environment, an oppositional role becomes necessary to accept the rules of the game.

When individuals are able to feel superior by judging the environment, opposing to some aspects to preserve their self-esteem, then over-adaptive participation becomes functional. But, this functionality depends on its compatibility with the adaptive participation.

Segments of Participation

Era of ParticipationThere are different segments or participants that need to be understood in order to deal with them. Accessing profiles and activities on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is very useful to identify the different segments, which are never pure but always have an implicit dominant trend that drives their participation.

  1. Publicity Driven
  2. Bragging Driven
  3. Utopia Driven
  4. Recognition Driven
  5. Action Driven

Conclusions

Paradoxically, the Era of Participation implies a prevalence of observation over true participation. This implies that this Era will represent implicitly a battle between observers and participants.

Over-adaptive participation is based on an observational attitude while adaptive participation is based on the synergy of the members to produce something.

The preexisting Era of Knowledge will be included as a secondary driver during the next decades to sustain, on the one hand, those who participate to build and, on the other hand, to sustain those who participate to expose the implicit weaknesses of the adaptive participants.

This makes this period a battle and an integration of these two groups. Dualism will be the driver for the mass that over-adapts while integralism will be the driver for the elites who adopt an adaptive participative approach. It is a battle of communication.

Adaptive Participation Building

The building of adaptive participation is the responsibility of the elite of cultures. It is an institutional role that needs to exist in order to make participative behavior meaningful.

Era of ParticipationThe purpose of adaptive participation building is to establish an influential social capital. Social capital is given by the strengths of the bonds among the members of a group or community that drive their value generating actions. Social capital implicitly implies the existence of a greater good to sustain the relationships among the members.

Adaptive participation requires the existence of a double ethical behavior in the community. On the one hand, there has to exist an internal ethics of the group which needs to be based on cooperativeness and, on the other hand, an external ethics with the environment is required, which needs to be driven by competitiveness in order to ensure survival.

This is evident in the behavior of countries that naturally have two different attitudes: one towards the environment and another towards the members of the culture. However, both ethics need to be integrated by a social capital, which establishes the participation rules for the members of the group towards other members and towards the environment.

If cooperation is replaced by competition among the members of a group or community, the social capital becomes corrupt and over-adaptiveness replaces adaptiveness.

Corruption and over-adaptiveness also prevails when competition is based on the destruction of the environment in order to take advantage of it.

Adaptiveness drives towards evolution and over-adaptiveness is the cause and consequence of involution.

If you want to access more information about this study please contact n.i.brown@unicist.org

Unicist Press Committee

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.http://www.unicist.org/turi.pdf


Unicist Anthropology: The Archetype of Japan

Japan

The reach of one’s globalization is defined
by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

Japan has a very powerful archetype to sustain its ultimate purpose that is growth within a communitarian environment and a deep sense of loyalty. Thus reliability is a natural consequence.

The archetype of Japan, and the trends of its evolution were developed by a unicist anthropology research group led by Peter Belohlavek

To understand the Japanese archetype we recommend listening to the lecture you find at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApRaK516PZU

Cultures that have a strong drive towards growth cannot accept the defeat of their leaders. The elite of the culture needs to represent the values of the archetype.

The purpose of the maximal strategy of the Japanese culture is the expansion of the community based on the members’ pride for their work and sustained by their collective intelligence as a community or group.

Unicist Archetype JapanCollective intelligence is in Japan the catalyst of their growth. Therefore there is a need for  integrating the values of the community in order to be able to exert collective intelligence.

Individual intelligence is the entropy inhibitor of the Japanese archetype. It allows individuals to adapt to the conditions of the situation in order to achieve growth.

Loyalty is the final purpose of the minimum strategy. This means that individuals who are not loyal to the structure of the society are considered as aliens.

The integration of aliens implies a very slow process in order to avoid the loss of the roots of the culture.

Strong cultures as Japan respect foreigners based on their values and deeds. Dealing with Japan as an outsider is easy if one accepts that one is a foreigner. Respecting its archetype is the first step to deal with the Japanese community.

Unicist Future Research Lab

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.
http://www.unicist-school.org/future-research/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/turi-1-1.pdf