The holistic view on the world

In the last few months, we all participated in the course “System theories, psychology and social media”, probably most of us have been quite confused in the beginning about what awaits us – now, after 12 lectures, we all should have a way more precise idea about what is actually meant by this title. To only speak about me, I was going into the first lection with the expectation of a class about social media and how everything is connected nowadays, quite fast it got clear to me that this is not the focus in this class, even though the ideas we discussed can used in this field as well, as they are suitable for many fields of thought. I understand this lecture as something less specific, and more a practise in taking a meta perspective, a perspective which is applicable to many topics. Especially in the last few sittings it got clear to me that it is about leaving our (sometimes narrow minded) normal school of thought (cartesian thinking as it is called in the movie “Mindwalk”) and to open to a whole new way of perceiving, processing, and understanding the world.

At this point of my final blog & reflection it may come to you, my dearest reader, as if I am dancing around something, not coming to a point – but this shallow description of a meta-perspective-like understanding is an important part, in order to grasp the very essence of what we have learned, before I am trying to bring it down to a more handy but closed down specific level.

Nowadays we live in a world heavily shaped by the mechanisms of capitalism. Without wanting to open pandoras box, this has a big influence on how humanity acts nowadays and the way we perceive things. In the individualistic cultures of our western hemisphere, which are obsessed by growth and personal achievements more than ever, it is widely normalized to put oneself at the very top of the own priority list. And you can even take this several levels up, with once again rising nationalistic movements and its belonging ideas, the focus on what we consider “our” own groups/nations/… is growing bigger and bigger. This goes even beyond simple cognitive biases as the mere exposure effect, a handy little example here, which describes that we like things more and more, only out of the reason that we are exposed to them (and in my opinion a perfect show off on how self-focused our mind is sometimes) – it translates into real actions. In the wide world of a majorly globalised century, we tend to focus on what is directly in front of us, what is right now and here. And as our brain gets flooded by more and more short time entertainment (e.g.: TikTok, Instagram Reals, songs are getting shorter and shorter, …) our attention span shrinks. Just think about last year: Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and somehow even the Russian invasion in Ukraine – sure it is still sometimes in the news (the last one more due to its direct effects on us, this just strengthens the point I try to make here), but it got normalized and shifted out of focus quite fast! We only want to occupy our brain with things directly impacting us, the less complex and abstract the better. Topics as the climate change are rising in our attention – but too slowly and due to the complexity of the topic it must fight for every bit of attention. It is to abstract and invisible for many of us to take it as seriously as it would be appropriate. And to close the circle back to taking real actions controlled by a self-centred mind, climate catastrophes will mainly impact the poor ones on our planet, while the rich countries, who have polluted the earth for decades and centuries, have the resources to at least (relatively) ease the impact on themselves. So, we continue buying ourselves several pair of shoes a year, buying ourselves new smartphones – just because the old one is… old. Some might even watch documentaries about pollution and all the pain we bring to other parts of the world, being ashamed for a moment just to move on as before. Very little people may actually change their behaviour – but is that enough? To just rely on them? So, what has the thought-school of system theories to offer to counter this self-centred world we live in?

System theories. It is an interesting term for a school of thought, as the plural is already included in its very name, it is implying that there is not the “one” way or perspective which is right, but many of them. And here we already got to the core of systemic thinking – not to remain in one’s static perspective, focused on single elements – but to widen the view to keep a dynamic flow, not picking out single parts or perspectives, to open up to see connections between them. That is what system theories have to offer, to loosen our focus on single elements of our surroundings or behaviour. This may sound silly at first sight, and you might ask yourself what it changes. It changes a lot. By perceiving our behaviour as a part of something bigger and opening up to perspectives of the other parts of our systems, we are able to grasp the consequences of our behaviour not as something which only impacts us, but as something having an impact on a way bigger level. We are looking at systems and not single units of them, this also implies that the focus on ourselves is shifting in the background – as we are only one of many parts within our systems. This stands in huge contrast of our world as it is right now, a world of egomaniacs trying to gain more and more wealth (i.e. money) on the one side, and people trying to fight for their bare survival on the other side. As we now see the strings leaving and at the same time coming back to us, we will think in a way which is involving the shadows, the stuff we try so hard to ignore in our western arrogance. Ignorance can not be a part of a holistic systemic understanding, per definition holisticism is including everything and not excluding certain parts, which one might consider as unpleasant to occupy one’s mind with.

Moving from an individualistic and self-centred perspective to a holistic one with setting focus on consequences behind personal growth, within a society extremely opposing this exact mechanism, is something not happening within the blink of an eye. We cannot expect ourselves to run against the masses, it is more like our society needs a guided turn as a whole. Try to imagine it as a herd of sheep running towards one direction, and a single sheep suddenly just turning to go another way, it would have to fight hard and would probably still fail. It would need to convince its fellow sheep to go with him in order to succeed. One single person within a societal system cant change anything as long as this very society is not with him. It is needed to bring back to our minds that we all are together in the same boat, a boat we decided to call earth centuries ago.

If we are alone we all have (more or less) the tendency to behave in absurd and random ways – you can´t tell me that you never do random stuff you probably wouldn’t do if someone else would sit next to you. This can reach from scratching your ass to singing weirdly along to a song to clapping rhythms on a table, you get an idea what I mean.

So, what happens to this behaviour if you know you are getting watched?

Visible observation changes the behaviour which is shown. This can have many reasons, just to mention two examples: the simple feeling of shame or having manners and trying not to annoy your environment – the exact reason is individually and highly connected to the inhibited behaviour. But for behaviour to change due to observation we need to be aware of our observer, and here it gets complicated. Because being aware doesn’t only mean to know it, it does imply that we have this knowledge active in our mind at the very moment and that we care. If a real human sits in front of you this is quite easy, it gets harder if a camera is a few meters away and ultimately hard if you google something and your data gets transmitted without you having a visible notice about it.

The moment where this gets really problematic if you get observed, but no one observes the observer – in one case you are aware of the observer and try to behave nicely and the other you are not and do stuff which can used against you (or “just” a violation of privacy), but either way the observer has no reason to behave what one would evaluate as good. To conclude this thought, maybe an observer needs to get observed/somehow controlled? Maybe someone needs to watch the one who watches us, and someone else need to watch the one who watches the one who watches, and … you have a feeling where we are going. Us all sitting in a circle watching each other. Sounds pretty dystopic? Indeed, not a free world as we know it – but in reality, is it really a free world or are we just trying to give ourselves the luxury to ignore? I honestly don’t know (or maybe just don’t want to know).

Empty space. What exactly does it mean if we say a particular space is empty? Simple answer would be a vacuum – a place where (at least approximately) no matter exists. So, the difference to a filled-up place is matter and the atoms the regarding matter exists off.

But matter itself is empty, the nucleus of an atom, as the area where the neutrons and protons are, only occupies such a small amount of the volume of an atom that it is difficult to imagine and picturize it. Everything we feel and see relies on connections, only those connections between an unbelievable high number of atoms are holding everything together and are really defining the difference to total emptiness in space.

Speaking about this we are on the (sub)atomic level, so let’s level up to have a more metaphorical but practical analogy to it. We all are living in democracies – big countries controlled by humans, if we would spread the inhabitants of such a country evenly across its landmass, it would be lots of free space in between persons. But we manage to work together, to take democratic decisions and to rule a country… One single person never could do this, alone we are only nuclei in a frightening big world, but with our connections to other people we develop real power. Those connections allow us to have power, which is on first sight unproportional to our size and place we naturally occupy – similar to atoms holding together to form matter.

Let’s draw a simple line.

In basic algebra we learn to describe lines within the two-dimensional room.  f(x) = m *x + b

Everyone of us has seen this or similar forms of this formula, it is a simple straight line, as steep as m and as distant from (0|0) as b. With b and m given as constant values the place where we are with our line is only depending on x. If we change our linear model to something as a quadratic, a logarithmic, an exponential, … term we may have something a bit more complicated – but given all the constants we are still only depending on x. It is linear causality in its most obvious form.

In physics there is a simple rule (which at least applies in more simple areas of the discipline): the variable time is always on the x-axis. Time is never the dependent variable, as in fields like mechanics nothing is affecting time, but time itself is affecting a lot of possible variables. Again – a quite simple form of a chain of causality.

You can also use more than one variable to describe something, leaving the two-dimensional room and entering the three-dimensional one with now two independent variables, or even going further in the four-, five- , … dimensional room. Our visual imagination might not be able to create a picture of this inside our heads, but it is still possible to create a proper model for such cases. You could also include interactions, mediations; even trying to describe and to put into consideration not so obvious parts and mechanics with methods like structural equation models.

But in describing human behaviour in most cases there is still an error term needed in those formulas. We can collect data on so many variables, let them interact and combine to an effect on our behaviour – but in most models a bit of variation, a bit of error, will still exist around. I am not saying that it will never be possible to make a perfect prediction of human behaviour, but for the moment I am happy to believe in a more complex chain of causality, not a (combined) linear one. Everything else would be quite dystopic.

Nature in the Anthropocene. To discuss this topic, we need to define those things a priori to get to a common ground from which we can start our thinking. Anthropocene has many different definitions as we learned in the lecture – some say it started with the beginning of humans making the earth agricultural useful and to bring the nature beyond its natural limits, some say it started with the step to nuclear tests and our impact on the climate – but all of those have in common that the human is putting the earth beyond its limits. And whenever you want to put the starting point of this; I think we all can agree this is the reality of today and we are living in a world mainly, even though not completely, created by humans. Nature – how would you define this? Probably you think right now about grass, maybe mountains, the sea? Landscapes, untouched places of the earth… Everything which is not created by humankind.

I will try to look on all of this out of a slightly different perspective. It is not the usual definition, but let’s say nature is everything which we didn’t created by ourselves, and which is not within our control. So, we are speaking about individuals now, not about the humankind in total as in the normal definition. This changes a lot. With thousands of years of human history and 8 billion humans living on the planet at the moment most elements of the Anthropocene, of our surroundings, are neither created by us nor under our control. This – the city we live in, the trams we are riding to university, … – this is our natural surroundings. Nowadays we are not built to survive in the ancient definition of nature, for most of us the city is our natural habitat. And as indigenous cultures may have a systemic understanding of the nature and their place within, we have a similar understanding of the Anthropocene and our very own place within. This doesn’t always mean that we know what to do and how to act in every moment, but most of us are able to navigate within it – as indigenous people are able to do in their world, but not in ours and vice versa.

In today’s class we learned a few (philosophical) approaches to an understanding of the world, or at least to whatever we lay our focus on. Two of those concepts are in some kind of conflict in my opinion.

Reductionism describes a bunch of philosophical dogmata to ease something hard in understandable parts. When you got a complex problem in front of you, let’s say a difficult social situation, it can make sense to break this problem into parts and to look at those alone and put it all together afterwards to understand the whole. In my example of a social conflict this could mean to listen to everyone alone and trying to understand them, only to put all those perspectives together afterwards and to make it easier (at least in theory) to find a solution because you now have a holistic understanding of the problem.

But does this always work? If I understand the parts, reduced the whole down into its integral belongings – is it as easy to combine those parts together to the whole picture as it was breaking down this picture into its parts? A truly philosophic question, something you could keep your mind busy for a very long time and still have no clear answer. In my simple opinion it depends (as so usual…) on the situation. This is where I want to talk briefly about the concept of emergence. This is describing something when the whole is more than its parts would be by simple combination. You could build a bridge here back to the concept of sums and systems, of interdependence and independence, of having the parts of something and still not seeing the whole picture. I don’t think you can reduce everything to its parts and understand it this way. You maybe can come closer, but regarding things with emerging characteristics this approach won’t give you a proper understanding. If I eat a carrot, some tomatoes, garlic, onions and some minced meat all on its own I still have no idea of the taste of a good Bolognese.  

Right at the beginning of mathematics in school you learn about addition and subtraction, the concept of sums is even for a 7-year-old child easy to understand. It is something quite easy to imagine, in lower counts even visually – you have one person who meets another one, you now have two persons standing next to each other. Later in school multiplication and division are introduced. Those are mathematical functions a bit more complicated, but with practice something we can still grasp as logical and clear. But let’s move on from this little introduction and flashback to your early years in school…

There is a reason why I wanted to talk about easy-to-understand logical mathematical functions and the period where we all learned those. Right now, we have something quite similar, but the things we learn nowadays grew a lot in complexity. Considering human social groups (this is where I want to put the focus, even though there a lot of other possible groupings also effected by the following) we need more than only summing, subtraction or multiplication to understand how those are working. This does not mean that simple functions are not important anymore (i.e. the time a car needs to be constructed by a work group could be seen as a simple sum out of the time of the different steps at the band in the factory), it does only mean that they are often not enough. A real group is more than a sum out of people and their individual characteristics, it is about interaction and interdependence. If I change my behaviour this will affect people connected to me, as their behaviour is affecting me. It is not always possible to look at one’s behaviour, look at another one’s behaviour and get a simple result. To grasp a group, and the connections within, its needed to take a look at the whole picture, because one’s behaviour doesn’t only have direct effects, it also changes the context of another one’s behaviour whose behaviour is again effecting the first person and so on… This may seem complicated – but even simple mathematical functions as multiplications were confusing at the beginning, we have to practise… And I wish we would do this a little more in class.

Sitting in classroom full of people, we all know this feeling. But something is different here in Athens… Most of us are non-main English speakers, but still, we are all speaking in English (at least most of the time). The reason seems to be obvious, our home countries are spread all over the world and we use English as a language everyone of us speaks, as a way to connect to all those people from different places. And as obvious and easy this observation is to make, as impressive it is while thinking about it. This is something all of us connects, maybe some are more and some are less fluent, but this shared knowledge about English gives us the possibility to connect with people from all over the world.

In this lesson the vibe was more of a meet and greet, but it was about connecting within the class as well. Seeing this map, we made at the beginning, with little pinpoints for everyone’s hometowns, lets one realise how globalised this actually is. How many different people from many different places come together, connected through their plan of an Erasmus Semester in Athens. This is the moment where I want to make my thematic transition back to systems – maybe you already saw this coming – we all are connected, through our plans, our knowledge and something as simple as the place and time we are in. Even though nobody of us planned a few months ago to sit next to the person who we now have sat next to in class, we did. And I think this absolutely awesome.

Did you ever feel like you are a part of something bigger?

That is the question I want to begin today’s reflection with. Think about it for second, feel your surroundings and then come back to read the rest.

System theories and the systemic perspective is not about you as a singular and individual being, it is about all of us in a bigger context, in so called systems. (Hopefully) you just reflected at the beginning of reading this; you felt the area around you – probably some room within your apartment? Sitting on some chair? For the sake of this let’s just say you are sitting on some desk chair right now, you won’t have constructed it by yourself, probably some foreign fabricant did this.

Let’s just imagine the fabric worker who screwed all the screws in your chair has a wife, maybe they had an argument in the evening before he screwed your chair and she forgot to feed their cat. This cat really got unhappy and didn’t let them sleep this night, as a result our fabric worker was quite tired the day he had to do your chair and probably wasn’t as concentrated as he is normally. He made a few mistakes and while reading this those screws who are holding together the very chair you are sitting on begin to loosen themselves and the chair will break down very soon.

What I just tried to illustrate is how some event (argument between those two – but you could go further back to the reasons of this argument if you want to) far away and without you being anyhow involved could have an actual impact on you right now. Because you, your chair and this fabric worker are somehow connected to each other. If you understand this, you are probably quite close to being able to grasp what power lying within such a systemic view. Some little change in behaviour may not change anything, but maybe this little change will grow and just roll down the systemic way like an avalanche a mountain.

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