I went to a School of Cybernetics hoping to develop ideas about how systems organise and reproduce themselves. My experience instead prompted an unexpected examination of institutional authority, intellectual exclusion and the patterns through which institutions reproduce themselves.
We have become extraordinarily good at making technology better, but much less skilled at recognising when good enough is enough. Much of what passes for progress now serves profit rather than people, so deeply embedded in our culture that we scarcely recognise the difference.
A school can teach systems thinking and still fail to recognise the system it has become. The paradox is not educational but civilisational: systems routinely develop the capacity to analyse (and acknowledge) everything except the conditions that organise and sustain their own perception.
