So, last week of talking about systems and, appropriate to the acidic arc of life I’m sailing through at the moment, this week’s piece is a critique. Because it’s nice to have delved into a topic deeply, developed some sympathy for it, tested its lenses a bit and found some that you like and then to start hacking at its roots. And I wonder why I feel like I’m chasing my tail.

This article — entitled “Magical systems thinking” — comes from Works in Progress which is afaik Stripe’s publication. Not sure how I came across it but I’ve had their emails coming into my inbox for a while. Some are meh some gold. I’ll let you decide which this week’s reading was.

The first thing I learned from this article is that Systems Thinking is no small fish. I should have known this already perhaps given how much I’ve heard about the Club of Rome and how popular (Meadows’ first book) Limits to Growth was. But I still thought of it as this niche subcultural point of view. I guess I was wrong.

The second thing that jumped out was, of course, the spirited attack on Systems Thinking. It outlined a whole pile of Systems Thinking interventions governments have tried, which have utterly failed. It seems the complexity of systems outstrips our ability to effectively map them (those clouds in Meadows diagrams, it seems, were more dangerous than they seemed). This was a critique I’d been incubating myself what with the horrendous disparity between the pearl-clutching about population overload that accompanied Systems Thinking’s birth and the state of our current dilemma: demographic collapse > overpopulation.

But the real thing that grasped me from this article and why I wanted to share it, was not the negative corrosive work of critique that must be done, but the positive proposition that we can take away.

The takeaway for me was this: start small. Don’t go messing with complex systems. Start over. Start small. Build a system that works then add to it. It’s such a simple realisation, but as I write this in my Obsidian vault, where I have attempted to give birth to many complex emergent systems, I am aware that I write in a graveyard of big systems ambition. The past year I’ve been content to work in the ashes. But I grow more inspired by the idea of starting something simple and small that works. Then I’ll build upon that.

As I begin to work on the Jungian Masters here in Limerick, I am contemplating what shape my scholarly system will take. I’m nervous about having a run at my Zettelkasten system again, but I’m scared by the ghosts of notetaking systems past — the cities of thought whose empty ruins I still sometimes wander through, sad at the dreams that could have been. Why, in the 21st century, does it feel like there are so many basic things still needing to be worked out? There’s so much talk of second brains and second minds. The veterans among us know it for the frothy sales pitch it is. Or, perhaps more charitably, it is merely the enthusiastic proselytising of the starry-eyed novices. We all fell on our knees before the grandeur of Nikolas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. But we were bowing down before a complex system that had decades to grow into what it was. We suffered from the same audacity as the Systems Thinkers and their complex diagrams (which ultimately proved to be all-too-simple): how to start humbly? How to start simply? With Gall’s Law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

A few notable quotes from the article: ⁠

“our successes, when they do come, are invariably the result of starting small. As the systems we have built slip further beyond our collective control, it is these simple working systems that offer us the best path back.”

“With the failure of his World Model, Forrester had fallen into the same trap as his MIT students. Systems analysis works best under specific conditions: when the system is static; when you can dismantle and examine it closely; when it involves few moving parts rather than many; and when you can iterate fixes through multiple attempts.” ⁠

“Starting with a working simple system and evolving from there is how we went from the water wheel in Godalming to the modern electric grid. It is how we went from a hunk of germanium, gold foil, and hand-soldered wires in 1947 to transistors being etched onto silicon wafers in their trillions today.”

⁠“Le Chatelier’s Principle [the idea that the system always kicks back] provided an answer: systems should not be thought of as benign entities that will faithfully carry out their creators’ intentions. Rather, over time, they come to oppose their own proper functioning.”

⁠“The long-term promise of a small working system is that over time it can supplant the old, broken one and produce results on a larger scale.”

“⁠As systems become more complex, they become more chaotic, not less. The best solution remains humility, and a simple system that works.”

In the end, this is what I’m taking away from this flirtation with systems thinking the past couple of months.

Systems are gorgeous. They are miraculous. The idea that a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts is dazzling, especially when it stretches beyond the domain of life into the abstract domain of culture, where our relationships with each other become alive in a way that is not quite human. The miracle of emergence is overwhelming.

Yet, it is more complex than we can hope to architect. Is this not the reason the socialist Communist states failed across the world while the free market bloomed? So, to be candid, my takeaway is Voltaire’s “il faut cultiver notre jardin” (we must cultivate our garden). But this isn’t the fatalist capitulation it might seem — the collapse into “desperate narcissism” that some leftist commentators might see. Instead, this act of gardening is the humble beginnings of a new cosmos.

This read like Donella Meadows’ 12 Rules for Life. I quite liked it.

I deeply related to the humility of this passage that any fan of productivity and personal development will find all-too-familiar:

“The truth was, we didn’t even follow our advice. We gave learned lectures on the structure of addiction and could not give up coffee. We knew all about the dynamics of eroding goals and eroded our own jogging programs. We warned against the traps of escalation and shifting the burden and then created them in our own marriages.” (p.167)

I appreciated her first systems thinker’s rules for life:

“Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.”

This passage vibed with the guiding idea of the Philosopher’s Toolkit:

“The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible—part of the job of keeping information streams clear. The second step is to enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems.” (p.175)

This one hit close to home:

“Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct.” (p.183)

I’ve been feeling…decontextualised. I feel alienated from the world because there’s no group or narrative or cohesive thing that’s knitting me into it. My vast curiosity draws me in too many directions; any one of which would be worth dedicating a life to. But I grow increasingly convinced that I just need to dedicate myself to one. We need to pick a problem and wrestle with it. The core of a paradigm is the exemplar: the problem/solution of the paradigm founder that points the way to the work of future scientists and provides a concrete example of a solution. Knowledge that has a dynamic body and wants to dance rather than vivisected dead knowledge.

And with that, the book was over.

I got a lot out of it. But what I got most out of it, was the confirmation that this too is not my home. This too, is another lampost on the road to wherever it is my inner compass is steering. There was a lot of signal in here, but also a lot of noise. More concluding thoughts to come at the end of next week’s piece, but for now, that’s my closing sense: it was fascinating, but it’s not mine.

This week’s reading got close to home.

As she worked through her list of 12 leverage points, my head was doing a lot of gyrating: a lot of nods and a lot of shakes. I liked the new layer of depth to the concepts of flows:

“Think about the basic stock-and-flow bathtub from Chapter One. The size of the flows is a matter of numbers and how quickly those numbers can be changed. Maybe the faucet turns hard, so it takes a while to get the water flowing or to turn it off. Maybe the drain is blocked and can allow only a small flow, no matter how open it is. Maybe the faucet can deliver with the force of a fire hose.” (p.147)

I also appreciated the political relevance of her points:

“Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate at which the faucets turn, but if they’re the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information and goals and rules, the system behavior isn’t going to change much.” (p.148)

“I said a while back that changing the players in the system is a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system. The exception to that rule is at the top, where a single player can have the power to change the system’s goal. I have watched in wonder as—only very occasionally—a new leader in an organization, from Dartmouth College to Nazi Germany, comes in, enunciates a new goal, and swings hundreds or thousands or millions of perfectly intelligent, rational people off in a new direction.” (p.162)

Seems quite relevant as Trump transforms the global economic order, or at least America’s place in it. His policies of tariffs and his concern with trade deficit are a harking back to old old economic paradigm of Mercantilism. China, of course, has a lot of Mercantilist vibes to it, but America seemed to be at the opposite end of the spectrum, until Trump. It is astounding to see how much change one man can bring. He has changed the goals of the system — trade deficit being just one measure. Within the American system, many more of the goals are oriented towards him — pleasing him, increasing his power so he can bring about his agenda. Not since FDR has the executive had such power.

Aside from that political aside, there were a couple more nuggets I would love to muse on for longer:

“To demonstrate the power of rules, I like to ask my students to imagine different ones for a college. Suppose the students graded the teachers, or each other. Suppose there were no degrees: You come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you’ve learned it. Suppose tenure were awarded to professors according to their ability to solve real-world problems, rather than to publish academic papers. Suppose a class got graded as a group, instead of as individuals.” (p.158)

That latter suggestion is the one that really got me. I think all sorts of things would go wrong when you scaled that up to the level of a nation, but you can see the seed of a different system in changing education’s metric from the individual to the group. A class would become a business essentially. The A-students would be incentivised to share their study abilities with the failures. There would be social consequences for bad behaviour and slacking off. Inter-class competition within the school and between schools would ramp up. From that one little nugget, I can imagine a whole different educational landscape. This is a plant I’d like to water and write about in more length, but for a throwaway line — wow. Education is at the cusp of a MAJOR overhaul since AI has hollowed out the education system. Such questions as these might be important to ask.

Another aside I would like to dwell longer upon is democracy:

“This great system was invented to put self-correcting feedback between the people and their government. The people, informed about what their elected representatives do, respond by voting those representatives in or out of office. The process depends on the free, full, unbiased flow of information back and forth between electorate and leaders. Billions of dollars are spent to limit and bias and dominate that flow of clear information. Give the people who want to distort market-price signals the power to influence government leaders, allow the distributors of information to be self-interested partners, and none of the necessary balancing feedbacks work well. Both market and democracy erode.” (p.154)

Meadows is of the opinion that democracy’s demise is due to a lack of transparency. I couldn’t disagree more. I think the limits of the Hamiltonian model of democracy have been revealed. In a small nation like 18th-century America, perhaps the people could have informed takes on the state of the nation. But things have gotten far too complex. The intricacies of a globalised world are beyond any generalist citizenry. We need specialisation, and with that we get a byzantine labyrinth of red tape and nomenclature. Perhaps a system with more fractal distributions of power rather than a delegation to an elite class? Again, a line of enquiry calling for exploration.

But these are mere asides when she comes to my main quest and concern, the past few months: paradigm-lessness. The lack of proper orientation, having the “tremendously limited understanding” of my “sweetly shaping” paradigms of yore.

She ranked these paradigmatic shifts as the two pinnacles of systems thinking leverage points. Over the longer term, I agree. But lacking a new paradigm, they might be the least actionable ones. She goes off into spiritual paeans on the non-paradigmatic state, aligning it to “what the Buddhists call enlightenment” (p.164). Here’s her optimistic view of it:

“Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, embodied in the notion that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe.” (p.164)

To that I reply only with a wry Nihilistic recitation of Yeats’s account of such days:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity”

Still, I like her optimism, and it was nice to have someone hold up a mirror to what I’ve been wrestling with myself. And there’s a nice pragmatism to what she’s saying, so maybe I’ll warm more to it in time.

I thought this week's reading was going to be like the chapter on the Systems Zoo: tedious. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. Pleasantly surprised and overwhelmed.

There was a lot going on in here. The whole chapter was a study of "systems archetypes":

• Policy Resistance

• Tragedy of the Commons

• Drift to Low Performance

• Escalation

• Success to the Successful

• Addiction (Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor)

• Rule Beating and

• Seeking the Wrong Goal

That's a lot. I've spent a lot of time reading about and reflecting upon a number of these. There are books and books on each of these subjects, and Meadows just paraded them out one after another. My head was spinning by the end. I really feel like this is a book worth reading and rereading and rereading. This is a great 10ft overview of systems thinking. It's a wonderful topology that gives you the whole framework is such a compressed package.

That makes it a tad overwhelming to consume, yet it's connecting so many dots in me that weren't previously connected. The video on beauty was about the Seeking the Wrong Goal archetype. I've mentioned my deep study of the Tragedy of the Commons that never materialised into content. I've thought a lot about Rule Beating over the years, and I'm sure I've talked recently about the dangers of setting reading goals because of this. Success to the Successful is something I've reflected on a lot personally, creatively and philosophically.

In short, there's just so much in here that I've worked on in isolation, and it's been scintillating seeing them connected together through this lens of systemic thinking.

I don't have much more than that to add to that this week. I'm dazed and amused by it.

Next week: "SIX. Leverage Points—Places to Intervene in a System" (pp.145-166)

After finding last week’s reading a bit slow, things picked up considerably with this week’s reading: resilience, self-organisation and hierarchy.

This week’s reading felt VERY Wilber (and hence Metamodernist). Self-organisation/emergentism is all the rage in these subcultures, as is hierarchy.

Thoughts on Resilience

The standout for me in this chapter was not the hierarchy and self-organisation, which I’ve read and thought about a lot in the past, but the resilience. The part that stopped me in my tracks a little:

“Just-in-time deliveries of products to retailers or parts to manufacturers have reduced inventory instabilities and brought down costs in many industries. The just-in-time model also has made the production system more vulnerable, however, to perturbations in fuel supply, traffic flow, computer breakdown, labor availability, and other possible glitches.” (p.77)

The tradeoff between resilience and productivity hadn’t struck me before. The first thing that came to mind was the fragility of the global supply chain exposed by Covid, which saw food shortages in Africa amid a plague of locusts without the pesticides and capacity to deal with it. No doubt this is one reason why protectionism and tariffs have been making a comeback: it’s not just about onshoring jobs but about making supply chains less fragile — especially amid the geopolitical winter brewing.

I’ve been reading a lot of economics lately, and it’s peculiar to see this return to Mercantilism after decades/centuries characterised by Liberalism and Socialism. Another thought: the Classical school of economic Liberalism (Adam Smith and his intellectual descendants — especially the Austrians) is really a case of increasing productivity and decreasing resilience. Economic liberalism prioritises productivity above all else. What would an economic model that emphasises resilience look like?

Economic thoughts aside, this also got me thinking about my relationship with YouTube. I’ve seen so many YouTubers at the top of the game burning out because of the nature of the platform. Their relationship with the beast is one of incredible productivity, but with a paucity of resilience. From YouTube’s perspective, it is resilient: there are always more aspiring content creators out there; the individual YouTubers are expendable. But from the creator’s point of view, this concept of resilience is pronounced.

Over the past couple of years, since my YouTube career hit a wobble (in fairness, that’s because I kneecapped its growth when it conflicted with my integrity) I’ve been contemplating my relationship with the algorithmic beast. It’s no way to live.

That being said, I love making things. YouTube is an amazing outlet for creative expression. But the thing is, if you want to succeed there financially, you have to compromise with the machine. And if you do that, you are, to use Meadows’ analogy, narrowing your plateau of resilience in the name of productivity. It gave me a conceptual lens to look at this ongoing renegotiation through which is always a treat.

Anyway, just a series of thoughts prompted by this distinction. I hadn’t thought of this conflictual relationship between productivity and resilience in systems before. It’s a powerful lens.

Chapter 4

Events, behaviours and structure were the themes of this chapter.

Events are “the outputs, moment by moment, from the black box of the system” — the things you see on the six o’clock news: bombings, battles, disasters, stock market booms and river floods.

Behaviours are patterns of events, e.g. the stock market has been trending upwards for ten years, the temperature of the planet has been trending upwards for 150 years, the variance of the river is increasing with more floods during heavy rains and lower flows during droughts.

Then you have the structure, which is what the diagrams we’ve been looking at the past couple of weeks are mapping:

It’s the “interlocking stocks, flows and feedback loops” of the system. This structure “determines what behaviours are latent in the system.”

After this, there was some discussion of boundaries, limits and bounded rationality. I think this is a section I need to reread again. I didn’t quite grasp the limits concept, which is progress because going in, I thought I did.

Bounded rationality grabbed me more because it’s a common talking point in modern economics and something I’m very familiar with from studying the tragedy of the commons.

Anyway, compared to last week, these chapters were heaped with concepts which I love. I’ll be rereading these at some point for sure. It is giving me a hankering to read Wilber’s Sex, Ecology, Spirituality again, though, which is systems thinking on spiritual steroids (with all the positive and negative connotations of that phrase).

Next week’s reading: “FIVE: System Traps . . . and Opportunities” (pp.111-144)

I found this week’s reading a bit slower going. The systems zoo, while interesting, was a bit tedious. Though I must admit, the opening quote was 👌👌

“The . . . goal of all theory is to make the . . . basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of . . . experience.”
—Albert Einstein

The animal that stuck out to me in her zoo was population. Probably because Meadows was the author of Limits to Growth and was part of the great Malthusian fear-mongering of the Population Bomb/Club of Rome subculture of the late 60s/early 70s. It’s one of the many historical curiosities about Meadows’ work. How things could have turned around so much in 50 years, where instead of worrying about insane overpopulation, we are staring demographic collapse, is a delectable systems curiosity. Looking back, you can already see the fertility rate collapsing when they were writing. Though the stock was continuing to be fed by the inflows, the trajectory of fertility was already on the wall. The increased life expectancy and decrease in child mortality was like the sulphur dioxide emitted by the great shipping containers: a mask.

Since the great pollutant of sulphur was cut out of the world of shipping a couple of years ago, the world experiences less acid rain but also a 0.05ºC increase in temperature. The sulphur masked a deeper problem.

The same thing was going on with breakthroughs in medicine hitting the Global South: a massive increase in population by eliminating the outflows. But this was merely a mask over a deeper trend: the precipitous decline in inflows. The past 50 years have not been good:

The trend lines all point one way. The world is barely holding on above the replenishment rate (2.1 births per woman) at 2.3, meanwhile South Korea is down to 0.7, and China is at 1.0, which is…not good. Instead of explosion, population implosion seems to be the imminent threat (unless some other balancing feedback loop enters the fray).

Anyway, that’s egregiously tangential except perhaps as an illustration of how delays in changes in stock can outwit even the savviest systems thinkers. It was something I wrote a lot about in a long piece I was working on last year on The Tragedy of the Commons before I discovered Ostrom’s Nobel-prize-winning work on commons and postponed publishing (indefinitely it seems) pending further research.

Back to the book. In the systems zoo, she looks at a number of different species of systems:

1. One stock systems

   1. A stock with two competing balancing loops

   2. A stock with one reinforcing loop and one balancing loop

2. A system with delays

3. Two stock systems

   1. A Renewable Stock Constrained by a Nonrenewable Stock

   2. Renewable Stock Constrained by a Renewable Stock

And that was the chapter on the systems zoo. Kind of technical, helpful for giving some flesh to the bones of some of these concepts, but nothing that got me excited.

Then, in the third chapter, we got some more concepts:

• Resilience

• Self-organisation

• Hierarchy

All of which put me very much in mind of Ken Wilber’s work (particularly Sex, Ecology, Spirituality). I think Wilber captures the hierarchy element better than Meadows. The idea of a “holarchy” — of holons (wholes that are also parts — the subsystems within subsystems with subsystems) is better, but that may be because he maps out the nested levels of holons/subsystems so well. The Nordic Metamodernists also talk a lot about all this, which is unsurprising given their Wilberian DNA.

Next week's reading: "THREE: Why Systems Work So Well" and "FOUR. Why Systems Surprise Us" (pp.75-110)

Now we’re getting into the meat of it. This was definitely the chapter I read last time and felt overwhelmed by. There are two major conceptual megazords introduced here. There’s the “System” we looked at in last Friday’s Philosopher’s Toolkit with its three parts (elements, interconnections and functions/purposes), then there’s the grand model of this with the stocks and the inflows and outflows and then there’s a lot about feedback loops and two types of feedback loops (self-reinforcing and runaway).

That’s a lot of conceptual gunpowder to pack into one chapter. There’s a lot of distinctive terminology flying around, and I can only imagine that the rest of the book builds on this.

I’ve been having a couple of thoughts/feelings about the subject matter over the past couple of weeks. Firstly, I feel like I am a systems thinker through and through. From the Nietzschean/Jungian drive system/psychical structure, to Wilber’s wild systems time, to Marx’s very systemic perspective, to Sowell’s Constrained Vision and de Saussure’s Semiotics, wherever I’ve been on the ideological/political map, it has been more or less systemic. It’s clear to me that Wilber is a very close cousin of this school of thought, and the Metamodernists even more so. So the first feeling I’ve been having is a sense of deep familiarity, even while I’m a bit bamboozled by the conceptual framework being flung at me.

Secondly, I’ve found myself using the terminology multiple times this week. Today, I used it talking about finances — how I calibrate my outflows by my inflows rather than my stock (unlike some friends). But it’s proving to be a useful conceptual language. We shall see whether this deepens or fades as the book goes on, but it’s a promising sign.

Unpacking the theory

As far as the aforementioned conceptual megazords go, here’s my tl;dr

A system has three components:

1. Elements (people, buildings, trees, your stomach, etc.)

2. Interconnections (the physical and informational flow between these things)

3. Function/Purpose (the end towards which the system is geared)

Systems change over time. Here’s a way of picturing that1:

1. Stocks: the reserve of the element at any point in time (the water level of the reservoir, the amount of money in your bank account)

2. Flows: the amounts of the element flowing. These can be

   1. Inflows: amount of the element flowing in, increasing the stock

   2. Outflows: the amount flowing out, decreasing the stock

Systems are dynamic. They don’t just let the stock rise or fall with the blind whim of the flows. The flows can be manipulated. There are feedback loops:

1. Balancing feedback loop: this type of feedback loop responds to a change in the system by replenishing the outflow with inflow. I’m hungry, so I eat; I’m tired, so I sleep or I drink coffee.

2. Reinforcing feedback loop: the second type of feedback loop is a cascade. It’s an amplifying, self-reinforcing virtuous/vicious cycle on a one-way train to healthy growth or runaway destruction. “To those who have, more shall be given”. The stock in your bank account earns you interest, which increases the stock and increases the interest you will get in future (virtuous cycle). The more soil is eroded, the less plants are able to grow, the less roots there are holding the soil together, the more soil is eroded (vicious cycle).

Those are the three conceptual frameworks presented in this chapter. There’s a whole lot of nuance in there about the dynamics of these dynamics, but that should serve as a solid reminder for future reference.

What did you think? Were you bamboozled? Did you love it? Or was it all a bit meh?

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Next week: TWO: A Brief Visit to the Systems Zoo (pp.35-74)

Seven pages in, and this book has already been life-changing for me. Nothing to do with systems (though I’m VERY excited about that).

Reading the first pages of the book, I was struck by both excitement and, to my surprise, a little grief.

I wasn’t expecting to find something I’d forgotten we’ve lost: my (now extinct) home constellation of hippie leftism. That’s prompted all sorts of revelations for me that I’m going to dedicate a whole piece to. Suffice to say, these pages, not by the content but by their perspective, have restored something deep in my identity. What a gift. And we’re only ten pages in!

As far as Systems go, we got a concise definition of our subject matter:

“A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.” (Meadows 2009:3)

The slinky example was the perfect illustration of this 👌👌👌

At the end of the introduction, we got another key insight into systems thinking:

“That’s what I hope to get across throughout this book, but especially in its conclusion. I don’t think the systems way of seeing is better than the reductionist way of thinking. I think it’s complementary, and therefore revealing” (Meadows 2009:6)

The binary opposition that’s going to make Systems Thinking come into starker relief is reductionism. Reductionism is the yang to the Systems yin.

On a side note, this is pretty much a 1:1 mapover with McGilchrist’s left-/right-hemisphere thesis. We could also network this idea together with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage and Wilber/Koestler’s idea of the holon.

Other than that, we’ve got some hints of key concepts to come in the book: archetypes (systems traps and opportunities) and the feedback loop (“the basic operating unit of a system” (Meadows 2009:5)).

Conceptual download incoming. But I already feel like I’ve come away with a haul.

What about you? What were your thoughts and feelings on the intro?

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This week’s reading: "ONE: The Basics" (pp. 11-34)
Link to free PDF of book if you haven’t got it already: here

As I mentioned last week, we are taking a pause from Poetry Club to get into some deeper reading once again.

I’ve been feeling the gravitational pull to Donella Meadows’s work for some months now, and I am excited for us to dig in. I started reading this back in 2020, but never did get around to finishing it. I suspect there’ll be many Philosopher’s Toolkits instalments emerging from this and a paradigmatic language evolving out of it, so I hope many of you will join the journey.

The book is available for free online in PDF form here. In the meantime, if you want to grab a physical copy, you have time. Next week we'll just cover the intro so you'll have time to get the physical book if you prefer and we can all get our heads into Systems Thinking mode.

Plan of Reading:

• Week 1 (next Tuesday, August 12th): “Introduction” (chance for people to get the book if they want and to read the intro) (pp.ix-10)

• Week 2: "ONE: The Basics" (if I remember right this may be a bit theory heavy so this chapter will be more than enough) (pp. 11-34)

• Week 3: "TWO: A Brief Visit to the Systems Zoo" (pp.35-74)

• Week 4: "THREE: Why Systems Work So Well" and "FOUR. Why Systems Surprise Us" (pp.75-110)

• Week 5: "FIVE: System Traps . . . and Opportunities" (pp.111-144)

• Week 6: "SIX. Leverage Points—Places to Intervene in a System" (pp.145-166)

• Week 7: "SEVEN. Living in a World of Systems" (pp.166-187)

• Week 8: Appendices and wrapup (I'll be organising a group hangout here to chat about it — we could have others along the way on Discord if people are interested (paid members: let me know if you need access to the Discord)

Goodreads blurb:

Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global.

Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.

While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.

In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

We are going to be taking a little intermission from Poetry Club after this week in order to head back to book club territory. Exciting for those who like book club, sad perhaps for those who enjoy poetry club. But I like the mix in rhythm!

More on that next week. This week is another community poem (if you have a poem that deeply moves you, I’d love to hear from you and would be delighted to share it in the next bout of poetry club).

Belinda, living in the land down under, suggested this poem after I capitulated that summer has begun to lose its confident footing on this northern hemisphere and is coming her way. She shared the poem with the following note:

“I appreciate Berry’s poem for its Autumnal tone and imagery, the reminder of the importance of preparation as we head inward (in the best sense), and of course, the pertinent reminder inherent in the last two lines.”

I'm looking forward to spending some time with this poem as I head off to Kerry for a couple of days hiking and camping with some friends and a couple of lads from the next generation.

The Wild Geese by Wendell Berry

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

This week's poem is an old friend. More than any other poem, it has stuck with me through my philosophical evolutions over the years. There's such a deep truth to it, and yet, in its pristine state, it is hauntingly beautiful. I bring it up this week because it came up once again in an article I was writing this week. It is the perfect example of Yeats’ talent for mixing occultic, poetic, mythological and religious imagery into something hauntingly modern. I can smell the influence of Nietzsche in this one.

I can still picture where I was when I learned it off — walking through a field on my 40-day camping trek along the southwest coast of Ireland back in 2020 (I wanna say it was on the Sheep's Head peninsula?).

In my 20s, I was struck more by the second stanza with the Second Coming of this antichrist/sphinx figure emerging from the collective unconscious — there's no finer vision of the crisis of Nihilism as Nietzsche diagnoses it with the death of God.

These days it's the first stanza I think about: the widening gyre (a gyre being the circle the falcon flies in — I can see the buzzards flying in their gyres, high in the sky, when I look out my door on a good day), the centre that can't hold and the consequences of that. There's a book gloss of Deleuzian assemblages, Nietzsche Nihilism and social media era narrative fragmentation I could write reflecting on these lines. I'm still not sure I share Yeats’ fear, but the fear of the fear still scares me.

And then, of course, there's that couplet which ends the first stanza, which, 105 years on, captures the state of our epistemic commons better than any contemporary commentary. I will be writing a piece soon on the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, which runs parallel to this couplet.

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I came across this week’s poem in a beautiful article on The Lost Art of Leisure.

It gnaws at me.

I traded Astronomer for philosopher when reading this and it moved me. It reconnected me to the ancient philosophers. Not just your Cynics, Stoics, Academics and Peripatetics, but the Pre-Socratics — those philosophers so close to Reason’s dawn that their work was part poetry, part mythology, part religion, part science, and part philosophy. Our first, Thales of Miletus, was a source of awe for predicting a lunar eclipse. And so with Elson, I feel we’ve come full circle.

After perusing the poem, I did a little reading about Elson. A brilliant scientist who contributed to seventy scientific publications before she died of cancer at only 39. My reading of the poem now marinates in that all-too-human tragedy.

The movement of the poem is disenchantment. It is a movement from awe, beauty and wonder into the labyrinth of the mundane, lost in the quotidian, Fallen from enchantment.

I think about last week and how I couldn’t meet Pascal’s challenge to sit in a room quietly. They say Heraclitus spent a week in solitary darkness (a shitting hole if memory serves) and it changed him. Descartes used to sit in the dark sauna and think his revolutionary thoughts (no wonder the poor soul perished in the Swedish cold). But I can’t sit in this auld farmhouse alone for a few hours without craving some external source to feed my hungry mental vacuum.

And what about that turn from the nomadic, adventuring philosopher (“to the philosopher, nothing is impersonal” — Nietzsche), drunk on life and the world? What about the great believer of my youth? I am industrious. I, too, have bred enthusiasms. But I, too, have bent my face to the ground “And only count things”. My cosmic tent has dried up.

Starlight became too sharp.

How I hunger for the desire for starlight again.

And most of all: “responsibility to awe”. That is the great reminder that comes to me out of this. As a philosopher, I feel it: the vocation to honour that responsibility to awe.

Of course, this is the journey of life. I hope I’m not presuming when I imagine this arc is the human one: Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained.

We Astronomers by Rebecca Elson

We astronomers are nomads,
Merchants, circus people,
All the earth our tent.

We are industrious.
We breed enthusiasms,
Honour our responsibility to awe.

But the universe has moved a long way off.
Sometimes, I confess,
Starlight seems too sharp,

And like the moon
I bend my face to the ground,
To the small patch where each foot falls,

Before it falls,
And I forget to ask questions,
And only count things.

I think this week’s piece was the first poem I ever memorised of my own volition. It’s by Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, who was on the Leaving Cert English syllabus when I was in school. I think Yeats and Kavanagh were the poets my teacher steered us towards, but perusing the rest of the book, I remember reading this and being knocked with the force of a cannonball.

The content of the poem is from our oldest piece of literature in the Western canon: Homer’s Iliad. But in context, it’s about The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the brutal cycle of senseless violence where revenge killing repaid revenge killing. It’s what René Girard calls a mimetic crisis — in which the cycle of horrors symmetrically mirror each other until the root is left irrelevant. A Catholic killed a Protestant, so Justice necessitates the killing of another Catholic. When the victims are innocent — people selected purely on a contingency of their identity — how can we possibly forgive? How do you move past that? I struggle to let a petty argument go without getting the last word in. What tragic, titanic wisdom it must take to move past that kind of wounding?

Longley’s hope is sublime; it’s the lofty peak of human ethics. The consonance between the content and context — the oldest piece of literature and contemporary conflict — reminds us that these problems are as old as time. It’s a reminder that, unlike the skyscrapers of knowledge that science has accumulated over the centuries, the work of wisdom begins again with each new generation and each new birth.

Given the way of humans and the world, it seems miraculous every time the hatchet is buried, slate wiped clean, peace reborn from the ashes of tragedy.

I remember, in my youthful days, a medieval mystical work called The Cloud of Unknowing, in which the (unknown) author talked about the process of illumination: you enter the darkness — that pitch cloud of unknowing. This, you can do by your will. What you cannot control, what you can only pray for, hope for, and be blessed enough to receive, is the divine light which can fill that darkness. You can empty yourself, but only by the Grace of God can you be refilled.

That, it seems to me, is the nature of forgiveness. You can’t scale it; you can’t bottle it; you can only move in its direction. There’s tragedy in that. The gravity of human nature makes it so much easier to perpetuate the cycle of misery. Justice seems to demand it. But sometimes, miracles happen.

Ceasefire by Michael Longley

I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

II
Taking Hector's corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king's sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other's beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

IV
'I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son.'

What is your Innisfree?

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Logistically I’ve decided to try something a little different. Last week I tried pinning the poem as a way of continuing engagement. During the week I remembered the chat function so I’m going to start a thread on the poem and we can post our thoughts in there. I assume we get notifications about messages in there so it should work nicely for this.

This week’s poem was recommended by Belinda. One thing I hoped for with this poetry group was to encounter the poems that have affected your lives and to get a glimpse into why. I think of these reflections as a little bait attached to the poem as we cast it into our depths. Belinda obliged with the following reflection:

I think it is the sense of welcoming of one’s own self like an old familiar friend that I appreciate most deeply in Love After Love.

It’s a bit like Neruda writing, “I want to return to what ( who?) I haven’t been ..”

The gift of meeting with my better self , the self that is yearning perhaps for a bit more self acceptance and just plain welcome - the one whom I have ignored for another, the one who has waited patiently & who knows me by heart .. That one.

This poem sings to me of acceptance, patience and welcome; three things I would love to know more of - towards myself and towards others .

Thanks for that, Belinda. That was beautiful. Without further ado:

Love after Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Boy am I excited about this! Thanks to Carla for recommending this poem by Charles Bukowski. I’ve never sat down and read ol’ Charles, and I can’t think of a better place to start our poetry club than here.

As I was saying in last week’s post, poetry is an odd duck. I don’t find myself entranced when first encountering a poem, yet I find snatches of lines I’ve encountered over the years covering the walls of my psyche like graffiti, and I want more, more, more of this.

Here’s how I’m intending on going about this: I’m going to sit down every morning out in my garden and have a read of this poem and let it sink into me. I might try memorise it; I might not. But I want to give it fertile ground lest this be one of those wonderful seeds that provide us shade our whole lives long.

Then, next week there’ll be another poem. I’d love to have you send in your favourite poems and a couple of lines (or more. or less) about why it has stuck with you, how it has wriggled its way into your flesh. I find a good story can go a long way in opening the doors of reception so this latter piece would be awesome. Thanks to Carla, Belinda and Cheryl we already have a few out, and I have a whole raft of poems beyond that to share.

As for responses…I’m not quite sure what to do. I’m thinking I’ll pin the week’s poem and then we can have chaotic free-for-all in the comment section below rather than doing a separate post for the previous week’s poem. That’s something I’m sure we can figure out along the way. Suggestions always welcome. Perhaps I should rewatch Dead Poets Society for some inspiration.

Without further ado,

Bluebird (1992) by Charles Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

I’ve noticed a recurring theme as I’ve been writing these daily pieces. Snatches of poetry keep bubbling to the surface.

Which is funny because I don’t think about poetry much these days, and I certainly haven’t been reading much. I used to memorise poems and tried to broaden my horizons, but I’ve never shown much rigour with it.

My relationship with poetry is like dandelions and concrete cracks. I’m not particularly fertile ground yet whenever I go scratching in the dirt of my inner kingdom, there, waiting patiently, is a line of poetry I haven’t thought about in years.

I’ve bought anthologies over the years and have read my fair share (hell, I’ve even identified as a poet at times in my life). But the truth is, I’ve never mastered reading it. How do you read something which soaks into your bones? It’s not a piece of information you hang on your knowledge web, it’s a hook that snags and embeds itself.

But I have an idea.

I’ve always felt that poetry called for a reading process with more patience than I could muster. It seems more like music than literature; I never know how much I’ll love an album based on the first listen (there are exceptions; I remember Dark Side of the Moon left me giddy with awe the first time I listened).

I digress. My idea: our own little dead poets society. Let’s have a book club, but instead of a book, a poem. We’ll take one poem a week, read it every day, soak in it and share our thoughts at the end of the week.

I want to discover more poetry that worms its way into the depths of my soul. The thing is, I don’t know what poems to pick. Of course, I could choose from the classics, but I have another idea: we take turns picking them.

Okay, I’ve had another idea. So part of the thing with a poem is that it nestles itself in your heart, right? What if the reflection for the week, rather than being me giving some fresh thoughts on your poems, you share why you love that poem? Every week could be a guest post. This could be anonymous if you want, and I would be delighted to chat about it with you and help you write it or whatever you need. What I want is to open up those cracks in the concrete and let more beauty in.

What I envision is sitting down every morning and reading the poem of the week, marinating in it for a couple of minutes and let it breath in me. Do this every day and then, at the end of the week, reflect. I don’t know what form that reflection would take. Maybe it doesn’t need to be anything special. Maybe it’s not about the reflection but about the warmth of the poem. It seems to me it’s a way to give the poem a chance to take root.

Maybe we can throw poems up and vote on them. I don’t know how this would go, I only know that there’s something I value in poetry, and it’s something I’d like to deepen and share. Anyone else interested? Lemme know, and especially lemme know if you have a poem you’d like to share.

Hello there,

The Living Philosophy book club is coming to Substack! This is something we’ve been experimenting with over on the Patreon page and it’s high time we bring it to Substack. The format is quite simple (perhaps meriting some improvement).

1. We pick a book;

2. set the dates for reading the various sections by week (e.g. Chapters 1&2 on Week 1; Chapters 3, 4 and 5 on Week 2, Chapter 6 on Week 3 etc. etc.);

3. then I’ll post my thoughts/reflections/musings on those sections on the week’s chapters and you can post your thoughts/reflections/musings beneath;

4. and then when we’re finished we have a Zoom debrief chat discussing the whole book and what we got out of it

I’m planning on creating a Discord for paid members of Substack and Patreon where we can have more of a conversational flow rather than the post/comments dynamic which isn’t as dialogical as I’d like. I’m going to try and get that set up in the next couple of weeks before the book club gets started.

The book we’re going to be reading next is “Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth” by Robert A. Johnson (amazon.co.uk link here). I got really excited reading about Active Imagination again recently and what I’d love to see happen is for The Living Philosophy to turn into a community of practice where we engage in philosophical exercises together. Not sure how that would look but I’ve found working with dreams again recently has lifted the weight of Nihilism off my shoulders once again and I’m excited to get into more work.

So, Active Imagination is the first port of call. I’ve experimented with it in the past but never made much headway. I’m hoping working in parallel with a community we might learn from each other and get value from the practice. I’m also thinking of bringing in some Jungian analysts maybe to do a podcast with to help us.

Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself. For now: Johnson’s book is a primer on working with Active Imagination. If you’re interested in getting your hands dirty in some Jungian self-work then this could be for you.

The plan is to get the book this week then I’ll send out a plan of attack next Saturday and then the Saturday after post the first week’s report.

Looking forward to reading with you,
James