Jessie Henshaw: Difference between revisions

Emerging systems display what animates their growth if we pay attention. They capture energy and resources to multiply their starting designs. That burst of growth in an emerging system may either just fail by itself or adapt to keep going as it collides with one new context after another and its limits. If those encounters trigger the right response, the new design will follow the ubiquitous “S” curve kind of growth path and adaptation ending in perfected designs with an enduring climax. As humanity pushes our world to its greatest designs, we are making ever more hasty, short-lived, and disorderly designs, i.e., utter chaos.  

Growth is an organizational, not numerical, process that begins with a “germination event” as contextual factors couple and start to reproduce. It is sometimes noticeable, like when a new game, project, or friendship takes off, but they are always implied where there’s evidence of regular proportional change: growth.

Sadly, it is some of the most innovative and successful people who become powerfully stuck on their own ideas of how things should work in nature, often long after they stop working. For example, our reliance today on regularly doubling the scale, complexity, and demands of our global economy is utterly foolhardy, but also our main quest. That could indeed cause our civilization to fully collapse and vanish if we proceed as other civilizations before us: trying to expand their powers to infinity to the end, naturally disrupting the working designs of everything they relied on. - Oops!

It was an unusual coincidence that let her notice and write up a complete outline of a new general systems theory of organization in nature. Its source might well have been John Maynard Keynes' repeated insistence that compound investing would destabilize civilization, as we now see. Her father, Clement Long Henshaw, an admired physics professor, and Kenneth Boulding, the co-founder of SGSR and noted economist, had been best friends as junior faculty at Colgate in the 1930s before they were married. Ken, having been a student of Keynes at Oxford, and Clem, somehow passed on a kind of marriage of physics and economics to Jessie, born several years later. She does not recall the subject ever coming up, but her first post-graduate work seemed perfectly targeted to prove Keynes' conjecture as a physical law. It went as unnoticed as the many efforts Keynes and Boulding too made to point out that devotion to seeking infinite power over nature would be a very bad idea.