Nora Bateson — The Paradox of Agency

The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.  

Humanity is at a crossroads, will we be hoarders or healers? There is every reason to argue that history proves either. System Change is needed to find our way to another way of living that is not fed by exploitation of each other and the ecology. The change needed is not in any of the institutions, for surely they are interdependent, the change is... See more

Interdependency is vital to the health of any system. But, the interdependency does not sit still. All of biological evolution, and development of culture and society, would seem to be a testament to the characteristics of contextual multilayered shiftings through time. Nothing stays the same, clearly. So could it be that change is a kind of learni... See more

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

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