What Makes a Social System Conscious? -- by Tom Atlee

At the first Evolutionary Salon, thirty scientists and social thinkers envisioned

an emerging movement   

for the conscious evolution   

of increasingly conscious social systems.

That's an intriguing idea.  But what does it mean?  What IS a conscious social system?

It turns out that this is a rich inquiry -- juicy and productive, taking us broader and deeper into life, as any evolutionary inquiry should.  In this essay I'll share some of my initial thoughts -- which I expect to revise frequently as new insights and examples emerge.  Feel free to explore with us on this emerging edge.

One way I see for a social system to be conscious is for all of us who are in it to be informed about -- and oriented to -- the social system's life and well-being.  Our many individual consciousnesses can then add up to a form of collective consciousness.  Sometimes a collective "field of consciousness" permeates the whole system.

Consider a mundane example:  Think about what happens when millions of us -- all at the same time -- watch a catastrophe like a tsunami, a disastrous hurricane, or a couple of giant skyscrapers collapsing on television news and the Internet.  Together, as we watch and react, we generate a palpable field of awareness and concern that powerfully shapes subsequent events.  Similar to the way magnetic and gravitational fields work, in this field of shared awareness every person and institution shifts in relationship to it.

Perhaps the most important shared awareness that we have is our collective indentity -- a shared perception that we ARE our group, community, country, or world.  This recognition underlies most other aspects of collective consciousness.  The more deeply we sense our common identity and the more care and esteem we have for each other and for the larger life we are part of, the more the human systems we live in emerge as coherent -- and potentially conscious -- entities. In well-developed forms of collective identity, we not only cherish our whole community, bioregion, or world, but see it living in and through us -- cherishing every part of itself, every individual or species, as a source of diverse delight and unique gifts.  In this expansive form of identity we can often experience a deep, flowing communion.*

So what is possible when we become a coherent living system together? The more we all know what's going on ... and care about what's happening to our whole community, society, and world ... and are linked to each other in useful ways ... and know what to do to improve our system's well-being ... the more conscious our system, as a whole, will become.  As these factors grow, we COLLECTIVELY tend to act more and more like a coherent living organism that appropriately responds to the world around it.  More and more, our community, society or world shows up as a living conscious whole.

So the consciousness of a whole social system naturally includes our individual consciousnesses.  But more is involved.  How are our individual minds informed, linked, attuned, engaged...?  To answer this, we need to explore the structures, processes, and cultures that are as much "the system" as we are.

I see many of the major factors in whole-system consciousness falling into the following four tentative topic areas.

• Holistic awareness 
• Shared knowledge and care 
• Systemic leadership
• Evolvability
  

I describe each of these a bit more below.  Within each one, I offer a few factors I believe are characteristic of human systems as they become more conscious.  Each of these topics will be explored further in future essays.

I hope this and similar models can help us focus our attention, resources and efforts on activities that have special impact on the healthy evolution of humanity.

HOLISTIC AWARENESS

How do people deeply and consciously connect to the whole systems they are part of?

In a conscious social system, we know, identify with, and care about our community, bioregion, and world -- each system we are part of -- as a whole.  We orient our awareness and behavior to the existence and needs of these precious living systems, through culture (especially stories), education, governance, and spiritual and group attunement practices.

We know about the health of our human and natural communities, thanks to engaging media, grassroots sharing of news, statistics, briefings, clear attention to environmental changes and many other common activities and facets of our culture.  We know enough about system dynamics to recognize what is happening, what it means, and how we can engage with it.

We are aware of and value each other, and what people different from us are doing.  The field of our collective awareness is vitally alive, as evidenced by the frequency with which similar ideas, innovations, and discoveries show up simultaneously in different places, as needed.

SHARED KNOWLEDGE AND CARE

How do human knowing and caring flow powerfully through the social system?

In a conscious social system, relevant knowledge or caring of one person, time or place is, to a remarkable degree, available to other people, times and places.  We see healthy communication, media, and political systems through which information flows freely, intermingling in many ways and increasing in value as it moves.

Our whole systems have forms of memory which transcend our individual memories and lives.  These include powerfully inclusive and accessible information storage, evaluation, distribution, and retrieval systems like libraries, databases, open source intelligence services, and the searchable Internet.

We readily find each other to work together and share what we care about, and systemic structures and processes facilitate this -- from electronic networking tools to self-organizing face-to-face gatherings around advertised interests.

SYSTEMIC LEADERSHIP

How are the power and guidance systems of society aligned to serve the needs of the whole?

In a conscious social system, certain parts of the system -- leaders and institutions -- are sometimes empowered by the whole to perceive and act on its behalf.

Our social arrangements make it extremely difficult for our leaders and power centers to colonize our systems' resources for their own personal or group benefit.  Well-designed feedback mechanisms and future-orientation systems keep them responsive to the needs of our whole community, society, and world.

Our political, governmental, economic, information and education systems are designed for answerability and service to the common good -- while mindfully protecting and nurturing our precious individuality and diversity from which so many social benefits flow.

Our institutions and cultural practices support legitimate leadership arising from the collective intelligence and wisdom of adequately diverse groups of us in high quality conversations, which are watched by our whole community or society and often exercise direct decision-making power.**

EVOLVABILITY

How does a whole system evolve itself?

In a conscious social system, our system as a whole (sometimes through its leaders or proxies, as above) constantly reflects on its own operation, the results of our collective activity, and our future prospects.

Key parts of our systems are kept as free as possible from bias, fixed ideas, and inflexible attitudes.  We honor wholeness in all its forms.  Our system continually creatively engages the diversity -- and even conflict -- in and around it to generate inclusive, evolving forms of common sense and shared enterprise.  Ways to do this are broadly known.

We have a certain eagerness to welcome, generate and consider novel perspectives and possibilities -- and to test them in useful ways.

We always set up the structures of our systems so they can and do change in a timely manner:  They neither resist needed changes and miss promising opportunities nor do they change chaotically in response to every impulse.  Overall, we maintain a healthy relationship between centralized and decentralized forms of collective perception, reflection, and action -- out of which the necessary level of appropriate change naturally emerges.

FROM SOCIAL CHANGE TO SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Orienting ourselves to visions like these can guide our attention beyond the normal realms of charitable and activist activity -- as vital as they are.  While we need to ameliorate individual suffering, prevent damage to the commonwealth, improve undesirable social conditions, and otherwise address social problems, we need to also explore why such problems are so persistent or increasing.

Orienting ourselves to helping social systems evolve into greater consciousness can stir our imaginations beyond fixing "bad" institutions that generate suffering, damage and harmful conditions. It can stretch us beyond even our utopian visions.

Because what we are after here is not a static ideal form of society. We want social systems that can change themselves -- that can consciously evolve in healthy directions -- over and over, in ongoing response to emerging understandings and new challenges.  We want to nurture this capacity to consciously evolve together forever.

This is not a movement for social change.  This is a movement to expand ourselves into evolution, itself, as it becomes more conscious through us and through the self-transforming social systems we create.  This is a movement to enable our world to learn its way into greater vitality and awareness with each newborn day.