Man and his surroundings have to be conceived as one single whole, a system, in fact, in which changes in one part have an impact on all other parts, directly or indirectly. The picture we should have of our state on this globe is one of interdependence as between nations and regions, and also between man and the natural world which sustains him.
We never question the proposition that economic growth, the growth of the material standard of living, and the resulting competition between individuals, companies, and nations are good things and ought to be encouraged. This is surely a prescription for disaster. We are already straining against the limits of growth: economies cannot go on growing much further, consumption and the exploitation of the Earth’s resources cannot increase indefinitely.
I’m talking about the need for a complete cultural, I might almost say anthropological, transformation.
National interests may be defeated if global interests are not taken care of.
The population of the United States is six per cent of the world’s population. Yet it consumes forty per cent of the world’s resources. If everybody in the world consumed on the scale of the United States, the world’s consumption of resources would increase sevenfold and that would mean instant disaster.
There is no question of man subduing the Earth or slaughtering the fish of the seas. On the contrary, it is realized that the man who subdues nature also subdues the human species. This is perhaps the easiest part of cybernetics to understand. But cybernetic planning applies the same philosophy to man-made systems and to the interplay between the man-made world and the natural environment. Its fundamental tenet is that systems—social systems, cities, industrial conglomerations, and so on—are in permanent interaction with each other, with the earth, the air, the world’s energy resources, and have to be continuously redesigned to protect the ecological balance and, through it, man’s freedom.
We are told that in fifty years’ time we shall all be living in vast, push-button glass and concrete environments, but we have no notion how that will affect us. There is a new science to be founded to study this kind of problem—the science of humanity. It will be a study of man as he encounters himself in an increasingly man-made world.