Flourishing is a Choice

The pursuit of happiness is your inalienable birthright.

Preamble

As you well know, over 80% of the USA population is being psychologically and physically harmed by chronically high levels of social system incompetence, unrest and insecurity. You and your family witness the effects of high anxiety in everyday dealings with local dysfunctional bureaucracies, like schools, banks and healthcare. Caused by malfunctional healthcare allied with malfunctional politics, the average life expectancy of a member of USA society has gone down by two years in the last 18 months. To no one’s surprise, happiness is unattainable under conditions of chronic harassment, fear, anxiety, and security. Accordingly, the choice of happiness means first doing whatever it takes to rid yourself of angst. Your unhappy condition has been infused in you by a corrupt social system. You will need a good supply of free energy to get free of victimhood and complete the happiness trek. It’s never too late to abandon a failing ideology.

The entanglement between social happiness and the man-in-the-middle (MitM) was validated in 2013. While we focused on the MitM as central to social prosperity, we were to learn through direct experience that he was the maestro composer of social happiness as well. Although most of the website is about the MitM role in bringing organizational success, the discussion starts with the key factors of happiness that apply to everyone.

Experience has shown two  prominent factors in delivering social self-destruction:

1. The victims of malevolent social systems do not understand the mechanisms of social action, the system dynamics causing their morbid sense of insecurity. Everyone is already so insecure there’s barely enough insecurity to go around.
2. The same victims do not know a self-administered fix is available. Insecurity is a completely psychological phenomenon, with nothing to buy, but plenty of stuff to learn.

This website provides the sociotechnical knowledge bank to address both factors. Happiness is not a stand-alone add-on to your life. It is an ideological displacement – a happy proactive process from day one that you can witness and participate in, first hand.

The ability to improve on improvements (bootstrapping, “getting better at getting better,” resides entirely within the human sphere. This maxim is not limited to an increase in the acquisition, or use of, or quantity of knowledge, nor of the extent or depth of participation among individuals or teams, nor of the period-to-period change. The law is independent of the domain of performance and the quantity, amount, or degree on which one chooses a measure. Doug Englebart 1968

Background

Happiness is so variously defined and so complicated in construction, the word happiness itself presents challenges in trustworthy communications. Happiness is one of those words like “talent” that people, when pressed for a definition, declare “I can’t tell you what happiness is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

Our narrative with happiness made a dramatic advance in 2013 with the question we could never ask before attaining the goal we set for ourselves in 1988, named Plan B, flourishing organization, sustainable happiness. Once the generic capability to solve the problem of social dysfunction (unhappiness), named Plan A, had been demonstrated, we could finally wonder aloud, “Why wasn’t this bonanza exploited millennia ago?” Our process of elimination (POE) trip to happiness had been too long, painful, and erratic for us to think we had any special cognitive endowments or a superior level of intelligence somehow lacking in the many billions of Homo sapiens that preceded us – facing the exact same dilemmas of progressive social disintegration. It took us a year of post-success examination and evaluation of the now-flourishing organization to grasp how significant our development of Plan B really was to the future existence of humanity.

The Plan B paradigm is to social process as prudence is to human virtue. It is the mother of lasting social advancement and prosperity. Without prudence to keep things aligned with reality, there can be no other sort of human virtue. In a changing world, without a resilient and prudent operating ideology, there can be no social stability, no survival of our “sapient” species. Business as usual does not work for times of rapid change and disturbance, including growth.

Everyone knows the population is now suffering psychologically and physically from social insecurity and abuse. The fearmongering of the Chinese virus pandemic, the destruction of the USA way of life by the current Establishment, inflation, and the global disruptions of the European war are taking their toll on everyone. No nation knows what it takes to reverse the march to madness or where to begin remedial action. As far as Nature is concerned, nothing ever happens at the wrong time.

All pursuits of  happiness begin by freeing-up the energies being commandeered to psychologically cope with insecurity. Experience has shown that awareness of causation and a proven get-well plan does wonders. True, reducing unhappiness is not the same goal as attaining the happiness condition, Plan B, but it is far better for you than giving the forces of  societal dysfunction free rein to increase its grasp on your psychological health and your endocrine system. However Plan B may be much better for mankind, Plan A has a louder voice.

For those loyal to business as usual, Plan A, you can still benefit from learning what remedial efforts for organizational dysfunction (OD) it employs fail and why. You can find out what “standard” intuitive practices and hunch procedures to avoid, because they can only make matters worse. You can acquire the knowledge about the many causes of unhappiness and how to discern those causes among them that no human can control. You’ll be surprised at how much grief you can spare yourself by knowing what tactics don’t work and avoid wasting your resources on hopeless, counterproductive actions. In social behavior matters, good intentions by themselves count for nothing.

For 65 years our quest has been making concrete the best possibility of mankind. The epiphany for establishing and sustaining flourishing social systems came into the world in 2013. That’s when the ongoing, unanticipated struggle with social behavior began.

For those open to the effort to attain happiness, know upfront that the associated realities include:

• No one can gain your happiness for you. No one can learn for you.
• You will be using your conscious mind at high intensity levels on a frequent basis.
  • There will be times when cognitive demands will temporarily exhaust your brain’s glucose fuel supply.
• Your social circles will notice you changing for the better and reflexively push back on your progress (Nash).
• Any attempt to defy natural law or default to component “solutions,” defaulting to reductionism instead of system think, must be quickly detected. In reductionism, it’s the little achievements that bring total failure to attain the goal.

On the plus side:

• The trail is blazed and equipped with plenty of rest stations. You progress at your own pace.
• You have buddy veterans on call 24/7 to support you as you may require. They will not let you fail.
• When reality denial is history, benefits accrue all over the place.

The notion that reality-denial and other attempts to defy the  laws of ecological systems could in any way lead to happiness is ludicrous. The pilgrimage to happiness is tough enough without bearing the millstone of GIGO fantasy. Then again, it’s not likely that anyone in their private thoughts actually believes that reality denial has any place in attaining and sustaining authentic happiness in the operational reality. Anyone who has to be told that real problems won’t respond to GIGO is too far gone to the dark side to help themselves.

Government is the negation of liberty. Ludwig von Mises

Government is the monopoly of force without moral propriety. Murray Rothbard

There are two connected, requisite perspectives:

1. From reality-centered and reality-competent individuals, engaging cause/effect knowledge
2. System think, system practices
   • Freedom to exchange the truth

This means those able to attain happiness by volition and approach are effective producers, producing more than they consume. Reality-deniers are confined to consumption of excess production and bitter, pointless zero-sum competition to gain the privileged  authority to receive their life sustenance needs.

The instant that reality latches in as the goal-seeking navigational aid, the stop light appears on piecemeal intradisciplinary remedies for intradisciplinary causes. Regardless of the popularity of goal decomposition for application of known component fixes, reductionism has never solved a system matter. People thinking we have an economic crisis, for example, are disconnected from the reality that the crisis is the consequence of defects in cause/effect and social intelligence. The realm of flourishing, sustainable prosperity, security and happiness is the Plan B ecosystem.

Unhappiness is not a problem to be solved, it is an innate ideological system to be displaced. Your constraint is a social system barrier, not a gap in mathematical physics.

The need for understanding of and skills with ecosystem laws, system-think, follows immediately after the commitment to reality-centering. Fixing pieces and parts of the social system ideology does not fix the system and never did. Disciplines only have fixes for problems within their arbitrarily-limited, guild-think scope. The network of social behavior is profoundly cross-disciplinary with all sorts of feedback loops. The large number of disciplines that claim social-behavior turf in academia signals that no discipline encompasses the entire social ecological interaction network as a system. It’s you and system think or incoherence. Half-way measures score zero or less on results.

Getting yourself happy is not done by bunching individual solutions to individual causes of unhappiness. Such was the expressed strategy in the seminal book “Utopia” by Sir Thomas More (1516 CE) and every attempt to establish a utopian society since. Piecemeal fixes for piecemeal causes in a fractal system of causes and effects is the platform of bureaucracy, government, religion, and ruling class directives. In case you hadn’t noticed, they have never delivered happiness.

A foolproof indicator of a corrupt head shed. It has zero interest in whether or not their programs work. POSIWID

In spite of the immense popularity of reductionism, breaking a conundrum in goal-seeking down to its individual components for individual intradisciplinary treatment is only effective on small, readily-understood project goals. In the days of hand-to-hand combat, for example, winning a war meant winning battles, which meant training each soldier to be more lethal than his opponent, one on one on the battlefield (Sparta). When the Athenian Greeks  developed the phalanx, the team approach proved to be more lethal in battle than the best trained Spartans one-on-one. In today’s warfare, there are no battlefields where massed armies collide. Now what?

Getting yourself happy is a requisite for solving social unhappiness and these matters only respond favorably to system practices. Since all the causes of unhappiness, fractal, do not line up with all the causes of happiness, you are facing the specter of conscious-mind systems think. Ouch!

Our original question about why we succeeded when tens of billions of previous attempts failed got answered in part when Plan B went operational. We learned it took Plan B success to use as a quantitative reference to validate the scope and depth of Plan A consequences. It takes before and after, with and without comparisons to validate that the Plan B ideology eliminates the repertoire of consequences of the Plan A, business as usual, process. We discovered consequences of Plan A we didn’t “know” were solidly connected to social behavior. The instant elimination of a raft of consequences by a system fix, a phenomenon you can witness for yourself at a Plan B implementation, speaks for itself.

From the first installation of Plan B, and every application thereafter, the following issues disappeared. Because this social-behavior matter is 100% psychological, issue elimination occurs instantly, one mind at a time. Nothing in this network of entangled subconscious minds is material. Without inertia to overcome, just think how fast you lose trust in him who has betrayed you. Regaining the lost trust? Never.

There is little conjunction of truth and social reality. Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie. Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat? Ronald D. Laing 1965

Consequences of organizational malfunction eliminated by transposition to flourishing system Plan B

• Productivity (⇑ 25%)
• Administration overhead (⇓ 50%)
  • Public relations
  • Stakeholder relations
  • Regulatory relations
• Customer/client/stakeholder dissatisfaction
• Turnover, morale
• Unsafety
• Un-quality
• Unhealthy
• Waste and losses
• Business decline

Functions enabled by Plan B unavailable to Plan A

• Positive reciprocity, benefits multiplier
• Resilience to disturbances, problem solving capability
  • Corruption proof, futureproof
• Competitive advantage, innovation on steroids
• Franchise Plan B, workforce payoffs

Your bottom line

• If you can freely commit to reality-centering and develop your system-think skills, you are cleared for takeoff. Veterans of the pilgrimage are available 24/7.
• If you don’t elect to learn the necessaries, you have already decided your fate.

Our paramount goal is to engineer the world that was dealt to us to the advantage of our species with no losers in its realization. While this lofty goal is quite challenging, it is demonstrably attainable. Any scheme which produces losers, like zero sum competition, is immoral.

The final impasse, in brief

No website can benefit everyone. While the developed knowledge it contains about happiness is ultimately beneficial for the entire population, there are three high hurdles to be negotiated that put most people off:

1. As stated above, the “happiness” subject is ill-defined and very entangled. Both the causes and the effects of this mental state are fractal. For such complexity, Einstein’s dictum applies: “We can make the subject as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Since the complexity and the many levels of inference are built-in, unavoidable, they must be accommodated, whether it is understood or not. Yes, it is work for your mind. Lot’s of it. Ouch!
2. Because happiness is “real,” the mindset of those wishing to acquire that condition must be reality-centered. Just because reality denial is so popular these days does not mean it can somehow avoid bringing unhappiness to everything it touches. Becoming reality-centered, especially for the multitudes, socially conditioned and habituated to reality-denial, is a big commitment of your intellectual resources, your conscious mind working overtime. Ouch!
3. Dealing with the reality of happiness, because it is such a fuzzball entangled network of unknowable minds, requires a “systems” perspective. As stated above, the standard approach, decomposing the complexity into parts that fit established disciplines, reductionism, does not work. For those unfamiliar with the cross-discipline discipline of systems engineering, developing requisite “system” competency is a big commitment of your cognitive efforts. Ouch! After you pass the Ho Lee Schmidt moment, the pain goes away.

There is an echelon of functionality in the social hierarchy, called men-in-the-middle since 1850, aka keystones, that has these tickets. Accordingly, this website was conceived, loaded, and configured for their use. To be with and experience a group of keystones in hyper learning mode, in their responsible production of surplus, will answer any questions you may have. Like barn-raising day for the Amish, it’s as beautiful as social behavior can get. Consider yourself invited to experience an implementation.

There is no need for pontification about the dismal operational reality. The worst of offenders of reality-denial would never admit in public they think that fantasy-based “solutions,” ala “Star Trek,” can be effective on material calamities. The system-think requisite for happiness attainment is another matter entirely. It goes against the grain of social conditioning and organizational culture. The initial reaction is always fear of losing social status for being “exceptional.” This fear is well-founded. It is the Nash Equilibrium at work, a natural law.

Many pages in this website expound on ecosystem think. It is a way to ease-in on this academically-avoided subject. Consider what ignoring system practices has done to humanity and the ridiculous, self-defeating state of social affairs today makes more sense. If there was a quick fix for organizational dysfunction, it would have been adopted millennia ago. The choice is yours, the facts of reality cannot be changed.

There are threads of practical systems theory, concepts, and logic that tie things together on this website about social behavior. They include:

1- Organizations are ecosystems, subject to the same laws of “system” that determine the behavior of any ecosystem. If the disturbance streaming in from reality is a “system” matter, reductionism, problem decomposition, makes matters worse.

1a – Only system practices effective with the operational reality can eliminate unwanted operating system consequences.

2 – Reality denial regarding system malfunction makes business as usual practices counterproductive, no matter the quantity or ferocity of remedial efforts applied.

3 – How the social system behaves in one kind of disturbance and one environment provides no factual basis for predicting how the social system will behave in another kind of disturbance and operating context.

The disturbance that came to the USA way of life in 2021 provided volumes of dynamics data on the Establishment and its population. The disturbances that came in 2022, still reverberating across the globe, exposed the true character of the Establishment of every nation, every one in serious reality denial, unprepared to deal with it. Disturbances are the vehicles of insight to system dynamics. It’s a hyper-learning time for social behavior.

Government has no competition; it has captive customers who must pay its bills and it has made itself immune from the consequences of its own dysfunction. Corporations created in its shrunken image are responsible to no one.

The validation of a paradigm, an ideology, like Plan B is its ability to foresee the future trajectory of the Establishments, with predictions made now that match those of the arriving future. We stipulate:

• The system perspective will prove trustworthy. The primary error being made today is thinking knowledge of the past will apply regardless of the context, the operating environment.
• The experts in foreign affairs intelligence, in perpetual denial of reality, have no idea of what a nation, a government, a big organization, and oligarchs will do when facing an unprecedented reality of changing interconnectedness. They are crippled in performance by their false assumption that the currency of authority is equivalent to the currency of social power. In truth, there is no connection at all whatsoever.

What you’re watching on the world stage today (2022) is a monster example of GIGO at work. Garbage in means bad decisions out and GIGO has no stop rule. That’s called “news” 24/7.

What you have right in front of you is the clash in Eastern Europe between top-down dictatorial authority designed for a world that no longer exists, in serious reality denial, powerless to solve, new, big unanticipated problems, and a reality-centered population, power concentrated in the front lines, rallied together, exercising the positive social power they’ve had the whole time. It’s basically Plan A vs Plan B.

On Feb 28, 2022, we predicted that the reality-centered, collaborating population will prevail. The dictators and their dysfunctional military will resort to draconian terror tactics, ruin morale, and deplete their nation’s resources, but Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety favors those with unbounded social power (high variety), not those restricted to force and punishment (low variety) over their peoples.

No one can predict the details or the timetable. All the “intelligence” sources, the media, the experts, and the politicians they feed are proving to be grossly incompetent. No lessons will be learned from the experience. End of prediction.

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