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NOAH'S FLOOD - ITS CAUSE AND ITS EFFECT
From DAVID WHITTAKER, Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir, author's interview with Brian Eno (Charlbury: Wavestone Press, 2003, pp. 53-63):
"The funny thing is I'm a very peculiar student in a way: I don't need many instances of something… Although I have all these books here, the number that I've read with real depth and attention is very small… There's John Cage's Silence… I must have read it thirty times probably. As I reread it, it kept changing as my context changed.""Stafford [Beer] for me was the doorway into a whole way of thinking. I head [his Brain of the Firm] closely, over and over." "The mathematics is not the interesting part for me, the interesting part is how you rethink how something is made, how something comes into being… You're no longer exactly the architect of a piece of work but more the designer of [an] ecosystem. You put a fews things in place and see how they react or what they do to each other… You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction that you want to go."
"Autopoiesis was a new word but the concept was prefigured here in Stafford I felt… It wasn't until cellular automata and complexity theory started appearing that I felt there was something a step on from Stafford. Decision and Control and Platform for Change are also very good." [Designing Freedom - The Massey Lectures, Thirteenth Series: 1973 (Canadian Broadcasting Company, 1974) is, however, the most accessible first introduction to his thought.]
T H E P R O L O G U E
From STAFFORD BEER, Brain of the Firm, 2nd edition (Paperback edition, John Wiley & Sons, 1994, pp. xii, 8-9):
"The reward-and-penalty structure in management heavily disfavours innovation: it is a fact which demands fresh thinking if our institutions are to survive."My first Lecture to RILKO (Research into Lost Knowledge Organisation) was delivered at 41 Queensgate in South Kensington on the evening of Friday, 31 March 1995, and a revised and augmented version of it which I completed on Thursday, 14 September that same year remains freely available on the Internet. I now very much regret that I had not then read even once John C. Whitcomb's and Henry M. Morris's magisterial study: The Genesis Flood - The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications (ISBN 0-87552-338-2), even though it was originally published as far back as 1961 - and is now in its forty-fourth printing. Research into mislaid ignorance is even more needed than that into lost knowledge. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us, some time before his election: "We need to learn to read the Bible afresh.""Consider the problem posed by our own children. There is a cultural as well as a psychological gap between the generations, which seems to have existed throughout history. But today people wonder whether the gap in our own generation is not profoundly more significant. All I can say is that I hope it may be so. For the whole structure of society has this same problem of adaptation, and unless our children can invent what amounts to a new way of living in a single generation our species may be doomed. We ourselves are trapped in our own social and cultural patterns, so the more incomprehensible to us our children seem, the better it probably is."
From Edward J. Clemmer, Alfred Sant Explained - In-Novella ta' Malta fil-Mediterran (PIN Pubblikazzjonijiet Indipendenza, 2000, pp. 79-80):
"The present author has used one effective methodology to evaluate various political concepts and personalities… It was found that Distrust and Boredom rather than Trust and Interest were the two most important affective dimensions in response to voter evaluations on the issues. Both of these affective dimensions are similar, if not identical, to those also described in a leading model of emotion in politics, which is also consistent with one of the most integrative psychological theories on the structure of emotions.On the first affective dimension, Trust is perhaps the most important and desirable political frame of reference. Whereas otherwise its opposite Distrust emphasizes elements of deception and danger, malevolence, threat, and low integrity. On the second affective dimension, Boredom was a politically deadly frame of reference related to insipidness, low competence, and low reliability. Whereas otherwise its opposite reflects a positive dynamism, competence, reliability, and mastery.
From these two dimensions, political issues and personalities were easily described according to four affective-image possibilities: a benevolent-dynamic image versus malevolent insipidness, and a malevolent dynamism versus benevolent insipidness… Elections are won or lost on the basis of these affective dimensions."
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