The Sociopathic Epidemic –  ‘Author’s Subtext’

There is a problem with the way we ‘present’ social issues in our culture and in our culture’s media, in that the presentations often start ‘in the middle of things’ and treat the middle as a local-system-in-itself.   Can we understand the organism as a local system out of the context of the environment; e.g the storm-cell as a local system out of the context of the fluid-flow of the atmosphere?   The ‘Sociopathy Epidemic’ article invites us focus on a problem WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, as if there were nothing to be gained from opening our inquiry to dynamics in which the US  is at the same time included (the world dynamic, nature).    The problem with ‘limiting our inquiry’ to the notional ‘local system’, as has often been pointed out by the systems sciences, is that it forces us to identify the source of all behaviours (functional or dysfunctional) as originating within the ‘local’ system.   If we inquire into the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ functionality of a university, we will always be able to point to something in its operations that we can credit or blame for good or bad results.  But as Russell Ackoff has pointed out, the system we call ‘university’ is included within the suprasystem of ‘community’ and had we started our inquiry at the level of community, we might have found that there was a problem that associated with the manner in which the ‘subsystem’ (formerly ‘the system’) called ‘university’ co-operates within an interdependent web of subsystems.

So, the author who would like to shift the ‘framing’ of the inquiry so as to look upstream’ from the nominal ‘local system’ has to hunt for some device to do so, and it may not be easy.

In the case of the ‘Sociopathy’ article, the framing is ‘the nation’ (the United States), and the contention of Robin of Berkeley is; (more…)