Our unbiblical concern for what we shall eat, what we shall drink, and what we shall put on is amplified and made obsessional by the pressure to consume—way, way beyond the natural need. All this is demanded by the way we have arranged our economy. And the institutions we have built to operate that economy, to safeguard ourselves, protect our homes, care for and educate our families, have all grown into large and powerful pieces of social machinery which suddenly seem not so much protective as actually threatening.

all these institutions we have been contemplating—the homes, the offices, the schools, the cities, the firms, the states, the countries—are not just things, entities we recognize and label. They are instead dynamic and surviving systems.

the wave cannot be other than it is because a wave is a dynamic system. It consists of flows of water, which are its parts, and the relations between those flows, which are governed by the natural laws of systems of water that are investigated by the science of hydrodynamics. The appearances of the wave, its shape and the happy white crest, are actually outputs of this system. They are what they are because the system is organized in the way that it is, and this organization produces an inescapable kind of behaviour. The cross-section of the wave is parabolic, having two basic forms, the one dominating at the open-sea stage of the wave, and the other dominating later. As the second form is produced from the first, there is a moment when the wave holds the two forms: it has at this moment a wedge shape of 120 °. And at this point, as the second form takes over, the wave begins to break—hence the happy white crest.

our society—is an entity that survives, albeit by adaptive change. And if this society embodied in its institutions is threatened by too rapid change, then the answer that many serious and concerned people give is to reinforce the rules of the societary game, strengthen the institutions, tighten up the criminal, social, and moral laws, and weather the storm. That is the conservative attitude. It is not mine. It is not going to work much longer.

In order to get rid of the concept of an institution as a fixed entity, we have to get rid of the classical picture of its organization. You know how this looks. The institution’s activity is divided into chunks, which are also perceived as entities; these chunks are divided into smaller chunks, and so on. In every chunk there is a boss-man, with lesser bosses reporting to him and running the smaller chunks. This picture looks like a family tree, and it is useful for just one purpose. If something has gone wrong, you can use the picture to trace whose fault it is. In fact, this whole picture of an institution is just like a fault-finding chart that shows how an automobile is organized.

Our institutions were set up a long time ago. They handled a certain amount of variety, and controlled it by sets of organizational variety reducers. They coped with a certain range of perturbations, coming along at a certain average frequency. The system had a characteristic relaxation time which was acceptable to society. As time went by, variety rose—because the relevant population grew, and more states became accessible both to that population and to the institutional system. This meant that more variety reducers were systematically built into the system, until today our institutions are nearly solid with organizational restrictions.

Thirty years on, this new definition might be preferred: Cybernetics is the science of effective organization.

our culture teaches us not intellectual courage, but intellectual conformity.

We need to look for the people hiding behind all this mess; the people who are responsible for the system itself being the way it is, the people who don’t understand what the computer is really for, and the people who have turned computers into one of the biggest businesses of our age, regardless of the societary consequences. These are the people who make the mistakes, and they do not even know it.

the phrase “map onto” in mathematics has exactly the meaning you would expect. A map is the pattern of something, represented with much attenuation of variety, but with its significant elements preserved.

evolving use of the computer. Here, once again, the machine could be used as a real liberator. It is an instrument of colossal variety, to which each pupil could have ready access. Thanks to parallel processing, a computer can be interrogated, explored, used, continuously and in different ways by a few hundred pupils at once—it has requisite variety. So what happens? The variety is attenuated out of the computer, by making it operate trivial little programs that actually condition the pupil to give the right (in quotes) answers to a set of trivial questions.

an entirely personalized educational system, in which the subscriber would be in absolute command of his own development. Well, we are frightened of this projection too. Someone may get inside the works, we say, and start conditioning us. Maybe we should have eighty alternative standard channels, thereby “restoring choice to the people”. Here is my third and last bit of mathematics: eighty times nothing is nothing. Meanwhile, we allow publishers to file away electronically masses of information about ourselves—who we are, what are our interests—and to tie that in with mail order schemes, credit systems, and advertising campaigns that line us all up like a row of ducks to be picked off in the interests of conspicuous consumption. I know which prospect frightens me the more.

The brain is a finite instrument that mediates all our experience. It has high variety, but not necessarily requisite variety for handling an environment of exploding complexity. It has a relaxation time that was fast enough to deal with a world in which perturbations came at a particular rate, but it is not necessarily fast enough to offer a guarantee of equilibrial response in the current world.

the brain is a finite instrument that mediates all our experience, and is therefore limiting.

we as individuals are the unwitting victims of a cultural process which very drastically delimits variety for us. In the first place our economic environment points to an increasing use of science and technology in what is allegedly the service of man—but which I contend takes this service in a false sense. As a result, we stand, and the innocent legatees of our policies in the developing nations yet more vulnerably stand, to be exploited by whoever wields the power of science to technocratic ends. In the second place, the instruments of variety constraint turn out to be education and the communications media—both of which we culturally suppose to be variety amplifiers. This belief is as delusory as the belief that we can fully know reality.

For the first time in the history of man, science can do whatever can be exactly specified. Then, also for the first time, we do not have to be scientists to understand what can be done. It follows that we are no longer at the mercy of a technocracy which alone can tell us what to do. Our job is to start specifying.

viable systems are bombarded continuously with high-variety stimuli, the variety of which has to be attenuated if the system is not to be overloaded. The attenuation must be done according to a pattern, if it is not merely an arbitrary discard. If that pattern is to have survival-value (which is a necessity for a viable system) then it must be a regulatory model of whatever is regulated. Then it follows that this has to be a central function for the system, because only the system as a whole can have a model of its own relationship with its own environment.

As we have several times noticed, bureaucracies install amplifiers in one loop of the homeostat when they should be installing attenuators in the other—and vice versa.

One of my earliest experiences in industry was to listen to managers explaining to senior operatives that they were to be deprived of their life-times’ ambitions, because the whole technology of the process was to be changed. That was in the steel industry, in which the skills of a first-hand melter—a job that it took a lifetime to learn—were replaced in a year by clever instrumentation. But ten years later those same managers were themselves confronted by the computer, which would have made many of their skills redundant in turn. However managers have power, and the computer none. It was easier to misuse the computer than to accept the institutional change—because the consequences would have been quite personal.

institutions are not just entities, with certain characteristics. They are instead dynamic viable systems, and their characteristics are in fact outputs of their organizational behaviour. The variety that is pumped into them is absorbed by regulating variety, through an arrangement of amplifiers and attenuators. A system that, through this kind of exercise in requisite variety, achieves stability against all perturbations, is called a homeostat. A homeostat can resist perturbation, not only against expected disruption, but against unexpected disruption too. For this reason it is not only stable, but ultra stable. Whatever happens to it—provided that its relaxation time is sufficiently short—it will not go into oscillation, and still less will it explode in catastrophic instability. The sign of this homeostasis, now so deficient in our major institutions (and perhaps, as I said earlier, even in ourselves) is that critical outputs of the system are held steady.

All homeostatic systems hold a critical output at a steady level. But some of them have a very special extra feature. It is that the output they hold steady is their own organization. Hence every response that they make, every adaptation that they embody in themselves, and every evolutionary manoeuvre that they spawn, is directed to survival. So this special trick rather well defines the nature of life itself. It also rather well explains why we cannot change our institutions very easily. Their systemic organization is directed, not primarily to our welfare, but to their own survival.

buried inside the institution is a nucleus which retains its homeostasis by ignoring not only external change but the primary function of the institution itself. This nucleus is the special kind of homeostat that produces itself. And it is this nucleus that I call the bureaucracy. By this term I am not simply referring to paper-pushing, but to an institution within the institution that exists—narcissus-like—in self-regard.

Bureaucracies do accept change; they do this by acknowledging novel conditions. They are not so stupid as to pretend that such conditions have not occurred. But what changes they make are superficial, and they are made so that organization—which is what makes the system the system that it is and no other—is completely preserved. Thus there is no actual alteration, although appearances may have been changed a great deal. When this is generally understood, it will no longer be possible to fob people off with unreal changes, masquerading as real alterations. Until then, our institutions will go on producing the social benefits of their activities simply as by-products of their major bureaucratic undertaking, which is to produce themselves.

The new word for a homeostatic system whose major concern is to produce itself (that is, to hold constant its own organization) has been given by the man who first penetrated this phenomenon. He is Humberto Maturana, and he calls this kind of system autopoietic—which is the pure Greek for “making itself”.

The continuous process of liberating our minds from the programs implanted in our brains is a prerequisite of personal evolution. We can embark on that process of liberation only by constantly and consciously testing the ways in which our personal variety has been and is being constrained by the very things we tend to hold most dear.

the trouble with our institutions is in their loss of the ability to respond in time, to learn in time, to adapt and to evolve. Like the dinosaurs, they cease to be viable systems. I have tried very hard to lay bare the mechanisms that appear to me to lead to this disaster, because I think they can well be understood. What we understand we can control.

There are two things wrong with the role of science in our society. One is its use as a tool of power, wherever that is concentrated by economic forces. The other is its elite image. None of us wishes to be manipulated by power; and if science is the tool of power, to hell with it. None of us wishes to entrust our liberty to a man in a white laboratory coat, armed with a computer and a row of ball-point pens in his pocket, if he does not share in our humanity.

At the moment, the scientist himself is trapped by the way in which society employs him. What proportion of our scientists are employed in death rather than life, in exploitation rather than liberation? I tell you: most of them. But that is not their free choice. It is an output of a dynamic system having a particular organization. Remember the waves.

I may have a model of you, I may have found out how you are, and have a very good idea of what you will do. This fact does not constrain your freedom; it constrains the variety of my model of how you use it. If this distinction had been understood some time back in history, there would have been less confusion in what used to be very popular discussions of free will.

Planning is a variety attenuator. What is planned tends to come about—but often rather shakily,

we need to use the computer properly inside this network; not as a device to make silly mistakes, not as a calculator to do cheap sums expensively, and not as an invigilator of the people’s free expression of themselves. Those proscriptions would knock out ninety-five per cent of current applications, and free computer power so that people could engage in their personal evolution—by guiding their own learning, and editing their own input.

our personal freedom is not the absolute we take for granted. We are profoundly constrained by the limitations of our brains and by the inexorable attenuation of our input variety. That is how we are, and we ought not to start our thinking from a worldly minded pretence. Secondly, I do not forecast or predict that such freedom as is our natural right will be imperilled: I say with passion that it is imperilled now, but we are too complaisant to face up to this. We live in too cosy a world. This is not the real world, uncomfortable and discomforting, where so many people are enslaved and dying; it is a variety-attenuated model of the real world, in which these stark horrors acquire that air of unreality which our television screens know well how to bestow.

I draw attention to computer-driven systems that compile dossiers on the individual, to rob him of his credit and his good name. That is oppression. If multi-national companies are allowed to use science on a global scale to exploit the planet’s dwindling finite resources for the benefit of the few in whom the power to do this is concentrated, then that will be oppressive. And if the might of military science is used, or even threatened to be used, against the democratic choice of any nation, then that is oppression indeed. This last example, unlike all the others, is not new; but if we are going to pour so much science into that oppressive purpose, at least let us use science in the service of freedom too.

science is not a neutral thing, as many scientists themselves try to believe. As for the public, I sometimes think they just hope that all this power implanted in our institutions will not hurt them, if they are quiet as mice. But the mouse trap is loaded with cheese, called growing prosperity, conspicuous consumption; and the destructive force stored in the wound-up spring is the economic power that underwrites technocracy. Then we can lose our freedom… snap!

let us not say, as we hear said, that Allende reduced his country to chaos, and destroyed the economy. A system of world forces acting upon Chile reduced his economy to chaos, and destroyed him. Allende understood that his country was losing its freedom in the oppressive grip of that external system, and went and said as much to the United Nations. The free world, as it likes to call itself, heard what he said, and waited until his own prophetic words were fulfilled: “They will only drag me out of La Moneda in wooden pajamas.” At that point it offered muted protests, and set about recognizing the military junta.