1 Reader’s guide
In the North life is focused on one purpose: bringing order in chaos. Still chaos is the rule, and so is disequilibrium. Order, linearity and balance are the exceptions. One strategy of politicians and policymakers is to break the rule and try to beat Nature. The other, more realistic, strategy is to get used to chaos and try to live with it. Chaos has a charming side to it. It leaves room for creation.
Chaos is a system, like all others. It has structure. It is not pure anarchy. There are some ordering principles underneath all things. Things that present themselves as signs and clues to follow up on. This book looks at the things behind things and at the patterns underneath.
A clarifying discovery was that of a rhizome. A rhizome is like a rootstock, a networked herb that grows underground with no other ordering principle than the search for fertile earth, water and sunlight. The rootstock is indestructible, unless the gardener uses chemicals or patiently, meticulously and continuously, keeps on weeding. Deleuze and Guattari wrote on the rhizome8: ‘Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple.’ ‘It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n – 1).’
JES! is a rhizome of words and concepts. There is no beginning, neither an end. You can plunge into it at every paragraph and find a dimension or a direction in motion. Always in motion, in development. All pages together form a network that may be hard to oversee or summarize, but that offers an intuitive vision for a direction society and individuals in that society can choose. Searching fertile grounds is done without a map, because as soon as the map is drawn the land has turned infertile or overcrowded. As soon as a society is described, developments have taken a different course and the society has changed. Only things that are dead and done can be rightfully described in a linear way, because the motion stopped, the ‘thing’ is finished, it has become something with a beginning and an end, history has entered. In that case back casting can do the trick, but for living organisms, under which we reckon all systems, back casting alone is not sufficient for there is nothing linear between the past, the present and the future.
The rhizome needs to be approached from the middle, which can be at any place of the network. To find it we need to develop at least an understanding of how it works. Understanding goes beyond knowledge or information, although these are required. Understanding needs context too as well as experience. All these elements come together in intuition, which enables a person to dance with systems. Dancing is the only effective way to interfere, as Donella Meadows stated9.
A person can start to understand her or his surroundings and circumstances once knowledge and information are embedded in a context. We enter the rhizome off road, right through nine battlefields. A set of true stories that occurred at different corners of the world, is brought to you as snapshots of a movie - Take 1 to 9 -and is meant to sketch a rough picture of the type of battlefields humanity is engaged in.
Further on this book will place these battlefields into a context after which the theory of ecolution introduces a method and toolbox for change.
This toolbox is just as dynamic as reality. It contains concepts, which are plans for action that are variable and multiple. Each person, community or organization thinks of their own. Seven criteria to select concepts support the choice for constructive plans.
The match of context and concept offers content, it stirs the mind to change and gives meaning to the plan. The idea becomes reality and evolves, new ideas sprout, unknown territory will be discovered. Every time this occurs, society develops towards a higher ecological, economic, societal and psychological level in the direction of a joint effort society.