The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

by Fritjof Capra

the major problems of our time are systemic problems – all interconnected and interdependent – and that, accordingly, they require systemic solutions.

Within a corporation, individual managers may be very caring people, embracing the ideals of social justice and environmental responsibility. But the organizational structure of the corporation and the severe constraints of its financial statements force them to behave in certain ways regardless of their personal values.

Like the corporation's managers, they may have great personal integrity but are trapped in a corporate structure that is devoid of all ethics.

In other words, the problem of relentless corporate growth lies in the design of the system – it is a systemic problem.

It was judges again, not legislators, who narrowly defined corporate interest to mean shareholder interest alone. Common law, however, can easily be overturned by legislation.

Today's widespread belief that corporations exist primarily to maximize returns to their shareholders favors the wealth of the shareholders over the well-being of the corporations’ communities, which are as important for the flourishing of the organization as a whole.

In the corporate view of economics, shareholders should be paid as much as possible and employees as little as possible. And yet, it is the employees who contribute to companies year after year, while shareholders contribute very little beyond their initial investment.

The employees, by contrast, keep the corporation running on a daily basis. But in corporate governance they are largely invisible and have no rights to the value they help create.

it will not be necessary to abandon the belief in a market economy in order to change the corporate structure, just as it was not necessary to abandon the belief in God in order to change the monarchy.

new forms of ownership go beyond capitalism (private ownership) and beyond socialism (state ownership). They include a radically new option of private ownership for the common good.

They serve the needs of life by building into the very fabric of their organizational structures tendencies to be socially just and ecologically sustainable.

basic idea underlying all ecodesign: that many of our design problems have been solved by living organisms and ecological communities during billions of years of evolutionary tinkering in elegant, efficient, and ecologically sustainable ways, and that we can learn valuable lessons from this evolutionary wisdom of nature.

On the other hand, complexity theory also tells us that these points of instability may lead to breakdowns rather than breakthroughs.

Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.