While searching through my disorganized files looking for one of my papers I stumbled upon this presentation that I gave at the dedication of the William T. Powers Archive at Northwestern University. It describes my vision of the future of PCT as a scientific rather than a purely theoretical exercise. It shows that I’ve been futilely singing the same song for over a decade, but singing it a bit more on key back then.
Rick, I can assure you you have been singing from the same songbook since the Bush administration. Bush senior, that is. ![]()
Hey, as Mark Twain advised, put all your eggs in one basket - and watch that basket!
I’ve been spending time in the Closed Loop Winter 1992 edition on Social Control (PCT Resources). It includes valuable contributions from yourself and Bruce (and Kent if he’s reading). It’s too bad many of the interlocutors are no longer around to chip in.
In one of his interventions (p.20) Bill discusses the system concept question:
"What kind of world do I want to make and live in?
A thoroughgoingly social and existentially demanding question, by the way, and clearly connected to a phrase I think Tim Carey sometimes uses, working towards “a world worth the trouble”.
So from the point of view of that question, I might translate your topic of the future into another set of questions, such as: what aspects of PCT do I want to carry forward into the future? And, perhaps, what from PCT do I want to help make available for others, to pick up if they so choose?
For me something I might want to carry forward is that system concept question itself:
"What kind of world do I want to make and live in?
…along with the understanding that finding something close to a “just right” reference involves a long time living with such a question as one deals with everything else life throws at us at the lower levels. Otto Scharmer’s phrase “leading from the future as it emerges” seems to fit somehow.
There are other things I’d want to carry forward…the ingredients that might help us understand for ourselves that our attempts at coercive control are based on a fallacy. That for me is where your emphasis on scientific and logical rigour might come in.
I also want a world that retains the capacity to wonder: “what is the individual in front of me controlling for?” (whether or not in so many words).
Bill:
I don’t think that the world is going to be either saved or destroyed by any particular set of proposals as to how we should run our affairs. Specific proposals are at too low a level. So are specific principles - moral standards, economic principles. The ideas which stick around and have a long-term (if slow) effect are the system concepts (or whatever that level of conceptualization is). The question is always “What kind of world do I want to make and live in?” That question is even more important than “What kind of person do I want to be?” Living in a world of limited resources with other people who are just as autonomous as you are is a difficult problem, an extremely complex problem. We will arrive at successive approximations to solutions by trying different solutions and seeing how they work. Gurus and saviors come and go; they leave their traces, and we choose which traces to retain. Blind variation, but selective retention.