1. Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps. Networking; the first report and directory. Doubleday, 1982

2. Paul Feyerabend. Against Method; outline of an anarchist theory of knowledge. Verso, 1978

3. Ivan Illich. Medical Nemesis; the expropriation of health. Pantheon, 1976.

4. Jacques Attali. L'Ordre cannibale. Paris, Grasset, 1979

5. Jacques Attali. Les Trois Mondes; pour une theorie de l'apres-crise. Paris, Fayard, 1981

#1 This term is borrowed from Maruyama (51, 52, 53, 54)

#2 Currently special adviser to Francois Mitterrand.

#2 cf Bateson: "A self-healing tautology, which is also a sphere, a multidimensional sphere" (29, p. 207)

#3 In the light of the possibility of insights from generator design, this suggests the possible importance of polyphase revolutionary cycles (in an engineering sense) as a necessary basis for an adequate meta-answer.

The major criticism of this paper in an early form was that it did not take a "position" or advocate a "stance". The reason for this is that this paper is about the necessity of moving beyond the mind-set which engenders answer arenas in which stance-taking is perceived as the only viable activity. In a turbulent environment some more dynamic response is required than that of "drawing the line" somewhere - the conceptual equivalent of a "Maginot-line".

The current sterile debate, reinforced by the differences between Western and Eastern cultural traditions, as to whether the significance of an individual lies only in his individuality and its transformative development or only in his social context and its transformative development, can be viewed in a new light of the arguments of this paper. Each of these opposing views clearly offers valuable insights, but the transformative development of the human self-image results from the process of alternation between them.

The transformative right-hemisphere step advocated in the previous section can be advantageously complemented and challenged by a left-hemisphere focus on innovations in structured information processing. As argued in an earlier paper (81), the information systems currently installed or envisaged facilitate, in the Club of Rome's terms, maintenance (adaptive) learning but not innovative (shock) learning. This applies particularly to the development information systems promoted by the intergovernmental community.

This paper has stressed the limited value of various conventional modes of expression. These arguments necessarily apply also to papers of this kind. The question is whether it is possible to devise some means of by-passing the desperately slow learning cycle associated with research-education-policy formulation-implementation in a world in which the education gap is increasing rapidly. If the current crisis is to be taken seriously, people must acquire access to an appropriate response by some other means.

The natural tendency of any answer domain to act as a focal point for all significance clearly introduces a distortion in the general field of significance. This necessary distortion can be set in a more fruitful context if it is seen as one extreme in an alternation process (as with an extreme position in the swing of a pendulum). But the question is then how is the limit of the swing to be sensed in relation to the answer domain. What are the limits to answer domain expression which suggest the need for some other mode to correct for its excesses and compensate for its failures?

The world community has had to recognize a succession of problems (e.g. environment, energy) which have each cut dramatically across discipline and institutional boundaries and across prevailing systems of values. Each may be considered as a learning crisis arising from a collective blind spot. It would appear that the next of these is to be "unemployment". This problem tends to be conceived in the traditional terms of the absence of job "slots" and the necessity for their creation.

Organizations tend to assume that the world would be a far better place if the bodies that oppose them did not exist. This is a necessary consequence of their specificity. The arguments of this paper suggest that not only do organizations need opposition to fulfil their functions in relation to healthy human and social development, but in a healthy organization opposition to policies must necessarily be internalized. The question is then how to bring this about without tearing such a system apart or simply paralyzing it.

There is a widespread belief that a universal set of values can be formulated for the global community, possibly elaborated in the form of a hierarchy. A great deal of hope is placed in the possibility that everyone naturally accepts that "peace", "love", and "justice", for example, are unquestionable "goods", or that people can be educated into this understanding. The arguments of this paper suggest that, whilst efforts in this direction are necessary, they are of local rather than global significance.