The theory of the Wisdom of the Crowd supposes that it is possible to create collective wisdom out of the combination of the wisdom of many disconnected independent intelligent (wise) individuals.
This theory has nothing to do with a Crowd. As you will see Crowds are not intelligent. Crowds are groups of people that are totally synchronized and act out of their collective emotions.
When people talk they move into a state of entrainment within a few seconds. The reason is the dialogue itself. If focuses the participants on the same issue.
When many people focus their attention at the same subject (television, movie, music, soccer match, a ritual, ..) the same effect happens. Individuals in a crowd become the crowd.
When many individuals are not focused on a shared goal they will never become a crowd. In this case every individual will go his own way looking for a “real” crowd.
Human beings want to be part of a crowd because a crowd is one of the most effective ways to generate a lot of personal energy.
Most people, the generators, are energy producers. Some people are energy consumers. Extraverts take their energy out of the crowd. Introverts accumulate energy when they are alone and relaxed. It is not easy to entrain introverts.
Why Crowds give Energy
Entrainment or Trance is a state of the body in which the Left and Right Brain are synchronized. When this happens the Human becomes his Emotions.
Sociologist Randall Collins has called this interactive rhythmic entrainment the “hum of solidarity“.
As in an empassioned conversation, the synchrony of our rhythms forms an inaudibly low frequency, we hum. If you record such a conversation and speed up the recording a few octaves, you will hear it. Laughing together is a perfect example, often showing rapid synchronization.
Ritual practices (meals, parties, etc) help sustain these moments of solidarity over time. The local energy exchange is a fine-grained flow of micro-events that build up in patterns of split seconds and ebb away in longer periods of minutes, hours, days.
These local interactions combine, giving rise to another form at a ‘higher’ degree, a social emotion. Emotional energy is defined by Randall Collins as a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action. And it is the giving and recieving of emotional energy that keeps a practice, an idea, a fad, a tune, and a people going.
Shamans and cultural leaders have known this for centuries and used rhythmic or emotional entrainment to heal, commune with, or even to brainwash and destroy one another.
The role of rhythm in trance music is largely in synchronizing an individual’s internal rhythms (heart rate, respiratory rate, blood flow, neural potentials) with those of others. And this is done by using a swift, loud, clear rhythm to drive everyone.
When people synchronize they experience a rise of their energy-level and this energy-level persists for about a week. That is why spiritual rituals are repeated every week on a Sun-day, the day of the Energy of the Center.
How to control Moving Masses
Events that create a huge amount of emotional energy like concerts and soccer-matches attract huge amount of people. There have been many incidents where the movement of the entrained crowds has created many casualties.
People in crowds obey just two rules. Copy the other and keep a certain distance to the other.
The distance is a very important variable. When the distance exceeds the limit of the personal field, the personal fields merge and the personal identity dissolves into the collective identity.
At that moment the crowd starts to move on its own. The “leader“, the first person in the crowd, becomes a very important person. When the “leader of the crowd” does not know what to do, the crowd will start to behave in a chaotic way. Experiments show that about 5% of the people in a crowd are “leading’ the crowd.
When you want to control a crowd you have to control the people that are in front of the crowd.
When you want to control a moving crowd you have to create a structure that guides the crowd (“way-finding”). One of the most important mistakes is to create a bottleneck in this structure.
When the crowd moves into this bottleneck it will slow down the speed of the crowd and the distance between the members of the crowd will decrease until the crowd will stop at a certain point creating a “traffic jam”. At that point people will be crushed.
When people participate in a crowd the Emotions of the crowd become dominant. When the crowd is attacked or is unable to find its way, the negative Primary Emotions appear.
In this state individuals are able to produce highly agressive behavior (Fight), extreme passive behavior (Freeze) or extreme avoidant behavior (Flight).
When the flow of the crowd is disturbed somewhere and the collective moves into the state of panic the bottleneck will certainly kill or injure many people.
How to manipulate the Masses
The predictable behavior of a crowd has been known for a very long time. This knowledge was used by intelligent “dictators” who wanted to use the masses for their own aim. Good examples are of course Hilter and Goering, his communications manager.
When they tried to move the masses, the mass media were in their infancy. At this moment it is possible to reach millions of people with ease. The “leaders” of this moment know that they have to behave and talk in a certain way to entrain their followers.
The big problem is that crowds are unable to think so they have to simplify their message and emphasize certain “mantra’s“. The effect of their behavior is that the world becomes very simple.
The most effective way to influence the Crowd is to divide the Crowd into two parts, the In-Crowd (“we’) and the Out-Crowd (“not-we”) and to project everything that is wrong on the Out-Crowd. Hitler used the Jews but at this moment the Muslims are the most used “Out-Crowd”.
There is nothing wrong when Leaders use the Psychology of the Masses to move the Masses. The masses, the Sheep, need a leader, the Shepherd. Without a leader they start to drift and will never reach the Promised Land.
When Leaders misuse innocent people of the Out-Crowd to increase their own power there is something terribly wrong. These Leaders are criminals and should be treated this way.
In 1665 the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens noticed that two pendulum clocks in his room tended to Swing in Sync. The same happens with fireflies, cardiac pacemaker cells, menstrual cycles, birds in flight, walking, dancing, circadian rhythms in animals, quantum gravity theory, dialogues and people in a crowd.
Two connected Systems always Entrain because Every System in our Universe Vibrates and is connected.
When the Parts are connected, the Rhythm of the Whole controls the Rhythm of the Parts.
The transformations of the seperate parts takes place in two steps. In the first step the variance of the frequencies of the parts is reduced but the oscillators remain incoherent, each running near its natural frequency, until a certain threshold is crossed. Then the oscillators begin to synchronize spontaneously. The effect is somewhat like the outbreak of synchronous applause after a magnificent concert.
To make the transformation possible the Parts have to adjust their behavior. They have to move with the Rhythm of the Flow of the Central Clock. At the end of the transformation from isolated Parts to the Whole the Parts are the Same. They are Copying each other.
When people are copying other people they lose their identity and move into a trance-state. The same effect can be accomplished with hypnosis. When people are in a trance-state it is easy to manipulate them.
About Copying
Humans are Copiers. When we look at the Science of Coupled Oscillators it becomes clear that Copying is not an intentional act. People and other Systems are more or less forced to copy others when the frequencies of their systems are within a certain bandwith.
When people are close and are focused on a shared target (a soccer match, a concert, a conversation, a dance, a common goal) the human parts start to synchronize and become a Crowd, an entity that starts to act on its own.
About Communication
The word “communion” means “becoming a union“. All communication arises through Synchronization. All communications are dances that coordinate the rhythmic processes shared among the engaging systems.
Communication is not a transmission of information, but rather a coordination of behavior among living organisms through Mutual Structural Coupling. Just like the Crowd, a communication, starts to live a life of its own, when the exchange of the vibrations of the conversation starts to synchronize. This happens within seconds.
In the 1960’s, William Condon of Boston University School of Medicine pioneered the empirical study of communication as coupling. In the microanalysis of a few seconds of film he was astonished to find how the voice and bodily movements of speaker and listener were coordinated within intervals as short as 20 milliseconds.
Condon introduced the term entrainment to describe the coupled behavior. He noted that: “Communication is thus like a dance, with everyone engaged in intricate and shared movements across many subtle dimensions, yet all strangely oblivious that they are doing so“.
Coupling begins with getting the attention of other organisms, or more accurately, with distracting the organisms from other engagements so they are able to discern and respond to this engagement.
When the Oscillations of two Systems are outside a certain bandwith it looks like the most powerful system takes over control. The frequency of the synchronized system is a mean and when big numbers and small numbers are added the small numbers simply disappear. This situation is called an Overload.
Overloads are able to kill small systems because the small system is unable to cope with the huge pertuberations. People with a Dominant Personality are able to force (to entrain) Dependent people to copy their behavior.
About Synchronization
A System of N coupled different oscillators creates a very complex almost unsolvable mathematical problem. In 1975 Charles Peskin formulated the conjecture that Systems would eventually synchronize even when the parts are not identical. In 1990 the conjecture has been proven by Strogatz and Mirollo.
Systems of Coupled Oscillators show four states called Phase Locking (Synchronization), Phase Drift (“Chaos“) and Amplitude Death (“Order“). In the last state the oscillations stop completely. The fourth state called a Chimera is a combination of a synchronized and a drifting state.
The most important issue to notice is the fact that the state of Amplitude Death is what we call Order. It is an exceptional state that can be reached when the exchange of information between the states is “compensating” the vibrations of the states or when the System is “compressed” into a Singularity.
Most Systems are oscillating (“Cyclic“) and are in a Phase Drift (“Chaos“) or a Chimera trying to reach some sort of Synchronicity with the other connected Systems. In Nature every System is connected to every other System because of the Electro-Magnetic (and Sound) Fields they share.
Systems of Coupled Oscillators behave differently when the connections between the parts are delayed. It this case highly identical parts start to behave as not identical parts. When a delay occurs the stable rhythm of the heart can suddenly stop, resulting in a sudden death.
About the Circadian Clock
In order to cope with and to predict 24-hour rhythms in the environment, such as light and darkness, temperature or the availability of food, most, if not all, organisms have Circadian (“Daily“) Timing Systems. These systems generate circadian rhythms in a wide range of behavioral and physiological processes.
For most animal species, a main circadian pacemaker has been identified in an anatomically defined location in or close to the brain. During the last years, however, it has become clear that circadian systems are complex and that additional oscillators exist, both within and outside the central nervous system.
The Peripheral Circadian Clocks are situated in the Heart, the Liver, the Lungs and the Kidney. These organs are the same “organs” that are used in Chinese Acupuncture which is not strange because the Aim of Acupuncture is to Balance the Electro Magnetic Field in the Body.
For a correct functioning of the circadian timing system, these oscillators should be synchronized to one another and properly phased to the environmental cycle.
Synchronization between the oscillators occurs via interactions or coupling pathways, whereas the light-dark cycle is used for synchronization to the outside world.
The most important mammalian circadian pacemaker is located in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) at the base of the hypothalamus in the brain.
From the suprachiasmatic nucleus, nerve impulses travel via the sympathetic nervous system to the pineal gland and inhibit the production of melatonin. At night, these impulses stop and melatonin production ensues and is released into the body.
In fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds, the pineal gland appears to be directly sensitive to small amounts of light that penetrate the skin and skull.
In mammals, with increased development of the cerebral hemispheres, the pineal body came to lie deeper within the brain and indirect stimulation of the pineal gland by light via the retina came to be more important. The Suprachiasmatic Nuclei are connected to the Outer Eye and the Inner Eye, the Pineal Gland.
The Pineal Gland is called the 6th Chakra, the Third Eye (or the Eye of Horus), the Seat of the Imagination. The Imagination, the Central Clock of our Body, is “in control” of all the other Clocks in our Body.
With the Help of our Imagination we are able to Cure and to Kill the Body.
About the Pineal Gland
The Earth is a huge magnetic sphere. The E/M field of the Earth varies in strength and consistency through the ages. Our bodies own magnetic frequencies and our bio-field patterns react to this variance of the Earth’s field.
The pineal gland is the principal structure in the brain that is directly sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field. The Pineal Gland Senses the Field. To sense the Field the Pineal Gland contains small calcite crystals.
Our bone structure Converts Vibrational Energy into Magnetic and Electric Energy. When the bone is bent it produces an E/M-field. This E/M-field interacts with the Pineal Gland and creates a Feed-Back Cycle.
The E/M-field of our Body, the Aura, is a combination of all kind of waves. A special type of wave-structure is called a Standing Wave.
When the E/M-field acts as a Standing Wave all the waves are in harmony and conserve structure. The Human body is in harmony when the total field of all the separate E/M-fields of the Body act as a Standing Wave.
The Standing Wave appears when the Spinal Wave of the Vertebrae of the Body is in a special Alignment. If this happens the Standing Wave of the Spine Resonates with the Standing Wave of the Earth. At that moment the Kundalini Rises and the Pineal Gland reacts with a Huge Mystical Experience.
About the Heart
The heart beats about once a second throughout your life. These regular contractions pump blood to the Upper (Head) and the Lower part of the body and are driven by electrical impulses from a natural pacemaker inside the heart.
This pacemaker, known as the sino-atrial node, responds to signals from the Central Circadian Clock situated in the Hypothalamus that changes the heart rate according to the body’s needs (“the action potential“), making it slower when resting and faster during exercise.The rhythmic contractions of the heart are triggered by waves of electrical activity that spread from the sino-atrial node throughout the heart muscle.
There are small fluctuations in the time intervals between beats that are fractal in nature, and a loss in this variability is a sign of cardiac ill health. However, a cardiac arrhythmia, in which the rhythm of electrical waves that drive the heart is broken, can be lethal.
A loss in the synchronized rhythm of the heart causes different parts of the atrial or ventricular muscle to contract at different times, undermining the pumping action of the heart. An arrhythmia therefore leads to the mechanical failure of the heart.
The propagation of excitations in heart tissue can be described in terms of travelling waves with a velocity of about 0.5 m s-1 and an amplitude given by the action potential. Since the action potential lasts for several hundreds of milliseconds, a single wave extends over a distance of about 10 cm. This means that a normal human heart is hardly large enough to contain a single wave.
In the heart the wave propagates around a circular obstacle. The wave repeatedly travels along the same path at a frequency given by the wave velocity divided by the circumference of the obstacle.
If the radius is gradually decreased, the frequency increases until the wavefront of a new wave catches up with the tail of the previous wave. If the radius is made even smaller, the wave is forced to adopt a spiral shape that continues to rotate around a central core. Spiral Waves have been observed in numerous chemical and physical experiments.
The Wave Structure of the Heart resembles the Wave Structure of the Universe. This could be the reason why the Heart plays such an important role in many Religions.
When the Wave Structure of the Heart is coherent with the Wave Structure of the Whole, the Rhythm of your Life is in Sync with the Rhythm of the Universe.
The Pacemaker Cells are called the Heart Chakra, the 4th Chakra. The Heart Chakra acts as the Balance Point for all the Chakras.
The Balancing Point is the Middle of two Triangels related to the Head and the Body that rotate With- and Counter-the-Clock creating a Moebius Ring. The Pineal Gland, the Central Clock, is part of the Upper Triangel of the Mind.
About Cymatics
In 1967, the late Hans Jenny, a Swiss doctor, artist, and researcher, published the book Cymatics, The Structure and Dynamics of Waves and Vibrations. In this book Jenny showed what happens when one takes various materials like sand, spores, iron filings, water, and viscous substances, and places them on vibrating metal plates and membranes.
What then appears are shapes and motion- patterns which vary from the nearly perfectly ordered and stationary to those that are turbulently developing, organic, and constantly in motion.
When Jenny experimented with Fluids of various kinds he produced Wave motions, Spirals, and wave-like patterns in Continuous Circulation.
These patterns are the same patterns that are produced by Coupled Oscillators. This is not strange because Sound Waves are highly comparable to Electro Magnetic Waves.
With the help of simple tools it is possible to Simulate the Creation and Expansion of the Universe.
We don’t need very complicated tools to observe the Whole. The Whole shows its patterns everywhere, even in your bathtub.
About the Creation of the Universe
In beginning the Void, the Zero Point Field, rotated in Silence until a Huge Action Potential disturbed its Eternal Rest.
The Void was in a state of Amplitude Death until a Statistical Fluctuation, an Act of Creation, moved the System into a Chimera and later a Phase Drift.
Out of the Phase Drift Two Coupled Oscillators (Yin & Yang) appeared that moved With- and Against the Clock creating a Spiral Motion, a Vortex.
The Two Coupled Oscillators were each others Complement because two Coupled Oscillators are always Complementary.
After a while the Phase Drift generated Four and More Oscillators and Space started to Expand.
The pattern of this Expansion is governed by the Metallic Mean, which generates Fluent or Quasi Crystals. Fluent Crystals are the basic structure of the Electro Magnetic System of the Human. Scientists believe that the basic structure of our Universe is a Fluent Crystal, a Hall of Mirrors.
Space stops expanding when the Unbalance of the Energy of the Act of Creation is compensated by the amount of Oscillators (Strings) of Expanding Space.
At that moment the Universe will move into the State of Synchronization and all the Parts will move with the Rhythm of the Central Clock, the Tao.
When this happens the Universe starts to contract until Space has reached the Void.
In the last step the Oscillation will stop and the Void and Amplitude Death will appear again.
“Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.”
Will was an expert in the myths and culture of the Ancient Tribes that lived in the Four Corners-area of New Mexico. Every year he organized a seminar in the Ghost Range for his ex-PHD-students. I visited many of his seminars and fell in love with New Mexico and the ancient cultures (Hopi!) that live in this area.
Will tried to write a second book called Grammars of Engagement. The book is about Coupling or Entrainment. For about ten years we discussed many of his ideas.
Unfortunately his book was never finished. The reason it was never finished can be found in Paths of Change. Will was not able to apply his own theory. Strangely enough this proves his theory.
Let me try to explain the theory of Will. The theory of Will is based on his reflection about the Practice of Change.
He did not write the book alone. He discussed his intuition with all his colleagues of UCLA (University of Los Angeles).
What they wanted to resolve was a very strange pattern behind the failures of Personal and Organizational Change.
Will and his colleagues found out that the explanation was simple. Human beings don’t think the same. They are unaware of this. Almost everybody is convinced that all humans think the same. This is the main reason why many people don’t believe the theory of Will. This again proves the theory.
Will discovered four basic ways to think. He named them Mythic, Social, Unity and Sensory. The four ways are completely independent.
The consequence of Path of Change is that You reader when you are not of my world will read this article and think you understand what I am trying to say but in reality you understand something else.
When I meet you you will prove this when I ask you to explain what you think I am trying to say. The only way to explain the theory is to detect your worldview and use your language to tell the same thing.
When I do that you will think I am explaining a different theory. Probably you will ask me why I have changed my point of view (= world-view) and I have to explain you in your language that I did not do that. This will cause the same problem. You will think I am inconsistent.
When you are living in a world with only one world view you are according to all the Best Practises in Mental Ilness (Interpersonal Theory) highly disturbed.
Many people are able to think in two world views. They are able to switch from one world view to the other.
The amount of different combinations of Two of the Four Worldviews is Twelve (4×4 = 16 but 4 are the same x the same = the same -> 16-4 = 12). Will named the 12 Duals Games but you can also call them Apostles (with Jezus at the Center 12+1 = 13), Knights (of the Round Table with Arhur at the Center) or Constellations (of the Zodiac with the Sun at the Center).
Some people are able to switch to all of the world views. When you are able to switch to the worldview of the other you are able to explain the same thing differently. You are able to look at the world with a shared view.
When both our worldviews are the same we will agree on everything but both of us will not see the others. This is the main reason why people with shared worldviews join in all kinds of cooperation’s. They join because they need a secure place that shields them from the strange outside world.
It is also the reason why people with different world-views leave a cooperation in due time. They feel the others don’t understand them. Clusters of shared world-views become highly inflexible when the outside world changes.
When you are a Sensory you will say “what I read until now is highly theoretical. I want to see facts and prove. Is the theory of Will tested?”.
Although Path of Change is Best Practice you will not accept what he is writing. You want to experience the theory yourself and perhaps 20 years later you will write a book telling the same thing. You will write a book full of examples because you love examples. You will be convinced it is telling something very different Will was telling. Happily Will has also written a book that uses examples and cases to help You.
When you are a Social you want to know the opinions of important social scientists and others you feel are of importance. You believe important people are telling important things and you have never heard of McWhinney so his theory is not important to know.
When you are a Unity you want to know the Rules. You want to be told what to do and most of the time you do what the Rules tell you to do. The book Will has written is without Rules it contains concepts and ideas. You think concepts and ideas are not concrete. You even don’t like some of his concepts because they are not according to the concepts you think are true. They are violating your System of Thought. You believe in absolute truth.
When you are a Mythic you believe everything is possible. Life is full of opportunities. You generate ideas and concepts all the time. A Mythic creates his own unique theory and his theory is really a theory about himself. A Mythic is unaware of this. To become aware of this he has to face the facts. He needs to switch to a Sensory world view or accept the view of an other who is able to see the world this way. This is very difficult for a Mythic because a Mythic is very Will-full.
A Mythic is convinced he is the only person who understands the World and some day the World will understand what a genius he is. This will never happen when he is alive. Mythics become a Myth when they are dead.
A Mythic is also an artist. He produces paintings, poems and even theory but his theory is mostly incomprehensible for others just like poetry.
Only Mythics understand Mythics. They feel the Field of Meaning. A Mythic does not understand that the others don’t understand him because his poetry is `the way it is`. It tells everything there is to say.
Will’s basic patterns were Mythic and Social. He was also able to switch to Unity. His blind spot was Sensory. Although many people were very enthusiastic about his book he did not see the facts about his success.
As a Social he focused on the recognition of important social scientists. At the end of his life he was very sad about this. As a Mythic he was convinced his theory was simple and easy to understand. This created even more sadness. Sadness and depressions are the mental illnesses when a Social becomes too Social.
Why was Will unable to finish his book? A Mythic is a highly creative person. He was constantly generating new ideas and concepts. The book was changing and changing and changing because Will wanted to create the perfect book about Engagement. Every version of the book he created was a jewel of poetry and insight. Will wanted to create the perfect book and striving to perfection is again an act of a Mythic. Will was falling in the trap of his own world-view.
What Will also did not realize that he was really writing to understand himself. Path of Change and Grammars of Engagement were a personal quest to understand the real Will McWhinney.
In the last year of his life somebody asked him to write his life-story. He tried to do this. He became aware of the fact that his whole life was centered around one personal quest. He wanted to find harmony. He never found harmony because a Mythic is on a Quest and the Quest never stops because every time when he has found the Grale he will start to look for a new Grale.
In Grammars of Engagement he started to write about Harmony.
A few citations out of his unpublished manuscript:
“All communication arises through coupling. All communications are dances that coordinate the rhythmic processes shared among the engaging systems“
“Communication is not a transmission of information, but rather a coordination of behavior among living organisms through mutual structural coupling. Coupling, the instrument of coordination, is established by the physics of exchange and by traditions that associate both human relations and communications with music: harmony, rhythm, tone and tune”.
‘Just right’ communication work because it allows systems to exchange energy, thus information, through entrainment. They dance to a just right message. The communication follows from exchanges that take place as the systems draw each other toward a common resonant mode. Systems communicate in the process of being more similar, approaching a harmonious state at least in the domain of the communication. Entrainment stops short of perfect harmony. With perfect harmony there is no exchange. ‘Just right’ is becoming close to harmonizing”.
What Will is describing is a dialogue. Will was always playing with his own thoughts. He was busy with an internal dialogue called Reflexion. Intense reflexion is a Mythic Process. When you only talk with Your Self there will be no difference. You are similar with yourself and the internal dialogue stops. You are in harmony.
To make a difference you have to introduce others like your wife or your mother. People talk internally and externally with many voices. Most of them do this without noticing. They are not aware of the many personalities they are. They are not similar to themselves and therefore “out of balance”.
To become balanced they need to talk. A huge amount of conversations (gossip) are aimed at creating an internal balance. To find internal balance people look for people that are similar. Again they need a secure place that shields them from the strange outside world.
When people are constantly moving in similar environments they will never find their Kernel, The Self. It will be watching unable to interfere in the many dialogues that are taking place.
When the Self is unknown, people will not accept the theory of Will. They will be switching from one theory to the other without finding rest.
When they find themselves they will not need the theory of Will because they will be able to play with all the world-views. This is a paradox. It also proves the theory of Will because Will tried to explain that Life is a Paradox.
Another citation: `The process of coming close to harmonizing is visible in an old example. Automobiles and farm machinery once had clutches. These clutches consisted of two plates, one attached to the driver motor, the other attached to the wheels, thrasher, or rotary saw. When the operator ‘let in the clutch’ the two plates moved flat up against each other. As the clutch ‘comes in,’ the driver plate begins to transfer energy to the follower plate getting thus it to turn. At first, the clutch slips and most of the power goes to grabbing, which produces heat. Increasingly the driving plate turns the follower. With full ‘letting in,’ the two turn together. There is no more heating; they form a unit with no further visible communications. The coupling established at the molecular level joins the material of the driver and follower plates in transmitting power to the wheels and cutting blades. This clutching sequence is a model of entrainment. We can recognize similar entrainment sequences in many other situations: a spoon stirring batter in a bowl, cellular protein molecules latching onto antibodies, two persons entering into conversation, and 100,000 people being captured by Marion Anderson singing God Bless America at the Lincoln Memorial”
Will was unable to operate his own clutch. This was really visible when he was driving his car.
He was a staccato person. He loved to work with steel and stone. He was a sculptor. His art was concrete. He loved to practice what he preached but he always practiced his theory in the outside world. He loved to help others but never wanted to be helped. This is the sad consequence of a Mythic/Social-combination.
Will showed that all the combinations are games and the Mythic/Social-game is the game of creating new games. A Mythic Social is an innovator. He is always on the front-line.
He does not see that his inventions wil be taken over by other World-View combinations that are highly practical like the Unity/Sensory-combination, The Expert.
Expert always think they have invented things themselves and never give the Mythic/Social the credits. This is a fact of life but Mythics don’t accept the facts of Life.
His books are wonderful pieces of English words I never heard of. He was a child of a highly educated family in Boston. His mother and father did not love him. They wanted him to become somebody. At the end of his life he was convinced he had failed to satisfy the ambitions of his parents. He told everybody this was the fatal trap in life.
Will was not only a Mythic but also a Social. Socials are highly influenced by Others. Of course parents play the most important role because a young child is incapable of resisting their influence. The Self of the young child is watching.
In the internal dialogue of Will his mother plaid a very important role. In his external dialogue he looked for a similar person and his wife plaid that role. He was unaware of this. He was constantly fighting the mother in his wife without noticing she was a different person. His wife plaid the same game. Will was her father and she did not notice Will was really looking for love and harmony.
Will promoted ”Just right” because ”With perfect harmony there is no exchange”.
Another citation:”Too Large—Overloads. Highly energetic perturbations overload a system, tearing apart the autocatalytic loops that hold its definition. Too much energy bifurcates the stable basins of a system’s memory and ultimately violates its autopoietic identity. The overly energetic perturbations leave open non-reflecting fragments of nodes: neurons, bits of stories, and social customs. These fragmented networks are no longer able to hold meanings or link to memory traces. Short of total destruction, strong perturbation will wipe out the fine structure of a receiving system, leaving it only able to operate in those sequences enforced by the invasive perturbation. To protect the networks of connections, electrical and mechanical systems have features to handle ‘over-modulation.’ With appropriate design, they digitize signals to compress the spectrum, thereby allows the message to be accepted. Human systems have a variety of means to block or censor invasive signals that violate our senses and psyches. Some at the physiological level block the energy that carries the messages; others receive, understand and reject the overwhelming impact. Blocking and the use of censorship disconnects us from the environment and preempts the discrimination they would our systems had more capacity”.
Wills communication was Too Large.
He was a genius and his wife a normal person. He did not realize this.
His knowledge and experience was so enormous that he overwhelmed everybody.
He was looking for a dialogue but in every dialogue and project he became the leader.
He was a guru but he did not want to be a guru.
He was a child longing for his mother but he never wanted to be touched.
He cared for everybody but not for himself.
He was fighting but he wanted peace.
He wanted to create a better world but the outside world was moving into the wrong direction. He did not accept the Cycle.
He always wanted to cure himself. He wanted to find the eternal youth and searched the whole world for new treatments and medicines. He did not believe in the medical system but at the end of his life he needed the system desperately. He never listened to the experts so they left him alone.
He preached meditation but he could not calm himself.
Will was the prove of his own theory.
He was a living paradox.
What Happened?
The personality and the vision of Will McWhinney attracted many Mythic people. All of them started to play with the theory of Will in their own way. Soon it became very clear that Will had re-discovered a very ancient theory of Life.
A pastor found a relationship between the World Views of Will and the Four Apostles (see pictures in this blog). He discovered that the Four Books of the Evangelists where written to adress one particular World View of the believers.
We discovered a relationship with the very powerfull psychological theory called Interpersonal Theory, Game Theory, Conflict Theory, the Cycles in History, the Tarot, the Four Humors, the Zodiac, the Four Forces of Nature, the Archtetypes of Jung, the Myers Briggs test, the Big Five, the metaphors of George Lakoff and many many other ancient and modern theories.
Paths of Change has proved to be the perfect meta-theory to map and understand all kinds of different physical and social sciences. It shows without any doubt that a theory of everything is possible.
The most interesting find was the self-referencial nature of the theory. It is possible to map the theory on itself.
This website contains many examples of the remarkable power of Paths of Change to understand what is happening in the World. Use the tag Will McWhinney to find them all.
