Latent Centers

• We can build systems that live alongside the old and slowly replace them if they prove to be truly better.

• I guess these kinds of things are called attractors in dynamical systems theory. I just reread Jim Rutt’s “In Search of the 5th Attractor” which talks about what he calls “network attractors.” In his view, there are a number of possible attractors that we might fall into during this phase of instability: neofeudalism, neofascism, new-Dark Ages, environmental collapse, and endogenous collapse. His point is that we need to create a better option, what he came to call Game B.

• So my thinking is that the landscape of attractors is more fine-grained than Rutt shows. The alternatives are not just one big -ism, but lots of smaller -isms that together might be called Game B. You could say that the patterns in this book are a bunch of smaller attractors, alternative ways to think and behave that add up to the alternative of working toward the great turning rather than forming a militia and trying to take over the state government. It’s a step back, I suppose, where I’m trying to make the creation of a Game B a preferred attractor.

• In his article, Rutt showed a sketch of a situation where a ball (where we are now) is in a valley. On one side, the elevation is steep and high; clearly it’s going to take a major disturbance to move in that direction. On the other side, it’s more shallow and over that ridge is another deeper valley. I can imagine the landscape around, for example, the Great Turning, as a bunch of shallow attractors around the edge, ideas like we have the power as individuals to change the world for the better. Then closer in, other ideas go deeper, like you can set up a creative practice that is easy to follow that could make all the difference. at each level, it becomes easier to move toward the center than to move away, and ultimately, we all end up in that better place.

• It’s important to note that Rutt also characterizes the ball as being all of us, our society as a whole. I think that it’s more accurate to say that each ball is an individual and that as more balls fall into an attractor, it makes the slope toward that attractor steeper and perhaps wider, like more BBs in one well of a rubber sheet. We are looking to get enough people in our preferred attractor that this kind of increased attraction occurs.

• All of this is analogous to what Fuller talked about when he suggested that we strive to make systems that are not working obsolete. Again, the focus isn’t on destroying what we don’t like, at least not directly. We create a better alternative and let what we don’t like wither on the vine.

• Now, I’m thinking about the 15 properties of livingness that Christopher Alexander listed, and one of them was “the void (open space)” which (I think) he also refers to as a hidden or latent center. When Helmut Leitner describes latent centers in his book Pattern Theory, he uses the example of “an empty space in the garden” which I think would be described in that particular system as a void or open space.

• All systems have open spaces or latent centers, and those are the places we want to build our better world. We don’t want or need to destroy existing centers, but build in the open spaces between them.

Therefore: