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Thinking on the Level of the System
Focusing less on individuals and more on the networks that sustain us
Each person is “an open system continuously engaged in mutual development with the outside,” psychoanalyst Gilbert J. Rose wrote in a 1977 essay.
Open. You, an open system. “You” are a “we.”
“Everything that exists on earth — from human bodies to rivers to cities to ocean currents — does so as part of an ever-expanding, vascularized flow system,” Sarah LaBrie explains in thermodynamic engineering professor Adrian Bejan’s Design in Nature, “with individual elements evolving together over time to increase efficiency of movement and growth.”
When humans distance ourselves from our “context,” we may suffer depression.
The natural world is all around us, supporting our existence even when it may seem merely peripheral. We could not breathe without its regulation of oxygen. We would dehydrate without access to clean water.
And we depend on human social networks for our healthcare and other labor that gives us our quality of life.
We do not exist apart from everything that keeps us alive.
If the Ecosystem Were the Smallest Unit
“How would we act in a forest if there were no names for anything smaller than an ecosystem?” Kathleen Dean Moore asks in Riverwalking.
Reducing an organism to its component parts does not leave us with a working whole. Thus, Moore also asks: “How could we walk, if there were no way to talk about anything larger than a cell?” We have to see ourselves as component parts of a system if we want to feel how the system works.
How we act towards other parts of the system reveals how we think about our connection to it. Sebastian Junger wrote in Tribe:
“When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors — or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. My friend Ellis was once asked by a troubled young boy whether there was any compelling reason for him not to pull the legs off a spider. Ellis said that there was. ‘Well, spiders don’t feel any pain,’ the boy retorted. ‘It’s not the spider I’m worried about,’ Ellis said.”
If there were no word for a separate “you,” and instead only an expansive “we,” how would we act toward each other and toward the world that makes our existence possible?
If “we” were the only pronoun, how would “you” act?
