Most aspects of our world today involve interactions, with other people, with things, with nature.
It is part of our Western heritage to judge situations as if they were static and to suppose that our decisions
should be made on this basis, yet this is very wrong. The world is not separate from ourselves,
(the 'objective' myth of our science) but part of our own reality. We co-evolve with the world of
which we are a part. This means that the world, and the other people within it, react in their
own ways to our decisions and actions, they compensate for them. The result is that any
choice we make will not have the exact effect we expected. The subjective nature of the
world will change, in largely unpredictable ways, the scenario by which our decision was made,
such that our attempt to progress our cause will be fleeting, unless it happens also to be in the
interests of all the other affected parties.
This feature of complex interacting systems helps to explain the failure of selfish techniques
as a method of attaining ends. If we act in such a way that others are hurt then they will oppose us,
and the net result will be conflict, such progression is unstable. Conflicts are always negative-sum,
both sides lose overall in the long term (if all dimensions are taken into account). If, however, we revise our
thinking and look instead for options that benefit all involved parties (a co-operative or symbiotic
strategy) then we can obtain a stable progression into a new positive-sum state, giving a higher
fitness to both individuals and society. The ability to recognise the existence of such positive
alternatives however requires education, knowledge, communication and openness - all
attributes opposed by dictatorships, whatever their political or religious flavour may be.
