The Pathways Toward the New Normal

Tranistion o the New Normal

Cultural Changes

Technological Development and Good Moral

Management of General Resources.

Repair the World!

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Today, we’re talking about resilience and how broken systems return to normal. Let’s begin at the object level, as usual. Last time, we talked about feedback loops maintaining stability in physical systems and in relationships. In fact, this pattern of feedback loops leading to stability appears very often in nature. One example is the human body’s ability to maintain a stable temperature. And we have also used our understanding of feedback loops to improve people’s health and wellbeing, such as intervening in the broken feedback loops in diabetes to prolong people’s lives. And in the book, you go even further than just observing where they turn up and what happens if they don’t. Now if we think of systems as cohesive groups of interrelated parts, can you talk about how understanding feedback loops better have led to new general theories of the way systems work? 

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Today, we’re talking about two concepts. First, the idea of the Golden Age, an era that probably never existed. And second, general mechanisms for why things go wrong at all scales

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We had several motivations for writing the book:

   (i) The first was personal. We have seen and experienced too many broken relationships around us, as have many others. The question is with us: Should and could they be repaired?

  (ii) The second one was very global. Many people now agree that something went wrong in the world. Food waste and hunger, cheap clothing for the rich manufactured in conditions close to slavery in another part of the world, climate crisis, and social inequality. More frequent natural and social disasters. (Surprisingly, our initial motivation was neither COVID-19 nor war. We started to chat about the book before the pandemic began and worked on its last part as foreign soldiers invaded Ukraine).

  (iii) As children, we lived in a poor country, where “repair culture” was the social norm.

What is this book about?

   People have many types of resources. Objects (such as our cell phones and laptops), close and more distant individuals (like family members, colleagues, and even accidental acquaintances), communities, and global resources (including air and ocean waters). What will we do if the resources are impaired? The unintended consequence of economic and technological development was the emergence of a society centered around disposable products, with further implications related to the environmental crisis. We had an Aha momentm, when we realized: the central core of the book should emphasize that repair is a general resource management strategy. Repair provides people with many positive opportunities to live happier lives.

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