A Profound Irony —

Although everyone seems to understand the words of the previous chapters, few have come to appreciate the holism of life and living that brings about the stable state of a family, community, or national society using the values that are innate to each individual. The irony of having to discover the values that are organic to each person in order to develop stable and sustainable societies is profound. The irony rests on the historic fact that these values are self-evident, yet have been invisible to us until now. Now, it appears, the necessity of their revelation is immediate, and global.

A pivotal time for social evolution. This is the first time in the history of our planet that it has become fully occupied, and at a time when the old problems of national sovereignty, militarism and its increased capability for swift and violent action, belligerence of national leaders, violent radical social, political, and economic groups, and many more have not been resolved. In other words we live in an ongoing violent, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) global situation, with no one capable as a referee or facilitator of peace and social, political, and economic stability. That highly desired outcome is impossible when no one is using a universal set of values that are applicable to everyone of every race, culture, ethnicity, nation, and gender; or a mechanism to determine what corporate or governmental policies are sustainable or not.

This is a critical time for decision-making that could lead to the peaceful social evolution of social institutions, political entities, and economic policies. This is a time when a proven set of integrated and universally applicable values must be presented to the world as a social-systems morality that is applicable to the holism of all human activity. Necessarily, the values that form such a morality must be capable of being used easily by average citizens in every local community to validate their decisions and those of their public executives, and the decisions of corporations.

It is foreseeable, as the U. N. and the “Club of Rome” have determined decades ago that there surely is a “terminal point of time” for the erroneously assumed continuation of “sustainable growth.” Such an assumption will be seen eventually as the stuff of grand ignorance, (Al Bartlett, professor emeritus), the kind of ignorance that is existentially incurable except by the demise of the cultures that support it. The alternative view is not utopian but pragmatically linked to the practices and morality of social sustainability, with decision-making that produces sound social policies.

Development of the “Design and Validation Schematic of Social Sustainability” —

An “Ah-ha” moment. In late 2007 and the spring of 2008, in order to provide a proof of concept, I formed an experimental “Social Sustainability Design Team” to explore a team process and a rudimentary form of a procedural Schematic as shown on the LINK. This is the last iteration of a ten-year developmental cycle of design, test, revise, test, and so on of this device. The team had the latitude to choose the topic that they would like to explore through this procedure. They choose to examine the reasons for disappointment in intimate, personal, business, and other relationships.

Please use the Schematic to understand the following. We had begun by working backwards from disappointment that we listed in column #6. It is an observable outcome we sometimes experience in personal relationships. Disappointment is almost always caused by our unsupported expectations for a relationship, which we listed in column #7. Those unsupported expectations are always based our unsupported beliefs about relationships, which we placed in column #8. What we did not know at the time were the assumptions about personal and intimate relationships that are intimately but invisibly connected to our beliefs, about what a personal or intimate relationship “should” be. As our Team progressed through the Schematic, we had gotten to the values column (#10) and had identified LIFE as the most important value. We were stymied to move ahead and decided to attack the problem in the following week. At the end of the session we socialized for a bit before returning to our homes.

As I walked from the kitchen into the living room I had an “Ah-ha” moment. The result was the awareness of three primary values that support human sustainability. Yes, life has ultimate value, but the primary value that makes life meaningful is the quality of life. We also yearn to grow into our innate potential that makes it possible for us to enjoy a continuing improvement in the quality of our life. Because we are social creatures and always compare ourselves to others, we also value equality — to grow into our potential and improve our quality of life equally as any other person would or could.

Interpretations of the three primary values. Before we had the three primary values available to clarify our work, we were left to use our interpretations of those three values as being the primary values of life and living. Interpretations of any value will never give a full description of that value. Interpretations are valid in their own right as long as they are consistent with the holism of all three primary values. That “Ah-ha” moment provided the foundation for the development of all of the other concepts and principles of social sustainability. Yet, it was not until November 2014 that the three secondary values were revealed to me that completed the holism of the seven values.

The primacy of the three primary values is that they are ORGANIC VALUES and innate to our species. Interpreted values on the other hand are not organic, but rather “artificial” representations of the permanent, immutable values that support the sustainability of our species. Interpreted values are in reality solely “what we think” the seven values of sustainability mean to us personally or organizationally. These values motivate us to strive to fulfill them according to our interpretations in order to satisfy our hierarchy of needs.

As the evolution of the Schematic progressed, it became apparent that the seven organic values must occupy column #10, with value-interpretations occupying column #9. This fully distinguishes one from the other so that those who are working through the Schematic are guided to recognize how their interpretations and assumptions come into existence.

Working with the Schematic —

The Schematic is a remarkable instrument because it can be used to design socially sustainable policies and social processes, and to validate existing policies, statutes, political campaign “planks,” moral and ethical issues, and many more. Because it is based on the values that are innate to humans, it enables us to work our way through our thinking from the obvious to the obscure. It helps us peel away the layers of our thinking to reveal the rationales, justifications, biases, assumptions, and prejudices that cause our lives to become UNsustainable. It asks one primary question:

Do our measurable behaviors, expectations, beliefs, and assumptions support the seven values of social sustainability?

The Schematic, (See the LINK), is divided into the top part that is used to identify the topic or issue that you or a team are examining. The bottom half provides a procedural outline to validate your beliefs and assumptions, expectations, and how you fulfill the top half of the Schematic.

The Values in Column #10 are the key for cross-checking and validating the entries in Columns 6-9.

The synergism of the three primary values becomes clear when we discern that quality of life is valued equally by each person; and that life becomes meaningless without the hope that equal opportunities provide us to grow into our potential, and explore our abilities for improving our quality of life. Because hope manifests as confidence, the loss of confidence of the public in their ability to satisfy the values that urge them on almost always leads to feelings, collectively, of social depression — hopeless and helpless to affect the circumstances of their life. Then social, political, and economic reactions can become volatile and unstable.

Beliefs. No one can rationally argue against these values as being universal to all people. Yet, as we will see almost immediately, when it comes to beliefs, there can be extreme variations of interpretations between people based on those same values. Even though there are only three simple primary values how we interpret those values generates hundreds of value-interpretation and beliefs. Some of those beliefs are hidden as invisible assumptions until someone questions our beliefs as being valid.

Assumptions. Our interpretations of these universal values are almost always colored by underlying assumptions or sets of assumptions to form a hidden set of beliefs. Discovering those assumptions of how they do and don’t support the social sustainability of an individual, family, community, or society is one of the primary reasons for using the Schematic. No common ground (peace) will ever be gained until all of the beliefs, assumptions, and expectations become exposed and processed through the Schematic. The process of listing all of our beliefs provides a visible means of developing commonality and productive unison of action, when we compare our beliefs with other people.

Assumptions. Because assumptions are almost always invisible to the person who holds them it becomes a vital necessity to expose those assumptions in a Design and Validation Team. It begins by asking individuals pertinent and pointed questions about their beliefs. Disagreement of beliefs between team members is evidence of hidden assumptions. That is a signal to begin the gentle and diplomatic process of determining how each person who holds a difference of belief gained their assumed belief.

The wide variation of expectations for each belief is due to the underlying, unspoken assumptions each individual accepted early in their life, and are usually quite unaware of their existence. Because of this, no progress will ever be made by any two people, team, family, community, or society until those assumptions have been clearly revealed.⁷ Conscientiously using the Schematic will eventually reveal and identify those assumptions.

Once the assumptions are exposed, they then need to be validated or invalidated using the criteria of the three primary values. If beliefs and assumptions are hard to define, then look to the expectations and the criteria of fulfillment of those beliefs and assumptions to make them visible.

Expectations. We tend to live our lives minute-by-minute and day-by-day with incredible lists of expectations in mind for each of our beliefs, and our hidden assumptions. From the time of our childhood we have simply accepted those expectations and their hidden assumptions. We were children then but now we are adults who will become more and more responsible for the fate of our own community, as for our own life. Not surprisingly, the expectations held by different societies, even in the same nation, reveal vast differences. Those differences are also due to the existence of different assumptions as to how those beliefs and their attendant expectations must be satisfied or fulfilled.

Criteria for Fulfillment. For every expectation there are measurable criteria that demonstrate the fulfillment for that expectation. To check the moral validity of a measurable criterion, it is necessary to validate it against the three primary values of sustainability. For a socially sustainable morality to become a functional part of a community or society, measurable outcomes must demonstrate how expectations are to be fulfilled; and, cross-validated against the seven values of sustainability.

For example, in the belief of universal education being beneficial, we would expect that graduating students would measurably prove that higher education relates positively to socioeconomic indicators such as better health, longer lifetimes, greater earning income, and whose children also experience the same outcomes. If that expectation proves to be true, then each of these indicators offers the individual the ability to improve their quality of life, and to develop and grow into their innate potential equally as those who already have those quality of life indicators.

Validating Historic and Contemporary Decision-Making—

The seven values of social sustainability make it possible to take on the task of understanding all historical events in terms of the values of social sustainability. Doing so will also bring contemporary decision-making by all public executives, CEOs, corporate boards, legislatures and Congress under accurate scrutiny. Doing so will reveal the repeated lessons of history that can then be distilled into the wisdom of the ages to guide future generations to successful, peaceful, stable, and sustaining existence.

⁷ David Bohm, Peter M. Senge, and Chris Argyris have much to say about how to reveal the underlying assumptions in dialogue. Dialogue, as they define it is not conversation or discussion, but a thoroughgoing process for making progress involving difficult topics. (See Bibliography.)