ABSTRACT
This chapter by no means will be a summary of the fundamental ideas taken from earlier chapters, for we aim to press ahead on the implications of those ideas. In our first section, The East-West Strategy Revisited: From Social Science to Social Technology, we aim to move further into this problem-solving strategy and into how we can learn to employ it in one scene after another. Just as technologies like engineering and medicine developed on the basis of knowledge from physical science and biological science, so have personal and social technologies developed on the basis of knowledge from the social sciences. Yet existing personal and social technologies—like psychotherapy and education—have not been able to get very far in solving problems, given the failure of social scientists to integrate their knowledge, an integration that is essential for penetrating the complexity of human behavior and problems. And shaping that failure is an invisible worldview and way of life that works against scientific ideals for opening up to the full range of knowledge that is relevant to a given problem. It is also a worldview that works against the infinite potential of language for enabling us to learn how to address our problems. Given the invisibility of that worldview—which we have labeled “bureaucratic”—people generally continue to believe that our social technologies need no more than a bit of adjustment here and there rather than fundamental changes that open them up to a much wider range of knowledge. And we continue to see ourselves as no more than tiny cogs in the vast machine of society, failing to see our own infinite potential for evolving as individuals and helping to develop nothing less than an evolutionary society.
