Word: systemics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...leader in ideology and revolutionary pratique was the German SDS. Convinced that Advanced Industrial Society had developed a complex system to integrate and blunt all opposition within it, they concluded that participation in parliamentary elections, worker-employer councils, student-faculty committees, cte., was all a-big sham. The owners of the big enterprises and the politicians still made the decisions, only "consulting" the people from time to time. To destroy this false impression of participation and open a breech in the system of integration, the political action of SDS became a "refus organisee...
...They decide everything from how much money is spent to what time the classes are given. There are no "intermediate institutions"-no student-faculty committees which can often muffle and absorb a conflict as at Harvard. If anything goes wrong it is brought straight to the ministry. In a system with such little leeway for evolution, any change was a radical change and any serious challenge liable to topple everything...
Robert Downey wanders around a system, too. The Advertising World America. He does not wander around with a motorcycle, but he has a camera. He records things as he sees them. It doesn't have to make sense. It shouldn't make sense. Like Rosencrantz and Guilderstern. Downey has developed a sensibility for chaos...
...system is a poor attempt on someone's part to make chaos look plausible. Not everyone sees that, and those who don't get trapped in its fraudulent logic. But we are safe as long as we see everything the way Downey does: crazy and illogical, funny and tragic...
...throw out one system, you get another system. Is there such a thing as a better system...