Jantsch, Evolutionary Vision, Elice Boulding

<Power structure theme> p. 173

Dominance Structures: Barriers to the Evolutionary Vision

I have used the term deep structures to refer to the ordering experiences which shape our perceptions of reality. I suggest that there are deep structures in every society that organize the experience of learning about and constructing relationships between human beings. To the extent that those deep structures continually constrain and distort human relationships in certain particular ways, they cripple basic learning capacities. These deep structures are first cousin to Chomsky’s linguistic structures, second cousin to Durkheim’s collective representations and third cousin to Jung’s archetypes, yet they are none of these. Specifically sociological, they go beyond socialization processes for they are found in all societies with all kinds of socialization processes. Their most striking manifestation is found in the dominance patterns and institutionalized power relationships that characterize all but the most simply organized hunting and gathering peoples. [...] There are other deep structures equally pervasive in human experience, the deep structures of nurturance, which create caring relationships in the family and in other primary groups, usually in the private spaces of society, from generation to generation. [...] Dominance structures engender fear and insecurity, nurturance structures engender confidence, an openness to learning.

The tragedy of human history over the past 12,000 years of settlement and urbanization has been the increasing institutionalization of dominance structures in the public sphere and the pushing of nurturance structures into the private sphere, making it harder for social learning to take place in the very centuries when knowledge about physical and social environments has accumulated the most rapidly.

[...] We confront the same situation in today’s axial age. [...] Egalitarianism and decentralism are fashionable words, but there is little visible redistribution of resources. Existing power structures continue to capture ideas and resource flows. We know that there are egalitarian microsocieties where status differentials do not become the basis for the exercise of power over others, but the tendencies for societies to tip one way, towards crystallized dominance behavior, is a historical fact. That the tipping is inevitable can, however be questioned. My interpretation of the sociological phenomenon of deep structures is that they represent repeatedly experienced social patternings which were given a few initial “kicks” in a certain direction in the early days of human settlement, continuing in that direction through social drift—and are now perceived as in some way basic to the structuring of human relationships. 

<Learning> p. 177

This dependence of cultural evolution on having optimal conditions for social learning has not been adequately understood, although the most recent Club of Rome report, No Limits to Learning (1979) points to this problem. We know from research on learning that this process, so critical for the evolutionary development of the individual, does not easily take place under conditions of threat. The available behavioral repertoire developed in power-structured settings is narrow. Fear constricts openness, limits exploratory behavior, closes the door on free flights of the imagination. To the extent that authoritarianism prevails in the classrooms of the industrial world, schools have thus narrowed, not expanded, the social repertoires of the adults who have passed through them. The costs of the power structures of any society are thus crippled learning capacity, a dependent frame of mind of the citizenry—and the social violence which dependency invites. The more complex the society, the more acute the dependency and the more erratic the violence. At the level of the international system, we see heads of state and political negotiators operating primarily out of power structure thinking, which is antithetical to problem-solving approaches. It is hard for representatives of nation states to enter into learning dialogues with one another.

A society characterized by public attitudes of trust which could generate feedback systems of nurturant psychic energy so that individuals could afford to take an open, listening-learning stance in all interactions, however brief or special-purpose, is not, however, unimaginable.  Such a stance could be taken if each individual