All of our wars and injustices have been fought or perpetrated against others who are separate from us. Today’s existential climate crisis is the denouement of our 2000-year-old belief that we humans are separate from Nature, that Nature is a resource to be used by us. From the atoms of Democritus to those of Newton, we in the West have experienced ourselves, our organizations, and our societies as being composed of atomistic bits-body parts, minds & bodies, individuals, departments, sectors, nation states. In the Western world at least, since the ancient Greeks, we have lived with and had all our lives, thoughts, and decisions defined by a paradigm that stresses the “reality” of separation and fragmentation. This book integrates them all in a comprehensive, new Quantum Management Theory. We are already seeing harbingers of new Quantum Psychology, Quantum Social Theory, & Quantum Biology. It will create new theories, new personal, social, & political models, new solutions to problems (& a few new problems of its own), and of course, endless new technologies. As with the paradigm shift experienced by the sciences themselves, a resulting paradigm shift in human thinking will turn everything with which we previously have been familiar upside down & inside out. It is fair to say that with the invention of the silicon chip, we left behind the Industrial Age and entered “The Quantum Age.” In all of my previous books, I have argued that fundamental changes wrought through the discovery of quantum physics constitute the birth of a new paradigm, as powerful in every way as the Newtonian paradigm it is replacing. The silicon chip that enables computers, smart phones, homes & cities, the internet, and the soon-to-arrive, revolutionary 5G technology, depends on quantum processes to function. It is also quantum physics that has given rise to all the new technology that shapes and defines twenty-first-century life. It describes the universe as complex, uncertain, unpredictable, and self-organizing. Among these, quantum physics is the most philosophically fundamental. First Einstein’s relativity theory, then quantum physics and, as later off-shoots, chaos theory & complexity science. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new physics was born. But the same thinking, and the values associated with it, also produced the many very serious, some existential, problems that we now face in the twenty-first century: climate change, over population, mass migration, inequality, food & water shortage, threat of nuclear extinction, & the identity issues underlying the current, populist political upheavals in Europe & the Americas (Brexit & Trump, among others.). These three centuries gave us progress never seen before, producing enormous wealth and many benefits. The eighteenth through the twentieth centuries was the Industrial Age, but it can also rightly be called the Newtonian Age. Thus, for the followers of these foundational thinkers, and for the general public at large, whether they were aware of it or not, and whether they knew anything at all about physics or not, Newtonian thinking shaped the way they thought, the way they perceived, the way they related, the way they organized themselves, the way they acted, the things they valued, & the things they invented. It had such a powerful impact that Newton’s physics became the template for all subsequent thinkers, in every field of thought for the next 300 years-Freud in psychology, Comte in sociology, Locke & Mill in political philosophy, Adam Smith in economics, and Frederick Taylor in management thinking (“Scientific Management,” or “Taylorism.”). His metaphor for the universe was a well-oiled “machine.” This model gave birth to the modern mind. Newton’s three Laws of Motion (plus his Law of Gravitation) described a universe that is simple, law-abiding, predictable, and controllable. Thus, in popular form, it is often called “Newtonian physics,” and I shall follow that usage. Classical, “mechanistic” physics, the work of many sixteenth-century scientists, was summed up and codified in Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica early in the seventeenth century. From the Newtonian Age to the Quantum Age.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |