AHP Perspective is a magazine published bi-monthly for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. It includes interviews, articles, essays, updates on member activities, conference announcements, and book reviews. Members receive the complete AHP Perspective as part of their membership.

AHP PERSPECTIVE December 2000/January 2001 Table of Contents

December 2000 /January 2001 AHP PERSPECTIVE Online Article

Fear and Anxiety: They’re in the System

— Cliff Havener

Some years ago, I talked with an industrial psychologist. "When you cut through all the motivational crap," he said, "people have only two primary motivations: pursuit of possibilities and avoidance of negative consequences."

"Around 3 percent of our population," he continued, "is primarily motivated to pursue possibilities. About 92percent completely concerns itself with avoiding negatives. There’s a 5 percent swing group that’s sometimes motivated by one, sometimes the other."

"As organizations age," he concluded, "they first throw out employees who pursue possibilities. Next, they get rid of those who might pursue possibilities. Who’s left? Only people devoutly committed to avoiding negatives. They won’t deviate from the status quo or introduce diversity, and they’ll move to kill off anyone who even thinks about it."

That conversation kept returning to me as I observed both people and organizations. I saw more and more "normal" people complaining, vaguely, but continuously, about stress, fear, and anxiety. I don’t mean specific fears and phobias, aftermaths of traumatic experiences, but rather the generalized, non-specific fear, anxiety, and stress that "normal" people experience. Some seek therapy to help them cope. They believe "the problem" is themselves. Yet, if anything, their situation usually gets worse. What’s happening?

Picture, for a minute, a life almost entirely composed of decisions about how to avoid negative consequences—a life about what not to do, about not making a mistake. "Mistakes," by definition, are deviations from accepted rules, policies, and practices imposed by the person’s environment—whatever social system he or she is engaged with. This amounts to living life in a minefield—fearful of every next step. No wonder these people have fear and anxiety. Where does this view of life as a minefield come from? To answer that, we need to look at the aging process of social systems in the larger context of General Systems.

As social systems age, they drive toward a state of static equilibrium—no change, no deviation. They maximize entropy, which, in human terms, is a form of death. Such systems violate the essential nature of living things. As we know from our studies of biology and ecology, living things prosper through diversity, by adapting to ever-changing conditions.

So far as we know, everything that exists is a system—"a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole." The universe, an organization, the human body, an atom: all are systems. Nature creates them; people create them.

People, as sentient beings, have intuitively understood that we live in systems, though only recently have we begun to consciously recognize them. We have ancient and universal representations of systems. They are all the same—concentric shapes emanating outward from a nucleus, like a stone thrown into a pond. These representations, circles, ellipses, spirals, and other forms appear in petroglyphs and decorative stones over several thousand years.

Systems and Purpose

We depict systems with a nucleus or origin. In human social systems, this nucleus is the system’s central organizing principle, its reason for being, its purpose. It defines the system’s nature. Whenever people create a new system, they have a reason—and how they define that intent will define the nature of the system that evolves. Suppose we create a new school. If we say its purpose is to mold children into responsible public citizens, we will get a very different structure, with very different processes and participants, and with very different results, than if its purpose is to assure children the freedom and opportunity to think, create, and live fully their present and future lives.

Open and Closed Systems

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the originator of General System Theory, identified two fundamentally different types of systems: open and closed. Natural, living systems are open systems. They continually change, adapt, and evolve because they are interdependent with the larger systems that surround them, their environment. Closed systems are mechanical and repetitive. A machine is a closed system. A tractor cannot evolve and become a boat when the fields flood. A closed system often becomes useless, that is obsolete, when the larger systems surrounding it change. Closed human social systems suffer the same fate. As they move toward equilibrium, they become progressively more isolated from their environments. They lose the ability to change and adapt. Entropy increases until it reaches a fatal level.

Living things do not thrive in closed systems. As a child, perhaps you put a butterfly in a jar and wondered the next day why it was dead. Imagine being trapped in an elevator; what happens? Do you feel fear and anxiety? A "moving box" is a great metaphor for a closed system.

When people create social systems, they may create them as open or closed. As we’ll see, even systems that begin as open ones usually become closed. The key issue to remember is that open systems are alive and active; closed ones drive toward static equilibrium. The distinction lies in the system’s core or nucleus—how the people in it define its reason for existing.

At the core of every human social system, which includes every social institution, is a transaction between two principal partners. In personal relationships, it’s the two people. In education, it’s the provider of the information and those who use it—the teacher and the students. In business, the two principal partners are the producer of the product or service and its users. In healthcare, it’s the doctor and the patient.

The critical question is, "For what purpose does this transaction occur?" Everything else in the system is defined by the answer to this question. In an open social system, the critical partners are aware of their interdependence and any statement of purpose is inclusive; it recognizes benefit to both parties. In a closed social system, the partners do not recognize their interdependence.

If, in starting a new business, we say its purpose is to make money, which considers only the seller’s best interests, we are creating a closed system. If, however, the seller says its purpose is to provide users with some form of unique usefulness, even something as simple as potato chips they really enjoy, the seller is creating an open system.

George Land, in his book Break-point and Beyond, posited that organizational and social systems have two demonstrated phases—the formative and the normative. He also tells us that there is, theoretically, a third phase—the integrative phase.

The Formative Phase

All social systems originate as a concept, idea, philosophy, or solution to a problem in someone’s mind. Once people have defined the purpose for a system, they move to manifest that purpose—create material forms and processes that accomplish the intent. Whether the intended system’s purpose is originally open or closed, the work in this phase is highly creative. It’s mostly problem-solving—trying to create something that has not previously existed. In this phase, the key questions are, "What are we trying to do, and why?" People focus on outcomes. The formative phase is about "making it up as you go along." Decisionmaking criteria are highly qualitative.

A new system will succeed or fail based upon its relevance to a principal partner, recognized or not, and upon the collective and diverse skills of the people working to manifest it. This phase of a system values people for their creativity, their authenticity. It affirms the unique value of its individual members. People within it feel alive, that they are "making a difference."

The Normative Phase

If a system is truly closed in the beginning—that is, it has no principal external partner, no other people that want or need what it provides, it quickly dies. But, if it does have external beneficiaries, recognized or not, the system begins to grow.

At some point, people sense that what they’ve been building is working. "People are buying what we’re selling. We’ve got funds and students in the school." "Our congregation is growing." "We’ve got the plane up in the air; now all we have to do is keep it there."

At this point, the focus may move to repeating what’s working in the hope of keeping it working. Even if the provider—the business, school, church, whatever—originally valued its principal external partner, it no longer does. As it focuses on increasing the predictability and efficiency of its internal operating forms and processes, it becomes more and more concerned only with its own best interests. It becomes a closed system.

Inside, the organization moves to eliminate diversity and variance. For products coming off an assembly line, that’s good. For people, it’s a disaster. The system now asks people within it to conform. It moves to control them, to make them predictable and interchangeable—like tractor parts. Leaders—managers, teachers, ministers, directors—say to employees, students, members, participants: "Here’s how we do things around here. Conform and you can stay. Think for yourself and you’re out." In other words, "Be normal."

The "life" of the living—personal integrity and authenticity, creativity, insight, meaning, and purpose, the sense of actually being alive—cannot survive inside closed systems. Living systems require diversity, for life and prosperity, not conformity. As Charles Darwin put it:

So, in the general economy of any land, the more widely and perfectly the animals and plants are diversified for different habits of life, so will a greater number of individuals be capable of there supporting themselves. A set of animals, with their organisation but little diversified, could hardly compete with a set more perfectly diversified in structure.

The normative social systems that constitute a person’s environment create the sense of life in a mine-field. The non-specific, widespread anxiety that plagues millions of people is fear of invoking negative consequences by deviating from the norms. To avoid this possibility, we have to deny our uniqueness, our authenticity, and any tendencies we may have to think independently—to try to make sense of our world and our lives. As we allow ourselves to be driven toward static equilibrium, we move closer toward personal entropy—death.
Traditional psychotherapy continues to measure deviation from norms and treat it as disease, using tools such as the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Inventory (MMPI) to find out just how abnormal someone is. Declaring diversity to be disease, which is exactly what normative systems do, ultimately destroys both the individual people in the system and the system itself. Traditional psychotherapy reinforces precisely the problem it ostensibly exists to resolve. Psychotherapists need to recognize that, in many instances, it’s not the client, it is "the system."

Integrative Systems

I believe that what Land called the integrative phase of systems is what everyone from new-age gurus, who may call it "higher consciousness," to organizational developers, who may call it "empowerment," is groping toward.

Creating an integrative system essentially means to consciously recognize and live by the system’s open purpose. Recall that purpose drives the nature of a system—its structure, its processes, its attitudes, its results. Recall, also, that each partner in an open system is dedicated to promoting the other partner’s best interests. A purpose of mutual benefit is the foundation of an integrative system.

People in integrative systems know the basis of unity between the principal partners, even after the system has become large and materially complex. Therefore, they can see the meaning behind its forms and processes. They make decisions from purpose. Unlike in the incomprehensible complexity in a normative system, people can comfortably function in the complexity of an integrative system because they have the foundation of mutually beneficial purpose for organizing all the details.

People in integrative systems are valued, not punished, for their unique, authentic, and diverse talents. Individual creativity is cherished, not exiled. In stark contrast to the view that "life is a minefield" produced by normative systems, integrative systems support the essence of "being alive."

CLIFF HAVENER’s new book Meaning—The Secret of Being Alive is the basis for this article. Looking at our human condition in the context of General Systems provides essential explanation of why so many things don’t work and what we can do about it. To see more of the book, go to www.forseekers.com.

AHP PERSPECTIVE December 2000/January 2001 Table of Contents

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