Ellis/A Systemic History, 1. Conflict and Integration in Organic Systems

The first, biological, section of this book traces the basic conditions for the Middle Way in the reinforcing feedback loops that make living organisms continue, together with the balancing feedback loops that help them adapt to their environment. One can find the roots of these two kinds of feedback loops in organisms from the very beginning of life (and perhaps even before it in some respects). As we follow the development of increasing complexity up the tree of life, however, those feedback loops are constantly echoed. The more organisms turn to reinforcing feedback loops to try to sustain themselves, the more they run into conflicts with their environment, which in more complex organisms also become reflected in internal conflicts. To deal with those conflicts, they develop balancing feedback loops, only for more conflicts to arise as conditions change or competition moves in. In more complex organisms, these two types of feedback loops become the dominant functions of the two hemispheres of the brain – the left reinforcing and the right adaptive. This enables the same feedback patterns to recur in human psychology, history, and culture.