by Lucian CULDA
1. Can people be reduced to statistical objects?
2. The suitability of trans-causal assessments
3. Explanatory possibilities offered by the people's processual analysis
4. The security strategies should include goals by which to improve the people's social situation
During the last decades, more and more people have become aware that the social existence has reached a stage at which the macrosocial-level organizing processes and the connections among them are being amplified and diversified, and their consequences are exerting contradictory pressures on the encompassing social organizations. Under the given circumstances, the concern for a better understanding of the developments of the social existence, especially of the connections emerging between the people's and the social situation, is perfectly legitimate.
A good interpretation, by this meaning an accurate and comprehensive one, is the minimum condition for people's actions, especially the latter's reactions to the situations they are being faced with, not to cause malfunctioning or disorganizing processes inside the social organizations, which can further make their situation worse.
As an extension of the previous studies I have made [1] , and considering people still do not have a satisfactory way of interpreting mega-existence, meaning particularly the social and biotic one, I maintain people have already acted in ways which strongly affected both their social and biotic existence. In the present study, I will draw particular attention on the main consequences of the fact that people assess their social existence in improper ways, deriving from the epistemological perspective they are using; the simpler the latter is, the less access do people have to the kind of processes taking place in their social and biotic existence, processes which can be approached only as people develop proper epistemological skills. For instance, as Raymond Boudon [2] argued, those who have only causal interpretation skills minimize interactionist processes to causal interpretation schemes; under such circumstances, their interventions into interactionist processes are unavoidably inadequate. Suffice it to take into account this distorting simplification and we can notice one of the errors of positivist interpretations given to people and their social situation.
1. Can people be reduced to statistical objects?
The by now traditional positivist method of analysis has drawn people's attention on statistical assessments. The ratio has been considered relevant also when analyzing people's social situation, and the statistical analysis method led to the well-known assessments of people's situation within the social organizations in which they exist and to which they belong. Statistical data tell us about the average life span, about how little or big their wealth is, at least at the 'theoretical' level (the famous figures referring to the distribution 'per capita' or the average income); they classify both criminality and pathological states according to gender, age, education level, and also to geographic zones, time, etc. Such statistical analyses claim to be relevant to the people's situation.
This way of designing analyses has inevitably led to the situation in which the nations and states are assessed on a statistical basis too. Comparing the states, as well as the nations by using data supplied by statistical analyses is a widely used method, still considered pertinent, especially by the governance. In terms of such analyses, citizens are referred to as 'population'.
Can such analyses be satisfactory? How much relevance can they provide?
It has been long known that the statistical distribution of wealth is not relevant to people; the latter do not have access to the wealth statistically allotted to them. Similar remarks are true for any attempt to characterize people in terms of statistics. For those familiar with the statistical calculation premises, it is obvious people do not meet the conditions to make them be considered statistical objects. Consequently, neither can the social organizations' situation, the nations' included, be properly explained within the statistical methods of designing analyses. The statistical analysis neither describes realities, nor explains them; it only provides data obtained by distorting simplifications, which can be usual communication benchmarks among the people who accept this way of simplifying the interpretations. As long as more efficient methods of analysis are not designed, the statistical way will be useful, but preserving it does not pay off when more efficient alternatives become available, by this meaning more explanatory for the issue under study.
2. The suitability of trans-causal assessments
The existence of social organizations, the great diversity of the kinds of processes which maintain them and differentiate their relationships, the complicated nature of the situations which people are faced with due to living inside an organization and to being dependent on numerous kinds of processes occurring in their existence have exerted pressures which made people try to perform other 'cognitive' processes. Therefore, certain ways of interpretation have emerged, different from the causal ones, and discriminated [3] as to the nature of the processes they investigate. Some of them have already been systematically presented. I have in mind precisely the systemic and interactionist investigation methodologies, so widely utilized in the last decades.
By assimilating the analysis paths made possible by the trans-causal methods, one can multiply the interpretation possibilities. The analyses meant to identify the interactions by which people try to meet their needs, the way they perceive them can be extremely relevant; tailoring the interactions can be significantly relevant as interactions are the source of some social processes deriving from their traits, processes having important effects on people too, on the latter's functional and reproduction possibilities, and also on the social organizations the latter maintain, and within which the interactions will further develop.[4]
3. Explanatory possibilities offered by the people's processual analysis
The previous statement suggests that the people's situation derives not only from the interactions the latter are involved in, or their position inside these interactions, but also from the consequences the interactions foster due to their by-products. Therefore, the comprehensive analyses are relevant by assessing the people's situation through investigations which refer also to organizing and disorganizing processes, possibly derived from the interactions in which people are involved. Such kind of analysis can be satisfactory if it encompasses studies on:
- the interactions
by which people try to meet certain needs;
- the consequences generated by interactions, affected by the capacity to understand
the needs that justify the manifestations;
- the ways in which the cycles meant to meet certain needs are resumed;
- the development of people's possibilities to become functional in the further
interactions;
- while meeting needs, the likelihood to further foster new necessities through
its effects, and by this other kinds of interactions, with different consequences;
- the development of people's possibilities to reproduce under ever changing
circumstances, due to the organizing processes favored and maintained by the
consequences of the interactions;
- the development of the social organizations in which people live, whose traits
differentiate people's possibilities to reproduce and interact.
Within this theoretical framework, the result of the processual-organic paradigm [5], criteria such as the ones further referred to become relevant. ( A detailed study dedicated to this issue is under way).
The interactions are extremely relevant to the people's social situation, as they can become sources of organizing and disorganizing processes, which influence people's possibilities to reproduce as social beings.
The human
interactions meant to meet necessities are the most relevant, as they can exert
the ever higher organizing and disorganizing pressures simultaneously on:
· the biotic organizations, the intracellular ones included;
· the socializing processes;
· the social organizations, starting from the ones in which people interact.
The consequences of the interactions can be considered positive to the extent in which they are favorable both to people and mankind; any consequence, no matter how much it favors some people, say, those who design interactions, cannot be assessed as positive if it harms other people or mankind.
The interactions bring about preponderantly negative consequences especially in three main types of situations:
·
when they take place under unsatisfactory circumstances informationwise, when
people are not able to perceive necessities or the way to meet them correctly,
as well as the consequences that the interactions, when wrongly performed, can
produce;
· when they are meant to produce advantages by harming other people,
no matter the means;
· when they are designed in ways which ignore their consequences on the
organizations in which people live, from the biotic to the social ones.
Occurring for thousands of years mainly under unsatisfactory circumstances informationwise, interactions have had and are still having preponderantly negative consequences, although the superficial analyses, such as the causal type ones, maintain the human condition has improved. For instance, the causal interpretations of the cures induced by allopat medicine, of the connections between enhancing and diversifying the output, the use of the theories that ease people's access to existential levels ever higher than the empirically accessible one, or of the connections between meeting some needs and people's access to chemical, microphysics or microbiological technologies, etc. are very misleading.
When assessed within the borders of causal knowledge, the interactions made possible by the theories are seemingly ever more rewarding, but being designed and conducted in ways derived from positivist (causal) interpretation methods, they bring about more and more serious derived consequences for people and mankind. The negative consequences enhancement derives both from diversifying people's possibilities to design and perform actions that encompass vast areas of existence, and from their incapacity to notice, as long as their analyses are mainly causal in nature, the connections emerging among successive consequences, or the possibility that the new consequences might amplify the previous ones.
An interactionist type of analysis, be it superficial, shows that the human interactions meant to meet some needs, if improperly designed, induce changes in the human social environment and pressures exerted by the latter on the bio-organizations, which affect to a larger extent the genetic code of more and more biotic entities maintaining the biotic mega-organization. The data supplied by the available literature reveal the genetic mutations are not likely to occur on a constant basis and the social influences are greater and greater; suffice it to consider the already noticed consequences of the alterations induced by man' s interventions at the chemical, macro-physical and macro-biotic processes level in order to gather information underlying that man's actions foster certain processes which, for the last decades, have caused the disorganizing pressures at the intracellular level within the bio-organization seen as a whole to enhance. Such pressures materialize into genetic changes which affect slowly for the time being the bio-physical environment that makes possible the people's social existence.
The trans-causal
assessment of the socializing processes can reveal the fact that people are
increasingly affected by the contradictory nature of many of the latter's consequences.
Here I have in mind at least that they are the primary cause of increasingly
more and serious deviant behavior:
· malfunctioning of the processors maintaining normal sexuality and more
and more people's incapacity to correctly perceive sexual deviance;
· ever more diverse types of handicaps affecting both human relations
and people's operational capacities;
· deviant behavior which enhances and diversifies the forms of social
aggressiveness;
· deviant behavior manifested in illegal drug consumption, as well as
enhanced by illegal drug abuse.
Such involutions are relevant to the topic under discussion for at least three reasons:
·
they strongly affect the socializing processes and the people's possibilities
to work together in a productive manner within the social environment;
· they cause the human being's alteration, the latter's possibilities
to manifest itself, especially man's possibility to get involved in meeting
his own needs as well as the collective necessities;
· finally, they affect mankind's capacity to reproduce itself.
When interactions are improperly designed for the human being, the pressures they exert on the social organizations, beyond the surface aspects which can be considered beneficial for people (i. e. , they produce goods, give participants the possibility to earn money in order to subsist, …), cause changes at the social level which, in their turn, exert pressures favoring the alteration of people's social situation. I primarily have in mind consequences that can foster deviant personalities, with passive or aggressive social behavior, as well as punitive organizations which are false solutions to the disorder deriving from improper socialization.
As long as the socializing consequences of the social situations are ignored or wrongly interpreted, the changes occurring especially in the public social environment, into the ways in which public management activities are carried out, prove to be contradictory and increasingly harmful for people. The pressures degrading the human condition are eventually prevailing. I am focussing on three main aspects, but they are not unique:
1. the amplification
of the ways in which people, more often than not compelled by the situations
they are facing, defy or avoid public order, which should be accepted if it
were an environment genuinely favorable to mankind and to meeting the latter's
needs. Both tax evasion and corruption-like manifestations specific to public
employees are the easiest forms to notice - but not unique - of the consequences
of public management errors, enhanced by socializing processes, improper for
the human being.
2. the spread of organized crime and diversification of its manifestations.
3. the spread of moral confusion, the increasingly more people's incapacity
to produce and observe the internal norms that grant behavior coherence and
consistency, and even to differentiate between "good" or "evil",
between what is becoming or not.
Such disorders are relevant to the human being's situation, insofar as the social processes can favor people only if they maintain a social and biotic environment favorable to the latter's socialization in ways which enable productive interactions among them in order to meet some better grasped necessities.
The fact that all the three kinds of processes taken into account to assess the people's situation reveal regressions of the human condition is of great significance.
·
Within the epistemological analysis tier, I interpret this finding as indicative
of the accuracy of the assessment, insofar as the processual-organic interpretation
of the social existence, which provided the criteria I used, reveals complex
connections, at the organizing / disorganizing processes level, as well as at
the processors' maintaining the people's social condition. If only one of the
three tiers under analysis had been the source of some social regress, while
the others had induced mainly positive consequences, the theoretical scheme
would have been false, as it maintains the compulsion of direct connections.
· Within the ontological analysis tier, I consider the connections among
the relevant kinds of processes to the human being's situation; they bear strong
evidence of the human condition regress, although the analysis made within the
limits of the causal approach results in contradictory statements. The ontic
condition of the human being cannot be characterized pertinently using criteria
such as the ones provided by the statistical analysis; indicators like resource
consumption, access to education, drug consumption or life span cannot be relevant,
because:
- the data on resource consumption are not also indicative of the consequences
of pollution for the whole range of processes controlling the reproduction of
the biotic entities, not just people;
- the data on access to education do not reveal the socializing effects of the
educational strategies, which underlie people's responsibility for their public
environment's condition, for reducing the people's capacity to grasp mankind's
situation under the increase of the media strategies aimed at guiding attitudes;
- the data on drug consumption are misleading, as the more efficient drugs are
for the moment, the more they intervene at the cell level (in intra-cellular
processes) to alleviate certain processes, the more numerous are the perverse
consequences occurring at the higher levels of cellular organization, since
the latter is still insufficiently known;
- the data concerning the life span are also misleading if inconsistently provided,
if they do not refer to the birth-rate, to the increased ratio of handicapped
children's birth, or having more and more serious genetic diseases.
4. The security strategies should include goals by which to improve the people's social situation
If we use
the praxiological analysis tier, I interpret the aforementioned data as benchmarks
pleading for the need to work out a new way of designing the strategies meant
to intervene into the social organizations, so that we can prevent the further
alteration of the human condition as well as of man's social environment.
Such interventions aimed at improving the human condition, starting from mankind's
'genetic inheritance', can be considered as core objectives of the strategies
which are intrinsically security-related. Within them, people should not be
mere objects whose functional possibilities are improved; they should become
subjects of such actions. That is why I think it is useful that people should
be aware of the regress harming their social existence; people should have access
to sufficient information in order to become sensitized, because, without minimum
social awareness, they are not concerned with the quality of their own existence,
the future of mankind and of life on our planet. This kind of motivation, specific
to those who have overcome the self-interests characterizing people who live
spontaneously, presuppose socializing processes monitored by educators who are
aware of the connections among people's lives, the functional possibilities
of the social organizations and the condition of our planet. Training such educators
and organizing the socializing processes can become important goals of the strategies
we are putting forward.
In conclusion:
· if the evaluation centers continue to assess the situation of the people, states and nations only by using statistical criteria, mankind will not have the possibility to become aware of the severe regress of the kind we have put forward and the types of processes the latter foster;
· if the analysis criteria are not reconsidered, so that they involve processual aspects relevant to the people's situation, we will continue to believe not only mankind is on the right way, but also the current methods of the public management of mankind (I mean the actions taken by the states as well as those likely at the global and regional levels) are satisfactory;
· the globalization issue will not be satisfactorily settled by the ideological approach prevailing nowadays, as politicians have not proved themselves up to identifying and solving the issue under discussion.
If the analysis method we have put forward is preferable to the causal one, by taking it into account one may improve the analyses and, by this, the possibilities to intervene in the social organizations.
NOTES
[1]
Lucian Culda, The Social Processuality. Licorna Press, Bucharest, 1994.
[2] Raymond Boudon, Effets pervers et ordre social. P.U.F.,
1993.
[3] Lucian Culda, The Epistemological Dimension of Investigating
the People's Social Existence. Licorna Press, Bucharest, 2000.
[4] Lucian Culda, The Organizations. Licorna Press, 1999.