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Doctrina liberală (The Libertarian Doctrine)

Revoluţia conceptuală şi centrul transcendent (The Conceptual Revolution and the Transcendent Centre)

Editura SEMNE, Bucureşti, 2000 —ISBN 973-654-035-9

English language below the Romanian text.

Read the word of Professor Lucian Iordănescu on launching the book

   Tudor Georgescu ( TGeorgescu@hotmail.com ) este licenţiat în filosofie al Universităţii Bucureşti. Îprima sa carte el abordează liberalismul prin prisma valorilor democratice, iar în cea de-a doua, prefaţată de Dan A. Lăzărescu, critică democraţia prin prisma valorilor liberale.

inginerie morală

inginerie socială                 majoritate morală

(Stânga)                             (Dreapta)

Să privim figura de mai sus: S.U.A., “pământul libertăţii”, au devenit adăpostul democraţie a lumii. Facem observaţia că centrul imanent este variabil, spre deosebire de scopul manipulării LAMBDA. Concluzia? Avem de-a face cu o morală cu geometrie variabilă, instrument al puterii.

"An outstanding synthesis of several recent foreign studies"

Dan A. Lăzărescu

Ad-Vitam Sovereign Grand Commander of the 33rd and Last Degree Supreme Council for Romania

 

Tudor Georgescu

The Notional Revolution

(conception of the year 1993)

—excerpts—

 

1. The Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions

 

Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave exposes the notion of revolution and, for the beginning of the study dedicated to the informational revolution; he does a profound description of the first two technological revolutions the humanity has known: the agrarian revolution and the industrial revolution.

 

2. The Informational Revolution (W3)

 

During recent past time, the thesis that the industrial society is being replaced with another type of society, based of the processing of the information became a public domain. Daniel Bell was among the first sociologists to notice the birth of a new society he called post-industrial society, also noticing that the information became the strategic resource. Alain Minc named this society telematic, from telecommunications plus informatics, representing the two components of the use of information: the exchange and the administration.

To glimpse the wideness of the phenomenon, I'll use here a short example given by Robert Reich, Professor of Economics at Harvard University: "The people think they buy objects, solid products, but it is not so: the most important part of the cost of a product is given by research and development, the marketing costs, by the legal solutions embedded in the product, etc.". That is, more than half of the cost of a product is given by an invisible content, by information.

John Naisbitt, in Megatrends, notices how profoundly engraved the society this economical phenomenon: "Starting with 1955, the number of white collars surpassed the number of blue collars". The physical work has been more and more replaced by certain intellectual activities, this process having deep implications on the way the society works: a lot of principles and customs necessary to the industrial production prove today useless, the rigidity of the discipline and the punctuality being replaced by flexibility.

 

3. Passage Phenomena (W3-4)

 

In order to see the way things care to evolve, let's consider the way in which the second chapter noted informational activities are formed and what their components that are most probably to evolve are. Important from this viewpoint is that quota between the offer of information and the selection of information because obviously, not all the information has the same value.

Working with a fragmented press forces the individual to synthesis, the media being unable to completely assume this task. As such, the image the actual stage of development of the informational society offers is the following: all the people are journalist, each producing, stealing and synthesizing the information he wants (Loren Ghiglione, Ziaristul de mâine [Tomorrow's Newspaperman], "Sinteza" nr. 87/1991). From here, the system vision, interdisciplinarity and the generalism to which the modern man is bound to appeal to.

The peak technology (espionage satellites, the listening devices, etc.), on one hand, and the press, on the other, question the definition of the secret. Having in mind that this rests just a cumulus of data, costly to gather and difficultly to valorise missing the specific know-how, we are witnessing the death of the secret. The informative activities are sedimenting around the decision centres of the society, these disposing of a richness of information. In Recviem pentru oamenii invizibili [Requiem for the invisible men] ("Expres" nr. 7/1993), Radu Budeanu notices the commensuration of the information activities with bureaucratically means. The truth is that are required new means that can realize the administration of the knowledge rather than information. The economical espionage, quite abundant our days, is hunting less mere information, but mostly know-how.

Indeed, the richness of information the society disposes nowadays relatively facile allows the elaboration of efficient technology for industry and agriculture. The computers, though they master this increasing volume of information, they are incapable of thinking, of creating concepts. So, we are imposing a differentiation between the information and their creative use, as we can do the difference between the copyright and the industrial property, by similarity with the difference between copying and the conceptual discrimination invention / innovation. The problematic of industrial property is climbing on a plane higher than the informational one. It is no longer mere copying, that makes the object of the copyright, but of taking over structures, ideas and concepts.

The passage from W3 to W4 can be named teaching revolution: the enormous flow of thinking currents produces a great quantity of learning processes, today generally considered as useful for mastering the information. In today's society, everybody is being in the middle of a continuous process of learning. Each of the media's communication, if not evident, is followed by an explanation. Changing more than one career, the people of today are bound to learn continuously. Each man that the life tangently brings him into contact with a field is bound to learn something about that field in order to go on.

 

4. The Notional Revolution (W4)

 

Peter F. Drucker wrote ("Society" nr. 198/1992) of the knowledge workers as the new ruling class of the society. Few men and women do today the difference between the information and the knowledge that grafts on it, ultimately being more relevant, because the rule on the former. By his expression, which tried at its time to anticipate the informational revolution, Drucker se equivocally places himself between W3 and W4. James Burnham wrote him too, in 1941, a more adequate work, The Managerial Revolution. Let's see what W4 is about.

Not all the information have the same usage value, either objective, either subjective. A first step of underlining the value of the information is presenting it structured. The structure, at its time, is revealed with the occasion of the presentation, and it is not very useful to differentiate it from information, can be unintelligently processed, being nothing else than the transposition of the concept in patterns for the information. The different essence of the concept can be easily revealed: a computer cannot elaborate concepts from information, from particular aspects of it, and, though the generalization operation can be simulated, the computer has neither intuition nor revelation, by means of which to dynamically create useful concepts. If we think to the definition of the concept: "association of particular aspects, abstractization" (Dicţionarul de neologisme [The Neologisms Dictionary]), we notice that the notion of abstractization supposes psychical phenomenon of understanding, and we will never find a machine guilty of that. Making a parallel with the noted industrial property, I can say that in relation with the noted property, the relation concept-information is analogue to the patent-machine relationship.

Example: a meteorological satellite transmits towards the soil a considerable amount of informational, but the knowledge deducted from the analysis of this amount is rather few, being synthesized in data that explains the weather. This data, gathered as simple information, on a longer interval and a larger area can make the object of a theory, which really creates significant knowledge.

What is the concept? This can be defined as the rational part of the idea. In several languages (German, Latin, and others) to conceive means to catch, to grab. The notion we can represent as perpendicular on the plane of information, with which is linked by the structure. The operation of conceiving means the reduction to the unity of a multitude of something.

The structure is generally a multitude of objects plus a composition law. In our case, the multitude is the information, and the law is the concept. The concept is represented by a sign, the sign being beyond information, although fixed on it, being made manifest only when interpreting the information—the same information could have different values in different structures or conceptual contexts, in different symbolic systems.

Integrated into some social activities, the information belongs to W3, the logical formulas (that are structures) to W3-4, as a passage, and the concept belongs to W4.

Bernard Conrad Cole in Beyond word processing—using your computer as a knowledge processor, speaks of knowledge processing revolution and refers to knowledge management.

Today we can witness the beginning of a notional revolution, that will become general because the creation of new philosophical objects—the concepts—gives the information superior values. The concept as such comprises the understanding of objects, state of fact, phenomena, etc. The creation of concepts could mean a new systemic indicator, a new principle, a new theory, etc. By the influence they have on the information connected activities, the concepts optimize on a superior level the economical activity, the functioning of some organizations, services, etc., and, in the climate that will precede the actual conceptual revolution the quota of the intellectuality will grow, because the main activities concentrate on the ideas as optimisers of decisions.

 

5. The Development of the Notional Activities

 

A widely remarked phenomenon in the new entrepreneurial climate remains without a satisfactory explanation in the context of the simple informational revolution: billions of dollars markets have been taken over from the grand companies by small enterprises thanks to the exceptional ideas they put to work—not long ago firms with just one employee made concurrence to concerns as Microsoft and IBM. The economy of information has its own particular logics, different from the managerial experience of the past. The boom has at its foundations the fact that for a valuable idea is easier to conquer a small structure and then impose on the market rather than directly conquering multinational mastodons that, however determined, cannot rapidly and extensively assume the task of applying the idea in the absence of a preliminary experimentation. Small, flexible structures, disposed to wholly assume a responsibility are a more adequate climate for developing ideas. The economical world learned this lesson right, the organigrams changing accordingly: they changed from hierarchies to networks. This is a combined effect of two revolutions: the informational one, fully developed, that facilitated the communication, and the notional one, being in an incipient phase and becoming to be felt.

The information services appeal to a number of analysis and synthesis operation in order to function optimally. The information banks are today a banality, as well other informatics activities. Growing on their skeletons are new objects: banks, networks and conceptual trusts and the actual university systems, that undertake artisanal activities f exploiting the intellectual creativity. The brainstorming and the synectics and other methods of stimulating the ideation can become characteristically to W4. A few examples reveal the dimension of the conceptual power: it becomes economical power. In France, e.g., the "Negroes" realize about 20% of the books' total, offering services similar to those of the sophists in the antique Greece, respectively making available to the buyers services starting from the text's toilet to the integral writing of a book based on an idea.

As many other technologies the genetically engineering is facilitated by the information explosion, but what determined its evolution is the notional development, from Mendel's heredity to the HUGO project (the map of the human genome). HUGO deserves and underline because it offers a clear image of the distinction concept / information: the result of the project is a quantity of information that, stocked on optical disks and distributed constitutes a component of genetically engineering technologies. But all this immense volume of work, developed in several American research centres for several years, was generated by the (simple) idea of mapping the human genome. The billions of dollars invested were attracted by the HUGO concept and not by the diskettes. Of course, the idea seduced others competitors as well.

By education, the conceptual power is accessible to almost any individual, group, class or nation, but the weight of the mentalities characteristically for the old orders represents a dimension of the society's exhaustion towards the new production modalities (waves). Japan, as an example, had the chance of a general catastrophe that cleaned the land and allowed the development of the actual economy, with the price of moving the human concerns toward the martial plane. For a poor country, the only way out of the underdevelopment trap is the launch, with a gigantesque effort in the wave that begins (the 3rd one being now a missed opportunity).

The 4th wave modifies the human personality by pushing the man towards rationalism, because the very wave is nothing else than a rational explosion, characterized by the rational dialogue between society's members.