Master and His Emissary - the Rise of Systems Thinking

Modernity and Domain Experts

While reading and listening to Iain McGilchrist exploring the idea of the Master / Emissary (L/R hemisphere) - I couldn’t help transposing it to a wider context of the society and finding (for me) an even deeper meaning. In the modernity we saw an emergence of a “domain expert” - particularly in the context of scientific and technological advancements.

Reductionism

This specialisation was seen as the inevitable path towards solving all problems and challenges. The rise of domain expert s was the result of reductionist thinking that saw all problems as complicated systems. Now we know that a lot of them are actually complex systems that cannot be (easily? yet? never?) understood using the narrow beam of reductionism and scientific enquiry. The oversimplification of reality leads to the loss of emergent properties and the failure to properly appreciate interconnectedness of all the other systems in the play.

Ecco the Master

This idea then leads towards the notion of the “Master” - who is someone that can appreciate all the detail (scientific, left brain) stuff, but can easily (intuitively) decide what should be included or excluded - effectively orchestrating the emissaries into holistic perspectives. Now, this again feeds into something that I saw mentioned in the Github discussions - “holding 2 things at once”. This is, IMO, what is called Systems Thinking - and post modernity we’ll see a strong move into this paradigm. The leaders will no longer be frustrated deep dive specialists who simply don’t have capacity to go deeper into the rabbit hole of scientific research, but a capacity in itself - unique talents that go beyond the tunnel vision. This shouldn’t be confused with introverted vs extroverted (in extreme cases - autistic specturm vs ADHD) even though L/R might as well be related to that.

If you find this idea interesting - it would maybe interesting to explore it further because examples of the lack of holistic vision (Master component) are painfully obvious everywhere - I’d say within all the meta-crisis cracks.