Panel presentation: Social objectives and systems science

Being unsure of the intended meaning of the title for this Panel, I propose a brief statement which may be viewed as irrelevant, or possibly even inappropriate, I propose a set of theses : - that the development of systems science cannot be value free, but rather that developments in systems science could affect the kind of society reward which we move; - that our Panel topic cannot be addressed without one\´s assuming an a priori position as to what kind of a society he has in view; - that the essential genius of our society, as conceived and formulated in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, safeguarded individual, group, and local freedom by institutionalizing a healthy pluralism via a decentralized, multi-level political structure; - that the emergence of modern technology, among other developments, has seriously threatened those freedoms by erosion and obsolesence of the eighteenth century safeguards; - that most proposals to serve "social objectives" thru application of systems science have, implicitly or explicitly, assumed and encouraged increasing centralization in social and political decision making; - that such a course tends to promote the quest of secondary, material objectives at the risk of destroying primary, fundamental social values; - that the most profound, and priceless contribution which systems science research could make to western society would be to develop a mature science of decentralized, multi-level systems which would ultimately enable us to reformulate, for ourselves or our children, political structures which would reguarantee, in the context of high technology, individual freedoms in a pluralistic society.