Sustainability

or
cultural-biological harmony of processes?
Every noun hides a verb.

Ximena Davila, Humberto Maturana, Ignacio Muñoz & Patricio García

The Matríztico Institute, after reading this thought provoking book Education and Inovation in
Sustainability, by Rodrigo Loures Da Rocha, has written an essay presenting his vision of the
foundations of what is called sustainability, as well as on various biological-cultural foundations of
human life and coexistence, which in a systemically systemic view allows the creation of a global
understanding, not only of what is involved in the distinction of sustainability, but also of the pitfalls,
temptations, strengths and opportunities faced by humanity in the present

Introduction

We currently live, globally speaking, in a culture whose epistemological substrate is founded on the
being itself of all that exists, in the question of the being of things and of entities, resulting in a
basically dualist epistemology that in all spheres separates what is observed from the observed and
does not consider the cultural-biological regularities of the processes of distinction that the worlds
seem to bring to us, thus experiencing them as existing regardless of our operation in observation,
since this is always an unconscious operation.

The question of being is an epistemological background, which generates looks from where the
dynamics that make up the systems do not come, but that linearly meets the supposed causes and
effects, where matrices are not seen but rather objects. One of the characters belonging to this
epistemology of background is that explanatory principles and definitions are generated from it that
while nouns always hide the dynamics that bring to us the phenomena we seek to explain, that is,
the verbs become material things on intending to describe and explain the experiences we have as
observers on not meeting the operation itself with which we bring the observed into the operation of
distinction that makes it up.

In this reflection, we will explore the multidimensional dynamics that is hidden when we talk of
sustainability, and we will see that such dynamics, which is actually that which constitutes the
processes that a posteriori we call sustainable, is, as we shall see, a cultural-biological dynamic.

Cultural-biology is not a theory, but rather an operational dynamic that creates the niche or
relational matrix that gives rise to human existence. Therefore, the Cultural-biological Matrix notion
of Human Existence connotes the cultural-biological intertwining of the human being in conversation
networks.

The conversation networks that make up the human cultural living modulated and modulate the
course of the human being’s biological flow, and the biological flow of the realization of living of the
human being modulated and modulates the course of the cultural living of the human being. All this
1
in a recursive intertwining that emerges with the human lineage in the transgenerational
conversation of conversing on its emergence in the ancestral family in the origins of human living
itself. Cultural-biology is the relational-operational sphere in which this process occurs in the
evolutional history of our lineage. Cultural-biology is therefore the peculiarity of the human lineage
and it is in it that every human occurs. All that is experienced by human beings is experienced

1 Recursiveness, recursion: Words that refer to the occurrence of a process when the repetition of its
occurrence applies to the result of its previous occurrence. In economy, the compound interest is a case of
recursion in the calculation of the interests of an investment.
through cultural-biology, whether art, science, technology, religion, philosophy, sport, leisure or
merely the experiencing of activities to preserve living. Thus, the flow of human living in cultural-
biology is what constitutes human living in the language and in the conversation as a living that
creates worlds that emerge as expansions from the operational and relational matrices of
fundamental everyday human living.

The essence of biological living is the dynamics of preservation and transformation of changing
architectonic processes that every instant constitute the realization of the living of an organism.

And the essence of cultural living is the dynamics of preservation of the manners of feeling,
thinking, doing, explaining and reflecting that as closed or open networks of recursive
conversations, configure the feelings, thoughts, doings and explanations that are accepted as
conscious or unconscious valid fundaments that constitute the spontaneous way of flowing of the
present changing continuum of everyday living.

Human living, while a cultural cohabitation in conversation networks, starts an era that gives origin
to different manners of living and cohabitation that make up the different cultural-biological worlds
we live in as different realities or biological-cultural matrices of living.

The cultural-biological dynamics of sustainability

Nowadays, the notion of sustainability and reflections and actions in this regard have gained
international importance, both in the business and government, interstate and citizenship sphere,
and in which the current understanding of sustainability goes beyond the merely environmental.
One talks of “the challenge” of sustainability, which has economic, social, cultural, political-
institutional, physical-territorial and scientific-technological dimensions.

Great amounts of economic and human resources are used to generate instances that allow us to
implement and disseminate practices that result in the generation of several dimensions of
sustainability, among which are the instances to create a global or world society or sustainable
world that seems to us to have the longest stimulus and depth.

But how does sustainability emerge? Which multidimensional dynamics that a global society brings
to hand does an observer distinguish as sustainable?

In a cultural-biological look at biology, we find that the living being emerges in a matrix of existence
that contains and makes him possible, which implies that to preserve the living of human beings,
2
the relation of congruency between the organism and the environment is a constant, not a variable .
If the structural link between the organism and the environment is not preserved, the organism dies.
That is, if the conditions that enable the living being to create, realize and preserve his niche in the
environment are not given, if the environment is not structurally receiving, the living of the living
being will be impossible. Well, all living being, absolutely all, transform the surroundings of the
environment that shelters them, and vice-versa, in a mutual relation of triggering of reciprocal
structural transformations. And in the case of social insects and animals, other organisms of the
same class become part of the environment in which they live. This is how it will occur in our case,
humans, and when we talk of anthroposphere, we will be distinguishing this sphere of relations
where human communities are a fundamental part of the environment in which humans exist and

2To see the fundaments of this explanation, see: Maturana, H. R. Autopoiesis:

Reproduction, Heredity and Evolution. En: Autopoiesis, dissipative structures and
spontaneous social order, pp. 48-80. Milan Zeleny (ed.) Westview Press, Boulder. 1981.
and: Maturana, H.R., J. Mpodozis. Origen de las Especies por Medio de la Deriva
Natural, Publicacion Ocasional N. 46. Museu Nacional de História Natural. Santiago,
Chile.2000. (revista chilena de História Natural. 73: 261-310.)
where they are actually humanized in cohabitation. The word anthroposphere makes reference to
the relational sphere that emerges as a private ecological dynamics with the living being, and as
such, is a constituent part of the biosphere. Human beings as living beings exist in the biosphere,
and as human beings in all that we do (companies, organizations, philosophies, politics, etc.), we
exist in the anthroposphere. That is, in a strict sense, biosphere and anthroposphere are only
separable in the distinction, but not in the dynamics of the flow of the systemic systemic processes3
of which they are made up, and as we shall see, the reference to the cultural-biological seeks to
evoke this inseparable unity when talking of natural and human processes.

The fact that living beings transform the environment in which they are found and that makes their
existence possible is part of the coherences of the flow of living itself of ecological systems, likewise
massive extinctions. Change is another constant in the flow of ecological processes of the
biosphere, in fact, the flow of living of living beings occurs in a continuous drift of structural
changes. The living of an organism occurs as a continuous flow of structural change in which its
organization (autopoiesis) and its adaptation in its sphere of interactions are preserved at the same
time. And we synthetically refer to the spontaneous process of natural structural drift that occurs
with the series of transformations of every system, natural drift when referring to the historical series
of transformations of living beings. The fundamental consequence of the natural drift is that the
living being that lives through its realization lives in an environment in constant preservation of its
structural link relation, with it: if this does not occur, the living being dies. In the natural drift, the one
who is liable to a non-comparative series of transformation is the one that survives.

However, one must understand that the change does not occur in the empty, as states the systemic
law of change and preservation: “Whenever in a set of elements, certain relations start to be
4
preserved, space is created for everything to change around the relations that preserve them” .
That is to say that everything changes around something that preserves it. And in the case of
structural change of living beings, in the course of evolutive history and in the course of the
ontogeny or history of transformations in the course of the living of the organism, which changes
5
around the preservation of two intertwined dynamics, of preservation and autopoiesis and of
preservation of the relation of congruency between organism and environment or structural link that
an observer calls adaptation.

In such circumstances, it is easier to be able to distinguish that the relation of structural link
between organism and environment is a dynamic of constant transformation, not a fixed process,
therefore, the harmony that arises out of this relation of congruency between one and another is
permanently open to its own extinction, since if the conditions that make possible the stability of the
relation of mutual congruency are not satisfied, it is disintegrated and the living being dies.

3
Ximena Dávila provided the distinction of the systemic systemic to explain the recursive nature of systemic
processes and the linearization into which the so-called systemic thinking fell.
4
See: Maturana H. e Dávila X. Leyes Sistémicas y Metasistémicas. Em; Habitar Humano:
en Seis Ensayos de Biología-Cultural. Coleção Instituto Matríztico-JC Sáez Editor. Santiago
de Chile. 2008. (Written in 2002-2006)

5Autopoiesis is the dynamics of cellular self-production that makes up the

fundamental organization of living beings. See: Maturana, H. R. The
Organization of the living: A theory of the living organization. The Int. J.
of Man-Machine Studies 7: 313-332, 1975. E; Maturana, H. R., Varela, F.
Autopoietic Systems. B. C. L. Report 9.4; 107 pp. Biological Computer
Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois.
1975.
To be able to see all this, it is crucial to see the fundamental dynamics that hides the word
sustainability. For example, to understand that in the environmental domain, the ecological problem
created by companies and human communities is not in the degradation they create in the
environment in which they are found on removing elements and disposing of residues, that is, made
by all living beings, but rather the problem that arises out of the irresponsibility and lack of
awareness with which we conduct this relation with the environment. Living beings are the animals
that generate the greatest transformation of the biosphere, and at an increasing rate.

If a person extracts the so-called natural resources faster than it can replace them, this creates
poverty, if a person discharges residues in such great quantities that the land cannot absorb them,
or non-absorbable residues, this generates environmental destruction. The subject in the
background is how we transform our surroundings, not the dynamic of transformation, since this is
inevitable. Will we do this by preserving the conditions that allow us to preserve, in the long term,
the relation of congruency between the anthroposphere and the biosphere? Will we do this in the
least inappropriate manner only? Or simply in the cheapest manner possible in the short term? As
we will see, this, like all other human themes, is an ethical theme.

Returning to the question of dynamics underlying what is distinguished or one wishes to distinguish
when talking of sustainability, one must state that sustainability is not a process that is part of the
ecological dynamics of the of the biosphere; in the natural world, there is neither sustainability nor
non-sustainability, this is a distinction that as observers we introduce to limit a certain sphere of
processes we would like to be preserved in a certain period of time. And to see the domain in which
the distinction of sustainability exists, we must talk of culture, which is the niche we create as
humans on living in our social environment. We will approach this by talking before conversing.

In daily life, an observer distinguishes conversation as a flow of coordination of actions and

6
emotions that we distinguish as occurring among human beings that interact recurrently in
7
language . In such circumstances, there are at least two fundamental phenomena that an observer
makes when he or she distinguishes a conversation:

a) the coordination of recursive actions that appear as coordination of conducts,

b) the coordination of emotions that appear as coordination of domains of actions.

Conversations as operations in language are operations in domains of consension that can be

expanded, restricted or that can disappear, with or without the appearance of new domains of
consension during them. This is evident in our daily life when we experience an increase, reduction
or change, in our intimacy with those with which we converse, as something that occurs while
conversation occurs.

There are several types of conversations and these differ in the types of coordination of actions and
emotions involved. Each type of conversation is defined by a standard or particular configuration of
coordination of actions and emotional flow. Furthermore, all types of conversations can occur in
many different domains of actions and in many different emotional complexes, without meaning the
operational domain or domain of reality in which the actions occur.

Each human being usually takes part in many different conversations, simultaneously or
successively, which intersect with each other through their realization in their corporability. Actually,

6 We usually think of emotions as intimate states and refer to them as feelings. However, what an observer
distinguishes when distinguishing emotions are types or domains of relational conducts. Emotions are the
fundament of every doing.
7 Language is not an abstract field of meanings but rather an operational field whose dynamics is that of

recursive coordination of consensual conducts, which actually has the concreteness of doing and of the worlds
we create on existing, flowing in the talking that arises each moment interlinked with emotional
configurations in the cultural matrices in which we exist.
as human beings, we live in communities that exist in conversation networks intercrossed, not
intersectional, of different types, which are equal to one another in their flow through their
intersection in our corporality.

What then do we distinguish when we talk of culture? Human beings emerge in the history of the
family of biped primates to which they belong, when talking as a way of cohabitation in coordination
of consensual conduct coordination, was not longer an occasional phenomenon, and on being
preserved generation after generation in a group of them, became a central part of the way of living
that henceforth defined our language. That which we connote in daily life, when we talk of culture or
cultural matters, is a closed network of conversations that constitutes and defines a way of human
living as a network of coordination of emotions and actions that is realized as a particular
configuration of intertwining of acting and feeling of the people who live this culture. As such, a
culture is constitutively a closed conservative system, which generates its members to the extent in
which these are realized through their participation in the conventions that constitute and define it.
We also deduce from this that no particular action and that no particular emotion defines a culture
because a culture as network of conversations is a configuration of coordination of actions and
emotions. From the above, we infer that the different cultures are distinct closed networks of
conversations, which realize so many other different manners of human living as different
configurations of intertwining of talking and feeling. We also deduce that a cultural change is a
change in the configuration of acting and of feeling of the members of a culture, and that as such
has a place as a change in the closed network of conversations that originally defined the culture
that changes.

The extremes of a culture, as a way of living, are operational and emerge with its establishment, at
the same time, belonging to a culture is an operational condition, not a constitutive condition or
intrinsic property of the human beings that realize it, and any human being can belong to different
cultures at different times of his or her life, according to the conversations in which he or she takes
part at these different times.

With this in mind, we can see that what is called sustainability consists of a closed network of
conversations that bring recursively the viability, realization and preservation of the conditions that
enable preserving the well-being of the anthroposphere and biosphere. That is, sustainability is
eventually a culture, whose fundamental orientation is found in the generation of processes that
enable the preservation of a Cultural-Biological Matrix of Human Existence, coursing through the
well-being and, therefore, of a Biological Matrix of the existence of living beings that are also
preserved coursing through the well-being.

Note here that the notion of well-being is neither an explanatory principle nor an arbitrary definition,
but rather an abstraction of a fundamental aspect of the living of living beings in general. While what
defines the course that follows the evolutive drift of a lineage is given by the preferences and likes
of organisms (+), the course that follows the evolutive series of transformations arises moment to
moment, defined by preservation of the well-being of the individuals that realize it. Or what is equal;
what guides the course that follows the evolutive series of transformations of a lineage is the course
of the preservation of the living of organisms in dynamic congruency with the environment.

However, the traditional evolutive discourse that talks of adaptation to the environment as an
achievement that becomes possible on following the competitive path of adaptive advantages
leaves out the entire understanding of the phenomenon of the well-being of living, and is labeled as
something subjective. However, from what the understanding of “natural drift” shows us, we see
that living beings slide in the living and cohabitation in preserving the structural link in the
preservation of living. That is, in the preservation of natural well-being, where well-being occurs in
each moment, the preservation of living, which is the natural well-being of this moment and where
the organism dies if this does not occur.
To understand that sustainability is a closed network of conversations allows us to become aware
that the fundamental responsibility toward it is in our hands, the biosphere will do nothing on behalf
of sustainability.

And sustainability is a closed network of conversations not because it is merely a conversation, but
rather because it is a dynamic intertwining of multiple conversations and also closed networks of
conversations in the multiple spheres in which there is actual ethical concern (or occupation) with
sustainability, in the environmental space as well as in the economic, business, government,
interstate space, etc.

Well, on talking of ethics again, we are not referring to a definition or to a philosophical principle, we
are showing a human relational dynamic that we can all detect in the daily living on abstracting the
situations in which we talk of ethical conducts. An observer says that a person has an ethical
conduct when he or she sees that the latter conducts himself or herself choosing his or her activities
in such a way as not to damage another or others in his or her social and ecological sphere
because this person is concerned with what can happen to others due to what he or she fails to do,
simply because this person is concerned with this other person or another. That is, he or she does
not live caring about the relation with others through respect for norms but rather because he or she
cares about others. In this wise, we must distinguish between ethics and morality. Ethics has a
biological fundament, given our human evolutive history of social beings, we are concerned with
and we are spontaneously moved by what happens to others, in ethics, I am concerned with others
through what others mean to me, without rational justifications, while in morality, what we are
concerned with are norms and, therefore, the fundament of morality is culture and there are so
many different moralities as cultural criteria, while there is only one ethics. This is how we can
conduct ourselves ethically, but immorally, like when Jesus saves the prostitute from being stoned
to death, since Jewish morality at the time demanded this punishment by its validity criterion, or we
can conduct ourselves morally, but not ethically, as is the case whenever a company throws a
certain amount of toxic residues in the environment knowing that it causes an ecological damage,
but which is permitted by law. And, obviously, one can be both ethical and moral, immoral and
unethical. Well, this is not a putting into a comparative framework of ethics, but showing the
dynamics that constitutes it, if we create justifications for our ethical operation, we will be conducting
ourselves morally, and ethics does not need justifications, exactly because it is a conscience, a
feeling, each one knows when to act through the desire to shelter the other or another, and when
not to.

What has become important is the consensual desire to create sustainability for the human world
and the natural world, which has to do with the fact that we are becoming aware of the damage we
are creating to both the biosphere and the anthroposphere, and which at a last moment this
damage always returns to us the individuals and different communities we formed due to the
systemic systemic nature of cultural-biological processes.

In fact, nowadays, we find ourselves at a crossroad between two eras, we are at the door of the
possibility of a new cultural change in which ethical concern with people, communities and the
entire biosphere is the cardinal point around which all the rest can change if we have the desire and
proper awareness. However, before we see this, let us look at some fundamental aspects of the
human, social and education.

Fundaments of the individual-social unit and of education

We live in a historic time in which human beings create pain and suffering in their lives, in the lives
of others and in their surroundings. How does this happen to us? Human beings, as beings that live
in communities, are not genetically determined. They must live with human beings to become
human beings: we need a social living to become social beings, and we make the body and soul ill
when we lack this social living, which is realized through cultural cohabitation, and the type of social
cohabitation we realize will depend on the cultural way in which we live and cohabit.
However, even in this social living, we need our individual living, which is what gives shape to our
living, and whose preservation guides the course of our series of transformations through any tasks
we must pass through in the community to which we belong. The meaning of the individual being is
obtained through conception in the cohabitation with the adults with whom we must cohabit in the
process of becoming people in the social cohabitation. The individual meaning of living is an
individual-social direction. There is no contradiction between the individual and the social, besides
the theories that for over 200 years have placed discursively and operationally these spheres in
opposition through a dualist and linear epistemological substrate. In fact, in a strict sense, there is
little, in terms of the processes that constitute it, separation between public and private companies,
the dynamics that sustains both and makes them possible occurs unitarily intertwined. Without the
public space that citizens enjoy in their cohabitation, private companies would not be able to
emerge, these take from this space all that they need to subsist and deliver to this space what
society needs for its subsistence. Furthermore, in this wise, we can state that every company is
eventually public, since its tasks always have consequences in the public space, obviously, it is not
public in the sphere of the property of the shareholders, but rather in the dynamics that makes
possible, creates, realizes and preserves its existence in the wider matrix in which it exists and
where its products and services make sense or not.

We are individuals in a social sphere, and the social arises out of the cohabitation of individuals. For
this reason, in a harmonious human community, without discriminations, without abuses, open to
cooperation in mutual respect, there is no contradiction between the individual and the social.

In the world in general, we find ourselves experiencing the systematic negation of the relational
conditions that make possible the growth of children and youngsters as a process in which they are
transformed into adult people with an individual-social sense of living capable of generating and
preserving a social cohabitation of collaboration in the creation of a cohabitation in honesty, mutual
respect and well-being, fundaments of democratic cohabitation. And we carry out this denial mainly
in the unconscious, but also in the conscious, at home, on the street, in schools, at work, means of
communication, leisure spaces, etc. on disbelieving, denying, invalidating, the possibility that the
concern and ethical conduct are actually in the center of our spontaneous individual and social
action.

We state, proclaim, argue that the future is uncertain, that nothing is safe, that in a few years
knowledge will become outdated, that we must obtain success at any cost, and we state, proclaim
and argue in the family, on the street, in universities, in public life, in television programs. Yet we
are surprised that there is juvenile toxicomania, juvenile delinquency, school violence, domestic
violence, labor abuses, child pregnancy, dishonesty. How can boys, girls and youngsters learn
another way of living if this is the living and cohabitation that we, adults, seems to validate with our
conduct, with our lack of ethics in our productive, material and intellectual activities, in our unfulfilled
promises, the violation of our agreements, our lack of reflection and our unwillingness to reflect, see
and correct our mistakes?
Look at our beginning: As babies, we are born in total trust, structural, implicit, that there will be an
adult world that will welcome, contain and love us. We come to the world in the same implicit trust
as a butterfly on leaving the chrysalis, the trust that there will be a world there full of nectars and
flowers. That is, our biological character emerges in coherence and close relationship with the
biological character of the environment that will contain us and with regard to which we can
preserve our structural link if the conditions are given to make this possible.

Human beings are creators of worlds. The human baby, the boy, the girl emerge in an operational-
relational dynamics that will create the world in which he or she will live in, in the joy or pain, with or
without regard for himself or herself, in honesty or in lie, in well-being or discomfort, in love or
resentment, but it will always be together with others or against other human beings, in a desired
fulfilled or frustrated to belong to a social sphere that will welcome it, respect it, where being a
person makes sense. But how does this occur?
The juvenile forms of all mammals are transformed in the cohabitation with the adults and other
young with which they cohabit. Boys, girls and human youth are transformed in the course of their
growth in the cohabitation with the human adults with whom they cohabit, being incorporated in a
social sphere or other as they feel their presence and that their lives make individual-social sense,
and according to the inspiration that arises in them in this cohabitation. What then is the constitutive
dynamics of learning? To learn is always a result of the drift itself of transformations in cohabitation,
we learn with or without education, we learn with or without teaching. And we will learn according to
the cohabitation.

Babies born in implicit trust that there will be a mother, father or adult that will receive them with
tenderness, and that will create with other adults an sphere of welcoming cohabitation in which it
can actually rely on as the most natural flow of its living. All social living beings live thus in the
social sphere to which they belong. Mutual trust is the basis of human cohabitation. When this trust
is broken, it is because there is betrayal, which can take many forms. And when a human being
experiences betrayal; there comes pain, disenchantment, resentment, depression, stress, the
desire to go away, to seek another human sphere in which one can recover this trust lost in the
desire of living and cohabiting in the physical and corporal tranquility that arises out of this
fundamental trust.

And this fundamental trust is lost when there are explicit or implicit promises not kept, betrayal of
consensuses that are experienced as legitimately expected, at any time of life. Except that boys,
girls and youngsters do not have many resources to recover this trust, unlike older people, who
have some level of autonomy in the social sphere, whether economic or in decision-making power.
Where did we fail, in our actions or in our commitment with what we say we want from our social
cohabitation?

We talk of older people to make a difference from an adult person. A person can be older and not
necessarily live and cohabit as an adult person that respects itself and whose living and cohabiting
is found in this fundamental axis of the center of self through which he or she can say yes or no
through himself or herself. A person becomes an adult not by the fact of being of age, having a job
or children, the adult person emerges if he or she lives and cohabits through the fundamental
ethical center of social cohabitation.

The violation of the fundamental trust of social cohabitation is the beginning of peripherization of
both the youth and older people, in situation of poverty as well as economic richness. This human
peripherization appears in people as rebellion, aggression, depression, delinquency, non-
participation, mistrust, toxicomania, when we do not create the social space to live and cohabit in
the psychic and material well-being that we promised them explicitly or implicitly.

And speaking of the dynamics underlying the global social non-sustainability, in its core, we will
find the multidimensional dynamics of human peripherization, since this is what disintegrates the
conditions of possibility for realization and preservation of the relations of congruency or structural
link in the human relational plane of the anthroposphere.

What is painful is that we are the ones responsible, when we do not act as responsible adults, when
we cultivate human peripherization on making social promises we will not fulfill, on thus reducing
the possibilities of boys, girls and youngsters of growing in the well-being that brings along with it a
cohabitation with social meaning. Human peripherization occurs like any manner of living and
cohabiting, whose consequence is the alienation that produces a cohabitation that is far from the
respect for oneself and for others. Human peripherization is not present as a way of coexistence
only where there is material poverty, but there is also human peripherization where there are no
economic problems, just look at how intrafamily violence and toxicomania are dynamics very
present in the economically accommodated strata. And what does this show us? That human
peripherization occurs when we live and cohabit outside our fundamental biological condition of
social beings, which is love. Love occurs as a domain of relational conducts through which each
one, the other and another emerge as legitimate other in cohabitation with each one. While love is
an occurrence, to occur, what an observer distinguishes as loving conduct is a relational dynamic of
cohabitation, of co-existence centered on respect for oneself, for others, in the social space in
which one belongs. To love is to see, to see is to love, that is, we are not speaking of feelings, we
are not talking about values, of being caring and compassionate, but rather of the operational
dynamics of the mutual acceptance that gave origin to the social sphere from the time of the first
social insects.

And when, where and how were we so blind as to create spaces where it is possible for our boys,
girls and youngsters to be peripherized? People are not born delinquents, they become so,
according to the manner of cohabitation they had.

What is our likelihood of leaving this painful crossroad? Crossroad that we continue to preserve,
realizing and creating in our manner of relating in this culture that we live. Our great possibility is of
becoming loving, serious and responsible adults. Boys, girls and youngsters wish for adults whom
they can trust and respect.

There is only one way out, and which is a fact of our biological constitution: the Biology of Love. The
procedure of social action is to generate in human communities the Reflection-Action-Ethics in
every activity, with the biology of love as a reference of reflection and action always from conception
to adult autonomy.

The baby is born loving, that is, we are all born loving, but we were frequently betrayed with
negligence, punishment, abandonment, corporation and psychical violation. And it is from this
betrayal that the boy, girl, youngster move away, becoming peripherical, and in their resentment
seek another social sphere that will receive them, whether through delinquency, drugs, theories that
justify the discrimination and aggression. In short, it is a path that irremediably leads to diseases of
the psyche, of the body and of the soul that are expressed through fanatism, authoritarianism,
psychic and physiological disorders like bulimia, anorexia, self-mutilation.

Young human beings in the power of their undoubtful growth seek a meaning for their individual
living that gives them a legitimate social belonging, but if they do not find it, they become
peripherical in the rage, social aggression and rebellion that marches toward resentment.
Youngsters desperately want adults to respect, adults that will receive them, respect them; adults
that show the path toward a desirable loving world; adults that are willing to reflect, notice their
mistakes and correct them. Youngsters want to feel that they have presence, want to feel that they
are a legitimate part of living in a social sphere in which their living has an individual-social
meaning. And when youngsters feel that this social sphere does not emerge, or they feel that when
it appears to be there betrays them, rejects and invalidates, in the attempt to obtain or recover the
presence they want, through insecurity regarding their own worth that this situation generates, men
enter the path of the bully who oppresses the weaker ones, and women enter the path of cynicisms
that pretends an autonomy they know they do not have. Youngsters live in the pain and suffering of
not being seen, of not having individual-social meaning, and through the resentment that this
generates, seek to belong to a different, foreign, transgressor community, accepting a “brain wash”
that promises to give them presence and individual-social meaning in the audacity of being deniers
of the same human sphere they wish to belong to.

Exiting individual-social denial is a recursive, multidimensional system and requires the co-
inspiration of a Country Project, and later a World Project, understood as a purpose of
cohabitation that cultivates in a quotidian manner the spontaneity of mutual respect in an sphere of
cohabitation where all people are legitimate citizens taking part in its creation and preservation.
8
Some fundamental elements of co-inspiration in a Country Project :

8
Reflections made from the unprecedented text: Proyecto País, do Instituto Matríztico. Presented to
Presidente Michelle Bachellet in the year 2006. From: Patricio García, Ximena Dávila, Humberto Maturana,
Cristóbal Gaggero & Ignacio Muñoz.
A) That is concerned with the quotidian dynamics of the transformation of boys, girls and
youngsters into adults, into citizens that respect themselves, with ethical sense, and with autonomy
of reflection and action, in the undoubtful course of their spontaneous growth;

B) That is concerned with the continuous creation and quotidian preservation of a space of
cohabitation of adults that facilitate and preserve what they choose spontaneously as ethical and
responsible conduct in their different activities, regardless of what they may be;

C) That is in charge of creating spaces to enable citizens to guide their creativity and their
knowledge through their ethical and social conscience, such that their living and doing, whatever
they may be, contribute toward the creation of a national anthroposphere that creates well-being for
all its members in the preservation of the biosphere that makes them possible.

Spheres:
1. For this, all schools must have spheres for sports, artistic, technical, scientific, literary
activities that can capture the vital energy, creative imagination and effective action of all
the youth, guided and followed up by receiving and inspiring masters, in a cohabitation that
due to the mere fact of being lived, will result in a magnifier of respect by itself. With this, it
is also fundamental for schools to consider welcoming spheres for the families.

2. The family as a fundamental nucleus of the transformation process of its members must be
invited and incorporated in a participation that expands the awareness of the essential that
adults are with whom boys, girls and youngsters share since their birth to the everyday of
living. Since it is the responsibility of fathers, mothers, grandmothers, adults in general, due
to the mere fact of living and cohabiting with them, to be the first ethical and loving
reference in the live of the younger ones. The family is not only the provider of a place to
live, feed, seek a nest, it is also the seeker of a niche formed by adults that respect
themselves as autonomous beings. If this occurs, boys, girls and youngsters will emerge in
their living spontaneously in a psychic and relational space where one does not talk of
respect, but where one lives and cohabits in respect as a way of natural cohabitation. The
great task of adults with whom boys, girls and youngsters share great part of the
fundamental transit of their vital history is to seek to create all the spaces so that these, in
turn, become adults who respect themselves.

3. It is also necessary to have a deep conscious and responsible participation from other
social players that are part of the anthroposphere in which boys, girls and youngsters grow,
such as companies and consortiums, the means of communications, politicians,
educational institutions and in general all adults who in one way or another are a
transforming reference for citizenship.

It is in this sphere in which the so-called five forces (Governments, companies, academic
sector, organizations of civil society and citizen networks) have an opportunity and a
fundamental relevance at the time of creating spaces of conversation, collaboration and
interlocution among communities and institutions for the consolidation of democratic
cohabitation.

The psychic space is an unconscious source of all conscious and unconscious action, and as such
defines in each instant the relational character of all that living beings and human beings do. In the
occurrence of our human living, we flow in the successive habit in the intertwining of many psychic
spaces that define in each instant the character of our activity in this instant. Whenever we evoke a
psychic space, we evoke an sphere of relational doings in the living and cohabitation.

Human beings, like all living beings, are emotional beings whose doing and feeling, in all the
dimensions of living, are guided moment to monument by their emotional flow. What is peculiar to
us is that among living beings, human beings exist in the talking , and it is through the talking that
they are rational beings who use reason to justify or deny their emotions. That is, even if we say
that we act by reason, it is emotions, desires, preferences, the fact of wanting or not wanting to do
something, that determines the rational arguments we use to do something or not.

This is why a Country Project is not only a set of possible doings, it not a set of rational arguments
that justify these tasks and deny others, but is rather an emotional space, a configuration of desires,
a psychic-relational space that determines in each instant which doings and which rational
arguments we accept or reject as operations that allow us to realize our desires, as well as give us
or not the emotional energy (the will) to do them.

Iniquity is a systemic and recursive psychic-relational space in which consciously or unconsciously

the systemic relational dynamic is preserved or wished to be preserved in which lives the
discrimination and non-sustainability of human communities. The preservation of living in which
boys, girls and youngsters growth in a living and cohabitation without individual-social meaning in
their personal realization, or lose them in the relational path that should guide them to adult life of a
democratic cohabitation, occurs in the psychic space of iniquity.

Aggression, abuse, misleading, dishonesty, exploitation, theft, are all aspects of a living and
cohabitation in the psychic space of iniquity. the path out of the psyche of iniquity is the biology of
love: operating spontaneously in the domain of relational conducts through which each one, the
other and another emerge as legitimate other in cohabitation with each one. And this is precisely
possible because human beings, even though able to cultivate aggression, denial of another, are in
their fundamental condition loving beings, beings that fall sick in body and soul if they do not love.

On talking of psychic space, we are connoting the relational operational dynamics that like the
present history of dynamic architecture of the organism-niche changing unit, constitutes in each
instant the relational and operational weft that an organism can live. In us, human beings, talking is
a central part of the niche in the organism-niche dynamic relation, and what we do and evoke in our
conversation and our reflection in the course of our living contributes toward configuring the psychic
spaces we experience in our relational living. Therefore, if we wish to leave the psychic space of
iniquity, we must change our saying and our thinking as well as the fundament of the change of our
doing. Respect is experienced by respecting, honesty is experienced in the honest conduct; respect
generates mutual respect, honesty generates mutual trust, and mutual respect and mutual trust
generate collaboration; mutual respect, mutual trust and collaboration create space for co-
inspiration in the creativity that creates individual-social-ecological well-being.

When one knows that one knows one cannot pretend not to know. The knowledge that one knows
in the biology of love is the basis of individual living and cohabitation in the Reflection-Action-
Ethics.

We will discuss the central theme, education, in depth. In the historic moment in which we live, the
change in direction we desire in our cohabitation will not occur spontaneously, it requires
commitment, the awareness of an intentional act, requires that we wish to do it, requires a change
through reflection that creates the space for the desired action through the will to do it. Every
human conduct emerges in the unconscious intimate emotional sphere that constitutes the
operational space that specifies in each instant in the feeling of a person what is possible and what
is not possible, what is desirable and what is not desirable in his or her relational living.

Furthermore, every human being learns right from birth in the company of the older ones with whom
he or she cohabits the emotional-operational matrix in which he or she realizes his or her living as a
participant or peripherical particular member of the community that receives or rejects him or her. If
a baby, boy, girl or young person grows in the a loving and caring sphere that receives and
respects him or her as a legitimate member of the social community in which he or she lives, he or
she grows to become a social and ethical being capable of collaborating and co-inspiring in a
common project without fear of fading on doing so. How would one achieve this now?
Seeking to make this baby, boy, girl or youngster to find in the course of his or her transformation
into an adult with older ones near the home, in the street, school and university that see him or her,
hear, do not lie, do not betray, whom they can respect. This is what all boys, girls and youngsters
desire, adults who in their cohabitation with them are “social educators”, beings whose living and
cohabitation consciously and unconsciously they wish to repeat.

Our recursively systemic look through the understanding of cultural-biology explains this
phenomenon that is occurring in the present that each one lives dynamically, and consciously or
unconsciously while we are alive, that Education is a transformation in cohabitation.

Therefore, does the educational task itself belong to masters only? Fathers, mothers?
Communicators?

Someone may ask what happens with education in this transformation in cohabitation? It has to do
with boys, girls and youngsters becoming adults in a certain way. If we look at the animal world, we
see that adults are not adults during sexuality, but rather when they stop being dependent on others
in a basic meaning to survive. They are always related to others, but there is a time in which the
little animal has a control of the world that allows it to act with autonomy and this is the moment of
adult age. Our real problem through the perspective of education is that this will occur in any form. It
may happen that some boys are unable to and in this case, one says that they are dependent
adults; but in fact, they are not adults, do not have autonomy, do not decide for themselves, for
good or bad.

It has to do with the fact that boys, girls and youngsters live in an experimental space of
transformation in the cohabitation (which starts in the uterus), in which they go on transforming,
such that this space creates possibilities of autonomy in the interaction, such that there comes a
time in which they are adults.

A space of cohabitation where he or she has been transformed into an adult, as a being that
respects himself or herself, that respects others, that can collaborate, that is autonomous, that is
responsible.

Education is a transformation in the cohabitation. Boys, girls and youngsters are transformed with
the adults with whom they cohabit. In terms of psychic space, they are submerged in the
conversations of the life of adults. Thus they will depend on what happens in the education of the
adult’s psyche. If we want democratic cohabitation, we must cohabit in a way that implies this
psyche and children will grow doing things, making conversations and living the feeling of this type
of cohabitation.

What happens to us is that when we talk of education, what we want is to prepare children from a
technical point of view to operate in the market space, to operate in the sphere of the search for
success. And this is alienating, because it is blind with regard to the human world in love.

It is an education that denies itself, that does not see the boys, girls and youngsters being
educated. It does not see them because its attention is directed toward the future, on what boys
should be in the future. However, the central point is that the transit up to adult life is a transit from a
dependent life to an autonomous life. To be autonomous means to act through oneself. To say yes
or no, through oneself and bear the consequences. And this is the essential part of education, not
the techniques, practices or theories.

We live a great confusion when we think that the themes of cohabitation, that human problems in
general are solved with technology or with science. Neither science nor technology solve human
problems; human problems are all relational problems. They belong to emotion.

Technological problems, scientific problems, are absolutely simple. They have to do with skills of
manipulation, whether to study something or to construct something. Cohabitation on the other
hand is not of this nature. Cohabitation has to do with the emotions, with respect, with love, with the
possibility of listening, of respecting ourselves in discrepancies. It has to do with making a world of
cohabitation in which one is thankful or not to live.
The central task of education and of democracy is that this transit toward adult life is in the
configuration of a world that is thankful to the boy, to the girl and to the youngsters in which one can
cooperate and learn everything because there is no fear of fading in the cooperation and there is no
shame of not knowing.

If boys, girls and youngsters cohabit with living, serious and responsible adults and enjoy their
tasks, that is, love what they do, whatever it is, and teach them in respect and paying attention to
the difficulties that boys, girls and youngsters with whom they wish to cohabit might have at some
time, these boys, girls and youngsters will spontaneously incorporate in their living the mathematic
view, the biological view, the view of mechanics or of gastronomy and these subjects or jobs will be,
so to speak, the instrument of cohabitation through which this person being educated will be
transformed into a socially integrated adult with trust in himself or herself, with capacity to cooperate
and learn anything without losing one’s social awareness and therefore ethics.

In such circumstances: who is a social educator? Any adult who chooses to live in the psyche of a
creator of cohabitation spaces in which boys, girls and youngsters can grow desiring to become
autonomous, serious, joyful and responsible adults, with ethical and social awareness in a changing
human cosmos that they create as a desirable sphere to live and cohabit in it in mutual respect by
respecting themselves as primarily loving beings.

Is this possible? Without a doubt, it is possible. Actually, all older adults, all adults will live this way if
they are not stuck in educational, philosophical or political theories that deny them in the conscious
or unconscious desire to preserve a cohabitation in relations of authority and submission, of
competition, success and addiction for power and profit.

The mother, father, master, politicians, in short, all adults from the time in their living in which they
become adults, autonomous, reflective, who live and cohabit through the center of themselves are,
with their living, the best space of fertile earth for the growth of boys, girls and youngsters.

On living thus, we become social educators, without effort, not only in the desire to live and cohabit
with boys, girls and youngsters in a space where they are not an impertinence, where all their
questions are legitimate, where one does not punish the mistake, and where there is no fear of
fading because one thinks differently and where there is room for reflection.

Cultural change, change of era and the end of leadership in the era of co-inspiration.

Let us look at the dynamics involved in cultural change. To the extent in which a culture, as a way
of human living seems in our view as a private network of conversations, we can see that its
constitutive dynamics is a private configuration of coordination of coordination of actions and
emotions (as private intertwining of language and emotion). And we can then see that a culture that
emerges when a human community starts to preserve generation after generation a new network of
coordination of coordination of actions and emotions as its own manner of living and disappears or
changes when the network of conversations that constitutes fails to preserve itself. Therefore, to
understand cultural change, we must be able to both characterize the closed network of
conversations that as quotidian practice of coordination of actions and emotions among the
members of a particular community constitute the culture that this community lives, like that of
recognizing the conditions of emotional change under which such coordination of actions of a
community may change such that a new culture emerges in it.

For this, it is essential to understand the emotional fundament of the cultural being; to the extent in
which we grow as members of a culture, we grow in a network of conversations, participating with
other members of it in a continuous consensual transformation that submerges us in a way of living
that makes us, and seems spontaneously natural. There, to the extent in which we obtain our
individual identity and our individual and social conscience, we follow as something natural the
feeling of our mothers and adults with whom we cohabit, learning to live the emotional flow of our
culture that makes all our actions, actions belonging to it. Our mothers teach us, without knowing,
and we learn from them, in the innocence of an non-reflected coexistence, the feeling of their
culture, by simply living with them. The result is that, once we grow into members of a particular
culture, everything in it seems to us proper and evident and, without noticing, the flow of our feeling
(of our desires, preferences, rejections, aspirations, intentions, choices…) guide our actions in the
changing circumstances of our living, such that all our actions are actions that belong to this culture.

It is through the reflection made up to this point that we propose to see the evolution of the human,
abstracting, from what his or her cultural-biological history shows us, the fundamental sensing and
emotions that guided him or her. However, we center ourselves fundamentally in the last era for
9
reasons of space .

We will thus talk of psychic eras, showing the configurations of the emotion of quotidian living that
seem to us to characterize different times of human history as distinct psychic spaces or distinct
ways of living in which all dimensions of relational cohabitation occurred and where they occurred.

The relational cohabitation was lived in each instant of each psychic era in a present in constant
change in which the flow of the emotion emerged from time to time from the imperative historical-
operational and philosophical-epistemological background. What we are saying with this statement
is that in each moment of the historical-operational epigenesist that makes up the different psychic
eras of humanity, the human being preserved different desires, had different likes and preferences,
whose fundament was determined moment to moment by the living of the present.

The different psychic eras of humanity correspond, in our thinking, with the dynamic history of
integral transformation of the human psyche, from its conception, passing through infancy, youth,
through the adult condition and through reflective maturity, which configure in each instant in them
how one lives, where one guides oneself and how one understands the nature and feeling of the
human being in his or her belonging to the biosphere. In the mythical view, this elapsing of human
life from conception to its ending in maturity occurs as a recursive dynamics in which the wisdom of
maturity leads to the beginning of a new psychic history in the next generation, which can be more
desirable because it implies the possibility of repeating the cycle, but with a magnified displacement
of the conscience in a greater coherence with the natural world. The occurrence of the psychic eras
of humanity we talked about here realizes a mythical cycle, and enables a reflective space that in
depth is known and re-known through living itself in cohabitation. This occurrence of psychic eras of
humanity dates back to the Archaic era in the origin of the human being, the Post-post-modern era,
already mentioned previously, as the era in which one recovered the conscience and actions lost
during the course of human belonging to the biosphere, which is the existence in depth in which the
human being is possible and occurs. Recovery of this conscience in systemic coherences makes it
possible to open and expand the recursive systemic view that makes up the human being as a live
being, which can reflect on his or her own living and the worlds that create this living.

Archaic psychic era:

Fundamental emotional dynamic: loving as a spontaneous occurrence.

This Era tells us about the origin of the human being in the origin of the family as a permanent way
of cohabiting in the intimacy of psychic-corporal-relational pleasure and well-being. Thus emerges

9For more about this, see: Dávila, X. & Maturana H. Eras psíquicas de la Humanidad. In:
Habitar Humano: En Seis Ensayos de Biología-Cultural. Coleção Instituto Matríztico-JC
Sáez Editor. Santiago de Chile. 2008.
the talking and conversing as a way of cohabiting in the relational intimacy in the coordination of
doings and emotions:

Homo sapiens-amans: Spontaneous presence of love.

Emergence of the human lineage in the preservation of conversation from one generation to
another in the learning of children.

Homo sapiens-amans amans: Presence of the preservation of love.

In this Era, we live the evolutive history of the Homo sapiens-amans’ lineage and its possible
division into three lineages: Homo sapiens-amans amans, Homo sapiens-amans agressans and
Homo sapiens-amans arrogans. These three lineages emerged as cultural lineages of which the
only current one preserved as cultural-biological lineage is the Homo sapiens-amans amans. Had
love as a cultural-biological lineage not been preserved in our evolutive drift, the Homo sapiens-
amans amans would not have been preserved, and we would have disappeared. Only be
preserving the psychic-corporal well-being that is preserved in love will human beings of today be
able to preserve living.

The other two lineages, had they evolved as cultural-biological lineages, would have been extinct,
despite also emerging with certain frequency as transitory cultural lineages.

The Homo sapiens-amans agressans lineage occurs in a cohabitation that preserves the blindness
of aggression.

The Homo sapiens-amans arrogans lineage occurs in a cohabitation that preserves the blindness of
arrogance.

Matricial psychic era:

Fundamental emotional dynamic: loving as a desired cohabitation.

This is the Era of the series of transformations of the Homo sapiens-amans amans: the
fundamental manner of cohabitation is that of small groups that collaborate in the activities of
sharing the quotidian living, united in the sensuality, tenderness and sexuality as an sphere of well-
being. This psychic-corporal well-being emerges spontaneously, but does not emerge from
reflection but rather from a way of living and cohabiting in coherence with the natural world. The
quotidian attitude is that of collaboration in the quotidian living, in search for food, care for children,
use of instruments, in short, in a way of cultural living that opens the space for co-inspiration and
that does not give room for the preservation of domination and submission and where aggression is
an occasional occurrence that does not guide cohabitation.

In this era, we live the generation of cultural worlds and knowledge of the worlds we live in.

Matricial cultures, centered on relations of collaboration and co-inspiration emerge. The

consciousness of the unit of existing is expanded.

Extinction of the agressans and arrogans lineages, produced by the restriction of a conscience of
the unit of existing, which results in the relational blindness that create the emotions of aggression
and arrogance. The lineages that emerge in the expansion of aggression and of omnipotence as a
cultural quotidian living, move toward their own extinction because they destroy themselves and the
biological environment that makes them possible. This would have happened with the Homo
sapiens-amans agressans and Homo sapiens-amans arrogans forms of living as self-destructive
cultural-biological lineages when through aggression and arrogance, they entered the dynamic of
hegemonic expansion. These ways of living often appear in later eras during our patriarchal history
(Era of appropriation) under the form of fanatism and empires that created their own extinction with
human pain and/or environmental damage that they produced in a living through blindness that
produce aggression and arrogance.

Psychic era of appropriation:

Fundamental emotional dynamic: veneration of authority.

It is the Era of the awakening of manipulative conscience in the expansion of manual and
explanatory skill in doing and living that opens the feeling on appropriating oneself of and of the
worlds that emerge in cohabitation. Loss of confidence in the spontaneous coherences of the world
in which one lives in and expansion of the desire for control. On the emergence of appropriation,
some ways of cohabitation appear in the appropriation and discrimination, and with the
discrimination, cultures emerge centered on relations of domination, submission, hierarchy, and
denial of the self and of another in authority and obedience. Cultural lineages of Homo sapiens-
amans agressans and arrogans. The moment that trust is lost in the spontaneous coherences of
the world, fear and insecurity appear, and the guiding emotion in this era is mistrust, control and
power, which seek dominion over things and over God. Believing to recover through control and
power the trust in the coherences of the world in which one lives.

Modern psychic era:

Fundamental emotional dynamic: dominion of authority and alienation in power.

It is the Era of the expansion of scientific and technological knowledge: knowledge, appropriation
and dominion of the world in which one lives because one thinks and feels that it is dominated.

We live in the trust that we can directly or indirectly know the essence of the worlds in which we live,
the confidence that the knowledge of the world or of the worlds in which we live will give universal
validity to our arguments and cognitive affirmations. One acts in the belief that knowledge will create
well-being in humanity.

Post-modern psychic era:

Fundamental Dynamics: Dominion of Knowledge.

It is the Era of the domination of science and technology: we can do everything we imagine if we
operate with the operational coherences of the dominion in which we imagine it. We are
omnipotent, we are gods in the doing, we, human beings, are instruments to achieve our plans.

We live in the hegemony of leadership: appropriation of truth, fanatism, ideological alienations, in

innovation, manipulation, dishonesty.

We live the generation of pain and suffering in the anthroposphere and biosphere. We also move in
our living in the search for eternity and prison in the psychic solitude of the alienation of
omnipotence.

Post-post-modern psychic era:

Fundamental emotional dynamic: Emergence of conscious reflection and ethical action.

It is the Era of pain and suffering of the anthroposphere and biosphere that the alienation in
omnipotence creates, it opens space for reflection and emergence of conscience of the ideological
and technological alienations, and of the pain and suffering they create.
It is the era in which ethical responsibility in the anthroposphere and biosphere emerges through
the expansion of the awareness that we are the ones that create the pains and suffering we
experience in the anthroposphere and biosphere.

We start to live in the end of leadership: the path is opened for reflection-ethical action,
reemergence of honesty and the desire to collaborate and co-inspire.

The awareness and understanding of the cultural-biological matrix of human existence emerges,
which generates, realizes and preserves the human as creator of the cosmos in which we live as
the relational and operational sphere in which we experience our living.

We live the following psychic dimensions:

Awareness and desire of reflection-ethical action.

Awareness of belonging to the anthroposphere and biosphere.
Awareness of the care and responsibility for the biosphere and anthroposphere.

Thus, the modern era is the era of doing and knowing, the era in which human capacities in the
spheres of doing and of scientific explanation become apparent; the era in which human beings find
themselves with technological capacities that open to them door of action before only possible in
the imagination. The post-modern era is the era of understanding; the era in which we notice that
we can do anything we imagine if we operate with the operational coherences of the relational
sphere in which we imagine; the era in which we notice the consequences of what we do, but do
not commit ourselves to act according to this awareness. However, the consequences of what we
do are there, we can see, hear, touch and feel them. The fact of not committing ourselves to act
according to our awareness, due to attachment to our certainties, because we wish to consciously
and unconsciously preserve the omnipotence of believing that we can do anything we wish by
preserving the operational coherences in the dominion where we wish, that is, the love for power
and omnipotence, leads us to the path of ailment. And it is through this psychic space that the post-
post-modern era begins. And it begins when we notice that we know that we know and that we
understand what we believe we understand, and at the same time we notice that this knowing that
we know that we know, and this understanding that we believe we understand commits us to action;
the era in which we are aware that if we do not act according to what we know we know, we lie to
ourselves and to others, including to our children: when one knows that one knows one cannot
pretend not to know without lying. The post-post modern era emerges as the era of ethical
awareness in our living and cohabitating, since we know what we know, understand what we
understand, which commits us to action. It does not however commit us to any action, committing
us to a conscious and responsible action so that the consequences of our acts do not harm others,
the era in which we do not want to remain in denial. We would also like to state that the post-post
modern era or the era of ethics in living and cohabitation is the era that creates an operational-
relational space in which we as living beings and human beings in particular feel more at ease,
more at home since our constitutive ontology guides us to live and cohabit as joyful, peaceful
beings in the preservation of well-being. This is the era in which we want to live in greater
coherence with the natural world, it is the era that places us at the center of our being loving beings.

While now we know that we know the consequences that our doing has in the human and
ecological sphere that emergences with our doing, and we act according to this knowledge that we
know, we are transiting to the post-post modern era. In the post-post modern era, we are more
aware of what we have to do to preserve the anthroposphere and biosphere so as to create and
preserve in them human living in well-being and psychic and operational harmony with other living
beings through respect for the legitimacy of their existence. We enter the post-post modern era
when we notice that the seriousness, efficiency and socially responsible creativity in any activity
expand in a community in which one lives in mutual respect and in autonomy in cooperation. On
entering the post-post modern era, we also notice that this occurs in a human community when its
members feel that what they do has meaning because they give it meaning with their living it, this
community is an ethical community. But how to act? What is the proper conduct to create this
cohabitation in the spontaneity of our feeling? What is the proper conduct to transit to the post-post
modern era and preserve the spontaneity of quotidian social responsibility? What must take place in
the soul of the tasks of productive activities? What must take place in the soul of the business
activity that opened the possibility of this change of era with so much pain and suffering in the
anthroposphere and biosphere, for this change to actually occur? We know it must occur, and we
also now that in general, if we do not immediately have an adequate conduct at hand to do what we
want to do, we can always conceive and create such a conduct, if we wish. That is, we know on
entering the post-post modern era that it is not lack of imagination or technological capacity that
prevents us from creating an adequate activity to create the cohabitation in well-being that we want,
regardless of the circumstance, but rather that it is the lack of desire to do so.
10
Why the End of leadership?

We live a moment in which we distinguish in people desires of well-being, joy and harmony with the
natural world, at the same time that we distinguish much pain and suffering in all humanity, wealth
and miseries that lead us to ask how we are living in the moment with the most creative potential
and capacity for action in our history, creating such much pain in many amidst the well-being of few.
We invite ourselves to look, to know how to look at our present, and we do this without fear and
without intension to hide what we see. What do we see?

We know that with our living, we continuously create the world we live in, and that the world we
create in our living recursively modifies our living and our cohabitation, constituting an
anthroposphere that as ecological weft of human cohabitation emerges as a constituent part of the
biosphere, in a recursive dynamics that will neither stop nor be stopped, except upon our extinction.
In such circumstances, if we look to the present in which we live, we can see the emergence of the
post-post modern era in the growing presence in our day-to-day cohabitation of ecological and
ethical reflections and considerations. Ecological and ethical reflections and considerations that
emerge in a change of awareness through knowing that we know that well-being in the
anthroposphere can only emerge and be preserved as an individual daily act of creativity in our
cohabitation.

Business activity is not, neither can it exist outside this change of awareness, since it emerges
mostly as a result of changes in human living that is presence brings along in the anthroposphere.
In fact, no human community today is possible without productive business activities, both because
these are now an intrinsic part of the ecological sphere of the anthroposphere in which we live and
because of the global transformation of the biosphere itself that has been occurring as a systemic
11
result of the preservation of its operation.

In this transformation of the anthroposphere and biosphere, the magnitude of the presence of
business activity and the magnitude of the consequences of this activity in our human living and
cohabitation makes it necessary to reflect on the nature of this activity as an aspect of our quotidian
cohabitation. Business activity under the notion of free company and free market is viewed as an
activity that, due to arising out of a private initiative, can be called private, even though in a strict
sense it always has public consequences in the community in which it emergences, that makes it
possible and that sustains it. However, even if any business activity as an activity that occurs in the
flow of living and cohabitation of a human community participates at the same time in these two
relational dimensions (private and public), at present, we point out the emphasis that is placed in

10These reflections appear in detail in the essay by Dávila X. & Maturana H. La gran
oportunidad: fin de la psiquis del liderazgo en el surgimiento de la psiquis de
la gerencia co-inspirativa. In magazine of Universidade do Chile: "Estado, Gobierno y
Gestión Pública" N° 10. December 2008. (Written in 2006).

11Remember Systemic law # 1: Whenever in a set of elements, certain relations start to be preserved, space is
created for everything to change around the relations that preserve them.
the present to separate the private from the public as if the two were opposite and excluding
relations. Thus, it happens that we now find ourselves in a historical present in which one expects
that the creativity of the members of a company is directed more toward profit than the well-being of
the internal and external communities that make it possible. Furthermore, this occurs without
recognizing that, in the transformation of the anthroposphere and biosphere that companies create,
the central task of companies is now essentially public service, and without seeing that the profit-
orientation is a course that drags the anthroposphere to ecological and human misfortune. We have
been aware of this last data for a long time, but only recently have we been accepting that we know
that we know.

The satisfying of addictions for profit and power of the post-modern era requires that our planning is
successful, and of this to occur, we must be impeccable in the planning, and for the planning to
occur, the people who participate in its realization must not make mistakes, must not change
opinion, must not have initiatives that were not considered; in short, it requires that they be
conducted like robots. The wonderful thing about robots is that, except for error in its construction,
relational accident or error in its use, they behave impeccably and predictably according to their
design. Living beings in general, and human beings in particular, are not like this, they are not
robots. Human beings want to think, reflect, change opinion, have initiative, participate in what they
do. They want to be seen and heard as intelligent and creative beings. In fact, when we find
ourselves in a professional sphere in which one must operate in the certainty that the desired
results will be obtained in a particular project, one seeks to do anything to ensure that those who
take part in this project’s realization act with full precision according to what one deems to be the
proper procedure to obtain these results. That is, we want to project the conduct of our
“collaborators” and employees with awards, punishments and rational arguments so that they act
according to our specifications. In short, we want them to behave like multidimensional robots in
which we can trust. Whether we recognize or not, this is the task of leadership. However, the
effectiveness of a leadership, regardless of its denomination (friendly, receiving), always lasts for a
short time because people want to be creative participants, and if they are not, they soon tire,
become bored and desire something else. Leadership requires that followers abandon their own
autonomy of thought and allow themselves to be guided by another, trusting or being subjected to
the latter’s guidelines or desires, whether because they feel inspired, or due to fear of losing
something without access to complaint or reflective questioning. However, inspiration in the
activities of a group does not last in the absence of creative participation, and both complaints and
reflective questions cannot be detained indefinitely without giving rise to frustration, anger or
apathy.

When an activity is conceived that requires a particular procedure that can only be fulfilled through
an accurate conduct of the one who performs it, it is the nature of the activity and of the accurate
conduct that performs it that define the order and precision of what is one, not a leader. The cultural
history of the post-modern era shows us that if one wishes to obtain an accurate conduct through
the operation of a leader, sooner or later, the requirements and reflective restriction that this implies
lead to complaint, apathy and pain: leadership ceases to be effective, since people want to be
responsible for what they do. This history also shows us that the rebirth of reflection and of ethical
actions from the pain and suffering of the post-modern era that leads us to the post-post modern
era, on bringing with it the integral presence of the human being, opens the way toward
collaboration through autonomy of thought and action in co-inspiration of any mutual project. This
is what we refer to when we talk of the end of leadership in the birth of collaboration in co-
inspiration.

In other words, we propose recognizing that we live at present a change of awareness that leads to
the end of leadership and to the intentional beginning of co-inspirational management.

Collaboration occurs when what is done with others is done in the pleasure of doing, and one
therefore lives through autonomy of thought and freedom of action. And it is through collaboration
with co-inspiration, or inspiration with others in an activity in a psychic space of respect, trust, that
we feel safe and expand our intelligent and creative doing. This co-inspiration occurs when through
the pleasure of collaboration, one conceives and creates a project that emerges in common
because all those who participate in it act living the sphere of operational coherences of its
realization as a space of action and reflection that gives them respect, autonomy, responsibility and
freedom of thought, regardless of the activity. Collaboration and co-inspiration are psychic spaces
that constitute spheres of cohabitation in the doing and reflecting, where seriousness, responsibility,
efficiency and the quality of what we do, whether alone or with others, arises from the awareness
that each one knows that he or she does what is done because of the desire to do, and knows that
what is done has meaning to him or her because he or she took part in some way in its creation. In
short, collaboration and co-inspiration are not possible in leadership (regardless of its
denomination), because its psychic space always implies the denial of the self even in the loss of
autonomy of thought and action. Leadership, regardless of its beginning, occurs in the coordination
of obedience and submission; reason for the transitory that its effectiveness results in. On restricting
autonomy of thought and action in the psychic space that emerges with leadership, one restricts
the creativity and desire to participate, since it restricts inspiration. This is why, on opening the
space of ethical cohabitation in business activity, leadership disappears with emergence of the
post-post modern era. And when leadership disappears, the psychic space is opened where it is
possible to create what we are referring to as Co-Inspirational Management, as a way of guiding
the coordination of activities and reflections in any field of production, with conversations of
coordination of the desires and will to do what we know how to do in this field, and to be willing to
learn what we do not know. Co-inspirational management is based on mutual respect and on the
awareness that people, through respect for themselves, want to make what they know how to do
responsible and serious, and also want to learn what they do not know, responsibly and seriously,
because they want to fulfill their commitments through respect for themselves. We all prefer to
collaborate and obey; we all prefer to be present in what we do and not be mere professional
pawns; we all prefer to be autonomous and reflective in our doing by understanding its nature and
meaning, and thus be people participating in a common project, rather than be robotic
subordinates. We all wish for our doing to be distinguished as an impeccable activity.

Leadership ends because on denying the autonomy of thought of people, it denies the fundaments
of responsible conduct, and soon fails in its attempt to obtain quality and efficiency in the accurate
activity of any production environment. Thus its end occurs through the soul of the “followers” in
view of the psychic and operational urgency to recover ethical reflection and actions as central
aspects of professional cohabitation. With the end of leadership and the beginning of co-
inspirational management, we recover seriousness in the activity through the awareness that we
know that we know what we know, and in the tranquility that a cohabitation in mutual respect allows
one to say “I don’t know” without fear of punishment, because one knows that what one does not
know can be learned and because one wants to learn. In co-inspirational management, one knows
that mistakes are not lies, and one also knows that their recognition opens reflective spaces that
lead to changing the circumstances that gave rise to the mistakes. In a changing world, there will be
mistakes, and there will be knowledge that will become outdated, however, intelligent conduct and
continuous opening for reflection that corrects mistakes and expands creative conduct that mutual
respect brings along with it, will never become outdated. When we live in a world as a present in
which there is constant change, we live without the fear of error or mistake, in a psychic space open
at the same time to reflection and collaborative conversations, we live our changing sensing in
serenity and in safety, without anxieties or anguishes. That is, we live in the emotional space of
psychic and corporal harmony that we call well-being. And this is not trivial, since emotions as
relational domains are the basis of all our activity.

The three pillars of spontaneous responsible social conduct.

We living beings slide in living in a continuous structural and relational drift in a course that is
established instant upon instant through conversation of the sensing of well-being in the flow of our
doing and in our relational feeling, on doing in each instant what we want to do. This is why the
course that follows our living does not emerge guided by reason but rather by our emotions, our
preferences, our addictions, our desires… our will, which are, besides this, what actually
fundaments our choice of the reasons or motives with which we justify what we do in any domain of
our living, when we think we must justify it. And this is exactly why if we want to understand the
joys, the pains, harmonies and conflicts of our present, we must look at the course of the flow of the
emotion that guided the series of transformations of our living in the course of our history such that
we are living what we are living in the present we now live. That is, to want it to obtain what one
desires through the addiction of profit, power, or both, which guided moment to moment of our
search for knowledge and guidance of what we do with this knowledge in the post-modern era.
Speaking more directly, it is that business and productive activity in the post-modern era has
centralized itself in the love of profit and power as guides of the use of knowledge that makes them
possible, which created great pains, sufferings and iniquities that we currently experience in the
anthroposphere and biosphere. Moreover, it is precisely because it is our emotions that guide the
course of our living, which is now the awareness of the pain and suffering we create through the
love of profit and power in the post-modern era, which leads us to a post-post modern era, and
takes us to the reemergence of ethical awareness in the daily living that starts the end of
leadership.

That is, it is the change of epistemological substrate that occurs in our relational living when we
become aware that we know what we know that the pain and suffering of the post-modern era were
created by ourselves with our loves for profit and power, which gives rise to the post-post modern
era. And it is this change of awareness that makes it possible for us, human beings, to reappear
before ourselves, noticing that we are biologically loving beings, and that we are right from our
origins like the Homo sapiens-amans amans from more than three million years ago.

As we said above, “the post-post modern era is the era in which we are aware that if we do not act
according to what we know we know, we lie to ourselves at the same time that we lie to others,
including to our children and to the children of our children”. We know the pain and suffering we
created in the addiction for omnipotence in the post-modern era and we no longer want to pretend
we do not know. When one knows that one knows, one cannot pretend not to know, and one knows
that when one pretends not to know, one lies.

The knowledge that we know that we do not want to continue submerged in the psyche of
omnipotence of the post-modern era constitutes the state of awareness in which “I notice that I am
or we are no longer blind on leaving this era”. And this noticing is what creates the change in
awareness that gives rise to the emergence of the post-post modern era and makes it possible for
us to educate ourselves in our daily lives in the ethical operation that fundaments what we call the
three pillars of spontaneous ethical conduct or the three pillars of responsible social conduct. These
three pillars are the knowing, understanding, and the having at hand an adequate action for the
circumstance being experienced, and is the basis from which our spontaneous ethical action
emerges in the different relational crossroads where we must choose to do in the sphere of our
social cohabitation. The knowing refers to the noticing of the nature of the social and ecological
crossroads we experience and of the actions we must choose from; the understanding refers to the
noticing of different social and ecological consequences (systemic view) to the anthroposphere and
biosphere of the different actions we must choose from; and to have an adequate action at hand
refers to the availability of adequate means (having them at hand) to carry out the chosen actions.
When one does not know, there is blindness and there is no awareness that action is required,
when one does not understand what is one knows involves, there is no possibility of conceiving an
adequate action for the social and ecological crossroad one experiences, and when there is no
adequate action at hand, when there is no opportune activity, there is paralysis, depression,
abandonment, anger and indignation. If one knows what is the social and ecological relational
crossroad one is experiencing in the anthroposphere and one knows which possible actions to take,
if one understands the possible consequences to the anthroposphere and biosphere of choosing
one action over the other, out of these possible actions, and if one has an adequate (ethical) action
at hand, it is impossible not to choose the socially responsible conduct without acting in bad faith.

With the emergence of the post-post modern era, the understanding of the operation of the three
pillars of socially responsible conduct makes these an opportunity for reflection to place ethical
inspiration as fundament of any business activity, first intentionally and later spontaneously in
mutual respect of a human cohabitation in well-being. In other words, the new looking and feeling
that emerges with the epistemological substrate that recovers the ethical view in the daily living and
brings with it the emergence of co-inspirational management together with the end of leadership on
entering the post-post modern era, implies in placing reflection and ethical action as basic reflective
and operational element in all activities in the production environment. Economic advantages will
not longer be the primary objective in business activity, as if these were an asset in themselves, but
now the center will be well-being in all dimensions of human social cohabitation that contains it and
makes it possible.

We said that in the beginning of the post-post modern era, human beings find themselves the
creators of a productive and business activity that was and still is the generator of an
anthroposphere destructive of the conditions that make possible the existence and preservation of
the biosphere as a habitat in which human beings can live in systemic coherence with other living
beings on Earth in ecological and ethical well-being. At the same time we said that on expanding
our view, we see the context in which our living occurs at the same time in which our participation in
the generation of this occurrence, it happens that we do not like it. Furthermore, in this view, we see
the recursive dynamic of the consequences of what we do or do not do, and on seeing that we are
the creators of the worlds we live in through our doing (and not doing), we also see the
consequences of this in all dimensions of the habitation of other living beings with whom we share
and co-create the biosphere that makes us possible. In short, on expanding our look, we see that
we are responsible for the emergence of everything that is good and of everything that is bad in our
lives on being creators through what we do, whether with our hands, with our thoughts, with our
theorizing and with our explaining, of all dimensions of all the worlds that we live in. Regardless of
the circumstances in which we experience our living, human beings are creators, and are therefore
responsible for both what they do in their domestic lives and in the multiple worlds they live in
through their philosophizing, art, religion, science or technology as different ways of human
habitation. However, in this same view, we also notice that our business and productive activities do
not have to be destructive of the conditions that make possible our living in an ethical and socially
responsible habitat if we do not wish it to be so, since we have all the capacities and knowledge to
do all that we do creating an anthroposphere in equality and well-being, in mutual respect,
abandoning our love of profit and power.

In effect, as we also said in the beginning, “we live in a time in our historical series of
transformations in which we find ourselves being able to do all we can imagine if we operate with
the operational coherences of the relational and operational sphere in which we imagine”. And this
is perhaps why now, on noticing our full responsibility in the continuous transformation of the habitat
we created, we ask ourselves “what to do?” and we ask ourselves “what do to?” because the pain
and suffering we created in our love for profit and power is so great that it is manifested recursively
in the living of our children, of our friends and in our dignity, so much that we begin to notice that we
do not want to lie or lie to ourselves any longer because we can no longer continue pretending not
to know what we know that we know. And it is in this moment, in the moment in which we notice
that we no longer want to lie, when we start moving to the post-post modern era on asking
ourselves “what to do to leave the trap we have created ourselves”; “how to leave from a way of
cohabitation where we are willing to accept anything whenever we preserve our loves for profit and
power?”

We know that we know we can do anything we want to do if we wish to do; and we know that we
know that if we want to do, we can enter the search or in the intentional project to do adapted to our
knowledge and our understanding and comprehension. That is, if we want to, we can conceive an
operation of reflection and ethical action in which our business activity allows us to leave the self-
destructive trap we have created ourselves in the post-modern era through the love for
omnipotence. If we wish, we can create together a cohabitation in which we preserve through
respect for ourselves respect for diversity, esthetics and for the pleasure of friendship in the co-
inspiration of the creation of a cohabitation in well-being without seeking perfection.
This is the great opportunity of the business activity in the post-post modern era. Mooney as
energy, and knowledge as capacity for action, are divine and not demonical gifts if we do not give in
to the temptations of the love for omnipotence. If we find ourselves in the love for omnipotence, all
our creativity, all our innovation, will flow around the preservation of power at any cost, and our
company will be blind to all that does not contribute toward this ambition; to ethics, considerations
about ecological damage, health and esthetics of living will be dispensable, fraud, drugs,
contamination, as well as lying, even if we say otherwise, will be acceptable. In short, all that does
not contribute directly to our love for omnipotence will be expensive and difficulty, or we will say that
the necessary knowledge and technologies do not exist, even knowing that we have capacity to do
whatever we wish. If we find ourselves in the love for power, all that does not seem to conduct to
the submission of others will be debility, also, all our creativity, all our innovation will flow around the
preservation of power at any cost, and our lives will be blind to all that does not contribute toward
increasing our power; ethics, considerations on ecological damage or damage to health, dignity,
human life, will be dispensable, fraud, drugs, revenge, manipulation and lying, even if we say
otherwise, will be acceptable opportunities to satisfy our search for omnipotence. In short, all that
does not lead us to omnipotence and to power will be undesirable, difficult and threatening, and we
will create theories justifying ourselves in the desires for omnipotence and power that blinds us to
the damage we are creating through these addictions.

On leaving the love for omnipotence of the post-modern era and on starting with it the post-post
modern era, we notice that we are the ones who create the pain and suffering we experience in the
anthroposphere and biosphere, and likewise in an awakening, we find ourselves abandoning the
loves for profit and power in the emergence of our ethical conscience in our daily cohabitation. How
does not occur? This emergence of our ethical conscience is possible because we are biologically
beings moved with the pain and suffering of others because we see ourselves in them, unless, not
knowing, we deny validity of this view driven by a rational argument that intends to justify an
addiction. The eras, modern, post-modern and post-post modern, of which we speak, are like
different historical times of human cohabitation, different psychic spaces, different ways of relational
feeling and acting, different epistemological substrates of where we live our living. In the flow of our
historical series of transformations, we enter and leave the different psychic spaces we live in
through a change of awareness that emerges from an emotional change that like a change of
understanding and comprehension of the living we live overpowers us and opens or closes our
reflective vie in the sphere of ethical conduct. Even when the changes in awareness we experience
occur spontaneously and not intentionally, it is possible to facilitate those that expand our ethical
conscience with a reflective process that allows us to perceive that we are ourselves the creators of
the pain and suffering we create in others and in ourselves in the love for omnipotence of the post-
modern era, and that we must therefore leave this psychic trap that leads to our own destruction.

What do we do if we are used to demanding and obeying, to fall into apathy or complaint of not
participating, and to lying because of the fear of being punished?

We talk of love for omnipotence and power as central emotional dimensions of the post-modern era,
and we do this making reference mainly to the productive business activity, because this activity
has become a great transforming and preserving dynamics that has become central realization of
the processes of the anthroposphere and, through this, of the biosphere. That, however, does not
mean that omnipotence and power are constitutional addictions of the productive business activity,
they are not. These are addictions of the patriarchal-matriarchal culture itself, which has currently
extended to all continents since its origin over fifteen thousand years ago in Central Asia. Our boys
and girls learned with us, adults, who as members of our patriarchal-matriarchal culture practice it in
all aspects of our living, and in particular in production environments. This last one is so because in
the patriarchal-matriarchal culture, one thinks that the only thing that can secure order, repair and
efficiency in an activity that implies participation of many people is authority (leadership) and
obedience. But know we know that this is not the case. Leadership does not create the order,
repair, quality and efficiency it promises, and if it seems to do so for a time, it does not because of
the leadership but rather as results of the accessory opportunities that are opened despite it for the
emergence of relations of friendship and with them the genuine desire for cooperation. In short, it
also occurs that secondary authorities emerge that under the conscious or unconscious protection
of a higher authority obtain what seems to be greater effectiveness through the manipulation of
fear. Nobody likes to obey, nobody likes to be denied. Who likes to act irresponsibly before an
agreement adopted with honesty in a dominion of mutual respect? Denial that implies obedience
generates resentment and apathy. What to do?

The history of living beings in general, and of human beings in particular, occurred and occurs as a
series of transformations that primarily follows an unconscious course that is established instant
upon instant from the sensing that preserves the living of the organism as being in each instant
according to the psychic and physiological living experienced in this instant. On speaking of well-
being, we connote this feeling of relational conformity and of sensorial harmony that an organism
lives unconsciously or consciously in the flow of its living in any circumstance of preservation of its
living. When the organism feels it is losing this sensorial harmony, its sensorial and motor dynamics
changes to a dynamic that preserves and recovers this sensorial harmony. That is, we live the
sensing of the well-being like a acrobat who experiences the sensing of equilibrium, moving
consciously and unconsciously to recover it when he or she feels it is lost. Likewise the acrobat
preserves the sensing of equilibrium by changing his or her corporality in relation to his or her
changing surrounding, while walking the tight rope, the living being preserves the sensing of well-
being by changing his or her corporality in relation to his or her surroundings while realizing his or
her living, regardless of what this is. An organism preserves the well-being in its living like an
invariant relationship of operational congruency with its niche or circumstance, while the manner in
which this relation is realized changes continuously in the course of its living. This occurs in the
same way that an acrobat preserves his equilibrium as an invariant relation of operational
congruency with his circumstance while his corporal form changes continuously on walking on the
tight rope without falling.

Each human being lives the realization of his living as an occurrence of structural and relational
changes that follow a course defined moment to moment through the conversation of well-being in
the realization of its living. The preservation of well-being defines in each instant the relational and
operational direction that the living being follows in its living. The different classes of living beings
meet in different ways the basic preservation of well-being according to their manner of living. Thus,
in our case, the flow of our living as human beings includes our operating in networks of
conversations of action and reflection, in which we can look at our feelings and recursively
modulate instant upon instant the direction to follow in our living in the preservation of our well-
12
being, depending on how we feel with our feeling in each instant . That is, it is through continuous
modulation of our feelings that occur instant upon instant as a central aspect of the course of our
living in conversations of reflection and action that the relational form that constitutes our well-being
changes in each instant according to what we feel, think and desire in relation to the worlds we
create in our living. This results in the fact that we always slide in our living in the preservation of the
sensing that we live as our well-being even when we live in our present with pain and something
undesirable. Whenever we do in each instant what we feel, it is the doing that preserves our well-
being in this instant. In fact, the change in configuration of the feelings that make up the well-being
of an organism changes with the flow of living in all living beings with or without talking as result of
their continuous structural change in the course of their epigenesis. The human peculiarity is that in
us, our epigenesist occurs in networks of conversations that make up the anthroposphere as the
relational and inter-relational space in which our living and cohabitation is preserved in the
13
preservation of our structural link in the biosphere .

12
Recursive modulation of the feeling of well-being with the flow of change that is produced in the feeling of
the organism in the course of its living belongs to all living beings in the feeling of the feeling that is lived.
13 This seems obvious in the change in configuration of the relations of well-being that an organism

experiences when it changes its emotion. The changes of relational space we see in organisms according to
their emotion are actually changes in the relational configuration of their flow in the well-being that occurs in
their living in the recursive dynamics of their emotion. Whenever it seems to us that an animal doubts the
course of its doing, it is in a recursive act of feeling its feeling.
In short, it is our biological fundaments in the flow of our living in the preservation of well-being that
provide us with the path out of the trap of the addictions of the patriarchal-matriarchal culture
through the center itself of productive business activity. This occurs when the reflective view that
leads to our understanding the pain we create through the love for omnipotence of our patriarchal-
matriarchal business activity displaces our feeling and the relational configuration of the
preservation of well-being in our cohabitation, leading us to act through the new awareness and
epistemological stance that this understanding implies. This is what we refer to when we show the
end of leadership and propose co-inspirational management in exchange as the way of placing
reflection and ethical action as the fundaments of all that we do in the anthroposphere.

What we call co-inspirational management is the art and science of listening, of seeing and of
inviting to act through the knowledge and understanding that we are and as creators of the worlds
we live in, aware that our knowing are only instruments to do what we want to do. Human beings
like to collaborate, participate, to do what they do well, to fulfill their agreement, to be present in
what they do. We all know from our own experience, alone or with others, that being seen, heard, to
participate in a cohabitation founded on mutual trust, that is, on love, expands our creative conduct,
expands our intelligent conduct, expands our seeing, our hearing, and expands the desire to be
impeccable in the quality of what we do, in any domain. And we do not just know this, we also wish
to live like this because it does us good in all the dimensions of our living.

The history of living beings occurred in a series of transformations of continuous change around the
preservation of living, why could we, living beings, not create a cultural history of continuous change
around the preservation of well-being in mutual respect and reflective co-inspiration that leads to
preservation of this cohabitation and correction of mistakes that takes us away from them in all the
networks of conversations we create? We live continuously creating a changing anthroposphere
that emerges in our daily doings in networks of conversations. All that we do as human beings we
do in networks of domestic, technological, scientific, philosophical, artistic conversations, of harvest
or of cultivation of foods,… and we do this like castors and ants do… or any living being in an
evolutive course that creates diversities around the preservation of living. The only peculiarity of our
doing is what we do as a human doing in networks of conversations, being aware or with the
possibility of being aware of what we do. Thus, why not do what we do in a recursive co-inspiration
around the preservation of well-being of a cohabitation in mutual respect where one has presence
and participation through the daily realization of this common project? Why do we not decide to
operate with our companies placing at the center of our activity the conscious reflection and ethical
action of the three pillars of socially responsible conduct? Difficult, costly? Are we afraid to lose
privileges, wealth, advantages that satisfy our thirst for omnipotence? Yes, but we know that we
know that we create damage and surfing in our atmosphere: and knowing that we know that we live
in a historical present in which we can do anything we wish to do if we wish to do it, we also know
that we can be ethical entrepreneurs able to act with social awareness.

What theory, what rational justification holds us back and causes us not to want to place in the
center of all our doing reflection and ethical action as a natural aspect of our cohabitation?

How do we want to be remembered by our sons, daughters and grandsons and granddaughters?
How do we want to be remembered by our co-citizens?

Postscriptum

We from Instituto Matríztico thought that if we accept this reflective invitation we are sharing here
with Rodrigo da Rocha Loures, we will be collaborating toward preserving a human being that as
such enables us to live and cohabit in the well-being that emerges from any activity when this
activity is lived in total harmony with the world we being to hand in our living. Moreover, we will be
open to transformation of all our spaces of cohabitation without this transformation resulting in ways
of living that preserve pain or suffering through denial of the legitimacy of ourselves, of others or
another.
In this task, we are as Instituto Matríztico inviting together with FIEP and UNINDUS those who wish
to collaborate toward expanding the view that arises from the understanding of the origin,
preservation and transformation of the human being, which we connote when we talk of cultural-
biology.

The invitation to see that all human well-being is of cultural origin is an invitation we can only accept
through our living and cohabiting in a world that we bring to hand, if we consider that we are
responsible for the world we live and cohabit in with others and if we live this perception as an
ethical living that emerges naturally on living in the understanding that cultural-biology shows us.