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Systems, Structures and Fundamental Principles

One of our biggest misconceptions is the belief that we are Independent. We are not independent, but instead, Interdependent.

“What does Trump and atoms have in common?”  (Warning:  this is my only original joke)  The answer:  “They both make up everything.”  My son offered a better answer.  “They both have tiny protons surrounded by a cloud of negativity”.

By Chuck Woolery (The Activist and not the TV Host)


In a peace conference three years ago, I had a conversation with a U.S. government nuclear engineer whose job was inspecting US nuclear power plants and weapons facilities.  He was there to convince peace activists to enlist engineers to support the peace movement because many of the engineers making weapons had signed a pledge to protect the public health and safety.  The leaders of the peace conference ignored him.

But as our conversation deepened, he enlightened me on a simple perspective that I should have known as a biologist and I’ve never seen the world, politics, science, or religion the same way since then.  He said, “everything in the Universe is made up of systems, structures, and fundamental principles.”  And they are all connected.  And, if anything goes wrong (anything!) with a system or structure, you can be certain that somewhere, somehow, someway a fundamental principle was not followed.   Wow!   Profound cubed (to the third power).

I love making and fixing things.  Having tripled the original floor space of my home by building mostly with used and recycled materials I learned a lot about the laws of nature (gravity, wind force, material strengths, decomposition of wood exposed to the elements…) and city laws (building codes).  Other than a leaky basement the walls, floors, windows, doors, wood stove, ceilings and 1000 sq ft roof deck have had no systemic or structural failures.

As a professional grass roots organizer, I built a small grass roots organization of US based health and medical professionals to tweak the US government system (earmarks) and structures (USAID) to earmark an appropriation of millions of tax dollars devoted to saving the lives of poor women and children beyond US borders (a fundamental principle of the organization).

As a volunteer I returned to Haiti to reinforce a rural K-7 school building I’d assisted in building prior to their catastrophic quake (more Haitians died in that 15 minutes than Japanese that died from both the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined).  Haitians rarely use rebar in their cement structures.  The earth quake didn’t killed them.  It was flawed political, economic and education systems that killed them.  Rebar was simply too expensive.   And the fundamental principles of physics and geology used to forecast earthquakes in the area two years earlier were ignored.

Before the quake there were other systemic failures in Haiti that I pointed out to my Haitian friends. They were defensive until I listed the systemic weaknesses of my own government.  Like the lack of justice. And, our own resistance to doing what we know needs to be done.  It’s nothing new.  Our nation’s founding fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we prefer suffering to changing our form of government as long as the evils are sufferable.

One human minds are laziness (energy conservation?) related to our prehistoric evolution.  Deep thinking takes time and energy.  Our brains were hardwired for quick answers in a dangerous environment.  We look at immediate threats not systemic flaws.  George Lakoff explains it as “Direct causation” and “systemic causation”.   It wasn’t the earthquake, or the lack of rebar that caused the massive death toll from Haiti’s quake.  It was their flawed economic, political, education and building code systems.    Liberals see someone killed with a gun and they want to take away the 2nd Amendment. Trump supporters see immigrants and want to build a wall.   Peace activists see a war and want to take away the weapons systems or money to the military.  Conservatives see a war and fear motivates them to demand more money for the military and more advanced weapons.  When it is the profound flaws in both our national and international political system that need to be corrected.

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The profound concept is how everything is connected and interdependent.  We basically understand this but don’t spend much time making the irreversible connections between war, poverty, infectious disease, climate change, politics, environment, loss of species, WMD proliferation, terrorism, international law, peace, lack of education, mental illness, public health, and the US debt (just to scratch the surface of a planet and universe that influence every aspect of our quality of life, and life itself.


  • Connect the dots (everything is connected)g is connected!).
  • See the web (of life).
  • Insist on justice for all (17 Sustainable Development Goals).
  • Or prepare for the catastrophic consequences (Global Catastrophic Risks 2018).

If you listen to C-span, read national security reports, or listen to experts attempting to explain how to solve a particular problem, you will often hear the words ‘holistic’, “comprehensive” or “whole of government approach.”  Rarely will enough funding be appropriated to actually prevent extremely costly problems, so there is usually one other word these experts will offer “resilience”.  They know what our founding fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”   Our form of government is based on the concept of independence.  We have independent agencies working problems that are completely dependent on things that happen in multiple issue areas, nations and oceans.

After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the US government first broke down the barriers between the CIA and the FBI that could have detected the plot before it happened. Later Congress created the Department of Homeland Security which consolidated over 20 other ‘independent’ federal agencies to improve our nation’s security.  But DHS doesn’t include the Department of Defense or the EPA which are each “independent” agencies but all equally dependent on tax dollars from a tax system that is unjust and dependent on Political will…. I think you get the point.  If not, read Einstein’s quote above, again.




So what are fundamental principles?  Read the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence for the best introduction.



The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are the most comprehensive and holistic solutions created by humans since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, it was never made enforceable.  Failing the SDGs will require investing in our resilience.  Given that some global threats are inevitable, and others we could prevent, won’t be, resilience investments are the next best plan.

But chances are that will NOT happen without some catastrophic suffering.  Even then, we might not spend on what’s needed.  Our minds and political factions work in mysterious ways.  Things change.  Maybe these should too.


Chuck Woolery, Former Chair
United Nations Association, Council of Organizations


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