Boundaries, Abuse of Value, & Participatory Values
Jason Hu
I now have a chance to respond to your important messages (attached below).
First, let me bravo you for coining this sharp term “openness with discrimination”! This is in line with my work about “Abuse of Value” – any good value, like wealth, like power, can be easily abused. We have ways to counter Abuse of Wealth and Abuse of Power; now we need to develop ways to counter Abuse of Value, one of the biggest threats to our civilization at this moment. (I have writings on Abuse of Value in Chinese, will find time to translate it if you’re interested in the details.) Here, “discrimination” IS NEEDED or the “openness” will be abused.
We are in the same boat in terms of my work with WINTOP Roundtable Leadership program, similar to your work on “Structured Democratic Dialogue, Future Worlds Center, and the Institute for 21st Century Agoras” – trying to build a participative organizational culture that counterbalances authoritarian/totalitarian power-grabbing instinct in human nature. But I stopped WINTOP practice in 2009 due to two reasons, the first is well-known – the Chinese Communist Party does not like that (my scheduled talk in the conference was canceled the night before, my article was deleted before the book was sent to the printer, our client was forced to cancel our project, etc.)
But the second reason is more important than the first, which sent me on the trajectory of reflection. It comes from one of our best clients, a thinking boss of a company that implemented the WINTOP program successfully. He said, “Wait a minute, Jason, I’m the sole owner of this company… if by now all the important decisions are all done by this team in a democratic/participatory way…even in a happy-go-around way, is it still my company?” Here, he raised a boundary issue. At that point, I realized, our democratic/participatory methods do have a boundary; crossing that, we commit “Abuse of Value.”
The Principle of Private Property/Private Ownership is a proven human engine for creativity and productivity, the source code of civilization's progress. Marxism messed up with it and generated huge disasters on this planet. Today, post-Marxism has been corrupting politicians in Europe and the U.S., generating a new wave of disasters (in terms of crime rate, rapes, crashing welfare systems, and social turmoil). I lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and had escaped CCP China three times, so I can recognize that many of today’s Democrat “leaders” are actually Communists in disguise.
So my opinion is that there is an important boundary between P&3P: Participation versus Private Property Principle. We need to analyze and very clearly define that boundary. Both are proven positive human values, but there is a boundary to be maintained to prevent Abuse of Value.
The above example is in the private sector. In the public sector, the issue becomes how to define the “we” – the community – you have been working with. In many cases, the so-called “we” is NOT a real “we” – e.g., are those Muslim immigrants in London demanding that the U.K. implement Sharia Law the same “we” as traditional Londoners? I’m sure on your political platforms, you have plenty of such issues too.
Besides the Abuse of Value issue, related to your boundary thinking, I invite you to consider the boundaries of our system thinking theories and practices. My views were presented in two writings, attached. One is a critic of what I call “elitist approaches,” including Stanford Beer, and my early mentor, H.S. Tsien, China’s top rocket scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen), who is the only cybernetician whose portrait is on the wall of SpaceX today. Please see these two papers to familiarize yourself with my views so we can engage deeper in this discussion. Those opinions also explain why our Oxford Project only targets 0.01 – 1% of our earth population – youngsters who are willing to take the challenge to learn and master SCI knowledge and become leaders of their communities.
As to the books and our group is working on, I’m open to the self-organizing processes among the group; I only serve as an initiator and a facilitator. Stay tuned for what's emerging, but you are more than welcome to come on board – we need draft reviewers/advisors.
Sorry for the delay in this response. With best regards, - Jason
P.S. I've put the emails of the previous group all in BCC, so people who are not interested in this won't be bothered by the following comments. For those who are interested, "I reply therefore I be" can be forwarded later by you and me.
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On Sun, 14 Jun 2026, 10:01 Yiannis Laouris, <lao...@futureworldscenter.org> wrote:
Dear Jason,
Thank you for your warm congratulations and for engaging seriously with the
Membrane-First hypothesis.
I have cc'd two people (Gerald and Norma) from whom I learned about boundaries
and boundary critique, Peter Tuddenham (with whom we published the paper:
Revitalizing democracy through cybernetics and systems science) as well as my
friend Andreas Nicolaides, new to systems science (who has presented his theory
of evolution at ISSS Symposia), and my parliamentary assistant, Vasilis
Thrasyvoulou, a rising systems thinker.
I think you have captured one of its most important systemic implications very
well: before we can speak meaningfully about elements, relations, functions, or
purpose, we must first ask what makes a system distinguishable from its
environment. In that sense, yes: boundary is not an afterthought. It is
constitutive.
But I would add one crucial clarification. A living membrane is not a
wall. It is also not an open door. It is a selectively permeable,
adaptive, semi-autonomous boundary. It enables exchange, but not indiscriminate
exchange. It protects internal coherence, but it does not cut the system off
from its environment. It makes life possible precisely because it combines
openness with discrimination.
That is also my position on social and political systems.
A society without boundaries dissolves into confusion, loss of trust, and loss
of institutional capacity. But a society with rigid, fearful, or morally blind boundaries
becomes closed, brittle, and eventually pathological. The question is therefore
not whether boundaries are good or bad. The question is: What kind of
boundaries, governed by whom, according to which values, with what feedback,
and with what consequences?
On immigration, I am neither in favor of naïve openness nor cruel exclusion. A
viable polity must know who enters, under what rules, with what rights and
responsibilities, and with what capacity for integration. But it must also
never forget the dignity of persons, the reality of suffering, and the
long-term systemic causes of migration: war, poverty, climate stress,
demographic imbalance, and failed governance. A mature society must be both
compassionate and competent.
On DEI, I support the original ethical impulse: no person should be excluded,
humiliated, or denied opportunity because of inherited identity, prejudice, or
historical disadvantage. But I am also concerned when any value becomes
bureaucratized, moralized, or weaponized in ways that undermine merit, freedom
of thought, open dialogue, or shared civic identity. Equality should not mean
sameness. Inclusion should not mean ideological conformity. Diversity
should enrich the commons, not fragment it into competing moral tribes.
As for “wokism,” I prefer not to use the term as a blanket label, because it
often shuts down thought instead of clarifying it. But if by it you mean moral
absolutism, cancellation, identity reductionism, or the replacement of dialogue
with accusation, then I oppose that. It is not systemic. It collapses
complexity into slogans. It often destroys feedback, learning, and trust;
exactly the capacities that complex societies need most.
So my clear answer is this:
I am not on the side of boundaryless progressivism, and I am not on the
side of defensive tribalism. I am on the side of living systems: bounded but
open, principled but adaptive, compassionate but disciplined, pluralistic but
coherent.
For me, the political task is to design institutions that can hold these
tensions without collapsing into ideological extremes. That is where I see
systems science, cybernetics, and democratic renewal converging. If this is the
“boat” you mean, a boat committed to life, boundaries, feedback, dignity,
responsibility, and practical wisdom, then yes, I am very much in that boat.
Warm regards,
Yiannis
In another message, Yiannis also said:
“Regarding your question about my own work at the boundary
of systems: I have increasingly come to believe that systems science must cross
the boundary between analysis and institutional action. For many years, my work
through Structured Democratic Dialogue, Future Worlds Center, and the Institute
for 21st Century Agoras has tried to create processes through which citizens,
experts, policymakers, and stakeholders can collectively structure complex
problems and design more coherent responses. Now, through my involvement in a
new political movement in Cyprus, I am trying to take the next step: to test
whether systems thinking can move from workshops, papers, and conferences into
the actual design of democratic practice.
For me, this is not about bringing “systems language” into politics as another
ideology. It is about bringing systems discipline into politics: listening
before deciding, mapping interdependencies before simplifying, identifying root
causes before proposing slogans, making assumptions visible, building feedback
loops, and designing institutions that can learn. In that sense, the boundary I
am working on is the boundary between knowing and doing, between systemic
diagnosis and systemic governance.
This is also why the discussion about the pioneers matters. If we honor only
those who formulated concepts, we risk underestimating those who built
institutions, methods, communities, and practices. If we honor only those who
“made things happen,” we risk celebrating power without sufficient reflection on
values, consequences, and exclusion. The challenge is to hold both together:
intellectual depth and ethical practice, theory and transformation, vision and
accountability.”