VITAL SIGNS MONITORS

Vital Signs Monitors are the early critical warning indicators for understanding and communicating about the dynamics that work in complex social systems to generate levels of destructive violence and conflict, or act to create waves of peace and tranquility. We will be scanning for the Vital Signs that announce the onset of either conflict or peace, and reveal the contours of the deeper tectonic-like social plates that are rumbling beneath the surface.

Our monitors will be unique in a number of ways, including offering a synthesis of all available early warning-like indices from public and private think tanks and other groups at all levels, as well as our own our own systemically and strategically placed sensors. We will incorporate state-of-the-art understanding of human nature i.e. how cultures/countries form, experience stresses and strains, go through layers of complexity as Life Conditions warrant, develop boundaries, interact with other cultures/countries, and deal internally with social, political, and technological dynamics that often break out into different forms of conflict.

This vast array of data will be meshed into holons to detect the underlying patterns and interrelationships that reach across so many domains. The information will point toward scaffoldings of solutions, forms of procedural conflict conclusions, and will include a host of other technologies that have the power to reduce levels of violence, while facilitating natural human emergence through evolutionary steps and stages.

These Richter-like conflict barometers and monitors will thus be able to make a profound difference in how we construct our social and physical environments in the decades to come. Global solutions will, of necessity, require global thinking. We must learn to think across human domains, boundaries, landscapes, and continents and deep down into the thought structures, ethnic cores, and indigenous worldviews to produce a new generation of global scholars, diplomats, and problem-solvers. Vital Signs Monitors are a vital step in realizing such a dream.