Becoming sustainable: human determinants of change

The author is a natural scientist and philosopher who has been involved in the global experience industry for more than 25 years. During this period of time he has developed a coherent, interdisciplinary body of knowledge that appears to be of essential interest as related to the transition towards a sustainable society: the Experience Science (Frank, 2011, 2012). Important scientific inputs come from underlying disciplines like cybernetics, system theory, psychology, and cognitive science. One of the key findings of the Experience Science is the innate structure of human experiencing. Any human experience includes 5 different experiential domains that influence and regulate each other: the emotional domain (feeling); the mental imagery domain (mental narrating); the sensorimotor domain (acting & perceiving); the linguistic domain (rational reasoning); the communicational domain (conversing). In the light of the Experience Science the dilemma of the current transition process towards a sustainable society becomes clearly visible. Any relevant attempt reduces the existing problems to more or less exclusively the linguistic, rational domain. Although ever evolving rational knowledge indeed is an indispensable prerequisite for a sustainable future this is not enough. Societal change towards a sustainable life-style can only happen if the whole experiential system gets a chance to reorganize itself. This leads to the following logical consequence. Any rational knowledge is embedded in a both emotional and narrative knowledge system that underlies and frames human reasoning. As long as human learning restricts itself to an exclusively rational attempt the underlying emotional and narrative program remains untouched. The learner hence continues orienting her attention into the direction determined by the underlying emotional and narrative paradigm. The paper delineates the experiential determinants of change and analyzes their specific, constitutive interrelations. From this a holistic choreography of change learning is outlined that pays tribute to the intrinsic transition principles represented by the human learner.