Life is problems yet problemology is not a taught subject. E.F. Schumacher noticed this and devoted one of the chapters in Guide for the Perplexed to the subject. Unfortunately he only identified part of the problem with problems so I extended the analysis in my Foundations of Structural Sociology essay many years ago. Here is what I wrote.
The dimensional issue in the overdeveloped world is primarily one of management. There are not two types of problem as Schumacher explains in Guide for the Perplexed but three. The third type is the uncircumvergent problem...too big to solve like the convergent problem or grapple with like the divergent problem. However in a human scale environment the dimensional issue takes on a different form.
As an analogy consider a gas turning into a liquid as the temperature is reduced. At the lower size levels the nature of the rules of dimensions are of a different nature. And indeed, when size levels fall even further there is another change of state analogous to the solidifying of a liquid. Did the Great Washerwoman in the Sky empty the dirty bathwater on us...and threw us the baby with it?
Social morphology and Ivan Illich's notion of the vernacular kohr deal with the laws of dimensions in the Socially Liquid State. In structural sociology the political problem might be defined as bringing the overdeveloped world from a gaseous to a liquid state while simultaneously melting the many fragmented crystals of the underdeveloped world into a liquid state.
Both steam and ice must become water. This task would be extremely difficult for the laboratory technician if the gas and the solid were maintained at similar temperatures in the same vessel. Our New Age Samurai must do the same and isolate the gas and the solid from each other.
The energy transfers also need to be carefully controlled...both the liquefaction of the gas and the melting of the solid. Without a controlled heat exchange there will be a whole range of unpredictable intermediate conditions ...superheating, supercooling, boundary layers, turbulent fluid flows etc. These can lead to undesirable results like chemical reactions, explosions or cracking of the containing vessel. Each of these intermediate conditions could with imagination be given its analogous condition in the social liquid.
Captain Burt Kleijwegt is a salvage expert who knows a convergent problem when he sees one. While Antonia Nicholson the 32-year old skipper of Gypsy Moth IV was being grilled at UK Sailing Academy HQ in West Cowes on the Isle of Wight he was driving a mechanical digger across a reef in the Toumotu archipelago north of Tahiti.
The digger lifted the boat, sandbags were placed beneath the hull and a plank slipway built to the edge of the reef. Meanwhile the hull was patched up while a nervous watch was kept on the weather. This is the season of tropical storms and there was every chance that the famous craft would be pounded to pieces. But the gods were kind.
In a stroke of diplomacy…reminiscent of the time that Benjamin Franklin persuaded the international maritime powers to give Captain Cook’s Endeavour clear passage around the globe…the French Navy saved the day by lending a tug. After six days on the reef Gipsy Moth IV was hauled off and taken to dry dock in Tahiti. From there it will be cargo ship to Auckland for repairs before sailing for Sydney and a rendezvous with Princess Anne on 12th July…forty years after Sir Francis Chichester’s triumphal arrival there in his 53ft ketch.