# 3. The goals of the system The goal of a system is a leverage point superior to the self-organizing ability of a system. For example, if the goal is to bring more and more of the world under the control of one particular central planning system (the empire of Genghis Khan, the world of Islam, the People's Republic of China, WalMart, Disney, whatever), then, **everything further down the list**, physical stocks and flows, feedback loops, information flows, even self-organizing behavior, **will be twisted to conform to that goal**.
That's why I can't get into arguments about whether genetic engineering is "good" or a "bad" thing. Like all technologies, it is depends upon **who is wielding it, with what goal**. The only thing one can say is that if corporations wield it for the purpose of generating **marketable products**, that is a very different goal, a different selection mechanism, **a different direction for evolution than anything the planet has seen so far**.
As my little single-loop examples have shown, most **negative feedback loops within systems have their own goals:** to keep the bathwater at the right level, to keep the room temperature comfortable, to keep inventories stocked at sufficient levels, to keep enough water behind the dam. Those goals are important leverage points for pieces of systems, and most people realize that. If you want the room warmer, you know the thermostat setting is the place to intervene. But there are **larger, less obvious, higher-leverage goals, those of the entire system.**
Whole system goals are not what we think of as goals in the human-motivational sense. They are not so much deducible from what anyone _says_ as from what the system does. **Survival, resilience, differentiation, evolution, are system level goals.**
Even people within systems, don't often recognize that whole-system goals they are serving. To make profits, most corporations would say, but that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. **What is the point of the game?**
To increase stakeholder wealth, most everyone would say, and that is a powerful, behavior-shaping goal. But there is an even larger one, **formally espoused by no one, but obvious when one looks at the actual behavior of the system**. To grow, to increase market share, to bring the world, (customers, suppliers, regulators), more, and more. under the control of the corporation, so that its operations become ever more **shielded from uncertainty**. John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that corporate goal--**to engulf everything**--long ago.
It's the goal of a cancer cell too. Actually it's **the goal of every living population**, and only a bad one when it isn't balanced by higher-level negative feedback loops that never let an upstart power-driven entity control the world. The goal of keeping the market competitive has to trump the goal of each corporation to eliminate its competitors (and brainwash its customers and swallow its suppliers), just as an ecosystem, the goal of keeping populations in balance and evolving has to trump the goal of each population to reproduce without limit and control all the resource base.
I said earlier that **changing the players** in the system as a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system. The exception to that rule is **at the top**, where a single player can have the power **to change the system's goal**. I have watched in wonder as – only very occasionally – a new leader in an organization, from Dartmouth College to Nazi Germany, comes in, enunciates a new goal, and swings hundreds or thousands or millions of perfectly intelligent people, rational people, off in a new direction.
That's what **Ronald Reagan did**. Not long before he came to office, a president could say "Ask not what your government can do for you, ask what you can do for the government," and no one even laughed. Regan said over and over, the goal is not to get the people to help the government and not to get government to help the people, but to **get the government off our backs**. One can argue, and I would, that larger system changes in the rise of **corporate power over government** let him get away with that. But the thoroughness with which the public discourse in the US and even the world has changed since Reagan is **testimony to the high leverage of articulating, meaning, repeating, standing up for, insisting upon new system goals.**