Desigining Freedom

Designing Freedom collects the six radio talks Stafford Beer gave as the 1973 CBC Massey Lectures, delivered not long after the military coup that ended his Cybersyn project, a cybernetic system for managing Chile's economy under the Allende government. In the lectures Beer makes the case for cybernetics and systems thinking as a science of organization, arguing that many of society's institutions rely on tools and forms of management no longer adequate to the complexity of the modern world. Across talks with titles such as "The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear," "The Discarded Tools of Modern Man" and "The Free Man in a Cybernetic World," he explores how redesigning institutions along cybernetic lines could expand rather than constrain individual liberty, treating freedom itself as something that can be engineered through better system design. Credits: Beer, S. (1973). Desigining Freedom. Massey Lectures. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.