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was to move the control room into the presidential palace, La Moneda. “By
the 11 September 1973, the plans were nearly ready. Instead La Moneda it-
self was reduced to a smoking ruin” (Beer 1974a, 332). Salvador Allende was
dead, too, in the ruin: the Pinochet coup—Chile's 9/11—brought a definitive
end to the Chilean experiment with socialism, and with it went Cybersyn.
Beer was in London at the time but had prepared for the end by devising
three different codes in which to communicate with his collaborators and
friends in Chile, who were, through their association with the Allende gov-
ernment, in very serious trouble. Beer did what he could to help them. On
8 November 1973, he wrote to von Foerster at the University of Illinois: “My
dear Heinz, I think you know that I am doing everything possible to rescue
my scientific colleagues (at the level of Team Heads) from Chile. It is going
well—10 families. There is another problem. My main collaborator is held
in a concentration camp, and is coming up for trial. There is a real risk that
he will be shot, or sent down for life.”
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The collaborator in question was
Fernando Flores, who had risen to become Chile's minister of finance be-
fore the coup. Beer enclosed the draft of his personal statement to be read
at Flores's trial and urged von Foerster to send his own. In the event, Flores
was imprisoned for three years, until Amnesty International helped to ne-
gotiate his release, when he moved to the United States, completed a PhD
in Heideggerian philosophy, and became a highly successful management
consultant.
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The Politics of the VSM
THE PROBLEM IS FOR CYBERNETICS TO DISCOvER, AND TO MAKE ABUNDANTLY
CLEAR TO THE WORLD, WHAT METASYSTEMS TRULY ARE, AND WHY THEY SHOULD
NOT BE EqUATED WITH THE SUPRA-AUTHORITIES TO WHICH OUR ORGANIZA-
TIONAL PARADIGMS DIRECT THEM. IT IS AN APPALLING [
siC
] DIFFICULT JOB,
BECAUSE IT IS SO vERY EASY TO CONDEMN THE WHOLE IDEA AS TOTALITAR-
IAN. HENCE MY USE OF THE TERM: THE LIBERTY MACHINE. WE WANT ONE THAT
ACTUALLY WORKS.
STaFFORd BeeR,
“THE LIBERTY MACHINE” (1975 [1970], 318)
Beer's daughter Vanilla recalls that “Stafford and I generally ran Jesus and
Marx together in an attempt to produce metanoyic possibilities,” so I turn
now to Beer's politics and its relation to his cybernetics; later sections will
focus on his spiritual beliefs and practices.
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