Frameworks: Conflict in Balance

This book examines the human ability to balance conflicts with a sense of context. Frameworks provide the necessary structure. Frameworks can be physical or imaginary. By analyzing the form and dynamics of frameworks, Mark Moorstein shows how conflicts arise within the infinite frameworks of the universe, how we use conflicts to motivate ourselves and how we can resolve conflicts through balance. Moorstein argues that frameworks are the best tools to sense things--but if frameworks overload on variables, or they lack enough variables, we humans will fail to find an adequate balance and the freedom that results from balance.

In the progressive sections of this study, Moorstein explains how our brains struggle to build a model of the correct view of our varied worlds--using experience, evidence, logic and emotions. Moorstein offers both theory and example to explain the amazing ways frameworks arise, evolve, revolt, mutate and disappear--and how they carry our thinking with them. Some changes in framework occur by design and some by luck--and Moorstein borrows from the concepts of Thomas Kuhn and evolutionary science to explain their dynamics. Citing Kuhn, Moorstein agrees that major changes occur when frameworks become inadequate to explain anomalies. But by re-examining many of the great writers within a common context, he shows that humans always have used frameworks to explain wars and the conflicts of the human condition. Moorstein argues that ultimately conflict resolution depends on balance--and balance may be invisible without an adequate lens or filter.

Moorstein contends that we see very few of the variables that affect our lives. We are free only within the boundaries of a system that balances our interests--but we may be only partially aware of those interests. Frameworks expose possibilities to the senses and suggest options--and in these options balance exists.