In this excerpt from Stafford Beer’s Massey Lectures for CBC Radio (1973), Beer concludes the six-part series with a plea to recognize the fundamental role of new technologies in designing new models of freedom; and the threat to that freedom if those technologies are mishandled. This conclusion to the lecture series was hastily revised to acknowledge the ongoing coup in Chile. Using the language of cybernetics theory, Beer cites the actions of the Pinochet junta as “the output of a system designed to curb liberty, my message is that we must redesign that system to produce freedom as an output.”

Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom: The 1973 CBC Massey Lectures, Part 6 (excerpt), 1973, sound recording, 3:52 min., CBC Licensing, used with permission of the Malik Institute, Switzerland  


Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom (Massey Lectures), 1974, paperback book, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

︎︎︎ Link to full lecture series