How much order in collective life maintains itself, without supervision? The question is answered by the longest part of the article, devoted to social homeostasis, that is, the maintenance of functional equilibrium by many regulators coupled with one another — here, by people acting in their own interest. According to the author, self-regulation has an advantage that no management can provide: it works at once and reaches as far as the community itself. With an example devised as a joke, Mazur shows that where everyone looks after their own interest, equilibrium is maintained without supervision and at no cost. The limit lies where a loss must first be borne in order to gain later; there, homeostasis cannot replace management. The author also puts forward the idea of basing the school on self-regulation.
The way to this theme leads through several short lectures on concepts: on feedback, because of which one-sided interaction does not exist in practice; on the systems method and its rigours; on counting the relations between people in an organisation, of which there are more than first impressions suggest; and on decision-makers. The decision process breaks down into the choice of the goal, of the method and of the resources, so each of the three functions calls for different qualifications.
Separately, the author carries the theory over to the human being as an autonomous system: a person's character is made up of rigid properties, which upbringing will not change. He lists three informational properties — capacity, registrativity and preferentiality, on which intelligence, aptitude and talent depend — and three energetic ones (character dynamism, tolerance, susceptibility), referring the reader for details to Cybernetyka i charakter (‘Cybernetics and Character’, 1976).
Mazur places cybernetics itself between mathematics and the specific disciplines. He recalls the origin of the name (Plato, Ampère, Trentowski) and the birth of the discipline around 1948 — Wiener, Shannon, Ashby's homeostat, Bertalanffy's systems theory — and regards the emergence of a science of control as a necessary consequence of science having begun to deal with decisions.
In our reading, the article is a popular synthesis: it brings together threads from the theory of character and from decision theory, it ends with a call for the teaching of social cybernetics, and Mazur takes up the theme of social homeostasis again in a paper of 1983.
Our own account, working version; definitions of concepts are in the dictionary, with their sources.