A. Nicholas Frank

Founder

I was born into the Great Depression in Budapest, Hungary. My father was an attorney, writer, lecturer, and dreamer. He wrote about the direction of social evolution and need for the workers of Europe to unite – his early dream of a united Europe. I lost him to illness when I was four years old but got to know him well through the 1930s book manuscript he left behind. My mother’s devotion and heroic determination allowed my sister and me to survive the Holocaust and World War II. Near the end of the war my eight-year old self emerged from the bomb shelter hungry, filthy and full of lice; I looked around and saw my city bombed to rubble and asked: “Why would grownups destroy beautiful buildings and kill innocent people?” This became the engine driving my life-long search for answers.

Following the defeat of the Hungarian revolution by the Red Army in 1956, I escaped across the Iron Curtain from communist Hungary. After some years of living in Montreal, Canada, in 1963 I moved to Los Angeles, California. The many unanswered questions my mind collected as I grew up during those turbulent times of the mid-20th century prompted me in 1972 to begin a project to answer as many of life’s questions as I could.

From 1972 to 1985 I studied and experimented with stress to understand the neuroendocrine process and effects of stress on human behavior. While I learned a great deal, it became evident to me that there was something more important beyond the psychophysiology of stress that has a greater impact on individual behavior and the functioning of society. In the spring of 1985 I took my wife and two small children on a year-and-a-half thinking, writing, and camping tour of Europe.

Upon our return I retired from all commercial work, lived off of our investments and devoted the following twenty years to the search for a unified answer to personal, social, economic and environmental questions. Realizing that stress is merely a failure indicator of complex systems that are experiencing some degree of dysfunction, I turned my attention to understanding how socioeconomic systems work. For a long period of time I believed that the concept of synergy would shed light on that subject. However, when I realized that synergy does not fully explain the nature of complex emergent systems, and that synergy had come to be associated with corporate and commercial concerns, I felt the need to search for a more complete answer.

Over time the simple question of my eight-year old self has grown into a very complex problem. I realized that no compartmentalized answers are capable of solving the challenge of true sustainability. To overcome the high hurdle of entropy and achieve social, economic and environmental sustainability we must find a new organizing arrangement that is able to create all-in-one systemic synthesis. During the fourth decade of my search a unifying and satisfactory answer developed in the form of the Holigent (holistic-emergent) organizing concept, which is modeled after natural self-organization. Holistic-emergent evolutionary self-organization is in essence nature’s building code. It is the energetic primal self-organizing mechanism that enables simple parts and particles to come together and build our complex universe.

The Holigent socioeconomic self-organizing concept transforms the top-down, reductionist/compartmentalized and fragmentary institutional approach of our current socioeconomic system. The Holigent Solution can gradually reorganize our existing system to function more like robust and sustainable natural systems – to develop through self-organization from the nucleus out and roots up, and function in balanced reciprocity with all other parts of the manmade and natural life support system. I introduce and explore this concept in a book coauthored with Elisa Frank, The Holigent Solution. In a more recent edition under the title: Holigent RECONSTRUCT America, Europe, the World, I provide an action guide for societal innovation and reconstruction.

Currently I am fully engaged in promoting an action plan to build an experimental mixed-use, live/work, pedestrian compact urban village/campus with a hybrid economy and social contract to demonstrate the systemic synthesis that would achieve social, economic and environmental justice, quality and sustainability.

I live with my wife in Los Angeles, California. We have a son and a daughter. I work for Holigent Org full time at a salary of one dollar per year.