Which takes precedence in collective life: self-regulation or orders? Mazur answers with the thesis that organisation, that is, a structure based on orders, can only supplement social homeostasis, because it does not exist without it, and when it comes into conflict with it — as with prohibition — it usually loses. When both routes lead to the goal, he gives precedence to self-regulation, which works more precisely and costs nothing; organisation is needed when one has to go through a temporary deterioration for the sake of a later benefit. Voluntary association, moreover, is not self-regulation. The author marks this part of the argument as his own inquiry.
The conclusions for the school are the part closest to the readers of the volume. The author explains the overburdening of pupils by the homeostasis of the school system itself, in which every subject has its own defender, and proposes gradually handing over to pupils the choice of subjects and abolishing university entrance examinations while raising the requirements during the course of studies, relying on the self-regulation of the candidates.
The paper reconstructs its conceptual background from the beginning: how homeostasis passed from physiology, from Claude Bernard and Cannon, into cybernetics thanks to Ashby's technical model, and what it means in cybernetics, namely the maintenance of functional equilibrium by coupled regulators. The paper derives the generality of the phenomenon from the fact that it could be built technically; an example from the organism and — as a merely related phenomenon — one from technology illustrate it. A separate part classifies five patterns of agreement between the homeostasis of society as a whole, the homeostasis of the group and the law; only the first, in which all three agree, does the author regard as healthy.
The paper appeared in a collective volume on self-regulation in education, published in the year of the author's death. In a separate, orderly exposition it develops a thread that took up one section in the 1980 article.
Our own account, working version; definitions of concepts are in the dictionary, with their sources.