collective autoimmunity
A great unrecorded aspect of Vietnamese history is the epidemic autoimmune disease which culminated in the Vietnamese people during the American war in Viet Nam. How could such a momentous event have been missed by the ever-observant and abundant international press corps on the scene? How, subsequently, could writers of popular history have been so neglectful as to not even mention it?

One of the tacit assumptions of contemporary immunological science is that the organism is selfsame, self-identical, the same-as-itself -- and that the primary function of the immune system is to insure that this fact is not violated, to insure that is, that the self is absolutely distinguished from the not-self, and further, that any not-self factors present are removed or destroyed. But what if this is a gross oversimplification? What if the immunological signifier of any constituent of the organism is not singular, but a multiple, a stack, a superposition? What if it is something like a musical note and its overtone series? Then the disease inducing occasion would not be an attack on the singular nature of organic self-being, but would be an attempt to force the whole musical chord of immunological identity, so to speak, into one of its semitones. The way this would be represented biophysically is through wave dynamics, the quantum wave dynamics of the DNA molecule, to be specific (Paine and Pensinger, 1979; Jus, Pensinger and Paine, 1995; Pensinger, Paine and Jus, 1997).

Perhaps the journalists and historians did not notice the epidemic because they attributed to the Vietnamese a sense of identity which the Vietnamese did not possess. Perhaps the Vietnamese sense of selfhood was not singular, was not, that is, single-valued -- as the journalists and historians surely assumed in consonance with the presuppositions of a modern medicine based exclusively upon molecular biology.

The well-known specialist in Chinese tributary societies, Alexander Woodside, once made the following observation while analyzing late 19th century urban Vietnamese social organization: “Comprehensive Western-style role specialization was essentially alien…” (Woodside, 1971). Yes, I am talking about collective social autoimmunity, not clinical organic degenerative disease -- though the two may be related phenomena.

identity transparency in gifting behaviors
Traditionally, in Viet Nam as in the rest of East Asia, there was no Weberian administrative bureaucracy, no rule-regulated system managed by managers. There was the Emperor, yes, and his mandarinate, of course, but role specialization was alien and administrative procedures were not derived from rule frameworks rooted in a notion of civil law. There was a moral economy of executive action wherein authority found legitimacy via cosmological metaphor, and defined its purviews of responsibility with categorical fuzziness. Rules could not find uniform application in a universe where absolute distinctions did not exist: each case, optimally, was handled on its own merits. Instead of rules, there were relationships -- relationships of trust in the best of cases. Administration proceeded through cultivation of personal loyalties, through patronage, through hopefully equitable dispensation of largess. This largess never involved bribes because bribery cannot, by definition, transpire in a system free of universal rules, free of uniform application, free of absolute categorical distinctions.

Administration through giving and receiving was a systemic expression of an ancient practice: ritual gift exchange. This exchange was not, essentially, of valuable material objects or money. The physical commodity exchanged merely signified what was actually exchanged: the identity of giver and receiver. This was not regarding separate identities, but the common identity. The French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, with his general theory of the gift (Mauss, 1954), has made a strong case that commodity exchange is epiphenomenal of identity exchange: the common spiritual essence of giver-receiver is signified in exchange as a conflict avoidance mechanism. This is not to say that inherently separate identities momentarily merge in this procedure of exchange; there is always the internal common identity which the act of exchange momentarily signifies in external social space.

What is the nature of this common identity? The French ethnologist, Giran, writing before World War One, offers us a provocative portrait:

…everything becomes confused and blended into one. The state of everything is essentially precarious. Their aspect is elusive and affords no hold for us to seize. This curious vision of the universe explains some beliefs which otherwise would be hardly conceivable. Each individuality being very badly defined, its limits are wavering, extensible. They do not confine within the individual himself but overlap him and encroach on his surroundings. Under these conditions, it is as difficult to discern the individual from the group to which he belongs as to discern him from everything that touches him or reminds of himself. With such concepts, we may understand that the universe must appear as an inextricable entanglement of reciprocal influences where persons and things, in a perpetual state of instability, become fused together while borrowing mutually their qualities. This idea of contagion, which is anything but scientific, is very common among the Annamese. (Quoted in Nguyen Khac Kham, 1970.)

Here we have a characterization of animism, of contagion, of, if you will, identity transparency. But is this notion of non-singular, non-selfsame identity non-scientific? It is non-Newtonian, certainly, but with equal certainty is it consistent with quantum physics in general and the biophysics of the quantum wave properties of the DNA molecule in particular. Even the vocabulary of this ethnographic portrait produced in 1912 evokes the discourse of contemporary physics with its peculiar terminology: spontaneous fusion, relative-state, chaotic dynamics, collective and cooperative behaviors, entangled states, reciprocal maintenance, instabilities, non-simple identity, multiply-connected, and so on.

parts and wholes in relative-state
In the closed-system physics of Newton's laws of motion, all the variables in the involved equations are single-valued. For every value of x there is a single, unique value for y -- to state it, for clarity, in an oversimplified fashion. The entities subject to these billiard-ball laws exhibit simple-identity, which is to say they can be absolutely distinguished one from another. In quantum physics, however, Schrödinger's wave equation replaced Newton's laws of motion. Again to oversimplify for clarity, the variables in the quantum wave equation are multivalued. For every value of x, the time-related variable, there are many values for y, the spatial variable --which is to say that at a given time, x, the entity under consideration is at many different locations, y. Hence, the quantum physics term “nonlocality”. This property of nonlocality implies non-simple identity or multivalued identity, in contrast with the simple or single-valued identity of Newtonian physics. No entity can be absolutely distinguished from any other: the state of each is relative to that of the others. A relative-state prevails between all parts and wholes. Apparently, if we are to believe Giran's portrait, traditional Vietnamese society was organized in relation to a cosmological metaphor expressing a view of reality and identity quite similar to that of contemporary quantum theory.

But how did it work specifically? No role specialization, okay, as Woodside says. But what was there instead, and how did collective social autoimmunity result from its destruction?

Traditionally, the Emperor's mandate stopped at the village gate, and very often the Council of Village Notables stood symbolically in a line before that gate to insure the internal anarchism of the village remained a sacred property inviolate. What transpired behind that gate so sacredly held? Superposition -- just as the stack of values is superposed upon a variable in Schrödinger's quantum wave equation. Role superposition. A given individual in authority simultaneously wore many hats, assumed multiple identity. For a thousand years or more, the rural social security guaranteed to all -- in the wavering, contagion-filled, identity-transparent context of anarchistic village life -- was provided, not by the mandarinate, not by the government that is, but by the village voluntary associations (Nha Trang, 1994). Reciprocal maintenance, multivalued identity, ritual exchange, consensual decision making, relative-state, selfhood read in the natural surround, voluntary participation: all of these were found, for instance, in normative practices governing utilization of the communal lands sanctified by ancestral presence -- sanctified, that is, in the terms of quantum and relativity physics, by identity nonlocal in time. The many hats symbolically reached across a multitude of domains, spatial and temporal. Identity transparency is not only with other members of the contemporary social corpus; it is also with the natural surround, with the land. And it is diffuse in time: the spirit medium becomes the ancestors which inhabit the land as tutelary deities. Space is collapsible; time, dilatible: like in Einstein's theory of relativity.

superposition in functions of roles
Not only was there uncomplicated role superposition, there was superposition in the functions of roles. The whole sociocultural ecosystem was double-stacked, a stack stacked upon a stack reading itself in the stacked stacks of the natural surround. Scale invariance and quantum mechanics with a vengeance! Before the village shrine, in trance induction, via ritualized cosmological invocation, the wavering, fuzzy individual spoke with the collective voice, spoke as the ancestors, spoke for the spirits of the land, spoke with the knowing possessed by the relative-state of the population corpus. Thus did the identity-transparent personhood produce a trance reading of the collective need, human and natural. In this cauldron of superposition was the moral authority of executive action legitimized. Here we have legitimization by metaphysical reference, by scripting the greater personhood in the form of the cosmological model. Immanuel Swedenborg, in his treatise HEAVEN AND HELL, provides us with an apt summation: “ In so far as one is in the form of Heaven, one is in Heaven.” Thus was the Mandate of Heaven bestowed and recognized by all.

When the Vietnamese communists began building their anticolonial front, particularly in the southern region of the country, they did not start by subverting the local government the French had tried to create and legitimize by recourse to conventions of Napoleonic bureaucracy and civil code. They started by infiltrating the village voluntary associations. Anarchistic social self-organization -- the result of a superposed internal state of a polity -- had never transpired on a scale-level larger than that of the village. The event-horizon for spontaneous social order had to be expanded to embrace the whole population corpus, otherwise the French could not be thrown out, the disparity of available force could not be overcome. So the voluntary associations were infiltrated, subverted, and amalgamated into a national front. The principle of superposition underlying identity transparency was applied in many ways to the resultant large-scale organization -- and reached its fullest expression in the generative and transformational dynamics of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam and associated underground political infrastructure, a multi-scale, self-similar, chaotic system.

The details of this -- personnel allocation and transfer patterns; multiple chains of command; forward and reverse representation; overlapping hierarchies; multiple role attributions; fluctuating boundaries, mission statements, agency subordination patterns; creation and retraction of echelons; and on and on -- of course, are interesting only to theorists of bureaucratic function. Or, well, should be of interest to such theorists. In actuality, they have exhibited little interest. During the American war, political scientists had some vague awareness of the various indicators of superposition; but these were regarded in a negative vein and dismissed with the pejorative “parallelism” -- a redundancy of negative value to Weberian sociologists.

onset of autoimmune dyscrasia
But Westerners were not the only ones to disparage the self-organizing properties, the autopoietic operators, the algorithms of non-equilibrium transition characteristic of the Vietcong's clandestine political process. So did Hanoi. Because of various ideological dynamics and historical predisposing factors involving anarchism, Trotskyism, and the intellectual climate of the French Communist Party during the 1930s, which greatly influenced the southern arm of the Vietnamese party, the southern political cadres who infiltrated and subverted the village voluntary associations were themselves subverted, subverted by the decision algorithms and identity construct operative in these associations, and the age-old patterns of rural voluntarism the associations were an expression of. The northern cadres --given that the northern arm of the party was much more directly influenced by a Stalinist Soviet Union -- were not at all disposed to being influenced by this counter-subversion of the village internal anarchism. What was the outcome of this? On the surface, factionalist in-fighting; more profoundly, a histocompatibility disorder in the tissue of Vietnamese communism. Whenever and wherever it could, Hanoi opposed superposition -- the expression of animistic identity transparency and the engine driving self-organization -- and imposed its opposite: rigid hierarchy. Superposition melts down hierarchy into a holographic identity transparency: the part contains all the information of the whole. Hanoi was most successful in this effort of imposing rigid hierarchy during the 1968 Tet offensive and its aftermath. The principle that won the war against America, superposition, unfortunately was systematically removed from influence before peace was attained. In this fratricidal autoimmune clash between two different notions of identity, that notion embraced by molecular biology -- single-valuedness -- won out over the notion associated with quantum biochemistry -- the animistic multivalue.

Are such autoimmune dyscrasias -- be they organic, social, political, military, cultural -- necessary concomitants of transitional processes? If not, how do they arise and how can they be avoided? Is conflict latency and onset something we can understand with the mathematical tools available to us?

epidemic as social commentary
Single-valuedness is a nested property of the multivalue; a multivalued function is composed of a multitude of single-valued functions in superposition as a composite mathematically involuted. This can perhaps be usefully visualized as the coiling and uncoiling of a very deep spiral maze. Quantum biochemistry is related to molecular biology as the multivalue to its decomposed mathematical involute: its various single values. Immune system function as understood by molecular biology is the interplay of various single-valued entities: helper T-cells, killer T-cells, antibodies, and so on. But on the sub-molecular level we have what could accurately be called “nanoimmunity”: the spontaneously-fused composite frequency domain, which is the multivalued reference space for the decomposed single-valued entities. The quantum reference keeps a running composite accounting of all discrete exchanges on superordinate scale levels. Single-valued processes primarily fulfill the requirements of functional specificity; multivalued processes, functional integration. There is overlap because the two purviews of activity are mirror images of each other: complementarity.

What happens when one image in the mirror tries to suppress the other? Autoimmunity. Because the other is just the self in reverse! Well, there are many paradoxes for binary logic here, and conflict latency inheres therein. Conflict onset, in any process, is the result of some form of rectification effort, an attempt, that is, to iron out the multivalued wrinkles in the frequency domain, those wavering, entangled, reciprocal aspects of identity -- to use ethnologist Giran's words. Psycho-neuro-immunology is too small a concept to embrace the reality. If immunological identity has a biologically active psychological dimension, then, as Georg Groddeck so brilliantly argues in his 1923 THE BOOK OF THE IT, there must also be biologically active social and cultural concomitants of immunity. Disease as self-expression; epidemic as social commentary, as culture-wide collective introjection.

Ethnocentrism in particular and cultural conflict in general are autoimmunological. Why? Because a limited notion of identity is the core of the problem. Not any particular identity; identity as a metaphysical category. Selfsameness. Nature is thought to be self-identical, the same-as-itself. Therefore, there can be only one correct description of it. In constructing its cosmology, a specific culture assumes that its account of reality is the only possible valid account -- because nature is judged to be selfsame, and cannot, therefore, validly support contradictory accounts of itself. Quantum physics tells us this is not correct: nature is inherently multivalued. Apparently, we must abandon certain conventions of our binary logic, those Aristotelean-Baconian rules which codify the selfsame notion identity as the only possible notion of identity. This is accomplished by the Law of Excluded Contradiction (no A is not-A) and the Law of Excluded Middle (the case is either A or not-A). Multivaluedness means simultaneously embracing more than one logical value.

multi-visioning a global metaculture
How can this multi-visioning be achieved in the realms of cultural codification, dynamics, and symbolic interaction? By imitating the immune system in both of its aspects: that of molecular biology; that of quantum biochemistry. A concrete culture is a specific culture. Metaculture is more abstract; it is universalistic, an expression of that which is common to a multitude of concrete cultures. Cultural monism was a popular ideology of expansionism during the nazification of Germany. Which is to trumpet monoculture, not metaculture. Monoculture is cultural uniformity; metaculture is a cultural unity which demands diversity for its very realization. Just as the multivalue is a mathematically involuted composite of its single values! Just as the organism's quantum frequency domain is a reference space for its various single-valued processes!

Today, in the era of global integration, we make monoculture, not metaculture. Five-star world monoculture is the objective we pursue all around the planet. Not only is this a recipe for global uniformity, it most certainly is a pathogenic process guaranteeing eventual pandemic autoimmune dyscrasia -- or everything we have learned in the last twenty years about psycho-neuro-immunology is wrong. We do not seek an authentic universal; we seek to impose upon all concrete cultures the conventions associated with the post-Renaissance mechanistic world view -- and thus create a global melting pot, a planetary tossed-salad culture. And we undertake this imposition by disseminating a uniformizing technology base -- not to mention war, of course.

Can it be any different? Can “culturally sensitive development” be anything more than an oxymoron and a black propaganda term? Can technology be adapted -- adapted, that is, to unique cultural environments? How can an authentic universalistic cultural multivalue be created, and how can this metaculture support the array of its unique single-valued concrete cultural expressions?

metareference in design
It can be done as it has always been done: by metaphysical reference, by cosmological metaphor. The way authority was once legitimized in, for instance, East Asia -- only the meta-reference has to simultaneously transpire on two levels of abstraction. All concrete cultures have represented their world view constructs, cosmologies, and values in artifacts, art objects, architecture, systems of music, apparel, ritual behaviors, and so on. This symbolic representation involves meta-reference: the art object, for instance, refers to an element of the cosmology, which is itself a meta-construct. The more densely packed a culture is with such meta-reference, the more, that is, such reference infuses the objects and activities of daily life, the less coercion is required to insure a harmonious social order -- because collective attention is subtly and frequently directed to shared vision. Metaculture, on the other hand, is more abstract than a concrete culture. In creating a world view construct, in codifying a reality, all cultures -- no matter how different -- fulfill certain prerequisites, follow certain meta-rules of world view construction. Each world view is unique, but the abstract properties of the construction process are the same. These “abstract properties” are shared in common by all concrete cultures. The abstract properties, then, are the unity, the unifying vision, the authentic universal underlying cultural diversity. And they should be the basis of any global integration.

Culture-bound meta-reference in product-development design activities can bind technology in a given culture's value context by conveying those values with meta-reference in design. Thus, can technology be made to lose its uniformizing propensities. Similarly, by inversion of reference, artifacts, art objects, and architecture could be created which refer, not to elements of any given cosmology, but to those abstract properties common to all world view constructs propounded by given concrete cultures. This more abstract form of meta-reference would be the basis for a global metaculture. But in order to increase our knowledge of the commonly held abstract properties, we must re-validate, sustain, and cultivate the existing concrete cultures -- otherwise, our authentic universal will be nothing but more hype, another oxymoron, a new wave of black propaganda. We need unity that demands diversity for its very realization! And we need it yesterday, because all around us are the myriad signs and symptoms of pandemic autoimmune dyscrasia. Today is too late.

REFERENCES

• Groddeck, Georg. The book of the It. N.Y.: Mentor, 1961. (Original German: 1923).
  
• Jus, Julia, William L. Pensinger and Douglas Paine. “A New Theoretical Approach to the Homeopathic Law of Similars”, Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, 88:3, 1995.
  
• Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. Glencoe: Free Press, 1954.
  
• Nguyen Khac Kham. Celebrations of Rice Cultivation in Vietnam. Saigon: Vietnam Council on Foreign Relations, 1970.
  
• Nha Trang, Cong Huyen Ton Nu and William L. Pensinger. The Moon Of Hoa Binh. Bangkok: Foundation Autopoy, 1994.
  
• Paine, D. A. and William L. Pensinger. “A Dynamical Theory Describing Superconductant DNA”, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, 15:3, 1979.
  
• Pensinger, William L., Douglas A. Paine and Julia Jus. “ Time-Logics of the Quantal Base State in Homeopathic Potentization”, Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, 90:2, 1997.
  
• Swedenborg, Immanuel. Heaven and Hell. Bryn Athen, Pa.: General Church of the New Jerusalem, 1959.
  
• Woodside, Alexander B. “The Development of Social Organization in Vietnamese Cities in the Late Colonial Period”, Pacific Affairs, 44:1, 1971.

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