Mark Sedgwick's book (Against the Modern World: Traditonalism and the Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford U. Press, 2004) is a sophisticated piece of scholarship and a great read, but I substantially disagree with his historical take, as exemplified in the following statement (p. 207):
The 1960s were clearly the major cultural and intellectual turning point of the Western twentieth century, perhaps even more than 1914-18.
My replacement statement would be: The period 1900-13, from date of publication of Planck's paper on the quantum of action to placement by Marcel Duchamp of a urinal in the Armory Show, was when all positive fundamental intellectual and cultural creativity transpired during the Western 20th century, the 1960s being a period of trickle-down to popular culture. To me, everything of consequence was over by onset of WWI. Duchamp's Readymade had not only prefigured and encapsulated what would become a hundred years of debate over the quantum measurement problem, it thoroughly prefigured General Relativity, which Duchamp went on to consider in depth on his Large Glass, the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Duchamp, through good offices of his brother, was extremely well informed on the meta-physics of pre-WWI physics. I am even learning that substance of Lukasiewicz's breakaway in logic, leading to creation of m-valued logics, was already in place by 1910 and being elaborated by 1913. There were, of course, extremely negative innovations during other periods of the 20th century like the bivalent finite-sequence Turing Machine, applications of Einstein's partial insight embodied in the equation “c equals plus or minus the square root of E over m”, discovery of the double-helical hardball-and-peg structure of DNA and promulgation of the associated Central Dogma, reduction of physics to probability and time to a one-way street, and so on. What happened after WWI is to me quintessentially paraded by what Julius Evola did to the work of John Woodroffe. Woodroffe's pre- and intra-WWI articles on the Agamas and Tantra Sastras, particularly the Sakta Vedanta, were brought together in 1921 under the title The World as Power (my copy is the fifth edition, 1974, published by Genesh, acquired from Samuel Wiser's bookstore in NYC which replaced the Sunwise Turn used by Eugene O'Neil). Textural commentary on Tantra by Woodroffe is interfused throughout the discourse by comments derived from a professional-level familiarity with the metaphysical implications of prewar “new physics”: the breakthroughs in atomic theory, emerging quantum perspectives, the relativistic notions. Woodroffe does not make it into Sedgwick's index; nonetheless, Sedgwick provides the great service of giving (p. 296) the Italian title (with English translation) to Evola's book on Tantra of 1926: Man as Power. H. T. Hansen, in “A Short Introduction to Julius Evola” (incorporated into Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World, Inner Traditions International, 1995 translation of the 1969 edition of the 1934 Italian original) mentions Evola's condemnation of Woodroffe during the Twenties. Before reading Sedgwick, I had no knowledge of the existence of this 1926 book by Evola. The transliterative falsification from “world” to “man” in the very year Max Borne “innovated” the probability amplitude interpretation of Schrödinger's wave-function -- part of a time-independent wave equation Schrödinger wrote while practicing Tantric sexual yoga -- completely summarizes subsequent human history. As Prigogine points out in elaborating his “the probabilities themselves” interpretation of Schrödinger's canonical equation for quantum mechanics, a time-independent perspective is a man-transcending, Divine perspective which, he argues, it is incumbent upon man to transcend. Man as Power and From Being to Becoming are intellectually compatible. What better illustration of how the collective unconscious uses synchronistic thematic orchestration (derivative of the “thematic orchestration” employed by the “centrencepahlic safety-discharge mechanism” governing sub-clinical and clinical intensity brain discharge phenomena) as means of “demergence” to history (collapse at measurement) through projective identification of the masses?
On the same page, page 207, Sedgwick gives his version of the standard interpretation: Old Europe committed suicide in succumbing to WWI. This contention, I see no evidence to support. The casket of continental institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, after being on view for several generations, was placed in the ground and covered over in the trench of WWI; suicide was committed during the Franco-Prussian war. If artificial insemination of that paradigm came during the post-Renaissance and continental birth in institutionalization during 1789, then 19th century creativity was concentrated into two decades: the 1820s (discovery-creation of transcendental m-valued functions and successful challenge to the Euclidian parallel postulate) and the 1870s (diagonal proof of the definition of a denumerable transfinite set, that definition mathematically embodying archaic, primordial, pre-homo hierarchicus traditionalis, part-whole equivalency, holographic-animistic identity transparency). Europe synchronistically (not causally) dealt with lead up to this Cantorian codification of the 1870s by severe generalized collective hysteria immediately displaced to cognitive self-immolation. Attempts at self-medicating involved Impressionism, Post Impressionism, atonality, liberal doses of “On Denoting” and so much else of Father Knows Best, but there was no resurrection, and the casket lay in the crypt, people filing past, for almost half a century before finally being buried. Each generation since has tried to dig it up, but somehow or another they've always dug the wrong hole.
Trying to answer such questions doesn't really get us anywhere worth getting, produces no real synopsis of the prevailing case we should be attempting to gather insight upon, confront, reshape, transform. There is a form of so-called “blindness” where the sufferer cannot recognize faces; she-he is face blind -- tee-hee-hee! shee-hee! -- and one who has supposedly sustained a genetic disease: prosopagnosia. One more agnosiac! Another cosmic reject sent into W.V.O.Quine-exile by endogenous antidote flood to glutamaturgic neuronal etching, wherein upon whom 1T2 logic never was ably adequate to establish itself -- prenatally, even (under the Central Dogma, of course: each and every genetic disease requires the Central Dogma; otherwise it and they couldn't have gotten there in the first place). Not merely: face-to-face by White-Out. What are pronouns for? Nouns? In a crowd, this person sees, actually sees, only one face -- nose, eyes, mouth, jaw -- the family of man in composite as androgynous singularity, Cubistic, Picassoesque, synthetic no less than abstract: if you stare at it, the composite fades to the generic. Looking in the mirror, Being John Malkovich, this person sees faces in infinite regress: blip, blip, blip, one after another the singular androgyne comes forth as the plurality of mankind: very definition of a non-denumerable transfinite set. So very, very fast is this face, awareness has to sprint to catch up. In a diagnosis of prosopagnosia, awareness never does catch up (not enough antidote flood): therefore, cannot sufficiently engage in autosensory observation so as to disturb the diagnosis. Vision of identity transparency, which just has to be some kind of “blindness”! Part and whole equivalent: holographic. Husserl's denumerably infinite “horizons” of the object superposed as facial facets. These horizons are not in parallel universes; they are just as Picasso painted them (1908-13, memory serving, the same period as Lukasiewicz's breakaway in logic) and Alfred Jarry saw them. µTm not 1T2. Liana and Liana and Liana: the one and only woman Lalla dancing her naked song, Tat Tvam Asi. In higher-order time, each Liana is EveryLiana: masks of the same face. Each of all, tale of the totem mask. Lalla, as licentious Ame-no-Izumi, as operator-time, that is, calling forth the decomposition Involute, Amaterasu, calling her out of her m-logically-valued “cave”, that dark space where the face of EveryLiana first appears (“cave” only to the 1T2-bound mind). Skew-parallels are in parallel universes only for a 1T2-bound ratiocination. In Amaterasu's mirror, under µTm, selfhood diaphanous Kashmiri chiffon. For Lalla engaging in layla, “That which am I” is not “What-Is is what-is, not what-is-not”. This latter proposition, which Lalla in all her nakedness rejects, is an assumption, purportedly tacit, but actually acutely conscious and hyperintensively intended, because if “What-Is is not-what-is”, then there is absolutely no possibility of role stratification, social hierarchy, dominance relations, exploitation, slavery, rape, holocaust, and all the other normative normotic features of F---you society. F---you society requires a nature that is selfsame, identical to itself, the same as itself, a “What-Is that is what-is, not that is what-is-not”. Non-selfsameness (psychodynamically intimated in the act of carrying and birthing a child, making carriers and birthers intrinsically subversives, and therefore to be suppressed, if possible by applications in low-intensity warfare) precludes the distinctions prerequisite to role stratification, social hierarchy, dominance relations, exploitation, and so on and so on. From point of view of the type-A personality, there could, in that case, only be F---me society: completely unacceptable, of course. Put your damn clothes back on, Lalla! But for all of Lalla's dancing the naked, “I am That” is not that, not “What-is is not-what-is”: mere absence of bivalence (duality), distributed middle, whatsoever entailment is not the animistic skinny on the dance Lalla danced. “I am” is; “That” is: neither are not-what-is. And each is singular! If not, why not “Us is Those”. Two is's do not make a not (unless you are G. Spencer Brown): transcendence of selfsameness is not in exponentiating the self and/or its sameness. Nonsingular is not the same thing as non-selfsame. Degrees of freedom, n, are not the same things as m-orders of logical-value to a given proposition. No matter how many No's, never are there No's enough. And Sankaracarya maintained that infinite regress is a logical fallacy! It is well to remember that “I am That” -- what “I”; what “That”? -- incarnated as the Laws of Manu, took as its imago Involution of the Divine into a caste system officiated by the Brahmins: as below, so above. Lah-dee-dah! The inversions of projective identification: that's the traditional, no less than the modern. Lalla's dance, Ame-no-Izumi's dance, the Dance of the Seven Veils, is older than tradition, older than any “great” religion; it comes ontologically and logically “before” linear-time is, “before” the Involute “leaves” the m-logically-valued reference space. One truth! Truth is one! A singular straight path to the Absolute! When truth-value is absolutely without value. Soft, not hard, is the answer? Hmmmm. To what advantage? If it's not no-s--- therapy, it's s---, not therapy. Let those who choose to perish perish; regardless, no matter the varieties of efforts made, that will, anyway, be the outcome. What the Traditionalists wish upon the planet (all the old-bastard hierarchies and the absence of direct spiritual experience always and forever actively imposed on mass membership by each of the world's “great” religions, and those not thus “great”) is no less anathema than what modernism and postmodernism have been successfully imposing: a post-human future, not merely a post-humane future. By the linear-time instant Traditionalism got off the blocks, all the issues it addressed were irrevocably passed over. What is no longer in linear-time past, what is post-post-postmodern, is what came before the traditional which Traditionalists espouse: the m-logically-valued, nonlocal identity transparency of pre-role-stratification, extra-luminal (propagation-independent) nonlinear-temporal, trance-seizure animism that will resurrect the human and the humane from the post-humane post-human immediate linear-time future.
For a realist trying to garner insight by strategic analysis of dissociative processes, traditional or modern, under archetypally-driven projective identification in mass psychological expression -- harebrains are barebrains! -- consideration of rational responses to likely developments is an unintelligent way to go. Stomach for it or not, insight is to be found in the dirty underwear business. Analyze most-irrational responses to highly unlikely developments, as that is what most certainly will occur. Rationality of hysterics in dissociation is normotic, not normative; developments under projective identification are demand-pull unlikely, not cause-push likely. It's just that mass mental illness is like that -- which is not to say that India's Indians treat cows as sacred cows. Want a read on a person? Make an apparently outlandish assertion: “There will be x-cities nuked before this is over.” If you find yourself regarded a harebrain, you know you are standing before a barebrain (stripped bare by neuronal etching). Normotically absent a self-psychology; therefore, no heteropsychological sensitivity to collective gradients. America has not yet sustained anything remotely like an existential threat. Analyze what her response has been to non-existential threats. Are rational responses likely or unlikely developments once actual existential threats materialize? Under what laws of likelihood? Such threats have long since existed immaterially in self-psychology of the challenge to Cartesian-Newtonian sacred cows by the evolving discovery-driven worldview construct and techno-base, and, by transference, these self-psycho threats determine responses to sub-existential material threats. Just like, in transference, you always respond to your wife the way you once responded to your father; and she always responds to you the way she once responded to her mother -- animus in the anima being what it is: intrapsychic contrasexual. Analysis of rational responses to likely developments is absolutely no help here in prognosticating knee-jerkings to sub-existential threats, let alone actual existential threats. Hold up a green square if you want them to see a blue circle.
I see you are still upset by my disparagement of Harper's Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly. So I guess I have to give more examples. Any issue of either magazine would do. A good example is Harper's, June 2005. We start with quotations from Jack Beatty, according to the brief biographic statement, a senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly writing in Harper's. Quoting Mr. Beatty from “Markets Gone Wild”, page 92:
But surely Gene Sperling, a White House economic advisor to former president Bill Clinton, was sapient when he observed: “Protectionists have nothing to say to the future. Free traders have nothing to say to the present.” A middle way that could speak to both is as easy to recommend as, now, it is hard to imagine.
Two pages earlier, without realizing it, Mr. Beatty gives a good indication why his imagination has failed. On page 90, Beatty begins a paragraph by quoting the book by John Steele Gordon he is ridiculing with his Harper's article:
“In one of history's great coincidences, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776,” writes Gordon, attributing significance to coincidence.
Neither Smith nor Gordon interest me here; what is significant is Beatty's disparaging parenthetical remark: “…attributing significance to coincidence”. Leaving aside altogether Pauli's and Jung's notion of synchronicity, still, this observation indicates Beatty's operative notion of “connecting principle” is lost somewhere back there in the 17th and 18th centuries, hasn't assimilated implications of Abel's work of the 1820s on m-valued functions, and certainly hasn't taken cognizance of Schrödinger's m-valued wave-function wherein the coincidences of superposition are undeniably significant, the only question being “significant how?”. Since protectionism and the ideology of free-trade (notions well understood during the 17th and 18th centuries) both presume topologically simply-connected closed boundaries where “inside” and “outside” can be unambiguously determined, and the quantum-based technologies of the 21st century -- technologies utterly dependent upon Schrödinger's wave-function -- impart undeniable ambiguity where previously none was perceived to exist (in the old days, as Beatty points out on page 92, the factors of production were localized, not nonlocal by internet telepresence and thereby in violation of the boundary conditions assumed by both protectionists and free traders), questions about how, exactly, coincidence is significant likely are of great importance to imagining the middle way hard, now, to imagine. A middle way such as? For instance, economic fractal boundaries with band-pass fractal entrapment capabilities (porous financial electronic firewalls) modulated by free markets utilizing m-logically-valued nested (local to global) monetary units tagged to economic, sustainable-development, and quality-of-life indicators (nested locally to globally) initialized by computer gaming the electronic commons and publicly posted in Musculpt.
This notion, of course, involves rethinking the nature of money, rethinking its logical properties in light of what has happened in the field of logic since 1910, and how those properties interface with market mechanisms. But wherever one might go, people are obsessed with paranoia and generally don't have the intellectual capacity to comprehend the prevailing circumstance on planet Earth or the moral courage to effectively use the intellectual capacity they have. In the same issue of Harper's (June 2005), for instance, there is the transcript of a moderated discussion of America's current account deficit and capital account surplus (“The Iceberg Cometh”) wherein the following statement by Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, is made (p. 40):
The United States dollar is the reserve currency for most of the world, and we've never seen a reserve-currency country in this position.
This comes early in the transcript and is the closest the discussants come to discussing the subject to be discussed. Paul Krugman mentions (p. 40) that “…the immediate capital loss from a weakened dollar falls not on U.S. businesses but on foreign central banks…” but does not mention the non-immediate capital loss to holders of dollars due to global inflation since 1945 and the truly staggering “overhang” this represents, the losses to oil producing countries in the early-'70s due to devaluation of the dollar denominating oil transactions had not oil prices been jacked up at the time, nor does he go on to explain what the monetary black propaganda term “liability financing” actually means or how the present position of the foremost reserve-currency country, the U.S., was the all but inevitable outcome of the fact that the Bretton-Woods Agreement made a vehicle currency the foremost international reserve currency, the “printing” of which to cover international obligations was constrained only by a gold-exchange mechanism with a limited life expectancy. Maintaining adequate international liquidity is the responsibility the foremost reserve-currency country takes upon itself in return for the relatively unconstrained right to create its currency for international circulation, but separating international needs from pursuit of national interests, goals, and objectives is not something easily accomplished by people lacking the “moral courage to effectively use the intellectual capacity they have”. And no amount of moral upbraiding, of course, will implant integrity where none has ever existed due to lack of cultivation of the prerequisite introspective faculties. Discussion of alternatives to a vehicle currency being the foremost reserve currency, which absolutely is prerequisite to any real solution being reached to the prevailing global economic conundrum, a discussion not entered upon by these Harper's discussants, would inevitably finally converge upon the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units and their relation to what Keynes-White wanted in the bancor-unitas non-vehicle reserve currency both pushed so hard for. It is extremely difficult not to regard Bretton-Woods as being the functional equivalent for hot WWIII to Versailles for WWII. The Harper's discussants, like Jack Beatty, and surely for similar reasons, were unable to imagine a doable solution to present conundrums, even without discussion of the oil peak overlay dynamic, and so on. Fact is, the U.S. will not do a real solution, won't even contemplate it. What it will do is use “liability financing” to pursue its national interests, goals, and objectives for as long as possible, using all its available means, including military, to maintain dollar confidence for as long as possible. When, in the end, possibilities of this posture collapse into general war, the treasury bills at issue will for all intents and purposes simply be electronically shredded in the expectation that the whole thing will be worked out in some end-of-conflict new Bretton-Woods-type conclave -- a conclave which may never actually assemble.
And why will the U.S. not even contemplate a real solution? Because of the intellectual history overlay upon the oil peak overlay and the collective psychology overlay upon the individual psychology overlay lying atop all the other superposed overlays. Contemplation by people who have no sense of identity independent of identifying themselves by naming the socially conferred role attribution they are identified with? That this “refusal to even contemplate” will be the case is made quite clear in the same issue of Harper's (June, 2005) in a “Reading” by Denise Riley entitled “The Inner Voice”. Embrace of m-logical-values to a given proposition -- the basic notion behind m-logically-valued monetary units and the most straightforward interpretation of the significance of coincidence (termed “superposition”) in Schrödinger's wave-function -- is a very scary thing, not only because the 17th and 18th century “connecting principle” upon which all prevailing political, economic, and social systems are based would have to be utterly abandoned, but also, and much more immediately threatening, because the assumption that the predicated personal self is selfsame would likewise have to be completely cast aside. The intensity of psychological dread involved here is sufficient to preclude all possibility of rethinking the nature of money, or even actually contemplating the real nature of the prevailing collective circumstance on planet Earth. As Riley says (p. 16):
In clinical practice, the working distinction between delusion and sanity resides in the capacity to recognize that inner voices are self-generated, even where they are experienced as peremptory invasions…
In Riley's judgment (p. 16), “This silent dialogue certainly lies on the side of the good…”, even though the state of Nirvana, according to Sri Aurobindo's very detailed accounts, in his Letters on Yoga, is entered upon by stopping “roof-brain chatter”, a stopping which cannot occur until one unreservedly embraces knowledge that inner voices “come from elsewhere”, that they “come in on you” and are not self-generated -- for, as long as, using Gurdjieff's terminology, one “says 'I' to them”, one cannot accomplish “inner stop”. Riley buys into (p. 14) the neurologists' claims to have localized the inner voices to “the brain's left inferior frontal region” with the new scanning technologies. She goes on to give a brief account of her own very admirable attempts to experientially localize the inner voice (the practices of which readers of MOON will realize Derek undertook intensively over a period of years, leading to a “peculiar” gran mal seizure and subsequent “state”) and quotes from William James regarding his personal experiential attempts (p. 14):
“The 'Self of selves,'” he wrote, “when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat.”
Riley observes that she cannot make any sense out of this from her own experience -- an observation which puts her in the company of psychologists using “eye movement reprogramming” to treat post-traumatic stress disorder without having developed any real insight into why this reprogramming helps subdue repetition compulsion, for instance. The student of William James, unparalleled practitioner of autosensory observation, originator of “progressive relaxation”, and actual creator of the first EEG machine, Edmund Jacobson, who was for many years associated with the University of Chicago, demonstrated over and over relentlessly that mental associations (visual and verbal) are highly correlated with residual tension patterns (very near zero action-potential) of the small extra-ocular muscles and the laryngeal muscles, providing the likely explanation for James' observation and also insight into the mechanism of action of “eye-movement reprogramming”. As roof-brain chatter progressively shuts down, localization of the inner voice enters upon an apparently random walk, just as James notes -- a walk in all likelihood related to the pattern of autogenic-discharge-driven appearance of paroxystic phenomena with onset of long-range neuronal phase coherence -- and in due course is directly experienced leaving the head as it quite literally screams in order still to be heard (see our 1981 paper entitled “Autogenic Discharge: Quantum Biological Considerations”). Jacobson's electrophysiological measurements upon subjects highly trained in autosensory observation did not, however, provide much insight into the associative processes governing nonverbal, non-imagistic thought by ordered sequences of feeling-tones, content filled or without contents (i.e., Kandinsky's “pure feeling”). These measurements did, nonetheless -- in conjunction with his own personal experiential explorations of the inner voices and their cessation to chatter -- convince Jacobson that “contentless awareness” does exist at zero action-potential for the extra-ocular and laryngeal muscles. Practice at such zero-action potential inevitably -- according to Aurobindo's testimony -- will take one into the nest of Samadhi states which Derek, in MOON, describes as being the state-specific correlates to the numbered Gödel-numbers of the order-types of m-valued logics necessary to straightforward interpretation of Schrödinger's wave-function. The inner voices, inner image generator, and the inner pure-feeling (which is not the same as “affect charge”) producer at various stages of Samadhi are not localizable in the brain, as, indeed, the brain itself is not localized to the brain by any quantum biophysics yardstick one might find. The quantum wave properties of intraneuronal superconductant DNA are of importance here.
Obviously, the connections I have outlined here were no part of the conscious criteria used by the editors of Harper's to select the articles printed in the June 2005 issue. But I have no doubt that the implied unconscious factors were involved, as the pattern of threat dispersal achieved by the articles is very coherent.
The best published assessment of certain aspects of the prevailing and evolving global circumstance I've seen is a piece by James Howard Kunstler: “End of the Binge, The exhaustion of our energy supply may end affluence as we know it” (The American Conservative, 12 September 2005). By direct implication, this article provides considerable support to the notion that m-logically-valued monetary units (nested local to global), if not inevitable, are necessary, if the worst is to be avoided, and if there is going to be anything worth having once the inevitable transpires. Not to mention the fact that viable new approaches to energy issues will not be forthcoming until Schrödinger's wave-function ceases to be dissimulated relative to probability amplitudes and is finally rightfully interpreted in terms of the m-valued logics on the scene before Schrödinger wrote his famous time-independent wave equation. Of course, the inevitability of affluence degree-zero is 35-year-old news in the circles I've been traveling -- and if it weren't, there wouldn't be the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units currently on the scene. Focusing the discussion onto the developed world, America in particular, still, by implication, Kunstler's article describes why, though few yet recognize the fact, economic development is a thing of the past, and economic de-development is a thing of the not distant future. Not only will peoples of the developed world have difficulties with this, so will those of the underdeveloped and developing worlds. Indeed, “difficulties” is not the right word; not only will peoples everywhere have trouble accepting the realities of de-development, they simply will not be able to process what has transpired. Living people will not accept the difficulties, will not process the realities; only those yet to be born will live with the new circumstances. Those least able to process are those from the underdeveloped world who have received higher education at the best universities in the developed world, uncritically eaten the Western paradigm, and returned home as agents of influence. During the pandemic failure to process reality hard upon the planet, the recruitment base of Al Qaeda and Associates, the various mafias, gangs, extralegal sectors, those declaring reversion to tribal status, like some in New Orleans, will expand exponentially well beyond radical Islamism, indeed, beyond all fundamentalist motivations and commitments. Warfare will not only transpire between nation-states of a nation-state system in its death throes; as has already occurred in certain locations, the educated, the professional, the successful, the wealthy will be targeted en masse as the responsible agents. This will not be the result of the sorts of intellectual history interpretations I embrace, but simply because these people most exemplify the failed system, benefited most from it, and on that basis alone will be rightly or wrongly scapegoated.
It is not at all surprising that so many of the “outrageous” positions on issues explicated in MOON via “Derek's Journals” and the polemics of conversation should decades later increasingly enter mainstream discourse and behavior. The rhyme of reasoning behind the outrageous positions taken was in versification of the historical black propaganda Derek learned the techniques of while assigned in 1967 to Psychological Operations Group, JFK Special Warfare Center, and studies made there of OSS-MO, the Office of War Information, and so on. Derek did not waste time during his brief opportunity; nor did he violate any of the codes imposed. He essayed no exposes. He used the exposure simply to inform his personal “historical imagination” and to analytically project implications of that imagination for future histories, probable and improbable. He had free run of the Special Warfare Center Library for approximately six months, and worked 14-hour days during that period. All the economies of motion cultivated by a year-and-a-half in Special Forces Training Group were brought to bear upon the self-originated intellectual task undertaken in the Library. The revisionist -- more accurately, perhaps, “visionist” -- suggestions incorporated into MOON about actual origins and precipitants of the Korean war, for instance, were not idle and/or uninformed. It was apparent that in due course Korean sentiment would gravitate in the direction indicated. And this drift seems to be well underway at present: “The Unwanted General, Young revisionists in South Korea are rethinking who the villains and heroes were in the Korean War” by B. J. Lee, Newsweek, September 5, 2005. It will get worse when they start looking closely at the culture assassination roles played by the fundamentalisms of SingMan and the Dull, Duller, Dullest Dulles. Though black propaganda (often with white spin-off) on occasion has short-term utilities, the long-term consequences of how it works on the collective unconscious of self, friend, and foe are virtually without exception enormous prefigurations.
I have no knowledge of the details concerning Japanese plans for privatizing their postal savings system, but I have little doubt that, whatever the details, the involved transformation of the banking system will be another staggering stage in the Americanization of Japanese life. Right now in Japan it is impossible to do virtually anything without a postal savings account and a jitsuin, a registered hanko or personal seal/stamp. These are required to obtain a registered parking space so a car can be purchased and registered. No one will rent you a place to live before receiving your postal savings account number, for the rent will be paid automatically by the post office each month, as will each of your utility bills, and probably also your credit card bills. You simply have to make sure that your account balance never falls below the minimum established for your prevailing circumstances. As your wages are automatically deposited, this is insured in cases where extravagant expenditures are not undertaken. Cash, however, is generally acceptable for key money and the yearly gift money to the landlord. Personal debts are frequently paid by electronic transfer between personal accounts in the postal savings system and in the commercial banking system, where no additional charges are made by either system for accomplishing the transfers. Personal checks are almost never used. Grocery bills at the ma-and-pa shop down the street can be paid on a monthly basis in the same fashion, as can delivery charges by the Three Cats delivery service which will very rapidly deliver your suitcase or virtually anything else from any point A to any point B in Japan for such a reasonable fee that people hardly ever carry a suitcase as it will be at their destination before they arrive. Except for American-style chain stores (which will maintain lower prices only so long as required to run the corpus of sole proprietorships out of business, then jack prices up above previous levels so as to provide shareholder value and yen tens-of-billions-yearly executive salaries), there are no delivery fees for significant purchases, so it is not necessary to carry arm loads of grocery bags or large items home on public transportation. Prices obviously reflect such service provisions. The delivery system in Japan, as well as the requirement to have a registered parking space to own a car, effectively reduce the number of cars on the roads, which decreases petroleum consumption and pollution levels. Much of this, as well as a great deal more, will in due course change with privatization of the postal savings system and continued progressive deregulation of the commercial banking system. The small-depositor customer service orientation of the commercial banking system has deteriorated considerably since the late-1960s when I had my first engagement with it. Once the funds in the postal savings system find their ways into the commercial banking system, by whatever details of structural and procedural transformation, and latent demand for bank-shareholder value is unleashed upon bank boards-of-directors and expectation levels for stock distributions by bank CEOs, small-depositor customer service will collapse to American levels. Collapse in quality of interpersonal space with explosive expansion of minimum permissible interpersonal distance prefigures loss of personal space altogether to virtual space, cybersex, and so on. Granted, LDP pork-barrel projects like lining creek beds and breakwaters with modular concrete blocks and tinker-toy structures is as dismaying in a society that produced the Japanese garden as the Osaka flower show where one can wander for days without ever encountering a natural flower. But transformation of daily life in Japan is surely the least of it. By one path or another the funds in the postal savings system will find their ways to support America's “liability financed” agenda for global monoculture in fashions far more risky than that of U.S. Treasury bills. Collective decision to dismantle the postal savings system is an enormous vote of confidence in America's oneiric planetary vision. One would think a bit of judicious caution would be in order relative to the corpus of national savings from sixty years of work. Particularly as oil peak dynamics have already begun; particularly in wake of bubble formation and ensuing consequences for the Japanese economy (passed on to the rest of East Asia as the '97 event) of the Plaza Accords devaluation of the U.S. dollar. Snap-over in Japanese-American relations from compliant submission to explosive back-reaction would likely take a major precipitating event. Decision to put the funds in the postal savings system at much greater risk may be just what is required to set up prerequisites of such an event.
Thank you most heartily for drawing my attention to the parallel between Hayao Kawai's analysis of the traditional decision-free Japanese-political-system implications of the notion of an “empty center” in Japanese Shinto cosmogony with its associated myth of origins (“The Hidden Gods in Japanese Mythology”, Eranos Yearbook 1985, Volume 54, 1986) and Claude Lefort's treatment of a supposed vacuum center in Western democratic systems. I see what you mean, but I dispute Lefort's contention -- one more obnubilation -- that there has been an unoccupyable center in constitutional democracies. No such state, no such place: nation-state as imaginary community, not imagined community. An action-based sociology employs individual “actors” as agents of decision science, not spacetime singularities as teleological strange attractors or entropic information gobblers. The empty center has never been a part of Western democracy based as it is on Cartesian-Newtonian countervailing forces. The prime minister and the president are present and primary occupiers of power points established by intersection of countervailing forces. Newton's laws of motion applied not only to John Locke's very definition of “majority rule” and Adam Smith's explication of the market supply and demand dynamic, but institutional structure as counterpoised bicameral legislatures and Trinity of executive, legislative, and judicial powers resident in the vector sums of force divided against itself. Fraternal animus as inherent and non-disposable conflict that can only be momentarily adjudicated within a clockwork structure of delicate balances maintained by cross-cutting pendulum swings carrying threat of the guillotine. “For what is the heart, but a spring?”: quote the preface to the founding document of social contract theory. None of this is modeled on the notion of a quantum vacuum fluctuation. By 1980, Lefort was acutely aware of the political, social, and economic implications of the almost one-hundred-year-old new physics, didn't like those implications, chose not to look for appropriate new political, social, and economic concepts, and decided instead to map post-Newtonian physics ideas back onto something -- Western democratic institutions and decision algorithms -- which has never actually manifest one iota of the post-Newtonian. More gill fungus! More French postmodernist dissimulation: 17th and 18th century political economy, if interpreted with a glacé of 19th century Marxist aspic, already incorporates black hole computers! Hah! We don't need to change. I'm okay, you're okay; they're the ones who aren't okay. So croak the frogs into the withering storm hard upon us, if not yet illuminated by sheet lightning. A confabulation so in need of rewriting it is sure to become a palimpsest. This inversion of the case is thematically consonant with Oliver Stone's treatment of the Bosnian war sniper in his film “The Savior”. The sniper is distant, you see, removed, as if looking through the cameraman's telephoto lens backwards, as if peering down the wrong end of the telescope on his rifle, as if he were Louis Dumont's absent individual, the outsider, the man apart from the world in some mystified oneiromantic state-place. Not a man up-close by animistic identity transparency, so deeply embedded in the world as to be invisible, scanning the natural surround through the correct end of his scope, a man made pathological and lethal by a political ideology birthed in fears of the Dark Continent (the jungle of the collective unconscious) and the need to kill or enslave figures found there. The child savior, of course, grew up to martyrdom, which became institutionalized as signifier of spiritual “individuation” (to use C. G. Jung's misnomer).
Uh, uh… Well, new ideas like… Look. Lefort basically argued that a role being a slot, no mere hole, is empty even when filled… What a Lacanianism! The sexual metaphor, you know, uh, well, following in the steps of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cornelius Castoriadis… And this secular Sunyata of Lefort has so inspired the Buddhists in Paris, New York, San Francisco, and other such spiritual redoubts, that the paradox of embodiment in woman-being-bodied probably means being holistically penetrated -- by no means genitally-focused -- by the A-field of Kali's Akasa. Never, never, nevermore stop chasing the Marxist chimeras of your youth, even when Marxism, in your youth, say the youth of an ex-Trotskyite Castoriadis, is found to be the weakest representation of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm -- Kill Marxism in order to resurrect Marx! thus using the “opiate of the people” to good advantage, whatever your general theory of praxis -- and when, in your old age, this weakest representation is the first to collapse as the nesting Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm enters whipstall and readies itself for incendiary discorporation, the only real question having become: Will the capitalist representation or the democracy representation of the paradigm be the last to disintegrate? This being the paradigmatic march into deconstruction (which is not decomposition from the A-field into corporeal ponderable spacetime existence), one can always, as each representation collapses, jump onto the next -- and even build an academic career upon such jumps. At least Castoriadis, in “de-centering infantile omnipotence”, came down hard on “ensemblist-identitarian” classical logic as he proclaimed the untranscendable, ineliminable unsurpassability of the reflexivization involved in the praxis of the imaginative creativity projecting new social worlds which aim at the expansion of autonomy, which ain't polymorphous perverse infantile egoic autonomy, such omnipotency already having been de-centered, so as to… Decentring, you idiot, not de-centering! Of course, Castoriadis looked no more closely at non-classical logics than Lefort looked at… You know, the degree of dishonesty of every sort -- from the most intrapersonal to the most interpersonal to the most transpersonal -- has reached such sublime heights, one can hardly justify… The pseudoasceticism of the affluent upper middle class sophisticate social critic, though swallowed by so many, is about as digestible as… and as ineliminable as… the pseudoaestheticism of the… So many will be killed, you know, it's not only ineliminable, it's inevitable that a time will come when they will be arguing over all the redefinitions of “dead” employed to reduce the body count.
New ideas Lefort might have pursued, but didn't; ideas like Derek's 1968 effusion on Thuy Tien's thesis on the thousands-of-years-old animistic identity transparency underlay to the anarchist-Trotskyite overlay underlying the Marxist-Leninist veneer of the self-organizational praxis of the southern Viet Cong political infrastructure terrorist network dynamical transformations conducted over boundaries-without-boundary (MOON, Vol. 1, p. 598):
The intersection of behavior and norms generates roles.
A given role actively imparts structure to the sociopolitical corpus within which it appears.
This activity of the role may be represented as the structuring of a set.
The structuring of the set may be represented by decomposition into subsets.
A given function of a role may be represented as a mapping across the decomposed subsets.
This mapping may be represented graphically as a point-set topology on a sheet of a Riemann surface (covering surface).
Other functions of the role may be graphed on other sheets of the Riemann surface.
The graphs on the total stack of sheets, when projectively recomposed, provide a composite multivalued representation of the functions of the role.
The composites of many roles may be graphed upon multiple sheets of stacked Riemann surfaces (universal covering surface) and their second-order composite projected, thus providing a map of the multiply-connected functions of roles in a complex ecosystem.
When it was suggested that construction of the implied “multivalued reference space” would probably involve applications of the Teichmueller spaces first described in Germany during WWII, the conversation deteriorated and came to focus upon the Vietnamese Vong Co, a melodic musical evocation of “Longing for the Past”.
Later, this notion of the slot which is a role, or more specifically, the multiple functions of such slots which are roles, fed into the idea of m-logically-valued monetary units tagged to local sustainable development indicators. Search, during the 1970s, for algorithms through which to identify where -- what geographical sites -- to begin creation of such local monies suggested a number of answers, one of which related to the ecosystem aspect of an m-logically-valued sociology qua quantum economy: singular critical points strung along cultural fault lines (by analogy to localizations of transformational dynamics in far-from-equilibrium chemical phase-transitions). These thirty-plus year-old ideas seem to have some resonance with Peter Turchin's recent ecological theory of history. The major difference being there is no simple antecedent-consequent, cause-effect notion of history possible in an m-logically-valued conception of the factors underlying the quantal identity transparency informing collective and cooperative behaviors.
“Autonomous meaning”? Humph! This is no less an oxymoron than the aged upper middle class Sixties street theater activist hysterically decrying the exurban neocon (many of whom were once themselves yippie types) realization of the planetary consequences of his freely chosen personal lifestyle as he sits in his five-thousand-dollar lazy-boy vibrator in the rec room of his seven-hundred-thousand-dollar suburban ranch house reading into his subscription to Radical Philosophy which he graduated to from New Left Review -- after setting aside the laptop whereupon his stock trades are daily completed. And these people, when not moaning about how nothing can be done no matter how hard one tries, are transfixed by the need to prevent a catastrophe (the resultant of their own freely chosen lifestyle). Thorough disgust is the only appropriate emotion. Fixation on discrete agents in projective identification to blame and ambivalent quaking under a self-imposed moral imperative to prevent that made inevitable by ones own behaviors are clear signs of failure in comprehension. No idea whatsoever of the actual prevailing circumstance. The planetary phase transition mentioned previously as presented by James Howard Kunstler: “End of the Binge, The exhaustion of our energy supply may end affluence as we know it” (The American Conservative, 12 September 2005), which is but one aspect of a much larger transformation, will not occur in a fashion smooth and easily accommodated. I am not, like Peter Turchin, particularly interested in developing a science of historical dynamics, of the rise and fall of civilizations, when the fall we have already entered upon will take science as we have known it right along with it. Nor do I feel myself in a position to make a judgment on the woebegoneness of such a passing -- particularly given the scientist component of culpability for the present planetary circumstance. The scientific focus on prediction appears to have had not one iota of value; indeed, it appears largely to have itself produced the circumstance that was not predicted before it was too late to utilize the value supposedly in prediction. But Turchin's work is, nonetheless, very important, as it steps right into midst of the late-19th century conundrum over “animal societies”, insect swarms, collective and cooperative biological behaviors prefiguring emergence of the new physics, with its transition from statistical dynamics of ensembles to the m-logically-valued non-orientabilities the binary mind has persisted in characterizing as indeterminant, undecidable, nonlocal, incomplete and the seemingly (but certainly not actually) endless recursively generated list of not-A's juxtaposed to the A-for-autonomy in “autonomous meaning”, the kind of Cartesian-Newtonian meaning ex-Trotskyite Castoriadis jumped over onto when the Marxist representation of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, with its basis in 1T2 “ensemblist-identitarian” classical logic, gave every indication of having clearly (in pattern recognition by minds habituated to 1T2 logic) failed. Suppression during the late-19th century of the sort of investigations Turchin is presently undertaking was intimately involved, by processes of projective identification, as essayed in MOON, in producing regressed expressions like national socialism and state Shinto -- and which Turchin, by his consideration of the Arabic notion of group cohesion, asabiya, apparently realizes is presently involved in projection of regressed expressions like the transnational neo-umma Al Qaeda juxtaposes to the regressed neocon borderless world governed by a planetary transnational Cartesian-Newtonian suprastate. Sever aqida -- the binding spiritual links “stereo-chemically” responsible for communitarian bonds -- with an ego-sphere stepped into like a car stalled on the LA freeways with all its doors locked, and “contagion”, that Western social anthropology corruption of m-logically-valued animistic identity transparency, rears its ugly head via processes of projective identification. But is it really true that the answer to the question “What is to be done?” is “Nothing, and so be it”? Oriana's answer to Nicky's question may not, y'know, be the final word.
Nah, nah, nah. Though the increase involved in the Arabic baraka is about animism and collective behavior (see the film by that name), it is not the craziness of the Japanese baka -- except to those hypercathectors panicked by what they regard “intersubjectivity”. O, 'ow little 'ave they learned! The “inter” in intersubjectivity is a lie; there are no discrete subjectivities under m-logically-valued identity transparency: nonlocality not only has no locality, it is without localities. Identity transparency violates what Castoriadis regarded (but did not shed much light upon) the “identitarian” character of classical logic. Such violation, regardless of what the corpus of social anthropologists, analytical psychologists, and neuroscientists who have never experienced a state of identity transparency might have to say about the nature of “participation inconciente” and “participation mystique”. Susan Greenwood, in her chapter, “Magical Consciousness” (The Nature of Magic: An Anthropology of Consciousness, Berg, 2005), provides a recent accurate account of Lévy-Bruhl's 1910 lack of insight into How Natives Think. Why do you think British Radical Philosophy never got into the Brit G. Spencer Brown's “cross” notation for his calculus of indications? Best ask Castoriadis' ghost. And it is no mere mistaken impression that in generative-empathic animism the living are regarded spiritually dead, while dead ancestors are worshipped as vibrantly alive. Oh, so soteriological, and even sapiential! Read the Tenth Book of Plato's Republic if you are in doubt. One does not have to go to the Arabic world or The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The Secret of the Golden Flower to find insight into this matter; it once was integral to Western civilization and deeply cultivated, not least by neo-Platonists like Plotinus and the much-later Brit Thomas Taylor (just try to read his books!) -- though I must admit it was Abdul Aziz Said at AU's SIS who in 1963 directed me to this aspect of Plato's thought when I raised certain unsavory questions about his, Said's that is, conceptual model of the international system of Westphalian nation-states. Such unsavories were never uttered on campus, of course; only over Turkish coffee at the MacArthur Blvd. abode. In identity transparency, there is no distinguishing the inhabitants from the land inhabited. REALLY! Not just metaphorically, symbolically, notionally; not by the artist's empathy; not by painting what one feels as opposed to what one sees. And certainly not in Pierre Bourdieu's linear-time-bound general theory of practice! (which Derek so thoroughly parodied in MOON) -- a theory of practice incompatible with Mauss' general theory of the gift, by virtue of irreconcilable notions of time. If not there, where? In direct immediate perception, perception with the five senses everyone is all too familiar with. Nothing any conceivable Clinton Global Initiative could possibly come up with can address the degree to which quantum physics and ancient animism (which preceded all shepherding traditions and all traditions analogically derivative of the shepherd's control over his flock) have come together to destroy every last remnant of institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm presently shifting into incendiary collapse.
I do not consider the essential quandary in the existing global circumstance a mere matter of whether or not Al Qaeda and Associates is going to win “the clash of civilizations”; much, much more is involved in the prevailing historical conjuncture than simply one take on coercive imposition of planetary monoculture prevailing over another such take. But people don't see it; and not seeing it, they cannot see what AQ & A is actually all about; and not seeing what AQ & A is all about, they cannot comprehend its self-organizational initiative; and not cognizing the organizational dynamic, they cannot see how “what AQ & A is actually all about” regressively embodies very large issues the human species is fatally foundering upon. And these non-comprehenders, because of their inability to comprehend, regard such usage as “fatally” in “fatally foundering” as hysterical exaggeration. The human species is not, repeat not, they insist, launched upon a collective and cooperative martyrdom operation modeled upon lemming behavior, no matter what ecologists like Peter Turchin might think. Hah! What else could the editorial exemplars of normotic illness at The Economist possibly conclude? Aye, open up, that yon of yours, and you find… nowt! Bloomin' mercy, it's beginning to notice! And it will soon be all! Nothing is the number when you die! The “why” of their non-comprehension is firstly, even predominantly, a matter of psychological ineptitude, most especially introspective incompetence. An incompetence with consequences. They do not believe that everything is connected to everything else. In spite of the unconscious being infinite sets, they do not believe in Germanic, indeed Hegelian, notions like superintegration and overdetermination. They believe that reality is as fragmented as their inner state, as are their perceptions and proprioceptions, as is the knowledge base -- and that “the mechanism of meaning” and “history as force” (vector sums of Newtonian force-structures) verify, and will continue to verify, truth-value validity of the involved “identitarian” 1T2 outside-inside isomorphism. And they make judgments based on cultivation of this tacitly held imputed schematic isomorphism. Such reliance on mere sculpture! In spite of the haptification of space and the concretion of time.
“The standard answer we got from Bremer's people was that tribes are a vestige of the past, that they have no place in the new democratic Iraq,” says the former intelligence officer.
This statement is recorded in Joe Klein's excellent recent article entitled “Saddam's Revenge: The secret history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart” (Time Magazine, 18 September 2005). My reaction to this is that Bremer's myopia is a direct synchronicity echo (historical beat frequency) of the conceptual presuppositions employed by constructivist sculptor David Smith in creation of his abstract expressionist Cubi series and in determination of the placement of its various pieces on his sculpture farm at Bolton Landing in the Adirondack Mountains… By the smirk on your face, I can see that you “do not believe in superintegration and overdetermination”. This is a subject close to my heart, as I once worked in upstate New York (in the little town where Moog synthesized his synthesizer) as an assistant to metal sculptor Gary Wojcik. Between welds, when the grinders were silent, when Moog's synthesizer was silent, our conversation was often quite sophisticated, ranging even into the numerics, algebra, and nested triangular geometries of the m-logically-valued reference space, and speculation as to exactly how the triangles and their placement on Duchamp's “Large Glass” related to this reference space and Duchamp's take on the multiple scenarios strategic planning algorithms involved in the game of chess (applications of which are necessary for computer gaming the process of weighting the m-logical-values to be superposed upon a given local currency base). A Wojcik thinking about Polish logics? Nah! Any calculus of indications involves removal and placement of signifying terms -- like clacking the stones in the Japanese game of “go”; like situating rock gestalts in Zen gardening; like in the deployment of Takemitsu's notational ikons (triangles prominent among them) upon the score's blank page to produce a music-sculpture composition. Musculpt! Holographic-eidetic medium for studying projective identification on the level of man-woman transference; uh, subject-object hallucination/simulacra; uh, space-time ephemera; uh, pregeometrical virtualities; uh… Contextualizing this bidirectional discourse (“conversation”, if you insist!) was the fact that Wojcik's prevailing artistic focus, at least as far as I could understand it, was upon a Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis and a Husserlian reductive phenomenology of the triangle: crisp and hard-edged; the inside of triangles and wedges displayed on the outside; the outside, inside. Psychological induction as topological abduction in negative space. Writing sculpture into the counterspace invoked by inversion of G. Spencer Brown's “crosses” (a decades-early prefiguration of Galton's Temporal Logics and Jozsa's “counterfactual computation”). Of course, the New York City art-business agencies and galleries are not much when it comes to the sophisticated, particularly if the involved “sophisticated” has tribal implications, and especially if those implications are about tribal states of consciousness, tribal modes of comprehension (prevalent still -- at least at that time -- on the Meeting Grounds beneath the Falls a mile from Wojcik's studio). On what island in North America was it that the foreign invaders perpetrated their first village massacre? Archetypal memes do cascade from generation to generation.
David Smith began his Cubi series in 1963, which was just short of a decade after J. G. Bennett promulgated his mathematical treatment of “diversely-identical skew-cubes” (a subject discussed on occasion with Wojcik). Existing in higher dimensions, dimensions not directly given to 1T2-logically-governed perception, the skew-parallel-polytopes of post-quantum-relativistic M Theory (polytopes being Coxeter's four-and-higher dimensional geometrical figures, regular and irregular) are not nearly so frightening as 3-D skew-parallel-cubes: being beyond the reach of prescriptively enculturated 1T2 perception, skew-parallel-polytopes are much more easily dismissed, whatever their implications might be relative to reincarnation or the Tenth Book of Plato's Republic or The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the m-superposed-lives of “Schrödinger's cat” (undoubtedly “contemplated” by Schrödinger and his two teenaged-sister paramours during their three-way practice of Tantric sexual yoga, a practice which came during the same period David Smith was shifting from work as a riveter and welder to studies at the Art Students' League). The parallel-skewness (not the shrewness one just must attribute to Schrödinger's women, who most assuredly insisted resolutely he take notice of identity transparency) in 3-D skew-parallel-cubes -- and massiveness of the mortifying implied threat to the ego's 3-sphere -- is not merely a question of N or M?, whatever Orient Express it might be riding upon, but is found in non-linear imaginary time and non-binary orders of logical-value. For the technically inclined, m-valued variables, e.g., eigenvalues of eigenfunctions, are not the same as m-orders of logical-value: m-valued variables on n-dimensional manifolds can exist under m-orders of logical-value to a given proposition over those n-manifolds, whatever n is the nth-degree of the manifold in question in any given case. No matter from what perspective -- this or that in cognitive, feeling-toned, or spatial reference -- one studies the Cubi series, and imagines the relative placement of its pieces in Bolton Landing fields, it is not construable that these totemic arches and lesser compositions (be they regarded quasi-figural; architectural; evoking regular polyhedra made of Fermi surfaces and Brillouin holes, with implied frequency response windows) are in any way sculptural embodiments of “diversely-identical skew-cubes”. Analytical Cubism was called “analytical” -- not synthetic or constructivist -- for good reasons having nothing to do with materials and means, and everything to do with Husserl's “horizons”. That being the case, though Smith made his best effort to weld together factory and forest with the torch of emotional abstraction, though he strove to create an industrial arcadia with stripped-down controlled affect-charge, he failed in this endeavor to conflate Hamilton and Jefferson, failed utterly to find the instrumental notions -- just as any conceivable Clinton Global Initiative, whipping together with a magic wand Kyoto and globalization, inevitably will fail to create a postindustrial arcadia. Exotic eidolon, India-China, contrasexual imago signifying non-integrated contents of the unconscious, of course, has always been at the fantasy root of American efforts to expurgate the ghost-witch -- dread hierarchy of “women”! -- in the machine by fusing it to (mother) nature, as Henry Nash Smith so well explicated in Virgin Land (all such Abrahamic monotheistic global monoculture efforts possessing an elaborate explicit Hagaric-Christic-Maryamiyya overtone series). The “diversely-identical” inherent to animism is not person-to-person, but always mediated by transparency with the natural surround, a transparency found geometrically in skews that are parallel, and thus in violation of the theorem of the acute angle or the wedge, crisp and hard-edged. A violation resolved m-times over, under Lukasiewicz's and Post's m-valued logics -- not only in non-Euclidian geometries on n-dimensional manifolds under 1T2 logic. What people often regard the height of person-to-person intersubjectivity is not authentic animistic identity transparency, but predominantly psychological identification, and occasionally empathy, most rarely generative empathy. Which takes us to Al Qaeda and the identity state accompanying the suicide/murder of martyrdom operations, leverage of this identity state upon the recruitment base, and the entailed vision regarding the animistic-quantum “relative-state” of culture, society, and politics.
As Aunt Agatha says, They Came to Baghdad because Murder is Easy. The only real mystery is: what (not who) are “They”? Farhad Khosrokhavar (Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs, David Macey trans., Pluto, 2005), professor at the School of High Studies in Sociology, “supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs” (front piece facing the title page), offers us what I would call a French, socialistic, Christian Existentialism, symbolic interactionist, Prague School of Linguistics, postmodern, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, intertextural interpretation of what he calls Islamist “martyropathy”. And, clearly, this is “No Place For Amerchewers!”: a motto under which I once lived intensely for two years. More apropos than “De Oppresso Liber!”. The metapsychology of your suicide squad ain't the same as mine! You see? An easy way to cease being an amateur in these domains is to stare at the mottlements marking a marble floor or the maculations marring a water-blemished wall: become flood-borne. Go “negative” long enough, dump “world arrogance”, defocus sufficiently, and you will surely see faces, figures, whole landscapes where once you thought only spots and blotches. Now, here is the hard part, imagine you are not inimitable Catherine Deneuve virgin wrapped in Kashmiri mousseline de soie staring at walls of threat -- humiliating, mortiferous, gangrenous, necrotic -- in Roman Polanski's film “Repulsion” evoking too much revulsion (a proconsul of Polish logic?), that this is not a Rorschach test but real reality, however regressed. Stay here awhile, long enough to feel at home; then try to imagine yourself -- no mere motley lower-case self written of blood-and-thunder cliché -- into the consensus reality of the dominant culture. Unnerving! to put it mildly. The only real oneirocritical issue is the polysemy, whose hermeneutics to believe. Or is it that, in all polysemy, each equally believable under µTm? Skews that are parallel and parallels that are skew happen just here in your eyes when you look right back into them, literally seeing the seeing, seeing the cones of your own eyes in photism splash, splash, splush, “warm golden dust of supermind”, Yayoi Kusama polka-dot universe: the parallel-distance alleys intersect evermore in superposition as onset of identity transparency elaborates with “pilot” fixation syndrome at µTm-information overload for a brain reduced to 1T2-functioning and reaching its limiting velocity in cognition of percepts (baud rate of consciousness: boys' faster than girls', recent experiments have been engineered to demonstrate). A “time comes” whenupon the injunction “Draw a distinction!” carries no semantic (etymologically engineered to be related to the word “semen”) import under the involved temporal logic. In subjective heat of Islam (no cold fusion for them!), hours on end watching the sand move… Sliding from the Arabian horse; slipping off the camel's back: not so easy. Stuck there with bubblegum at any attempt to disengage (this is actually topologically depicted with “the wall” in Polanski's film, depicted in Kusama topo-environmental-sculpture fashion, depicted during the film's most frightening proprioceptive sequence; the identity-transparency, bubblegum-universe, Deneuve-wall being the same “wall” Derek in MOON called his “Plexiglas wall”). Not simply de-realizing. De-realizing what? You can't get rid of the wall, of the ego's boundary, if you can't see it! Retrograde inversion, now: altering the base state of tonic activation, the habituated normative state of consciousness, is required for sliding off the Arabic horse, for entry upon consensus reality of the dominant culture -- with its boundary values, its “identitarian” walls of logic, its coercion by syllogism, its logics of action (requiring absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct actors acting in action-based sociologies with their force-structure variants divided against themselves, against their infernal fragging fraternal selves, and so on and so on). And who wants to get that far out of the natural surround, that far out of the “other”? As if there were a surround! As if there were an “other”! Not in this Klein bottle! Swatting at the institutional Jell-O embodying Aristotle's syllogistic. Ach! Ach! Drowning in vicious social snot so viscous you can't fling it off your fingertips.
There is no possibility that human brain, under subjection to the prevailing extreme forms of prescriptive 1T2-logical enculturation and associated glutamaturgic neuronal etching, could undergo sufficiently extreme forms of polysemic subjectivation as to embrace real reality with its µTm-logic properties -- without, that is, autogenic induction of fully-conscious gran mal seizure. In regards to William James' “selves of the Self”, self-annihilation may be regarded a self-transcendence in “relative-state” to the nine lives of “Schrödinger's cat”, any particular self-case declension having trans-temporal, trans-dimensional consequences for future-tense conjugation of every other self-case declension of the Self. The original meaning of a plural form for the word “martyrdom” was lost when polysemic µTm-world-perception collapsed to monotonic 1T2-world-arrogance under shepherding traditions wielding prescriptive enculturation as electrochemical antidote to attributed heresy and imputed infidelity. When authentic inner-jihad (inner work) relative to the simultaneous m-egoic selves of the Self was suppressed with the glutamaturgic neuronal etching of intrauterine, postpartum, and peripubertal prescriptive enculturation, it became by projective identification outer-jihad warfare against the m-egoic selves projected as “others” lacking fidelity to the introjected inflationary pseudo-“Self”. Boy, what a physiological fix we are in.
Like the Einstein of General Relativity, get the notion of force completely out of your head! That means not only representative democracy, but also participatory democracy. Public opinion, an integral of sums, is without fundamental consequence -- even absent consideration of unconscious processes, personal and collective. John Locke, quoting almost word for word from Newton's System of the World, said in Chapter VIII of his Second Treatise on Civil Government:
For that which acts any community being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being one body must move one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it [emphasis added], which is the consent of the majority; or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body, one community…
See how the simple-identity enforced by conventions (called “laws”) of identitarian-logic syllogism, the identity of billiard balls, that is, inescapably yields governance by force? Selfsame nature and selfsame community and selfsame self, in sum, are coercion and nothing but coercion. Possibly by 1906, and certainly by 1910 with his Polish-language book entitled On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle, Lukasiewicz was in full rebellion against the psychological, social, political and economic coercion explicit in logical determination by goose-stepping syllogistic march. This rebellion brought about a breakthrough into conscious awareness of the m-valued logics of animistic identity transparency. Other than direct experience, there are many reasons to believe that animistic identity transparency is m-logically-valued; one of these is the recent discovery that the ancient language of the Andes, Aymara, is logically trivalent, and what that implies about neuron cell function in the archaic Aymaran brain (quantum wave properties were involved, not only on/off action-potential). If you are interested in pursuing the details, have a look at the work of Arianna Betti of University of Leiden, particularly her papers entitled “The Incomplete Story of Lukasiewicz and Bivalence” and “Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski on Contradiction” and “Excluded Middle and Bivalence: Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski in Comparison”. John Locke or no John Locke, no concatenation of theme and variations on rule by force yields authentic self-organization. Division of forces into counter-valence; summation of forces into majority rule: both of these are applications of coercion conceived as non-disposable, if amenable to softening. Even softened coercion, however, be its factors linear or non-linear in application, absolutely precludes the latent possibility of self-organization. Non-probabilistic m-logically-valued identity transparency -- essence of the unmolested wave-function in Schrödinger's linear-time-independent wave equation -- is the sole autopoietic operator yielding self-organization, a “process” which only appears by involutory decomposition (hardly a mere “collapse”). As Plotinus stated over and over and over, involutory decomposition does not “transpire” in real-number linear-time (and consequently the equation Schrödinger wrote was time-independent), is not recursive, and therefore is not governed by either the first or second laws of thermodynamics, both of which are real-number linear-time-bound expressions. Non-linear hyper-number operator-time is involved in “unpacking” the wave-function. No heat engines, mathematical involutes are cold counter-factual processors. Mathematical involutes violate the laws of thermodynamics no more than Abel's quintic equation violates the fundamental theorem of algebra: those involutes and that equation simply don't exist within the restricted domain presupposed by those laws, that theorem. Proof of Abel's impossibility theorem was a possibility-of-existence demonstration no less than was Gödel's proof more than a century later. Just because recourse to force in whatever form will not adequately deal with present global dilemmas does not mean “nothing can be done”. An enormous wealth of things can be done. The same things that could have been done thirty years ago, but weren't -- because of the near-universal obsession with force and its articulations by those of every prevailing political persuasion -- can still be done today, if at least a few people can reformat their cognitive functions such that the idea of force is wholly absent. Continued allegiance to falsifications of nature will lead inevitably to what by now looks like “an increasing likelihood of billions of casualties in so short a period as a single decade” racing rapidly from worst-case toward most-likely scenario. You may be envisioning billions of dead in one decade as being inevitable because of the laws of thermodynamics as projected by the Olduvai theory posted on the Die Off website, but, quite frankly, I decisively rejected that conclusion from deductive syllogistic march upon inductively marshaled analyses by 1977 -- through insight into operator-time and the m-logically-valued temporal logics thereof. Every aspect of the Olduvai theory was well formed in one or another geophysics lab, one or another atmospheric science department by the mid-1970s, if only discussed in hushed tones over coffee. The mainstream media even got wind of it when by word of mouth it became aware of, and scoffed at, a land-fall prediction for an Atlantic hurricane made six months in advance. When the event transpired as predicted, there was a brief flurry of astound, but no real interest. And some implied aspects of Olduvai theory were congealing in at least a few minds working in at least one shop keeping current intelligence on the Middle East in run up to the 1967 Six Day War. Linear-time is a decomposition product, not a referential expression of framework laws. Much exists, much is in being if not becoming, that is not under real-number linear-time. However nonlinear the functional relations between dynamical variables, models restricted to linear-time processing do not see how the where of becoming comes to exist. Where(s) is/are not eternal in real-number linear-time; linear-time eternality is last-plus-one: “in the limit” is just Utilitarianism and Pragmatism. There could be no ponderable space if there were only linear-time! Choosing to embrace billions of dead as virtually inevitable simply because of a psychological identification with the thermodynamics of force-structure articulations over a linear-time reference did not, to me, seem the optimum utilitarian and pragmatic choice. Given the stakes, explorations of operator-time seemed a reasonable alternative. In over thirty years, I have not changed my opinion on this matter. So long as three decades ago, the enormities that will yet transpire likely could not have been prevented, but even now intelligently conceived undertakings could substantially ameliorate the inevitable and foster transition to a collective circumstance worth attaining.
Just as I never over-valued altered states of consciousness or any of the various means of entering them, so I never over-fixated on scenario details. These two objectives were accomplished because of an acute awareness that no person on the planet grasped the whole collective circumstance, and because attempts at developing an in-depth holistic overview were necessary, even though no one would ever be capable of actually achieving it -- attempts required if genuinely new ideas for dealing with the circumstance were to be arrived at. Making, hopefully only one amongst many, such attempts meant never specializing and never over-attending to those who did. From the outset, it was clear there is and never will be any such job; thus, a living had to be made, catch as catch can. Not to downplay the importance of specialized knowledge, but to properly assess the appropriate role-attributions to be placed upon such knowledge vis-à-vis the tasks at hand, it can be observed that there are scads and scads of technicians out there capable of solving whatever puzzle is put before them. What these technicians are lousy at is choosing the right puzzle to solve. The puzzle I saw in late-fall of 1963 (relative to J. G. Bennett's “pencils of skew-parallels” and “diversely-identical skew-cubes”) needing to be chosen was (as I later was able to state it): What is the relationship between m-valued logics and Schrödinger's wave-function? This is not a question only for those working in the fields of meta-logic and physics; it is also a question related to Tantric yoga and the base state of Tzog-chen, a question in social anthropology, econometrics, meta-linguistics, general systems theory, immunology, monetary theory, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism, peace studies and conflict management, historiography, theory of the collective unconscious, theory of brain function and autogenic brain discharges, submolecular biology and theory of biological superconductivity, theory of severe storm genesis and the embedded black hole computing; it is a question involved in how interpretations of higher mathematics made during the 19th century are presently to be interpreted, a question in color theory of abstract painting, in theories of auditory space employed for art music composition, and so on. Indeed, it is a question in constructivist Abstract Expressionist metal sculpture. Quoting the abstract to a paper presented to the 27th International Symposium on Multivalued Logics, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, May 28-30, 1997 (“Cube diagram bundles: a new representation of strongly unspecified multiple-valued functions and relations” by S. Grygiel, M. Perkowski, M. Marek-Sadowska, T. Luba, and L. Jozwiak):
Efficient function representation is very important for speed and memory requirements of multiple-valued decomposers. This paper presents a new representation of multiple-valued relations (functions in particular), called multiple-valued cube diagram bundles (MVCDB). MVCDBs improve on rough partition representation by labeling their blocks with variable values and by representing blocks efficiently. The MVCDB representation is especially efficient for very strongly unspecified multiple-valued input, multiple-valued output functions and relations, typical for machine learning applications.
And in regards to Aunt Agatha's N or M? consider the following abstract from another paper presented to the same symposium (“Finding composition trees for multiple-valued functions” by E. V. Dubrova, J. C. Muzio, and B. von Stengel):
The composition tree of a given function, when it exists, provides a representation of the function revealing all possible disjunctive decompositions, thereby suggesting a realization of the function at a minimal cost. Previously and independently, the authors had studied the class of multiple-valued functions that are fully sensitive to their variables. These functions are useful for test generation purposes, and almost all m-valued n-variable functions belong to this class as n increases. All functions in this class have composition trees. This paper presents a recursive algorithm for generating the composition tree for any function in this class. The construction proceeds top-down and makes immediate use of any encountered decomposition, which reduces the (in general exponential) computation time.
Remember, in considering the cited recursive (logically bivalent) algorithm, that the subject of this paper is multivalued functions, not transfinitely m-valued logics. Antigonish is for me something of a synchronicity, and by no means a Greek tragedy, as I contemplated some of the involved issues while living on a commune very near there during the early-'70s. The list of disciplinarian crossovers is long, indeed. Judgments of specialists in meta-logic and physics are, therefore, not to be over-valued, even unduly regarded. Indeed, given the stakes, the accelerating march of events, and the fact these specialists have had 200 years of full-time work on the problem and its higher mathematics precursors, most of which has been dissipated in bickering, the appropriate judgment, by now, on their judgments is scathing derision.
The way to find a large solution is to choose the right small puzzle to study, for, if the right choice is made, the small puzzle will contain the large solution -- by analogical, abductive processes of thought (involving feeling-tone, auditory gestalt, image, symbol, and word synaesthetically enfolded all into each and each into all). Such thought for a 1T2-logic prescriptively-enculturated and endogenously-glutamatized mind is largely unconscious and can only be unpacked by cultivation of a state of “passive acceptance” leading with sufficient cultivation (and thus enough endogenous ketamine flood) inevitably to the seizures (Cantor's seizures, for instance) involved in restoration of conscious awareness of the m-logically-valued processing engaged in by the brain via its quantum wave properties. Such atemporal demergence into conscious awareness is an analogue of the involutory decomposition involved in the relation between m-valued logics and the wave-function in Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation. No mere monomania, this relation, of ancient days, was besoiled, desecrated, dissimulated, spoiled and transformed by psychological processes of personification (an expression of monolithic, Mesolithic, monotheistic identitarian 1T2 logic) into a travesty made the foundational concept for analogical embodiment as structure and function of traditional society: “Divine Descent” treated, through processes of projective identification, as role stratification and a hierarchy of governance. Mother of Muses! In fealty to Mnemosyne and in anamnesia, I swear this was a panhuman planetary phenomenon associated with the rise of patriarchy, likely induced by solar system catastrophic dynamics which quenched superconductivity of intraneuronal nuclear DNA, thus terminating conscious interface with the brain's capacity for m-logically-valued processing. In this fashion, it seems, did mankind leave the Garden of Eden and set himself against that garden. Questions as to when this occurred in real-number linear-time don't much interest me, given how small a decomposition product such time is in full chronotopological complement of operator-time. And being but an egg, I don't have a need to know what the transdimensional hypertemporal circumstances were occasioning this smoting of mankind.
Forms of governance, modes of thought and life based on force-structure articulation are inherently incapable of solving the gathering energy crunch. If the requisite scientific discoveries were -- or have already been -- made, those discoveries would be -- or have already been -- put at disposal of the needs of force-structure articulation. So, if anything real is to be done about the energy crisis, forms of self-organization that are not governance, modes of thought and life not based on force-structure articulation must be brought up simultaneously as technological implications of the requisite discoveries are pursued. What forms of self-organization; what modes of thought and life? No one and no group, and no Clinton Global Initiative, is going to sit down, work out all the details, and present a comprehensive plan for discorporation of force-structure articulation to the Supreme Force-Structure Articulation for consensual approval. And a Centcom top-down type implementation of disjointed incrementalism by tactical improvisation will not work, either, even using a flotilla of geo-stationary satellites as the command and control helicopter omnipotently and omnisciently voicing telepresence via wi-fi and P2P under total-information-control surveillance. The disjointed increments and tactical improvisations have to be initiated polycentrically from below and become holographically integrated as the distributed prerequisites to autopoietic self-organization are progressively fulfilled. All of these prerequisites relate to identity transparency, the “engine” of collective and cooperative self-organizing quantum processes. Self-organization can set in only to the degree its prerequisites are met. Eight no's and seventeen not-merely's are not enough, even for the 10,000 things! Metareference (the term I prefer because of all the deconstructionism which has congealed around “trope”), socio-cultural multi-utilities, Musculpt, and forms of gaming that build consensus and remove decision-need are critical to cultivation of identity transparency. Socio-cultural self-organization cannot transpire so long as politics remains a decision science. A generous list of projects related to these prerequisites is provided on the homepage to the website devoted to m-logically-valued monetary units. Other such lists surely must be possible. After 200 years of dissipation, waiting for a comprehensive plan to appear is the surest road to perdition.
Economics and monetary systematics, of course, are of the utmost importance. Economic incarnation of the wave-function in Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation is to be found in von Hayek's notion of the time-shapes of total capital stock. There are orders of infinitude in the simultaneously-present collections of such time-shapes, and that is why they are real-number linear-time independent. Market processors are cube-bundled automorphic decomposers of these time-shapes. Making these transfinitely-M m-valued n-variable functions pragmatically explicit to market participants in N-cases requires employment of autopoietic operators: m-logically-valued monetary units. But such units cannot be deployed by Centcom like nanocombatants, special service operatives, and other drones; they have to be brought up from below polycentrically. The best way to accomplish this is not by slamming your fist down on a puddle of mercury. Begin by computer gaming multiple scenarios strategic planning for many town sites around the planet. No need to foment a consensus before acting; create a process wherein consensus is an inevitable outcome. Start the march toward implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units with computer gaming of multiple scenarios strategic planning in the following fashion. Develop the software algorithms for the gaming interface via P2P as open-source software modules. This interface software will be applicable to any site-specific gaming content: video, still images, graphics, site history, planning issues, and on and on. Start content development with a world heritage site, say, like Luang Prabang, with the intent to expand to a selection of world heritage sites. Publicly following out implications of multiple scenarios, in all their various aspects, is a consensus building process. When the game is sufficiently developed, begin offering surface aspects of it to players free and its deeper aspects by paid subscription and coded entry over an internet site. The software interface modules are open source, but the town-specific content used by the interface is proprietary. This does not require permission of the authorities of Luang Prabang or any other such site. A given player can gain access to deeper and deeper levels of the game, and the reflexive feedback the game playing itself develops, only by attaining given levels of player expertise relative to the multiple scenarios strategic town planning issues computer gamed. Contests will be held, subscription wavers offered as prizes, and so on. Public posting of the game's strategic planning plays and outcomes will inevitably have some impact upon Luang Prabang public policy debate. If the game is done well enough, with all the bells and whistles, it will catch on sufficiently to draw interest of the Luang Prabang administrative authorities. If they decide to use the game as an element of the electronic commons part of their governance repertoire, they can purchase a site license and the game developer will post and maintain the website used by the Luang Prabang administration (open to public scrutiny, and third party certification, of course). Plays by residents of Luang Prabang (such subscriptions being covered by the site license) working out potential future histories of the city, will be stored and processed separately from plays made by non-resident players. Those persons who become involved in the P2P development of the computer game interface will be a recruitment pool for full- or part-time paid positions with the development and site service company (thus in the long-term receiving monetary rewards for their contributions to development efforts).
Successfully done at several world heritage sites, public pressure would build in multiple locations for a planning game for “our town”. Were this to grow, other developers would likely jump on the bandwagon. This would be good. Possibly something like a firestorm of site-specific game development could be created. The original developer could maintain financial viability by remaining several steps ahead of the pack. At the proper juncture, introduced to the site-specific planning games would be the notion that gaming outcomes could be used to arrive at community consensus on a set of local sustainable development indicators. Then, a single-logically-valued local exchange trading system (LETS) could be introduced to the game. Later yet, the notion that local sustainable development indicators can be weighted on the local currency could be introduced to the game (trading of carbon quotas as incorporated into the Kyoto Agreement, for instance, is monotonic and primitive by comparison). And so on. Alterations of the interface and out-reach, step by step as public understanding and consensus grows by gaming the concepts, until actual applications are experimented with on a local basis. From there, onward and upward, toward implementation of full-blown m-logically-valued monetary units on larger and larger scale levels of the global economy.
All sorts of ways this could be started, small and big. Pick up most any copy of The Economist. September 10, 2005, for instance. Aspects of the software produced by Markov Processes, Inc. to analyze hedge fund performance (p. 68) could be fused into the town planning computer game along with this or that piece of strategic planning software. So many to choose from! And since this is ultimately all about monetary units, the immediately preceding article on Swiss private banks is also potentially relevant. Maybe, just maybe, m-logically-valued local monetary units should become a new line of work for the Swiss. They didn't join in on the Nazi attack on Polish logic. They are into small and independent, and their private bank industry seems to be threatened with job loss. Perhaps Julius Baer Bank should open an office in Argentina, which has a history of spontaneous generation of local monetary units, and take computer gaming of site-specific town planning under its belt. A whole new field of banking might eventually be created.
This is merely the current expression of thirty-year-old ideas. People long off the electric grid (meaning: in possession of foresight) contributed enormously to formulation of the concepts. I began seriously and relentlessly soliciting interest in actually doing something during 1982. I am not a believer in the techniques of Elmer Gantry hucksterism: what good could ever come from eliciting that type of oligopsony, or even worse, monopsony? No names will be named. As there are no non-Cartesian-Newtonian institutions to work through, any institutional involvement would just be a liability. And when there are no right people, and there are no right people, you choose people rightly placed rather than right-thinking, no matter how small the expectations one can thereby entertain. I am not personally mortified by the lack of interest, but I am acutely embarrassed by witnessing what deep pockets turn out to support.
But I don't think Farhad Khosrokhavar's Abrahamic experience of time is deep enough to produce real understanding of the meaning of a Second Coming at End Times or of the Madhi's (so-called hidden last Imam, “last” being a linear-time bound interpretation) appearance at The End of Time. What does it mean when a linear-time-bound mind speaks of the end of real-number linear-time? Where in linear-time is the end of an infinitely long arrow? Any such end could only be a Cartesian Utilitarianism, a Newtonian Pragmatism “in the limit” of the calculus of temporal propositions involved. And any such end, from a linear-time-bound perspective, would have to be the end of All That Is (if not also of All That Not-Is). The 1T2-logic time-bound mind, though specialized in absolute distinctions, cannot radically distinguish space from time, yet, still, insists on time being a single arrow (God having only one in His Quiver) that cannot tie itself into knots. Time there cannot exhibit topological properties! What does it mean when a mind not linear-time bound, a mind experientially cued into Kairos by gran mal seizure, speaks of End Times? The holus-bolus holymoly of the Holy Rollers! Swedenborg, who experienced such a seizure, says that “times there are qualities of state”. Plural, not singular; polysemic, not monotonic. For contextualization of this statement, I recommend the biography written by Ernst Benz (Emanuel Swedenborg, Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason, Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, trans., Swedenborg Foundation, 2002 edition of the 1948 German original). I personally became informed of this observation made by Swedenborg in 1966 (as described in detail in MOON) while undergoing medical instruction at Special Forces Training Group, Ft. Bragg, N.C. The informant -- who used the writing of often-mystical poetry as a personal “time machine” and the son of a Swedenborgian minister of the New Church in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania -- was a co-trainee later killed on an out-country SOG mission captained by Bo Gritz (Ram-bo's model) who wrote the obligatory letter of condolence (see: Zoe Gyllenhaal Simons, Promises to Keep, One Young Man's Journey From Home, to California, to the Vietnam War, 2005 Fountain Publishing edition of the 1989 Swedenborg Centre original). MOON is dedicated to this very good friend of mine: David Richard Simons. As described in the novel, we both, while at Bragg, were involved in the same incident and went from there in opposite directions. I survived. He was killed. This was a big motivator to try to understand the depth psychology involved! No matter how many years that might take. Khosrokhavar's Existentialist treatment of “martyropathy” in terms of the individual Stranger, suffering alienation and anomie, rising up in rebellion, defining him or herself (identitarian behavior) by the action of throwing him or herself suicidally and murderously against the Plague of Westernization is true enough (even in U.S. Special Forces, as the film “Apocalypse Now” attempted to explore), in so far as it goes (and this is elaborately depicted in MOON), but it is only the surface time-bound metapsychology of voluntary discorporation. The distinctions Khosrokhavar justifiably makes between defensive martyrdom (e.g., early Christians against the Romans) and offensive martyrdom (e.g., radical Islamists against the prevailing dominant world monoculture), as well as between volunteers to offensive suicide squads where death is only likely, not certain, and volunteers to offensive suicide missions where death is certain, and the objective, are mistakenly treated by Khosrokhavar as mutually exclusive, disjoint distinctions, when in experiential actuality they are clearly arrayed on an arousal-activation continuum (a concept employed in neuropsychology) relative to both phasic and tonic activation. I presented a paper (written by Roland Fisher) on this continuum to the Autogenic Training symposium of the World Congress of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine held in Kyoto during 1977. How big is phenomenological difference between the immediate experience of “annihilating himself in Him” through use of poetry as time machine and through offensive martyrdom operation where transcendence of lower-case self in physical death is the objective? Or is it a true bidirectional one-to-one mapping homeomorphism? Khosrokhavar, insisting on disjoint distinction, nonetheless provides the answer (p. 8, Suicide Bombers, Pluto, 2005):
On the whole, the literature of martyrology speaks of the equanimity of martyrs and their yearning for death, and of affects characterized by inner happiness, and sometimes even exultation.
The immanent father-son dynamic, always involved (even in the case of the intrapsychically-contrasexual “Animus” of the female martyr: see, for instance, the film made by the Tamil Tigers about pre-mission training of the pregnant assassiness of Rajeev Gandhi), is decomposition by projective identification of the transcendent Father-Son martyrdom archetypal dynamic. The End of Time is not the last instant of an infinitely extended sequence with an arrowhead attached; such an end is available at each instant of real-number linear-time, because such instants are products of involutory decomposition (Kairos) under nonlinear temporal operations. End Times, The End of Time(s) it should be, is whenin real-number linear-time is no longer a focus of attention, cathexis having first phasically, then tonically, shifted to nonlinear orders (plural) of hypertime (thereby being an instance of hypercathecting). Obviously, physical death is not required for this type of hypercathecting on the “time-shapes of total capital stock” -- a given time-shape of total “capital stock” in this case being the complete lifeline of a lower-case self of the capitalized Self. Nonetheless, physical death through voluntary “sacrifice” has enormous precedent as an organizational facilitator and analogical model: “Divine Descent” as God's “sacrifice” models involutory decomposition, which was transformed (by projective identification) into the structure and functions of hierarchical governance throughout the traditional world.
Thank you for sending the material on symmetry-group theory of Mozart's and Beethoven's methods of composition in juxtaposition with Stan Tenen's topological-shapes interpretation of the Hebrew alphabet and the Hebrew version of Genesis. You asked if I have significant thoughts on these matters beyond those already posted on the MOON website. There are two limitations on my ability to respond: it is a difficult subject to communicate about in words and, with intermittent fleeting exceptions, most of my “in immediacy” direct experience of inner Musculpt came between the ages of 25 and 40 (the latter, twenty years ago). My access faded because I was unable to find a means of continued cultivation of the underlying synaesthesia: quenching set in by habituation and stimulus fatigue while drawing and painting music and engaging in active imagination during walking meditation. New cues have continually to be found as the old ones fatigue. I was unsuccessful at garnering interest in creating an electronic-holographic medium for exteriorized Musculpt, a medium within which significant issues could be explored without undo reductionism.
The group-theory analysis of compositional technique is truly interesting (particularly as Galois' discovery during the 1820s -- i.e., a time of transition between the Classical and Romantic Periods, as incidence of chromaticism slowly began to increase and surge toward eventual writing of the Tristan chords -- of algebraic group theory came in direct relation to Abel's “impossibility” solution to non-algebraic m-valued n-variable equations, which I see as the beginning of a direct march to the discovery of m-valued-logics) and in many ways seems to reflect what must, in one manner or another, have been a stage in Schoenberg's thought as he made his passage from extreme chromaticism through atonality into the first intimations of the dodecaphonic method in the period 1908-12. 1908 was hay day of Analytical Cubism, of course, usually dated 1907-1911, which, by Husserl's infinite “horizons” of the ponderable object and Jean Gebser's “concretion of time; haptification of space” over those horizons interpretation of Analytical Cubism, directly suggests artistic perception to some degree tacitly informed by m-valued logics. The first person to do this, in my judgment, likely was Alfred Jarry. The Pole, Jan Lukasiewicz, made his breakaway in logic between 1906 and 1913, leading to rigorous codification of m-valued logics, but arrived at no adequate interpretation of the meaning thereof. Jarry died in 1907, but his character Pa Ubu -- in the play entitled “Ubu Roi” premiered in 1896 just as m-logically-valued schizophrenia was for the first time being officially deemed a disease -- was a foul-mouthed old bastard, oh-so-appropriately parodying Macbeth, determined to conquer Poland. Moreover, during the period of genesis for 12-tone composition and transition to Kandinsky's painting of his first purely non-objective canvas (1911), Schoenberg and Kandinsky, friends in Vienna, changed roles: Schoenberg painted; Kandinsky composed. Synchronicity piled upon synchronicity; transposition upon transposition! Employment of a composition matrix in Schoenberg's 12-tone method illustrates the degree to which symmetry-group-type considerations were explicit in Schoenberg's thought. The dodecaphonic composer directly manipulates parameters of his Grundgestalt -- the chosen generative 12-note chromatic tone row, with its various dimensions specified, duration, color, rhythm, meter, amplitude, et cetera, putting it into “basic shape” -- by symmetry transpositions: retrograde, inversion, retrograde-inversion, opposed octave leaps, interval transforms, and so on. Nowadays such symmetry group manipulations are a simple click of the keyboard away, and by synthesizer one can try out a wealth of possibilities by ear without in any way having to aurally “visualize” them. Composing at a piano is only a partial such aid.
During the early-'70s, I briefly studied composition under an accomplished pianist and a woman who sang dodecaphonic vocal works internationally. Not only was her voice box capable of Morgana King octave leaps, but her Sprechstimme, surpassing. She urged me to devote myself to 12-tone composition. I chose not to do so because I knew the medium, like painting, would quench the synaesthesia necessary to inner Musculpt. This is related to why I have to say that I doubt Mozart and Beethoven created their musical ideas by group-theory-type manipulation of tones: such manipulation is the drudgery that comes later. To the degree that a dodecaphonic composer actually composes by tone manipulation in matrices, to the same degree is the music uninteresting. But, clearly, a rather surface level of the mind is quite cognizant of tone symmetries and their manipulations (by matrices or not) as deeper levels of the mind do other things which decompose to tone patterns. I think stimulus fatigue in painting quenched, or at least significantly dulled, Kandinsky's access to synaesthetic perception, which I imagine was at its height in Russia before he, a lawyer, moved to the West and took up painting at approximately age 40. I think something similar must also have happened to Schoenberg's synaesthetic access, as the dodecaphonic system never got beyond the early stages of analogically modeling the emergent post-Cartesian-Newtonian world construct (whereas the well-tempered diatonic system had in full measure musically codified the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, and thus permitted the creation of many masterpieces). This whipstall in elaboration of the new paradigm, suffered by Schoenberg, in my estimation was in significant measure due to collective hysterical back-reaction and falsification of the emerging paradigm (reaching its apotheosis in dissimulation of Schrödinger's wave-function).
Beethoven's statement, quoted by J. W. N. Sullivan, about seeing moving, flowing forms in relation to his symphonies is only suggestive as regards what actually transpired in the deeper levels of his awareness while he composed. As I speculated, if such “forms” decompose into logically-connected tonal patterns and sequences, it would help explain how Mozart could transcribe into notation lengthy pieces of music after only one hearing, or even the whole piece after only a partial hearing. At college, not only was I more or less thrown out of calculus class, I literally became sick to my stomach in harmony class. Something in me (associated with the cross-modal correlations of sensory dimensions in synaesthetic perception) simply did not want to engage music on the level of tones, and to a lesser degree even on the level of intervals. The two sorts of auditory space involved were physically nauseating (it took something of a process for me to understand this). I certainly don't know, but I would speculate that it was not only his last symphony that Beethoven could not hear. He may never have heard any of his symphonies on the level of tones and intervals in the fashion they are heard by the average performer and listener. This is not to say that he was unable to hear in tone-interval fashion; rather, that he had far greater voluntary mastery over what he heard and what he did not hear -- and that his focus of aural attention was decisively sub-tonal, formal, architectonic: musically, this is indubitably in superposed and colored time-shapes.
Such hearing, such perception, I believe, is m-logically valued. Even though these modes of cognition were defined out of existence by the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview, nonetheless, just like Swedenborg in his own fashion, Beethoven and Mozart had them. Sustainable exercise of these interfused modes is always in relation to the prevailing Zeitgeist, non-reductive exploration of which provides an endless stream of cues (each one of which becomes fatigued at habituation). The requirement for continuous creation is not a mere conceit of avant-gardism; it is required to retain the state and the access. It seems highly unlikely, however, that either Beethoven or Mozart had a conscious analytic grammatical and syntactical grasp of the semiotics of universal “form language” -- otherwise, Beethoven's letters, for instance, likely would contain some evidence of it. And this is where Stan Tenen's work likely comes into this discussion.
The meaning in the form, in my experience, is in feeling-tone, not symmetry pattern, topological shape, or any other relation-structure. Meaning is attributed, not intrinsic. Lack of the intrinsic, however, does not necessarily mean lack of universality, for under m-orders of logical value the 1T2 distinctions prerequisite to this bifurcation disappear. The quantum tunnel at the root of semantics is a Klein-bottle reentry, no mere barrier penetration. This feeling-tone is not affect-charge, not emotive; it is what I believe Kandinsky meant by his use of the term “pure feeling” uncorrupted by concrete contents. Polysemy in abductive logic over topological transforms is in the “internal necessities” of nested feeling-tones; it is not analytic or generative. But gathering awareness of the feeling-tone bundled by a topological shape can give rise to affect-charge, photism, tinnitus, and so on. Indeed, this is how existence of the feeling-tone is brought to attention cathexes. Frequently, people allow themselves to be so transfixed by the affect-charge, so identified with it, they never become aware of the underlying “pure feeling”. The “genius” wringing his hands, rippling tension pulses, as he paces under the effortless inflow while lecturing in the pit of the auditorium. Rather disgusting, the involved state of identification which inevitably distorts, breaks the seamless. Is this what Stan Tenen has done? I don't think so.
My experience of inner Musculpt is instantaneous presentation to awareness of a colored, sounded-form in the round. Meaning is in feeling-tone “viewed-heard-tasted-felt” as transform in any of the dimensions of the whole-form. The whole-form is understood as an analogical model of something, such as a “complete” (m-logically-valued) conversation, which is to say the Platonic conversation behind any concrete incomplete (1T2-logic) conversation on a given subject or subjects. All semantic gestalts of the complete conversation are simultaneously present in apprehension of the whole-form, and, as they unfold in concrete conversation, dimensions of the whole-form transform as decomposition of the bundled nest of feeling-toned semantic gestalts -- the topological transform and the semantic gestalt being uncannily “diversely identical” in pure feeling. Somehow all of this is synchronous with, or precedes, and is correlated to what linguists call “natural language” -- in my case, English. The whole-form could be an analogical model of most anything, for instance the complete symphony behind the incomplete symphony actually played. I think that what Beethoven must have heard was the complete symphony never played. I think Stan Tenen may have found a handle with which to unpack the whole-form on the m-logically-valued reference space. The biggest symphony of all, of course, is the symphony of everyday life.
How deeply buried in the isolation-flotation tank of the collective unconscious are the decomposition operators responsible for demerging prevailing global event gradients? We can get some feeling for that by looking at a bit of Oliver Stone's work in comparison to the fact that the Putin government suppressed public awareness that a lethal dose of ketamine was incorporated into the anesthetic cocktail gas used to disperse the big Moscow hostage-taking event. Reported statements by victim survivors clearly indicated presence of ketamine, but no anesthesiologist comment to that effect made it into the international press, so far as I was able to determine. Endogenous ketamine is an antidote to endogenous glutamate. Ketaminetic restoration of the integrity of intermolecular electron transport processes essential to animistic m-logically-valued processing should modulate the glutamaturgic neuronal etching which imposes conscious awareness of binary-and-only-binary dimensions of cognitive processing, thus establishing the opaque ego sphere and banishing identity transparency. The “inner counter-work” Zen-bushido role of ketamine cannot be accomplished, however, in presence of the prescriptive impress of enculturation to selfsame world, selfsame community, selfsame self -- without “the practice”. The “selves of the Self” (invoked by William James to explain varieties of religious experience) are reduced to the self of the unseen Self (the “Hidden Imam”). Radical Islamist hostage takers (takers of the selves of the Self) being brought down by lethal ketamine dose, and public awareness of that fact being suppressed, is real-world dream imagery, nightmare transposed by projective identification into “daymare”. Denied ops of special service decomposition operators, operators having wrapped themselves in a security blanket, very deeply buried, I'd say. Using lethal ketamine dose to release the selves of the Self held hostage is counterintuitive counter-terror, so one just must hypothesize an extremely “healthy” dose of collective unconscious leverage to explain it. Why else were VR applications pioneered by SF? How can I maintain any degree of personal assurance as to the meaning of what is collectively unconscious? In my personal case, the what should have been a lethal dose of rohypnol cocktailed to the what should have been a lethal dose of rat poison mutually countervailed into life-saving unconscious projectile vomiting: the concept of operations employed was over-zealous. Oliver Stone got some things right about this domain of experience. The “Do it!” of “Platoon” was an act following upon des-pair (pairing of the buddy system had been irrevocably sundered). Khosrokhavar says (Suicide Bombers, p. 60) “Despair turns life into death…” What he doesn't understand, and what Stone appears to have understood, is that physical death of those des-paired is chosen because there is in des-pairing of the Self, for those so des-paired, no death of the 1T2 subject-self possible. In the “restricted 'umma in death'” (Suicide Bombers, p. 64) of the old Special Forces (SF prior to late-1965) there was “mission-specific assignment” and “team integrity”. Under team integrity, no replacement was made for an individual killed during the period of mission-specific assignment: integrity of the A-Team's umma was never violated. Without this integrity, there was (quoting Toussaint in MOON) no “High combat”, only combat -- as High combat cannot exist unless the 1T2 subject-self dies in pre-mission training long before physical death is even risked, let alone perhaps ultimately chosen (e.g., to save another member of the Self of the team, a member who is in jeopardy: shared undoubted knowledge that such sacrifice absolutely will spontaneously, by reflex action, be made is what forms amnion of the umma of the A-Team). Clintonesque pettifoggery, lawyerly hairsplitting wordplay, aside, how many trauma types are there? Trauma types. Only two? What about the in-the-body sensory flashbacks induced by perinatal prescriptive enculturation and associated glutamaturic neuronal etching? And how are life-long repetition-cycles of such sensory flashbacks to be transcended? Those who trained the mujahadeen during the Russian period of the Afghan war, trained according to the legacy of a Special Forces that, by then, no longer existed. And who defined concepts of operation for old SF? Colin Dawes in MOON is a stand-in for Aaron Banks. ABCD. Facts and only facts.
Oh, yeah! Derek's themes, as argued with Toussaint in MOON, are popping up everywhere these days. Focused dissimulation being the raison d'être. Check out What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa by David Murphy. As if the best strategy in wake of Heydrick's supremely successful black op fanning the purges was not to become a foam rubber pillow after the fashion Napoleon had been dealt with. Or have a look at 1945, The War That Never Ended by Gregor Dallas. A mere shadow of Derek's argument that the fundamental deep-structure issues explored by the war are still in control of human affairs, and that, indeed, the war never actually had a beginning, as the same deep-structure issues drove WWI and the Franco-Prussian war before it, issues crystallizing into the present 200-year-long fulmination on the back of Abel's mathematical work of the mid-1820s, which harked back to issues divorcing the ancient Greeks from nature, as so brilliantly explicated by Shigehisa Kuriyama in his The Expressiveness of the Body, And the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone Books, 1999). The first two books mentioned are from Yale U. Press, 2005.
Just as when victorious Western nation-states commit atrocities against unarmed civilians -- fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, for instance -- these acts are not called atrocities, but historical events, so, when Western suicide-terrorists engage in their acts, they are not called suicide-terrorists, but mass murderers or even a variant of Natural Born Celebrities (see David Schmid's book on serial killers, U. of Chicago Press, 2005). As Khosrokhavar says about radical Islamist suicide-terrorist martyrs: “…they want to die and take with them as many as possible…” (pp. 49-50, Suicide Bombers). But this statement equally well describes the man who climbed to the top of the tower at University of Texas and shot as many people as he could until he himself was killed (or shot himself with his last bullet, which ever the case may have been) -- or the many other Americans who have engaged in similar acts targeting the American way of life, whether in the home, at their place of employment, a fast-food restaurant, a daycare center, or a high school fenced in by a wall topped with concertina and spikes pointing inward, or a school that by happenstance was not “protected” in this fashion. After a lifetime pushing at bureaucratic-psychological Jell-O, be it in the Dull's House, on the job site, at the licensing bureau, before the… he snaps, decides death is preferable to the “good life”, and will be damned if he will go out without taking down with him as many as possible of the swarm excreting the viscous royal Jell-O: a major component of the involved mindset. America has zero chance of success against international suicide-terrorism so long as it deludes itself even about its own suicide-terrorists. Black propaganda, if repeated often enough, eventually is believed even by the propagandist. The so-called “good life”; the life of sublimated suburban alienation and anomie; the life of office warfare and infantilism; the life of Prozac, valium, alcohol, and other forms of self-medication; the life of social impersonalism and intimate depersonalization, invidious rule regulation, and constant insidious threat; the life where all that doesn't need standardized is standardized, and all needing standardization is not standardized; the life of scientism and technocratism; the life where the rottenest apples are always institutionally escorted to the top, and fill most of the upper rungs; the affluent Western -- becoming globalized, at least in pockets -- way of life, that way of life which is far more threatening to life on Earth, to integrity of the geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere than radical Islamist suicide-terrorism is threatening to the Western way of life.
Okay. In that case, I have an interesting exercise to propose. You will see that it offers the possibility of developing considerable insight into organizational strategies (consciously and unconsciously elaborated) currently being pursued by criminal gangs, terrorist groups, and the extra-legal sector of the forced-draft, deruralized, squatter-settlement dispossessed (about a billion new ones expected in the next five years or so of accelerating 1T2-logic capitalist impress). And there is continuity to be discovered back across a considerable swath of history: not only the usual examples, but also including groups deciding to catch a comet; lotus eaters nostalgic for “home”, like the Jonestown Cool-Aid acid test freaks; the Cambodian holocaust collective suicide, Jonestown on a grand scale; Buddhist self-immolators and martyrs amongst the Hoang Ngan partisans; human-wave suicide of the Korean conflict; banzai wave attacks of the South Pacific; Divine Wind mass suicide of the kamikaze; the over-the-top mass suicide attacks of mustard-gas, trench warfare; the cotton-gin-induced, regimental-scale, killing-fields mass suicide of the American Civil War; and back and back to the origins of mass warfare in industrial-revolution engendered, mobility-of-labor forced, population displacements and relocations. Foreign occupation, as Robert Pape would have it (Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Random House, 2005), is a special case of the generalized bundle of forcing functions. The exercise: go through Farhad Khosrokhavar's book Suicide Bombers, Allah's New Martyrs (Pluto, 2005 English edition to the 2002 French original) with a red Hi-Liter and mark every sentence and phrase in one way or another having to do with violations of initial conditions or boundary values to hierarchically-organized general systems, these conditions and values being necessary prerequisites to solution of complex systems of non-linear differential equations, and their violations being necessary prerequisites to onset of far from equilibrium, collective and cooperative, critical-state, quantum processes of self-organization. You will find that the book becomes a wash of red. Graphic illustration of the thesis that these mass behaviors are controlled by unconscious processes of projective identification. Below I list a few examples. You will be able to find many more.
“…meaning was something to be conquered.” [A French Existentialist interpretation of the hypostatized necessity to overcome boundaries to value.]
“…most of them [martyrs] 'disinherited' (or oppressed, mostadafine) men from lower or middleclass groups that had been urbanized over one or two generations.” [In the same fashion urbanization had transpired during the Meiji era in Japan, giving rise to “The Last Samurai” and eventually the Divine Wind. “Urbanized” is a nice word for 1T2-logic monetization, destruction of yeoman agriculture and face-to-face extended-family co-production, alienation from nature, forced mass population relocation and inducement into impressed factory wage-slavery and resultant destruction of the embedded, nesting values cultivated within the nuclear family but unable to flower when cut off from the humus of the extended familial context -- and resultant infection by the associated mass psychological dyscrasias. In a very real sense, one could say that home-schooled rural American Christian fundamentalism, displaced from the family farm or the open range to, at best, the hobby farm or ranch, is on the same side of these issues as is UBL's radical Islamist fundamentalism. What else did they martyr themselves for at the Alamo?]
“…defy the public space…”
“…a new articulation between self and community.” [Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian nation-state qua nation-state, being a socially-contracted mass psychological projection of the individualistic ego sphere, personal spiritual transformation and subsequent realization by identity transparency with unmolested nature is utterly impossible in socio-political context of any organizational format prevailing for the past several centuries. Contraction under a contract to an egoic state imposed by the nation-state.]
“Their ideal is to create a transnational neo-umma…” [Umma translating as “community”.]
“…restricted 'umma in death'…” [“Death” being a boundary value to conquer, if meaning is to be reestablished through identity-transparent small unit cohesion. Ego-death under mass-psychologically-induced transference becoming physical-death due to the extreme conditions imposed at far-from-equilibrium phase transition.]
“Death means that the self is dissolved into a neo-umma characterized by emptiness.” [French Existentialist hermeneutics, again; dissolution of the ego and absolute separatism in abeyance to animistic identity transparency is regarded by Western individualists as absolute nihil: absolute unto absolute under 1T2 logic. The best the postmodernists can do to get between µTm-logic dust unto µTm-logic dust is Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (U. of Michigan Press, 1994), which is just more of same-old, same-old dissimulation of the m-logically-valued identity transparency at heart of the wave-function of Schrödinger's cat, with his/her nine lives.]
“…the idea of a sacrifice (qurban in Arabic) that brings one closer to God… the notion of qurb (proximity) is implicit in the word qurban.”
“…a transcendental and inaccessible world…” [Inaccessible to the ego function, surely.]
“Individualized martyrdom corresponds to a secularization of the religious.” [Or is it a sacralization of the secular? For surely there can be no such thing as a spiritually realized individual, for transcendental union with Godhead precludes the standpoint of individualistic awareness just as certainly as solution to a transcendental Abelian equation must be non-algebraic.]
“Exodus or hijrah… strategic retreat [like recently in Afghanistan]… has two objectives: leaving when one is in a position of weakness to seek protection against the more powerful forces of Evil; and gaining new strength in exile, returning in force, fighting the unbelievers…”
“Hijra, finally, comes to mean the various stages an elite soul passes through… in a purely spiritual upward journey towards the Absolute.”
“…climbing its different stages (maqamat).”
“…migration (hirjat)… Migration means leaving this life in order to achieve a sacred goal…”
“…a center that no one can occupy…” [The m-logically-valued center that, holographically speaking, is everywhere, and hence, exhibits quantum non-locality -- just like the VC in Indian Country could not be found, fixed, and finished.]
“…he exists only in a mystical form, or 'apart from' or 'outside' the world…”
“…construction of the neo-umma… means rejecting the individual…” [For the ensemble of collective and cooperative quantum behaviors.]
“…intersubjectivity…” [Postmodernist hermeneutics in lieu of animistic identity transparency.]
“…autonomous meaning… communitarian bonds… virtual community…” [More postmodernist hypostatization to oxymorons.]
“…contagion…” [Modernist hermeneutics in lieu of animistic identity transparency.]
“The frontier between dine (religion), dunya (the world), and dowla (politics, state) becomes blurred. The end result is a holistic and rigidly unified version of Islam…” [With all the horrid implications for socio-political embodiment of quantum principles of self-organizing systems.]
“These domains came within the remit of what was known as the hoqouq al ibad, or the rights of persons (creatures). There was a body of laws dealing with the public domain; this came into the category of hoqouq allah (the rights of God).” [Domain structures, limited spacetime domains, laminated spacetime, Sakharov's multisheet model of the universe…]
“…asabiya, or the principle of group cohesion…”
“For reasons to do with the poor organization of the struggle, Husain died in October 680 on the plain of Kerbala…” [Something not forgotten, it appears.]
“…aqida is the spiritual link that binds…”
“…unite the Muslim world on a planetary scale.”
“…a neo-umma that has yet to be defined.”
“…they may refer to a specific society with specific national frontiers and argue the case for its radical transformation.”
“They offer to build a neo-umma whose frontiers will not coincide with those assigned to the old communities of the past. They do so in two very different ways. They refer to an umma that transcends national frontiers and speak of a world shaped by the new distribution of populations, power and beliefs.” [Beyond this being a vision, desert-heat hallucination, dream as to inversion of the effects of colonial boundary impositions, resource usurpations, and population abuses, it can be observed that this is a transcendental -- i.e., shift in scale-level perspective from intranational to transnational -- application of the “constant boundary changes” (brilliant expansion of the principles behind “organizational adaptation by resource exchange across boundaries”) used by the underground Viet Cong (political) Infrastructure (VCI) to self-organize their on-the-ground combat victory over the United States Army. As soon as the on-the-ground requirement for exponential increase in resource commitments by the counterinsurgent so as to insure public order, maintenance of LOCS, and so on and so on, sundered the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism -- decisive movement toward separation of the dollar from gold began within weeks of the 1968 Tet offensive when LBJ was forced to institute currency controls and other measures -- powerbroker support for the war in Viet Nam rapidly collapsed. It should be noted that the discipline studying the theory of “organizational adaptation by resource exchange across boundaries” is a field of biological research important to the theory of embryogenesis, and, hence, of considerable subliminal symbolic significance to unconscious orchestration of public sentiment in response to technological applications of developments in the field of genetics.]
In Khosrokhavar's analysis, the radical Islamist movement is not an attempt to reestablish traditional Islamic modes of life and belief. From what I see, this certainly appears true enough. But even if in the short haul, the movement's aspirations were informed by French Existentialist and Marxist perspectives, this is something being rapidly left behind under UBL's transnationalist, materiel trouble-shooter, macroinstruction orientation to self-organizing processes -- regressed to violent means, of course, by the suppression insuring recoil into the mass psychological processes of projective identification so lavishly illustrated in the list given above. Al Qaeda & Associates is not the movements it utilizes, not the same as, for instance, the Taliban. By the self-organizational inclination alone, UBL could never have entertained the slightest interest in Traditionalism. Look at his childhood exposure, his personal and family history! The movement's aspiration is simultaneously post-postmodern and pre-traditional, archaic/primordial, animistic, and tribal -- uniqueness of the prevailing historical conjuncture being resident in the fact that yet-to-actually-materialize unmolested post-quantum-relativity physics is decisively gravitating upon codification of the worldview construct characteristic of holographic, identity transparent, pre-traditional, archaic/primordial, animistic, and tribal societies. Core meanings of this worldview never were completely lost, never stopped organizing a sector of human affairs: tribal and peasant cultures everywhere the Emperor's mandate stopped at the village gate, the King's prerogatives were curtailed at the bottom of the social order, that diversely-identical global culture, that is, distinct from ecclesiastic and court cultures and their latter-day derivatives. If this is, indeed, the case, there can be little doubt that as institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm continues its incendiary collapse, it will become apparent that the forms of self-organization currently most conspicuously employing UBL & Associates are in no way confined to utilization of radical Islamism. The real question is: to what degree are these nascent forms of self-organization regressed by suppression, as active in other population corpora, and, hence, what degree of violence or non-violence can be expected when decisively kindled? The almost universal lack of interest in m-logically-valued monetary units, I think, is a pretty good indicator. What's your idea for a post-petroleum-conflict, post-petroleum, climate-shifted new world order?
My main point here can be quite simply stated: in Suicide Bombers, Khosrokhavar has produced yet another essay against utilizing m-valued logics to interpret Schrödinger's wave-function, and he has done so with typical postmodernist literary convolutions. He says (p. 90) the martyrs would “…rather die than have to renounce the dream-logic…”. This “dream-logic” is the logic of non-simple (animistic) identity transparency between the n-branches of the quantum wave-function, a holographic transparency which requires m-valued logics to represent. But Khosrokhavar's explication of the psychology of suicide-terrorism (pp. 87-9) leading to his disparagement of “dream-logic” is itself pretty awfully “dreamy”. Here is some of his logic (p. 87):
A martyropath is an individual in crisis who no longer knows how to control his individuality and who tries, by resorting to a repressive category of the political, to rid himself of his individuated being [emphasis added] and to embrace death… Martyropathy became an ultimate expression of the political and, at the same time, a legitimate way of constructing an individual-in-death [emphasis added].
The martyr, you see, in order to rid himself of individuated being by embracing death constructs an individual-in-death. And just to make sure the reader understands this postmodernist form of 1T2 logic, Khosrokhavar further elaborates the basic idea farther down the same page:
Revolutionary consciousness became a deadly force and led to the production of a self-in-death [emphasis added]. Demolished by the war economy and social chaos, consumerism became fixated on the body. Those who could no longer be consumers began to consume themselves [emphasis added].
Those non-self entities who could only have selves by producing them in death, you see, consumed selves that did not exist until produced in death. And in case the reader still doesn’t quite get the hang of this peculiar logic, another example is provided (p. 88):
Martyropaths surrendered their identity [emphasis added] for the greater good of an organization that granted them plenitude in death… The Bassidj satisfied the martyropaths' desire for heteronomy [emphasis added].
They surrendered their identity, you see, in order to establish an individual-in-death, a self-in-death, so as to fulfill a desire for a heteronomy of individualized identities. And why did these non-self entities who had surrendered their identity, out of a desire for heteronomy recreate in death that which they had surrendered? Because they had become a part of an organization, the Bassidj, which had (p. 88) “no social differentiation and hierarchy between its members”, an organization where (p. 88) “outside hierarchy was abolished and replaced by a 'hierarchy of the heart'”. Because they were being smothered by (p. 88) “the absence of any hierarchy, the egalitarianism and the feeling of fraternity”, they yearned for the heteronomy reclaimable only by establishing an individual-in-death, a self-in-death. And this Existentialist morass was the result of the deconstruction of the communitarian structures of traditional society, a deconstruction which began in earnest early in the 20th century. Well, all I can say is… No wonder the French Foreign Ministry was a sponsor of this book!
Couldn't it be just as simple as the metapsychology of volunteering for suicide squads once was -- and maybe still is -- in U. S. Army Special Forces? Think of the two Delta operators who volunteered for what was likely, and which became, the supreme sacrifice as described in Black Hawk Down, for instance. The volunteer returns again and again to Toussaint's “High combat” -- a particularly effective facilitator of the act of surrendering one's identity, surrendering one's “claim to be absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct” (Zen-bushido term) -- simply to experience the transfiguring experience of the surrender, and no other reason. This surrender necessary to direct experience of animistic identity transparency (and built into structural properties of the brain's electrons and its higher-order distributed functions) being actively and intensively suppressed in everyday life, and thereby pushed to the periphery, the fringes where only regressed expressions can be cultivated: drug-rock concerts; motorcycle gangs; sadomasochism; lap-danced, commercialized, public group sex; extreme sports; caged fight clubs; et cetera. “For the greater good” and the “struggle against the enemy”, as worthy as they might be, are merely means to the end of surrender, and after-the-fact justification of having surrendered. No SF person will admit this, of course, except to another person who has worn that green beanie -- and then only by the few on those few very special occasions of mutual reflection upon the results of clear-headed introspection repeated over a period of years. On the arousal-activation continuum -- phasic and tonic -- volunteering for certain death rather than merely the pedestrian high-risk suicide squad is an inevitable outcome of having reached the point where the volunteer needs the absolute experience of surrendering the false “claim to be absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct”. This need for an absolute renunciation of the false existential and Existentialist claim is not only due to habituation of the arousal reaction, but is knee-jerk evoked response to absolute imposition of the false claim by the globalizing, middleclass, mainstream, bourgeois, moneylender, Pharisee culture which denies the animistic, tribal, peasant, yeoman, holographic, identity transparency inherent to unmolested natural nature (and the natural nature of selfhood denied by imposition of “outside hierarchy”). At that critical point, that Curie temperature in Islamic heat, that point where the correlation length instantly snaps to infinite distance (as the physicists studying the quantum physics of un-renormalized collective and cooperative behaviors have experimentally documented in detail for over 50 years), the volunteer “decides” to embrace by “spontaneous fusion” relative-state of the complete wave-function, and simultaneously “decides” to renounce mere subsets thereof established by “spontaneous localization”. Spontaneous localization and fusion being complementary aspects of the autogenic brain discharges orchestrating phasic and tonic activation. The reason why the volunteer (currently in epidemic, transiting to lemming pandemic, collective expression: each tattooed and pierced secretary, expressing her unconscious identification with animistic states of consciousness, is a potential recruit at endgame) is compelled (by his/her brain) to do this in projective identification as physical death (what John C. Lilly in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer called a “suicidal self-metaprogram”), rather than by consciously integrated inner work jihad, is because the centrencephalic, primordial-archaic, brainstem reticular activating system, m-valued, phase-digit, q-bit logic of Schrödinger's wave-function has been constellated and dissimulated for close to 100 years, and because that wave-function's higher mathematics precursors were constellated and dissimulated for the preceding 100 years: from 1826 (Abel's theorem) to 1926 (Born's falsifying probability amplitude interpretation). Phylogenesis is atemporal (i.e., Schrödinger time-independent) decomposition from µTm to 1T2, not linear-time-bound if-and-only-if-recursive generation from 1T2 to µTm. Unmolested m-valued “dream-logic” subtends all potential regressive delimitations thereof. Khosrokhavar's essay -- like poststructuralist, deconstructionist postmodernism in general, with its self-contradictory (metaphorical trope for suicide) parodies of Aristotle's syllogistic 1T2 law of non-contradiction -- contributes strongly to the atmosphere of neuropsychological suppression fundamentally responsible for the regressed phenomenon his essay decries. Deconstructing deconstructionism, only those who have walked the walk -- at least to some extent -- can talk the talk with any degree of verisimilitude to the actual case; otherwise, there is no trade-craft and just Simulacra and Simulation: smoke-and-mirrors pony show. Well, stuffit! says my brief-back.
I hate always to be so contrary, but the fact is that there simply is zero psychological capacity to produce an actual assessment of global terrorism. Zero! Khosrokhavar's Suicide Bombers is a lavish illustration of this circumstance. For instance, on page 92, he says that “They [those he uses the term “martyropaths” to designate] oscillated between several contradictory principles.” This is, clear and simple, a psychological projection on part of Khosrokhavar, as our earlier discussion of his stigmatization of m-logically-valued “dream logic” so well illustrates. The whole of French Postmodernism is an attempt to save what little can be saved of the Cartesian mindset in face of the overwhelming assault mounted by fact and discovery over the past 200 years. Khosrokhavar actually sees Existentialist-Postmodernist “stuff” wherever he looks. Hold up a blue square and he sees a green circle. That is what psychological projection does! As I have discussed elsewhere, the Postmodernists chose the principle of non-contradiction to parody, rather than that of distributed middle, because they can't save any Cartesianisms by focusing undue attention on the fallacy of undistributed middle (not to mention the impropriety that would be involved -- as any Newly Born Woman sitting legs together on her academic highchair surely knows). Khosrokhavar goes on to say, same page, “This attitude [the “martyropath's ambivalence”] is based upon the heteronomy of the revolutionary ego.” What balderdash! And what ambivalence? Strapping a bomb around the waist, striding to the chosen place, pushing the button: where the ambivalence? Seems rather decisive action to me. To Khosrokhavar, however, such martyropaths (same page) “…took flight in suicide because they despaired of being able to fulfill their ambition in this world.” What despair? They are winning! There is virtually no chance they could lose. Khosrokhavar gives us a megalomaniac's assessment of the powers of the ego function. This is the assessment of someone -- anyone, the megalomaniac -- who attributes an ability to “do” to the ego function which the ego function simply does not possess, yet mistakenly attributes to itself. This fact of being-in-the-world is covered during the first session of any Sufi kindergarten, any Gurdjieff primary school. We are to suppose graduates from Martyropath University of the World don't know this? The ego function doesn't “do”; it is “done to” by both the personal and collective unconscious. The ego function simply arrogates the so-called “ability to do” as mere self-attribution: even B. F. Skinner understood that aspect of the “moving parts of centers”. This is of the utmost importance to any actual assessment of global terrorism, to even accurately naming those involved: something not yet actually accomplished.
Though Khosrokhavar's ego-identified, linear-time-bound assessment involves attempts to arrive at criteria for such naming, he clearly goes astray. He speaks of (p. 91) “a destructured individual”, whereas a more appropriate term, though still missing the mark, would be “a deautomatized individual”. Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. H. Hartmann. Ugh! Merde! The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming! Missing the mark, because there is some ill-defined threshold in degree of experienced deautomatization of neuropsychological functions whereupon the term “individual” simply retains no experiential meaning: Toussaint's exclamations concerning “High combat” given in MOON: “You are no longer simply one person!” and “You can see things you can't possibly see, things someone else is in a position to see!” The automatized, sleepwalker functions of habituated everyday people (such as the ego function) are deautomatized by the self-observation cultivated by “being in the practice” and thus by obtaining “interior distance” and the concomitant “inner separation” from identification with socially-conferred attributes of discrete 1T2-logic identity, as anyone well prepared well knows by mind-on direct experience -- anyone who has gone through general suicide-squad preparations (or long-term sitting or walking meditation in preparation for sudden illumination: Satori, Nirvana), and more particularly pre-mission training (cyanide caps were handed out to SF personnel on certain occasions, even if not officially noted). The difference between outer and inner jihad being, not a matter of (p. 91) “anomic despair” or not, but of projective identification or not. The case within which to look for a significant component of anomic despair is the suicide-terrorist loner who carries a rifle to the tower at University of Texas, but even for such a loner this component cannot be the only significant component, as there is no requirement for presence of significant others, the presence of a so-called “community-in-death”, in cultivation of the consciously integrated experience of animistic identity transparency or its transposition -- by unconscious projective identification and compensatory introjection of the projected absolute -- into a physical act of abreactive suicide-terrorism. Moreover, Khosrokhavar's naming behaviors degenerate into mere name calling. According to him, these martyropaths are the most egregious members of (p. 91) “a necro-community”, the (p. 92) “necrophile Bassidjis”. My understanding is that the term “necrophilia” designates the act of having sexual intercourse with a corpse. Annabell L. and all that nevermore-raven stitch. Clintonesque lawyerisms aside, I have heard of this -- by direct word-of-mouth -- as having transpired in Soviet forced-labor camps by rare individual deviations, and it is not too hard to imagine that it could even have transpired on a similar basis in Abu Ghraib (after all, GIs used to take on bar girls costumed in black pajamas “locked” in tiger cages located upstairs from Tu Do Street bars: a precursor of other analogical themes on offer at Japanese love hotels), but I have never heard of a whole “community-in-death” based upon necrophilism. But then, who knows, maybe I am naive. Hopefully, this particular attempt at naming was not another example of psychological projection! Members of such a community are portrayed as (p. 91) “…painting a black picture of the modern world…” and as being (p. 92) “…profoundly disgusted by the spectacle of life in the city…” Well… these surely seem to be criteria of naming, but I must admit to not seeing them as meeting the criterion of efficient specificity. Probably more than half the human population of the planet can be so designated, and surely at least ninety-nine percent of the membership of the biosphere.
Attribution of unique pathology to a corpus of Cool Hand Luke's in IEDs is not so much “a failure to communicate” as a failure in perception -- and all such perceptual faux pas are rooted in a failure of self-perception. These “cool hands” are winning, and there is virtually no chance they could lose, because they are not who they have been named. And they have been misnamed because there has been a failure in perception of their context rooted in a failure of self-perception. Radical Islamism, contrary to all appearances, is not one of their defining characteristics. Islamism is to against-the-very-idea-of-the-nation-state transnational terrorism what communism was to nationalistic national-liberation war: a component of strategy for catalysis of self-organization. The Taliban may not know this, jihadi volunteers may not know this, but UBL surely does -- even if he ain't talkin' and won't be talkin' 'bout that. But even UBL may not be fully conscious of the degree to which this is the case. No matter. As passing-time passes, he, or those who have or will replace him, will progressively become more conscious of this fact. They will have no alternative, as their conscious egos are being “done to” by the process; their egos are not “doing” the process. Unconscious collective processes of projective identification are in the driver's seat, as illustrated by the actual metapsychology of suicide-terrorism. As Khosrokhavar rightly points out, radical Islamists are not trying to reestablish traditional Islamic society; they are trying to do something else. As he says (pp. 66-6): “Even when it [the “new umma”] claims to be reproducing an immemorial past, it reshapes it into something that has nothing in common with the real history of Muslim societies.” What Khosrokhavar fails to understand is that the “immemorial past” refers to a “time” before the traditional came into being: it refers to the “dream logic” of tribal animism, the m-valued logic of dreamtime which Abel began to resurrect in 1826, and Lukasiewicz formulated in 1910, and Schrödinger decisively constellated in 1925. These and other resurrections, formulations, and constellations of the pre-traditional set the collective unconscious into overdrive. Linear-time independent, m-logically-valued, transcendental (i.e., non-algebraic), spontaneous localization and fusion of identity transparency over time-shapes of the universal wave-function is primordial-archaic dreamtime animism no less than quantum physics. Blocking for 200 years -- by elites -- of the directly implied, and clearly indicated, socio-politico-economic applications was unconscionable, and imposed enormously conflicted double-binds with all their powerful schizophrenogenic inducements. These inducements become event gradients in the collective unconscious, gradients governing by processes of projective identification collective behaviors in the physical world. As Al Qaeda has already explicitly prefigured, when institutional disintegration goes to cusp, those elites who conspired with, and unduly benefited from, the system deemed responsible for the prevailing travail, will be spontaneously and mercilessly targeted by collective action. Mob logic (“dream logic” regressed by prior suppression, prior repression) doesn't require an “outside hierarchy”, a chain of command. Transnational terrorism will not be managed, and it will not go away, until the Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian nation-state system and its supranational agglomerations and agencies altogether go away. One can be certain of this, because terrorism is not a tactic or technique employed in a “clash of civilizations” but a symptom of a degenerative autoimmune disease suffered by a global civilization that has self-medicated through several prior fulminations with massive steroid infusions, and is now entering terminal phases of the septicemia where saddle-block fevers, deliria, and convulsive episodes dominate. The collective unconscious is responding to the total circumstance and activating constituencies according to thematics of constellated archetypal gradients and complex formations. As activation thresholds are reached by this and that constituency -- consequences of governmental inability to meet minimum expectations for social, political, and economic provisioning in response to resource wars, climate shift dynamics, epidemics, and so on -- those constituencies will adopt and adapt action directives (“internal necessities”) derived from established precedent, just as Al Qaeda & Associates has already done. By what plausible scenario do you imagine they, properly named, could possibly lose? I have failed to find that scenario ever since beginning to seek it during spring of 1968 sitting in Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-Headquarters, contemplating what I had earlier learned as an intelligence analyst at JFK Special Warfare Center tasked with studying the Middle East in run-up to the Six Day War. The most strategic therapeutic intervention into the disease is implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units. But will this be done? I've been placing bets that it will for thirty years, and have yet to win a single hand. People are not interested. Sitting there holding their cards against their chests. They think they've got themselves covered. They are wrong. It's going to be far worse than any of us are even capable of imagining. One reason this is certain is that one means of elite blocking involved dissimulation of the ideas resurrected, formulated, constellated. This dissimulation, over a 200-year period, affected every academic discipline, hard and soft. That means the models currently employed to assess severity of the situation are fundamentally flawed.
One just gets sick to death reading the same old bilge over and over for decades. Contrary to closed-loop repetition of the official position, there would have been a 1973 oil shock, Yom Kippur War or no Yom Kippur War, U.S. oil peak or no U.S. oil peak, due to ending of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism and devaluation of the U.S. dollar denominating oil transactions. You think intelligence analysts cultivated no interest in oil issues during the period of run up to the Six Day War? The Special Warfare Center library at that time contained a great deal of information on the relevant subjects, which I remember very well, having had run of that library for six months during 1967. You think it was possible, as a student of international relations at American or Georgetown universities in the period 1963-5, to reside in Georgetown and lounge on Foxhall Road and Spring Valley drawing room couches and swimming pool terrace chairs without learning something about the Bretton-Woods monetary system? I was a live-in in the household of a high-ranking State Department official; a fellow SIS student lived in the Chain Bridge Road residence of the President of the World Bank. Who could, in those circumstances, have escaped learning about the Kennedy Round, Roosa bonds, the sterling crisis, the necessity to block any multilateral “stuff” that might conceivably dilute the dollar's unique role, the hush hush about financing of the Vietnam war so as not to publicly air information that might threaten dollar confidence, and on and on. This was common currency of conversation people made sure you listened to, as you had been put on the fast track by having been chosen for live-in status. The short-lived Saudi embargo following the Six Day War failed because it was partially an emotively-driven response on part of the Saudis, and partially a testing of the waters: nothing more serious. The threat to U.S. gold reserves was very advanced by the time of the Six Day War. There were all sorts of indications by then that Bretton-Woods was at extreme risk and could well undergo renunciation. Indeed, it was in 1967 that a Standard Oil and Chase Manhattan executive, Birnbaum, wrote the first proposal that the U.S. separate the dollar from gold. The Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism obliged the U.S. to support dollar confidence at the $35 per ounce level. If dollar confidence flagged, private investors bought gold and the U.S. had to sell gold to keep the price stable. By 1961, the U.S. could no longer do this because -- pursuing its self-interested and self-absorbed global geopolitical agenda, rather than implications of Silent Spring, the needs of sustained planetary integrity, and the larger human interest -- it was running short of gold. Bretton-Woods had become a constraint upon promulgation of U.S. foreign policy in pursuit of national self-interestedness! Thus, in 1961, the gold pool agreement was reached whereby some European countries would put up about 40 percent of the gold required. The U.S. deficit had become such a problem by 1963, Kennedy-Dillon proposed indirect currency controls. The sterling crisis ran from 1964 to '67. Defense of the pound was defense of the dollar one step removed. The Saudis had to have been acutely aware of all this, and what it implied for the future of their oil income, denominated in dollars as it was. Climax of the sterling crisis came just weeks before outbreak of the Six Day War, and after the war the pound was allowed to devalue, but not before the IMF agreed to creation of SDRs, Special Drawing Rights. Devaluation of the pound led to an attack on the dollar which reached such proportions that, just weeks before the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam and at the very time of the taking of the Pueblo by North Korea, LBJ was forced to institute direct currency controls and restrain his response to the Pueblo incident. Just weeks after the offensive, which exacerbated speculation against the dollar, the U.S. government announced it would no longer support gold at $35 an ounce. The Vietnam war had been won, and in just the manner outlined a year previously in policy planning documents briefed at COSVN to the command cadres who mounted the Tet-'68 offensive. Currencies began revaluing against the dollar, which reached a crisis in mid-1971. Nixon responded by shutting the gold window altogether, thus terminating the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton-Woods monetary system. Another run on the dollar took place following the increased inflation occasioning an end to wage and price controls, leading, in early 1973, to a major devaluation of the dollar after yet further revaluations of the pound, the mark, and the yen. These revaluations and devaluations all transpired before outbreak of the Yom Kippur War and imposition of the OPEC price hikes and embargo, and represented an enormous loss of real dollar-denominated income to OPEC countries, immediately and as projected out over the decades. The substance they had to sell being of limited quantity and a one-shot opportunity for access to the amenities of the modern world, total transformation, indeed, UNILATERAL repudiation by the U.S., not only of the 1961 shirking-of-responsibility leveraged gold pool arrangement, but of the fundamental property of the post-WWII global monetary system the U.S. itself had insisted upon -- the defining gold-exchange mechanism -- and the associated series of substantial defaults-on-store-of-value devaluations (most of them dissimulated as revaluations of other currencies) of the so-very-privileged international reserve currency denominating oil transactions catastrophically altered the equation upon which all prior agreements had been negotiated in the period post-1945. Villainy. The greatest con, the biggest sting ever run in human history. Compensatory oil price increases could hardly have been unexpected in an attempt to recoup at least some of the losses and what would be lost in the coming decades, Yom Kippur War or no Yom Kippur War, U.S. oil peak or no U.S. oil peak. The effects of the oil price hikes upon the U.S. auto industry's competitiveness with fuel-efficient Japanese vehicles, of course, were real, but well-prepared by billions and billions and billions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies to the Japanese auto industry over decades carried out through supply and materiel out-sourcing in provisioning of the French Foreign Legion, the ROC military, and the VNAF (whose vehicles were not made in America). My first awareness of the out-sourcing came in 1954 watching wave after wave of C-119 "flying boxcars" lift off the flight line of Ashiya AFB, Kyushu, Japan, for flights to Dien Bien Phu. My father handled supply and materiel acquisitions for this re-supply effort. It has recently become public knowledge ("Their valor recognized -- five decades later", Robert Burns, AP, February 16, 2005) that Civil Air Transport pilots flew the aircraft from Hanoi to Dien Bien Phu, but -- for reasons explicated here -- there has been no public airing of the fact that point of origin was Ashiya, and that insignia changes were involved. So, the continued black propaganda on this oil-related bit of monetary history, obviously, today, 2005, is leveraging something related to probable future events. By this means and this means alone can the U.S. current account and trade deficits be maintained indefinitely! Confidence in a fiat dollar separated from gold can be modulated by many factors, including war. When brush fire resource wars are no longer sufficient, then all debts are off as national mobilization is brought about in face of the big one by a system of civil preparedness progressively brought on line since the arrangements for alternative-government were first created during the Eisenhower administration. You think the U.S. has been blindsided by global oil peak dynamics? Better think again.
You figure it out. I spent 15 years working in Washington, D.C. What did I do there? I propagated, nurtured, and transplanted tens of thousands of trees and shrubs, hundreds of thousands of plants.
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