You won't find me counseling McNamaran quantitative approaches, but one way to get a feeling for how bad things are likely to become is to develop -- by impressionistic traffic analysis -- some guestimate as to the incidence, persistence and virulence of mental automatisms, cognitive tape loops, stock thoughts (not merely stock phrases), emotional “internal considering” formulae, instances of thematic paralogia, perseveration, paraphasia, echolalia, and the like prevalent in public discourse. These represent short-circuits of the collective mind in face of challenge; they indicate inability to conduct situational assessments and reach conclusions on the basis of such assessments. At present, incidence of these cognitive-emotive failures is legion. Consider, for example, the following statement made by Patrick J. Buchanan in his widely circulated op/ed piece of 28 November 2005, “Is Defeat Now an Option?” He says: “Hence, a defeat, not of American arms, but of the U.S. policy in Iraq, is now a distinct possibility.” This is a formulaic mental automatism, derivative of the dissimulation of Tet-'68, put into concrete contemporary terms. There can be little doubt that the statement was passed over without challenge by virtually all readers. Such “passing over” deems the statement collective behavior, not merely individual pathology. By all the Cartesian-Newtonian qua Clausewitzian rules of military science taught at the Command and General Staff College, a defeat of U.S. policy is a defeat of American arms. The only legitimate purpose for putting American soldiers employing American arms in harm's way is to successfully implement U.S. policy. When policy implementation by force of arms fails, the policy failure is a defeat of American arms. This is elementary Clausewitz: see, for instance, his chapter “Ends and Means in War”. Arms can be defeated even by their being too effectively utilized -- if such successful utilization scuttles the policy. Were this not the case, then it would mean that the arms are being deployed independent of policy objectives, that they are being deployed simply for the sake of deploying them, simply for sake of the kill. And were that the case, the defeat of arms that would represent, would be qualitatively incommensurate to lesser forms of defeat, as the larger consequences for society would, in due course, be incommensurately greater. And “due course” here might well be very short. False, paralogical separation of policy from the arms of implementation prefigures more advanced elaborations of situational disorientation. And if arms are inherently incapable of implementing the given policy, then the commander called upon to execute the policy, if he is astute enough to recognize the certain failure of arms and hence of policy, is called by the integrity of his profession to resign his commission. A professional soldier does not take a leadership position in a bad war; only career soldiers do that. The “Powell Doctrine”, for instance, is a squad leader's tactical lesson from the Viet Nam war misapplied as strategic principle. Put these two instances of thematic paralogia together, in context of policy-arms failure in Iraq and nesting failure in the global counter-terror war, and two of the prerequisites to massive, even nuclear, retaliation against population centers of the adversary have been met. Though all of this be merely symptomatic, and thus of little real interest, except insofar as awareness thereof helps concretize what turns out to be an accurate prognosis developed upon an insightful differential diagnosis, what one would hope to avoid, of course, is paragnosis -- diagnosis after death.
What you see is not what you get; what you don't see is what you get. The immediately recognized concrete challenge is not generally all the challenge there is, and the automatisms, inevitably, are not in response to what is consciously recognized as challenge. Just as all historical events have multiple levels of “causation”, not only multiple cause-pushes and attractor-pulls, so challenges are multi-tiered and frequently nested. The collective reaction to what is seen may not be an actual reaction to what is seen, but a reaction to something not seen which is transferred by projective identification to what is seen. The response may, therefore, be wholly inappropriate; and the situational assessment may be response driven, rather than the driver of the response. Today, in the gathering global crisis, it's not presently only about oil and ego, culture and climate, and whose God is the greater God -- whatever the peaks and troughs, the conflict zones, the meta-ethnic fault-lines, the internal strife cycles; whatever the quotient in vertical integration and upward mobility, the operative shame-structure index, the expulsion-threat matrix, the frameworks of incentives and sanctions of rules and meta-rules. There is a lot more happening here. And the automatisms are largely related to failure in assessment of this “a lot more”. Everything of consequence happening today is at least thirty-year-old news: it was all predicted in detail that long ago. Climate shift dynamics, biospheric ecocide, oil peak dynamics, pathogen-host disequilibrium, explosion in forced migration and urbanization, culture clashes, global terrorist insurgency, foundering of the Westphalian nation-state system and its supraordinate agglomerations through failure of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and its institutionalization to meet adequately the complexity of these challenges. Old, old news. The human species knew what was coming and chose to ignore it, chose indurate dithering and infantile squabbling over effective action. This was an informed choice, and a choice not yet significantly altered. It was, however, a leveraged informed choice, a choice leveraged by loathing, vectored by dread, impelled by a fear skin-crawling and clammy -- even if the lever, the vector, and the impetus were not quite conscious.
The collective symptoms we presently see, the infra-cognitions, the inappropriate affects, the transference-driven responses, the continuing poor choices are derailleurs slipstreaming a semi going down the interstate, while the fundamentalisms and the culture clashes are wellings up from the entr' acte, not actual expressions of the mise-en-scène. As the world construct of the dominant culture goes into a state of deautomatization and terminally shatters into myriad dissembled fragments, clinging behaviors develop with their associated tantrums. But renewed culture clash between facets of the Fertile Crescent Religion -- with its plethora of new prophetic books by Micah and its obsessions with myriad martyries -- is not the clash actually propelling the transference-guided responses to the response-driven malapropos situational assessments. That terminal clash, pulling-pushing mass expressions of projective identification, has yet to rise beyond the nascent. Coherency of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm was slain by exposure of the European collective mind to The Great Books of the East. Implications of this were so terrifying, the Western mind has done little since beyond dissembling and warring over consequences of the dissimulation, spinning off all the while destructive technological artifacts, while the Eastern mind became, and remains, fixated on the task of proving it too can master the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and its techno-gadget spin-offs. But nowadays the issue is being rapidly forced by Nature: climate-shift dynamics, fossil-fuel depletion, pathogen-host disequilibrium… And a cascading fungi growth of invasive quantum-based technologies has appeared on the scene, the omni-transforming effects of which are so complex there is no hope Cartesian-Newtonian paradigmatic institutions could ever manage to manage them. It is not long now, not long before the real clash stops being nascent and rears its ugly head above the surface: fire in the lake.
Being no war-loving devout Christian soldier seeking in face of every reality of the kill -- the kill of pagans, heretics, non-believers, and just simply others -- to demonstrate moral war possible, rather than just simply war in the real, therefore war sustainable as God-given right no human agency can successfully challenge, and thus being no fish-backed Piscean fisher of men, obviously, I thoroughly disagree, and to a degree not generally conceivable, especially by thumpers and mega-church goers. Inconceivable because most people simply cannot imagine the extent to which others are capable of not living in one's own reality. To seriously entertain this possibility, this capability of others, a barrier of dread, horror, revulsion, terror of the uncanny has to be exorcised, and such an unmitigated assault on the Umwelt is almost never voluntarily undertaken, particularly by those among us least psychologically capable: public personas. Use of the bomb by nation-states, not only non-state actors, is increasingly in the hands of infra-cognition. Rational processes play a fading role. But the role that is fading has always been small, and now it is going to the vanishing point. This has not been particularly apparent because, in the post-Hiroshima-Nagasaki era, the situation has never actually approached real cusp for nuclear-weapons use, only public posturing, in-group screeching theater, and internal psycho-babble. There were enormous disparities of available unconventional-conventional forces and delivery capacities, and, even once MAD was established, these disparities continued to insure cusp was never reached, cusp on the instrumental unconscious level -- whatever inflated conscious minds, identified with socially-conferred role attributions and thus pawns of archetypal processes, may have thought. Irrational and non-rational factors have always made the major decisions, with rational factors being relegated to rationalization alone, rationalization for sake of the conscious standpoint, rationalization for public consumption. This is not nihilism; it is realism, a historiographic realism of the substantialist Thucydides variety disparaged by Robin George Collingwood and Karl Popper and devotees of nonlinear (Newtonian) dynamics in the science of history. Only a small fraction of human cognitive function is conscious, and only a fraction of this fraction is rational. Until recently, MAD was in a Cartesian-Newtonian world of geopolitics. There actually were conflict zones and meta-ethnic frontiers, because it is so, dear Pirandello, if you think so -- and they thought so. The adversaries had simple-identity and simple locality in space and time: the “geo” of geopolitics. They were bombable. They had the kind of identity bombs could verify, indeed, the kind of identity bombs were made to verify, especially smart bombs, bombs that can seek out simple-identity and explode at a specific location at some particular right-now. Bombs, even atomic and nuclear bombs, are Cartesian-Newtonian techno-artifacts. Oppenheimer never actually cognitively entered the world of relativistic quantum mechanics: he chose those few “sweet” principles that could be brought together in such a way as to construct a destructive device with Cartesian-Newtonian simple-identity and simple locality in space and time. And quantum realities were the worst of realities, the absolute worst: consciously or not, that's why the genius chose his focus as he did. He was not completely successful, of course, in obtaining his object -- confining quantum mechanics to a box -- for the genie somehow always escapes, in this case as electromagnetic pulse, fallout, and the salty half-lives nature must dispose of. He tried, but produced a wasteland of half-objects. And he was burnt by the society that produced him: no mere eschewal, but Burnt Norton for having failed to keep quantum mechanics completely confined to the box society built. Excruciated for the execrable. God, my God, to have produced a half-object, an Asiatic half-object… Life expectancy under friendly fire being no simple matter of the exclusion principle, societies can turn on you, the collective unconscious can turn on you, turn so rapidly, so successfully, so maliciously you never see the real reason why.
My post-adolescent exposure to the physics of the military-service-funded was alone insufficient, and just because I was the eldest son of a bomber pilot taken as a preadolescent from an animistic rice-ritual hamlet to view Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not enough, not enough to get deeply into the infra- and meta-psychology of bombability. In addition to these factors, I had to be at the Cartesian-Newtonian right place at the Cartesian-Newtonian right time, the only right place, the only right time in the post-Little-Boy era: Targets Branch of the Combined Intelligence Center, Viet Nam. Erewhiles, erenow: never. It's been interesting watching this, but it would have been a lot more interesting if it hadn't been so obvious what was to transpire. A bodeful imminence at storm, that's what this has been. CICV-Targets is where Dennis the Menace for the first time became truly hysterical over the unbombability of non-simple identity. This is where Injun Cuntry animism decisively came together with the weirdness of quantum mechanics for the American subliminal mind: it could no longer remain substantially unconscious, as it had been for Oppenheimer's generation. Banzai and kamikaze attacks did not produce recognition, nor did the human wave attacks of the Korean war: ordnance could arrest these. Not so with COSVN, the communist's Central Office for South Viet Nam. COSVN was inherently unbombable. It was not a place; it was an activity without office hours: action in myriad cellular quanta constantly in Brownian motion spread over thousands of square miles of mostly Cambodian rain forest (35 miles by 35 miles is already over 1,000 square miles). Why do you think Bo Gritz became Rambo, not any number of other candidates? Because Bo's AO was this particular patch of triple-canopy: COSVN's turf. When all the king's sniggling men and all the bombs all the king's B-52s could drop were unable to put COSVN together into a box, a little after-war psychological compensation, a bit of succor, was required: hence, the side-glance, Bo Gritz as Rambo. Carpet bombing, Snoopy, Puff the Magic Dragon, the Daisy Cutter, CBUs, seismic sensors, McNamara's electronic battlefield, chemical warfare with dioxin, ROME plows, Professor S. Huntington's “forced-draft urbanization” and associated free-fire zones: each of these was an attempt to force non-simple identity and/or non-locality into the Cartesian-Newtonian modality bombs can verify. When none of these were adequate to such verification, ordnance was thrown after ordnance in blubbering fit, a collective convulsion. Ubbadubbadubba…brrrrrrrr. And now that Al Qaeda has not only non-simple identity and non-locality, but also no locus of authority, it is easy to see why there is so much interest in the thesis that Khe Sanh was as great a communist failure as Tet-'68, and oh-so-much sweeter, a failure due to the effectiveness of U.S. bombing. Reversion in service to the ego: almost as fulfilling as covering over the trenches in the first Persian Gulf war. A failure of policy is one thing; anybody can make a mistake. A failure of arms, particularly a failure of arms against an enemy that one cannot find, fix, and finish, now that is something altogether different: not a question of this or that identity, but the very idea of identity as a metaphysical category called into question. And not just metaphysics! I think, therefore I am. That metaphysical notion of identity called into question by failure of arms is assumed by logic; it is the very means by which I think, and therefore by which I am. A failure of arms is not only the end of me, it is the end of what makes me possible. It's the end, not only of my own-world, my Umwelt, but of my whole world, of the very possibility of that world. My God! My God!
Think of the schizophrenogenic double-bind involved here! The mind of Latin Christendom brought forth quantum mechanics only to discover its isomorphisms with pagan animism. Yaaaaaaack! The Tao of Physics? Yaaaaaaack! How pull myself out of Myself? How kill myself in Myself? Yaaaaaaack! There's only one painless solution: pull myself out of Myself with projective identification. By transference, dress the self in the guise of the other, and kill the image seen in the mirror. Yaaaaaaack! And the more Latin Christendom's progeny, the Western mind, experimentally verifies relativistic-quantum weirdness -- the Aspect experiments; supraluminal light; a single atom, and even a single molecule, each in more than one place at a given time -- the more does it verify principles of pagan animism, and the more fixated does the self become by the image seen in the mirror, and the greater does the need to kill that shadow figure become. And -- Yaaaaaaack! -- the more dependent does the self pulled out of Myself become upon quantum-based techno-artifacts in order to accomplish the evermore needed kill. Yaaaaaaack!
Indeed, in order to keep this at bay, to keep it out of the conscious mind, there was no alternative but for the conscious mind to become the postmodern mind, indeed, no alternative but to make a new science, and even a new science of history. Nonlinear (Newtonian) dynamics came, not after linear (Newtonian) dynamics, but after the advent of quantum mechanics -- and on the heels of threats to the classical limit. Relativistic quantum theory threatened to destroy form in plastic art, in art music, in poetry, in fiction writing; it threatened to destroy the perfectly obvious distinction between fiction and non-fiction, between simulacra and fact, between the virtual and the real; it threatened spillover into biology, into meteorology, and -- worst of all -- into the social sciences. Thus, in exorcism and expurgation were nonlinear (Newtonian) dynamics, chaos and complexity theory born. Will Rogers, Elmer Gantry, the Music Man, Robert Redford, and the whole crew jumped on the bandwagon to exhort the audience, make their spiels, sell their oils. And we are here only talking about consensus quantum theory, not quantum theory interpreted via m-valued logics: horrors no greater. Nature deplores bloody Occam's Razor so intensely, it embraces µTm logics. Yaaaaaaack! So, complexity theory, following well-worn postmodernist tradition, names itself by the name of its opposite: a theory of 2nk fitness-utility in linear-time over nonlinear spatial-landscapes is simplistic beside a theory of double-exponential articulation in nonlinear temporal-landscapes over µTm-logical values raised to powers mnk. This latter non-simplistic case is time pulled out of Time; time killed in Time: changing curvature-topologies over space being the mirror, the mirror being that of complex-imaginary operator-Time which is given to view. The complexity of pagan animism raised to the mth to the mth power: Dreamtime and song-lines with so great a vengeance the mind reels, just simply reels. Yaaaaaaack! Musculpt! M Theory, absent psychologically leveraged myopia and via Goode “looking through”, in due course will become a theory of m-logical values raised to powers mnk -- over Sakharov collapse/anti-collapse multi-sheeted Novikov-Auorbindo-Kusama dust looped on Riemann-bridged Pereira self/anti-self layered-transparent transcendental zeta-function space networked in strings to Regge lattices hyper-numbered with numbered Gödel numbers. No schizophrenic word-salad; no clippings from a beautiful mind.
Historiographically speaking, this is not “history as force”. There may not even be history or force. But let us hear from Peter Turchin explaining the nonlinear complexity of War and Peace and War (Pi Press, 2006, p. 208):
This way of thinking originated within the physical sciences during the days of Newton and Leibniz and was, in large degree, responsible for the brilliant successes of such fields as classical mechanics and thermodynamics. During the last two or three decades, it spread to biology and social sciences under the guise of “the science of nonlinear dynamics.”
The gist of the approach was admirably expressed by George Puttenham in 1589: “Peace makes plentie, plentie makes pride, pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel breeds warre: Warre brings spoile, and spoile povertie, povertie pacience, and pacience peace: So peace brings warre and warre brings peace.” What is important here is not the specific details of how one thing leads to another, but the absence of simple, linear causal relationship. What causes “warre”? Peace. But peace itself is caused by war. So there is no cause and effect, or rather each is both the cause and the effect. War brings peace, and peace brings war, and so on, cycle after cycle, ad infinitum. The causation is not linear, but circular.
As a person who once taught black propaganda techniques at Psychological Operations Group, Special Warfare Center, using materials earlier developed at the Center for War Information and within OSS-MO, I can testify that one tried-and-true method is to employ cute language and/or neologisms wherever there is a lacuna in the argument. This is one technique postmodernists have made their own, a technique I have attempted to parody. Circular causation, as Turchin notes and then qualifies, is no cause-effect connecting principle. What he doesn't note, and where the lacuna lies, is that circular causation is the “liar's paradox”: self-reference, the basic principle of m-valued logics. Identity -- of the tiger chasing its own tail -- turned to butter. While, under transfinite m-valued logics, truth-value has absolutely no value, animistic identity transparency is the foundation of first-order, or pure, logic, the logic of pure feeling without discrete concrete contents: that synaesthetic logic sought by Frege, Husserl, Hilbert, Kandinsky, Schoenberg. And if causation is looped by the gravity of events, is circular, cyclical, nonlinear, how is it that time-itself stays straight as an arrow: linear-time? Nonlinear functions mapped over linear-time, when there is “cycle after cycle, ad infinitum”? To use “ad infinitum” is to employ a very big term. This is a term that cannot exist in linear-time; the infinity involved cannot be constructed, cannot be demonstrated in finite time. Such a constructive demonstration would require linear-time to stop, to complete itself as a sequence become an infinite set. There was a humongous argument about this, never quite resolved, just at the very moment quantum theory was being born. And those who argued against utility of that which is not finitely constructible were really arguing, by argument in surrogates, against the (quantum-holographic) part-whole identity transparency explicit in Cantor's diagonal proof of his definition of a denumerable transfinite set: any set that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with one of its proper subsets. There is a quantum jump between the linear and the nonlinear and between orders of the nonlinear, each of which involves an “ad infinitum” which cannot exist in linear-time, or any dynamical history thereupon. Quantum theory stepped into this breach -- even if dissembling all along the way -- and that is why nonlinear (Newtonian) dynamics did not follow upon linear (Newtonian) dynamics: the nonlinear came only “during the last two or three decades” when the threat index reached the requisite inductive threshold.
Nonlinear laws of history as force, as functions of societal driving forces -- demographic forcing, social mobility patterns, economic trends -- wed to factors like climate, geomorphology, disease, technological innovation were castigated by Karl Popper as inherently totalitarian in character, as having no basis in historical fact, and as having no place in an “open society”. Knowledge acquisition, and hence technological innovation, he argued, is unpredictable; therefore, no historical laws (linear or nonlinear) are possible. R. G. Collingwood argued posthumously (The Idea of History, 1946 if memory serves) against such laws, essentially, under charge of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness -- hypostatization: the substantialism of the Greeks, hypostatos, viewed in modern times as illegitimate conflation of the conceptual to the concrete. The modern mind does not see this hypostatization, this conflation, as Kairos, as involutory decomposition, as descent of the divine via mathematical involutes, as transformation of atemporal Ideal Form into incarnated time-bound concrete object. Plato's answer to Popper: Knowledge acquisition, i.e., learning, is remembering, anamnesis. And anamnesis requires metanoia, change of mind (which may require fully-conscious gran mal seizure like that of Swedenborg and Cantor). Yaaaaaaack! What is remembered is already there, wherever “there” might be; it is not emergent; it does not evolve. History, insofar as there is history, would not be a matter of nonlinear functions over linear-time, but, as Derek argues in MOON, a matter of the universal physical constants treated, not as single-valued fields, not as m-valued fields, but as m-logically-valued m-valued fields. Yaaaaaaack! One cannot be a Platonist, except in contemporary philosophy classes, if one believes in the objectivity of linear-time. And if there is no objective linear-time, there are no initial conditions, and, therefore, no sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Yaaaaaaack! There is, instead, the time-independent Schrödinger equation. Yaaaaaaack! In order to keep Schrödinger hidden behind the classical limit, chaos and complexity theorists transubstantiated Greek substantialism and Platonic anamnesis into percolation theory. Time-evolution -- not, that is, the evolution of time -- history, in a word, treated as a forest fire, as an epidemic. The Pythagorean Holy Tetraktys (ten Kusama-dots arrayed into the equilateral Pascal's triangle) of Greek gematria treated as if it were a screen grid through which the sand grains of linear-time percolate like pachinko balls into the curve of a Gaussian normal distribution. Oops! Not the sands of time, the sands in time. This is the fundament of the transubstantiation: active operator-time reduced to passive passing time. But then, a non-reductive treatment of this is just what cascade theory of tornado genesis is all about! Though there be no historical laws (linear or nonlinear) in linear-time, such laws there are of non-linear time, of complex-imaginary operator-Time, of Dreamtime. What do you think the collective Smart(lynch)Mob-logic wisdom-of-the-crowd response will be when terminal threat-index threshold is reached over all this? Pile up little mistakes to make a mountainous disaster. Having once witnessed the hysteria at CICV-Targets, I can only suppose that reaction is liable to be ordnance thrown after ordnance in blubbering fit, a collective convulsion. Ubbadubbadubba…brrrrrrrr. Dumping the whole darned arsenal out of the belly of the beast.
Of course LBJ and McNamara didn’t know -- didn’t know that kind of detail. Just get it done, son. I don’t want to know how. This Tonkin Gulf Incident revelation by the NSA (“US government misled over Vietnam War incident”, AFP, 2 December 2005) is so obviously what it is and so ineptly done, though exquisitely timed, it’s embarrassing.
Hah! Remember that piece on the misinterpreted Sig-Int and Tonkin Gulf? Where did I see that? Christ, this memory! Better get Joe on it. He’ll be able to find it. Exactly what we need. The perfect subliminal message. Read my lips: Just like LBJ, the Bush administration was misled by incompetent low-level intelligence personnel.
Just like LBJ, uh, just like FDR, uh, just like… The Maine, uh… Over there, over there… When, actually, nothing yet publicly discussed had anything whatsoever to do with why Johnny went to war in Iraq.
Though governance creates the conditions of its own necessity, and government is even more self-fulfilling, even more parasitic, governance and government have been going on for so long any attempt to abruptly change would yield the same results as going from schools that are prisons directly into Summerhill without Christmas vacation: universal nervous breakdown.
Metalogics; physics; history; theoretical mathematics; metapsychology; political economy; theory of physical diagnosis, medical and meteorological; art and art-music semiotics in the same sentence. Walking meditation in the layered-transparent is penetration of one Plexiglas wall after the next. Of course my I only rarely touches upon this subject matter in conversation: people simply short-circuit on the category mix, less readable than house music. He talks funny, don’t he?… It’s bad enough to be taking courses in several majors during the same semester!… How very risqué of you… What is not yet understood virtually everywhere is that this egghead stuff should no longer be the concern only of people who walk through glass doors: the human species, and much else, will survive or become extinct on these impractical concerns within a historical wink. What is tacitly assumed about the category mix -- and any tacit categorization is its own unconscious mix -- for better or for worse, governs what choices are made, how responses are implemented. Sins of the fathers, our great leaders: probably at least four billion people beyond ecologically-balanced planetary carrying capacity under present and presently plausible technological regimes; regressed, phobic-compulsive, manic-depressive, Cartesian-Newtonian trigger fingers on the several categories of relativistic quantum-based doomsday buttons (the more simple controlling the more complex: something my long-ago employer, Johnson Controls -- me an IBEW apprentice wiring the computer room in the Forestall Building -- would never permit); in mere decades, quite possibly a planet hotter than at any time in the past 2 million years; glutamate-etched hyperactive brains with attention-deficit disorder frantically keyboarding word searches upon the cosmic-IDHS seeking solutions to the energy crisis they would communicate to the SmartMob; and so many asleep at the wheel… Not hardly the 5th century or the 14th century.
How did I get into this way of thinking? Hmmmm. I have to blame the inscrutable Oriental. Anyone who had a “cultural visa” to Japan during the '60s and '70s will understand. This is something the Japanese did to the gaiatsu (foreign pressure) element amongst them; not something they did themselves. To gain and sustain such a visa, the recipient had to design his/her own cultural studies program, identify and enlist resident experts, and periodically offer proof of continuing regular pursuit in order to justify visa renewal: the community as faculty, and team teaching of interdisciplinary studies in a self-designed curriculum. Something totally alien to Japanese education. Friends World College, without FWC. Where did this concept come from, this Japanese version of American higher education of foreigners as a way to make agents of influence? It came from the period 1945-55. Inversion of American-created and American-staffed International Christian University, without inverted ICU. Watching American housewives form sewing-circle study groups for every conceivable aspect of traditional Japanese culture, and place their kids in myriad impromptu classes, the Japanese conceived the cultural visa and envisioned the various advantages of having foreigners become spokespersons for Japanese traditions. This, in spite of considerable intercultural animosity, racism, resentment, arrogance, and all the rest. For three years in the '50s, as a military brat, I lived the functional equivalent of such a visa: God only knows how many classes on how many subjects, paper folding to flower arranging, jujitsu to bamboo swords, sitting, bathing, planting, drinking tea, cutting fish, mashing beans, throwing pots, smelling. Trips to Kyoto to study the gardens, view the silk floating in the Kamagawa, and watch the craftsmen at their work. Old grandmother in the rural hamlet where I lived: the local expert on Shinto… uh, Shinto everything. Even once, only once, thank you, watching the honey-bucket drayman at work, and me falling backwards into one of the open ordure pits next to the rice fields! What I didn't do along with my mother, and she did a whole lot, I did on my own. Traveled on the ground, literally, by six-by truck, throughout every region of the country as the water boy for the base football team. Flew into the nearest airfield, then hopped a truck with all the equipment to the outlying post were the game was to be played. A day or two before the team arrived. Climbed Mount Fuji with the Boy Scouts. Traveled by submarine from Sasebo to Yokohama. I retained little in the way of concrete contents, but, coming at ages 8-11, residuals summed to a profound orienting effect. Years later, on several occasions, serious injury, even possibly death, was avoided because of this subliminally absorbed orientation: body knowing and instinctive correct falling, for instance, as a result of three years of jujitsu. Forgot it all, except the instinctive reflex responses. Growing up elsewhere, outside Japan, without being quite aware of it, I looked to the community, particularly elders, for my basic education -- not to the formal school system, which I more or less tolerated. Boy Scout merit badges, for instance, were approached in this “cultural visa” fashion -- beginning in the Far East Council. As a kid, of course, I did not figure out that the schooling of society by the state is one of the primary means by which supersociality is removed from society (along with imposition of single-logically-valued property and single-logically-valued monetary units). I just sort of happened into deschooling myself. During three years in Alaska, '60-'61-'62, two sourdoughs, each with twenty winters alone on the Yukon under their belts, became mentors on multifarious skills and subjects, stalking caribou way up the Denali Highway, collective behaviors of wolves, all the stages of choosing the right piece of land to homestead (the Act was still in effect at that time), first real job at age fourteen building log cabins at a remote site, and so on -- and an old retired professor working at the base high school agreed to give independent study courses on esoterica of higher mathematics: symbolic logic, topology, foundations. But not only elders, peers too. Hey, I learned to swim in the Sea of Japan dodging jellyfish and watching girl pearl divers; I'll get you over that fear of the water in a week. You teach me how to play basketball and I'll have you swimming lengths in the base pool within a month. Cross-training. In three months I was scrimmaging Saturday mornings with the GIs and trying to imitate moves of the one who had come into the Air Force directly out of the Harlem Magicians. The traditional Japanese kata way of learning by imitation: not quite conscious, but something I did by subliminal habit for years. You don't have much self-confidence, do you? This was said to me many times. In contemplating these negative judgments on my imitative tendency (which I much later learned was predation-reducing Müllerian mimicry), I came to explicitly understand the degree to which the kata way had infiltrated my subliminal metaprograms. Once that was understood, I cultivated it even more -- and eventually it became the foundation of a meditative discipline based in self-observation of bodily actions (later cognitive functions) while performing a task, whatever task: basketball playing, swinging an ax or an adz in building a cabin, working a swing-scaffold while painting radar domes, all day long handling open burlap bags of feed fresh from mouth of the mill while working as a grader of grain, breaking loose and flipping out decking on the 17th floor of open steel for the Native American steelworkers walking it out for spot welding, learning from a West Virginia old boy to strip romex with a penknife fast as a whippet, handling lineman's pliers working as a rodman, root pruning or balling trees with a narrow spade kept razor sharp… And college. In those years at American University's School of International Service, it was the “cultural visa” program all over again, with the addition of “problem-based” and minus “self-designed”: team teaching of interdisciplinary studies seminars in a problem-based curriculum. This was the case for the first two years. The last two years were standard college-course format. I quit early into the third year: couldn't stand the standard format. Volunteered for U.S. Army Special Forces. One-and-a-half more years of team teaching of interdisciplinary studies in a problem-based curriculum: Special Forces medic training under a battery of MD's and other resident experts. Had I stayed in SF, there would have been more experience of cross-training. But I quit; moved on into intelligence work. Gotta keep movin'. And after Viet Nam one informal understudy-collaborator relationship after another. Problem-based focus. Pull in ideas from wherever, just so they address the problem. Couldn't find a way to do this in any formal educational setting, so I just kept right on with it as best I could on my own. Still doing it just the same. As near as I can tell, that's how I got into this way of thinking.
If the best they can do is what one sees in The Economist and New Scientist, then whatever propaganda agency it was that replaced the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office (see Paul Lashmar's and James Oliver's Britain's Secret Propaganda War, Sutton, 1998) is in trouble. The series of articles on fundamentalism in the 8 October 2005 issue of New Scientist is a good example. The fundamentalists are not reacting against modern modernism, let alone postmodernism; it's the scientists identified with premodern modernism, stupid! It is not what the fundamentalists think they think, it's what they think they don't think, that matters. The collective unconscious puts mass movements in motion, not conscious contents of individual awareness or the conscious contents of group collective occasions of experience. It is not what the scientists think they think, it's what they think they don't think, that matters. The scientists rejected Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation because of their attachment (in the Buddhist sense) to time evolution. In rejecting evolution, the fundamentalists place themselves in the same camp as the Schrödinger who practiced triadic Buddhist Tantric sexual yoga as a scientific method for overcoming the scientist's state of attachment, so as to reach the insight required to write the atemporal fundamental equation of quantum mechanics, that equation which quantum physicists to this very day reject clear implications of because of their states of attachment.
Poor propaganda -- as I used to teach at Psychological Operations Group, JFK Special Warfare Center, Ft. Bragg -- somehow always finds a way to contradict itself. This principle is exemplified in the 8 October issue of New Scientist: the article immediately preceding the series on fundamentalism contradicts content of articles in the series. The preceding article is about the “supersolid” state of matter, that state wherein solid matter can move through solid walls as if those walls were not there, something that the Christ of the fundamentalists was apparently able to do -- and which, at least since the early-'60s, has been widely rumored as being a commonplace demonstration made by monks in various monasteries in Latin America (just as barefoot walking of fire and biological superconductant levitation is rumored to be demonstrated in parts of Asia). “Supersolidity”, itself, is a scientific term in contradiction with itself, a term exemplifying the scientist's reaction against the modern modernism of the time-independent Schrödinger equation. A supersolid, quite obviously, is not especially-solid; it's not-especially solid. I've been writing about supersolidity for over thirty years, but I have always used an accurate term of description: animistic “identity transparency”. The superstate of a solid, no less than that of a fluid or a gas, is a state of identity transparency. An exemplary case of identity transparency (involving structured-water “ice-nine” crystals, not only fluids and gases, as well as acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes, i.e., the sound waves filtered out of consensus atmospheric models and treated as noise, not data, because their authentic treatment would introduce relativistic quantum theory to meteorology) occurs well above absolute zero in the Earth's atmosphere as superconductance of hydrothermodynamic properties associated with limited spacetime domains leading to tornado genesis. This “identity transparency” is precisely what Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation describes. Define time evolution onto identity transparency, or configure your experiments so as to achieve the same, and you confine identity transparency to temperatures near absolute zero by establishing initial and boundary conditions precluding “hypertemperature”, i.e., the twistorized spin component of non-linear operator-time (which, as Schrödinger's equation describes, is independent of passive passing linear-time). Identity transparency is m-logically-valued, not Aristotelian, not Baconian, not Boolean, not binary, not merely of the 1T2 order of logical-value. Identity transparency is the foundation of logic, not truth-value. One way to confine identity transparency to near absolute zero is to interpret Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation in terms of probability amplitudes, such interpretation being undertaken so as to permit continued employment of 1T2 logic, an order of logical-value wholly inappropriate to the time-independence of the Schrödinger equation (that's why Dirac rewrote the equation to make it time-dependent). Were one to cease such dissembling of Schrödinger, such dissimulation of his equation -- by ceasing the scientific mind's state of attachment to time evolution -- and apply Schrödinger's bare insight in its raw uncooked state to consideration of conductivity properties of DNA, for instance, one might discover, not only that DNA has a superconductant p-electron gas core (about which the double-helix and screen-grid base pairs entwine) at physiological temperatures, but also that the notion of time evolution is not intrinsic to genetics, that it is something imposed by the state of attachment characteristic of the limitations of the dissembling scientific mind. The transcendental (transcending any finite number of algebraic operations) states described by the time-independent Schrödinger wave equation are simultaneously immanent, imminent, and eminent as the quantum wave properties of the DNA molecule, waves, which, in their quantum properties, are non-local spatially and temporally, i.e., spread out over the whole universe and over the whole of what is misapprehended by binary mind as the arrow of passive passing linear-time. “Intelligent design” is simply a buzz term -- a better buzz term than “supersolid” -- for something correctly intuited, but not fully comprehended: the temporal operations (speeding things up a bit, the twisting and bending and cutting and pasting and reentering of things at this or that Russellian type of absolute limit to a given order of value) of nonlinear, complex-imaginary, operator-time as demergent expression of logical, ontological, and topological operations upon the m-logically-valued reference space (n-dimensional Hilbertian function space over Sakharovian multi-sheeted Riemannian universal covering surface under transfinite orders of Lukasiewicz's m-valued logics in Regge lattice array numbered with numbered Gödel numbers). No schizophrenic word salad! No clippings from a beautiful mind!
And guess what the 8 October New Scientist article immediately following the series on fundamentalism was about. Gregariosa obligato! The “empathy gene”, shared by humans and the bonobo apes, which regulates the neurotransmitter responsible for generative empathy, the state preliminary to direct experience of animistic “identity transparency”. What are the differences between the following psychological states: empathy, identification, attachment, possession, contagion, participation mystique, participation inconsciente, romantic eros love, agape love, sympathy, resonance, compassion? The list is a long one. And how many people have phenomenologically distinguished the variant identity properties of these by direct introspection? When Abel, during the 1820s, solved the problem of the quintic by proving that equations with exponents to the 5th-degree and higher are transcendental equations, he set in motion within higher mathematics concepts of identity which killed the 18th century dead: scientists in attachment states of mind -- states they are not introspectively competent to distinguish from other such states -- have still not assimilated the import of this, are still dissembling, still lying to themselves and the rest of us, still inflicting collective hysteria by imposing an ever-expanding lack of correspondence between worldview construct and institutional embodiment, that lack of correspondence which foments collective existential anxiety and mass movements like the various fundamentalisms mushrooming all around us today, mushrooming just as they did in earlier forms during the 1870s (the fight against transcendental Cantorian mysticism of transfinite sets in synchronicity to the Franco-Prussian war), the first decades of the 20th century (rejection of the axiom of choice in synchronicity to WWI), and the late-1920s/early-'30s (dissimulation of Schrödinger's wave equation by rejection of m-valued logics and embrace of probability amplitudes in synchronicity to WWII) -- and with regard to the exact same issues and forcing functions today (attempts in the 1960s and '70s to introduce a submolecular biology and a relativistic quantum meteorology were suppressed and diverted to nonlinear Newtonian dynamics, chaos and complexity theory, while divergence between Weltanschauung and institutional Umwelt-Weltbilt has accelerated with outcome of the Aspect experiments on nonlocality, demonstrations that a given atom and even a given molecule can be in more than one place at a given instant of linear-time, discovery of the m-valued velocity of light and M theory's m-valued other fundamental constants, demonstration of superconductant levitation, demonstration of identity transparency under the misnomer of “supersolidity”, and so on, in synchronicity to the current nascent collapse of the Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization to planetary… whatever new class of catastrophic violence it becomes). Less and less and less and less correspondence between worldview construct and institutional embodiment. This rising cycle of violence will not end until scientists cease being attached to attachment -- and begin to comprehend the import of “mathematical function” which is in the “correspondence” they have done so much to subvert over the past 200 years.
People simply don't have a clue. For almost 40 years there have been blank stares, gapping mouths, irritation, outrage, turned up noses, summary dismissal, smirks, laughter, displays of inappropriate affect, and other psychologically revealing responses to the sort of juxtaposition just provided. There is no connection between this exotic physics and the things you connect it to! so they have said over and over and over: statements made by air heads. Zilch, not a clue have they had. Lacuna-on-the-brain. Whatever! Whatever happened to be their personal pathologies. And they still don't even understand what happened in Mao's China, let alone during the Viet Nam war, let alone let alone what is presently transpiring with Al Qaeda and Associates. They do not even suspect that AQ&A is producing a far more elaborate form of self-organization than did the Viet Cong, which was far more elaborate than that version Mao brought forth. What we get are statements like the following (Michael Meyer and Anna Nemtsova, “Awaiting the 'Big Fire'”, Newsweek, 28 November 2005, p. 23):
Authorities in Nalchik [north Caucasus] confirm that a major “cleanup operation” is underway. “One hundred armed people came into the streets on Oct. 13,” says Interior Ministry spokeswoman Marina Kyasina. “Now we are investigating how many people could be supporting them, or sympathizing with them.”
How many supporters and sympathizers was already known by the early-1950s. This is not something that needs to be investigated in 2005. That it is being investigated at this late date illustrates how far behind the 8-ball people are, how far they are from comprehending what is happening to them. Very well documented historical precedent indicates there are approximately 30 active supporters for each armed person, and ten times that many passive sympathizers: news from half a century ago.
Or, in another recent example, military affairs analyst J. R. Dunn, writing in The American Thinker (“Zarqawi and People's War”, 8 December 2005) assures us that Mao was a mandarin. A mandarin mind you! A Taoist, so thoroughly into alchemical self-organization and so anti-Confucian he created a Cultural Revolution in a failed attempt to destroy the party mandarinate, is designated a mandarin in course of Dunn providing an explanation as to how Mao won his national-liberation war by intervention of an “externality”: Stalin (when Stalin -- out of antipathy for Mao's refusal to kowtow like a good Confucianist, actually lent strong early support to the Gearwheel, a very un-Taoist, un-alchemical transformation of the tai chi symbol, it can be noted). These observations of Dunn about Mao and Stalin were offered by way of a very long introduction to the much shorter body of the article wherein it is argued that the terrorist tactics of Zarqawi are doomed because he does not have the good sense displayed by the Vietnamese communists to service the people with positive feedback while attacking the adversary with negative feedback. Well, one certainly cannot dispute the notion that the Vietnamese communists had such good sense, but the generalization provided by Dunn -- on first principles of supersolidity -- is clearly unwarranted. Supersolidity is a material expression of a particularly intense form of asabiya (group cohesion). The supersolid phase of the solid-state material corpus obtains by Bose-Einstein condensation (and there is now even evidence of fermion condensates: different hypertemperature spin components of operator-time for bosons and fermions) the group cohesion and component synchrony required to move through what no solid can normally move through. For this to transpire, the bonds between components have to weaken simultaneously as identity transparency between those components heightens (as seen from a linear-time bound perspective): something AQ&A have clearly achieved in successfully negotiating several self-organizational phase transitions. But this fundamentalist asabiya is not the asabiya of Peter Turchin (War and Peace and War, Pi Press, 2006) and other theoreticians of nonlinear Newtonian dynamics, chaos, and complexity; this asabiya is a leveraged, decontextualized, manipulated, subverted form of the identity transparency at the foundation of m-valued logics and the time-independent quantum mechanics of spontaneous self-organization at critical states (such as those instantaneously obtained at the Curie temperature when the correlation length snaps to infinity, and the scientist's renormalization is filtered from the model). In truth, asabiya is a regressed condition of the collectivity: suppress the non-doing prerequisite to the unmanipulated “pure state” of animistic identity transparency and, by compensatory abreaction, you get a regressed form of the capacity for collective action, asabiya-for-conquest. A smart lynch mob is still a lynch mob; the “wisdom” of the crowd is not that wisdom Socrates referred to. Social solidarity is only one dimension of ultrasociality, and by no means equivalent to the supersolid phase (a pure quantum state). Unadulterated identity transparency always involves generative empathy with the natural surround (part-whole-part, not part-to-part: where do you think the zero-point energy comes from?), while asabiya, group cohesion, social solidarity is driven by exogenous challenge, be the challenge metaethnic, environmental, epidemiologic, the “Joddy” stalking your girl back home, whatever (“exogenous”, obviously, being a relative term: a term relative to the partition-nesting chosen, how the “metaethnic frontiers” are perceived). Though, as in all quantum systems, “mixed states” are possible, spontaneous social order cannot be used for conquest; if it is so usable, it is not spontaneous (and being not spontaneous, it is not a “pure state” of the involved wave-function). Ask any Philippina who spent ten years at grassroots organizing how spontaneous the mass action was that toppled Marcos when the long-awaited critical-state conjuncture finally arrived (the complexity theorist's “self-organized criticality” is not equivalent to that of the quantum physicist pondering Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation).
How do you get the terrorist network-infrastructure to move in the perfect goose-stepping lock-step of jack-booted close-order drill required to initiate manipulated supersolid phase? You don't! Nor does any form of leadership. AQ&A tell each other: though we may need another hero or heroine, we don't need another leader. It is the Western leadership elite and the Western media who have been making leaders of AQ&A, not AQ&A (assimilation of AQ&A's MO to one's own MO is a psychological defense mechanism). And so we have statements like that of Major General Rick Lynch, coalition spokesman in Baghdad (Bill Powell, “A War Without Borders”, Time, 21 November 2005, p. 28): “Zarqawi still has capability, and never have we said we've taken away that capability.” Where is to be found an insightful statement made by any official anywhere? And just like in Viet Nam, prisoners will quickly figure out what the new party line is, and tell you exactly what you want to hear. Is current terrorism the same terrorism as the terrorism that was promoted in The Wretched of the Earth or Revolution Within the Revolution? Not hardly (especially with Nicaragua's per capita GDP dropping from something like USD5,000 to under 500 as a legacy of the Contras). Zarqawi's acolytes -- to use the Lynch mischaracterization -- are not trying to overcome an inferiority complex inculcated by colonialism. They are not engaged in organization slaying so as to create a united front in the way the Vietnamese communists went about it. They are not fish swimming in an ocean of peasants in quite the way Mao imagined. The kind of group cohesion AQ&A cultivates, though related to the leveraged, decontextualized, manipulated, subverted animistic identity transparency exhibited by the Viet Cong, is quite different and exemplary of a more elaborate form of self-organization by virtue of… what? Dust along the path. A trail of singular points. Empty centers. Zero-points. Singularities. Holes. Vacancies. Zero-point vacancies. These constitute the phase of solid-state virtualities which obtain the highest state of animistic identity transparency and thus drive processes of spontaneous self-organization throughout the corpus. The so-called “classical world” doesn't exist; it is learned behavior of glutamate-etched brains reduced to consciousness of the 1T2 order of logical processing only. The single atom in its single solid-matter, crystal-lattice, grid box is not in the grid box it is in; being m-logically valued, the box is vacant as far as the binary mind is concerned. Presence of the m-logically-valued is transcendental to the initial and boundary conditions imposed by boxed-in binary mind. Matter as we have learned it, is lacuna-on-the-brain. This can be tapped into differentially; it can be leveraged, decontextualized, manipulated, subverted in many ways. Animistic Shinto, for instance, ceased to exist in a pure form once subjected to Confucianism and institutionalized Buddhism. The martyrdom operations undertaken by AQ&A are not primarily to have an effect on the adversary; they are to constellate self-organization of AQ&A by providing extra-combat free-energy, energy not identified by comparative summation-of-forces accounting. Possibly even some “regressed” zero-point energy (the zero-point vacuum fluctuation is a notion not yet well understood, and the role played by impurities, i.e., “dust”, in phase transition to high-temperature superconductivity is also not well understood). Leaders are counter-productive, indeed antithetical, to this type and degree of self-organization. The major synoptic phase transition was catalyzed, not by the situation in Iraq, but by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, an anticipated provoked reflex reaction. UBL is not worried about lying back with his feet up. The instant U.S. boots were placed on the ground in Afghanistan, his major mission was accomplished; anything else for him personally could only be the icing on the cake.
But more elaborate forms of self-organization incorporate principles of the less elaborate. And this belies the title to Bill Powell's article: “A War Without Borders”. Powell is a journalist, not an intelligence analyst. If he chooses so mistaken a title, this is because of how he was informed, misinformed, and dysinformed by those he interviewed (and also because of the impositions placed upon him by editors and editorial policies: nilpotents “reading” nawiht “writing” naught). Why do you think they used Iraqi terrorist-martyrs, not those Jordanian? Think, forgodsake! The strikes against hotels in Amman were undertaken precisely because there is a border, not because there is none: organizational adaptation by resource exchange across phase boundaries. This is the way cells work, be they biological cells or terrorist cells. Osmosis by identity transparency! Without borders, almost by definition alone, there is no possibility of insurgency. Insurgencies thrive on transformation of 1T2-logical boundaries -- closed-circles establishing absolute distinction between inside and outside, between here and there -- into porous, band-pass, µTm-logical, fractal boundaries. Fractal entrapment is how the insurgent ensnares the counterinsurgent by topologically transforming properties of the very boundaries the counterinsurgent imposes to stamp out the insurgency. An approximation to understanding of this comes with study of calculus on n-dimensional manifolds. Ask yourself how many degrees of freedom -- geopolitical, geographical, geomorphological, geological, military, administrative, racial, religious, ethnic, metaethnic, legalistic, sexual, sociological, psychological, psychiatric, economic, monetary, spiritual -- a boundary has. Each variable related to every one of these degrees of freedom is mapped on the boundary as a function and changes as the boundary changes: this is the mental space wherein the insurgent strategist establishes his habitus. An insurgency wins not by winning battles, but by driving itself to higher and higher levels of self-organizational competency through resource exchange across boundaries -- in all their degrees of freedom, all their functional mappings. If winning battles helps this process, fine; if losing battles helps, also fine. Especially if losing battles confuses your opposition into believing that the game is soccer, when it is actually tennis! In tennis the net is a phase boundary over which the ball must go, not a trap into which it is kicked. How many set points can you make while confused on this issue? The competent insurgent strategist studies his own network-organization in formulating strategy; if he does this well enough, the combat will take care of itself. Why? Because the level of self-organizational competency his organization has been able to achieve is a function of the total configuration of the combat and its environmental constraints (as functional maps on boundaries). The insurgent has a better chance of getting accurate information about his own organization than about anything else. Physician, heal thyself! If the counterinsurgent analyst or the journalist didn't do so good at high school biology class, then he ain't gunna do so good at figurin' AQ&A. Going across the border into Jordan may have been just what was required to push processes of insurgent self-organization within Iraq to a higher level of competency. Going across the border requires doing things in Iraq by the insurgency not done in Iraq before; if you want the level of self-organizational competency in Iraq that the doing of these things that have not been done before in Iraq facilitates, then you have to create a project that requires the doing of those things (the same principle is involved here, on a different scale level, as was involved in the setting up of a sting operation designed to get the U.S. to invade Afghanistan: a situation had to be created that would facilitate a synoptic self-organizational phase transition -- UBL had the benefit of all that went before him in his chosen area of interest, including Viet Nam). A self-organizational phase is not a structural configuration, it is a state of functional articulation (best described by a wave-function which characterizes the synoptic state of identity transparency -- the Everett “relative-state” -- prevailing in a given region of component space, the space of contention). There are borders within borders within borders within Iraq over which resource exchanges have been conducted for purposes of organizational adaptation ever since U.S. boots began to pound Iraqi sand. Look at every AO and TOAR of every military unit, U.S. and otherwise, every police precinct, every religious sect, every voting district, every municipal administrative boundary, every infrastructure development sub-region, every valve-managed cadastral-plan sector used by the Iraqi government and its “international advisors”, military and non-military. Now superimpose the assuredly different AOs and TOARs used by the insurgency upon these and you begin to get a picture of the chess board inside Iraq being utilized for organizational adaptation by resource exchange across phase boundaries. You can bet your boots that the borders utilized by the U.S. and the Iraqi government are relatively stable by comparison to those of the insurgency plus AQ&A. There can be no doubt that the AOs and TOARs of I+AQ&A are in a virtual state of constant changes -- otherwise, I+AQ&A could not be successfully and unsuccessfully mounting the number of strikes per day they do. Every functional alteration mapped on a border is simultaneously a change in a long list of factors, whether explicitly stated or tacitly understood and acted upon without instruction: personnel allocation, unit mission statement, job descriptions, materiel accessibility, recruitment tactics, organization and utilization of noncombatant support, and on and on. Even the project that becomes an unsuccessful strike requires the marshalling of manpower and materiel resources -- and every act of such marshalling alters the relative-state of the corpus of insurgent components. That's one way losing is a way to win. The higher the degree of identity transparency, the higher the degree of quantum relative-state, the more self-organizational competency and the less decision-need, the less leadership requirement, the less point-A to point-B commo required in order to effectively marshal manpower and materiel resources. Why do you think martyrdom operations were innovated? In order to drive the degree of identity transparency operative in the corpus of AQ&A components to higher and higher levels, so as to increase the degree of functional integration. Psychological boundaries melt within the ambient operational space of the martyr. Put five of them together into a crystal-lattice network and you have a manipulated supersolid phase. Riding such a process does not necessarily involve obtaining this or that prescribed structural configuration: it's a question of condensation into the same state, the same quantum state. Nothing stated here was not understood, in principle, at SRA-MACV-J2, almost 40 years ago. Really!
AQ&A is a regressed sociological model of quantum processes of collective and cooperative behavior in spontaneous self-organization at critical states. This assertion is not based upon the supposition that Zarqawi, a high school drop out, is a student of quantum mechanics in his spare time. It does not suppose that UBL and/or his close associates study higher mathematics and physics in their caves so as to arrive at organizational strategies. Not that formal institutionalized education is the only, or even the best, education this planet has to offer -- as I well know, being a college dropout and someone who stopped taking formal education quite seriously toward the end of junior high school. If contemporary schools are prisons, as many kids think, then what is to prevent prisons from becoming schools, schools even better than contemporary schools that are prisons? And AQ&A's being a sociological model does not mean not also being neurological and neuropsychological models: intraneuronal DNA, brain discharge phenomena, and so on (perspectives worked out in significant measure by reductive phenomenology of PTSD). Import of Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation, which describes the principles at issue, has been falsified for eight decades. Import of Abel's solution, relative to identity transparency, of the quintic -- his impossibility theorem establishing transcendence of al-jabr as a state mathematically describable -- has been suppressed for almost 200 years. Given that the involved dissembled principles articulated by the efforts of Abel, Schrödinger, and others directly relate to central features of traditional notions of reality, it is not outlandish, or even unexpected, these suppressed principles should become sufficiently regressed as to constellate unconscious archetypal processes setting in motion and governing collective behaviors. Were the principles not suppressed, and hence not regressed, they would not be driving violent expressions, but consciously integrated processes of spontaneous social order.
What to do about it is, of course, altogether a different question. Means, methods, media, and convivial tools for consciously integrating m-logically-valued identity transparency have to be found, implemented, and utilized by collectivities (not merely by individuals or some critical threshold summation of individuals, as identity transparency is between whole-part, not part-part, and is not reducible to Newton's fluxions: even 1T2 two-against-the-world romantic love is no solution, making “Make love, not war” an uninformed dictum). Since scientists and academicians in general have been those most responsible for the conundrum and its associated crises, it hardly seems efficacious to turn to them for help at solving the problem they have created. This can be seen as especially being the case, when one realizes the extent to which “true science” is of interest to career scientists only to the degree it serves as a context for the status duel and the accumulation of peer recognition. There being so little actual intrinsic interest in the subject matter, scientists and academicians in general are not much influenced by perspectives on the subject matter that do not directly impinge upon squabbles over status and recognition rites they are not personally involved with. Those who have no handle on being-in-itself, fixate upon self-being. Clearly, other avenues have to be found, or a linear-time-bound time will come when the human species sitting in the global village will have no other way to save itself but to call ordnance in upon its own position -- thermonuclear ordnance. It's become too complicated to deal with, eh bub? Well, just drop a bomb on it; that'll make it simple, real quick.
Al Qaeda, Real Al Qaeda, Continuity Al Qaeda, you say, and then ask me how I define “crazy”? What are you thinking? “There is no center of gravity, no leadership, no hierarchy.” Yet another RAND quote, in the interminable incantation litany expressive of phobic fixation upon the feared ad hoc horizontal (no longer slanted), an animistic identity transparency regressed into asabiya (no longer ancestor worshipping tie to the communal lands). The issues involved with the definition of “crazy” seem to me too complex to be dealt with in the little claimed civilization remaining to us. But I can offer what I consider a sign of utter collective psychosis: the recently appointed Japanese Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, Heizo Takenaka, says (Newsweek, 19 December 2005, p. 56), “What is important is to sustain the standard of living of the Japanese people.” Of all peoples on this planet, with possible exception of the Israelis, the Japanese people are clearly the most uniquely positioned for collective seppuku. Not only may Japan not survive, not only may the Japanese people not survive, but Japanese persons may not survive. In such circumstances, worries about standards of living, particularly by an Internal Affairs minister, seems just plain crazy to me. Numbers of the Japanese people is huge, huge, huge, all sitting on a small collection of not-big islands pretty far north with even smaller, smaller and made oh-so-much smaller land capable of producing food by a once-rural constituency over-public-worked with concrete fixtures and plastic silk-flower festivals, now debunked, deregulated, deprotected, and debanked, such that, no matter what the internal affairs contemplated, the Japanese islands cannot feed the Japanese people, no matter what the wildest, wildest dreams of such people. And these so-so, so-so, so-so very far past carrying capacity people, a people who already went through something like this during the 1930s -- a can't-possibly-feed-themselves kind of people, a people without oil altogether, a people lacking uranium -- have so, so, so, over-industrialized and now so, so, so over-post-industrialized just as post-peak-oil-dynamics onset has shifted not-so quietly into second gear, which is only the very tip of fossil-fuel-peak dynamics, which is only the tip of carbon-based-fuel-peak dynamics (can't go back to trees: how many months of trees does the so, so, so many Japanese people with their hibachis have? and can't go forward to biofuels anywhere or everywhere on planet Earth because the scaled scalar scale-level of monocropping involved would utterly destroy ecological integrity of any anywhere and every everywhere employed). What happens to the Japanese people, having forgotten the 1930s, when virtually overnight oil, natural gas, and uranium (not enough on the planet to even generate electricity required for 6.5 billion people for long) cease being commodities and suddenly are scarce strategic military resources, when the only oil they can get their hands on is black-market oil, and the only natural gas they can get their hands on is black-market, and the only uranium they can get their hands upon is black-market -- and then only if… How long do you think this if-list is? When concrete prefigurative signs of this begin to appear, what chance does the McArthur democracy movement have of not ending in the same fashion as the Taisho democracy movement? Only in the present case, not to invade China, but to kowtow to China-Russia control of energy on their side of the planet. Great time to return to the 15th century -- if you can. But if you can't, you might presently really try living in the real real-world just to see if, just maybe, there might be some internal affairs of actual consequence that might be pursued before there is no claimed civilization left to pursue them in.
I am, and have long been, saying that the “Yellow-Peril hysteria” of the 1870s was in synchronicity (acausal connection; no antecedent-consequent relation; no probability amplitude; no before-after: in “thematic” syzygy on warps of the complex-net setting event gradients expressing archetypes of the collective unconscious) with Cantor's discoveries of transfinite sets and the Franco-Prussian war, and that this pan-European-American hysteria was a prefiguration of the Nazi holocaust of the Jews. By the 1870s, the European mind -- not merely European minds -- was a “double-veteran”: not only had it killed the transference-figure repositories of its fear-driven projections, it had raped the figure murdered and so thoroughly introjected signifiers of the vanquished identity that collective hysteria at introjection had arisen. The European mind had become decisively “yellowed”, and this yellowing was received threat of the signifiers introjected: mutilation behavior. Translation of “The Great Books of the East” into European languages, and dissembling-dissimulative “interpretive” commentary thereupon, by Max Müller and all the others had been but one aspect of the introjective process by which mutilation was accomplished, a late aspect. Another was incorporation of looted artifacts into European and American holding cells, and their assimilation by avant-garde-art ritualization-decontextualization. Collecting ears, heads, dinguses, whatever “body parts” to traffic in: all signifiers, all masks collected in repetition-psychosis automatisms incorporated into the normotic as normative and justified as decoration by perseveration, echolalia, paraphasia in self-propaganda word-salad of mass media. In S-M configuration of the alchemical “Eight-fold Way” of the transference (self/anti-self duality in crossover-time interlink of conscious-unconscious of two polar identities: the enfolded doubled-quaternity), the sadist (of each polar identity, as well as del-cross polar identities) dominates the masochist exteriorly, while the masochist dominates the sadist interiorly: syzygy of transference, animus-anima interlock (within and between: quite literally the Cayley-8-tuples of alchemical marriage, if not Chew's Monadology). Mass behaviors, collective action, lynch mob mind, crowd consciousness, identity transparency suppressed and regressed to asabiya, shift in collective immune system competency versus collective vector virulence (modulated by inherited DNA frequency anomalies): gradients at introjection upon projective-identification. This introjection was full-on by the time, 1820s, Abel solved the quintic with his impossibility theorem: invocation of mathematics transcendental to algebra. No longer soft Transcendentalism, but establishment of an epileptic focus in the European “brain” (quantum properties of physical brain not contained by physical brain) by which spreading would convulse, engulfing first, mathematics, then the arts, later hard science, hung up to this day at interface with soft science. Wherever resistance was met, thereupon did seizure ensure. Plato's Vedic idealism almost regained by stages; Caliban almost reborn in increments: acted out as recurrence in genocide (interior as well as exterior: obviously, law and punishment, in so far as they are successfully suppressive, facilitate the regression driving violent expressions). To the degree those aspects of the brains of imprisoned prisoners subject to the “classical limit” are physically contained (exterior domination by sadist), to the same degree do those aspects of the brains of imprisoned prisoners not subject to the classical limit psychically dominate brains not placed in cells (interior domination by masochist). Dog goes in; cat comes out: Tang-style poetry. This is automatic, not only by the physical principle of complementarity, but also by the psychic principle of compensatory abreaction.
The Shintoist kami dust seen in idioretinal light (Yayoi Kusama gone dotty), the Ganzfeld of Impressionism, and recoil into post-Impressionism, was played again in automatic writing by Husserl's propositional/nominal “moments of matter” as a matter of moments in internal time consciousness, which finally -- My God! after all that -- were superposed as “concretion of time” in Analytical Cubism, and just as Lukasiewicz's m-valued logics were coming on the scene to belie the consistency assumption underlying Husserl's: LOGIC - logic = pure grammar. Instantiating Plato's Vedic idealism as “ideal matters” of phenomenological description, a description of thought conducted in words treated as if this were actual introspection: mutilation of “The Great Books of the East”. Ideal matters of propositions as non-viewable intemporal objects (subjective and objective under 1T2 logic only): Russellian “type”; Husserlian-Platonic ideal “type”; Jungian-Platonic “archetype”. Literary (and mythological) artifacts of (oral and written) intertextuality! Speakable without the unspeakable, not only magic without magic. Whereas superposed psychological-temperamental-physical “type” is actual “ideal matters” identified by actual introspection: autosensory observation. Empathically enter the spaces of actual introspection and real “ideal matters” become directly viewable as Dillon-MOON “psycho-ideograms”: the moments of Musculpt matter numbered with numbered Gödel numbers. But the Husserl mutilation, just like the post-Impressionist recoil, was unconscious “conversion” over warps on the complex-net setting event gradients expressing archetypes of the collective unconscious: dissimulation and self-deception regarding the actual actual case -- i.e., NORMATIVE human functioning being largely a matter of enculturated, automatized, stimulus-response habituations, chemically and neuronally structuralized -- having been brought under threat by implications of animistic-tribal identity transparency, this threat is “converted” into its actual opposite as a way of simulating depotentiation of the threat to the self-deception that has been incorporated into the normotic as normative. Think of “The Double Life of Veronique” in Doppelganger, not drag, i.e., trans-temporal (trans-linear-time) identity transparency in “ideal type”, explicitly treated as being equivalent to trans-forming a human being with free will into a puppet on strings. Such conversions prefigure and underlie “displacements”: displacement from “yellow peril” to “Jewish peril”, for instance. Exchange of one transference figure for another is a commonplace, a pedestrian circumambulation of the epileptic focus, with its auras, its marches, its convulsions.
There is much that could be said to that, but I am disinclined toward the “much”. I will say, however, that to my knowledge there has never been a history on this planet of a society born in genocide and slavery that has truly transcended genocide and slavery: hard slavery becomes soft; the genocidal moment gets stretched way, way out into slow motion so as to appear no genocide at all; out of sight, out of mind, out there at the periphery, and off-shore as soon as possible. And once the society is well-born and has moved to the soft forms, and has pushed as much off-shore as possible, then it does everything it can to deny to other societies access to the means it employed at its own birthing. But having seen the precedent, there is no way those other societies can or will be deterred by mere human agency -- so long as the factors precipitating genocide and slavery remain sanctified in the corpus of tacit assumptions informing codification of culture per se, of whatever concrete cultures (e.g., nature is selfsame, the same as itself, in possession of simple-identity, and, therefore, there can be only one correct description of it). And ecocide is even more intractable: after a hundred years of protesting and a quarter of a million species extinctions over the same period, one would think that people would get the idea that protesting is an ineffective strategy. One would think.
People attempt to determine what to do about the global crisis without having identified the actual forcing functions involved. Having injudiciously limited purview of analysis, and thus become stymied, they fall back on the old standbys that didn't work then and certainly couldn't possibly work now. And when this becomes apparent, they feel utterly overwhelmed -- unnecessarily. Let me quote (p. 320) Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War (Pi Press, 2006, p. 320):
…micro actions, by most people most of the time, have no effect whatsoever on the behavior of the system as a whole -- they are completely dampened out at the macro level. But sometimes an individual acts in a place and at a time where the macrosystem is extremely sensitive to small perturbations. Then the little act of the little individual can trigger an avalanche of consequences, and result in a complete change of the course of events.
I ALMOST agree with this. Cascade theory of tornado genesis (“cascade” theory is theory of the “avalanche of consequences” set in motion by a “little act” of angular momentum jerk imparted to the global atmosphere by particles delivered from the sun by the solar wind), however, leads me to question the nonlinear NEWTONIAN dynamics of complexity and chaos theory Turchin relies upon. Cascade theory develops into nonlinear QUANTUM dynamics (the canonical equations of standard quantum mechanics are linear), and though, from a certain perspective, “little acts” are involved, from no actual perspective are “little individuals” involved. Turchin's notion of “group solidarity” -- he uses the Arabic term “asabiya” -- I regard a REGRESSED expression of the SUPPRESSION of authentic identity transparency (which is embedded in Cantor's very definition of a countable transfinite set, and necessitates a Platonic anamnesis-type generative empathy with the NATURAL SURROUND in order to manifest itself: the denumerable transfinite set of “Cantor dust” is not recursively generated from atomistic units, but involuted, by decomposition, from the continuum by Dedekind-cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting…). This regression-due-to-suppression is why asabiya is always associated with the violent acts of “little individuals”. I have long argued that the “little act” required to launch the avalanche of omni-transforming consequences relative to the current evolving global crisis is implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units coupled to Musculpt as processor of such unit transactions. Were this done, every actual forcing function driving the current crisis would be directly engaged and subtly modified, thus initiating the avalanche. But convincing people of this is another matter altogether! Thirty years of failed attempts went into reaching this judgment.
My assessment has, indeed, changed over the past 40 years. Beginning at JFK Special Warfare Center, Ft. Bragg, while studying the Middle East in run up to the Six Day War, looking at implications of post-WWII U.S. oil policy, I clearly stated to those around me the expectation that cusp would bring an order of magnitude increase over WWII death totals. Such statements were, of course, the source of much laughter, as no one else then working at the Center was forward looking, a statement that can be made categorically. I did not begin to revise upward this assessed increment until the late-'70s when, at Cornell, I was involved in studies of both severe-local-storm genesis and climate-change dynamics (using models employing principles of relativity physics and quantum mechanics to this very day not assimilated by scientists working in the involved fields: e.g., a long technical article published in GEO during the early-'80s on Planck black-body modeling of solar-terrestrial interactions in climate change dynamics was hugely evocative of negative emotional dynamics -- and nothing else). I was slow to catch on: it was not until the mid-'90s watching people's reactions to MOON that I realized how utterly mistaken I had been: clearly, the incremental increase over WWII, it became unassailable, is going to be far, far greater than merely an order of magnitude: three decades have passed and still nothing substantive has been done! Add to that all that has been done instead, and: My God! Indeed, even now, yet another decade hence, it is probable that no person on the planet is capable of imagining full reality of what is virtually certain to transpire. Nowadays, I discount almost everything I read on this subject because I do not believe in connecting principles (causal or acausal) involving external forces or linear-time evolution of any sort, and all assessments I encounter are so based. This does not mean that I do not believe in history, or that I believe in a Fukuyama-like end of history, by whatever means. Non-linear interactions (insofar -- in so little, actually -- as “interactions” is a useful term in face of the realities of non-simple, m-logically-valued identity transparency), to my understanding, do not occur in real-number linear-time -- they occur in orders of non-linear time -- which means that sensitive dependence does not play out by any principle of evolution, recursive or not (elaborated in relation to a referencing linear-time, isotropic or not). The “forward” of “forward looking” is not down the line, but, in a manner of speaking, transverse to the line. The closest thing to this is Julian Barbour's The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (Oxford, 2000), except that he continues to require a probability fog because he has yet to develop insight into how it is that (p. 137) “…time is…simply a complex of rules…” These “rules”, which are what we experience as “time”, are m-logically-valued, numbered-Gödel-numbered time-logics of the orders of non-linear operator-time requiring for definition, not only imaginary numbers as Steven Hawking imagined in A Brief History of Time as he tried to reduce implications of, and come to terms with, the notion of operator-time, but hypernumbers beyond imaginary numbers, hypernumbers effecting chronotopological “twists-by-Penrose-twistors” beyond that imparted by the square-root of minus-one. Hawking tried to invoke “imaginary time” as passive, passing linear-time, tried to invoke time numbered with imaginary numbers without invoking the topological twist necessarily involved in such an invocation, tried to keep time a reference-frame parameter, tried to disallow active-topological operator-time -- just as he had earlier tried to disallow black hole computers, particularly if they happen to be tornadoes and/or hurricanes radiating acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes: 1979. Great mathematical complexity in detailing simplistic ideas is a great postmodernist stratagem and valued over complex ideas not fully describable with prevailing mathematics (given how very much Mathematics in its Modern Aspect has been dissembled, how very much developments in logics have been falsified, how very much post-1900 physics has been dissimulated). In certain circles -- not those of Wheeler, Penrose, Hawking -- these issues of Living Time, of non-linear operator-time, that is, were intensively discussed during the 1970s, mathematically described as best can be done without the necessary aid of Musculpt as mathematical notation, introspectively experienced in depth by autosensory observation, argued over, experimentally studied, computer modeled as best can be done with binary-logic processors, tested with “historical” data sets on NASA's biggest mainframes, and so on -- echoes of which never made it into the “Off the Beat” column in Science News, so thorough is prevailing self-censorship (and, therefore, misassessment of the dimensions and magnitude of the current global crisis).
In face of these realities, I am not so sure my “Band-Aids” characterization of most, if not all, contemporary philanthropy is, as you assert, unnecessarily depreciatory. In the case of Bono living up to his namesake, for instance, Band-Aid is explicit… ICY. U2? Even as people have no capacity for forward looking -- and, therefore, implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units by VirFut Q-Pro, for example, is impossible -- still, emergence of philanthropy as a problem-solving strategy, indicates not only a failing system of governance, but a system which inevitably will utterly fail. Governments secure in their nation-statehood have no problem with LETS, local exchange trading systems -- so long as such systems do not introduce new concepts and have no significant effects. Introduce new concepts or induce significant effects, however, and the involved LETS will quickly be gone: for many, many reasons, no substantive change to the international monetary system will be tolerated, however local (for an example, look at how rapidly and vociferously attacked were the single-logically-valued LETS currencies that spontaneously emerged after collapse of the Argentine peso). Governments still engaged in forced assimilation to nation-statehood, of course, will not permit LETS in any form, ever. This illustrates the primary difficulty with any forward-looking strategy: it cannot actually be implemented. People simply, under no circumstances, will permit anything being done to actually reduce magnitude of the oncoming global meltdown: an instance in operations of the lemming self-metaprogram mediated by the collective unconscious. What people think they think is not important; what they think they don't think is what matters. But a truly forward-looking strategy would take this cognitive self-metaprogram into account and not attempt actual implementation; it would attempt preparation for implementation, only; preparation for when the conditions are ripe, i.e., at cusp, as the global Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization goes into incendiary planetary collapse, for the page after page of reasons long ago identified by one and many. Helping people in need of help -- sick, hungry, poor, deranged -- as Gates-Bono-Soros and the like, have done and do -- the large foundations from the 19th and early-20th centuries need not be discussed, as they have long since been little more than instruments of nation-state foreign policies, one of various kinds of combat arms -- is wonderful, just wonderful, whatever secondary motivations, egoic, non-egoic, public relations, tax-wise, there might be. But the downside of such helping has been, and is, substantial, and will become very substantial in due course, for such helping shores up, supports, the failed system, does on a small scale what the system of governance should itself be doing on a large scale, in self-fulfilling fashion reinforces the instrumentality of the ills being Band-Aided, and, since such support to the failed system buoys the spirit, it provides false hope that everything can be fixed without actually fixing anything: such helping, thus, becomes a behind-the-lines spoiling operation, siphoning off attention cathexes and resources, preventing anything effective from being done about a system of organization too dumb to find a way to bring externalities within the purview of its governing autopoietic operators. Recommended: Weapons of the Weak (to be employed, according to the instruction manual, while trekking upon The Route to Extinction). There is absolutely nothing innovative about what Gates, for instance, does, says, or supports. So long as this continues, not only is his past success tied to the failed system, indeed, the magnitude of that success being a measure of the magnitude of the system's failure, so is his future -- successful or unsuccessful as it may be.
Ennui, ennui -- yawn, yawn. Digging another Dupuy foxhole! How boring -- heh-heh --to yet again defend the notion that the psychological transference is historically instrumental. Oh, Thucydides! Waesucks! Waesucks! Quoting Turchin (War and Peace and War, p. 341) to argue against Turchin:
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the radio show host Michael Savage, after referring to Arabs as “nonhumans,” said “conversion to Christianity is the only thing that probably can turn them into human beings.” As Lieven reports, he then declared: “Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing to what I'd like to see done to these people.”
Turchin then observes that Americans have generalized the high asabiya (group solidarity) of the frontier to their clash with Muslims. Over and above there being a lie even, one wonders who the actual savage was and is. What better illustration -- except for west-more-land, perhaps -- of projective-identification in transference? But Freudianism, especially The Structural Theory, is a thing of the past, you know -- especially to all those especially engaged with the transference. Synchronistic thematic orchestration is how the collective unconscious marks its historiographic impress, for history does have something to do with human actions and the fact that conscious awareness plays such a small role in impelling those actions. Foundations of American democracy -- then, now, and forever -- include the genocidal impulse at core of anti-animism, with its theological rationalizations. Turchin thinks (p. 245) this reaction in “the same way” to Indians and Arabs might be “written into cultural genes” as memes. What a crock! No insight into the livid dread, quaking fear of animistic identity transparency and compensatory abreaction as reciprocal suppression-regression to asabiya-for-conquest: sub-cultural, intra-cultural, trans-cultural. European Confucianism (the black and the white of a Voltaire, for instance, who assiduously studied Confucius' Analects) of the Age of Enlightenment (so overtly a borrowed term, it could be Chinese Chippendale, borrowed from those who later would become the “yellow peril”) set against European Taoism (Einfuhlung, Heimat sensibility, and the Erdgeist, say). That recommended -- asabiya -- is the mirror image of that being decried! And that being recommended and decried is a pale shadow of the real thing -- non-simple quantum identity transparency at critical states where the correlation length goes to infinity -- which should be sought, but is either ignored, spurned or murdered, depending upon how frightfully reality gets in the face. Anything, oh anything, dear Lord, to keep animistic quantum weirdness at a distance. Out, out, damn spot! You dust mote, you. Monad! Ugh! There is not, repeat not, anything remotely like a collective occasion of experience! Instead, there is group solidarity; there is social capital; there is cell-phoned and internetted telepresence; there is social software; there is asabiya. If not, then God help us! What would we do? How could “I” even be? Without non-linear (Newtonian) dynamics, there are no viable metaphysical justifications for constitutional democracy and capitalism left. They've all been stomped unto dust! In truth, the collective hysteria elicited by 9/11 was not due to 9/11; it was due to having long since been stomped unto dust over fundamentals, and that's why the fundamentalists were and are the most hysterical. Those damn Huns with their quantum and relativity craziness… To quote a famous international correspondent, “Quite frankly, what you have to say doesn't make much sense.”
Sorry, but I can find nothing in Iraq Confidential (Scott Ritter, Avalon, 2005) to substantiate the assumptions brought to the “Forward” by Seymour Hersh: [1] that the present conflict in Iraq is a war, not a mere battle; [2] that there was an intelligence failure; [3] that some policy principal somewhere actually thought WMDs had something beyond public relations to do with initiation of the present Battle of Iraq; [4] that some policy principal somewhere actually thought that the objective to democratize the Arabs had something beyond public relations to do with the objective to redraw the map of the Middle East, this latter objective not being a mere matter of positioning for the anticipated war with a Greater China and whomever is its allies on a post-peak planet four-billion people over ecologically-balanced carrying capacity and no adequate viable alternative energy sources in sight, the planet not even being in possession of sufficient uranium ore stores; [5] that there was actual intent to interdict 9/11 amongst some subset of policy principals, rather than well over a decade of generalized awaiting of such an event with ecstatic anticipation, savored relish, and bated breath -- waiting for everything such an event would permit that could not otherwise easily be done relative to the “total control” anticipated developments, it is believed, will necessitate (ditto Tokyo, Oklahoma City, Bali, Madrid, London, Paris…). This statement in no sense expresses a theory of pandemic conscious conspiracy; it gives voice to the notion that the collective unconscious of the human species has long since constellated a cognitive self-metaprogram entitled “species suicide”, and that this constellation involves thematic orchestration of psychological event gradients productive of concrete instances of projective identification. Why would such a constellation transpire? Because myriad individual personal decisions over the past 200 years, decisions which were instances of “neutralization antagonizing forms of resistance”, pushed past threshold for such constellation, that's why. The Atman Project (which in due course would have given access to a wide range of high-yield, cold, non-fossil, non-carbon-based, energy sources) to reincorporate conscious awareness of m-logically-valued animistic identity transparency and associated psychological immersion in the NATURAL SURROUND (placed on neurological burner by Niels Henrik Abel in 1826), turned out to be beyond the cognitive capacity of a brain-damaged species, a species which quenched at each stage opportunities provided by the project, such that suicidal self-metaprogamming became the only viable alternative. Martyrdom operations are prefigurative of more elaborate collective behaviors yet to come.
While the media and the public mind obsess upon a so-far hugely over-blown supposed clash between civilizations, a clash very likely epiphenomenal to processes much more fundamental than mere culture, one real question -- what to do about the coming collapse of civilization per se -- is only just beginning to be entertained (even by Hollywood and those posting to the Die Off website) and then mostly only in relation to oil-peak dynamics, greenhouse warming, and pandemiology. Universal observer-Q in “high indifference” could easily regard the clashing-civilizations thesis as C-n-D, cover and diversion, by which provocations are concealed -- provocations designed to elicit responses involved in positioning behaviors related to those “processes much more fundamental”. Self-referential reflexivities in provoked response to self-referential reflexivities (much more complex than mere n-bodied nonlinear feedbacks). After all, Samuel Huntington has long had academic involvements in military affairs, translating the global MOs of capitalism into concrete military applications: interpreting, for instance, the “forced-draft urbanization” mobility-of-labor offing of communal lands and ending of small subsistence holdings MO to the counter-insurgent's free-fire-zone deruralization, Rome plow, agent-orange offing of native rice varieties in ecological balance with indigenous pest populations and substitution with pesticide- and herbicide-nourished foreign hybrid (and now GMO) imports, and et cetera, and et cetera MO. Development = Urbanization. Plus. Group Solidarity :: Institutional Size. Plus. Optimum Currency Area = Largest Area Possible. Money mapped on geographic and administrative space, not by considerations of functionality or ecological adaptation or incorporation of externalities, but by military impress: war. How could that work well; how could it be a level playing field? And Huntington's famously written “bloody borders” thesis (see, e.g., Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack, Times Books, 2005, p. 95) was explicated in a book, the title to which is a typical postmodernist inversion of the case. The actual title should be: Remaking the World Order by a Clash of Civilizations. More accurately yet, the title should be: Reconstituting the Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian Paradigm by Means of a Clash of Civilizations. This reconstitution involves transit from linear (Newtonian) dynamics to nonlinear (Newtonian) dynamics. Do not pass “Go” if you pick the cards that say “quantum mechanics” or “relativity theory”. Academics couldn't be involved in such subterfuges, could they? Certainly not those from Harvard, an institution for centuries known near and far to unrelentingly support anything related to the animistic “participation mystique” endemic to non-simple quantum identity transparency. When, truthfully, institutional size is inversely proportional to actual sociality. And. Asabiya ¹ actual sociality. And. Though index of higher enculturation is directly proportional to institutional performance, it is inversely proportional to capacity for actual sociality. Now that, very probably, it is too late to do anything significant about it, the mainstream scientific community is finally getting around to debating among themselves whether or not there is already, or is likely to be, human triggering of a “Remaking” by climate shift (this was intensely debated to an affirmative answer during the '60s and '70s by scientists not in positions of institutional power who became subject to silencing rage displays and expulsions upon expressing their “yes” to a question the large-scale institutional “system that works” could not pose). That the prevailing system “works” is probably our greatest immediate threat. And quite possibly the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm has been the greatest disaster to befall humanity and the biosphere since the last time a Velikovsky comet collided with Earth. Consider, for instance, that research for the 1982 book, The Survival of Civilization (John Hamaker and Donald Weaver, Hamaker-Weaver Publishers), was conducted and debated long before the material it contains (not primarily related to greenhouse warming induced by fossil-fuel burning, but to non-survivable downsides of industrial agriculture's “green revolution”) was self-published. Today, approaching half a century after these debates began in earnest, within large-scale institutions habituated to raging and expulsing, the issue of raising questions as to what to do about climate shift dynamics beyond a far-too-little far-too-late trading of carbon chits (nothing like m-logically-valued monetary units tagged to indicators, one such possibly being carbon emissions) has barely crossed the threshold of the “normal science” scientist's awareness. And climate-shift dynamics are only one aspect of the coming collapse of civilization per se. One can even regard Jared Diamond's Collapse and his earlier Guns, Germs, and Steel as C-n-D, given that civilization per se is not discussed -- only this or that society, this or that civilization. Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War is also along a similar vein, being about life cycles of this or that nation, this or that empire, not nationhood per se. This, particularly so, when one considers that Turchin, in spite of his discourse on Tolstoy's historiographic addendum to War and Peace, deigned to shed light on the life cycle of the USSR: how, for instance, a war in Afghanistan, where only 14,263 Russian combatants died (see for this figure, Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization, Knopf, 2005, p. 50), was sufficient to trigger collapse of that imperial nation. How many Russians died in WWII? Or how a $35-billion (Fisk, p. 90) expenditure on the war in Afghanistan collapsed the Soviet economy, when the Saudi-Kuwaiti contribution to Saddam's war on Khomeini was $404 billion (Fisk, p. 222) and the current U.S. war in Iraq is expected to cost $2 trillion. Moreover, the Russian's war against Afghan Muslims triggered no general insurrection of Muslim troops in the Soviet military across the Islamic republics of the USSR as a precipitant to collapse of the Soviet Union. I have yet to see any account I personally find believable as to how the Soviet Union collapsed by pressure from the periphery toward the center and from a failure of command economics. The accepted ideologically-motivated press and academic account greatly predisposes to misassessment of the current global crisis, and underestimation of the severity thereof. MOON offers an alternative thesis, a thesis argued at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-HQ, two decades before the event.
James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), of course, decisively raises the question of the collapse of civilization per se, but doesn't really address what to do about it, except to advocate embrace of the single-scenario, single-(local)scale, hippie-yippie-dippy approach to returning to 18th century New England (or, by juxtaposition, say, my personal preference, and that of some friends already long off the grid: a forgotten village in 15th century Japan). And Kunstler's is actually a how-to book, a book addressed to the individual reader, stating for the individual survivalist how to survive “the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century”; it is not written for the species, let alone for the biosphere -- except in so far as The (archetypal) Return would facilitate general survival. But that is one crux of the “what is to be done” question. Would The Return (of the native; or is it to the native?) really facilitate survival of the human species and the biosphere? And if so, by what route of return? Kunstler really doesn't address this in anything like the necessary detail to develop conviction on part of the reader not already convinced before having read the book. He just more or less states his conviction, his belief, that the emergency will be a long one; he, for instance, makes no attempt to identify the prerequisites that must be fulfilled if the emergency is to be long. According to Kunstler's thesis, the emergency is, essentially, the period of return to ecologically-balanced planetary carrying capacity -- which could mean reducing human population by something like, possibly, four-billion people. If the emergency is not long, then those people will be doffed not by retirement, not by mere demobilization, but by RIF means less friendly, means of downsizing deadwood that could, well, get completely out of hand. De-, de-, de-, decongestion, debridement, decommission, decanting, decerebrating, decapitation, defenestration, deletion… Aside from what needs to be done to fulfill prerequisites for a long emergency, there is where it should be done and with whom it should be done. And here the question of borders comes in; how, specifically, Huntington's “Remaking” might transpire without “bloody borders” or with the least bloody borders. Long-short is not necessarily an either/or issue, except for the on/off binary 1T2-logic type us/them mind. Those who use the term “doomsayers” generally use it because they wish to advocate doing nothing; and they advocate doing nothing because they have speculated that doing something is not in their personal vested interests, to include the interest vested in their own psychology (as opposed to someone else's psychology, particularly if it happens to be animistic in nature). The emergency, however long or short, is not due to nature; or even to human nature; it is due to humans collectively acting against nature and even against human nature (if that nature is inherently animistic by virtue of the m-logically-valued quantum properties of matter and brain). Of course, as long as a person believes, for whatever reasons, an emergency is unlikely, he will not act in anticipation of it. And then there is also the likelihood, that many, maybe even most, people who believe an emergency is inevitable, for a variety of reasons, will choose not to act intelligently relative to it.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of what is to be done, say, implementation of m-logically-valued LETS, and focusing on where to do it, we can note that Huntington speaks not only of bloody borders, but of cultural fault lines (the Pythagorean “edges” of civilizations viewed from God's-eye perspective, one must suppose; hopefully not the Regge “bones”), and fault-line warfare. Turchin prefers the term “metaethnic frontiers”, judiciously employing a less definite specification. This focus on boundaries, particularly for Turchin with his mathematical orientation, one must suppose is because solutions to sets of nonlinear differential equations require imposition of initial and boundary conditions, if they are to be approximated. But this is pretty old-hat stuff, as, for instance, John Allen, the driving force behind creation of “Biosphere 2”, has from the early-'70s explicitly attempted to site his projects in “zones of intense acculturation”. The fault-line analogy clearly draws on tectonic plate dynamics and geomorphology in regards to a tacit theory of “Remaking”. Whether John Allen got onto this analogy so early because he was trained as a geologist, I do not know, but certainly cultural diffusion theory, Kulturekreis specifically, was a contributory factor. Another approach to the where issue involves adopting and adapting the spatial dynamics of far-from-equilibrium chemical phase transitions as a “Remaking” analogy. Nodal points about which self-organizing processes congeal are therein important. In terms of human systems, how would one go about identifying such points? Places from where the most light is radiated into space? The great money centers on the planet? World heritage sites? What about studying human migration patterns by analogy to molecular migration patterns? Two decades ago, amenity migration studies attempted to explore the possibility. This was done with the projection of global crisis held firmly at forefront of the mind. Most of these amenity migration sites were found by Laurence A. G. Moss, the foremost researcher, to be located where cultural resources and landscape ecologies are “thick”. Tribal and peasant peoples abounded at such sites, many of which were old colonial hill stations. Why? The theory emerged that amenity migrants were drawn, consciously or unconsciously, to such peoples not only because of habitats and habitus, tribal art and exotic culture, but because these peoples, by virtue of their traditional knowledge, are most likely to survive the coming emergency, be it howsoever long or so very short. Books appeared about that time documenting the survival capacities of the peasantry. Whatever was to be done, modern Nobel-quality science -- the work of Ilya Prigogine -- indicated it should be done, so was the appearance, at amenity migration sites, and proceed outward from there. A kind of oil-slick strategy, the “oil” of whatever was to be done, hopefully, emerging from gushers. Of course, the oil-slick counter-insurgency strategy had been employed by the U.S. Marines in I-Corps during the Viet Nam war, and, clearly, for whatever reasons, did not work (any better than did Huntington's “forced-draft urbanization”). And the absence of gushers was one of the problems giving rise to the emergency the oil-slick strategy was to address. So, it was not a great surprise when problems began to appear with the amenity migration paradigm for species survival: unfortunately, the amenity migrants were not sustaining the resources that attracted them; they carnivorously consumed precious amenities with gluttonous abandon. So much for survivability: a locust-like precursor to MoSoSo (mobile social software) swarming. Maybe the critical nodes at which to create oil slicks are points wherefrom the least light radiates into space, those points with no population density whatsoever. There must still be some! They couldn't be all, could they? Nah, they couldn't be over, not over.
Or maybe the one-variable -- cultural fault lines, metaethnic frontiers, acculturation zones, points of migration -- way of thinking, or one-spatial-variable -- point, line, zone -- way of thinking is at fault… ugh! there it is again. The where separated from the what separated from the who separated from the when separated from the how. Perhaps all of these have to be thought simultaneously and each have to be some degree of plural, not only singular. How does one do that sort of thought without having access to VirFut Q-Pro?
Don't think it is necessary to speculate about the general character and pattern of things to come, only the details and timing. Overcoming the need to speculate is a matter of attaining capacity for honesty with the self about what is known from direct experience. Uncertainty is a matter of a self in self-deception. Get behind thyself! someone famous once said. If learning is remembering, as Plato said, linear-time is a consensuated cognitive construct and getting rid of the shadows and the fog in tunnel vision through the cave is no easy task for any “I”, as this “getting rid of” clearly must involve abandonment of “I”-claims in order to enter “collective occasions of experience”: otherwise, there would be no way to “get behind” the consensuation process onto the bare percept. This “digression” into the metapsychology of neoPlatonism will seem to most people disjunctive with the concrete level of the subject matter addressed here. To the degree there is a sense of disjunction, to the same degree is there a need to speculate on the nature of things to come. A good example of just how difficult a matter is this is Robert Fisk's handling of the USS Vincennes' act of shooting down the Iranian airliner in 1988 and the bombing later the same year of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie (The Great War for Civilization, pp. 260-73). Even years later, after plenty of time to think about it, in recounting the events and the suppression of accuracy in his reporting of them, Fisk still is able to reach the following conclusion (p. 272): “The parallel was relevant but had no moral equivalence. The annihilation of the [Iranian] Airbus had been a shameful mass killing but Lockerbie was murder.” This conclusion follows directly from his premises (p. 271): “…the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place” and, speaking of those on the Vincennes, “…the Americans' panic and incompetence…” Anyone who had spent even a little time in the field during the Viet Nam war knew immediately exactly what happened psychologically on the Vincennes; whether or not they or those on the Vincennes would admit it to themselves is altogether another question. Day in and day out swatting at flies, missing most of them, the frustrations rise and rise; flying home after a particularly unsuccessful mission, the door-gunner opens up, taking out six peasants planting rice in the field. After landing, there is arguing, screaming and pushing, and someone punches out the door-gunner. It is not necessary to witness this more than once to know how frequently it transpired. Having seen it and various classes of analogues, in context of killing and being killed, of the hormonal and rage dynamics involved and necessary for survival, and so on, clearly, there is just absolutely no possibility it would not occur -- and no possibility of not knowing that it would. But a person who believes war a matter of prejudice would, wouldn't you think, be inclined to find panic and incompetence -- even if he were prescient enough to anticipate the event? You talk about how war is supposed to be if you want war to continue; you talk about how war is if you want war to cease. Fisk's account of “the war for civilization”, for all the descriptions of torture and gore it contains, is strongly a “supposed to be” type account. His treatment, for instance, reprimands both Kurt Waldheim (p. 94) and C. M. Woodhouse (p. 97) for acts performed during WWII as members of their respective war machines' intelligence services. These reprimands are a talking about war as it is supposed to be. In war as it is, not killing the person trying to kill you will get you killed -- if not today, then tomorrow. If you don't like the fact that this is how war is, then talk about how war is, not how it is supposed to be. Continuance of war as a legitimated policy option of nation-states is dependent upon incessant inner and outer talking about how war is supposed to be.
Prejudice can exist without war; war cannot exist without prejudice. Where does war with prejudice stop and prejudice without war begin? Where does war that is not economics end and economics which is not war begin? Where does politics which is war by other means end and war that is politics by other means begin? Ditto sex, geography, pain, natural resources, markets, pleasure, fear… Who the combatant; who the non-combatant? Categories. Intersections. Venn diagrams. Who has the right to decide the initial conditions and boundary values of war? The Pope, the Imam, the Rabbinate, the Dalai Lama, the Most Ancient Chruch, the prince, the president, the king, the queen, the general, the priestess, the philosopher, the ancien régime, the priest, the emperor, the chief, the elder, the goddess, the chairman, the council, the soviet, the parliament, the congress? He who holds the biggest gun? She who is most fertile? Whose lawyer? Whose judge? Whose law? Law of nature? The wild? Survival? The sea? The land? OK Corral? High noon? The barrel of a gun? Hammurabi? Manu? Analect? Roman? Sharia? Common? Natural law? Napoleonic? Law as capital and capital as law? The law behind which stands the broadest thin blue line, the most lethal olive drab wall? Kata? Kata of rules? Kakureta kata? Categories. Intersections. Venn diagrams. The rules of logic? Logic! Logic! Logic! What logic is to be employed? That logic demonstrated inherently incomplete, frequently undecideable? Clearly, there are multiple levels of causation for any war, for war qua war, and the boundary values of war are relative to the level of causation chosen for perspectival orientation. What is hatred of communism on one level is hatred of the communal on another; more deeply, fear of the existential denial implicit in the collective qua collective; deeper yet, fear of the loss of ego autonomy in direct experience of collective and cooperative social phenomena; deeper, fear of self-annihilation during coitus by losing control and mistakenly going transorgasmic unto… oh myyyyy God; deeper, fear of being sucked into ghostly psychological dyscrasia by a ghastly animistic identity transparency with the natural surround; deeper, fear of absolute nihil in some black-hole Nirvana. War is one level or another of human brain fighting against some other level of human brain, lived out in physical space by projective identification. Gurdjieff believed that war is due to human failure to fulfill the requirements of a cosmic law, that of “reciprocal maintenance”. This is a theory of the origins of war rooted in a quantum neurocosmology, a theory tied to the “base state of Tzog-chen” Gurdjieff apparently learned of while receiving instruction in a Tibetan temple. In quantum parlance, reciprocal maintenance (RM) is equivalent to “relative-state”, and the corresponding metalogical principle is “identity transparency”. According to Gurdjieff's account, the human species can fulfill its RM obligations -- such fulfillment involving release of base-state energy -- either by “transforming impressions” (inducing a move to higher states of consciousness) or by transforming the basal condition of existence (by return to the base-state via death). Cosmologically speaking, both cases release zero-point energy, thus fulfilling the RM obligations of humanity to the natural surround and cosmic context. If there is little in the way of human experience of higher states of consciousness, there will be a lot of human death in war. Not hard to follow the logic of this theory. I would elaborate a bit by suggesting that, if spontaneous localization and fusion ( µTm logic demerging to 1T2 logic remerging to µTm logic) by autogenic discharge in human brain is disturbed by whatever means, capacity for “transformation of impressions” will decrease and RM will impose (by shift in the baselines of tonic and phasic activation) impetus to war as compensatory abreaction. If Gurdjieff's notion is somehow basically correct, there can be no mere political, mere economic, mere social, or even mere socio-politico-economic solution to war. More basic matters must be attended to. Gurdjieff discussed the RM release of zero-point energy in terms of a cycle of “carbons” which was developed into an elaborate Platonic mathematical metaphor for celestial influence (variations in solar wind, gamma ray impingement, et cetera: one class of means by which intra-neuronal superconductant-DNA-mediated spontaneous localization and fusion in human brain can be quenched). This somewhat whimsical explanatory algorithm was in many ways prescient, given that the cycle of human access to carbon-based energy (wood, coal, oil, petrochemicals) is coming to an end, thus giving rise to a greatly enhanced impetus to war -- and, the fact that, so long as the human species remains at such a low competency level for “transformation of impressions”, that species will preclude itself from access to those “spaces” within which ZPE could replace oxidization of carbon with clean, cold chi.
Very frequently, if not inevitably, a better idea will be rejected just because it is a better idea, and for no other reason. There were many opportunities to study the psychology of this behavior during the Viet Nam war. But I had universality of the phenomenon driven home to me soon after returning to America. As an apprentice union electrician, I was assigned to begin assembling thousands of florescent fixtures for a new high-rise I was helping to construct. I set about this task in earnest, figured out a number of assembly-line jigs, built them, got them in place and, along with my cohort, began churning out one assembled fixture after another. A few days later, a union official “working” on the job site gave me an intense upbraiding for the assembly-line way in which I had organized the task: the job was being accomplished far too fast. I quite the union very soon thereafter. Not only was I not too long out of Special Forces training with its emphasis on expertise at whatever task being performed, and full into self-observation meditation upon whatever repetitive physical motions at hand, but the union official who castigated me was receiving journeyman's wages for wandering the job site day after day selling numbers -- and that was all the work he ever did. The demand that I be inefficient and slow was placement of an upper bound on the states of consciousness available to me during the period I performed the work. No mob monkey was going to impress his cognitive lacunas on me, especially not just back from taking a hit in the Nam by direct order of the officer offal I had been forced to serve under! So I worked for free for six months learning about Japanese gardening and bonsai culture, until I was finally offered minimum wage. The slow-down is one of the anthropologist's Weapons of the Weak to be employed on the way to extinction; another is the concealed act of spite: both are epiphenomenal to chronically staying well below imposed upper bound on available states of consciousness. The degree to which, quite generally, petty negative emotions -- exteriorly suppressed inner tantrum -- govern normative behavior on a moment to moment basis, and decision-making processes within every sort of organization, cannot be overstated. Whatever the process of inculcation -- transference dynamics, historical grievances, enculturation prescriptions, chemical intake, stress induction, electromagnetic input, glutamaturic neuronal etching -- the person, group, people, nation, culture, civilization involved excludes itself-themselves from making any contribution to solving the prevailing global-crisis equation. So what, the historical grievances? So what, the child-parent transference hurts? A focus upon these in no way alters the prevailing equation. All the inner grievance chants of exteriorly suppressed tantrum amount to nothing, only disqualification. The prevailing equation cannot be seen; what is seen are projections upon prevailing equation -- and such seeing leads to no solutions. What this sort of seeing leads to, as well, is a reflexivity wherein those engaging in processes of projective identification are spang smitten by the equation they cannot see for Panglossian panoply of projections. The wrath of the process engaged in is called down upon the projector so engaged. How to become fodder for the cosmic cow. The inner office little individual act of spite, carried out many times daily is in self-driven circular relation to the collective processes of projective identification pulling-pushing the global event gradient. The wife says something and the husband reacts as the boy-to-mother (child-parent transference as personal analogue to collective historical grievance personified), while the husband-as-husband proclaims in his professional life that Freudianism is dead. Everybody has a psychology, you know! So what? Trifles, only trifles. De minimis non curat lex. In so far as such a psychology exists, to the same degree is the entity exhibiting it irrelevant to issues of prevention and solution. And this condition is far more pandemic than AIDS and bird flu! Raised to concert pitch. Readiness, tension, fitness. Ha! Moreover, lethality of the weapons at hand for retribution at existential denial are unprecedented in history of the planet, as are magnitude of the factors in the prevailing global-crisis equation. Debaissement in demarche of the demiurge. Eternal ideas fashioning the sensible demitted rather than decomposed. The new ethic: demob by SmartMob! We will sacrifice a million to smite you for your existential denial! Trouble is, a million here, a million there is utterly Panglossian small-potatoes relative to the actual Punic case in offing at cusp: those nation-states in possession of thousands of H-bombs have never yet come under authentic existential threat, only threat to their policies, their prestige, their personas, and some few of their citizens. And look at magnitude of disproportionate response under these merest of realized threats! Inappropriate affect, indeed: symptom of what? Bring them under actual existential threat -- as the prevailing global-crisis equation inevitably will -- and the weapons at hand will be used without restraint. Absolutely beyond doubt to anyone who worked in the psychological environment of CICV-Targets! The cultivated fiction that the USSR collapsed by pressure from the periphery reinforces Panglossian (used three times for proper emphasis) dimensions of the prevailing strategic misassessment. Understanding of transference dynamics, of the collective processes of projective identification, is prerequisite to actual strategic assessment of the prevailing global circumstance. The unprecedented pandemic virulence of inner tantrum makes the where-who-what problem intractable. It means there are no prevention-oriented options available under any scenario. What demesne shall we choose for our demiworld? Say the amenity migration point-mosaic spatial pattern were chosen for the where. At each of the involved sites, inner tantrum dynamics -- e.g., slow-down strike for spite, doing the wrong thing on purpose by dissembling -- would, beyond all doubt, scuttle every attempt, regardless of the who involved, to implement whatever what -- the infamous better idea -- attempted. The degree to which pandemic deployment of weapons of the weak recommended by The Complete Anthropologist diminishes quality of experience on a moment-to-moment basis is not the actual strategic issue here. Given that there are no prevention-oriented options available under any scenario, does it matter that any what undertaken any where relative to any who will inevitably fail? No. Absolutely not. No action taken can accomplish prevention: therefore, the issue of inevitable failure is irrelevant. “Jigs” only can be set up, such that when the cusp events come, then and only then can something be actually accomplished: in the nature of this case. The whole behavioral syndrome will undergo virtually instantaneous phase transition with onset of cusp events. If no “jigs” are in place by then, the full catastrophe will transpire unabated, as no autopoietic operators, no predisposing self-organizing factors, will be on the scene to step into the cognitive void: global dynamics of collective inner tantrum will be wholly unleashed to wreak their wrathy ways. So, does it matter that the amenity migration paradigm for choosing spatial nodes for congealing processes of self-organization at far-from-equilibrium phase transition, for instance, is seen to be a failed paradigm? Maybe not. At cusp in midst of the cognitive void, what is needed is a recognizable pattern to grasp. Maybe any pattern, just so it is recognizable. We are not talking a physical process here, but an analogue to a physical process. If the particular features of the pattern are important, then that importance resides in resonance with somewhat known anatomical-physiological patterns: brain anatomy and physiology on the levels of neuronal machine and quantum-wave properties: for the global-crisis equation is one written by lacuna-on-the-brain.
Whoopse! Yet again, a “whoopse”. Just because I disagree with some things, and don't agree with all things about any one thing, doesn't mean I completely disagree with everything. I've been recommending Kunstler's book (The Long Emergency) to all my friends. He does an excellent job of focusing attention on gravity of the circumstance. Just what we need. But he has created a time machine to take himself back to 18th century New England, and I'm not so sure the contraption will work, at least not with the Decalogue he reveals as the instruction manual. One more rallying Deborah, he wants to get back there, and the scenario he runs by the reader is designed to make the trip appear not only inevitable but desirable. For instance, he argues the rapid decline is to be a tumble-down dégringolade: the electrical grid globally will suffer brownouts and ultimate complete collapse so precipitously that coherency of nation-state governance and military machine will disintegrate in such a fashion as to prevent large-scale utilization of WMDs during the period of post-peak-oil conflict. This seems to me very likely wishful thinking necessitated by requirements of the scenario so as to sustain the impression that the time machine will actually work. I've argued for a long time to the contrary that the dégringolade will be anticipated with sufficient accuracy that the necessary moves will be made such that oil will suddenly cease to be a commodity and will be declared by the dominant contenders a scarce strategic MILITARY resource. Sorry, Charlie! The grid may brownout from the periphery to the center and from the civil to the military, the militarily important sectors of the grid being curtailed last and remaining enervated until defervescence of post-peak conflict by WMDs. Under this scenario, significant survivability would require there be a Demogorgon that antedates the WMDs standing in for the gods, such that their USER (TOE: hysteria, mass, unconscious, collective, human) is curtailed. This creative principle could well involve de novo implementation of the “jigs” capable of stepping into the cognitive void, once descended. As to the nature of the autopoietic “jigs”, the when's, the where's, the who's, et cetera… For a few ideas on this prospective psychological engineering project see the m-logically-valued monetary unit homepage.
Not that HHH! Harriman, Henderson, Helms. Though I traveled on behalf of AIESEC (the international student exchange organization) around official and corporate Washington in 1963-4 on a letter of introduction provided by the HHH (whose son was a student at AU at the time), knocking heads with Senator Mundt (advisor to AIESEC-US) over this traveling, and much later occasionally worked on Harriman's Middleburg estate, and regularly maintained Julia Helms' Japanese garden (designed by the old man with whom I studied gardening and bonsai culture), it was with Loy Henderson that the relevant discussions transpired (as mentioned in MOON). Career Ambassador (an FSO rank) Henderson was retired by 1963 when I arrived at AU's School of International Service (SIS). He was then associated with SIS in an honorary capacity and had an office at the school in which he spent a fair amount of time. There were office hours when students were welcome to seek inspiration and/or counseling. Few students, however, availed themselves of this considerable opportunity. I was one of them, and I may have overworked it, but that was my penchant, as for long I had milked as much as possible the knowledge bases of the old ones around me. Loy Henderson was just the latest in a long line. I was then living in the household of an ex-OSS officer and close personal friend, going back to college days, of JFK: another brain being picked. Realize that I had a chip on my shoulder, most of the time well concealed as only a military brat would know how. I viewed myself as “wanting to know”, not as actually preparing for a career. My personal seminal life-decisions were made in order “to find out”, not to fulfill requirements of career development. This orientation began early and persisted until too late. I had been disturbed by what I had seen and heard ever since the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, summer of 1953. And I wanted to know! Mostly, of Ambassador Henderson, I wanted to know about Greece, not Iran and his ambassadorship there. It was my understanding that Henderson had been in Moscow during the Second World War with some of the notables: Harriman, “Mr. X”, Sullivan. I was interested in generalization of the Containment Policy into the Third World and Henderson had been, not only there at birth of the policy, but in charge of U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Greece following WWII. This is mostly what we talked about, and the implications for Viet Nam and elsewhere. Iran was occasionally touched upon; and the 1953 coup was discussed a couple of times at the beginning. I was aware of some of this history. This “coup subject” was discussed in relation to the overthrow of the Diem brothers. Henderson had been at the SIS dinner where I had inappropriately interrupted and questioned the keynote speaker -- Mac Bundy -- about the U.S. role in the recent overthrow of Diem. I had orginally been sent to Henderson for counseling after Dean Griffith made the decision not to throw me out of SIS for “very undiplomatic behavior”. But the opportunities for a sponge at SIS in those days were far more elaborate than this -- Washington remaining an open town through the Sheraton-Park First National Teach-in Against the War and somewhat beyond the end of 1965. Over and above the “old Asia hands” at SORO, the AU-associated Special Operations Research Office, there were hangout bars in Georgetown where retirees congregated, at least one of whom had been on The Long March and still received Christmas cards from Mao (I was shown the whole collected stack). It took practice, but pretty soon it was possible to learn to ask the right questions, and one could find out about all sorts of useful stuff, e.g., origins of the pao chia used against the Mongols, which spawned the tongs and the neighborhood association self-defense system generalized for use all over Asia (and which, by offensive inversion, informed the system that ultimately beat the U.S. Army in Viet Nam). There were, for instance, a fair number of grad students from the Middle East who worked part-time at 16th Street restaurants like The Blue Nile and 14th Street clubs like Port Said. I hung out with them a bit, and absorbed a lot. Some of these grad students were in the group around Prof. Abdul Aziz Said, who taught theory of the international system at SIS (must now be close to 50 years in the same second floor office!). I had the rare opportunity as an undergrad to occasionally attend the MacArthur Boulevard dinners partaken by this circle, where discussions of Middle East affairs often went into the wee hours. It was my understanding -- perhaps unwisely trusting memory here -- that Dr. Said's father had been a high-level Syrian government official killed in the late-1950s just about the time Said was completing his Ph.D. in the U.S. The breadth and intensity of discussion at these select gnathic get-togethers was awe inspiring to a neophyte like me; nonetheless, by these and similar exposures I developed depth and perspective I otherwise could not have brought to the research I did at JFK Special Warfare Center during the period of run-up to the Six Day War. It is not too implausible, I believe, that I could have come so early to the perspectives I did, given this type of exposure and the knowledge acquired soon thereafter at CICV-Targets and Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-Headquarters.
As distressing as it might be, as repugnant as it might be, as depressing, as indigestible, unacceptable, reprehensible -- still, the notion that martyrdom operations are prefigurative is beyond doubt. Prefiguring what larger collective behaviors? Larger than the Cambodian self-holocaust, the Iranian Bassidji human-wave attacks upon mustard and nerve gas cocktail, the Rwandan orgy in blood, the Balkan ethnic cleanse? Larger than “A Problem From Hell”? Hacking and trashing of genomes; decrease in human immune competency and rise in human autoimmune reactivity as both relate to incidence and severity of degenerative disease; electromagnetic pollution and iatrogenic (e.g., MRI) incursion upon quantum-wave properties of DNA; human-induced climate shift by fossil-fuel burning, hot aurora, and the like; increased MSG consumption in tandem with increased understanding of glutamaturgic neuronal etching; a century of collective self-medication with what by now is well over a hundred types of mimetic estrogens: these are but a few of the more subtle examples of human-species collective suicidal activities rising to crescendo amongst a list surely much longer than is currently suspected. But, if so, where is the etiology and pathogenesis explaining connection between mastery of death by Bassidjis and these other, less explicit, necrotropic collective behaviors? Robert Fisk's reflections bear upon this question (The Great War for Civilization, p. 256):
I returned from the battle of Fish Lake [Iraq-Iran War, January of 1987] with a sense of despair. That small boy holding the Koran to his chest believed -- believed in a way that few Westerners, and I include myself, could any longer understand. He knew, with the conviction of his own life, that heaven awaited him. He would go straight there -- the fast train, direct, no limbo, no delays -- if he was lucky enough to be killed by the Iraqis. I began to think that life was not the only thing that could die in Iran. For there was, in some indefinable way, a death process within the state itself… it was as if the country was neutering itself, moving into a black experience that found its spiritual parallel in the mass slaughter of Cambodia…
The inner state of this “small boy” is an element of what Toussaint, in MOON, called “high combat” -- a type of combat that some few special service operators, in the early days, obtained direct experience of. Did the boy believe, or did he know? We look to Red Pine's translation of The Heart Sutra for edification (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004):
No causal link, from ignorance to old age and death;
And no end of causal link, from ignorance to old age and death.
Red Pine offers the following comment on the first line (p. 109):
We now consider it [our experience] as a sequence of causal connections. Of course, in the light of prajna [insight], these causal connections dissolve… Still, this sequence, known as the Twelve Links (dvadashanga) of Dependent Origination (pratitya-samutpada), remains one of the most powerful teachings of the Buddha…
And on the second line (p. 113):
Having told Shariputra that in the light of Prajnaparmita [transcendent wisdom] the links of this chain do not exist, Avalokiteshvara now tells him that in the same light, their non-existence also does not exist. There cannot be an end of causation, if there is no causation in the first place.
Now, I wish to throw a curve ball into this discourse on where mere belief ends and direct knowing begins -- and what happens to collective psychological processes when direct knowing is suppressed by being stigmatized as mere belief. There is an aspect of the principle of dependent origination that cannot be considered “as a sequence of causal connections”. Quoting the appendix to P. A. Payutto's Dependent Origination: The Buddhist Law of Conditionality (Bruce Evans, trans., Buddhadhamma Foundation, Bangkok, 1994, p. 98):
It has been mentioned that in the commentary [by Acariya Buddhaghosa, fifth century AD) to the Abhidhamma Pitaka (Sammohavinodani) the principle of Dependent Origination is shown occurring entirely within the space of one mind moment. This point needs to be reiterated, because modern day study of the teaching… interprets it completely on a lifetime-to-lifetime basis. Accordingly, when there are attempts to interpret the Dependent Origination cycle as a process occurring in everyday life, those who adhere to the traditional interpretations are wont to dismiss them as baseless…
One mind moment… “One mind moment” not only, by definition, removes passing passive linear-time from being a factor in dependent origination, but also sequence, which means recursion, Church's calculability, and Aristotle's syllogistic. Logical determinism -- the element of “necessity” in mind-modes, the “must” in propositional calculus, the “follows from” in enculturated cognition -- of bivalence, the 1T2 order of logical-value, which Lukasiewicz successfully challenged in discovering m-valued µTm logics, cannot be a factor in dependent origination. Modern treatments -- those of sequences of mind-moments, the Husserlian “units of consciousness” -- of this “one of the most powerful teachings of the Buddha” are restricted to “everyday life” and the “lifetime-to-lifetime” sequential-incarnations interpretation of reincarnation because the modern mind has become linear-time bound and thus cannot experience the ontic immersion in the natural surround prerequisite to animistic identity transparency -- an immersion high desert country is particularly conducive to. Modern, and particularly postmodern, commentaries on the enchaining effects of causal sequence predominately rely upon juxtaposition of contradictory statements as a means for subverting the law of non-contradiction in propositional logic and its syllogistic marches. Poetry of the sutras more often relies on verbal Venn diagrams to essay against 1T2-logic rules of accommodation. Dependent origination in one mind moment, however, is instantaneous identity transparency, quantum relative-state, superposition in the m-logically-valued quantum states defining the simultaneous “nine lives” of Schrödinger's cat (about which the “small boy” was so certain). As Derek says in MOON: no-mind is not absence of mind; it is presence of the multivalue! On the base state of Tzog-chen, all the values of any value are held full-stack aware in pure universal consciousness, subject to no habituation response; Platonic amnesis, ontological forgetting, of any of these values atemporally demerges a world. Insofar as there is forgetting, insofar as there is unconsciousness, to the same extent is there a world (appearance of Regge lattice, and hence of matter fields, requires a falling away from densest-packing matrix on the “m-logically-valued reference space” yet to be fully posited by M-Theory because of its linear-time-only reference frame postulate). Platonic forgetting and remembering are matters of one mind moment; whereas dependent origination lifetime-to-lifetime and in everyday life are Husserlian “moments of matter”. One mind moment is a Husserlian “moment of quality”. Escape from dependent origination in one mind moment -- Satori, say -- which was the intentionality of the Buddha's explication of this teaching, is by Platonic anamnesis, a remembering that is transverse to linear-time sequence -- be the sequence causal, acausal, teleological, probabilistic, numerated or not. Brentano-remembering is a remembering of the linear-time past, which remembering, according to Husserl, gives rise to a “given time”, the sort of time that is the time of the enculturated internal time consciousness of everyday life in the life-world. One has to forget Brentano-remembering if one is to “remember” oneself into Satori. To “remember yourself” (a Gurdjieff rendition of Sufi parlance) in one mind moment, on occasion, is one thing; to “remember yourself” in such fashion continuously is quite another (a chronotopological operation of considerable import is involved in actually accomplishing dilation of the moment to the oneness-of-mind which is no-mind). Belief stops being belief and begins to become knowing with such remembering of oneself on occasion; knowing “with the conviction of his own life” comes by remembering such continuously. It is the “small boy”, the child, boy or girl, who has the greatest capacity for remembering the existence of such remembering. Except as ye become… And this is why, globally, the teenager, and the preadolescent, is becoming an object of phobic fixation and attempted repression: mass action in cusp event will be, for them, a many-splendored thing.
Maquamat and hijra are Sufi terms related to Platonic anamnesis, remembering transverse to linear-time.
The Umwelt (self-world: a compounding of all the signifiers of simple-self-identity one has “eaten” by introjection) is a huge component of the Weltanschauung (worldview maintained by the corpus assimilating a multiplicity of self-worlds). Attack the Weltanschauung, and the Umwelt cannot be sustained; attack the Umwelt, and the Weltanschauung cannot be sustained. Prolonged persistence in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and associated deterioration in immune competency (e.g., Viet Nam war veterans) is tightly wrapped into this reciprocal relation: subjective experience of fundamental threat to the belief system is received as the same experience as that of coming under fire on the battlefield (intensity can even be the same). The life-worlds of all concrete cultures are constructed in this fashion by tacit assumption that Nature is selfsame, the same as itself, itself and only itself through simple-identity -- and, hence, that there can be only one correct description of it, that description embraced by the given concrete culture and its true believers. By this tacit assumption alone is war inevitable, for each concrete culture claims possession of the only possible ensemble of unquestionable truth-values, and any threat to this belief system is experienced by all members of the corpus as a coming under fire on the battlefield of existence. This is not only a German thing, or only an Islamic thing; the Japanese language, for instance, has an extremely elaborate vocabulary in this general subject area. Imposition of global monoculture by forced dissemination of uniformizing technologies and standards induces the psychological dyscrasia incumbent upon the reciprocal relation between Weltanschauung-Umwelt under challenge. This dyscrasia is the etiology underlying the pathogenesis by projective identification. Some three-hundred years old, the involved military, economic, political, social, and psychological global technological forcing of monoculture (derivative of but one concrete culture among many) is approaching cusp just as the cheap energy basis of the forcing reaches crisis, producing wave trains of beat frequencies. Beat frequencies wherein threats to particular Umwelts are transferred to Umwelt per se under threat -- concretized by projection as a Nazification of the sciences of self-identity (immunology and genetics) by incorporation of military analogies and terminology. Particularly insofar as humans have become self-reactive. Particularly insofar as humans have become autoantibodies. Particularly insofar as humans have become anti-DNA antibodies. Each such becoming by aid of uniformizing technology!
This discorporation of Umwelt per se, the resultant clinging behaviors and their projections via the Buddha's law of conditionality, is addressed by The Heart Sutra with a verbal Venn diagram (in Red Pine's translation):
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form;
Emptiness is not separate from form,
Form is not separate from emptiness;
Whatever is form is emptiness,
Whatever is emptiness is form.
Regarding this set of accommodations -- and, implicitly, the involved ZPE (zero-point energy) factors, quantum relative-state, superposed “nine lives” of Schrödinger's cat, and m-logically-valued animistic identity transparency -- Red Pine observes (p. 77):
Something that is empty of self-existence is inseparable from everything else, including emptiness. All separations are delusions. But if each of the skandhas [categories of understanding] is one with emptiness, and emptiness is one with each of the skandhas, then everything occupies the same indivisible space, which is emptiness, and the same indivisible time, which is also emptiness, and the same indivisible mind, which is emptiness again. Everything is empty and empty is everything.
A formless language of forms which is a form-language of the formless is the only possible basis of a universal metaculture which demands diversity in order to manifest unity: Musculpt methodology-technology.
Look at what is being said! Look, not just hear in some vague way. See the pattern, the infuriating pattern. Every account you can find of genocide and holocaust speaks of decisions by individuals and/or groups of individuals -- generally “authoritarian personalities” -- as precipitating the horrors being described. Except, of course, genocide of the American Indian, for the responsible agency in this case was history's exemplary democratic -- hence, necessarily non-authoritarian -- people. But, in reality… There were no individuals! There were no decisions! Certainly there were claims to simple-identity. Certainly there was pretense to decision. And there is, in every case, historical evidence, documentation, of such claims, such pretense; but that does not change the fact that there were no individuals and no decisions. Any possibility there might have been presence of “persons” had long since been eaten by socially-conferred role attributions imposing constellated unconscious action potential and event gradients. Simple-identity is simply no part of “collective occasions of experience”: what else is quantum physics all about, and why else have the neurosciences rejected quantum models of brain function? Never has a decision precipitated mass psychosis. Well, I think today, Hon, we will have… Accounts of genocide and holocaust in terms of decisions and individuals are one potent cause (actually, synchronistic associated elements of the constellated demergent pattern) of genocides and holocausts. The smug, self-righteous, moral one-upmanship of the ego-encapsulated linear-time bound mind! Suppressor! Regressor! It is very clear that institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm has been ending in holocaust and genocide, and that this institutionalization will go into incendiary collapse in self-holocaust of the whole Earth: individualism is being terminated by the exact thing it denies the existence of. This is the very definition of “compensatory abreaction”!
Sharon's CI (cerebral infarction, not, at least nominally, counter-intelligence) illustrates the importance of projecting as many multiple scenarios as possible. Hypnopompically placing oneself in “the tank” at the Pentagon -- surely no Lilly tank -- and imagining the view from there… The evolving Iranian situation is clearly carrying post-WWII oil policy of the industrial nations (as argued at JFKSWC and SRA-MACV-J2 during '67-'68 and stated by Dillon in MOON: keep the Arabs at one another's throats; stir the brew with Israel-the-stick; policy anchored by the Shah; production up; prices down: necessitating ever increasing infusions of violence, until no amount of additional violence will keep the policy on-track) into a maze of cul-de-sacs where, in the not too distant future, there will be no viable policy options available, including not only all forms of action, but all forms of sitting and waiting. Check, check, check, check, check… When that situation actually materializes, then the cusp events begin. Bulk of the world's sweet oil reserves are located in a rather small circle of geography. One scenario must envision a policy cusp situation emerging in that block of territory so chaotic that this bulk of reserves SUDDENLY just simply cannot be accessed for a substantial period. How many months of oil reserves service each of the various mega-urban regions on the planet? This “depth table” would give some sort of indication as to how the resultant “tsunami” would impact around the world, not only economically but in terms of mass evacuation dynamics. Yet, with scenarios like this coming into clearer and clearer “relief”, the philanthropic focus remains placement of Band-Aids. Even in the situation as it currently exists, Gates, for instance, doesn't have anything remotely like enough money to stanch the blood flow, let alone treat the complement of wounds presently sustained by the global body politic: and this, when he is placing his funds into action categories already being funded inadequately by governments, multilaterals, and supralaterals. What he does have enough money to actually accomplish is to initiate actions in categories where absolutely no action is being taken because such actions cannot be taken except by exclusive-discretion, sole-proprietor funding sources. Is the prevailing approach to funding strategy due to lack of imagination or less edifying reasons? An empty can makes the loudest noise? as the Vietnamese are wont to say.
What I have had an abiding interest in over the past 40 years of “wanting to know” is anything that can help identify and implement the autopoietic operators prerequisite to appreciably increasing the likelihood that a significant number of human beings can survive what throughout that period has appeared will transpire with virtual inevitability. All the rest has been detail I have tried to forget so as not to clog my brain. In midst of team-taught seminars and a problem-based curriculum, in 1963 at AU's School of International Service, I read over and over C. G. Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul. This book was assigned reading for Abdul Said's first-semester Freshman course “Introduction to World Politics”. The above-stated problem was explicit in my awareness in one fashion or another from that time onward. Two other major factors contributed to this focus: [1] having been taken to the atomic bombing sites as a preadolescent child; and [2] being aware that the re-supply effort flown from Ashiya, AFB, Japan to Dien Bien Phu was part of a war against the way of life pursued in the tiny rice-growing hamlet I was at the time living in. I wanted “to find out” what those autopoietic operators might be -- even though I did not use those words until the late-'70s.
As far as I know, my experience has been unique: I studied Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilization from cover to cover; while everyone I lent the book to set it aside within the first 200 pages. Despite the probable violation of copyright law, or, at least principles of the “law and capital” movement -- an interesting experiment. “Fiskian”: absolutely unrelenting drone of what's, where's, how's, when's, who's -- without significant address to why's, even as comic relief. What kept me plowing onward, returning to the notes, the index, the chronology, leafing back and forth was the conviction that anyone so obsessed (“dedicated” is the politically-correct word) as to have chosen to do what Fisk has done with his life must have developed some new insight, an original idea as to why's. But, alas, 1000 pages later… As if repeating the magical word “genocide” over and over and over as a catholic Voodooistic expiation-incantation of extirpation, exorcism, banishment is somehow capable of preventing future occurrences of genocide -- indeed, self-genocide of the whole human species, which is the eventuality presently raising its ugly Gorgon head: count the methodological options currently available and being intensely pursued. Instead of John C. Lilly's “cogitate, cogitate, cogitate, cogitate, cogitate…” as an indubitable “demystification of mantra”, we have Robert Fisk's “genocide, genocide, genocide, genocide, genocide…” as a potential depotentiation of holocaust. Daily bead counting -- G-one, G-two, G-three… -- practice of the phylactery, public remembrance, legal proscription, the tribunal, punishment of individuals for occasions of psychotic collective experience as purgative-preventative. Fat chance! What a pipe dream! More likely a plumber's nightmare. There are reasons why why's are almost universally treated so lightly, spurned even, why what's, where's, how's, when's, who's are obsessed over so obsessively. Thematic orchestration by the collective and personal unconscious, which Jung's association experiments attempted to map, and which autogenic abreaction by complex patterns of brain discharge activity reveals, is co-opted by the conscious mind, arrogated as if egoic planning, as if can-do industrial organization, as if self-originated systems of implementation. Claims to simple-identity; pretense to individual conscious decision. Why -- not only how, where, when, what, whom. But when real why's don't fit unreal presuppositions, those why's are lightly treated, spurned, no part of politically-correct historiography. History is what happened; there is no why what happened happened. And the railing, then, hastens the next holocaust by extending the empty claims, deepening the pathetic pretense. Time-bound minds which have never experienced non-egoic states of consciousness deny existence of collective occasions of experience; this denial, once successfully propagated and incorporated into the enculturation process, suppresses and regresses collective occasions of experience such that their only possible elaborate expression becomes collective violence. Hypnosis and related states: deautomatization. Fugue. Loss of time to the time-bound mind. Passing “in” and passing “out” with no conscious registration of the shift in brain state. Fisk naively quotes a British-prisoner eye-witness to the Armenian genocide (p. 328):
Amongst our sentries were men who had slain men, women, and children till their arms were too tired to strike. They boasted of it amongst themselves. And yet, in many ways, they were pleasant enough fellows.
After the fact, pleasant enough fellows; in the act… No individuals were present! No decisions were made! Loss of time. Fugue, fugue, fugue. Take a half-team of Lodge-Bill recruits, put them in the jungles of Laos in 1961, White Star passing down the trail, across the creek: AMBUSH! Half-team in the kill zone. Instantaneous response. Response an instant before any consciously perceivable stimulus. No decisions are made. No individuals are present. Each “individual” sees what every other “individual” member of the half-team sees, even though this is physically impossible. “Each” acts in absolute relative-state to the “others”: total spontaneous coordination. Every act so finely tuned to every other act as ritual dance theater choreographed in the only way possible that six men could have escaped the kill zone unharmed and taken out all their adversaries in 15 seconds stretched in time-slow-down to a leisurely interlude. Quantum paradoxical EscherForm dance. Time in the collective tunnel, EXQUISITE: whatever the act, it is always seen before it transpires; whatever the react, there is always more than enough time to complete it. Which the act; which the react? Toussaint's “high combat”. And afterwards, no one can quite remember, let alone comprehend, how it could have happened. We were all dead! There is, of course, a whole range of greater and lesser states of exquisiteness. Greek atomism, culminating in the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm (and its institutionalization as the Westphalian system), denies, suppresses, and regresses to violence any elaborate normative experience of such non-local quantum-brain states: driving them to the periphery of social experience: rock concerts, motorcycle gangs, war, mass war, total war. With the requisite level of constellation and back-reactive suppression, whole societies can enter the suppressed-regressed collective tunnel; one word for such an entry is “Nazification”. And whole societies have been organized around consciously-integrated, non-suppressed, non-regressed such collective states: ritual dance theater of wet rice planting in which the whole valley has to be planted in one day, or, otherwise, the yama no kami, the gods of the mountains, will not come down to protect the fields. Midori Gaoka, Ashiya, Japan: 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956. Time in the collective tunnel of the pace-setter's beat, EXQUISITE. As is the fertility rite engaged in at the end of planting day.
- Return to:
- •Top
- •Home page
- •Top
