If there is anyone on the planet today who needs to consider his personal fallibility -- and there are a lot of us out here -- it's George Soros. Reviews are sometimes clarified accounts of the books they recount, and that is the case with John Gray's reflections on Soros' new book The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror (“The Moving Target”, The New York Review of Books, 5 October 2006). Gray rephrases a question posed by Soros (p. 22): “What are the flaws in human reason that make such 'far from equilibrium situations' possible?” The example given for such a situation -- when the “accepted rules of human behavior are suspended or destroyed” -- is the Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944 which Soros experienced as a boy. This question posed by Soros is interesting on at least two counts. He appropriates a term from the chemistry and physics most associated with the work of Prigogine and applies it to socio-politico-military situations in a fashion that falsifies its meaning in the fields of its original application. He then feeds this malaprop back into itself to create a retrograde inversion over the notion of logical flaws: the resultant statement is a subtle example of the “liar's paradox” used early in his career as a financial speculator to arrive at his notion of the “reflexivity” of markets which prevents them from being cleared and obtaining equilibrium. Simply put, according to Prigogine's account, “far from equilibrium phase transitions” are normative states of physical processes whereby negative entropy (order) drawn from the embedding domain into the embedded domain allows the subsystem to escape the ironclad rule of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in such a fashion as to permit the evolution of higher forms of order necessary to the maintenance of life. Entropy (disorder, heat) generated in the embedded domain is transferred to the environment so as to allow a temporary local evolution of form not otherwise permitted by the laws of physics as explicated during the second half of the 19th century. No ultimate violation of the Second Law is involved. Prigogine received a Nobel for explicating the complex technical details of this. The “far from equilibrium” state of a system is a “critical” state. The word “critical” is a technical term in chemistry and physics, the meaning of which is explored most thoroughly in the branch of quantum mechanics devoted to the study of “collective and cooperative behaviors in material systems”. One critical variable of such behaviors is associated with the name of Madame Curie and her husband: the “Curie temperature”, the temperature, for instance, at which helix-coil transition of the DNA molecule is initiated with replication of the genetic information contained in its nucleotide pairs. The analogical generalization of this notion to the situation created by the Nazi invasion of Hungary illustrates one type of “the flaws of human reason” responsible for creation of situations like the Nazi invasion of Hungary, which was no part of any “far from equilibrium phase transition” in the original Prigogine sense of the term. Thought, explication, and the production of propaganda by means of this sort of analogical generalization was systematically perfected early in the 20th century by V. I. Lenin and his associate Willi Muenzenberg. Mao also specialized in employment of this “flaw” which has found many applications in the theory of insurgency and terrorist warfare.
But surely this has not been the conscious intent of George Soros. Hugely complex issues are involved here. There is a certain appearance of circularity in Prigogine's understanding of “far from equilibrium” processes. Entropy generation by the macrosystem maintains the internal system state which itself generates “dissipative” structures, the structures of life-forms in evolution. This fact inevitably led Prigogine into explorations of the relation between entropy generation and time. As time evolution transpires, entropy is transferred from subsystem to system to supersystem, and these being relative terms the exchange process continues on and on to larger and larger spatial scales of the universe. But the farther out into space the exchange process proceeds by time evolution, the farther back into time does the process “look” for its sustenance. Fundamental issues in Einstein's relativity theory cannot be escaped, just as issues at the core of quantum mechanics cannot be escaped in consideration of “critical” state behaviors of collective and cooperative phenomena. At the critical state -- Madame Curie's state -- the correlation length snaps to infinity: no matter how far removed in space the elements of the process become, their states remain highly correlated -- thus contravening the basic rules of Newtonian mechanics. There seem to be “flaws in human logic” involved here. And, indeed, early in the history of quantum mechanics the notion was entertained that some new type of logic was required. But this was unwelcome: back to the future, infinities, violations of classical logic that threaten the foundations of Western civilization. The very notion of an objective world was called into question, a threat that settled in upon physics as the “quantum measurement problem”. That Soros has been sincerely struggling with this problem in his own way is clearly stated in Gray's article (p. 22):
Social objects are not like stars or stones, which exist independently of how humans think about them; social objects are partly created by human perceptions and beliefs, and when these perceptions and beliefs change, social objects change with them. This introduces an element of uncertainty into our view of the world that makes us even more prone to error than Popper believed: we can never have objective knowledge of society, if only because our shifting beliefs are continuously changing it.
Reflexivity in the social life-world by virtue of our changing beliefs. Here we have another subtle “liar's paradox”. Soros has generalized Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics to social experience in the middle scale levels of reality: this is a violation of the uncertainty relations formulated by Heisenberg, which require that the measurement probe be of sufficient energy to disturb the process being measured; otherwise, stars and stones -- macroscopic objects -- could not “exist independently of how humans think about them”. Sustaining objectivity of stars and stones requires maintenance of the “classical limit”, which Soros violates with his analogical generalization of a principle of quantum mechanics to sociology.
But perhaps it is even more complex than this. Why would George Soros subliminally want to retain the classical limit with regard to natural macroscopic objects, yet violate it when it comes to macroscopic social objects? And is this unique to George Soros? One must admit that the paradox involved is an neat wish-fulfillment. One can eat one's cake and have it too -- or at least one can maintain the appearance that this is so. Clearly, the answer, in the case of George Soros, goes back to the events of 1944. By then, all these issues in one form or another had been on the scene for over a hundred years, first in the higher mathematics of the 19th century and then in the new physics of the early 20th century. Is it possible that how these issues were collectively dealt with then were cognitive preconditions to origins of the world wars? And further, could it be that those issues, never having fully been put to rest, are part of the cognitive preconditions to the present global crisis?
Look, it doesn't seem quite reasonable that I should be required to yet again re-state the same notions that are explicated in multiple ways on a general level, in technical fashion, by mathematical derivation, with regard to experimental data, and which were computer modeled and repeatedly tested as are already stated at multiple locations on this website. But if it will be helpful… Soros makes the same mistake that consensus atmospheric science makes; he indulges in the “Noam Chomsky behavior”: moral upbraiding. If you read the technical literature on severe storm genesis from the period WWII through the death of John von Neumann, you will find all too often the phrase “pathological phenomenon” used in relation to tornado genesis. You are either with us or with the hurricane! That old saw: 1T2 logic. Severe storms process complex angular momentum arriving in the Earth's upper atmosphere riding upon the solar wind. Contrary to Hawking's early take, they are information processors, i.e., part of normative natural process by “far from equilibrium phase transition”. Human beings residing on Earth need to “go with the flow”, which means, for instance, not building cities in locations required by our Sun for solar-terrestrial information exchange. If you violate requirements of the Sun Goddess, she will smote you. If you stay out of Her Way, she will nurture you. And woe be unto you if you arrogate the whole means by which Sun and Earth communicate and adjust to the levies placed upon them by Galactic Center, arrogate by disrupting ozone metabolism, by altering frequency spectra of pulse-code bursts with greenhouses gases and electron-temperature enhancements, and so on. Acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes poke holes in the tropopause boundary, allowing drawdown of ozone, not because they are pathological demons, but because that hole-poking is itself a deposition of information required for restoration of energy-momentum balance to the upper atmosphere which has just conveyed, by self-unbalancing, packets of information synthesized at the center of our Sun. Soros thinks market reflexivities are “pathological phenomena” resulting from human fallibility, that they are not “natural” by virtue of conforming to the “forms” of nature -- or more accurately, form forming, informing, and self-informing at limiting velocities of information exchange, limiting accelerations, and limiting time rates of change of acceleration. Markets are no “Platonic liquids” according to the Soros notion of reflexivity: no Platonic hyper-shapes appear in market wave dynamics because the market is human-created, and being human-created it cannot be “natural” because humans are-- what? Not properly part of nature; by implication, therefore, they are above nature. This is secular theology. And an exultation of the egoic (I thought I was God, he once said according to the newspapers) by denial that “collective and cooperative quantum processes” govern human behaviors just as they govern behaviors of any other natural process. There is no natural process you can find that does not employ some sort of “exchange unit”. That being the case, monetary units of exchange, therefore, must be an expression of the properties of “general process” in nature -- and the more monetary exchange units in their form, by their defining properties, that is, mirror properties of “exchange units” in nature the more competent they will be at executing “far from equilibrium phase transitions” by facilitating resource exchange across phase boundaries of the global economy -- particularly if those phase boundaries were arrayed according to natural form in process by disposition of the defining properties of the exchange units employed. Is it possible that what Soros sees as the results of “human fallibility” are actually the results of the defining properties of monetary exchange units employed by contemporary markets? Those defining properties of currently employed monetary exchange units came together under the guidance of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm by employment of the rules of classical 1T2 logic, and they have never been upgraded according to the insights provided by the quantum mechanics of collective and cooperative behaviors in material systems and the µTm Lukasiewiczian logics integral thereto. Soros has been all over this ever since he was a student at the London School of Economics, but he made his choices and his interpretations, as did Popper, under the impress of the affect-charge inculcated by experience of the events of 1944, affect-charge never adequately dissipated by the autogenic brain discharges responsible for formation of the “dissipative structures” described in Prigogine's theory of “far from equilibrium phase transitions”. In the Earth's atmosphere, one class of such “dissipative structures” is the tornado. Exchange processes cease being “far from equilibrium phase transitions” and become pathologies when formation of dissipative structures -- Platonic hyper-shapes -- is blocked by suppression of the natural processes required for adequate growth and repair. Doesn't it seem something of a Gore-ish fantasy to imagine that the human species can adequately respond to the climate-shift dynamic it has initiated without putting the economic processes it employs to allocate resources into more-natural form than were the economic processes employed to initiate the climate shift in the first place?
You should be aware that, by Soros' own account, human fallibility was only a secondary factor in origin of his notion of market reflexivity. The initial factor was a consideration of the meaning of self-referential propositions, the “liar's paradox” in particular. “This statement is false.” The statement refers to itself. Is it true or is it false? Soros decided that the answer is uncertain, and the existence of such propositions, he concluded, is at the root of human fallibility. He then generalized this insight to his understanding of market dynamics, the tendency to overshoot and so on. In all likelihood simultaneously, he analogically incorporated Heisenberg uncertainty and Prigogine's theory of “far from equilibrium” phase transitions to realms of social behavior via the resultant notion of market reflexivity. He also at this time was thinking of the implications of Gödel's theorem and the theory of “organizational adaptation by resource exchange across phase boundaries” -- but these latter two did not play important roles. In making these choices and reaching these interpretations, Soros was at the cutting edge of the contemporary Anglo-American Zeitgeist, and this positioned him to massively profit from the change in the international monetary system rapidly approaching: Nixon's closing of the gold window and the involved U.S. repudiation of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism and the free-floating currencies that resulted and were rationalized by economists like Milton Friedman. Soros' insight was a genuine prefigurative breakaway in understanding of the market as it would exist in the post-gold-exchange-mechanism regime: the extended Philips curve incorporating reflexivity, for which a Nobel has recently been awarded to an economist, can be viewed as a technical elaboration of the original more-intuitive insight Soros developed and expertly employed. Subsequently, having demonstrated his mastery of the dynamics of this regime, and having intimately witnessed the limitations of the regime as a general systems model for management of the full spectrum of human affairs, he became a critic of the very process he had ridden to the top. But his critique only returned to the secondary factor, human fallibility, in origin of his notion of market reflexivity; he did not re-engage the initial factor, the judgment that self-referential propositions signify uncertainty. Absent a re-engagement of the initial factor, he did not return to Gödel. And focusing on the “far from equilibrium” aspect of Prigogine's “far from equilibrium phase transition”, he did not re-engage the theory of “organizational adaptation by resource exchange across phase boundaries”. Had he returned to the theory of organizational adaptation, it is very unlikely that his foundation would so strongly have supported the program of “crash capitalism” unfortunately foist upon the former USSR as it struggled to find the best route through a fundamental organizational phase transition.
Soros reached his judgment that self-referential propositions like the “liar's paradox” signify uncertainty under the tacit assumption that truth-value is the foundation of logic. We cannot determine whether or not the statement at issue is true of false; therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that its truth-value must be uncertain, i.e., we cannot know, and hence our knowledge must be fallible. Let me quote from a letter I received several years ago from Prof. Alexander Karpenko, Chairman of the Department of Logic, Moscow State University, the world's leading authority on the relationship between multi-valued logics (which are elaborations of self-referential propositions) and prime numbers (which are the factors of Gödel numbers).
I agree with your opinion that “truth-value cannot be the foundation of logic”. It is the relation between prime numbers and Lukasiewicz's logics that supports this idea. I always thought that “logical” properties of prime numbers in some complicated way are connected with the structure of physical reality. To comprehend the issue generally efforts of experts in different fields of science are needed.
Origins of Lukasiewicz's logics go back to the late-19th century. Lukasiewicz was a Polish logician who began publishing his breakaway ideas as early as 1906. In 1921, both Lukasiewicz and Emil Post, an American logician of Polish origins, published rigorous treatments of m-valued logics -- but interpretation of the import of these logics remained controversial. Sidestepping all that history, and sticking close to the Soros theme, it can be observed that the branch of quantum mechanics that studies “collective and cooperative behavior in material systems” involves itself with the attempt to understand “organizational adaptation” and this adaptation in quantum biochemistry involves “resource exchange across phase boundaries”. Schrödinger's wave equation is the canonical equation for such processes -- processes which, in all likelihood, in the biological cell, involve quantum properties of the DNA molecule. The foremost distinction between Schrödinger's wave equation and the equations for Newton's laws of motion is that Schrödinger's variables are m-valued, whereas Newton's are single-valued. M-valued variables are not the same things as m-valued logics, but, nonetheless, it is not a large leap to imagine that the meaning of Schrödinger's m-valued variables might have something to do with the meaning of Lukasiewicz's m-valued logics. Were one to make this leap, another Polish factor would immediately enter the picture, a factor which might shed some light on foundations of logic more fundamental than truth-value. That factor was Madame Curie, a physicist of Polish origins working on radiation exchange processes at the time Lukasiewicz's Polish logics came on the scene. At the critical Curie temperature in quantum systems exhibiting collective and cooperative behaviors, the correlation length between components of the system goes to infinity. At the critical state, the components snap to indistinguishability, no matter how far removed in space. This is where “non-simple identity” enters quantum mechanics. One way to interpret this “far from equilibrium situation” is the Soros way: uncertainty, and hence human fallibility. Retention of the notions of foundational truth-value and simple-identity can only be achieved by interpreting the “situation” with probability and statistics: the m-values of the Schrödinger variables mean the probability of this identity or that identity, and we can only be certain which when a measurement disturbing the “far from equilibrium situation” is made. Once that disturbing measurement is made, the “situation” snaps back to a case of simple identities. The other way to look at the “far from equilibrium situation” is to interpret the meaning of Schrödinger's m-valued variables by employment of Lukasiewicz's logics, where the meaning of the order-types of such logics is understood as representing states of non-simple identity. And since order-types of Lukasiewicz's logics are orders of self-reference (an identity issue), we are immediately confronted with the possibility of orders of Soros reflexivity -- if the Soros generalization to market dynamics is given credibility and reflexivity is viewed as a marker of non-simple identity. In a very real sense, the canonical equation in our model of the radiation exchange processes transpiring in the p-electron gas core of superconductant DNA does a facsimile thereof. It was by consideration of this model that I began to get serious about my youthful notion of applying m-valued logics to the theory of monetary exchange units -- which would, of course, require changes in their defining properties in phase transition to e-money.
You have to discover some of the reasons why the right road was not taken. That the wrong road would be taken was publicly announced almost immediately by designation of Abel's theorem of 1826 as the “Impossibility Theorem”. This wrong road led through the Tristan chords, the rise of Marxism (on the right road Marx could never have ceased being a Young Hegelian for the reasons he stated), the Franco-Prussian war, the two world wars, a cold war, a climate shift, and the totality of our present global crisis.
JSPD satraps, JACK and SACSA cowboys, SOG chiefs, STRATDET (aka STRATA) and GREEK Indians: much of it has now been declassified and publicly reviewed by JFK Special Warfare Center -- unlike when MOON was written, between twelve and twenty years ago. Read between the lines, if you are interested. Though you seem still to be hankering for the one-percent solution: concrete circumstances, specific events, supposed discrete actors. The other ninety-nine-percent is constellated as strange-attractor event gradients over the collective unconscious (projected these days by the fundamentals as “Providence”, God's Willing, or as Goethe once said, as quoted in the frontispiece to MOON: “What you call the spirit of the age is in reality one's own spirit, in which the age is mirrored.”). Change the one-percent all you like and the ninety-nine-percent will find other concrete circumstances, other specific events, other supposed discrete actors to meet the requirements of its strange-attractor event gradients. There is no escaping the real reasons why the wrong path was taken. For better or worse, one is here -- surely worse, or one wouldn't be here -- and, being here, one might as well find out where here is, what it is. And the only way to do that is to gingerly, ever so gingerly, push against it, because only when it comes back upon you can you discover anything real about it -- otherwise, you are just passively pulled along by everyday life, complicit in the stream, mostly just consuming and defecating. How could JFK have been an initiator, just another PT109 caught by the current? Born to, always thereof. OSS was deeply involved with the syndicates during WWII: Italy, Corsica, and after the war, Marseilles, Corsican Saigon. What, in principle, has changed? In lieu of JIFs, capitalist-inspired fifth columnists. It was Henry Adams, brother of Brooks Adams writing, not only Law of Civilization and Decay (time of Sino-Japanese war), but also The New Empire, i.e., America (just prior to the Russo-Japanese war), and Theory of Social Revolutions (just prior to the Russian revolution) -- the first two topical today -- and ancestor to Sam Adams of West-more-land vs. CBS fame, who urged the Japanese government during the Russo-Japanese war to fund Lenin, which it did, and lavishly (see: note 34, p. 845, Emperor of Japan by Donald Keene citing a 1980 Japanese language publication, Columbia U. Press, 2002). Now that was a GREEK project! As discussions with MOON's Toussaint talked around, decision for CI over-reach did not begin during the first five months of 1950. And the OSS notion of creating a “guerrilla infrastructure” -- insurgency, not only counter-insurgency: not a JFK original -- never got beyond the “resistance” model cultivated by OSS: those functionaries and their mindset were still dominant throughout the Vietnam era (W. W. Rostow, for instance, was ex-OSS -- as was LBJ's foremost speech writer, whose family I happened to be a live-in babysitter for while a student at AU's SIS). People focus, not structure focus -- and no thought at all of “organizational adaptation by resource exchange across phase boundaries”, not even to mention functional-requisite phase shifts “far from equilibrium”. Carry this mindset into getting some back from the Bear in Afghanistan; carry this mindset into getting some back from the Sandinista (funded by Iran-Contra): and here we are today with GREEK projects running in sixty countries -- so the newspapers say. Straight path from The Adams Family to designer A-bombs by… What has changed? The lid on the pressure cooker was never removed. Back to the future with Daniel Ortega. Why GREEK projects to begin with? You have to discover some of the reasons why the right road was not taken.
It's truly an amazing phenomenon, how effective the dysinformation operation has been over the past 40 years, 1966-2006. LIMDIS, NODIS, and false documentation plants -- expertly handled -- do work. How do I know? Well, by reading Niall Ferguson, for instance (“America's Brittle Empire”, Los Angeles Times, 24 October 2006):
Asked Sunday on ABC's “This Week” program whether the situation in Iraq was comparable to that in Vietnam at the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive -- an event popularly (though wrongly) perceived as the beginning of the end for the U.S. defense of South Vietnam -- the president conceded the comparison “could be right.”
At least the President said “could be”, whereas Ferguson knows: “though wrongly”. Only trouble is, Ferguson doesn't know. He has not penetrated the fog of dysinformation; he has not acquired the facts. And these days Google has become the greatest aid to the dysinformation. Do a word search on “Tet Offensive”. I can assure you that you will not find any, repeat any, authentically edifying information in the first hundred links. Other than the information provided in MOON, there has been only a single truly edifying article available to the public on the Tet Offensive: Ngo Vinh Long's 1988 article written for the Indochina Newsletter (“The Tet Offensive and Its Aftermath”, 49 & 50, Jan.-Feb. & March-April) based upon interviews conducted 20 years after the fact with one-time low-level VC cadre involved in planning and execution of the offensive. That tells you a lot about Google's actual utility -- no better than utility of the IDHS (the word-searchable CSC-created “intelligence data handling system” instituted by undersight of General MAC-Christian). And if Ferguson were to think this is just another conspiracy theory, that would be par for the course amongst the foolish and the dysinformed. Enormous detail on this has been publicly available ever since 1988 (the year of Sam Adams' death), when the relevant documents were declassified, yet no scholar of the war, so far as I have been able to determine, has ever made reference to these documents -- if they have, I would like to know about it. The Strategic Research and Analysis Newsletters, disseminated during the late-1960s and early-1970s to approximately one-hundred offices of the U.S. Government and freely available to those with the requisite clearance from UUMSEF/MACJ281/CICV/TSN by message or U.S. Director, CICV, ATTN: Operations Branch, APO 96307. During the 1980s a complete collection of these documents -- six-inch stack -- sat on the bookshelf in the director's office, U.S. Army Center for Military History. LIMDIS and NODIS were applied only to the strategic analysis (“Third Stage of Insurgency Warfare: A Dynamical Analysis of Vietnamese Communist Strategy, Tactics, and Intentions”) of the content of these Newsletters, an analysis written at SRA/MACV-J2 and later reproduced and made publicly available, following declassification of the Newsletters, with publication of MOON in 1994. Of course, no political science professor, straight off the campus, would be able to make much sense out of the content of these Newsletters, given the technical jargon employed, the primary data having been derived from captured enemy documents wherein the relevant information was provided in alphanumeric code. But the mere ability to decode the unit and position designators -- which existed to a certain degree at CDEC, the Combined Document Exploitation Center, mostly by virtue of the expertise and long-photographic memory of Mr. Suc -- was of little or no strategic value. Elaborate qualitative pattern analysis was required for that -- second, third, and forth order abstractions from mere designators. Attempts were made to apply rigorous principles of statistical inference, but those accomplished at this skill were shunted off into the black hole of the enemy strength-estimates controversy, a controversy created by the “little minds” up the line. If one were to read the “experts” on the Phoenix Program, one would be further mislead. They say, for instance, that the computers housing the VC cadre list and bio-data files were housed in the Political Order of Battle (POLOB) section of CICV, the Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam, a section of CICV which was created under the auspices of the MAC-Christian instituted Combined Intelligence Staff (CIS). Wrong on all counts. POLOB was not created by command decision; it arose spontaneously from below despite the contrary wishes of the CIS. Indeed, the EEI, essential elements of information, MAC-Christian imposed by precedent of intelligence operations conducted in the European Theater during WWII, effectively defined the subject matter of concern to POLOB out of existence. POLOB contributed little to the VC cadre list and made virtually no use of this list -- just as it made virtually no use of the IDHS. The MACV mainframes were never located in the POLOB section. POLOB, after Sam Adams was deemed persona non grata in Vietnam, was renamed and physically moved out of CICV into a location where it could be subjected to tighter oversight and would be more decisively sequestered. The new name was SRA/MACV-J2, Strategic Research and Analysis, COMUSMACV's intelligence staff. Throughout its history, POLOB and SRA were opposed to every CT program undertaken, including the Phoenix Program, because it knew enough about the macro-structure, the micro-structure, the functions, the functional requisites, and the transformational dynamics of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) to understand exactly why such approaches were doomed to failure. No one in SRA believed the Phoenix Program would be successful, and it was an abysmal failure. And since present-day GWOT is based on a generalization of the Phoenix Program to the whole planet, one does not have to speculate as to whether or not James Fallows and his sources are experts on “strategy for the fight against terror” (“Declaring Victory”, The Atlantic, September 2006). “We win”, he says -- just like at Tet-'68. Unlike AQ&A, Fallows believes organizational structures are important in promulgation of insurgencies, local and/or global. In point of fact, however, structures are disposable, whereas functional requisites are indisposable. AQ&A understands this fundamental principle very well, and everything they have done and are doing is exhibition of that understanding. So, given the universal lack of understanding of Tet-'68, how does one imagine after the brief euphoria of a democratic presidential win, some more-effective policy will emerge from this universal lack? And if this “attitude” of mine is a botheration… Contempt for this or that institutional algorithm, this or that socially-conferred role attribution, is the least infraction that can be noted about my surly attitude over the years, which began to emerge with force in 1954 standing at the base of the flight line at Ashiya AFB, Kyushu, Japan, watching the C-119s take off for Dien Bien Phu -- a fact 52 years later the scholars have yet to discover. That surliness allowed me to learn what I learned. Absence of real insight into “far from equilibrium phase transitions” in sociology will insure continued absence of effective policy. Terrorism is merely a symptom, no part of the etiology: resolution of the disease will not be brought about by symptomatic treatment.
Well, to be wholly truthful, overt evidence of surliness was first given in 1953 standing in the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, watching behaviors of American officers in dress whites toward Japanese shoe-shine boys my own age. Such surliness was not tolerated, of course, so it went underground. But I began slipping away from the intolerance almost immediately. Had to go under cover. Slipping away from a real expert on organizational adaptation: my father, an ex-bomber-pilot turned supply and materiel trouble-shooter par excellence. Slipping away into first acts of positive collection for my personal edification concerning transformational dynamics in general systems. Slipping away into my first LRRPs and night patrols conducted during 1954: there were caves at the base of that flight line, caves that contained unexploded ordnance, but also Samurai swords, rusted pistols, and the like. Collectibles coveted by every adolescent boy in the AO. The whole area near the flight line was off limits, periodically lit by flares, and patrolled by the Japanese MPs who guarded the base. It was necessary to apply pattern analysis to guard-mount behaviors and find appropriate avenues of infiltration and escape. My family were the token Americans in a little hamlet -- Midori Gaoka (verdant hills) -- off the base, and I came at those caves from an unexpected direction, a hard climb. I got to know every inch of those hills overlooking the paddy fields. It was while on one of these operations that I received my first view of wave after wave of C-119s lifting off the flight line. Night flight. Over the years, I raised the gingerly pushing against the grain as an information gathering technique to a fine art. One major coup was brought about within weeks of arriving at AU's SIS. Soon after the Ngo brothers were killed in Saigon, Mac Bundy was the keynote speaker at an SIS dinner -- to which he may have walked, as his house was that nearby. I interrupted his talk to ask an embarrassing question about the demise of the brothers Ngo. The next day, I was threatened with expulsion and severely reprimanded by Dean Griffiths. After the reprimand, however, he decided not to throw me out, but to send me instead to retired Career Ambassador Loy Henderson, then associated with SIS, for in-depth counseling. In this manner, I walked into a goldmine of information about many, many things -- as well as introductions that got me a live-in babysitting job in Georgetown, and Sunday brunch at the Bundy's on a periodic basis, as my charges were regular visitors to the household. I quickly figured out that those C-119s were flying to Tonkin -- not because my father told me; I knew better than to ask -- but because I was helping one of the young pilots, Harry Phelps, build a scale model -- six-foot-long wingspan -- of a B-36. We spent hours and hours and hours on this, and it was pristine -- but it crashed on its maiden flight. Every time he flew off to Hanoi, he brought back a gift from the “Pearl of the Orient”. But Harry was not unique, as most of the pilots brought back gifts for their families. I overheard discussions at cocktail parties, before I was sent away, about “the Tonks” and about insignia changes, but only years later did I learn about Dien Bien Phu. From that point, I always assumed that French pilots took over the aircraft in Hanoi. But I was a complete idiot; I should have known that wouldn't have been the case. Recently, the French gave awards to the Civil Air Transport pilots who flew the planes over DBP. But the article I read did not reveal point of origin for the supplies and aircraft. When I set about writing MOON in 1986, in which contemplation of the import of these flights plays a role in the psychological development of the protagonist, I queried my father to confirm my conclusion: to his dying day more than a decade later, he refused to answer any questions on the subject. Just goes to show how easy it is to conceal information over long periods, information like that associated with the 1968 Tet Offensive, for instance. And if the information concealed is important enough, and it never makes its way into the awareness of future policymakers, this concealment can lead to strategic errors, errors like a declaration of GWOT -- ceding control over the space and time variables to the opposition -- in response to a terrorist attack.
Yes, I have heard that a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University has found evidence in the various archives that the NVNese began planning the 1968 Tet offensive during 1967. That posting was probably a misrepresentation of what the candidate discovered, as it is rather obvious that there had to have been planning during 1967 for a country-wide offensive initiated at the end of the first month of 1968. But the posting just goes to show how pathetic the level of understanding is. Let me quote on this specific issue from the paper written at SRA/MACV-J2 analyzing the offensive:
An “ABSOLUTE SECRET” communique from the Postal and Communication Section of Nam Truong (COSVN) contains the letter box numbers (LBNs) of “all sub-regions and some new provinces”, published by the Military Postal Office of the Military Staff Department, Headquarters SVNLA. [CDEC log 04-2739-67] From this we can ascertain that extensive political boundary changes were effected in the Saigon area by July of 1967. A conference was held by MR1 in April of 1967 during which the decision was made to coordinate with MR4 to form a “steel belt” around Saigon. [CDEC Bulletins 10,137 and 10,284] What had formally been MRs 1 and 4, along with VC Long An Province from MR2, vanished, and in their places appeared five wedge-shaped sub-regions with all the points directed at Saigon. The city itself became SR6 and Bien Hoa City (along with Vinh Cuu District, Di An Secret Zone, and Highway 1 between Saigon and Bien Hoa) was given SR status and designated U1. These new SRs were not subordinate to any region. SRs 2 thru 6 and U1 were subordinate to a COSVN forward headquarters code named Phan Tuc (k.26 aka D.86). SR1 was made directly subordinate to COSVN. Upon completion of these boundary changes, each SR commander had administrative control over the full extent of his routes of supply and attack into the city of Saigon. SR2, for example, contains a densely populated VC-controlled area stretching west to the Cambodian border through which a “clandestine LOC”, a line of communication, operated between Saigon and Cambodia. [CMIC Source US 32-47 and NIC Interrogation Report 2374/68].
Incidentally, the person to whom MOON is dedicated, Richard Simons, was killed on January 4, 1968, on a mission under the command of Bo Gritz, in just the area through which this “clandestine LOC” operated (see: Zoe Gyllenhaal Simons, Promises to Keep, Fountain Publishing, 1989). Hard to imagine a more sensitive area at that particular time. That's why GREEK projects in a hot war are not to be evaluated as being of the same functionality or dysfunctionality as GREEK projects in other circumstances. Capability is: context, context, context dependent! Here is another example from the same analytical paper:
A captured document, dated 12 July 1967, prepared by the Political Section of the 33rd NVA Regiment, provides guidelines for political activities to be performed by various subordinate party chapters during the last six months of 1967. [CDEC log 04-2742-67] Among the specific tasks to be accomplished during the second half of the year was full compliance with the directive of the Party Committee, HQ, SVNLA, and “the resolution of the B3 Front Party Committee.” When MR5 was reorganized in 1966, a B3 Front Military Headquarters was established, but the MR5 Party Committee retained political control over the area. The creation of a B3 Front Party Committee is equivalent to raising the front to military region status. What the 12 July directive referred to as the B3 Front Party Committee has more recently been called the “Tay Nguyen-Lower Laos Military Region Party Committee”. [CDEC Bulletin 11,774] The requirements of the upcoming general offensive apparently made it inefficient for the MR5 Party Committee to continue to administer the area politically.
The first of these two documents, as clearly signified by the archiving number, was captured during 1967 and was a major indicator of preparations for what became the 1968 Tet offensive. But just consider the store of knowledge required to pick up the implications of this change of “wording”, which, in the original document at issue, was provided only in alphanumeric code. I can tell you from first-hand experience, that the CIA did not concern itself with such matters (except for Sam Adams, who, not being located in Viet Nam, could not effectively do so). Try to imagine the level at which, say, a McNamara or a Kissinger engaged such concerns. Activities of the very few people capable of picking up on such details were systematically interdicted throughout the war. What they learned was in spite of “the system that worked” and only at the considerable risk of interdicting the interdictors! No such person was called to testimony at the Westmoreland vs CBS trial. When the defense threatened to call such a person, Westmoreland dropped the suit. This was revealed to me, face to face, by Sam Adams. Now, to the issue at hand, as considered in the MACV-J2 document LIMDISed and NODISed:
Is it correct to ask when the decision was made? Planning for general counter-offensive activity certainly began soon after the transition to the State of Equilibrium which was marked by the US troop build-up in 1965 and Hanoi's decision (undoubtedly taken after consultation with the Soviet Union to insure material support would be provided) to upscale its own units in response, rather than return to guerrilla actions and protracted struggle. Preparation for the ensuing transition to the State of General Counter-Offensive is the insurgent strategy during this Equilibrium State of the war. Given the pattern of infrastructural transformation that has emerged from captured enemy documents, we can be reasonably confident that by mid-1966 Hanoi strategists were beginning to make concrete plans; these had to have been concluded by the end of 1966, though probably at this point it was not necessary to have a firm date set. The specifics of the plan to create sub-regions around Saigon had to have been made at COSVN level by the end of January 1967, at the latest, and disseminated to the military regions in the next two months; documentation indicates that Military Region 1 (MR1) drew up its sub-region plan in April of 1967. The actual structural changes were in place by the end of July. Military staffing of command committees was complete by the end of October.
Once the decision to launch “Phase One” of the general offensive was made by the Lao Dong Party Central Committee in Hanoi, it was passed to COSVN for implementation. COSVN then submitted for approval to the Lao Dong Central Executive Committee the overall plan of attack. Once approved, a series of steps were taken to plan forthcoming military operations.
1. Each military region or sub-region required the military commander of the region and the secretary of the party committee to attend a COSVN meeting. At this meeting the COSVN resolution calling for the offensive was studied, and the missions and strengths of the various units which were to be involved in the offensive were reviewed, revised, and assigned.
2. After the party secretary and the region and sub-region commander returned from the COSVN meeting, a preliminary meeting was held at the region or sub-region level. Attending this meeting were members of the recently created military front committee (this is a military command committee and should not be confused with any element of the NFLSVN), which commands all military forces within the region or sub-region. This committee is composed of the chiefs of the three military staffs -- the military staff agency, political staff agency, and the rear services staff agency -- and the entire current affairs committee, which is the executive organ of the political infrastructure at the region or sub-region level. At this meeting, the contents of the COSVN resolution were discussed, and missions were assigned to each of the three military staff agencies, as well as to the infrastructure organizations.
3. Detailed plans for the offensive were formulated by the three military staff agencies, who in turn submitted them to the military front committee for approval and implementation instructions. At a subsequent meeting attended by the commanding officers of the divisions, independent regiments, battalions, and specialized units, plans were explained to the unit commanders and the military, political, and rear service staff agencies who were to supervise the preparations of the subordinate units.
4. Each regimental commander conducted a detailed reconnaissance of his objective and then held a meeting with his military, political, and rear service staff chiefs. During the meeting missions were assigned to subordinate units. Although the specific unit missions were assigned several weeks in advance, units were informed of the time of attack only a few days or a few hours before the attack began.
The myriad pieces of decoded and analyzed information -- surely there are at least a million pages in the archives of relevant captured enemy documents -- upon which this account was based were substantially corroborated during a two-week debriefing I conducted with Tran Van Dac, the former commander of SR1, the only sub-region around Saigon directly subordinate to COSVN, and physically located at the aforementioned Phan Tuc (k.26 aka D.86) headquarters, the headquarters used by General Tran Van Tra to oversee the attacks on Saigon. I arrived in Viet Nam soon after my father left. He had just completed overseeing for the USAF the supply and materiel aspects of the Phan Rang-Cam Ranh Bay project. All I learned about “organizational adaptation” growing up under his wing was brought to bear upon my contribution to understanding what transpired “far from equilibrium” in “organizational adaptation by resource exchange across phase boundaries” in planning and preparation for carrying out the 1968 Tet offensive. Incidentally, I was an E-5 throughout the period I was in Viet Nam. They offered me a direct commission, which I turned down.
The reductionistic Soros interpretation of the self-referential propositions at foundation of many-valued logics as being signifiers of human fallibility or ignorance, and the consequent rejection of the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units, is consonant with the spirit of the times -- as Goethe would have it. Complimenting this, the Perimeter Institute, which Blackberry established, attacks the transcendental orientation in physics it has taken us ever since 1826, and dysdesignation of Abel's theorem on the quintic as the “Impossibility” theorem, to arrive at: superstring theory; this attack being one more attempt to place a perimeter on physics. And The House that Gates Built -- aesthetically complimented by his personal house -- seeks non-Abelian knots for so-called quantum computers as a way to further dissimulate Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation. Here we have three businessmen using the fantastic profits accumulated from exploitation of the system responsible for the present global crisis imposing their will upon the worldview construct so as to obstruct the “far from equilibrium phase transition” required if the human species is to meet its present challenges. Who says these people can't think strategically? These efforts precisely target for despoliation the three most serious threats to the failed paradigm: Likasiewiczian logics, the m-valued universal physical constants superstring theory is vectored upon, and authentic quantum computing. By such means as these are holocausts created: collective behavior unmolested generates spontaneous social order; collective behavior suppressed and hence regressed generates mass warfare. Moreover, when one considers that Galois, who rigorously developed the foundation for the non-Abelian variety, died in a duel related to a love triangle the morning after jotting down his argument, it is not necessary to point out how this prefigured quark symmetries, for all one has to do is contemplate the transference dynamics involved in such a young death -- and how that prefigured subsequent history of Western “civilization”. Abelian groups are based on non-simple identity (that's why they can't be used to falsify quantum computing); Galois groups are based on simple identity. When faced with the time-transcending romance embodied by the psychological specter of Abelian identity-transparency, transmitted by Afro-dite's animistic interlock with Nature, Galois chose to die in a duel rather than directly experience it (and his argument for Galois groups was his suicide note, and our suicide note). Western civilization, when faced with the specter of “self-referential open awareness of unbounded wholeness” -- i.e., quantum relative-state, or dependent origination in one mind moment -- has done the same: today we call the duel GWOT, and it is vectoring on going atomic.
For years, I root-pruned trees piece-work using ancient Japanese methods taught to me by an octogenarian gardener who learned them in late-Meiji, before being banished to Okinawa for anarchistic political activities (my three years as a child living in a small wet-rice hamlet of rural Kyushu was the only introduction required). By these methods, and the involved concentration in autosensory observation, I cultivated self-referential open awareness: having just returned from Special Forces training and intelligence operations in Viet Nam, the sword was transformed into a spade; the skills of the sword-maker metamorphosed into those of a Digger, a digger into the collective unconscious by empathic interlock with trees (having been entranced by kraits, white-shouldered ibises, and Oriental darters into animistic interlock with the genius of a place called the Mekong delta, I knew that the only help I could hope for was to be found in the natural surround). The nursery within which this inner work was conducted happened to be that nursery closest to the residence of Hugh Everett, III -- a nursery he occasionally walked in and smoked in, possibly to clear his head. One military brat to another. Everett originated the notion of quantum relative-state, which is a codification of self-referential open awareness in quantum mechanics -- but after doing that, he was put upon a path self-similar to that imposed upon Husserl (if you do not believe this, check out the note appended to Everett's famous paper concerning the role played by Niels Bohr in interdiction of Everett's original, pre-von Neumann, thesis: a black operation conducted by Bohr six years before his death). Husserl's designation of his method “eidetic REDUCTION” was the functional equivalent of misnaming Abel's theorem on the quintic the “IMPOSSIBILITY theorem”. After Husserl demonstrated compliance to the criticism that his thesis had “psychologised” the notion of number, he was given the job of debunking Cantor, a task he performed superlatively. The well-formed formulas thus generated by Husserl -- particularly about “internal time consciousness” -- later precluded psychological insight into Gödel numbers and their relationship to order-types of Lukasiewiczian logic (Russell and Whitehead's Principia and Russell's thoughts on “logical atomism” helped, of course: late-Wittgenstein and especially G. Spencer Brown tried to get things back on the right track). And this absence of psychological insight insured that Everett's Satori would be debunked by someone, if not Bohr and von Neumann, with complicity of Wheeler, then by some Hawking (this task was over the head of a Sagan). Contemplating all this in the light of autogenic brain discharge phenomena, and after five years of informal collaborative studies of tornado genesis at Cornell, and becoming aware of the inevitability of climate shift, by the late-'70s, it appeared to me that -- in the words of MOON's Derek -- “holocaust of the Whole Earth” was a likely lemma.
Has no working physicist ever conducted the inner work required for extended sudden insight? Read Olaf W. Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) for prefigurative understanding and contextualization of “holocaust of the Whole Earth”. Read his Star Maker (1937) for a view to the transcendental Abelian physics of superstrings.
Yes, Ashiya AFB, Kyushu, Japan, is the same air force base depicted in the Yul Brenner film “Flight From Ashiya”. Located just where the Ongagawa flows into the Sea of Japan -- which is where I learned to swim, dodging jelly fish and ogling the girl divers. Nowadays, take the train from Kokura to Orio Station, the bus from Orio Station to Ashiya. During WWII, it was a Japanese AFB. Taken over by the Americans, it was notably used for air-sea rescue of downed pilots during the Korean war. My father was sent there during the Korean war to organize these rescue efforts; we came later -- no concurrent travel. After flying the Berlin Airlift, he had been a superstar at air-sea rescue of foundering ships in the North Atlantic, based at BW1 in Greenland and the Azores. During this period, he received an Air Medal for flying a wounded aircraft through a vast storm just above wave-top for 800 miles to beach it on the coast of Newfoundland, thus saving the lives of his crew and his own. Perfect person for the job. During his career, he was reported to my mother lost and presumed dead on two occasions: shot down over occupied France, it took three months for the Resistance to move him across the country and get him across the Channel, with a broken ankle from a poor PLF (he could never understand why I liked parachuting); while in Viet Nam, he was scheduled on a flight that crashed on take off killing everyone aboard; something came up causing him to miss that flight. Hard on my mother, who was much more than just “a real trooper”. His choice for an early retirement came in reaction to his experience in Viet Nam, and that decision was taken while he was assigned to the Pentagon. He was an exemplar, and that was quite a wing to grow up under: we had our ups and downs.
In thinking about GWOT in relation to the Viet Nam war, I feel you would benefit greatly by understanding that the Viet Nam war was longer than the Hundred Years' war. “Old Ironsides” cannonaded the Port of Da Nang in 1848, killing several hundred people when the Vietnamese refused to trade: this was a bigger kill than the French had yet to perpetrate. I first learned of this at SORO (AU's Special Operations Research Office) in 1963; Archimedes Patti (one of whose deputies was Aaron Bank, the “Father of Special Forces”) documented it from National Archives files and wrote it up in Why Vietnam? -- one of the more illuminating books on the war by the OSS commander for Indochina, located in Kunming during the later part of WWII, who was one of the very few to preserve any OSS X-2 counter-intelligence documents from WWII, upon which his book was notably based. We had many in-depth conversations during the period MOON was being researched -- to include development of the personal history details of the Toussaint character. The process that ultimately produced the extraordinary context-dependent capabilities of the Viet Cong (political) Infrastructure began at least that early, 1848. The war ended only after the SRV's army left Cambodia having put a stop to the holocaust American actions were responsible for (perpetrators of holocausts are rarely, if ever, the responsible agents -- the full spectrum of predisposing factors considered). Malraux left Indochina during the 1920s in disgust. This is a good marker of the time when the war became “unwinnable”. And I would submit that this is no mere spacious polemical statement. By this time Vietnamese intellectuals were highly attuned to the prevailing currents of European thought -- not the least by deep exposure to Paris and its spectrum of avant-garde concerns -- in every area from the arts to the new physics, and Ho Chi Minh and his associates were well-launched upon their path. They had already seriously begun to gather every category of tools required to do the job. Carrying the self-confidence of a tributary society that had thrown off the yoke of Chinese dominance by persistence over centuries, nothing short of total annihilation would have deterred them -- and following that, their ancestor spirits would have risen from the soil to plague the occupiers.
One way to think about what is involved, why it is so traumatic, is to consider the implications of Abelian transcendentalism (i.e., supra-algebras) for the standard interpretation of “the scientific method”, an area of thought Popper specialized in. Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation applies Abelian transcendentalism to quantum mechanics. This application, untampered with, precludes the possibility of repeatability of experiments -- no linear-time, no repeatability. And this, in turn, implies that direct measurables provide no handle on “real reality”; they inform -- by virtue of object-system/observer-state interaction -- only about “consensuated reality”. Husserl's “calling the thing by the name of its opposite” in designating his method “eidetic REDUCTION” necessitated his well-formed formulas about “internal time consciousness” as a defense of the standard interpretation of scientific method: developing a logical model of that method is where his whole academic career began. Husserl's work insured falsification of Schrödinger's wave equation, a falsification Everett tried to rectify. The way out of this two-hundred-year-long hiatus passes through M Theory, extensions of aleph-null-valued Lukasiewicz propositional logic as Wheelerian pregeometry, m-logically-valued functionals over the primes, numbered Gödel numbers, logic-lattices handled with a modification of the Regge calculus, three-fold operator-time quantized as Penrose twistor, m-valued universal physical constants (which nullify all varieties of “classical limits”), acoustic black hole analogues as information processors, and authentic Lukasiewiczian quantum computing -- none of which can actually be accomplished absent exteriorized Musculpt as mathematical notation. In the midst of such pursuits, completely new insight into the functional requisites of scientific method will emerge. The current attack on superstring theory is “peanuts”: a clinging to the security blanket of outmoded methods the current global crisis concretizes.
How can you possibly imagine that a collective psychosis is not involved? Check this out from Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 27 October 2006:
Last Wednesday, President George W. Bush was asked whether it is possible to make a comparison between the recent sharp rise in violence in Iraq and the Tet offensive in Vietnam in January 1968. Bush responded by noting that then as now, “There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election.”
During the Tet offensive, the North Vietnamese attacked 40 South Vietnamese villages simultaneously with a massive force of 84,000 troops. The offensive failed utterly. 45,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed, no ground was taken. Yet, when then US president Lyndon Johnson declared victory, the American people didn't believe him.
She is telling us that the Vietnamese communists attacked approximately one “village” in each province of South Viet Nam. What a massive assault that must have been! Using the VC scheme of things, which is what the VC used, how many provinces were there in South Viet Nam at the time? 33. 230 districts. 2,500 villages. And approximately 12,000 hamlets. I don't think she has gotten much sense for the lay of the land. And “no ground was taken”. This is somehow significant? When was taking ground ever a functional requisite to success in insurgency warfare? Never. 84 thousand “troops” committed. Possibly, but by whose set of enemy strength categories? By the categories employed by SRA/MACV-J2 the number was far greater than that, depending upon exactly what you mean by “committed”. There was a broad continuum over which the various categories of “commitment” were made. And were there “45,000 North Vietnamese soldiers” killed? I was in MACV-HQ throughout these events and I went over the CICV to study the OB boards most every day. I never saw this figure for NVA KIA. And what period are we constraining the period of the Tet Offensive down into? What phase of the offensive is she talking about, the phase up until LBJ declared victory? If so, no such number of NVA were killed in that period. And of the body count US/SVNAF/FWMAF developed, what percentage of those were actual troops by whatever set of categories of enemy strength one might choose? The offensive was planned, prepared, and launched not to take ground, not even to kill US/SVNAF/FWMAF soldiers, and only in small part to affect the will to fight by those enjoying coffee in the ZI, but to facilitate an organizational phase transition “far from equilibrium”, which could not be accomplished without the actual act of mounting an offensive that required such a transition be completed before the actual act was engaged in. Success or failure -- by whatever criteria of judgment -- of the actual act was wholly irrelevant. What mattered was whether or not the phase transition was successfully brought to completion before the act. In this particular case -- that associated with the Tet-'68 offensive -- the phase transition was so successfully completed that the phase transition continued right through all phases of the offensive well into the post-offensive period. And not only that, it was so successful that the NFLSVN was dismantled, not by the Phoenix Program's elimination efforts, but by the communists themselves. They didn't need it anymore; they didn't want it anymore. They were able to transit completely out of a national-front organizational format and into a pre-government format over substantial areas of South Vietnam. Read MOON for a detailed documented account. This was well in motion by the mid-summer of 1968 -- and accomplished in the presence of 500,000 US ground combat troops. Whoa! Just try to imagine what that involved. Having accomplished it, why would they have undertaken activities inviting the 500,000 to stay on? And who was it that the organizational phase transition reorganized? The NVA? The divisions, independent regiments, battalions, and specialized units? Certainly not the NVA, a significant percentage of those located in South Viet Nam at the time stood and watched. And only the command apparatus of the divisions, independent regiments, battalions, and specialized units. Non-combatants is the correct answer. Those who had never carried weapons and would never carry weapons. Shift from State of Equilibrium to General Counter-Offensive State of the war, a "far from equilibrium phase transition" (in the full Prigogine sense of the term), is all about capability (not force-structure projection) to bring participation of larger and larger percentages of the population base into more active engagement along the continuum of categories of “commitment” (borrowing negentropy from the macrosystem state). It is now almost 40 years later. Is this all that hard to understand? I don't think so. I think it is a collective psychosis -- and that does not augur well for character of the collective human behaviors likely soon to be upon us.
Not only do I not believe in the system and the principles behind the system, I don't believe in the metaphysics behind the principles -- and, truthfully, I don't believe in the mathematics behind the metaphysics behind the principles behind the system, because that mathematics is based only on 1T2 logic, a logic but one order-type of a non-denumerably infinite collection thereof. Hence, I have never voted. If I were to vote, it would be for “self-referential open awareness of unbounded wholeness”: i.e., quantum relative-state in application to…
Personally, I found Joan Didion's article about Cheney (“Cheney: The Fatal Touch”, The New York Review of Books, 5 October 2006) more illuminating about Joan Didion than Cheney. Clearly, she has never analyzed, and tacitly assumes, the spurious notion that were the U.S. Constitution not subverted, were it actually to work in the spirit of the Founding Father's original intent, were the men who fill the socially-conferred role attributions defined by the Constitution actually to abide by conventional moral precepts as commonly understood in 17th and 18th century Anglo-Saxon societies, were the Masters of the Universe and other corporate moguls to govern their behaviors in violation of the profit motive and by moral suasion refrain from cooking the books and mixing war with business, business with war, and were the laws of war as codified in the aftermath of WWI and WWII adhered to by government officials, at least in spirit, the world would not be in the mess it is currently in. I, for one, believe none of that. This planet might even be in worse condition than it presently is, because it was principles like “countervailing forces” -- extracted from Newton's single-valued laws of motion -- defining structures and functions permissible to organs of governance, employing the very notion of a vote to determine outcomes by vector sums, specifying the defining identity properties of monetary exchange units determining what the properties of “ownability” are to be and the interplay of supply and demand and the nature of the action directives that are to be allowed to impinge upon economic micro-actors, “free” market or not -- all integral to belief frameworks, Saint-Simonian utopian socialist to Smithian laisser-faire capitalist, operative in 17th and 18th century Anglo-Saxon societies -- which make it impossible, utterly impossible, that regulatory activity undertaken by governments and a United Nations constituted of such principles could… well, save the frogs, for instance. That corpus of principles -- not their misapplication -- and the technologies it has spawned, is responsible for demise of the Harlequin frog and his/her cohabitants, planet Earth -- as well as the energy crisis, the population bomb, global terrorism-insurgency, and so very much more. Making the system work is no solution, quite the contrary. People like Cheney are endemics to human systems in functional dyscrasia, and systems -- all systems -- in such condition move into fulminations when the fundamental principles they abide by prevent adaptation by far from equilibrium phase transition. Leave the failed principles intact, and any structural and/or functional modulation will simply draw more such endemics to positions of influence in the system, thus driving it into a series of greater and greater intensity fulminations. Clear overt in-principle evidence of system failure came as early as 1826 with Abel's “Impossibility” theorem, and there has been since then a series of greater and greater intensity fulminations. The principles Joan Didion invokes in castigating Cheney-endemics can only make the situation worse, by diverting the social structure of attention away from fundamentals of the actual case, thus helping to prevent the requisite adaptation by far from equilibrium phase transition, which involves autopoiesis on the level of organizational PRINCIPLES.
The recent book Never Saw It Coming by Karen Cerulo (U. of Chicago Press) certainly points to part of the prescription the doctor should write, though I am not sure how much inherent adaptive capacity remains to brains once they have been etched by glutamate flood and pasted with nerve glue. I've witnessed in circumstances like the Viet Nam war far more of the “hold up a blue square and they see a red circle” behavior than most other sorts of responses to worldview-challenging events. Attempts to impose crash capitalism on the former Soviet Union and instant shake-n'-bake democracy on Iraq are cases in point and hardly indicators of “paradigm flexibility”. The excellent review by Robert Skidelsky of Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes (“Drawing a Dog in Iraq”, The New York Review of Books, 5 October 2006) is an excellent introduction to minds with zero tolerance for the principles of organizational adaptation. General rejection of the Freudian “structural theory” -- specifically, perspectives like those essayed during the 1930s in Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, which prefigured much of Prigogine -- illustrates the degree to which transference dynamics are involved in fixing the zero-tolerance mindset, a mindset by now again become a collective gradient. I roared reading about “the dog” (Skidelsky, p. 16):
An American expert on democracy came from Baghdad to do some “capacity-building” with the new council. He drew an oblong box to represent the council, beneath it four boxes to represent the committees. “He is drawing a dog,” muttered one sheikh. “Welcome to your new democracy,” said the democracy expert. At this, “two of the sheikhs walked out.”
Now let me quote myself from Strategic Assessment, Part 14, about another “dog”:
The turning point for my theorizing the service and the firm came during several weeks debriefing Tran Van Dac. I've told this story before, but it bears retelling from a somewhat different angle in the present context. Tran Van Dac -- who fed a line to Bob Oberdorfer, misvectoring his book Tet -- was the commander at the time of Tet-'68 of the administrative sub-unit of COSVN encoded K-1, geographically one of the pie-shaped sub-regions encircling Saigon. Soon after General Tran Van Tra and Dac rapidly evacuated the headquarters site of K-1, it was overrun by ARVN troops who captured intact its whole document store, a cache containing deep historical memory. Once translated by CDEC, Combined Document Exploitation Center, located within the CICV compound adjacent to the JGS compound, they all ended up in huge piles on and around my desk. I spend three months studying these documents and produced, among other things, what was known as the “superchart” (provided along with each copy of MOON, with flaws: no matter how many times I sent it back to the printer, they always got it wrong, which tells you something). It was a highly-documented (no box, line, or color placed on the chart without many substantiating documents) generic line-and-block-chart representation of the total apparat of the VCI in the South including every echelon, presented in a single image. By current theory of the firm, this chart mapped the silo structuring, ad hoc committee framework, and matrix (party cell, chapter, committee webwork) overlay articulation of the VCI, along with its military and Front lateral extensions (“extended organizational form” in today's theory of the firm). I was rather proud of that chart, but I was even more proud of the series of historical charts I had developed, from the deep historical memory contained in the document cache, to map the world-line of organizational phase transitions leading to the K-landscape (oh yes, I am going to get to Stuart Kaufman's nk-fitness landscape, which was first developed to map codon behaviors of DNA: the collective unconscious is an amazing plenum when it comes to playful synchronicities) of the VCI in the Saigon-Cholon-GiaDinh-BienHoa area used to mount the Tet-'68 offensive on Saigon. This collection of world-line charts illustrated what, in parlance of today's theory of the firm, is called the process of “disaggregation” undertaken by the VCI in shifting from the Stage of Contention to the Stage of General Counter-Offensive of the war, such far-from-equilibrium transitions being adaptive responses to environmental changes, changes, that is, in the field of the combat, as implemented relative to the Greater SMA, Saigon Metropolitan Area. This is important because superconductant DNA is a pulse-code receiver and transmitter; it responds to changes in its ambient radiation field. Introduction to Field Theory in Sociology: that's what it was! Except that this particular case of disaggregation was in many respects simultaneously a hyper-aggregation -- which confused my 1T2-logical mind, if not its brain. MR-4, Military Region 4, the responsibility of Tran Bach Dang, Mai Thi Vang's husband, had been disaggregated into multiple smaller subunits, and new horizontal and vertical administrative boundaries had been established, with all the involved new geographical boundaries, personnel reallocations, new mission statements and job descriptions, new recruitment procedures, and tax structure levies and collection procedures, new accounting practices, and so on and so on, endlessly into transfinite classes of minutia, it seemed, while -- woe is me -- the new subunits were pushed up the echelon hierarchy to sub-COSVN status: there was no flattening of the organization, no removal of rungs of the ladder, while the benefits of having done so nonetheless seemed to have accrued to the system. Indeed, new rungs had been added, while the silos (multiple chains of command and distinct information flow channels) were even more multiplied into evermore parallelism, yet processes transpiring within the silos were streamlined by mechanisms like reverse-representation which were, in critical areas, rolled over onto the party webwork overlays and out across the extensions. Wholy-moly! What is that? Ever seen that before? But, hey, they probably just didn't know what they were doing, right? Weren't they so screwed up they couldn't even get the offensive off the ground at the same time all across the country? Yeah, they were just confused. I knew it. But, high and behold, another amazing thing happened on the way to the superconductant DNA paper. During the period of the May Offensive, Tran Van Dac became a rallier. There were transfer orders and many other categories of bureaucratic minutia stamped with his alpha-numeric codes in the captured cache going back over ten years. He'd carried some of his papers along with him as his career had unfolded. Why didn't the sky fall? Now I could talk personally with the man whose professional communications I, by then, knew virtually by heart. So, when the MACV PIOs, Public Information Officers, and Don Oberdorfer, finished with Dac -- shows you MACV priorities -- I carried along to the debriefing sessions my cache of world-line charts as a visual aid to the discussions. Visual aids were emphasized in Special Forces Training Group and I never forgot that. Dac and I didn't talk Theory X and Theory Y, of course. I won't recount the discussions, as they would bore you to tears. Nothing but minutia, minutia, minutia. Dac immediately recognized how proud I was of my charts. He always winced when I brought them out, but tolerated them until late in the period of debriefings, when, for one or another reason, he could no longer stomach them. He lashed into me, telling me that the charts gave the wrong impression, that things didn't work anything like the charts indicated, that, if I didn't get rid of the charts, I'd never understand what I wished to understand. It was a rabbit punch, not only to the solar plexus of my ego, but to my enteric nervous system's projections to the lumbar spine. I was not only pounded back in the chair, I was clamped down into a slump. We went round and round and round. I abandoned every other aspect of the debriefings, focused right in trying to understand what he was talking about. The facts were right and many, but the picture was wrong. My head hurt. Nothing made sense! And the debriefing sessions ended like that. The slough of despair. What were these people all about?
Just like the sheikh, Tran Van Dac knew a dog when he saw one.
Oh, no, these are not end times; these are early times still. America made use -- by GVN surrogate -- of the tiger cages on Dao Con Son throughout its period of involvement, cages far worse than anything I've heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, yet one hears nothing about them. Yes, it's early times yet. The mere allowance that combatants are the least important contenders in insurgency war would beat against mind states in identification with Cartesian-Newtonian notions of identity; the allowance is therefore disallowed, preventing insight into Tet-'68. Just as Ngo Dinh Nhu's “Personalism” and neighborhood associations were relatively benign compared to the escalating cycle of CT programs that followed in Viet Nam and Cambodia, so, what people fret over today will in future be considered relatively benign. The very fact that people partition off Iraq as if it were somehow a discrete war -- and compare the present situation there to the 1968 Tet offensive -- indicates they do not understand the planetary transition which has occurred in the collapsing institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and its prescriptive jurisprudential generalizations. And that lack of understanding -- mirrored as it is in the refusal to acknowledge the ecological over-determination involved in how everything is connected to everything else, perception of which is legally defined as a symptom of schizophrenia, even for A Beautiful Mind -- guarantees continuation of the mass clinging behaviors insuring all manner of escalating cycles: if not this one, then that one. Though America pulled out of Viet Nam, the war continued, transplanted to Afghanistan; and though the Afghan war appeared to end, it continued and morphed into a second American war in Iraq. And this is only one narrative amongst many simultaneous narratives. Narratives! And the very fact that post-structuralist literary semiotics -- not notions applicable to derailed organizational phase transitions -- are read into and written over the involved catastrophes also insures sustained cycles of escalation. And the involved “narratives” must be written according to the style manuals penned by the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's employing their notions of good dialogue -- anything else is implausible.
Speaking of the implausible, Yayoi Kusama has now received the highest art award offered by Japan for concurring that authentic Shinto animistic perceptions of nature at the very foundations of Japanese aesthetic sensibilities are pathological, a mere hallucinatory residue of Japan's adolescence -- and from the Imperial Family, no less: Praemium Imperiale. Hopefully, Ise Shrine was not informed, otherwise the yama no kami in their myriad polka-dot dustings would stop protecting the rice paddies. Maybe they already have; they certainly are no longer protecting the frogs. To appropriately quote one of Yayoi's sisterly peers, a peer with elaborate professional knowledge of autogenic brain discharge phenomena who has not forgotten the Authenticity of Open Awareness, “Well then, we were probably peeing in the same rice fields!”
Leslie Gelb says (“The Dominoes That Did Not Fall”, Time, 23 October 2006): “The results of Vietnam were not catastrophic.” Not catastrophic for whom? They certainly were for Cambodians. They certainly were for the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton-Woods monetary system, and hence for the whole Third World. They certainly were for Afghans. They certainly were for the World Trade Center.
There are no solutions within the paradigm for problems created by application of the fundamental principles of that paradigm. To me, the proximal causes of “Little Boy” were those who dissimulated Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation; and these same causes are the less-than-proximal causes of Kim's half a kiloton yield. Nature does not use chain reactions as inappropriate technologies in inappropriate environments, and it takes care of its toxic waste appropriately. Einstein's refusal to look quantum non-locality straight in the face reflects on just how “new paradigm” his insights actually were -- if the original insight was actually his. And since there is not a single organization presently on planet Earth in the form of the new paradigm which has not yet appeared, technical solutions, however plausible, are utterly unlikely on a pragmatic basis. And if even the Yayoi Kusama's of this world turn their backs on the Sun Goddess, what is that goddess to do but remain in her cave? You probably think that UV radiation is the primary solar energy source provided to this planet by its sun. If so, I submit you would be mistaken. Complex angular momentum is the most abundant source provided, and this is the source the planet itself makes most use of. This is the case, not only of the atmosphere and its severe local storms and of the planet's geomorphological processes, but also of the biosphere: the plant cell, via the quantum properties of its DNA -- mitochondrial DNA in particular -- makes greater transduced use of the complex angular momentum (first-order temporal curl) carried by ambient radiation than it does of photonic energy bath.
Here's a great paragraph from a great magazine (Newsweek, p. 36, “The New Feudalism”, by Owen Matthews and Anna Nemsova, 23 October 2006):
Once upon a time, this would have been called corruption. Nowadays, says Elena Panfilova at Transparency International, that term seems almost quaint. “It assumes corruption is an aberration,” she explains. “In Russia today, it is the system.” Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in Parliament, likens Putin to a contemporary czar. Determined to recoup from the chaos of the Yeltsin years, he says, “Putin turned Russia a hundred years back to the traditions of empire and absolute personification of power. We are back to the times when the state and private business grew together in a single body.”
And who do you suppose it is who funds Transparency International? Why, isn't it those who knew so little about “far from equilibrium phase transitions” they helped underwrite the program-from-above that was the “crash capitalism” and the instant shake-n'-bake democracy that precluded a series of small transitions-from-below utilizing the autopoietic potential of existing cellular structures and were thus responsible for creating the circumstances wherein a “new feudalism” became inevitable? How, in principle, did this differ from Bremer's decision to formally disband the Iraqi army -- even if it was disbanding itself? And if you doubt that cellular structures have autopoietic potential, I refer you to the above -- and to your own body. Since the Iraq Preemption StratPlan (displaced from Saudi Arabia) issued in all its vagueness out of the genius of Kissinger, it's only fitting that his office manager should have been selected to oversee implementation of “the far from equilibrium phase transition” thus set in motion. Managers are universal engines, you know -- with respect to recursive generative applications of objective universally-applicable rules, laws, principles.
The term “Enlightenment fundamentalists” is interesting, in that it is more encompassing than “the neocons” and classifies a lot of secular humanists as being members of a subset of the superset designated “the fundamentalists”. This is accurate, I think, in so far as it goes. What it suggests, but does not make quite clear, is that the various subsets of the fundamentalists -- though they each presently engage in killing members of one or more of the other subsets -- are all on the same side, that side with fundamentalism in its defining properties, regardless of the particular type of fundamentalism adhered to in any given case. Like a roaming pack of wild dogs streaming through the night that inadvertently collides with a pole not there the night before, once the melee begins, it's each against all, all against each, all against all -- even the pole. The collection of fundamentalist subsets hasn't quite gotten there yet, but these are early days still. I like the term “the clingers” better, because it is even more encompassing -- and more accurate, I think. Included amongst the clingers are subsets like: Left liberals; Deconstructionists; post-communist Marxists; post-movement-art artists; insisters upon music people can understand; generative linguists; aficionados of the Copenhagen Interpretation; advocates of a “classical limit”; those identified with “the probabilities themselves”; the arrow-of-time bound; seekers of non-Abelian knots; the Renormalizers; the Normotics; P2P Cyberians; free-money freaks; fuzzy logicians cultivating truth-values between zero and one… In short, any subset clinging to the notion of simple-identity.
In a can't-do situation can-do people can't do, only can't-do people can do. One-hundred-eighty years post-Abel, can-do people having done all the wrong things, this is a planetary can't-do situation.
Determining events today is what people will be thinking 30 years from now; it takes at least that long for the conscious mind to catch up with where the unconscious has been.
Well, maybe it's a hundred years; one can hardly find anyone who has integrated late-19th and early-20th century discoveries into their Umwelt: most people are still cognitively and emotionally located somewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries. Socialism, constitutional democracy, communism, and national totalitarianism are the four quadrants of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm institutionalized as sociology, politics, and economics. The surveillance societies currently being put into place will never be retracted; they will be superseded in the process of incendiary collapse, a collapse which is inevitable because the surveillance is being used to shore-up a dead paradigm near-universally identified with. Look at “planning” attempts for Post Iraq, for instance. The biggest cultural divide there is between people people and principle people: the sheikh who saw a dog in a line-and-block chart was a people person, while the Weberian “democracy expert” drawing the dog was a principle person. Governance by people-to-people give-and-take sympathetic interactions (incorporation of identity) or by “objective universally-applicable” rules, laws, principles? Which of the two is more “contemporary” -- as regards apprehension of the unconscious prevailing Weltanschauung? By instinctive Fingerspitzengefuhl, if not by mere modern German Einfuhlung and post-Meiji Japanese amae, I would have to say the sheikh, even though he has not consciously integrated early-20th century discoveries. Why? Because -- in wake of physics and logic degree zero -- those discoveries utterly shattered the notion of “simple-identity” absolutely necessary to Descartes and Newton, and in doing so they have more in common with the animism of pre-modern psycho-sociality than anything the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm has ever produced. I personally -- being convinced of the omnipresence of m-valued “constants” of nature disallowing all “classical limits” and insuring the Unbounded Wholeness of nature -- no longer believe in universal laws of nature; there are as many corpora of “universal” natural laws as there are partitionings superposeable upon the m-logically-valued reference space (Hilbert space under Lukasiewicz logics) by acts of quantum measurement: at least a Cantorian continuum infinity thereof. If 17th and 18th century minds continue -- as seems virtually certain -- to impose, with the full spectrum of coercions available to them, 17th and 18th century solutions upon 21st century complexities created by the systemic failures generated by application of 17th and 18th century principles, one can hardly hope for better than a ten-percent human survival rate and a fifty-percent biospheric survival rate. Indeed, current projections for ocean fish over the next two decades are far less than fifty-percent, according to the journal Science.
I beg to differ! This is not 20-20 hindsight speaking here. Let me quote a few relevant selections from the hundred-page annotated bibliography to MOON, published in 1994, many of which were written during the fifteen years of research conducted before writing of the novel began in 1986:
Bain, David Howard. After-Shocks. N.Y.: Penguin, 1980. (Speaking of the WWII period, the author says: “…the war came to Saigon, and the family was forced to flee the city to escape the almost daily bombings by the Japanese.” [p. 23] Unquote. What is this? Did the Japanese bomb Saigon? No. Who bombed Saigon in WWII? The Americans. When the interviews were conducted from which this sentence was written, the author could not hear right. Not only was his knowledge of history deficient, but, one can be sure, if someone said blue, he heard green -- in regards to certain subject areas. THIS sort of mental phenomenology is the long-term collective consequence of subjecting society to a persistent diet of morale operations. We must not underestimate the degree to which this mental aberration determines behaviors in the contemporary world.)
Fox, Guy H. and Charles A. Joiner. “Perceptions of the Vietnamese Public Administrative System”, Administration Science Quarterly, 8, March 1964. (Here we have American experts on bureaucratizing the Third World calling the Vietnamese political elite “impatient” and “Messianic”. Is there any way at all to imagine this was not a psychological projection? Parallelism of formal and operational administrative structures they consider a pathology, called “formalism”, resulting from the elite's resistance to the unquestionable benison of universalizing, impersonal, neutral, Weberian bureaucratization. Multivalence [one form of which is parallelism] is a very scary thig, y'know! People whose self-knowledge is so limited they have not learned to withdraw their projections are not capable of dealing with the multivalue, no matter where they might find it. Is it any wonder we did not understand the VCI?)
Heuer, Richard J. Jr.: editor. Quantitative Approaches to Political Intelligence: The CIA Experience. Boulder: Westview, 1978. (Quoting: “…make quantitative judgments -- that is, to assign probabilities, values or ranks to items of information.” Unquote. My, my, my. Dey sure is suu-phisticated adaptin' academic methods ta guv-ment at da C-I-A. No outmoded Newtonian models for them: no dynamical equation sets, no transformational analysis; no siree! For da in-telligence chumps… uh, champs, that is, it's gotta be da very latest: the probability methodologies favored by quantum physicists. Ha!)
“The Viet Cong Infrastructure, a Background Paper”. Saigon: U.S. Embassy, 1970. (Is it even possible to imagine people with allegiance to a bureaucratic abortion like America has spawned having the intelligence and independence of thought to comprehend the VCI? Reading this report -- summarizing official knowledge of the subject -- years after it was written, on can have no doubt why our experts at mounting insurgencies were so successful with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The CIA went in and set up an extensive political infrastructure that transformed itself progressively -- as the process of the combat unfolded in well-defined stages -- into ever more elaborate structures engaging larger and larger sectors of the civil population, until, at the critical moment, an effective pseudo-government existed de facto to replace that they were trying to supplant. And the formats chosen were so in concert with the projected post-insurgency institutions that no members of the civilian population had difficulty seeing the logic of the transition which occurred without a hitch. Because of the pervasive political infrastructure, it wasn't necessary to proclaim in abstentia an interim government located out-country in Peshawar. And since the rebel's shadow government in Afghanistan was so thoroughly entrenched, all AOs were well-prepared and there were no embarrassing setbacks in development of the combat… Right on! broth'. It's 'bout time dey done somethin' CO-rect. Dem folk in da Central Asia sure was smart listenin' ta deir U.S. ADD-visors, tweren't dey?… Since this was done to perfection in Afghanistan, they completely avoided a potential bleeding of the combat across Pakistan toward India [how many training camps staffed by U.S. special services operatives were located on the Kashmiri border?] -- in contrast to the expansion of the Viet Nam war into Cambodia -- and thereby precluded the possibility of inflicting on the people of Central Asia what they had earlier brought down upon the residents of Cambodia… Uh, uh, the intelligent person, y'know, looks closely at the word RESISTANCE -- beloved by the OSS -- in the phrase “Afghan resistance” and evaluates the implications thereof: the rebels were organized after the fashion of a WWII resistance movement, not like any successful insurgency one might refer to. Fractious, scurrilous: Dem damn Afghans can't agree to nothin'! Why, why, we'll have ta try da Bao Dai Solution…)
Lockhart, Greg. Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People's Army of Vietnam. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989. (This is an interesting and illuminating study. However, the comment in footnote number 71 on page 61 regading the relative unimportance of organizational factors is extraordinarily ill-informed and absolutely mistaken. Undoubtedly, it was sophisticated political organization, coupled to the opportunities of the moment, which permitted the rapid expansion of armed units in 1945. It is significant that Conley's book on the VCI is not included in the bibliography. In truth, there is only one real class of primary sources on how an army was created, on how it operates: internal directives regarding the minutiae of daily affairs. This class documents what was done, not what was said about what was [or should or should have been] done. Captured documents have been the only available collection of such internal directives. To anyone with detailed knowledge of the generative and transformational dynamics of insurgent infrastructures reading Truong Chinh's The August Revolution, it is abundantly clear that the complexity and scale of communist activities during the critical period at the end of WWII have been thoroughly underestimated by Western commentators because of the OSS-inspired fixation upon armed guerrilla units and the consequent associated neglect of the organized political ocean out of which those units are born and upon which they are borne.)
Eckhart, Major General George S. Command and Control, 1950-1969. Washington, D.C.: DOA, 1974. (Useful for seeing just how far bureaucracies can go in tying themselves up in knots. One is led directly into the preserves of abnormal psychology in trying to account for what is described here -- and the story is so naively told!)
Friedman, Norman. Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991. (So, what did Derek Dillon think about the war in Kuwait? First of all, three years before Saddam's invasion, he was telling everyone he knew that America soon was going to have herself another war, that walking the streets of D.C., the Cornell campus, the small towns of rural Pennsylvania he could feel the coming kill in the air, feel it crawl along the hairs on the back of his neck. The collective NEED, NEED, NEED had become so great, it was everywhere palpable: prefigured in histrionic daily interactions, in the films, in the fashion magazines [even to the point of offering the “I shall return! Dress” inspired by MacArthur's uniform and crumpled cap and advertised with the slogan “Return to the Forceful Forties!”]. Three years before! So Derek never believed the media account of the war and its origins. [1] Hardly anything of consequence has happened in the Middle East since WWII not caused directly by U.S. oil policy, and Derek, for one, does not agree that the U.S. has every right to kill millions of people so as to avoid building adequate mass transit systems. [2] No one but an idiot could believe that the war in Kuwait was not intimately involved with the events transpiring in the Soviet Union. [3] When Saddam released the huge number of hostages, the last vestige of doubt fled Derek's mind; Saddam may be a fool, but he is not that much of a fool! Had the confrontation become PROTRACTED -- and the hostages were the key to this -- much extra-combat free energy would have flowed into the situation, causing multiple realignments and many unexpected events worldwide. Saddam's decision on the hostages postponed the onset of America's time of reckoning -- which is no service to America, because the longer it is postponed, the greater the megadeath hiding in the wings will be. Much was happening in the situation that has gone totally unsuspected. [4] Accounts of why Saddam was such a tactical and strategic idiot read exactly like MACV intelligence assessments, and have equal credibility. [5] America is clearly a GREAT killer NATION -- as many as six million good kills in Indochina, due to American actions affecting the area since mid-1945, for a loss of some 60,000; not a bad kill ratio, eh? -- and her technology of war appears unparalleled, but the future holds huge surprises, staggering shocks even, on this issue. The mass psychology of American psychic diarrhea from trying to digest falsified quantum theory has become so acute, it just had to create a simply-located bombable foe. Otherwise, America would have suffered urban melt-down. If nothing else can expurgate nonlocality, smart bombs and a Maginot-minded foe can surely do the trick! Ever wonder what was really behind all those glassy-eyed stares of TV joy at witness to mass murder in the trenches of this reincarnation of a WWI foe? Ah, yes, back there where all the collective slaughter over quantum mechanics and transfinite set theory began. But the situation with this issue for the American psyche is now so critical, it has become another Germany in the Thirties -- and even requires ikons to signify the fact: adoption of Nazi-style helmets and pig-faced German heros… and its own little test-war in a new Spain called Iraq.)
Joyner, Christopher C.: editor. The Persian Gulf War: Lessons for Strategy, Law, and Diplomacy. N.Y.: Greenwood, 1990. (Here's another lesson, one from Derek Dillon in regards to the fifty-year-long American oil policy in the Middle East. What are Derek's credentials for offering lessons? Consider this: an old friend of his was the first American killed in Somalia, who earlier had done his time on Desert One -- and once was NCOIC of Delta Force. Terrorists persist in media-directed acts because, like Sixties radicals, they continue to believe in the system -- otherwise they wouldn't be trying to influence public awareness. The more apparent successes like the Persian Gulf War America pulls off, the closer the time comes to when terrorists stop believing in the system, therefore stop being terrorists and become transnational insurgents. Insurgents do not play to the media. So, what will they then do? They will turn America's methods back upon herself; they will create a transnational Phoenix Program directed toward the elimination of anyone suspected of being an American. They will exploit the fact that certain minority groups in America are more a part of the Third World than they are of America. This is a rich circumstance within which to conduct military proselytizing. And so on and so on.)
Valentine, Douglas. The Phoenix Program. N.Y.: William Morrow, 1990. (This is an interesting and, if closely read, bizarre book. It appears to be very well researched, but slides over with slapdash sleight of hand many areas -- early history of Special Forces, for instance; or, for another, neglects to mention that there were numerous captured documents, clearly indicating systematic VC use of terror from early-'58 and demonstrating that there can be little doubt of sporadic use throughout the whole post-'54 period because of committee documents attacking the idea of struggle absent armed force; or again, does not note that the party committee apparatus in the South remained intact after '54 and did not require regroupees from the North to reconstitute it -- such that gross misimpressions are given to the reader. There is much talk of atrocities, but no consideration of what, actually, an atrocity is in the context of war -- an activity, once begun, wherein the act of killing is the norm. Not killing is an aberration in war! Is the mutilation of one killed individual -- which alters the circumstance such that a dozen who would have been killed, were not -- an atrocity? This is no idle question! to the man who has to answer it. Is atrocity by decision as a tactic better or worse than atrocity by groupthink compulsion? Is a thousand clean kills by air a lesser atrocity than one mutilation in a frenzy following the hysteria of a CA on the ground? It is absolutely bizarre to bring into analysis of this domain of experience an ideologically motivated value framework grounded in domains wholly unconnected. Those values should be brought to bear on the question of war itself, on the idea that moral war is not only possible, but occasionally necessary. Derek Dillon was nothing if not adamantly opposed to the Phoenix Program. But he understood that once the war was underway, it was inevitable. Not only in Viet Nam! It has occurred in every protracted conflict: China, Algeria, Malaya, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Lebanon, Ethiopia, et cetera -- and generally, in one fashion or another, was used by all contenders. The reality of killing and avoiding being killed is no tea party; it's a mean business that calls into play all sorts of hormonally-mediated metaprograms having thousand-year histories. Once it starts, it surely will explore all the archetypal grooves. Moral umbrage about atrocities, individually or programmatically perpetrated, is the best propaganda there is for feasibility and utility of moral war. It's the realities of war that need to be confronted, on their own terms, if the species is to transcend its attachment to war.)
Adler, Renata. “Annals of Law”, The New Yorker, June 16 and June 23, 1986. (“…the sympathizers, the grandmothers, and the children.” My, my, my. How lawyers who don't know nothin' can sound so smart. Y'know, dem dere Generals, Leaders, Presidents, National Security Advisors, Big Pricks on the Seventh Floor, they might make honest mistakes, cuz they ain't too smart, cuz dey wants so much to do good, make the world safe for America, but dese mistakes are honest mistakes -- that's HONEST, now! -- cuz handsome, straight-backed American leaders couldn't knowingly lie, wouldn't give no metals for fabricatin' drawer after drawer a evidence, data, information [Jus' git it done, son; I don't wanta know how], who wouldn't do nothing causin' the production of black propaganda in their own bureaucracies, who ain't the same as somebody who'd knowingly slip up behind you and stick the point of a K-bar knife into your neck [I mean knowingly: drawin' the blade along the throat went out of style sometime ago in dese circles], then lie about the act to the public for decades ta come -- forget the Highest Levels what always is knowin', always did know, always will know: Jus' git it done, son; I don't wanta know how -- cuz dese peoples is MORAL, dey cares, deir careers come second ta people's lives, even yellow lives, black lives, GREEN lives, yessiree, dese LEADERS is something ta baalieve in, ta look to, ya know, cuz dey'd never do no mass murder a innocents jus' to cover how dumb dey was, cuz dey have healthy, American minds that would never do no bad things, never use chemical weapons like those horrible monsters -- THEM, them what hate the American way a rapin' the planet -- terrorists, who don't play by the rules spelled down by the Strategic Bombin' Survey [written by fine folk like John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Nitze, and George Ball], those what would come to America and try ta buy tons and hundreds of tons of our nerve gas and take it away from us, that is, take away from us our security -- our SECURITY, that is -- uh, from the healthy American mind made secure clutchin' its nerve gas while usin' smart lawyers ta prosecute bad guys for wantin' ta buy some… THUS SPRACH DEREK DILLON.)
And if this last display of emotion by an ex-POLOBer and ex-TargetsAnalyst for B-52 bombin' offends you, then I suggest you look closely at what is happening around you twenty years after it was written -- and forty years after the stimuli eliciting the emotion were delivered to awareness.
No, unless my memory is completely failing me, Midori Gaoka, the little hamlet in which my family lived, was and is located on the back side of the hills you see standing at the mouth of the Ongagawa in Ashiya and looking along the shoreline to the far end of the crescent of beach. There were American families peppered about off base, but few so removed from other Americans as we were. Mostly, those off base were in small enclaves like the one along the river where they could have speedboats for waterskiing. We were the sole Americans in an all-Japanese community of about a dozen families. Ashiya AFB, I believe, lay in the flats to the near side of the hills. I went back to Ashiya in 1990 before completing MOON. I had no map -- thus no overview of the area -- and found the house we had lived in only by extraordinary good luck. There was but one business hotel in town and I was immediately asked why I was in Ashiya, as no Americans came there anymore. Explaining that I had lived there as a child during 1953-6, an old grandmother was brought to me. I related some of my memories, how it had taken half an hour or so to ride my bike into town, and described the area around the house in which we had lived, the rice fields, the families in the hamlet and all. She said, yes, there had been one gaijin family living in Midori Gaoka and gave me the general direction of the hamlet. I walked out the next morning and it took me about two hours of mistakes and remembering to finally find the hamlet -- and another half hour to find the house. I met the old couple living there whose family had owned the house since it had been built in the 1890s. It no longer had a straw roof. Now gray pottery tiles on the roof and top of the wall surrounding the compound and garden, which was even more beautiful than I remembered it. Meticulously cared for. The water tower was gone. Actually, we may have had an early version of the tile roof, while all the other houses still had straw. No sure memory. I spent the day wandering through the same hills I had spent so much time in as a child. You had to cross the hills to get to the base of the flight line, as I remember from childhood, but I didn't go down that side of the hills on this trip in 1990, as I had done so many times as a child. The return visit was an extraordinary experience, as I had had an extraordinary experience as a child -- not only in Ashiya and Midori Gaoka, but all over Japan. As a boy scout, the water boy, working for the coach, “Pappy Austin”, of the base football team traveling to every game all over the country -- often along with the equipment going by truck before hand -- and because my family had a car my mother brought along on the troop transport ship from Seattle -- the USS Randalt -- and took many road trips, often accompanied by our ama, I literally was exposed to much of the country. Yes, we had an ama, a babysitter/maid, but she was not an ama, a naked diver. Those were to been seen at the far end of the beach were I learned to swim. This was still culturally largely premodern Japan in the rural areas -- appropriate nudity and bodily functions, given omnipresence of the honey-bucket man, were handled in the most natural of ways. Little attention was paid. This was a very traditional area, in the heart of early-Yayoi country, seat of Ongagawa pottery and bronze work, work of the bronze culture extending all the way to the Ma River valley of northern Viet Nam. Ma: sacred space. Most official accounts and much of the anthropology I've read as an adult jive poorly with my memories. Personal space, absent foreign adult males in particular, and minimum permissible distance were totally non-Western -- very up close and touchy, not distanced like described in the literature. That's why, in my opinion, the porno that began flooding the country from the late-'60s features -- among all the rest -- all that was normative in rural life before MacArthurization. That suppression still works over the Japanese psyche, I believe, and Japanese relationships. But maybe I just remember it all wrong, huh? Eyes of a child.
I had three assignments in Viet Nam. In the field with TID, 525th MIG. Technical Intelligence Detachment, the 525th Military Intelligence Group. Targets/CICV. Targets Branch, the Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam, located next door to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff compound. SRA/MACV-J2. Strategic Research and Analysis, the intelligence staff to the Commander of US forces in Vietnam, located in the MACV Headquarters building.
A “can't-do situation” is not the same as circumstances of an adaptive organizational phase transition in response to what George Soros calls a “far from equilibrium situation”, what Heidegger called Umsturzsituation, a critical revolutionary situation that can lead to either creation or destruction, a state of deautomatization, a nonequilibrium transition state between two stable states of automatization. Quite the contrary. It is a circumstance of failure to obtain the preconditions for such a state. In order to understand this it is necessary to get out of billiard-ball mind, which means getting out of memetime perspectives only. The neocons are starting to regard Iraq as a can't-do situation: the U.S. can't successfully export democracy, they now feel, not because it is not the right thing to do, but because of organizational ineptitude on part of non-neocon policy planners and implementers, and poor highest-level management thereof. This is the height of billiard-ball mental myopia. The actual can't-do situation is vastly larger and witheringly deeper. At onset of terminal phase in death of a paradigm, as its institutionalization goes into incendiary collapse, you cannot remotely hope to successfully export that institutionalization. This was already glaringly apparent in the Viet Nam war, where no contextually-relevant, actually-workable adaptive US/GVN “vision” ever appeared on the scene, the most necessary precondition for “victory”: communism did not beat America in Viet Nam; communism put out of business what beat America in Viet Nam. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was only a glaze over, and interpretive filter upon, the generative and transformational dynamic employed by the VCI, a dynamic deeply informed by traditional animism (in technical parlance of the quantum theory of collective and cooperative phenomena: relative-state non-simple identity as the “engine” of self-production and self-organization: superposition of multiple regimes of virtual states of identity transparency -- what F. von Hayek called the “time-shapes of total capital stock” -- internally and spontaneously generate action potential) resident in thousand-year-old traditions (notions of sacred space, border-without-border, immediacy of ancestral presence, et cetera) of the village voluntary associations used as the launching platform and metabolic-cascade vehicle. External inputs were simply energy metabolized by the vehicle -- however necessary that free energy was. These overdetermining generative and transformational processes were progressively suppressed between 1968 and 1975 as the internal factionalist endgame played itself out. The most astute analysis of this, by semi-outsiders, came from a surprising source. I quote from the bibliography to MOON:
RCP-CC. “Vietnam: Miscarriage of the Revolution”, Revolution, 4:7, July-August, 1979. (Surprisingly probing, erudite, and well-documented thirty-page statement of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA's assessment of the Vietnamese revolution. An American point of view few have heard. In fact, one of the most knowledgeable and contentious essays likely to be encountered on the Viet Nam war. Must reading for those wishing to understand the associated ideological conflicts from the inside. The single most provocative piece Derek Dillon has read on the war. There were many VCI cadre during the period expressing opinions similar to those offered in this article.)
Institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm included all four of its quadrants: socialism, constitutional democracy, communism, and national totalitarianism. Onset of incendiary collapse of the whole institutionalization began with the demise of communism. Communism never actually became communism (as the RCP-CC clearly hoped it would) for it always remained state-communism, so let's not go into that cul-de-sac. The victory of democracy-capitalism over communism was a triumph of one quadrant over another of the institutionalization of a dead paradigm, an event that in no way makes the paradigm or its institutionalization savable. Think of a can't-do situation as a “sink” and a can-do situation as a “source”. Actually, its more complicated than that: there are both internal and external source-sink terms driving the collective psychological vortex. But let's stick with the simplified heuristic model. When a paradigm fails (think: Abel's theorem on the quintic, 1826) and the preconditions for adaptive phase transition are met, what appears to behave as a cause-push event-gradient comes into being. Call this gradient a “source”. If, on the other hand, the preconditions for adaptive phase transition are not met (think: Abel's demonstration of the necessity for trans-algebras being deemed the “Impossibility” theorem), what appears to behave as a teleological-pull event-gradient comes into being. Call this gradient a “sink”. Post-1826, there were obviously both sources and sinks, but the sink-factor dominated by virtue of the mass back reaction on the metric of prescriptive values and jurisprudential principles embodied in the prevailing institutionalization. This is the inertial function of mass in a system. Actual origins of a “strange attractor” -- our “sink” -- has to do with how binary processors handle 3-fold operator-time as if memetime understood as linear-time. But let's skip the physics concepts here. Once a dominant sink has been established (archetypal constellation), the collective unconscious has received its marching orders; it doesn't care what the specific events are, who the players are; all that matters is that, whatever the events, whosoever the players, they feed into the strange attractor -- a process assured by presence of the constellated archetype. The unconscious is contemporary (by relative-state superposition) but is “located” as if teleological-pull attractor in the memetime future of the conscious standpoint, a standpoint which views the contemporary unconscious as if “located” in the past and as if it were cause-push driven. The unconscious strange attractor sets all agendas, pulls libido from wherever it can be found -- religion, infra-sex, economic compulsion, and the like -- while conscious minds engage in rationalizations to justify behaviors and maintain the illusion of autonomy. And the more evidence appears to indicate the conscious standpoint can't do, the more hysterically it clings to the illusion of autonomy by insisting on can-do behaviors, thus carrying the dynamics to higher and higher levels of intensity as the event-spiral tightens upon the attractor. A full-field can't-do acknowledgement would be the equivalent to sudden insight into death of the paradigm and its institutionalization. Only following upon such an acknowledgement would it be possible to fulfill the preconditions for establishment of the source-factor dominance required for actual transit of a “far from equilibrium phase transition”. But 1826 was a long memetime ago, globally speaking, just as 1967 was a long memetime ago, Palestinian-Israeli speaking, and the inertial mass has built up a huge head of momentum. Stay on the poorly chosen initial flight path long enough and the autopilot becomes jammed. Then, to quote MOON's “Succubus, Musculpt by Inward Cant”, copyright 1977, Autopoy, Inc. (Vol. 2, pp. 647-8):
My God! we're entering a region awash in Gibbs oscillations. Will we ever find a way to escape false numerical dispersion? The magnitude of the diffusion operator is being affected by high frequency ripples. We're going to be systematically truncated! Can a positive-definite advection scheme -- in flux form -- coupled to split-explicit time integration possibly save us from the inevitable discontinuities associated with strong initialization shock? We've tried equation system architecture relaxation with the incremental Newtonian nudging approach, but alas, to no avail. Our only hope is to activate the self-configuring pre-processor software in an optimum interpolation objective analysis scheme and hope for the necessary data from the Army's IMET system, NEXRAD Doppler radars, uh, uh, just a second, here… there's… ah, and the Air Force's PRESSURS, Pre-Strike Surveillance/Reconnaissance System. But… Oh, Jeeesus, Mary, and Joseph! the flux-corrected transport has failed us. We'll have to try the piecewise parabolic method or we'll never recover an adequate surface energy budget. And now, of all things! sub-grid heterogeneity parameterization is fragmenting, driving nonlinear variations in the grid-cell averaged evapotranspiration rate. God help us! we'll never get the forward-backward scheme for inertial gravity modes running in time to prevennnnnnnnnnnnnnn… ahahahahaahahjakjahajakj…
Next passage.
I can't say much for myself. Though I focused on discovery of the preconditions for formation of a robust source (in MOON called “the autopoietic operators setting routes of entry and exit and determining whether or not transit is to a higher or lower level of functional integration”), I grossly underestimated magnitude of the inertias and resiliency of the institutionalization once its informing paradigm has died. Thus, I judged the memetimes of phases shorter than they now appear to be, and consequently underestimated magnitude of the events likely to be associated with the period of transit. This many fundamental errors having been made, there is no way to entertain the notion that something significant could have been accomplished. These judgmental errors sponsor all sorts of mistaken action directives. For instance, if the conclusion is reached that the phases will be short and snappy (rapid “far from equilibrium phase transition”: snap to “critical Curie state”), then the best approach is to choose actors that are strategically positioned (points about which self-organizing processes congeal, e.g., geometries of chemical phase transitions) regardless of fit; but if the phases are likely long, then fitness overrides positioning. I made the wrong choices. It is one thing to talk of a window of opportunity and quite another to realize that such windows come in multiples, certainly stacked, clearly nested. Opportunity for what? for instance. But our aerialists of memetimes past have all suffered from “pilot fixation syndrome”. Their inertias were indubitably enormous and systemic resiliency all powerful. The Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian nation-state system was able to return after two world wars and no new ideas appeared on the scene. All they could do was attempt to create the nation-state on a larger scale level -- and not even effectively accomplish that: League of Nations, United Nations. This reflects the abysmal condition of human brain. No one on the planet, including myself, has been able to think more than an inch or two into institutionalization of the “new paradigm”. And this itself is a misnomer. Those who survive will be entering a post-paradigmatic Weltbilt. Paradigms are order-of-logical-value dependent. Under a world construct founded upon extensions of aleph-null-valued Lukasiewicz propositional logic, the functional requisites of worldview propoundment -- meaning abstraction from the class of all paradigms -- will be the base, and no particular paradigm will be permissible: that's what self-reflective open awareness of unbounded wholeness is all about, which is the only sort of engagement with the natural surround that will permit seven billion people to survive on this planet without leaving systemically disruptive footprints in their wake.
Fencing the Afghan-Paki border along hundreds of miles of some of the roughest alpine terrain on the planet: Dutch treat for AQ&A! Self-organizational adaptation by resource exchange across boundary-without-boundary. In calculus on manifolds, this is called “compaction”.
As I wrote into these assessments a couple of years ago, AQ&A have not mounted another terrorist attack on U.S. soil because there has been no need to do so, and no strategic benefit to be derived from doing so; such an attack will be carried out, again, iff required to facilitate a synoptic far-from-equilibrium self-organizational phase transition, and iff circumstances outside the U.S. make the probable U.S. response to the attack a likely facilitator of the particular sort of phase transition required. Since this has already been successfully accomplished once, it would appear that it will not be as easy to set up an analogous sting the second time around. Professor John Mueller's reflections (“Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?”, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006) are not informed by insight into the terrorists-insurgents' targeting problem (they have target analysts just as we do), how that problem connects to macrostrategy and self-organizational dynamics. Tactical improvisation is primarily of utility when employed at the periphery, not in staging provocations upon the center. It is necessary to get the idea of how a tactical offensive services the strategic defensive, which can be used as cover for strategic-offensive-by-organizational-transformation in adaptation to a changing combat environment. Win comes only by gaining greater and greater control over the recruitment base, and all actions must be suborned to this determinant; “hearts and minds” is only one small part of the prerequisites for such control. While any given one-off terrorist attack can be mounted independent of broad reliance on a local recruitment base, such attacks generally have little strategic value: in and of themselves -- not directly connected to strategic variables -- they can be hugely counterproductive. This has been understood for centuries. It's rather strange the neocons didn't learn about this from the evangelicals, who have demonstrated great skill and persistence at building an ecclesiogenic insurgent apparat over their domestic and international recruitment base, and infiltrating the U.S. government bureaucracy.
I learned a whole lot from the exposure, but I never employed it. I simply wasn't interested: that was one outcome from what I had learned. Why stay in elementary school? My interests had gravitated to much larger, deeper concerns. It took me two-and-a-half years to finally decide to quit AU-SIS. When I quit, that was it, the end of any aspiration for any leadership position whatsoever. Been that way ever since. That's why I wouldn't even consider the offer of a direct commission in Viet Nam. For me, this was not post-Vietnam syndrome; it was pre-Vietnam syndrome. A number of events particularly standout by being featured in memory, the following two among them. A formal military ball at FLW's Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, summer of 1953: the inordinate arrogance to which the shoeshine boys in the lobby were subjected. Even at eight-years old I had some intimation of the import of this. The image that came to mind was that of rubbing the puppy's nose in the pee on the floor. I had a strong emotional reaction, never expressed, but it established a “set” with regard to later assessments. This childhood experience prepared me to forecast long before it transpired the inevitability of some functional equivalent to a declaration of GWOT in response to something like 9/11. The “sting” AQ&A ran, America set up on itself; all AQ&A had to do was read the situation, the governing psychology to which there had been long exposure during the Soviet period of the Afghan war, and connect it up to its own need for a catalytic event with regard to synoptic self-organizational phase transition: that catalytic event being U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Ever since Truman, and to a lesser degree since Wilson, the American school master regarded the whole planet -- and its resources -- as its own personal playground. Who made the decision to transport PWs captured in Afghanistan to Cuba? There was probably no real decision; it was just done as a matter of course. The U.S. had long since determined it had the “right” -- and judged that it was smart -- to take and transport whomever it wished from wherever it wished, long before 9/11. T&T was just a variant on S&S: “snatch and snuff” stuff, as the stock phrase had it during the Viet Nam war era: look in a dictionary of GI slang. Since America “owns” the planetary schoolyard -- and has done since WWII -- it will subject whomever it wishes to its jurisprudential dictates, and tie itself in knots in the process. And, again as a matter of course, there will not even be a registration that declaration of GWOT cedes to the opposition strategic aspects of the spatial variable; we own the schoolyard, the playground, therefore GWOT is a forgone conclusion regardless of the negative strategic consequences. Another highlighted memory was the welcome speech delivered by the Dean of SIS to the incoming freshman class, 1963. First day of the semester. We were told that we were being presented by the unique educational offerings of SIS with the opportunity to become part of the policy elite that set the agenda for the whole world. Hearing that, and registering its implications, I knew instantly I would never finish the school.
My experience in Viet Nam only reinforced this well-established orientation to the larger and the deeper. Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, had no interest in current, operational, tactical intelligence; that was what the S2s, the G2s, the COC downstairs (at the level of MACV-HQ, the Command Operations Center), and the CIA specialized in (with fixation on their agents and the opposition's intelligence service, i.e., the “great game”). We were focused on transformational process in the organizational dynamic brought by the opposition to promulgation of the war in its various macro-phases. Of course, we couldn't help becoming aware of the way the U.S. framework functioned, as we were constantly subjected to it. When the Paris peace talks began, for instance, I was deluged with intelligence levies from on high. The questions were focused, sophomoric, and framed so as to fish support for conclusions already reached. And they came down through the chain-of-command, echelon by echelon -- and the answers went back echelon by echelon. I could not help comparing this with processes operative in the VCI which I was studying. Fox and Joiner, in the paper cited earlier, speak of parallelism as a bureaucratic pathology, and parallelisms were everywhere to be found in the VCI. In the VCI, there were information flow channels not in a command-and-control silo; there was parallelism. What was the purpose of this? Intelligence levies in our system functioned, by intent or not, as control over attention, pre-selecting documentary focus and analytic investment. In any large organization there is a discrete small set of points in the information handling system where exist maximum raw data flows, computerization or no computerization, internetworking or no internetworking, for much information is never documented for not being recognized as information. At its beginnings, the progenitors of POLOB focused upon information by EEI definitions not even permitted to exist. And much analysis never becomes analytic product, for myriad reasons. Moreover, even that slice of analysis which became SRA's analytic product was not attended to. Are you kidding? People who don't analyze their own bureaucracies would be interested in analysis of someone else's? These points of max raw flow are the critical points from which real insight is most likely to emerge -- and these points keep changing with personnel shifts and other factors. The smart high muck-a-muck is constantly analyzing this and continuously establishing and reestablishing unfiltered contact with these points. This cannot be done in a system that defines parallelism as pathology. It's against the rules to exchange information out of the chain-of-command, for such exchanges undermine the prerogatives and authority of the commander/manager, with all his extraneous concerns for the various utilities of filtering: cornering funds, needed or not; jockeying and in-fighting not being the least of which; i.e., elementary schoolyard stuff. In the VCI, however, whenever things got dicey and problems arose, they instituted “reverse representation”: the higher echelon represented itself to the lower, not vice versa. The big man going to the little man, not little man hunkering to big man. The district level was the hot spot of the war, and this is where most reverse representation transpired (whereas the U.S. sent its most inexperienced company-grade officers there: top-heavy pyramid; no big man at the bottom, and if he visits, he's a boss). Done right -- which was not always the case, and maybe not even predominantly the case, people being people -- reverse representation was conducted parallel to the command-and-control silo. The guy or gal (Nguyen Thi Dinh, for instance, pre-Tet TDYed from HQSVNLA several echelons lower to province level) sent down did not disrupt C&C, but sent information available only locally up through the parallel information flow channel. When critical circumstances had changed, the problem solved, whatever, the instance of reverse representation was removed: they provided formally for the need to have unfiltered contact. Guy and Joiner designated this “pathology” with the rubric “formalism”. I mean, there was just a great deal of this sort of stuff one could learn.
No. Reverse representation was not delayering, though it and other mechanisms employed achieved the purposes of that form of disaggregation. Traditional 1T2 logic of the West -- as distinct from the rotational 1T2 logic of the Chinese and the µTm logic of primordial animism -- permits only aggregation or disaggregation, not aggregated disaggregation or disaggregated aggregation. In reverse representation, for the period required, the person was assigned to a committee position and a functional-element role (the two involving distinct organizational entities) created in the lower echelon, and he physically moved there, while retaining his position, role, rank, and access apropos of the higher echelon where he remained assigned. Two jobs, two hats; many cattle. But this was only with regard to his functions in the governance sector of the tripartite extended organizational form; there were also his party-overlay roles, positions, and responsibilities: cell and chapter; and his positions in the military sector of the tripartite extended organizational form: he may have simultaneously sat on an MAPC (military affairs party committee) and an MAC (military affairs committee) and a CC (command committee), each being distinct and involving different people and different responsibilities; and his positions and roles in the NFLSVN people-interface sector of the tripartitite extended organizational form, which likely also were multiple and stacked. And if one had all these identity-transparent hats, all those cattle, then it behooved one to learn to think in such long, interpolated, and nested sentences. An assignment under reverse representation was generally mission specific and did not engage the full spectrum of the assignee's m-valued positions, roles, ranks, and responsibilities. Of course, all of this was in alphanumeric code, just as today one has numerous PINs (which can be encoded into a microchip for implantation to a card or passport or muscle or brain and which can be cloned by someone or some agency, no matter how sophisticated the code employed). Quite frankly, I don't think the identity definitions mandated by the Geneva Conventions take account of this. Reverse representation, parallelism, superposition, and m-valuedness -- under market conditions determined by single-logically-valued monetary units -- are not cost effective and profit heavy, therefore do not yield shareholder value. And since so much of our war-making is now farmed out to the private sector, hence to shareholders -- leaving military units and their soldiers, not generally shareholders, under-funded in the field -- it is not surprising we have no capacity in these regards, whatever our force multipliers might be. By contrast to the VC case, we have 5-star pony-show junkets and pre-announced white-glove IG inspections. Our reverse representation!
On one occasion, I almost stumbled into employment of this stuff. I applied for a low-level typist job at a starting-up spin-off company of the Santa Fe Institute. Hard to find a basement-level job in that place if you have a white face: Santa Fe. During the interview, in discussing my background with the NYC venture capitalist bringing the company up, I learned they had a large start-up contract with the Marine Corps to apply SFI's model of complexity theory to a disaggregation of the Corps' force structures so as to make it more fit for low-intensity warfare. I had read some of Stuart Kauffman's technical stuff -- books and papers -- as they came out, but not his popularizations, so, not being at home in that universe, it was a bit of an awkward conversation. I said that 2nk had to become Mnk if it was going to be of any real help to Marine Corps fitness on actual landscapes. At the end of the interview, the VCist said he wouldn't hire me for his personal secretary, something else perhaps, but he couldn't decide whether I would be a disruption or not. "We are not about doing science here; we are about making a great deal of money." I never heard back, so I guess he figured I would have been a disruption. This was four or five years before 9/11. I bet you that company made a lot of money.
We're not here talking about mere beliefs. Do you beeeeelieve?! We're not talking about that: very nearly highly indifferent. We're talking about direct immediate experience, what a person experiences himself to be. Self, other, object: the direct experience, the immediate percepts and propriocepts. Identity qua identity: what it is; what it ain't. People act from experience, not from non-experience. It is the very rarest person capable of experiencing non-experience, let alone acting from it. So let's forget about that; it violates conventional logic, the logic nowadays-people choose to use (given state of the brain contained by the brain). On the basis of this alone -- and there are many more bases -- the “thing” is going to run its course, run all the way to the bottom of the artesian well. Everything I am describing has been available for forty years, in principle for one-hundred years. People haven't wanted it; they don't want it. They want to experience what they experience, not what they don't experience. And the hell with the consequences! They probably will never live to see those consequences. A time will come, however, when there will be no one left who can believe that.
You are fooling yourself. Republican or Democrat; Sixties-hawk got a chance, Sixties-dove got a chance: what a joke! One more avoidance cycle, then quaking ambivalence at the next juncture in the maze. Klizzz, Klizzz, Klizzz goes the slinky down the stairwell. The whole Western political spectrum from anarcho-syndicalism to anarcho-capitalism is Cartesian-Newtonian, Cartesian-Newtonian, Cartesian-Newtonian! And the Cartesian-Newtonian ain't gunna take the human species, the population bomb, the energy crisis, the carbon footprint, ozone metabolism, nuke proliferation, atomic waste, the biosphere, the atmosphere out of where they are going. Cartesian-Newtonian systems don't exist in nature, never existed (dirty atoms are the result of a Newtonian take on the quantum-critical: call that uncooperative -- correlation lengths don't go to infinity -- take, Einstein's take); even collapse of the wave-function, if there were such a thing in nature, would not yield a Cartesian-Newtonian system. Identity qua identity is the root of all this, this conundrum -- even the collective negligent ecocide and willful bioslaughter responsible for the anthropogenic climate-shift modulation of natural cycles. If tree-huggers love trees so much, why are they still living in the First World participating in The Good Life? Mary Shelley's 1826 The Last Man was every bit a synchronicity-complement to N. H. Abel's 1826 “Impossibility” Theorem. People were all over the issue instantly; so don't tell me the mathematicians didn't understand, the logicians didn't understand, the physicists didn't understand. The West's pre-Abelian notion of identity is the root fault, which, beginning with Meiji, the whole of the East has come to emulate (except, of course, AQ&A and the like, in their regressed back-reactions leading to, say, updated Cambodia, Rwanda rerun, the heuristic prefigurative models). Each new generation is more hysterical, more phobic, more in projection (tattooing, piercing, body mod, genome hacking, autoimmune and immune incompetency pandemics, internetworking telepresence, COMSAT GPS MoSoSo crush-feature meshwork-swarming across Weimar-youth-movement battlefield of the sexes given over to ecstasy) than was the last generation vis-à-vis this issue: identity qua identity. Even the NVNese struggled throughout the whole period of the American war in Viet Nam to rid itself of the formative “force” -- animistic identity transparency -- which was responsible for the capacity to trounce the U.S. Army (such factionalism in itself being a type of autoimmune disorder). This formative “force” was most elaborated in the Mekong delta, where it was mistakenly experienced by the ML-indoctrinated as willful local autonomy: the whole internal factionalist equation within the Vietnamese communist movement was subliminally related to differing “immediate experience” of identity qua identity. A tattoo on a real tribal animist is not the same as a tattoo on a person unconsciously projecting inherent capacity for animistic identity transparency. Those who can and those who can't. That's why the biggest class of disciplinary citations the Northern bo doi issued on the Southern cadre was for: “licentious behavior”. Yessiree! Piles and piles and piles of such citations captured. Those who can and those who can't. Damn that Phoebe, that Artemis! Doxy + Doxy to any and every doyen. If and only if… All over the planet, in every sort of circumstance, those who can't have been, are, and will continue to kill those who can, can directly, in immediacy, experience identity transparency (the defining feature of the non-Cartesian-Newtonian). Those who can't don't have the brain for it: literally. Get yoursel' a brain contained by the brain and only a brain contained by the brain. Get yoursel' two filters, not the onlyest, not jus' one: the so-and-so algebra of the logic… and its characteristic matrix. Oh, Lord, please, jus' paaaalese, find me some evaluation of the algebra that won't, jus' won't, satisfy, that FAILS ta satisfy the formula, whatever formula. Then, finally, confirmation of the road, the route, the path, the march to TRUNCATION, to NORMALIZATION. The chosen, yes, THE CHOSEN: choose the greatest or the least, the mightiest of the mighty, the meekest of the meek, forget all the rest, distribute that middle, leave those behind; and having always left behind the mass and chosen such elements and only such elements, the Fisher of Men, mice, mullahs, monkeys, monads, monadic algebras has found a subclass of propositions, the CHOSEN, the CHOSEN few, the CHOSEN people, constituted by bi-filter, and any such logics where two such filters exist… what are they? Boolean: 1,0. Uniform substitution for variables and detachment for material implication means, by adjunction, the MIDDLE KINGDOM ain't the CHOSEN PEOPLE. And the brain contained by the brain ain't the brain not contained by the brain -- and for those who can't, never the twain shall meet. From A (those who can't, the Aristotelian conditional existere) infer []A (those who can, the Platonic universal esse). Philistines or Essenes. The “rule of necessitation” is equivalent to the aforementioned pairwise CHOSEN PEOPLE filter: those -- bi, hetero, homo, herma -- strictly equivalent copies which are isomorphic embeddable into the dense-in-itself subspace of the Herrenvolk quaternion, the p-adic algebras with families of commuting closure operators (i.e., those who can't: closed elements claiming to be open). [](p>q) >> ([]p>[]q): Gödel normotic, no self-referential open awareness of unbounded wholeness despite the “form” of Gödel's Proof which demonstrates that normal = normotic ¹ abnormal (i.e., the Lukasiewicz propositional). Particulars and universals. The conditional and the unconditional. No order class of Lukasiewicz logics supraordinate to 1T2 is Gödel normotic under closure conditions determining those to be LEFT BEHIND by “strict detachment”, even though Gödel's first axiom, from []A infer A, beats Dante's Hell out of, from A infer []A. Not possibly not is not not henceforth not; perhaps eventually that will be necessarily so. The bounds of logic and their modal-theoretic lemmas. Deontic ain't necessarily doxastic and certainly ain't necessarily doxological (at least not in Being John Malkovich). Rabbinical logic of morals: obligatory, permissible, impermissible, right, wrong, ought, naught, not nother. Belief, sub-belief, supra-belief: superposed substate-state-superstate disallowed in this logic, that logic, this possible-world, that possible-world. War, the phlogiston of logic; logic, the phlogiston of war: by projection, by transference. Don't believe it? Look at the states of consciousness occupied by lawmakers: the doxastic deontic! That truncation subset. Do I want to reside in such states? Not on your life, let alone my own. Their laws impose their infrastates of consciousness. It's bad enough having one's neurotransmitters messed with by the social structure of attention! My understanding is that it is against the laws to support terrorists. Who supports AQ&A more competently than the Bush Administration, the Canadian Mounties, British MI V&VI? If you know, let me know. The Dems'll do better! Ha. Problem in deep-structure, not only surface-structure. Don't forget the opposition's agenda: them, the enemy. Do forget the idea that non-commutative geometry is somehow going to reconnect the brain contained by the brain with the brain not contained by the brain; it just ain't going to happen.
Ending globalization while keeping economic fundamentals unchanged -- e.g., no alteration in the defining logical properties of monetary exchange units -- in conjunction with rising economic nationalism was one precondition for onset of WWI.
Martin Amis (“Goading the Enemy”, Newsweek, 6 November 2006, p. 66) understands “the sting” but his sense of how “playing into their hands” works doesn't seem to be so acute. He says, “When an American soldier kills an Iraqi civilian on purpose, he faces the death penalty. There is no equivalent mechanism among the enemy.” I guess Amis has never seen up close TAC AIR deliver napalm and/or WP on a squatter settlement into which bad guys have fled. What's worse, human shields or the TAC AIR that kills them? Obviously, since the decision is made against on-the-ground man-on-man and for zone defense and full-court by TAC AIR, no great value is placed on human shields. Personally, I've thought quite a bit about this, as I was closely involved with a squatter killed by TAC AIR in just such a situation: squatter housing over Rach Lang Creek, Bac Ai Hamlet Number 9, Binh Hoa Village, Go Vap District during the May phase of the Tet-'68 offensive on Saigon. Been happening in every conflict since Viet Nam, and quite a few before. But that is an airman killing civilians on purpose, not a soldier. Not to mention CBUs, DU projectiles, and all the rest. The logic here is in relative availability of disposable force: when ninety-nine percent of the force is deposed to one side, the other is forced by that circumstance to turn to capability, which is context dependent in a fashion raw force never is able to accommodate. Which side imposes this circumstance? Which side refuses to step out at High Noon for a fair fight? Consider the following from Newsweek, 13 November 2006 (Scott Johnson, “Ministers of DEATH”) on the new Zarqawi (p. 38):
…U.S. officials immediately suspected the notorious death-squad leader named Abu Deraa. American ground troops and warplanes hit the Shiite slums of Sadr City in a bid to retrieve the translator and nab his alleged captor. Two of the warlord's sons were reputedly killed in the raids, but he himself escaped.
Always a new Nguyen Chi Thanh (eliminated by air-strike), Zarqawi… Who's wimpish here? Do wimps win? We'll speak of this later, as it transpires in The Streets of San Francisco. Amis refers to: “rationalist naiveté” and “rejected reason” and “the laws of logic” and “attributing reason” and a “matter of reason” and “how rational” in the process of answering eight questions not addressing this theme. The laws of which order-type of logical-value? As if there were only one set! But then that has been what warfare over the last century and a half has been all about: consequence of the attempt to suppress awareness of the fact that the number of such sets is at least denumerably infinite. Amis decries “moral relativism” as the responsible agent, whereas the actual case is that the suppression of what lies logically and trans-algebraically behind relativism has been and will continue to be the root of the acceleration in “Horrorism”. Back in the 1970s, I thought human losses to the next global total war would be an order of magnitude greater than the last, just as had been the jumps from Franco-Prussian war to WWI to WWII, but I have since realized that this projection was very likely wrong: premature demise jumped an order of magnitude in the post-WWII period by casualties of imposition of the prevailing international system; the coming conflagration will take losses two orders of magnitude over WWII -- not hundreds of millions, billions. War, the phlogiston of logic; logic, the phlogiston of war: by projection, by transference.
Hey-hey-hey! Compensatory abreaction. Like the Khmer Rouge policy of forced-draft de-urbanization compensated the Huntingtonesque American policy of “forced-draft urbanization”. Recent compensatory offerings: Unconquerable Nation (Brian Michael Jenkins, Rand); Triumph Forsaken, The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Mark Moyar, Cambridge U. Press).
I'm told I'm pretty much off my rocker, so I guess it is only par that I should guffaw at the very idea the CEO of FedEx (p. 361) should have been placed on a list of possible candidates for SECDEF: the universal manager, replaceable like the universal soldier -- the task involves handling matters of interchangeable objective formalisms, no mastery of specific contents required. Must be a quick read-in and a people person. Like, one must suppose, John Negroponte being made DNI. Moreover, Negroponte had four years in the Saigon embassy during the 1960s, and learned so little he could, forty years later, say (p. 310), “I'm afraid we may have made the same mistake [with Iraqization] that we did in Vietnam, where we didn't start Vietnamization until it was too late…” (both drawn from Bob Woodward's State of Denial, Simon and Schuster, 2006). Guffaw-Guffaw-Guffaw! Changing parties will in no way affect this problem; voting is not a problem-solving algorithm.
Woodward's personal judgments offered in Denial take the breath away. On Brent Scowcroft (p. 419): “Few people knew more about Vietnam than Scowcroft, who had worked on Vietnam for Presidents Nixon and Ford.” What an amazing delusion, the thought that someone working in the Nixon and Ford White House could possibly have gained significant knowledge of the Viet Nam war. There was no conceivable way such a person could have gained the requisite information access! And Woodward relates (p. 407) straight-faced Kissinger's conviction and claim that the U.S. had “essentially won the war in 1972”. Vietnamization (an Americanization of the precedent-setting French pull-out program named Jaunissement [yellowing] in typical racist style) was the honor part of “Peace with Honor”. Kissinger's peace treaty was simply a ratification of the de facto situation on the ground, which everyone, except apparently Kissinger, understood was the “Decent Interval” part of “Peace with Honor”. Once the war had been won -- by October of 1967 -- when the VCI's country-wide synoptic “far from equilibrium” organizational phase transition had been successfully completed with 500,000 U.S. ground combat troops in country, the rest was just a playing out of endgame. The outcome was no longer at question, just the exact route to arrival the process would take. After the various phases of the Tet-'68 offensive had been completed, the NVNese strategy was to project a posture of weakness (planned before the offensive was initiated, and stated in COSVN-level briefing documents) so as to make it easy for the U.S. to rationalize to its deflated ego its departure in “Peace with Honor” after a “Decent Interval”. The man most responsible (not the prime perpetrator) for the Cambodian holocaust got a Nobel Peace Prize for accomplishing the extraordinarily difficult task of negotiating ratification of the de facto situation on the ground. And because Americans honored and believed their foundered leadership elite, America (indeed, the whole human species) is now in a circumstance it can't even begin to comprehend, let alone effectively respond to.
Donald Rumsfeld, by far, comes off the most insightful and intelligent of the characters described in Woodward's book, Denial. For instance, Woodward attributes the following to Rumsfeld (p. 379, drawn from a July 2006 interview):
“In the 21st century” he said, “in the information age, we're still functioning with an interagency process and a governmental structure that is in the industrial age in the last century… the government structure is a leftover from an earlier era.”
Then Woodward asks, “But that's--that would be something worth fixing, wouldn't it?” To ask that question in this way… Clearly, Woodward doesn't understand, no understanding at all, as with the rest of the media, the national polity, the general population of the planet -- and that invincible, willful nescience, which goes well back into the last century, was the real root cause of both world wars (for simplicity, reducing history to causes and effects). An outmoded notion of governance, in its final death throes -- metaphysically dead for 180 years -- doesn't permit formulation of workable policies, and unworkable policies cannot be effectively implemented. And this most certainly will not be resolved by a mere change of parties and/or people.
Whenever asked -- infrequently from the early-'70s; more frequently from the late-'80s when “flat management and the new physics” started catching on -- I always said, “Cartesian-Newtonian systems cannot be transformed into self-organizing quantum systems.” The first response was: “If that's the case, well, then, it's… it's just simply all over!” And I raised my finger and said, “Hey, now you're starting to get a little realism into your global assessment.” Heels spun, and there was a storming away. This was such an interesting response, I decided to stick to the assertion and see what kind of variant reactions emerged. Over the decades, there were virtually no variants -- all tantamount to the same response. Generally, given the stereotyped reaction, I kept to myself the digression: the absolute prerequisite -- actualized holographic identity transparency amongst the parts -- is not constructible by any structural and/or functional manipulation, symbolic interaction, whatever; it has to be given by brain-contained-by-the-brain maintaining conscious interface with its quantum substrate, i.e., the restored-sword of superconductivity in free-electron gas core of intranuclear-neuronal DNA (something DARPA and the Pentagon would prefer to use in anti-personnel EMP weaponry). It is not only that Rumsfeld didn't realize that the Pentagon is one of the worst places from which to attempt the transformation he envisioned (the military mind has a low quotient of “paradigm flexibility”: don't believe it, ask a military brat; and no surprise the media and the academics side with the military mind and other bureaucratic crustaceans). Especially an all-volunteer military. Of course they are against the draft! Many draftee EM are far better educated and very much smarter than careerists of the officer corps. This is a hugely conflicted situation the careerist has always wanted free of (root of fraggings in Viet Nam), just as he has wanted to get rid of professional soldiers of whatever rank: professionals don't marry, have no career aspirations, are war lovers, are extremely difficult to control, make their habitus outside the institutional game, despise careerists as much as they despise the rest of the middleclass, and so on. Bo Gritz became a Christian fundamentalist after he got out of the Army, when he got old; Bill Boykin ran Delta Force as a Christian evangelical: two different things. Convolutions bleeding in all directions: just as the crustaceans and the politicos are pretty awfully dumb, if only as marked by their blind ambitions, what they value. Imagine, try to imagine, a bunch of crustaceans and politicos beating against the bag to find their way out of Iraq by analogy to how they imagine the way that was, but wasn't, the way out of Viet Nam! How many million troops would it have taken to successfully have closed the borders of Viet Nam? And how many million troops would it have taken the Powell Doctrine to successfully have closed the borders of Iraq? Given how commitments and counter-commitments curl around into a self-driven wheel of positive reinforcement? It's that kind of war, this global war. Rumsfeld also didn't realize that the transformation simply cannot be done, period. There is no series, and no simultaneous stack, of topological operations available with which to take a system that defines itself into existence as inherently divided against itself by countervailing forces and transform it into a system founded upon unbounded wholeness of superposed order-types in self-referential holographic identity-transparency. In order to get rid of countervailing forces, the constitution would simply have to be nullified, and that, of course, would elicit collective hysteria precluding -- by definition -- the getting rid of countervailing forces. Every which way you look at it, you run into the same thing: self-canceling operations. The transformation sought is not a possible-world logic. “I don't believe it. Prove it!” they would demand. And I would humbly ask, “Which order-type of the m-valued logic of unbounded wholeness (or Suchness or Is-ness or whatever the term of the day employed) would you like the proof written in? Which is the order-type that works for proofs? Gödel certainly didn't find it.” Best look closely at the very notion of “self-canceling”! Getting outside the paradigm doesn't come about by seeking ways to stay within it. JUMP! Not over the edge with eyes wide shut; up, eyes open.
You got it; that's what I've been saying for quite some memetime. After fifty years of active exploration and passive contemplation, I have now come to firmly believe that unchallengeable Anglo-American and French intellectual commitments and psychological identifications, most especially as expressed in the realms of higher mathematics, logic, and theoretical physics, in particular, and middleclass values and sensibilities everywhere, in general, were the agents most responsible for the origins of both world wars -- everything else, religion, ethnicity, economics, empire, immigration, borders, autocratic personalities, tariffs, oil, energy, minerals, food, totalitarian theories of history, disease, drought, technology, weaponry, treaties, asabiya, mythology, inherited grievances, ideology, electroconvulsive therapy, misjudgments, hatred, territorial imperatives, racism, et cetera and et cetera were stacked on top as overtones and grace notes. You can believe whatever you like; this is what I personally have concluded.
What is the status of our hugely interdisciplinary research into autogenic brain discharge phenomena and dynamical meteorology, you ask? There is no status, and there has been no status for almost a quarter of a century. Why is that? Because the papers were reviewed by scientists in possession of a mindset exemplified in the following statement by James Lovelock (The Revenge of Gaia, Basic Books, 2006, p. 161):
It took the discovery of the utter incomprehensibility of quantum phenomena to force the acceptance of a statistical more than a deterministic world…
How could Lukasiewiczian logics enter upon a mindset such as this?
“Woodwardian” and “Collish”: black propaganda. That's what I think, even leaving aside all the “large questions”. Speaking of Murtha's DI call for a pull-out, Woodward says (p. 424), “Two years after the war, their [U.S. troops] very presence in Iraq was impeding Iraq's progress toward stability and self-governance.” After THE WAR! Black propaganda. After the INVASION. Learned such OSS-MO writing techniques while assigned to Psychological Operations Group, JFK Special Warfare Center. And when was it, anyhow, U.S. troops undermined Iraqi “stability and self-governance”? Before, during, or after -- or all of the above? If there is one sentence like this in Denial, there's hundreds. As to the little questions like how things happened, following close behind the snuffing out of the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton-Woods monetary system by the way in which the Viet Nam war was financed, and impact of that on the global oil dynamic (beginning 22 September 1971 when OPEC directed its members to negotiate price increases to offset devaluation of the U.S. dollar carried out along with stepped separation of the dollar from gold) and on Islamist impulses, the Afghan decisions were critical. Steve Coll's book Ghost Wars has in its subtitle the phrase “…from the Soviet Invasion to…” whereas it was “getting some back from the Bear” in Afghanistan in the period from the oil crisis that followed immediately upon separating the dollar from gold and closing the gold window to the time of the Soviet invasion that was critical -- not after the invasion. That's what I think. Stinging the Bear in Afghanistan and taking it down sent the whole fragile institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian world construct into collapse mode -- in the absence of significant prior initiatives directed toward the post-meltdown state of the global nation-state system qua system. No thought at all about a post-paradigmatic Weltbilt and its institutionalization. The decision for a declaration of GWOT and a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan post-9/11 (nothing less stupid would have been tolerated by an across-the-board American public which had for decades uncritically “eaten” Viet Nam war puppy kibble) made as big a contribution to furthering collapse of the global system as did termination of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism and fatal stinging of the Soviet Bear. The two invasions of Iraq were epiphenomenal, and in retrospect, given what is coming down the pike, will be considered small potatoes; but some of the harshest criticism of the current U.S. posture in Iraq comes from those who created the circumstances within which that situation became all but inevitable -- only too understandable to a child psychologist.
Well, ah, uh, I mean, dah… Look, ain't ever'body so smart as the stupid suppose, even if people don' hire people smarter than dem. Fur asample: do you really believe smart lawyers framin' post-9/11 counter-terror legislation -- Patriot Act, et al. -- ever knowledgeably studied the utility, let alone the consequences, of legislation in actual insurgency-counterinsurgency situations such as the corpus of relevant laws passed by the GVN? If they looked at that corpus, which I seriously doubt, they couldn't have done so knowledgeably -- couldn't, because I personally know the very few lawyers who have significant knowledge of the VCI which that corpus was legislated against, and those few lawyers didn't get involved in post-9/11 lawmakin'. If you don't know nothin' about what it is you be tryin' to counteract, how you be formulatin' laws to counteract it? And what makes you think laws, any laws, could actually counteract it? Jus' one more worn-out security blanket tucked into the crib.
So, what do you want from someone who stayed in the system? From such a person, how could you hope to find a better, more accurate, characterization than the following (Denial, p. 486) from Rumsfeld?
“We're facing a set of challenges that are different than our country understands… They're different than the Congress understands. They're different than our government, much of our government, probably understands and is organized or trained or equipped to cope and deal with… and with these new realities, with an industrial-age organization in an environment that has not adapted and adjusted, a public environment that has not adapted and adjusted.”
But on top of that we have limited minds like those of an Oberdorfer, a Woodward, a Coll, a Downie, and the like interpreting such statements for public consumption by a public craving the dissimulation dished out daily, and highly intolerant of anything not assimilated by osmosis in junior high. Of course there is a chip about the Post, but not only the Post, any press person. I never met one I didn't have complete contempt for: especially Viet Nam voyeurs, Stanley Karnow on down. How much does a Peter Boyer or a Keith Collins bring to this discourse? About as much as a Karnow brought to the Viet Nam war discourse. Twenty years after the fact, I had dinner with Karnow in Kyoto, and this walking encyclopedia of that war knew virtually nothing of significance about the VCI -- and was so arrogantly attached to his ignorance, I made no attempt whatsoever to disabuse him of it. All smiles. I can't count how many met at the Bangkok Press Club in the same category, if of lesser stature. The day long working the garden talking hour after hour with Michael Deaver, renter of Ben Bradlee's property, that property so well used by JFK and MM and LSD, laughing about “pay any price” when the Kennedys rarely even pay the plumber, and what plumber can sue the Kennedys? Talkin' about insider stuff Deaver never read in the Post. Pouring drink after drink for Stuart Alsop's brother while repotting his bamboo and musing upon the dreary British-style portraits in the downstairs dinning room… the list goes on and on and on. With exposure, one develops an ever more healthy contempt. My personal exposure began very young and was deep. End of my fourteenth year was my turnaround point: decision by a straight-A student never again to get higher than a C. Hard to maintain the discipline of such a decision, but I did pretty good. At the same time, however, was pulled into ungraded tutorials on symbolic logic, topology, foundations of mathematics. Off on my own, pretty much, after that -- intellectually speaking. I was psychologically out of the system by age fourteen: got my body, but not my brain not contained by the brain! Nobody who stayed in the system could possibly see more than these quoted statements indicate Rumsfeld has. To find more insight, you gotta go outside the system. But not to me: not interested in the not-possible. It is far deeper than Rumsfeld has thought into. The country will never understand; the Congress will never understand; the government will never understand; the people will never understand. Not-possible in the 1T2 logic with which they identify and without which they cannot be. Understanding will come only with Plato's after-death state, an aspect of The Republic forgotten by current republics. All too likely billions will die in the space of a single decade. Being a realist, with a Platonic orientation to foundations… Probably wrong about all this, don't you think?
Bull. Look what happened to Sam Adams. There was no one from SRA I talked with about Sam who did not know, by their own experience, long ahead of the actual events, what in principle would happen to Sam. You're a baaaliever, man, a baaaliever. Sam tried to prevent the inevitability of a declaration of GWOT. He knew importance for the future, if not in specific, of what he was trying to do. But, being in Langley, he had been too far away from the actual events he studied to really understand. You had to work in places like CICV-Targets, SRA/MACV-J2. Only then could you come to understand the inevitability of the inevitability. There were many reasons why I quit AU-SIS in 1965, but one the biggest conscious reasons -- explicitly stated and written into the personal journal -- was the intent to witness up close American psychopathology in action, so as to gain better understanding of MYSELF, a self born to a bomber pilot on Flag Day of 1945. Being a military brat, I knew how to get around in the military -- what you could and could not get away with, and that getting around is best accomplished by an EM. Moreover, smart people don't become leaders in a bad war. And I was very lucky: Basic run by a Special Forces officer with six years in Laos and Viet Nam in need of command time for a promotion, with his A-Team in tow (this was the very end of the period of “team integrity”); considerable exposure to demolitions training in engineering AIT; Special Forces Aidman (Abn) course; Psychological Operations Group, JFK Special Warfare Center (six months free run of the library studying the classified history of special ops, while assigned to specialize in analysis of the Middle East in period of run up to the Six Day war); TID/525th MIG; three weeks, as an almost-recovered wounded, of fourteen-hour days as a surgical tech assisting in the OR at Camp Zama Army Hospital when it was flooded with wounded from the battle of Dak To; CICV-Targets; SRA/MACV-J2. This was considerable exposure to the Full Monty, coming as it did following upon a fair exposure to certain aspects of Washington, D.C., not the least of which was SORO (AU's Special Operations Research Office) and its corps of “old Asia hands”. It has long been clear, perhaps even to some removed so far as Langley, that the level of Viet Nam war comprehension the American people can support is The Powell Doctrine, a squad leader's lesson from the war; just as it has even longer been more than clear that the only historiography post-WWII Anglo-American academic historians can support is: what happened is why what happened happened. Social theory as the academic study of how academics write about how they write about the study of social theory, and other such notions of text -- all unconscious psychological projections of the self-referential “liar's paradox” at the foundation of m-valued Lukasiewicz logics, which, when integrated into consciousness at higher order-types, even if remaining completely unformalized to awareness, gives rise to the animistic identity transparency informing “terrorist networks” like the VCI, in reaction to the effects of which Colin Powell formulated his so easily understood Doctrine (the same doctrine the pagan-phobic White Man used to mount holocaust and genocide upon the animistic Red Man, beginning 500 years prior to the Persian Gulf war). Style is substance, medium is message, existence is essence: to a tele-don intelligentsia putting into conversation the reading of the writing of those academics writing the reading of what happened in the 20th century is why what happened happened in the 20th century. Music people can understand; mathematics people can understand; logic people can understand; quantum physics people can understand; history people can understand; war people can understand; biospheric and atmospheric destruction people can understand; human-species self-annihilation people can understand.
Look, I am by no means a believer in the nation-state system, let alone any particular form within that system or supraordinate agglomeration thereof, but I make every effort not to allow my beliefs to corrupt my ability to think. No nation-state can survive when treason becomes a normative, day-in-day-out behavior -- as it has in the US of A. Receiving stolen classified documents and publishing them or substance of their contents is, by any way you choose to look at it, giving aid, assistance, encouragement to those who oppose the interests of the nation-state from which the documents were stolen. When treason has become “leak”, it has become normative behavior: you are deluding yourself to think that the nation-state involved will survive this circumstance (and you are deluding yourself if projecting greater than a ten-percent survival rate when the nation-state system qua system itself collapses like the WTC, whether by JP4 or bombs, for, unlike the WTC, there is no outside the system on a small planet to escape to -- and you obviously don't understand if you think the “when” instead of an “if” makes this certain enough to qualify as an extremist statement: no paradigm ever has ever collapsed without its institutionalization collapsing after, however long that might have taken, and the longer the harder the fall: 1826 was a long time ago, a long time for a dead paradigm walking). You think normative treason has had no effect on GWOT, on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- however misguided they may be? The normal period of classification runs two decades. Some people take this to extremes, like my father, who, forty years later, wouldn't talk about it. Journalists receive stolen classified documents and publish excerpts, summaries, extractions days, weeks, months after the document was produced. This is of enormous, enormous STRATEGIC intelligence value to the opposition -- which is the type of intelligence that makes the difference between win or lose. Items of current, tactical, operational, actionable intelligence -- with the rarest exception -- have small impact only, on the course of a conflict. Only in bulk. Not so, items of strategic intelligence value. There is no iota of a chance that treason become “leak” become normative behavior has not had major impact on course of GWOT, Afghanistan, Iraq. I waited until after the twenty-year classification period ended before I sought out the documents I needed in order to write MOON. I knew exactly what I was looking for and where to find them. No problem. What was a problem, and what took me a visit to the Library of Congress every Sunday for well over a year until they were finally made available, were copies of the very large-scale maps of the city of Saigon I had used while at SRA/MACV-J2 which I required in order to attain the accuracy I wished in description of the city. Provision of strategic intelligence by normative treason, AS STAB IN THE BACK, is an issue of absolutely no intrinsic interest to me, being no believer in the nation-state system. Moreover, there have been so many stabs in the back, the behavior has simply become a bore, and something any decent strategic planner simply has to assume and factor in. What interests me about this “provisioning behavior” is that it is yet one more very strong indicator of a collective unconscious pan-human will to species suicide. And though I do not believe the nation-state system has ever been in the human interest, I am not an advocate of its incendiary collapse -- particularly absent even a single initiative anywhere on the planet directed toward prefiguration of a post-Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian institutionalization. And, moreover, when both the individual and collective aspects of human consciousness/unconscious have reached the abysmal nadir they have, while being in possession of several thousand nuclear weapons and much else besides.
It certainly does look like UBL was exactly right (even if he doesn't see full spectrum of the deeper dimensions): the U.S. will go the way of the USSR. First S, then S2, and now for S3 -- where Abel's quintic is unreachable and S = Stupid. Ah, a period of relative calm, if in face of a full-court press. Coding Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian: efforts to reclaim the American Dream, restore the American Dream. Prerequisite to what? Human species self-annihilation? The most likely drift is for 5-6-7-8 years of recycling old saws newly named, gravitating on, if not realizing, the many dimensions of fortress America, with the usual ups and downs, and development of a very accommodating Europe, then the beginnings of a few more whimpers or a brightly lit night sky (depending on how hard the full-court press: the Islamists, not comprehending the full spectrum, have no insight into the magnitude and depth of collective hysteria, far predating the origins of Islam…JUMP…[e.g., one of the myriad currently-operative components being the suppressed regressed-hysteric, red-haired Neanderthal, Japanese animistic-Shinto displacement, projection-introjection identification, collective-unconscious prefigurative prognostication by the late and only once-atomized: brains disconnected from their quantum substrate]…JUMP…they are probing, a hysteria potentially armed with thousands of nukes and the requisite delivery capacity for War [truly] Without Mercy: to a one-time targets analyst assigned to a shop that targeted pre-Cambodian-holocaust victims, who doesn't doubt that the suicidal self-metaprogram of John C. Lilly's Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer and The Center of the Cyclone operates on the collective unconscious level, looking at history of the world wars and the fact that economic development has long been framed as equivalent to forced-draft urbanization, and that the vast bulk of the human species has fallen for this self-imposed ruse… Talkin' 'bout targets!). There was never any possibility the U.S. could survive descent into functional disintegration of the institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian world construct, but there was some small possibility actual feelers into a post-paradigmatic Weltbilt would be put out. No longer. This scuttled synoptic far from equilibrium phase transition is laid back in wet thrust and locked-on to a far lower level of functional integration in the resultant stable state. Done deal. No interest in details, timing.
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