Yes, I've read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2004). A tough book to read for someone who shares so few of the premises. The story told was not only predicable, but repeatedly predicted solely on the basis of what was not taught in Special Forces Training Group in 1966, and surely has not been taught anytime since. The glaring lacunas were slap-in-the-face obvious to anyone arriving at Training Group direct from hands of the already-pushed-out-of-influence Old Hands at American University's Special Operations Research Office (SORO). Those in the worst, no-window, cubbyhole compartments who wrote the dense, nuanced, interdisciplinary studies poorly circulated and rarely read; not those producing fact-compendium, bulleted, outline-style Area Handbooks for Department of the Army seen dog-eared on virtually every official bookshelf across brilliant reaches of N.W. Washington, Rosslyn, and the Palisades above Chain Bridge. If memory serves, it was 1966 when in-the-hinterlands SORO, itself, finally got rid of the Old Hands, stopped doing anything insightful, and renamed itself Center for Research in Social Systems (CRESS). That's probably when it started receiving truly major funding. What was not taught at Training Group in 1966 was not taught because of the degree to which assumptions of the OSS mindset determined the training parameters. And one can be sure that, if the OSS mindset determined the parameters of Special Forces training through people like Aaron Banks (MOON's Colin Dawes, Jacques Toussaint's OSS commander, being a stand-in for AB), this same mindset determined CIA operational assumptions far more so. You can see effects of this mindset to this very day as far away as Time magazine. For instance, Michael Ware's “Meet the New Jihad” (July 5, 2004, p. 33): “…less a military unit than a decentralized terrorist operation… the network shifts constantly… no formal membership in any one group… The amorphous nature of the resistance…” These phrases come from talking to members of the intelligence establishment. Quite simply, the intellectual equipment required for comprehension just does not exist anywhere in the American power structure: it has been blown away by 50 years of black self-propaganda blowback. Any organization that does not function according to Cartesian-Newtonian-Weberian principles can only be apprehended as “amorphous”. The term “amorphous” serves the same function for the intelligence analyst as the term “pathological” serves for the atmospheric physicist specialized in the study of severe storm genesis. And that just went way the hell over their heads!
But then the story told is not the story -- as is the case in postmodernist texts generally. And how could the story be the story, if you can't apprehend what it is you are trying to describe? And if you can't apprehend what you are trying to describe, how could you have “used it” for your own purposes as it was being brought up? Organize the “amorphous”, that pathological anomaly? Come on! Them damn Afghans can't agree ta nothin'! Just give the “amorphous” guns and time pencils through your client and let it sort itself out. That old OSS partisan-resistance game. If it gets to be too big of a mess, drop a bomb on it, like we done in The Good War. And consider the incontestable fact that the war in Afghanistan helped bring down the Soviet Union. Is that so? Or is that the dismantlement of the U.S.S.R., which would have transpired, Afghan war or no Afghan war, was put onto a flight path by the war in Afghanistan that helped the human species escape one of the last opportunities available to it to arrive at forms of organization consonant with the post-Newtonian paradigm elaborating itself with ever increasing vigor over the previous hundred years? Kill two birds with one stone. There was no possibility, of course, that people like Sakharov, who certainly knew nothing of post-Newtonian paradigms, had been for decades in process of vectoring the Soviet intellectual elite toward top-down dismantlement and onto uncharted organizational seas. And no possibility that Gorbachev, during the very short moment of opportunity, was screaming into darkest night for help in finding a route to the New (post-Newtonian) World Sakharov and his Vernadsky-ilk had pointed to. And what was the beacon finally switched on? Crash capitalism! With its flash transfer of state-held assets to a new oligarchy. How very Newtonian. How very like reconstitution of the zaibatsu by the U.S. Occupation authorities in postwar Japan, supposedly undertaken as a defense against communism.
Will the stone cast turn into a boomerang and come back to kill the bird-brained ornithologist? Coll would have us believe that U.S. actions in Afghanistan-Pakistan-Kashmir to “get some back from the Bear” began with Carter-Brzezinski, not Eisenhower. When was it the Indochina war began, with its impetus to “get some back”? And that the acceleration came in the time of Brzezinski, not in the time of Kissinger. Special Forces involvement enters his story in 1985, not during the second Indo-Pak war. That drugs and illicit banking operations had no role to play. And we, apparently, are to believe that formation of OPEC and oil price rise in the acceleration period had nothing to do with Nixon terminating Bretton-Woods, and what at that point happened to the value of the dollar, which was, after all, the currency denominating oil transactions. Or what role the Vietnam war played in making dollar confidence, the dollar having become fiat, solely dependent upon boisterous demonstrations that America sets the global agenda. Lots to get back from the Bear! Which story was not the story?
The real story is how all initiatives leading to a New post-Newtonian World have been suppressed and how, as a result, the “amorphous” came to embody a REGRESSED version of that which should have emerged as an integrated organizational vehicle. And how this regressed version, once fully globalized and having jumped beyond the initiating Islamic constituency, will be the most coherent framework setting the terms for rebuilding in the post-transition period.
Look, all of this is simply in the realms of multiple scenarios brainstorming, a potentially useful exercise. The long-lead, future-history projection of the formation of a Germano-Russian Bloc, arrived at before collapse of the Soviet Union, was based upon mapping disjointed incrementalism upon development of German-Russian relations. Disjointed incrementalism, in my utilization, is not solely a push-push algorithm; it has a teleological chaotic-attractor dimension. As a planning methodology, a vague fuzzy-logic strategic goal is postulated as a pull factor. The zig-zag motion of the increments are pushed by tactical improvisational responses to immediate SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) factors, but the worldline of the zigs and zags is pulled by the projected attractor. This understanding of disjointed incrementalism marries Newtonian causality to chaotic quantum teleology. I imagined a multivalent attractor governing the worldline of German-Russian relations over centuries, the most potent and deep-seated operative valences being psychological and cultural. The projection of the chaotic attractor, of course, is automatic on the collective unconscious as a function of the factors governing archetypal constellation. Given Musculpt, one could probably compose a mathematical synformphonie piece representing codification of the process (and this is more or less the direction in which Jung and Pauli were trying to move with their attempts to model Jung's notion of synchronisity, a non-probablistic acausal connecting principle; not incidentally, in the 1920s, Pauli was the first to postulate the notion of operator-time). Contemporary chaos and complexity theory, of course, having no insight into operator-time and having wed themselves to statistics and probability so as to maintain a supposed “classical limit”, offer no plausible explanation for the origin of attractors. Historically, the “Newtonian nudging approach” has been involved, in that charismatic personalities can “nudge” already constellated archetypes by establishing psychological identifications with them and fashioning personas accordingly. The charismatic personality thereby borrows the free energy accumulated by the constellated archetypal attractor and transmits the state of identification to the corpus of the collectivity. This becomes regressive only under conditions of suppression; anything that suppresses conscious integration of collective factors makes those factors regressive. The attractor's pull is most overt when imposed stress is most elaborate: everything goes to the most basic level under acute stress. As the European movement to Cartesian-Newtonian federation founders in an environment ever increasingly parameterized by gathering deployment of quantum-based technologies, stress on the evolving system becomes greater and greater. The defining characteristics of Newtonian systematics and quantum systemactics are incommensurate and irreconcilable. This increasing stress, the scenario postulated, will magnify the strategic pull of the attractor until it momentarily overwhelms instrumentality of the tactically-improvised push responses. I never developed this particular scenario enough to speculate on the concrete occasions by which this might occur. These days, however, with increasing debate over whether Germany, the EU, or both are to receive veto-empowered permanent seats on the UN Security Council, one can see potential scenario details emerging. Draw a matrix of the possible outcomes of this initiative and the likely national responses. Then view this matrix relative to evolution of total system state-function. The UN's decision algorithm is unanimity, with veto upon dissention -- whereas the federative principle requires for its functionality application of Newton's summation of forces (majority rule in peace and resultant of combat in war). The initiative to expand the Security Council is an attempt to increase potency of the federation component in the UN structure as a push-push generalization of the EU's move in this direction, and to borrow impetus for the EU's transit toward federation from the UN's structural properties. Unanimity is a quantum-based principle: the arising of spontaneous order at the critical state (e.g., the emergence of superconductivity at the Curie temperature). But there is nothing in the UN's original conception or present structure to facilitate such critical-state phase transitions. So, there is every reason to suspect that the initiative to expand the Security Council will contribute to the gathering organizational crisis both in the UN and the EU.
My statement about jumping “beyond the initiating Islamic constituency” does not necessarily imply that such jumping would be carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. No hierarchical management system or chain of command. No formal membership. No real structure, only constant shifts. Amorphous. Where do these judgments come from? They come from the analytic categories employed. The analyst is imposing his categories on the thing to be analyzed, not using the categories inherent to that thing. How are the two to be separated? Introspection and “extrospection” (as opposed to mere inspection). Ones own categories can only be identified by systematic self-observation. The categories apropos of the thing to be analyzed are not generally identified by systematic inspection or analysis of that thing; this is appropriate only after such identification has already been made -- and once the categories arrived at have been separated from those identified through introspection. How then to identity the categories inherent to the thing? By voluntarily cultivating a diffuse state of mind in presence of that thing to be “extrospected”. Consider Jasper Johns painting entitled “1 to 10”. The average viewer sees nothing but visual white noise, a jumble of amorphous colors depicting nothing. But, if the viewer learns to “go diffuse” while staring at the painting, suddenly the numbers 1, 2, 3… all the way up to 10 jump out of the “amorphous” into clear view. The Taliban's organizational paradigm, as distinct from the ideological-religious justification of it, is easily generalized to any portion of the planet where traditional animism has recently prevailed -- large areas. This organizational paradigm had its origins in local self-defense in face of political and economic chaos brought about by failed policies of nation-states, was based on village traditions, relied on animistic tribal voluntarism, and drew upon inspiration provided by local myths as an adhesive device. It was only later, as outside state-provided funds became available to the Taliban, that the religious factor back-reacted on the metric of animistic metareference and suppressed it (this has great similarity with certain processes that transpired during the thirty-year war in Indochina). The jirga, or its equivalent in non-Islamic traditions, TRADITIONALLY did not choose for leadership the “weak” one for considerations-of-power reasons, but because the “weak” one was most likely to have the diffuse receptivity required for shamanistic access to collectively-mandated decision factors; he was the one most likely to be capable of taking a mediumistic trance-read on the collective need by identifying himself with the constellated archetype, to use Jungian terminology. In the very old days of such traditions, before rise of specialization, any member of the corpus was capable of becoming a shaman-for-the-day. This is a “mechanism” for arriving at consensus or unanimity -- a trance-read on the collective need, by definition in context of animistic “identity transparency”, automatically establishes unanimity -- the very thing the UN, for instance, does not have, and the fundamental reason for the necessity of veto power. It is very likely that as the requisite circumstances arise, others, not the Islamic fundamentalists, will separate the organizational paradigm from the prevailing justification and employ the paradigm independent of its current justification. Indeed, there are indications that something like this may already be happening in Latin America and Africa.
In response to your critique of my idea that (a) 9/11 was a sting operation run on the U.S. to elicit a knee-jerk American response that would create circumstances that would meet the prerequisites for fulfillment of Al Qaeda's desire to undertake an organizational phase transition from international terrorism to global insurgency, and (b) that the Taliban and Al Qaeda performed brilliantly in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion, I can only say that (a) is beyond a reasonable doubt and, if (a) was indeed the case, then (b) has to be seriously entertained. We know from Bob Woodward's Bush At War (Simon & Schuster, 2002) that (1) Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance commander, was assassinated two days before 9/11 (p. 51), and (2) Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan were virtually empty at the time of the World Trade Center attacks (p. 44). Both (1) and (2) indicate that Al Qaeda expected U.S. actions against them in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. On 9/12, the CIA was reporting that Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan within the attack hour were saying that the WTC “attackers were following through with 'the doctor's program'” (p. 40). The doctor was Ayman al-Zawahiri, reputedly bin Laden's chief strategist. But what was “the doctor's program”? For that, we must turn to the doctor's book, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner (serialized in Al-Hayah, December 2001, according to Through Our Enemy's Eyes by Anonymous, published by Brassey's Inc. in 2002). Steve Coll in Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2004) partially summarizes, partially quotes the relevant passage from al-Zawahiri's book (p. 383 of Coll): al-Zawahiri advocated “the need to inflict the maximum casualties” on the U.S. “because, once provoked, the Americans would probably reply with revenge attacks” which would create circumstances “ripe for a 'clear-cut jihad against infidels'”. By 9/15, the U.S. had decided for war (p. 75 of Woodward); by 9/26 there were U.S. paramilitary operators on the ground in Afghanistan (p. 139 of Woodward). Four days is not sufficient time to assess whether or not one is being led down a nail strewn path, let alone to determine how big the nails are likely to be around the first and subsequent bends.
What is the main point? The main point is that for 150 years an insolent, infantile, intellectual elite has refused to permit the institutional transformation required by the paradigm shift which has occurred during the period. This refusal has directly resulted in the rise of communism, the Franco-Prussian War, WWI, and WWII. Each of these events only magnified the insolence and infantilism so prominently on display. Presently, as we approach the foamy edge of the cusp catastrophe's breaking wave, the mandated transformation has no place to go except into hands of the hoi polloi, where, due to the resolute repression, it has emerged in regressed fashion an expression of animistic tribalism. The drive activation of this regressed animism is so great because it metaphorically mirrors the principles underlying the new paradigm, animistic “identity transparency” being a reflection of quantum “relative-state” -- but, being regressed, the entelechy implicit in “identity transparency”, again, just like in WWII, finds explicit form in fascination with transformative death. We are entering the 5th parallax on this collective behavior and on each prior critical-state occasion magnitude of the megakill has incremented up. Draw your own conclusions as to what the future holds. You think some member of the elite, like mathematician Abel, is going suddenly to penetrate this equation of the 5th degree and produce a miraculous solution set? Abel prefigured the required transpose in the 1820s by solving for the first time an equation of the 5th degree, but clear implications of his accomplishment have been resolutely resisted until the present day, as reflected in the current status of m-valued logic, the direct heir of his efforts. Hosanna! Hosanna!
Yes, you are drawing the right conclusions from this discourse. I have long argued there is no efficacy in war crimes trials. Not only is there no evidence that war crimes trials prevent (rather than metastasize) future war crimes; not only does the very idea of a “war crime” suggest that acts of war can be conducted in moral fashion, thus preparing the way for justification of the next war; not only is the notion “war crime” based upon the mistaken premise that war crimes are individual acts, not collective behaviors; but war crimes trials very concretely ritualize in the community of peoples suppression of consciously integrated collective behaviors, that specific suppression most responsible for the regressive mass hysterias war crimes actually are. Collective behaviors consciously integrated give rise to spontaneous social order; collective behaviors suppressed, and hence regressed, give rise to mass expressions of infantile violence. This became such a mass hysterical issue during the 20th century because quantum mechanics is “the physics of collective and cooperative phenomena” in material systems, and thus fundamentally challenged the individualistic assumptions upon which Cartesian-Newtonian institutions are based. In response to this challenge, which seriously accelerated beginning early in the 19th century due to appearance of the mathematical precursors of the new physics, those institutions redoubled efforts to suppress every manifestation of collective behavior encountered. Whereas in the past, slavery and/or genocide of tribal and peasant peoples who organize themselves on basis of collective and cooperative behaviors were methodically pursued over long periods, in the 20th century with the redoubled efforts the event sequence became compressed and the effects of regressive mass action transpired in relatively short bursts of very massive collective violence. Such mass behaviors are not organized on a cause-effect basis, as historians identified with the notion of individualism would have us believe; they are constellated and organized thematically in the collective unconscious, the physical events via processes of collective projection metaphorically mirroring the internal themes. Persons who intensely advocate war crimes trials believe that under no circumstance could they ever participate in a war crime. This belief not only indicates an unconscionable degree of ignorance regarding the actual factors governing human behaviors, but a staggering level of ineptitude at introspection. The involved self-righteous moral posturing conceals the shaking fear of the transpersonal which actually motivates the crusade against the collective aspects of consciousness. This fear-of-higher-self motivated crusade, dissimulated as pursuit of high ethical purpose, is one of the main causes of the genocidal behaviors in question.
Well, of course there are many interesting aspects to Steve Coll's book, Ghost Wars. The chapter most interesting to me is “The Manson Family” about the bin Laden issue station inside the Counterterrorist Center. According to Coll, this station got that name because of the “cult”-like “intense” manner it pursued its studies, and the “crazed alarmism” with which it characterized the threat, the long hours it worked, and the highly educated nature of its analysts. This story is the story of POLOB-SRA at CICV-MACV-HQ all over again. The same story, the exact same story -- which is precisely what people at SRA knew would happen in the future, and repeatedly predicted. I know of only one person at SRA who considered working for the CIA after leaving Vietnam, and that person decided against it following the recruitment interviews. It was simply all too obvious as early as 1968 to people with experience like that gotten at SRA what the future held. Who in their right mind would pursue, given the constants of the bureaucratic and policy context, what certainly would be a failed career? No one chose that path. I personally turned down the offer of a direct battlefield commission for many reasons, including this one. SRA analysts deeply understood the broad range of possible applications of the organizational principles they were studying and clearly saw the inevitability of such applications in the future. They were writing no autopsies on the principles of this sort of warfare. It was also obvious what the nature of the response would be once those applications were brought into being. If this was obvious to those at SRA, imagine how well understood it would be by those who actually went through the process of bringing up such applications. There was nothing to be achieved by fighting what would certainly be a losing battle with the bureaucratic and policy context. Look what happened to Sam Adams, who made a valiant try! The whole of American society was dead set against developing insight. The perspective developed, according to Coll's account, by Paul Pillar, the deputy director of the Counterterrorist Center, i.e., that terrorism is “a challenge to be managed, not solved” and a “communicable disease” to be “controlled” -- with all that such “management” would involve -- is closest to the circumscribed SRA orientation, except that no mention is made of the all important issue of preventing organizational phase transitions, and how establishment of that priority necessarily would greatly modify all the standard approaches, particularly the removing-people-Phoenix-Program approach which facilitates metastasizing, be that approach law-enforcement or counterintelligence oriented. To quote Derek writing into his journals in 1971 or '72 (MOON, Vol. 2, pp. 350-51):
Terrorism is not a series of acts; it is a long, drawn out cultural process. Terrorism is not perpetrated by individuals or groups; it is autoimmune response in a civilization suffering degenerative disease of the collective psyche. This disease has been intensifying by ebb and flow over the decades. If the problem of terrorism continues to be met as if it were perpetrated acts, there will be an inflammatory fulmination of unimagined proportions.
But this was merely the circumscribed orientation, that orientation one would take if one did not consider fundamental causes of terrorism. Development of the uncircumscribed orientation involved all the “extracurricular” discussions about systematic sustained blocking of the global institutional phase transition mandated by the stalled paradigm shift between the Cartesian-Newtonian and quantum-relativity paradigms, quantum correspondences with traditional animistic organizational formats seen, for instance, in the Viet Cong political infrastructure, and so on. If one considered basic causes, then management could be no more successful than seeking the impossible solution. In a bureaucratic and policy environment characterized by “lateral mental cleavage” the issue of fundamental causes never arises; the policy principals simply have lacuna-on-the-brain with regards to that whole dimension. And this psychoneurological state is an expression of the fact that the whole society is dead set against developing insight. But people will never look this straight in the face. Too hard, too painful, too fundamentally threatening, too much guilt to be borne. It will run its nasty course.
And -- not to forget -- oh yes, I too flashed on the content of note 14 to this chapter (p. 635) by Coll. In context of a discussion of preparations for a snatch that might inadvertently become a snuff targeted on bin Laden, in the note there is an account of Zinni, Albright, and Freeh traveling personally to the site, Tashkent, from which the operation is to be arranged. Who ever heard of people at the level of Centcom Commander, Secretary of State, and the FBI Director personally getting thus involved in such an operation? One would think that such activity at that level would be associated with preparations for a strategic shift of some sort, not the type of thing Coll is apparently recounting. Which might go a long way to actually explaining a lot of the crazy stuff described in the book.
I know this sort of thing has an “I told you so” quality, which is true on one level and certainly is not exemplary of Buddha Mind, but even that quality seems somewhat “useful” after 40 years of resolutely hitting on certain “themes” completely ignored which have generated a series of major disasters, and disasters yet to come -- ignored because of a short list of cardinal factors which have yet to be, but must be, directly addressed if anything resembling a positive future is to be found. And it truly is now over 40 years, as my serious hitting on these themes began with exposure to Special Operations Research Office (SORO) soon after the JFK assassination in 1963. Associated in my mind is memory of standing on a rooftop in D.C. next to what was clearly a Secret Service agent or some such watching De Gaulle and the others tramp down the street behind the caisson and a matter of only days later entering SORO for the first time to do research on the long critique I wrote of the Strategic Hamlets Program, Ngo Dinh Nhu's “Personalism”, and his attempted counterintelligence application of the pao chia neighborhood association system, for which, in large measure, he was eventually killed. And which, I might add, the U.S. is currently implementing a version of in the Zone of the Interior (ZI) via Homeland Security, truck-driver road surveillance agents, Neighborhood Watch, and so on. I will say a bit about this paper because it relates to the following: I can find nothing in the institutional critique offered in James Bamford's A Pretext for War (Doubleday, 2004, by no means a piece of work like Coll's book) that is not at least touched upon in MOON, including the technical issues raised in the discussion of the NSA's failure to keep up with the evolving technological environment (Sette's rollicking discussion in the Geisha Scene with Derek about microcomputerization of “brocade-collar offenses” and his immediately following parody argument with Toussaint about precursors to the Afghan war and failure of the corporate management paradigm, filled with Faust and Holy Grail references, directly followed by a “wig play” on mistaken identity versus identity transparency written in the form of a Noh drama beginning in the Green Room is an allegory for evolving problems in technical intelligence production, among other things, as a Cartesian-Newtonian organization attempts to manage an environment characterized by ever increasing deployment of quantum-based technologies). This means that all the factors discussed by Bamford relative to the 1990s existed in the 1960s and were exemplified in characteristics of the intelligence environment of that period. And that current characterization of the problems is no better today than it was in the 1960s, which is not even to raise issues of possible solutions. But the problems involved are much larger then effectiveness of intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination, which is just a specific case where properties of the general case can be seen.
I chose to research the program most associated with Ngo Dinh Nhu because of the public challenge about Nhu's murder I had made to Mac Bundy several weeks earlier at an American University, School of International Service (SIS) dinner where he had been the keynote speaker -- and because of his deceitful response. After this event, I, a first semester freshman, was called on the carpet by the Dean of SIS and upbraided. This near stand-down set me in motion. The Strategic Hamlets Program paper was written for a 12-hour interdisciplinary team-taught problem-based seminar entitled “Human Behavior”, where the primary instructor was George Harris, an anthropologist who was the hands-on leader of the SORO team then completing the writing of the U.S. Army Handbook for Vietnam. Though many standard texts and supplementary books were required or recommended for this class, the lectures of Harris were almost exclusively engaged with outlining the history of changes of anthropology paradigms. This was intellectual history of the discipline and its methodologies, not content of the discipline, its specific concrete studies and data generation. A similar intellectual-history focus was simultaneously being transmitted in the interdisciplinary seminar “American Civilization”, taught by Elspeth Rostow, the wife of then Director of the Policy Planning Board of the State Department, W. W. Rostow. This focus was repeated in “Backgrounds of Western Civilization” as then taught at AU's School of International Service. In researching and writing the Strategic Hamlets paper, I thus took an anthropological approach oriented by an intellectual-history take on the discipline. Years later, Sam Adams read this school paper just before the Westmoreland vs. CBS trial and his response was something like: “My God! When you wrote this thing with page after page of annotated esoteric references, I hardly knew where Vietnam was.” Many of the most esoteric references came from Bernard Fall's personal library, Fall being a friend of George Harris.
Nothing like this could have transpired at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where the curriculum was very different from that at AU's SIS: traditionally organized, content oriented. Moreover, Georgetown's students did not cowboy the capital like AU's SIS students then did: develop strategies like attend classes only the first week, the weeks before mid-terms and finals, skim required reading and closely study recommended reading, write answer for the major exam question before the test, memorize it along with all the references, and adapt the prefabricated answer to whatever the question turned out to be, touching on a few of the required readings and concentrating on the always-more-difficult recommended readings (the sort of thing one had to be able to do expertly as a diplomat, politician, or an operative); spend time on the other campuses in the area; learn the small libraries and galleries all over town; become short-term bartender and film-crew hires for media bashes, inheriting the unwanted half-empty bottles for the home or frat bar; find ways to crash embassy parties and inaugural balls under this or that impersonation or surreptitiously acquired invitation; regularly prowl think-tank libraries and State Department desk officers while writing simulated position papers and country briefs (this was possible in '63, no longer possible by '65 as the town closed down on antiwar security issues); hang out for the late-night intellectual brawls engaged in by the African and Middle Eastern grad students and embassy gofers working part-time at the Blue Nile and the 14th Street belly-dancer supper clubs; con the Congressional Reference Service into writing college papers; run scams on Congressional staff, trade associations, embassy attachés, and lobby groups. My contribution to this cowboy style, only one among many, had personal origins as a 10-and-11-year-old playing hide-and-seek in the hills and gullies with the Japanese guard unit protecting Ashiya AFB, Japan: there were many off-limits areas along the fence lines, many caves in the cliffs off the ends of the runways containing live ammo and swords left over from the war. I sat in on the guard's kendo training sessions, then reconned the guard routes and schedules, planned operations for days, infiltrated and exfiltrated: much more fun than King of the Mountain on the local sand hills. Here was the fast track to finding out how the city really worked, not simply passively receiving the hagiographic account of how it was supposed to work. This is very important -- given the fact that Clinton, Tenet, and Saudi intelligence chief Turki attended the Georgetown Foreign Service School, and, as Bamford says, currently over 400 Georgetown Foreign Service School grads work for the CIA (p. 122). As a humorous but educational aside, I remember an early December 1963 visit to D.C. by my father, then a one-time combat-hardened pilot and a very accomplished Air Force colonel supply and materiel trouble-shooter preparing for a tour in Vietnam who had, years earlier, been shot down over occupied Alsace-Lorraine and spent three months behind enemy lines being moved across France by the Resistance and safely back to England without being captured by the Germans. He took me out to dinner and, strangely, let me choose the place, rather than the usual Army-Navy Country Club. I took him to the belly-dancer supper club on 14th Street I occasionally spent time in, as I knew they would serve me especially good fare. This was undoubtedly one of the more unpleasant social occasions of my father's life, became part of family lore, and almost got me pulled out of AU. The degree of discomfort he experienced with the culture-shock environment was extraordinary to observe. And this man had lived around the world, albeit in American communities, over the past 20 years. Part of my Washington education. AU took 80 students a year into SIS in the early-60s. Virtually every entering freshman planned to take the Foreign Service Exam. In my class, by the end of the second year, perhaps only 10 still intended a diplomatic career: they had learned enough about “the system” that they had abandoned the aspiration. How horrible a government service career would be! For most, the Vietnam war had little to do with it. And I think only two or three took the exam after graduation. Contrast this with Georgetown's Foreign Service School.
What I was trying to accomplish, if only in an amateurish way, with the Strategic Hamlets paper was to penetrate the intellectual history of how this failed program had happened. This focused my attention on paradigm-conflict-related issues and how they interface with institutional structures, functions, and algorithms. This is generally a non-sanctioned sort of research, as it cuts across all disciplinary boundaries. AU's SIS, however, not Georgetown, at that time sanctioned such approaches in its undergraduate interdisciplinary seminars. Georgetown's disciplinarian approach prevented the student from becoming aware of the paradigm level in policy formulation, institution creation and management, the level where tacit assumptions play so large -- which do have some connection with cross-cultural awareness, or the absence thereof. This approach propagates from academic generation to academic generation aspects of what I have adapted the term “lateral mental cleavage” to designate: no awareness of certain levels of function. At Georgetown, a paper on the Strategic Hamlets Program would have been a political analysis or a military analysis -- at most a politico-military analysis. Given that the NSA's current crisis involves a Cartesian-Newtonian bureaucracy trying to adapt to a rapidly changing information-communications environment characterized by mega-infusions of quantum-based technologies, the paradigm level is of the utmost importance. According to Bamford, they are trying to overcome the problems presented by fiber-optic cables, digitalized cell phones, fragmented internet transmission protocols, and so on -- ah, targeting information parked on hard drives, that'll do it -- when, according to my perspective, the real problem is embedded in the intellectual-history properties of the paradigm shift itself -- to which they surely are not attending, or more likely are tacitly attempting to suppress. It's not too much information or fragmented information or collapsing turnaround time or inadequate human penetration; they don't know what to analyze or how to analyze the what they don't know they don't know -- which is epiphenomenal of the paradigm-shift quagmire that has been there for a very long time and which they are resolutely committed to deepening. Failures, mistakes, oversights, under-sights, cross-wirings, short-circuits, panics, phobias, obsessions are inherent properties of counterintelligence operations, reducible but non-eliminate-able, properties assumed by the opposition in developing its strategies and tactics.
When I came back to look at AU a couple of years after my stint in Vietnam, SIS in my judgment was no longer so rich an educational environment as it had been in the '63-'65 period. I nonetheless began to reapply to the school and had an interview with the NDEA loan officer, who was a recently retired Army colonel, armor branch if I remember right, which his “wall of courage” prominently displayed in various framed certificates documenting his career. He went into an aggressive litany of recriminations concerning why I had not immediately returned to school after separating from the Army, that this suggested to him that I might not be a very good loan candidate, et cetera. I smiled through his antics, got up and departed without a word in response. How could I explain to someone like him that I had needed to work with my hands for a few years as a way to get the blood out of my eyes before I could possibly return to the study of international affairs? And can you imagine? Allowing a dumpy retired LEG colonel tell me how to conduct my life. My god. Beyond conception! Not to mention explaining to him this was my second overture to AU since Vietnam. I had returned in late October of '68 directly to George Harris, explaining my experience at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-HQ, the importance of the interrogations conducted on rallier Lt. Col. Tran Van Dac to conceptual issues concerned with understanding what I was starting to call quantum properties in the functioning of the Vietcong Political Infrastructure (the VCI, a terrorist network), and that I had set up a circumstance whereby Dac could be gotten to the PI for a year-long debriefing to explore these properties in depth: people in Saigon would work with me on this. Harris queried for a long time to find out details of what I was referring to, the notions involved being so unusual, and became quite enthusiastic, then put me in touch with the president of Human Sciences Research, Inc., a just-inside-the-beltway McLean DOD contractor with many current Vietnam-related projects. People at HSR questioned me in depth over several days and became very interested. They wanted to make me a rider to an existing project so as to get me back to Saigon as soon as possible to start working on getting Dac free of the Chieu Hoi Ministry. But they wanted a brief to DOD first, as a feeler, and then they would handle the full project application. What I think happened is that DOD gave a nod, then, given that the SRA take on the VCI was so much anathema, scuttled it by the back door in leaking a fabrication to the press, published in a leading news weekly, indicating Dac was to head up a Chieu Hoi delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. This never happened, and never was going to happen according to information which later came back to me from Saigon, but it prevented any commitment toward getting Dac to the PI for a year. So I walked. Several years later, George Harris ambled into Beeches Nursery, a little Japanese business on the triangle between routes 123 and 193 directly in the shadow of CIA Headquarters and ran into me pruning bonsai. “You ended up here?” he asked. “Not a bad life,” I replied, “making a Japanese garden for Julia Helms [wife of Richard] and chatting history and his brother's exploits with Joe Alsop while repotting bamboo for the Georgetown townhouse.” Harris was a bit mystified and strolled on to check out the flats of annuals on sale. In 1980, I made a third post-Vietnam overture to AU. This time I went in with a copy of the paper I had coauthored, recently published in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, describing a mathematical model of superconductant DNA and told the counselor I wanted to do a master's degree thesis comparing critical phase transitions in the organizational dynamics of the Vietcong Political Infrastructure (VCI), based on historical data I knew where and how to get, with critical-state behaviors of collective and cooperative quantum phenomena like superconductivity. I told him I'd do whatever they wanted to finish my undergrad degree, so long as they would sign a statement guaranteeing that I could do such a study for a grad degree. By then, my intellectual-history, paradigm-conflict approach was getting elaborate. The guy leafed through my resume and the several pages of equations constituting the reprint, asked no questions, and launched into an emotional diatribe about how it was impossible someone with my background could understand such a paper, let alone have helped write it, that there had to be some kind of hoax involved in this, that there was no connection between quantum physics and political science, and who the hell did I think I was anyway. So, again, I smiled through the antics, got up and departed without a word in response. That was the last time I set foot on the AU campus. Given what had earlier transpired at Cornell as the ideas in the DNA paper had developed, I was not really surprised by this reaction and had gone into AU with this proposal more or less just for the record and to complete the circle, so to speak. Aesthetics of the life pattern have always seemed to me rather important -- aesthetic properties of life pattern, an impress of moral strain, being the karmic carryover, the “eidolon” of quantum relative-state, mapped on superposition of simultaneous incarnations. A good algorithm by which to identify “good work” and through which to organize ones major life decisions.
One scam we ran, which turned out to be very educational, if not quite kosher, contributed in a minor way to my decision to quit school in 1965, enlist airborne unassigned, and volunteer for Special Forces Medic training. Of course, I inevitably had to find out for myself more about hamlets in Vietnam, but that's not part of this story. I had become associated with AIESEC, an international business student exchange program which had its beginnings in association with the Marshall Plan following WWII. There were no Georgetown students involved in this at that time in the early-60s, only a few from AU's SIS. A very important Senator was a strong supporter of AIESEC, though not on its board of advisors, and he agreed to provide us with letters of introduction on his official stationary to use in soliciting traineeships from corporations. Trouble was, there were few large corporations located in D.C., so we had to get creative. We decided to focus on Latin America and chose about a dozen countries, went to their embassy libraries (which one could make use of in the early-60s before the city closed down) and studied which U.S. corporations had the largest in-country investments. We then researched biodata, particularly the charitable donations history, of the presidents of these corporations, arriving at a short list of the most likely marks. Next we used the letters of introduction to get appointments with the commercial attachés of the involved countries, to whom we made a pitch about AIESEC, about bringing business students from their countries to U.S. corporations for traineeships at company expense, and asked the attachés to write the selected corporate presidents asking for appointments for us and that the company consider taking a given number of trainees from the country in which they were invested. No attaché ever turned us down. This worked like a charm and the traineeship commitments started coming in hand over foot following short trips to cities north, mostly NYC. It was very hard for the corporations to say no. But after awhile, the very important Senator had to come down hard on us for using these pressure tactics, which had been brought to his attention -- though he did laugh and slap backs while telling us we must quit. In the meanwhile, we developed a lot of contacts with student groups in Latin America while seeking traineeship volunteers, trainees went back and forth, we created other not-so-kosher tactics, and I eventually because aware that AIESEC had become compromised and was being used as cover for intelligence operations, particularly in what later became Richard Helms' nemesis, Santiago. I was not pleased by this discovery. For many reasons, this among them, but most unconnected, I left AU a few months later, much more informed than when I had arrived.
I quit Special Forces in the last week of medic training, but that's not part of this story. There was virtually nothing to learn about operations and intelligence in Training Group, except to confirm what I already knew: Special Forces received no training, even in the operational groups, on political infrastructures, overt or covert -- not how to create them, not how to disrupt them. The word “infrastructure” was frequently used, was even a buzz word, but the prevailing usage was a misnomer. They were speaking of armed guerrilla units deployed in an area of operations; this is not a political infrastructure -- a “shadow government”, which is itself something of a misnomer. Were one to be accurate in using such a term, one would have to say a shadow pre-pre-government transiting to a pre-pre-government transiting to a pre-government transiting to a de facto government tracking on de jure status. Phase transitions, not a static structure; the constants are functions, actually functional invariants. And the functional invariants are defined in relation to heuristic theoretical models, paradigmatic worldview constructs. The models are derived from cosmological metaphors. Special Forces learned to train and arm guerrilla units -- “create a guerrilla infrastructure” -- or how to assist pre-existing partisan and resistance units, an extension of one of the roles of OSS during WWII into conditions of insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare. Or how to run spoiling operations in denied areas like Eastern Europe in the event of hot war with the Soviets in Europe, actual capacity for this falling away as the “Lodge Bill recruits” retired. Political infrastructures are generally not armed, or only minimally so, as being armed is an operational liability for them, the risk of exposure being greatly increased. There was an incredible wealth of information on this subject in the SORO library, but this information had had little or no effect on U.S. military doctrine. I wished to understand why this was so, as I suspected that it was intimately involved with the paradigm-conflict issues I had begun to investigate. Indeed, not only did the very idea of “doctrine” contravene the possibility of creating or effectively interdicting political infrastructures, it precluded the possibility of actually understanding them. This seemed to me a significant paradigm-related issue. And I strongly suspected that the same was the case for the CIA, given that this agency had grown out of the OSS. Though using student groups like AIESEC for operational cover suggests knowledge of political infrastructures, as does the existence of proprietary businesses and infiltration of international labor organizations, I suspected these types of activity to be primarily a matter of supply transit and materiel support to guerrilla units, intelligence collection, black propaganda and black money, not authentic formation or effective interdiction of political infrastructures. The history of the Afghan war and its aftermath confirmed the accuracy of this suspicion in very graphic terms -- as, of course, did that of the Viet Nam war.
It was during the half-year preceding the Arab-Israeli Six-Day war (I don't like to sanctify war with a capital letter), while assigned to JFK Special Warfare Center as an intelligence analyst on the Middle East, that I first got across current intelligence on authentic political infrastructures. The unit at Special Warfare Center given responsibility for current intelligence on the Middle East was used primarily as an administrative transit facility for company-grade officers slated for imminent tours in Vietnam -- a hundred or so of them at any given time. Prior to my arrival under convoluted circumstances as an add-on, only the CO and the NCOIC were permanently assigned personnel. Therefore, no actual work on current intelligence had been done in the preceding couple of years. I jumped right into it with both feet, and had full run of the Special Warfare Center library and all current intelligence distribution classified secret and below received by the Center. Total immersion for six months before I was reassigned to Technical Intelligence Detachment of the 525th MI Group in Vietnam. I began to organize the distribution, started OB catalogs, a map gazetteer, biodata folders, and read late nights into history of the conflict. My billets were in Psyops Group less than 100 yards away. Though I never touched on this in briefings given, in private I argued to the NCOIC, an in-process-of-retiring Nisei Japanese counterintelligence operative who had served undercover in East Asia since before the Korean war, that U.S. oil policy in the Middle East since WWII -- using the Israeli stick to rattle the Arab cage so as to sustain a state of low-grade pandemonium conducive to high output and low prices -- could be kept on track over the long haul only by ever increasing infusions of violence leading inevitably to some sort of explosive endpoint. But I had no capacity to imagine details of how onset of policy endgame would begin, could not see how increasing pressure on the Soviets across the Islamic crescent at their underbelly would lead to an Afghan war promulgated by those who did not understand political infrastructures, how the low-grade pandemonium stacked on cross-current leftovers from British and French colonialism would lead to a Persian Gulf war, or how a member of the Palestinian political infrastructure would create an organization that later would morph into Al Qaeda, and how this would lead to a U.S. garrison state in Iraq.
Only at Strategic Research and Analysis (SRA), the psychosocially sequestered POLOB “Manson Family” of CICV and later MACV-HQ, which was the unit hidden behind all the controversy giving rise to the Westmoreland versus CBS trial, did I learn things really worth knowing about underground political infrastructures or terrorist networks. SRA was the sole allied unit in the Southeast Asia theater and the ZI organized like the Viet Cong Political Infrastructure -- so as to most effectively study its dynamical transformations: VC categories and terminology were taken as the organizational basis of SRA which changed in lock-step as the VCI changes were analytically discovered. A great psychological-osmosis mirroring aid to getting into the mindset of the adversary. I was given VC Military Region 4 (MR4), the infrastructural category encompassing the GVN Saigon/Bien-Hoa area -- which underwent vast, deep, and omni-transforming organizational changes involving every sort of bureaucratic variable (as described in detail in MOON). The CIA, according to Bamford and Coll, is organized according to U.S. notions of global geography, and got into severe difficulties implementing an “interdisciplinary” trans-geographical bin Laden issue station. Cartesian-Newtonian bureaucracies like the CIA -- rigidly hierarchical, coercively regulated by nesting echelons, filled with doctrine, highly centralized, organized according to tacitly-held spatial metaphors, employing a management paradigm based on notions like countervailing forces and conflict-resolution algorithms -- do not easily engage in organizational adaptation, as the informing paradigm was created specifically to impose structural viscosity (if not rigidity). No gerrymandering this bureaucratic fiefdom! Gerrymandering is a moral offense, even a criminal behavior, in face of Newton's summation-of-forces application: majority rule. Quantum principles of autopoiesis need not apply here; they won't be hired. The VCI used geographical categories, kept in great flux, because they were engaged in a nation-state-liberation struggle; Al Qaeda is characterized as “amorphous”, makes little use of geographical categories, and subverts boundaries (geographical and cellular) with modulation of resource exchange to facilitate organizational adaptation because it is engaged in a destroy-the-Cartesian-Newtonian-nation-state-system struggle. Intellectual-history and paradigm-conflict issues are rife. Inability to engage in organizational adaptation is not a mere bureaucratic constraint; it is a mental-limitation problem, a psychological inflexibility problem, a social rigidity problem, a problem in “lateral mental cleavage”, maybe even a glutamate-induced neurological problem, best designated lacuna-on-the-brain, inculcated via neural etching during childbearing and rearing and early higher enculturation. A complete inability to cultivate immediate paradigmatic awareness and consequent paradigm inflexibility in functional behavior, analytic and operational. Raiding parked hard drives, indeed. What a beautiful metaphoric collective psychological projection!
When a whole society goes into mass hysteria you see the fact of that most clearly in its institutional behaviors, which are collective behaviors. What Bamford describes in the second half of his book, describes in a poorly documented fashion mostly from press sources, describes as transpiring in the CIA, the Pentagon, the Executive Branch, Congress is mass hysteria. Legally speaking, the insane are not culpable by virtue of not being conscious of their insanity; if they are conscious of their state, then they are sane and hence legally culpable. People caught in the clutches of mass hysteria are by definition not conscious of that collective state. There are, of course, degrees of mass hysteria. Long before 9/11 there was a degree of mass hysteria well established as a normative state. One witnessed it in daily events. An information request tendered in a small-town Pennsylvania bus station to the attendant behind the counter, who, in response points to a map hanging on the wall in a position difficult to see. The questioner edges around the corner of the counter to better view the map and steps across a line laid into the floor tile. The attendant explodes into a tirade, calls a security guard and threatens assault charges. Rules are rules. Armed metropolitan police officer on guard 10 hours a day during the summer months at the central skateboard facility in a downtown Santa Fe public park. Several “No Skateboarding” signs on virtually every block of the village of Nederland, Colorado. Armed security guards monitoring the central quad of University of Hawaii to insure the students walk their bikes on the sidewalks, don't ride them; while other armed guards patrol the study carrels of the library regular as a metronome. Boisterous signs threatening hundred-thousand-dollar fines and/or incarceration for eating on public buses. These are just low-end pre-9/11 symptoms. No mention need be made of child molestation epidemics or child molestation witch hunts. The office girl who charges sexual harassment for having her arm caressed during casual conversation, attends sensitivity training workshops, and on weekends gets drunk and fornicates at the pole of the local strip bar. No terrorist surveilling such a society in process of developing a take-down strategy would have had any difficulty predicting the degree of hysteria that would likely follow upon progressive threat escalation. Nor would he have been unaware of how mistake prone, obsessive, phobic, and compulsive people are when functioning in a state of hysteria. Nor how this tilts tactical and strategic equations. How to exploit the near-universal tendency to mass-hysteria-under-threat is taught in virtually every special warfare center on the planet: it is the cardinal principle to be applied in running successful spoiling operations behind the lines in denied areas (to use OSS-era terminology). Root origin of the pre-9/11 hysteria was the cognitive dissonance accompanying stalled paradigm shift. Institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm -- fundamental assumptions underlying all the institutions: governmental, business, social, NGO formats, and most especially psychological and sexual habituations -- coming under ever increasing threat as experimental science demonstrates that paradigm more and more difficult to sustain, and the technological spin-offs of post-Newtonian discoveries progressively transforming the political, social, economic, religious, sexual, and psychological landscape. As the dissonance spirals into the stratosphere, because adaptational processes are blocked by actions of dysfunctional elites, the mass mind burrows deeper and deeper into longing-for-the-past, and there is onset of collective dissociation, the precondition for mass hysteria. External threat events magnify the process. Stall something long enough by suppression and it will rise up in the most unexpected guises, generally like your worst nightmare.
Locked into longing for the old paradigm that has passed, questions that otherwise would be asked are not asked. Word-salad prevails: “learn to distinguish between targeted killing and assassination”; “use lethal force if necessary to capture”; “analytically establish a chain of command”. Each of these, and so many more, signify activation of psychological “defense mechanisms”, are attempts at introjection, attempts to assimilate the “amorphous” to the clearly definable (that is, to the Cartesian-Newtonian), attempts to resolve new paradigm factors to terms of the old. An actionable link (“action-based sociology” is quintessentially Newtonian) between Saddam and Al Qaeda has to be legally definable relative to proximal cause, if only talmudically so, which optimally means establishing a chain of command or, minimally, demonstrating exercise of guidance or provision of resources. Periodic contact is not enough. What about absence altogether of direct contact, provision, and communications? No autopoietic operators allowed here, no spontaneous quantal order: such self-organized collective and cooperative quantum behaviors violate the Cartesian-Newtonian principles Judeo-Christian societies long ago embraced and embodied in their institutional algorithms. What questions that otherwise would have been asked? Does “decapitation” destroy an “amorphous network“ of infrastructural cells or facilitate metastasizing and evolution of spontaneous order? Kill the Queen and what does the hive do? Does one form of decapitation catalyze another? Can denial of geographical base areas and discrete training facilities, clearly tactical setbacks, catalyze strategic organizational shift into non-local modalities and improve efficacy of training under realistic conditions? Would the “amorphous” adversary actually court a tactical setback so as to catalyze a strategic shift, shedding the bottom-end security-risk sector of its recruitment base along the way, that sector which had become an unmanageable burden relative to the strategic tasks presently at hand? Would a cellular organization-become-a-cluster-formation actually invite a dispersive assault as a way to facilitate movement through its life cycle, the way a multi-cellular organism like slim mold thrives on diaspora? If rates are right -- recruitment, loss, resource assimilation, spatial expansion, time dilation -- does sink-or-swim training under realistic conditions actually become the best training there is? Are preparations for war different from war itself, as Clausewitz maintained, or can that boundary condition be changed by using time as a handle on the space of contention (quantum-based technologies being the rheostatic control handle)? In a global insurgency war, where the insurgent cannot strike everywhere all the time, but, due to the strategic balance of capabilities inherent to the space and time aspects of that type of conflict, can strike some place at most any time, is it good strategy for the global counterinsurgent to deploy its resources so as to attempt to prevent every attack whenever and wherever it might come? Or is this a recipe for certain strategic failure? Is deploying the counterinsurgent's resources so as to prevent organizational phase transitions by the insurgent a potentially effective strategic orientation? Are borders irrelevant to an “amorphous” transnational organization or are they (1) targets for subversion by that organization, and (2) facilitators of cellular organizational adaptation by modulation of resource flows across boundaries (as, for example, is the case of exchange processes through the “wall” in the life of biological cells engaging in autopoiesis)? Does declaration of global war on a global organization constitute a threat or an opportunity to that organization? Given the fundamental space and time factors involved, does declaration of global war on a global organization constitute a threat or an opportunity to the organization making that declaration? This list could become very long. That which you don't know you should know is what you have to know if you are ever going to know what it is you need to know.
In my view, neither Al Qaeda nor the neocons are causes; they are symptoms: both collective behaviors of the herd sensing signs of devastating threat too late for any response but panic. Via projective identification in transference, they regard each other as the threat they are responding to, when the actual circumstance threatening both has origins far deeper than either are capable of imagining. One mass hysteria set against another, both are mere eddy currents in a very long wave-train approaching cusp catastrophe. They are but two factors amongst a multitude mapped on the configuration space where the definitive mark of transition is the appearance of m-valued logics, a mode of cognition not employed in significant measure by the human species since the rise of spoken languages. Essence of the cusp catastrophe will be a gran mal seizure spreading complex matrix to complex matrix, constellated archetype to constellated archetype across reaches of the collective unconscious as a neurological way is electrochemically prepared for post-paradigmatic, post-linguistic Weltbilt. Seizures are one sort of critical-state quantum collective behavior. Since conscious focus of the species has set itself against making this transition -- Islamism and neoconservatism being but two examples thereof -- the involved collective convulsions will not be mild and they will not be short-lived; indeed, status epilepticus is likely to be a characteristic property of the passage. I am not speaking in metaphors here; I believe this will happen just as described. Metaphors will emerge through projective identification in process of one complex matrix activating another, as the Al Qaeda-neocon case concretely illustrates. Entry level mass hysterias are all we've seen so far in this 150-year climb up onto the back of the cusp surface. Mass hysterias are not manipulated by leadership cohorts; leadership cohorts are manipulated by mass hysterias. At most, there is only “Newtonian nudging”. Neocon or no neocon, Al Qaeda does not have the compass of the mass hysteria it is provoking -- anymore than America has compass of hysterical Islamism. The major difference between the two is the weapons systems available, and their relative numbers. Even at low-grade hysteria, rationalizations of irrational action are becoming the American pattern in response to provocation. As the refrain in MOON's “Time's Trouble Tripped” has it: “The only one who's ever used it is the sole possessor trusted never to abuse it.” Al Qaeda has naively bought the Islamic world into this Western consensus, and has done so by raising to clinical status but one factor among many driving relentlessly toward fulmination. Count the hidden dragons, if you can.
I not only beg to differ, I beg to differ fundamentally. All of these things are related profoundly, not just superficially. I would first point out that there is no possibility whatsoever, according to the quantum mechanics of collective and cooperative phenomena, of a non-conspiratorial event anywhere, anywhen. Any person who raises the issue of conspiracy is speaking from his identification with the Cartesian-Newtonian action-based notion of identity enculturated as Umwelt. Quantum physicists are especially prone to this identification as they have never applied what they know to what they are, and therefore are particularly phobic about what they won't admit they know they are. Simply-located, discrete individual identities, possessing no animistic identity transparency, no non-simple identity, are required if there is to be conspiration; absent such identities there is no binary distinction to be made between conspiracy and non-conspiracy. One way to covertly attack quantum sociologies is to harp on conspiracy theories, thereby implicitly denying sociological existence to quantum identity states. Projective identification does not produce mere hallucinations; the transference figure predisposed (in application of the principle of complementarity) to identify with the projection is changed (in application of the principle of indeterminacy) by the identification made (in application of the self-referential principle driving far-from-equilibrium phase transitions): the projection produces something real, real but regressed. Bin Ladenism is the regressed something real the quantum physicist projects in not admitting what he knows he is. Doubt that? Doubt there is any connection? Consider Anonymous (Through Our Enemies Eyes, an apt title, Brassey's, 2002), presumably the first chief of the first non-local, non-geographical CIA station, the Bin Laden issue station: he quotes (p. 63) “some commentators”, without further attribution, thus: “…bin Laden's 'strategy may be to create leadership and motivation that might galvanize individual independent units into action'” and goes on to quote Al-Watan Al-Arabi, “…despite his relationship with these organizations, bin Laden may not be in a position to choose their operations or targets and is not in control in this regard”. These are the first significant organization-related observations made in 63 pages. What is referred to here is that to which the media has applied the term “amorphous”, one crystalline property of the amorphous being non-simple identity, crystalline to those familiar with sociologies functioning according to the quantum principles governing collective and cooperative behaviors. What quantum sociologies? For one very relevant instance: most studies of the Viet Cong Political Infrastructure (VCI) were based upon assimilation of the phenomena observed to pre-existing literature on communist organizational modalities, thus concealing from the observer properties inherent to the VCI which were not prominently displayed by prior communist apparats. Nonetheless, if one closely peruses the literature on the subject, one will find many perplexed observations regarding how, particularly in the Delta, VC units separated from command and control often uncannily acted as if they were receiving C&C, when, in fact, this was impossible under the circumstances. Consideration of how this could have transpired leads one into investigations of the role played by animistic peasant states of consciousness -- non-simple “identity transparency” being the defining characteristic -- in establishing operational algorithms and the effects upon these algorithms of the various sorts of criticism/self-criticism employed (analogues of which are rife in the religious practices engaged in by Islamic terrorist networks).
And speaking of “assimilation” -- which is one introjective mechanism of the transference between us and them, that which is introjected always being prior projection -- consider how Anonymous (which is itself an invocative instance of non-simple identity) establishes an assimilative parallel between bin Laden and the Fathers of the American Revolution. Pretty Freudian, wouldn't you say? Bin Laden, of course, identifying himself with the archetypal father figure, praises then scolds his children in exhorting activation of the transference. Projective identification on the level of collective behavior thematically orchestrates down to detail. Bin Ladenism, per the notions discussed above, exhibits profound, if regressed, parallels with the quantum physics of collective and cooperative phenomena, while Anonymous chooses to make parallel with exemplars of Cartesian-Newtonian thought in application to institutionalization -- politically, economically, and socially. These sorts of psychological processes -- assimilation, introjection -- not conscious either to bin Laden or Anonymous, are the concrete contents, metaphorical as they may be regarded, of mass hysterias. Thematic orchestration relates to the root suppression, in this case stalled paradigm shift, not to what those who take themselves to be discrete actors regard causes of conflict. One does not have to understand the thing to be used by it; but one does have to understand it if one is to effectively interdict that form of use.
Calling on transference as an organizational vehicle involves cultivation of cognitive dissonance, prerequisite to the double-bind-induced dissociative processes involved in onset of collective hysteria. Black propaganda is one means to cultivate cognitive dissonance. Anonymous quotes bin Laden (p. 60):
…with a small number of RPG's [rocket-propelled grenades], with a small number of antitank mines, with a small number of Kalashnikov rifles, they managed to crush the greatest empire known to mankind. They crushed the greatest military machine. The so-called superpower vanished into thin air.
Is this a correct assessment of what transpired in Afghanistan and the Soviet Union? Moreover, is it an informed basis upon which to reach judgment about ones capabilities to crush America's military machine, a machine, which, under the implied scenario, would be wielded by the mass hysteria generated through significant authentic existential threat, something America has not to this day remotely experienced -- and yet has reacted to non-existential threat in the fashion it has? Or is it a product of the psychological inflation incumbent upon identification with an archetype coupled to being misinformed and/or uninformed? And consider the complementary assessment offered by Anonymous (p. 24): “The fact that there would have been no mujahedin -- Afghan, Arab, or otherwise -- if the Bolsheviks had not invaded and brutalized Afghanistan seems to escape their [the Western media's] ken completely”. Are we to believe that a dying empire, unprovoked, invaded Afghanistan? For what? “Dying” and “unprovoked” are the governing words here. Maybe, as bin Laden apparently supposes, the “greatest empire known to mankind” was not dying prior to its unprovoked Afghan invasion, that it died altogether in just the manner he describes. And maybe the U.S., through the Pakistanis, was helping a mujahedin cause; but then again, maybe the mujahedin, in fighting The Evil Empire, were helping an American cause. These two quotations are coupled propositions, complementary -- and both are based upon myriad unstated tacit assumptions. As if the stalled-paradigm-shift themes -- developing like a sonata cycle over the past 150 years -- so detailed in display as contemporary events had nothing to do with collapse of “the greatest empire known to mankind”. Those interested in these issues might do well to begin by executing internet searches on the following keywords: radar aurora; auroral oval; space weather; electrojet plasma instabilities; coherent radar backscatter (of ionosphere electron draft velocity); electron temperature enhancements in the auroral E-region; phased-array radar. And how timely that after 30 years Stephen Hawking has turned around on the thermodynamics of information transduction by black holes, an issue intensely discussed in Moscow by Western scientists during the Brezhnev era and an issue of considerable interest to Andrei Sahkarov, who, of course, played no significant role in the events under consideration here.
You ask me what can be done, why I am not doing anything -- for the hundredth time I've been asked that. I ask you why you think from the mid-'50s nothing significant has been done about the energy crunch, when it has been known since then that such a crunch was inevitable and not to be long awaited, and U.S. foreign policy -- globally, strategically -- has been dominated by the issue ever since the coup that installed the Shah of Iran. Vested interests of the oil companies? But they could have been preparing to make megaprofits on afteroil all the while making megaprofits on oil. Yet they haven't been. Oil company execs have to run damn hard to make a bigger salary than soccer studs these days. I say there is a long list of things that could have been done, some of which still can be done, none of which was done or will be done on a timely basis -- most of which will never ever be done, regardless of the evolution or revolution or convolution of events. Why? you ask. Because people would rather die, I say (which might be a major part of any real solution, the psychosomatic situation of the planet having become so bad as it is). Thirty-five years ago we were talking magnitude of megakill; today, it's how dead of a planet it's gonna be. Knock on wood, and if your fist doesn't momentarily disappear, that's sufficient proof projective identification ain't all it's cracked up to be: mad cow and bird flu eradication methodology ain't a projective prefiguration as to how the global terrorism problem will finally be solved. That isn't in The Book of the It! You simply can't talk to people about any of this. They know the history of this celestial orb over the last couple of centuries: the historians got it right, didn't miss nothing; it's all written down in the history books. Fine. I purposely didn't have kids on this account. I leave this planet not too long to wait without that kind of bad karma. I'm set dead on never coming back here again, God willing. The central concrete feature of the whole prevailing spiral of violence is contention over the energy consumption future of the planet (and not inexplicably, but inexplicitly, what that's gonna do to Life on Earth). And the BlueCoats won't arrive on the scene just in the nick of time because the supreme complexus behind the central concrete feature won't allow that to happen, and that's why the oil companies haven't been tracking on megaprofits on afteroil. The supreme complexus is why the paradigm shift is 150 years in whipstall, and why that whipstall has been and will continue to prevent anything serious from being done regarding the central concrete feature shucking the kernels of violence spiraling off the cob of history. One NSF grant away from discovering the secret of the universe, it's the quantum-relativity physicists who can't think without binary logic, one-way straight-line time, and a classical limit sustained by a probability interpretation who would rather die than suffer the psychological evolution or revolution or convolution incumbent upon discovering that Nature long ago solved our most pressing problems, but neglected to inform of this fact physicists one NSF grant away from Her secrets (alas, not revealed by the sacred slit experiment).
Look, the wrong tree you're barking up. My branch is comfortable enough and provides a long view round the whole compass. Everywhere actors there are. Choose one, like the others antsy. Acting, I'm not. I see no action transpiring anywhere not building walls of the induction funnel or a matter of inconsequence. How do you imagine this situation can be changed? Are there those possessing the required mental and emotional competencies with the requisite resources at their disposal? If so, where are indications of this? None seen by me. I didn't discover yesterday or late in life that “something is dreadfully amiss”. If David Goldstein writes in 2004 (Out of Gas, W. W. Norton) of the “Hubbert peak” of oil production and raises the specter of a dead planet (p. 37) on climactic climatic effects, John Hamaker and Donald Weaver made the same basic prediction in 1982 largely on the basis of effects of industrial agriculture on Earth's soil, oceans and atmosphere (The Survival of Civilization, Hamaker-Weaver Publishers), and atmospheric scientist Douglas Paine, to the everlasting outrage of Carl Sagan, was publicly describing the involved physics in 1974 -- physics still not consensually acknowledged (though in many ways methodologically become tacitly incorporated into current atmospheric models, sans the underlying theory never assimilated due to good offices of people like Stephen Hawking, only now starting to come around). But don't expect this “coming around” to go very far. It will be decades yet before they consent to evaluate implications of information transduction by black holes for (imaginary) chronotopology and onset of intersystemic complex (i.e., imaginary) angular momentum cascade in cosmological neighborhood of black-hole-centered, time-dilated, spiral-banded-hurricane-type Milky Way galaxy, something already done by the late-1950s relative to hydrodynamical analogies to E equals m c-squared and by the late-1960s relative to negative viscosity (Victor P. Starr: Tellus XI, 1, 1959; The Physics of Negative Viscosity Phenomena, McGraw-Hill, 1968). And the gods only know when such information-transduction breakthroughs of understanding will bleed down from relativistic-quantum cosmology, wrapped in strings, to the little old everyday world of the thermodynamics of global energy crisis -- or is it shed the emperor's new tiger fatigues in space warfare confrontation with The Evil Empire, wherever it can be found or imagined. A patent on the siphon hose for zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum has probably not been granted yet. “Particle Creation Under Cold-Controlled Fury Near Tornadoes” ain't likely to be published in a peer-reviewed non-classified journal anytime soon -- not while there's a classical limit to publicly uphold and a thermodynamic skirt to hold down. Maybe you think the oil-peak energy crisis can be solved on basis of innovation with Cartesian-Newtonian physics, the classical limit being inviolate in public? And maybe the same with complications of industrialized agriculture -- which has been around about as long as the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm? Slave labor is an industrialization of agriculture, you know, the sum total of slaves held representing enormous capitalization at play in fields of the Lord. The paper I wrote in Spring of 1964 for Elspeth Rostow concerning the Hamilton-Jefferson debates on the national debt (highly relevant even today) did not receive a poor grade for what it said, but for its unstated implications. What Jeffersonian path under Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm in hands of Christian fundamentalists? The American empire was well in hand by the 1780s, moving across the belly of a vast virginal continent. And when slave-state agriculture was no longer needed as launching platform for Hamiltonian development, those in the most-responsible north -- most responsible for the genocide occasioning nation birth -- set themselves against slavery, focused eyes on geographical predetermination spread across the Pacific, and soon cultivated yellow-peril hysteria -- after cannonading Da Nang with Old Ironsides (1848) and anchoring Edo Bay with Susquehanna (1853) -- before civil war broke out, the yellow-peril hysteria fulminating soon after the war's completion. Genocidal holocaust by the biggest employment of a biological warfare agent in history: smallpox intentionally transmitted by gifted blankets. These things had nothing to do with the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm's summation of forces as the only natural-right-and-growth decision algorithm? Where was it Hitler learned all his tricks, anyway, Lebensraum among them? Why was it the Vietnamese communists so closely studied America's founding documents, when they soon were to be on the receiving end of the biggest employment of chemical weapons use since WWI: dioxin? As threatening as Al Qaeda is, as much as Islamic Lon Nol look-alikes are still in place, as much as the Al Qaeda response to culture assassination parallels the earliest stages of that of the Khmer Rouge, as much as one can reasonably expect elaborations of the further stages of mass hysteria, as much as a Cambodian holocaust of the Whole Earth is a distinct possibility, as Derek long ago predicted, still, Al Qaeda is not likely to produce a dead planet. Who was it, anyway, who engaged in the biggest employment of radiological weapons use since WWII: depleted uranium projectiles causing Gunther's disease for so many half-life eons? People from a tradition such as this are going to take efficacious action in the prevailing planetary circumstance? Solve the supreme complexus in order to resolve the stalled paradigm shift behind the central concrete feature of unavoidable energy crisis driving the repositionings responsible for the gathering violence? If that happens, you can be sure I will prick up my ears and take notice.
Obviously, you still believe in hard cause and effect, or at least its soft degenerate version, probability amplitude; whilst I believe all skeins of Indra's net are connected, an early version of superstring theory -- and an insight into the infrasound-wave-guided flight patterns of “waterfowl”, as any good dictionary will inform. Michiyuki, as the Japanese Shintoists once said about such sacred flight paths of the crane's cry, those involving information transduction instead of thermodynamic death; Michigun in Native American parlance, a term Castenada's Don Juan, master of string theory that he was, certainly would have been familiar with. But my superstring theory is m-logically-valued and encompasses every length scale and time step, not only those minima of Planck. If Maxwell's demon-ess -- Kali, triply-imaginary operator-time -- is involved, so is Maxwell's silver hammer, which soon will slam hard upon this planet. The center of the galaxy knows details of everything transpiring here, and that is why the “amorphous” organization of Al Qaeda is so disturbing to the binary-logical Cartesian-Newtonian mind, mind of Mankind in Amnesia. Not only a theory of celestial influence, a theory of influencing the celestial. There are many ways to catch a comet -- and many levels of the imaginary (i.e., the numerically complex) through which to regard the nature of comets (and how their functional properties serve operator-time by dealing in connective-mass-energy, which has “units” different from mass-energy). Looseness of associations here, you perceive? Paraphasia of a sort? Schizophrenic world salad, wouldn't you say? How much these judgments are a matter of paradigm inflexibility! Why was it Hawking once preferred black holes of violence, order gobblers, locales of heat death to information-transducing power points, coordination points, cosmomantic acupuncture-point physical-region singularities, operational amplifiers for universal ley-line superstring meridians? I mean there are two traditions extant in the British Isles! Not to mention triply-imaginary chronomantic wi-fi articulation nexuses, because complex (i.e., imaginary) angular momentum cascade is just a Newtonian way of regarding operator-time -- and why the temporal curl so central to Penrose twistors is so important to Paine twisters. Al Qaeda embodies the suppressed and hence regressed unconscious, The Dark Continent, of the probability-ridden quantum theorist because the “amorphous” is a terrifying form of “letting go” (of the claim to absolute distinctness in self-identity). Information transduction by black hole raises the specter of all this! Which is why it must be embodied by projective identification as wi-fi articulation nexuses. And so very much more. Forgetting operator-time now, and speaking solely in hard-causality-type Newtonian terms, one way the Earth informs the sun (which, in turn, informs the center of the galaxy) is by coherent laser burst of high-energy particles created by tornado (if you ask how, then operator-timed cold-controlled fusion inside a superconducting plasma bottle by decomposition of Newtonian space to fractal dimensions will have to be invoked) carrying transduced information concerning the complex angular momentum budget of planet Earth -- the particles being created at instant (ksana) of coordination-point touch-down and complex angular momentum exchange injection to crustal dynamics, planet Earth: exchange is a two-way street. The upward-propagating particle-creation-transduced information is so superintegrated with quantal relative-state properties that details of the Earth's ecological condition is radiated hither and yon for all celestial beings to appraise, but, most importantly so, for symptomatic assessment by the black hole information transducer at the center of the Milky Way. Recently, however, this encoded commo has lost its error-correcting capacity due to imposition of hot aurora. Gotta get some back from The Evil Empire (surrogate for The Dark Continent) anyway we can! Not only that, the DNA fingerprint signatures radiating in coherent laser burst transmission from each superconductant-plasma-core, decomposing-to-fractal-dimensions, genetic molecule on the planet -- which can be scanned by satellite-borne sensor -- become part of the “terrestrial wind” inputting chaotic “butterfly wing-flaps” to the complex angular momentum budget of the solar orb, where it is transduced and reradiated for consideration by Milky Way Center. Recently, however, this encoded commo has suffered profound dyscrasia due to iatrogenic shuffling. These are two ways to influence the celestial, and among the reasons why celestial influence is about to wield Maxwell's silver hammer.
I'm sorry, but I look at this thing systemically and arrive at pattern recognition by asking, “What does system-state impose at such a conjuncture?” Discrete events, behaviors, motivations are evaluated relative to the patterns thus resolved. Increasingly, today, system-state imposes collective psychosis. Look at the magnitude of current cognitive dissonance! Look at the degree of intractability in the prevailing schizophrenogenic double-binds! Margaret Mead's husband, Gregory Bateson, speaking here -- from the grave. One example, only: in course of Cartesian-Newtonian industrialization, human population, planet Earth, has, in terms of geological time, instantaneous quantum-jumped from several hundred-million to approximately six-billion and counting; the resultant civilization is running out of the fuel created over geological time spans; this fuel problem cannot be solved in Cartesian-Newtonian terms (including, most especially, terms of the 19th century deterioration-into-statistics of the paradigm prior to rise of the blackbody physics birthing the quantum-mechanics-quickly-falsified) without driving the planet to a new metastable state unfriendly to life, only by recourse to m-logically-valued post-probability-amplitude relativistic-quantum physics (though published consensus analyses of the fuel problem never address it in New Physics terms, as the fuel problem is dressed in “classical limit” clothes); BUT, and here is made entry upon intractable double-bind, employment of non-dissimulated relativistic-quantum physics inevitably will involve utter destruction of the political, economic, and social institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, along with its systems of role stratification, privilege, preferential resource access, patterns of accumulation, and so on. Not only is this an intractable double-bind, but blackbodies are scary things! Psychological structuralizations of the paradigm, too, are involved. So very, very scary to those identified with such structuralizations, almost as scary as Hawking black holes that gobble order or the sensory-isolation/flotation tanks John C. Lilly, M.D., took LSD and ketamine in, while Gregory Bateson designed and oversaw the teaching of English to dolphins at Lilly's virgin island Caribbean labs. Any person with no-subjectivity-worth-noting is freaked out by all the psychological associations evoked by such things. Absolute threat to ego autonomy! At the very thought of it, people get nauseous; people, literally, throw up. If he/she who is thus freaked out becomes fixated, obsessed with the thing -- say, black holes; say, blackbodies; say, especially, Hawking black holes without what the physicists call “hair” (thematically related to current fads in pornography, often legally mandated, say in Japan) -- and can't find a way to sublimate attention cathexses, there may well be onset of degenerative disease (triggered by the massive Neutralization Antagonizing Forms of Resistance thus engaged in, of which there have been identified some two dozen types, and which the associated electrochemical brain discharges can, via modified electron-transport chains, induce alterations of normative neurotransmitter regimes and CNS/immune-system coupling, which alterations, in turn, when become chronic, can induce production of, say, autoantibodies, ultimately anti-DNA antibodies, and subsequent morphological changes at the cellular level in any histological type). This is precisely what Hugh Everett, III -- of “multi-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics” fame -- couldn't grapple with when presented to him shortly before his premature demise. But, if enough individual members of the population corpus successfully find ways to thus sublimate attention cathexses (say, through falsifying Schrödinger's wave-function by interpreting it in terms of probability amplitudes, rather than the m-valued logics already on the scene, or by less lethal black propagandistic means of manipulating the social structure of attention), then this sublimation, itself, writ large across full spectrum of the population base, becomes a thematic-evasion type of Neutralization Antagonizing Forms of Resistance, which induces mass dissociation and onset of schizophrenic symptomology in collective behaviors exhibited by the population corpus. Elaboration of this psychosis-induction process today is far, far greater than it was in run up to World War Two. Which provides some read on the magnitude of that which is prefigured. Franco-Prussian war: hundreds of the thousands; World War I: millions; World War II: tens of millions. This time, the species will be more than merely exceedingly lucky if there is only an order-of-magnitude increase in the megakill -- given that postponement has pushed it out of cycle, thus magnifying consequences of continued lack of resolution to the deep precipitating factors.
A very interesting THEMATIC “thing” happened at the second session of the Autogenic Therapy Symposium of the 4th World Congress of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine, Kyoto, Japan, August-September, 1977. I imagine some similar critical conferencing event took place during the brief period wherein Max Born's probability-amplitude interpretation of Schrödinger's wave-function was consensuated -- which I regard the straw that broke the camel's back in causes of WWII. Soon after this putative straw was placed on the proverbial camel's back, a German discovered electroshock therapy and the German medical establishment began to employ this therapy preferentially over the natural autogenic brain discharges facilitated by practice of Autogenic Training, which Schultz was then full into developing on the basis of Oscar and Cecile Vogt's earlier neuro-anatomical and psychophysiologic research, and their “fractionated” method of hypnotic induction, the designation “fractionated” authentically prefiguring the later discovery that fractal images spontaneously appear and perseverate during autogenic abreaction, even though the term “Autogenic Training” was first used only a few years after Born's critical moment -- the iatrogenically-imposed electroshock seizures helping to elaborate the collective-psychosis-induction process already well in motion, leading to fulmination as WWII. Roland Fischer -- a chemist who worked at Sandoz Labs when LSD was synthesized, and was one of the first to systematically employ LSD clinically (notably at the Maryland Psychiatric Institute where John Lilly subsequently joined the staff upon leaving his post as Director of Neurological Research, National Institutes of Health), who approximately twenty years later, in 1977, was editor of The Journal of Altered States of Consciousness -- could not make it to Kyoto because of being stuck at the World Congress of Psychiatry brouhaha then transpiring in Honolulu over Soviet misuse of the practice. As a result, Wolfgang Luthe, M.D., the dean of Autogenic Therapy after Schultz's death, asked me to present Roland Fischer's paper comparing -- relative to brain-activation continuum, both phasic and tonic -- the state of consciousness associated with the Buddhist meditation practice of sadhipadhana to that designated the “autogenic state” in Autogenic Therapy (both of which are neurohumorally and electrophysiologically distinguishable, and distinguishable from autohypnotically-induced states of consciousness). This presentation request was a strange synchronisity, given that Luthe did not know that I, a person with considerable history of near-death experience, knew quite a bit about sadhipadhana, having intensively practiced a self-originated version of it on a daily basis over a several-year period (leading to a “seizure” event that took me into the library of the Georgetown University Medical School, with which Roland Fischer was then associated, where I first read about the autogenic brain discharges I had by then naively accumulated a great deal of experience of -- more so, in my judgment, than had Luthe himself by direct experience, which is not surprising, given the difference in life histories).
Continuing with the thematic “thing” that happened during the symposium, after presenting Fischer's paper, I presented my own, which offered some thoughts on the quantum properties of autogenic brain discharges, alteration of those quantum properties, interaction of altered autogenic discharges with the quantum wave properties of intraneuronal superconductant DNA (the free-electron gas of the plasma core the double-helix wraps around being described as superconductant, not the sugar-phosphate backbone recent research is focused upon, a distinction researchers seem not to be able to make), and resultant onset of degenerative diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, SLE being the initial subject of Dr. Luthe's and my correspondence, which precipitated the invitation to present a paper. This presentation completed, the last paper of the day was given by Shunsaku Kimura, a professor of psychiatry at Kyoto University. Professor Kimura was of Jungian persuasion and specialized in the treatment of schizophrenia using Autogenic Therapy. He proceeded to offer an analysis of the archetypal contents produced by his schizophrenic patients during autogenic abreaction. He sought patterns that could provide some insight into the apparent connection between mechanisms underlying autogenic brain discharges and Jung's conception of the structure of the collective unconscious. Five minutes left, he was warned. Time has run out, he was told. He continued, speeding up, trying to get through the material. Dr. Luthe jumped in in a very rude fashion, coldly rebuked Kimura, and told him in no uncertain terms that his presentation was over. This was followed by a period for free questions from the floor, about 45 minutes remaining to that day's session. No one asked a question. The silence went on and on. Luthe threatened to close the meeting prematurely if no questions were asked in the next two minutes. I studied my watch. As the time ran out, I asked a question. “Dr. Luthe, very occasionally in your published clinical histories and associated analyses there is mentioned what you call 'bright-light states'. Not much elaboration is offered. I am particularly interested to know whether or not such states are accompanied by alterations in space and time perception.” Dr. Yuji Sasaki, Japan's leading authority on the electrophysiology of zazen meditation, was present, along with several elderly and revered Zen monks. For the next hour, extending well past the scheduled end for the session, there occurred a fascinating and very elaborate -- highly skilled professional simultaneous translators being available and wired to earphones of all participants -- discussion of the direct experiential content of altered space and time perceptions as they occur with the practice of zazen and with Autogenic Training.
There had occurred a closed circle, broken in the middle. Sadhipadhana is a type of Buddhist meditation wherein “stress release phenomena” tending toward petit mal seizures are characteristic, the “seizures” being particularly strong autogenic brain discharges. My paper presented perspectives by which the principles of quantum biochemistry could be brought to bear upon explicating the processes involved in producing and modifying autogenic discharges. Kimura was developing a body of data by which the phenomenological content of extended series of such discharges, as full-blown abreactions, could be correlated with their physical substrate, and he was doing so within a non-Western patient set, many of these patients having suffered childhood trauma during WWII. Two obvious variables in any such correlation are space and time, which the Zen monks and Dr. Sasaki's electrophysiological observations shed considerable light upon. But Dr. Luthe in a very strange, inappropriate, and emotional manner broke off Kimura's presentation. Why? Was this a non-clinical example of the thematic evasion type of Neutralization Antagonizing Forms of Resistance? As a youth, just at the end of WWII, before medical studies, Luthe had briefly been inducted into the Wehrmacht. Were there some suppressed factors related to the war at work here?
Professor Kimura did not continue his association with Autogenic Therapy following this symposium, though the two of us maintained contact and had periodic discussions over the years about the research he was no longer conducting. As far as I know, no one has further pursued his direction of research. What Kimura was describing when interrupted by Luthe was the elaborate primitive (i.e., non-state) Shinto reference suffusing the abreactions of his patients, the central theme of which is animistic “identity transparency”. In quantum parlance this is the “non-simple identity” characteristic of what Hugh Everett used the term “relative-state” to designate. The state of any member of the corpus is relative to that of all the rest; the part is holographically transparent with the whole. My supposition is that Luthe was not conscious of the real reason why he terminated Kimura's presentation. The inner tension he experienced must have begun with my presentation and reached a culmination in Kimura's discussion of Shinto reference. What is DNA superconductivity? Electrons unbound, goose-stepping like Nazi soldiers marching coherently on the “rope bridge” which is the structure of DNA, this perfectly phased goose-stepping upon an elastic substrate, once initiated by radiation impingement, giving rise by autocatalysis to solitons, solitary waves that persist for extraordinary periods because the wave components have identity transparency, or, in other words, because these components are m-logically-valued. Collective behavior so rarified, so perfectly in phase, so coherently self-organized, it gives rise to a state of conductance that persists undiminished indefinitely. Luthe did not understand this biophysics, but that is not required for his reaction. Subliminal awareness is acutely sensitive to metaphorical parallels. Implications far removed from the concrete level of discussion frequently govern emotional responses and set patterns of valuation and behavior. Indeed, this can become so elaborate that individuals of surpassing talent sometimes can so internalize the collective system-state that their whole lives come to metaphorically embody it. Such may have been the case with the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose work is redolent of Shinto reference; it may also have been the case with the British physicist Stephen Hawking.
What did this thematic evasion quench? Consider that a goose-stepping Wehrmacht, of course, is not actually a corpus of electrons proceeding in soliton array; it is a regressed metaphor only. Why should such a metaphor have arisen by mass projective identification at the time it did? Regression occurs when something is suppressed, thematically suppressed. The defining feature of a soliton wave, a tsunami, is the identity transparency of its components, complete description of this non-simple identity state requiring utilization of m-valued logics. Born's 1926 probability amplitude interpretation of Schrödinger's wave-function suppressed the m-logically-valued aspect of the wave components. Here was the suppression that set in motion unconscious processes generating the projective identification leading to formation of the regressive metaphor, a goose-stepping Wehrmacht. Kimura was trying to find and characterize the logics behind the abreactive contents produced through projective identification by his patients as their brains engaged in extended series of autogenic discharges. Jung, to his dying day, believed that his conception of the structure and dynamics of the collective unconscious strongly correlated with Einstein's general relativity theory of gravitation, that theory Hawking later became a leading proponent of. The best book on this correlation, Number and Time, was written by Maria Louise von Franz. She came right up to the edge of postulating time as an actor, but did not take the final leap. This was unfortunate, as Pauli, the physicist who worked most closely with Jung to explore the intuited correlation, during the 1920s, soon after the time Born's interpretation was consensuated, produced the notion of operator-time, only in the end to reject it as being incompatible with the standard interpretation (i.e., Born's interpretation) of quantum mechanics. Hawking's notion of “imaginary time” is a truncated version of what, fully elaborated, would be operator-time. Kimura was riding a brilliant intuition because the primitive Shinto notion of time organizing content of his patients' abreactions under autogenic brain discharge is a notion of time as an actor and the Shintoist notion of space is built up sheet upon sheet of kami dust, kami being the Shinto word for spirit entity. Andrei Sakharov, in 1968, published a summary account of his ideas about the metric elasticity of space and Novikov dust, formulated in the context of a relativistic-quantum theory, entitled “A Multi-Sheet Model of the Universe”. But even in Sakharov's account, the m-logically-valued aspect remains suppressed. Contemporary superstring theory extends considerably the direction these ideas moved in, without recourse to the notion of operator-time and without employing m-valued logics. The probability amplitude interpretation of the Schrödinger wave-function continues to prevail, thereby perpetuating the suppression responsible for the regressed metaphors governing human affairs by way of projective identification. Hawking's recent turn around on how black holes handle information is useful, but is only a nibble on the carrot nature dangles before us. Were an m-logically-valued reference space to be fully described, the logics Kimura sought in contents of his patient's abreactions would be Gödel-numbered strings of superstrings, a string of superstrings representing an m-logically-valued proposition. It is my contention that this would have application not only to cosmology and biophysics, but to languages of the brain. Moreover, it would be the theoretical basis for a fully-elaborated deployment of m-logically-valued monetary units.
But, alas, this is not yet the case. Extreme cognitive dissonance prevails. Intractable double-binds are characteristic of human endeavor in every area of activity. Low-grade sub-clinical mass hysteria is the normative state, with increasing incidence of breakthrough to fully clinical manifestations of hysteria the clear pattern of evolution. The only way to break this pathogenic evolution is to remove the fundamental suppression responsible for it, and map the implications of what is thus discovered into all appropriate areas of human activity.
Absolutely. There are many good reasons to think I am crazy. Let me give you one. Somebody hands me a copy of Brian Greene's book The Fabric of the Cosmos (Knopf, 2004), a popular account of recent superstring theory, the leading edge of the evolving worldview construct. I immediately go to the index and look up “wavefunctions”, where I find a note “see probability waves”. The first association that jumps into my mind is the oft repeated statement in the press concerning how two-thirds of the leadership of Al Qaeda has been neutralized. Crazy, huh? Here we surely have an information processing anomaly that is a clear symptom of involutional psychotic reaction or process schizophrenia.
Nah! has to be a result of high drive states.
It's all a concrete/abstract inversion: tradin' in the artifact of socialization for the bare m-valued percept.
Feels crazy, mon!
Surnuf.
M-valued mus' be paleological, I guess. Associational ineptitude: da powers-dat-be is da only ones knowin' what da right associations is.
I flunked dat dere test every darn time.
It's a slippage in me cogitation, y'see, a deficit in me neurologicals. (MOON, Vol. 2, p. 290.)The second association to appear is the prevalent derisive political cliché: “America is behind everything that happens on the planet! Ha-ha-ha.” Is Brian Greene's book an explication of current physical theory or is it black propaganda concerning a certain political orientation to current physical theory? As if there weren't a dozen accounts of “wavefunctions” other than “probability waves” available in the literature and no experimental data available adequate to decide between them! Uh, inadequate experimental data to convince those wearing politically-motivated cognitive blinders, that is. Any scientist who gets a spot on national television simply is not doing science. What, I would like to know, is significance of the facts that [1] the CIA has from its beginnings organized itself according to blocks of geography that blanket the whole planet, and [2] at any given time there are Special Forces personnel operating in over 40 countries (not to mention other categories of covert U.S. military operatives)? Any statement that has entered the lexicon of verbal currency is in one way or another a true statement. So it seems to me with my Psychological-Operations-Group-trained neurological deficits.
Why wavefunctions and Al Qaeda? Consider the interview (USA Today, July 20, 2004) granted by “The Manson Family's” Anonymous, author of the recent book Imperial Hubris. He points out that “…what we've done is kill two-thirds of the leadership we knew of on 9/11. We have body count; we don't have a measure of progress.” Point well taken. Moreover, it is only under the probability-wave interpretation of “wavefunctions” that one could ever imagine body count as a measure of progress, which, be aware, is the consensus interpretation in both physics and counterinsurgency. After all, Anonymous did get booted out of “The Manson Family”, the CIA's sole non-local station, the bin Laden Issue Station. Does elimination of “leadership” -- whatever that might be in a given category of systems -- quench or facilitate the quantum potential carried by the wavefunction of a self-organizing process? Talking macroscopic quantum systems here. Consider MOON's Derek Dillon -- someone who knew a great deal about the Phoenix Program, both tactically and strategically -- writing into his journals circa 1971 (Vol. 2, pp. 350-1):
If you want to understand the communicational potential of the terrorist “index” [reference to Roger Poole's book Towards Deep Subjectivity, which offered a '60s-style-protester evaluation of terrorism], look at Schrödinger's equation. Ask yourself what the wave function substituted for in Newtonian mechanics. And why! This is, indeed, a pregnant riddle! That message delivery potential of the “index” is tied to self-organization for collective action (a branch of contemporary quantum physics: superconductivity, superfluidity, et cetera). If you come to comprehend this, you will surely become a true believer in the proverbial ounce of prevention. Terrorism is not a series of acts; it is a long, drawn out cultural process. Terrorism is not perpetrated by individuals or groups; it is autoimmune response in a civilization suffering degenerative disease of the collective psyche. This disease has been intensifying by ebb and flow over the decades. If the problem of terrorism continues to be met as if it were perpetrated acts, there will be an inflammatory fulmination of unimagined proportions.
At the end of the USA Today interview, Anonymous answers the question “Where can this end?”. He says, “I don't know. But it's going to end in disaster if there is not some kind of discussion of whether we want to remain in the status quo of our policies.” In 1968, Derek Dillon was a member of “The Manson Family” of MACV Headquarters, the section of J2, the intelligence staff, called Strategic Research and Analysis, which studied the Viet Cong's underground “terrorist network”. And, as a result of that experience, Derek Dillon knows some details of “where can this end”. There cannot be substantive policy changes, regardless of who enters the White House, because those policies are expressions of consenuated deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality. Mistaken beliefs. Doubt “consenuated”? Here is another prediction: IMPLEMENTATION OF COUNTER-TERROR INITIATIVES -- AND ASSOCIATED INITIATIVES AGAINST THE GLOBAL EXTRA-LEGAL SECTOR -- WITH OVERT UN APPROVAL WILL BE VASTLY MORE DAMAGING TO INTEGRITY OF GLOBAL CARTESIAN-NEWTONIAN NATION-STATE SYSTEM FUNDAMENTALS THAN HAS BEEN IMPLEMENTATION OF U.S. POLICIES WITHOUT UN APPROVAL. Look at this from point of view of the system itself! The prevailing global system can be terminated only once global consensus has been reached for such implementation. You think there are not people out there who understand this fact? And those consenuated beliefs about the nature of reality are not going to change until endgame is fully upon us. “Us” being the whole of humanity. There is not a single individual in a position of power and influence in any area of contemporary human activity, or in possession of the requisite resources, who has given the slightest indication of movement in the required direction. None. And it is most unlikely that there will ever be such indication. That being the case, regressed expressions of the evolving worldview construct will be implemented from below -- in the extra-legal sector, via global insurgency, with single-valued Local Exchange Trading Systems, et cetera -- under guidance of unconscious processes of projective identification. The Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state SYSTEM will be eliminated globally in a most unpleasant fashion. There will be no soft landing. One can easily identify what the strategic planners call the “driving forces” -- most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with Islamic fundamentalism -- and thus speculate about every manner of detail, but this idea of a “summation of forces” is, of course, itself Cartesian-Newtonian falsification, addiction to which only facilitates the tidal bore building higher and higher in its rush toward the shore of “where can this end”. “Contempt” is far more than merely too small a word. To all those anticipating with relish systemic meltdown, I would counsel pause. When, in 1968, Derek Dillon vigorously argued that any U.S. expansion of the geographic extent of the Vietnam war would inevitably lead to a huge disaster, he was incapable of imagining the magnitude and character of the outcome: the Cambodian holocaust. And today, that Cassandraesque experience informs him that he must again be incapable of imagining magnitude and character of the outcome. “Cambodian holocaust of the WholeEarth?” -- a statement of expectation Derek has repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, tried to comprehend -- may well turn out to be the product of too small a mind, given dimensions of the gathering global ecological crisis staring us in the face as a result of the 150-year-long collective refusal to turn the paradigmatic corner. Yes, absolutely, there are many good reasons to think I am crazy.
Every time I hear this comment on my modes of thought, I have to suppress a snicker; anymore, often I do not bother. For me, reading the written today is an arduous task; not because the material cannot be understood, because of the disgust. Clarity of explication, elegance of style: my response is disgust. I long for the last book, the last word, the end of natural language as last arbiter. What needs to be said in the present conjuncture is not ineffable; it is inexplicable in terms of two-valued logic and associated forms of thought. Abel started the long march to the last word by discovering how to solve an equation of the fifth degree. That transpired during the 1820s. Since then, the human species has engaged in little more than stonewalling. The price paid by that species for the stonewalling will not be small. Other species have already paid the ultimate price for this human malfeasance. Unrecoverable, except by spontaneous regeneration! The biosphere itself will be made to sacrifice; the only real question is whether or not this will be an ultimate sacrifice -- and, if so, why the context did not destroy the destroyer before that context itself was destroyed. The very idea of the utility of experimentation for comprehension of the nature of nature is drawn into question by the quantum measurement problem -- even as to whether there is a nature of nature. Under m-valued logics reduced not to probabilities, not to possibilities, not to truth-values, but to the identity transparency underlying quantum relative-state, there is no nature of nature. Nature is not self-identical, not the same as itself. Parallel universes, virtual realities are psychological escape valves no less potent than probability amplitudes. Can this absence of a nature of nature be explicated, comprehended, in the terms of a two-valued logic reduced to truth-value? Absolutely not. Do I understand this? Yes. How? By interior Musculpt: the unnatural language forms of non-dissimulated m-valued logics. Visual logic, abductive logic, in m-logical values is not to be notated, not to be entabled; it is to be holographically and musically enformed, ending all natural languages as last arbiters, ending them except as cultural lags, except as foundations for Kalturenation, as opposed to Staatsnation. Contemporary policy makers cannot arrive at efficacious substantive new policies relative to the actual prevailing circumstance because they cannot imagine any such. They live in projective identification, not in the case; how then could they so imagine? For them, not only is there a nature of nature, but nature is nature. Nature being nature, nature being self-identical, nature being the same as itself there can be only one correct description of it. Their policies are based upon this tacit assumption; thus, our worldview as opposed to theirs! Culture clash, war of the world, of the WholeEarth. Because there is a nature of nature and that nature is that nature is nature: for this we will kill and kill and kill. Most of all, we will kill off the context we regard as that nature which is nature. Thus will we expurgate the existential threat posed by discovery that nature is not identical to herself. Rome plows and Agents Orange come in many shapes, many forms.
I'm just not finding indirect evidence in the publicly available literature on Al Qaeda of what I would consider intelligence analysis. In Bodansky, in Anonymous, in the myriad books, newspaper and magazine articles there is a paucity of statements one could project back to an actual analytic algorithm. Maybe I'm blind, but I don't think so. Maybe they just don't have available the sorts of information that would be required. I doubt this, however. What I do find is a wealth of statements one can attribute to projective identification. An enormous effort is being made to assimilate Al Qaeda to self-attributed self-properties. What you do in projective identification is psychologically “eat” the adversary; it's a highbrow form of mutilation behavior, an intellectual way of collecting ears or scalps. This has always been how the REMFs opt the grunts. A good example is provided in the Wired interview (June 2004, p. 44) of Philip Bobbitt, author of the recent book The Shield of Achilles. Bobbitt says of bin Laden: “He doesn't have tight vertical control of the operations; he only provides financing and infrastructure. That's how Mastercard runs its operation, too.” I don't believe this anymore than I believe bin Laden is creating a “market-state” or that he employs “internal decision markets” to decide which operations to support and which not to. First of all, MasterCard provides a lot more than just financing and infrastructure in “running” its operation; if they did not, there would be no procedural standards for their global operations, verifications, record keeping, and so on. The notion that this is all MasterCard provides is self-attribution, not a statement of fact. It is cultivation of self-image with self-propaganda. Of course, this can be easily challenged by appropriately changing definition of the term “infrastructure”. It's a word that works like “strength” worked during the Vietnam era. Moreover, markets in America, no less than global markets, are about as far from free as markets can get. But this fact does not sit well with the persona so long serviced by regression in service to the ego; processes of assimilation are, therefore, in great demand -- particularly so in face of threats to integrity of that persona. My impression is that it did not take a great feat of intelligence analysis to arrive at the conclusion that bin Laden, post-Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, “doesn't have tight vertical control”. But the only model of collective behavior, of group dynamics, of mass action credited by the cultivated persona is the market operating according to metaphorical generalization of Newton's summation of forces. The fact that such a market probably has never existed is irrelevant to the persona, and certainly provides little insight into how Al Qaeda actually functions. As soon as I start seeing statements derivative of non-persona-sanctioned accounts of spontaneous social order, I will begin entertaining the notion that some actual intelligence analysis is transpiring.
The problems are not the problems. Within realms of reasonable expectations, it doesn't matter how good the penetration, how good the electronic intelligence collection, how wet the surveillance blanket spread over the threat framework -- if you have no idea as to what the appropriate EEI (Essential Elements of Information) are. And clearly they have no idea, because their paradigm-inflexibility-induced lateral mental cleavage forces them to assimilate the adversary to attributed self-properties by means of projective identification. You think 400 Georgetown University School of Foreign Service graduates are going to find the appropriate EEI? What they surely have done, what they will continue to do, what has been done over and over for decades is “update” the EEI inherited from the WWII era. There is no such thing as a set of universal EEI: Hilbert thought so, Gödel demonstrated not so. Refinements don't count. There might be universal meta-EEI, but that requires going to m-valued logics, and even there such universality is likely not demonstrable. You have to deal with your own psychological barriers to looking at the thing-in-itself, that being-there. No hope of this absent actual practice of reductive phenomenology. Of course you will get lucky; you'll prevent this or that operation; but such luck only helps you in the short term, at best only helps you win every battle. But I wouldn't elevate my expectations if I were you, for reductive phenomenology involves self-modification, gerrymandering self-attribution, a virtual crime.
Whether Al Qaeda yet knows it or not, or regardless of the degree to which it knows it, its aspirations and agenda are far larger than it has publicly stated -- as interpreted by the press, by people like Bodansky and Anonymous, by commentators like Col. Robert Killebrew (Ret.) writing in the Houston Chronicle ("Facing Al-Qaida in 2010", August 14, 2004). This is so because (1) Al Qaeda's publicly stated objectives (its demands) cannot be obtained without sundering foundations of the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system as a system qua system, and (2) the actions undertaken by Al Qaeda have been carried out within a historical context wherein quantum-relativity theory, its extensions, and the technologies it has spawned have fundamentally challenged validity of the metaphysical principles upon which institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm are based. Regardless of initial motive, and independent of consciously articulated objective, the logics imposed by interplay of strategic variables (like the nation-state system's intrinsic reliance on balance of power mechanisms, need to maintain price stability of fossil fuels, inability to tolerate existence of extra-systemic political and economic entities and processes) with ongoing contextualizing historical developments will insure that the first actions taken inevitably lead to the second, and thence to the third, and so on, vectored along a path determined not by Al Qaeda's initial conscious impetus, but by this interplay between strategic variables and historical context. Adjustments to U.S. foreign policy will not turn aside what has been put in motion.
If Al Qaeda is not assimilated to MasterCard, then it's assimilated to McDonalds (Donna Abu-Nasr, “Al-Qaeda-spawned groups act like terror franchises”, Associated Press, August 9, 2004). Dee Hock, the Bank of America founder of Visa, International who globalized the easy-credit credit card of usurious interest rates and espoused “chaoplexy” -- a neologism formed of “chaos” and “complexity” -- would probably appreciate the irony. Only problem is, the self-organized criticality Al Qaeda reaches for is no more a function of franchise dynamics than it is of recursive iteration on fitness landscapes. If it were, then Bios Group, a spin-off of Santa Fe Institute, would probably be culpable, as this is an aspect of what they contract to implement. Or maybe Santa Fe Institute has played a role in arriving at this form of assimilation. Wouldn't be at all surprising. Spontaneous social order is a higher, more complex, form of ORGANIZATION than are Cartesian-Newtonian-Weberian sociologies. Al Qaeda and Associates is not without organization; it only appears that way to the binary mind. What they have tapped into, as origins of the Taliban clearly indicate, is tribal animism transmuted under traditional Islamic moral economies, which are deeply shared frameworks of belief, such frameworks being highly catalytic to collective states of identity transparency which, in turn, lead to formation of communities of practice. And these communities of practice collectively undergo non-equilibrium phase transitions between levels of self-organizational competency. Identity transparency being the actual agency responsible for self-organization, not recursive iteration. Church's hypothesis: calculable if and only if recursive. Impact of Al Qaeda upon the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system is not calculable, under Church's hypothesis. Because the discovery-driven worldview paradigm transition continues to evolve by elaboration of theory and experimental verification (these days of post-quantum-relativity perspectives), in spite of the stasis in institutional adaptation, the collective unconscious continues to make registrations, such that the “adversary” (projection of ones own unconscious attributes, which must be assimilated by virtue of being unconscious) evolves, with each new loop of the spiral, evermore sophisticated regressed embodiments of ones worst nightmare, that which one most resolutely suppresses. What one currently most resolutely suppresses is quantum relative-state, another term for animistic identity transparency. Santa Fe Institute courts Native American media stars only as part of its “legend”, not because it believes Redskin animism carries a system to self-organized criticality. The relative-state interpretation of quantum mechanics is also called the multi-worlds interpretation. Under Al Qaeda, the multi-worlds are the multiplicity of “independent” terrorist groups which cannot be described in “mechanistic terms”; instead of a “central nervous system”, there is a wave-effect processor functioning according to the rules of holography, wherein the part contains all the information of the whole simply by virtue of identity transparency. (Those words in quotes in the sentence immediately above are expressions used by Donna Abu-Nasr.) In Vietnam, the VC were assimilated to Redskins, and arguments were continuously made that their forms of organization were not matters of much military consequence. Moreover, portraits developed of those organizational formats were largely generalizations of textbook accounts of prior, predominantly hierarchical, communist cellular organizations, and thus were not based upon intensive analysis of the available field-generated documentation. The myopia involved allowed the portrait artists to ignore the strategic role played by animistic peasant identity transparency in driving processes of self-organization. This time around, the involved forms of self-organization are even more “amorphous”, even more exclusively driven by identity transparency; therefore, even more invisible to the binary mind. Al Qaeda may not have much in the way of Weberian organization, but it is rapidly evolving very sophisticated forms of large-scale self-organization. Weberian sociologies may be slain by leadership decapitation, but such decapitation only feeds processes of self-organization when there is a sufficient recruitment base, as there surely is in this case. The more leaderless and the more decision free the collective and cooperative behaviors resident in animistic quantum sociologies, the more coherent they are and the higher their level of self-organizational competency. If you cannot understand this, you are deeply uninformed concerning contemporary knowledge of critical-state behaviors in material systems -- or have not thought about their larger implications.
The primary purpose of terrorist actions, and military operations in insurgency war, is not to impact the adversary, but to have an effect upon the recruitment base and to drive organizational phase transitions. If the insurgent's adversary can be enticed into facilitating achievement of this purpose, all the better. Any time this principle is violated -- say, as in the macho Latin model, where violence itself was heralded as the transformative factor, the factor capable of transforming the insurgent combatant -- the terrorist or insurgent makes a grave error. Such conflicts are won only by drawing more and more people into active and passive support as the conflict is successfully protracted and spread out farther and farther in space. The corpus of those who will never carry arms, who will never directly engage in violence, that corpus which constitutes the preponderance of any successful insurgent infrastructure, is the critical strategic variable, the transformative factor of utmost importance. Only if more and more people are transformed by being drawn into the environment of the conflict in prescribed ways can the insurgent's objectives and goals be obtained. To the degree that the insurgent is successful at managing the time and space aspects of the conflict, to the same degree is disparity of available force overcome. In principle, if the insurgent can persist long enough, the counterinsurgent, regardless of available force, ultimately will be faced with a choice between killing the whole recruitment base or retiring from the field of conflict. Thus far, Al Qaeda has violated none of the involved cardinal principles. Moreover, the present conflict is set in context of a historical development where many extra-combat factors -- e.g., evolution and gathering dysfunction of the techno-base -- have drawn into question persistence of the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system. These extra-combat factors are free-energy to be drawn upon by the insurgent to overcome the disparity of available force. Immediately following 9/11, the counter-insurgent handed to the insurgent on a silver platter the space and time variables modulating disparities of force by declaring global war of indefinite extent -- when the only way it can win is by containing the conflict to the shortest possible time and the smallest possible space. It then undertook two offensive actions that catalyzed insurgent organizational phase transition and greatly facilitated insurgent recruitment. At the same time, its own recruitment activities enormously expanded the myriad corps of nascent mercenary groups, the very presence of which further undermines integrity of the nation-state system. The counter-insurgent, by undertaking its offensive initiatives in regions containing a dwindling strategic military resource, oil, greatly assisted the insurgent's efforts to throw nation-state against nation-state, thus helping the insurgent divide the available forces arrayed against it. This effort to divide opposing forces is a long-term venture and fruition is certainly a long way off, but with help from its foremost adversary, the insurgent has gotten off to a very good start. In such a strategic context it is hard to see how leadership decapitation could possibly make much impact. The gravity of the circumstance can be read in many ways, not the least of which is to be seen in the extraordinary media attention given to the capture of a mere commo-liaison agent, one amongst many thousands continuously moving between the “amorphous” and “independent” elements of Al Qaeda and Associates peppering the planet. When, in the history of insurgency warfare, has there been an insurgency better started than this one?
Look, people involved in counter-insurgency operations fight the war in service to their egos (and nowadays their pocketbooks). They fight the war that interests them, not the war that doesn't interest them. If they are psychologically identified with macho heroics and violence, they will choose to attempt to win every battle by immersing themselves in the continuum of micro-events, the drama, the risk, and all the rest -- to the relative neglect of macro-strategic factors. Look to Hollywood, to the thriller writers, if you want to understand how such strategic-orientation choices are collectively imposed. Christian Caryl's recent article on John Le Carré (“Le Carré's War on Terror”, The New York Review of Books, August 12, 2004) illustrates this point rather well, I believe. Caryl quotes a passage from The Little Drummer Girl which I remember laughing heartily about when I first read it in 1983, and which was the central premise of the storyline of the thriller (p. 12, Caryl):
Terrorist organizations don't carry passengers, Paul. I told Misha this. They don't have secretaries, typists, coding clerks, or any of the people who would normally make natural agents without being in the front line.
Not only is this untrue, it is impossible. What such organizations have are extremely effective firewalls between the armed actors and their active and passive support infrastructure. Historically, the unarmed and never to be armed, active full-time political infrastructure has been approximately 30 times as large as the armed action elements. The more absent state sponsorship, the greater the tooth-to-tail ratio and the higher the organizational competency required for continued mounting of successful operations over time. The losing insurgent neglects these facts of clandestine life. Is Al Qaeda engaging in such neglect, as the public is being told by implication? Is there anyway the public can assess this issue on basis of the information available to it? If one looks at the published personal history of bin Laden, for instance, one sees that throughout his career he has been almost exclusively involved with orchestration of the active and passive aspects of the support infrastructure, and almost never directly involved with details of armed operations. Is such a man likely to neglect the very things the bulk of his adult life has been devoted to? One can be certain that this focus has been all the more the case in aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which was elicited by Al Qaeda to facilitate global phase transition between levels of infrastructure self-organizational competency. Bin Laden's whole career has been that of a logistical troubleshooter who has mastered the theory of self-organizing systems as it applies to Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare (to quote the title of a book produced in 1963 at Special Operations Research Office while I was there: Andrew Molnar, et al). It appears Bin Laden has not violated any of the involved principles while carrying the network he is associated with from forms of organization apropos of international terrorism to those apropos of global insurgency. It goes without saying that a master of logistics must also be a master strategist, as the two areas are deeply interfused. Master tacticians are much more easily come by. But one must suppose that by now -- so many years having passed -- bin Laden's mode of thought and methods have been well diffused throughout the “amorphous” network, thereby making possible a greater level of fractionalized (therefore more secure) decentralization (i.e., “independent groups”) than was the case before entry upon the critical-state non-equilibrium phase transition between levels of self-organizational competency.
It is in the nature of operator-time that history always outruns itself: what appears to be the present, to those identified with linear-time, is always some part of the past. Today, especially, is the present well into the past and the future “causing” current events. Temporal reflexivity intensifies as the folding lips of cusp surfaces are approached. If this is difficult to understand, think of the cusp in fossil fuel availability relative to the dissimulated jockeying of nation-states and non-state actors in the Middle East and Central Asia as virtual confrontation between the U.S. and China actualizes under influence of the governing attractor.
When metaphorical embodiment of a worldview construct, the collection of prevailing institutions and conventions, moves into a state of high dysfunctionality -- as a result of extreme divergence between principles underlying the emergent worldview and those of the old worldview the institutions are based upon -- anyone who pursues a career of whatever sort is directly culpable for the behaviors of the prevailing institutionalization. Any attempt to move up that institutionalization directly reinforces its dysfunctionality. When a leading anti-war Vietnam scholar read MOON, one of the primary observations made was that it is impossible to imagine how the protagonist could have arrived at the position on the war he is portrayed as maintaining in the mid-60s. The position must have been created long after the fact. Which is to say that the scholar could not imagine having reached such a position at the time in question. The passage at issue comes from Derek Dillon's journals and was actually written in the Spring of 1965, or thereabouts, probably immediately after the first national teach-in against the war held at the Sheraton Park Hotel (Vol. 1, p. 281):
I am not going to talk about this much; I am still feeling my way into it. Quitting college to go to Viet Nam. From every approach to the issue, I have come to be opposed to American involvement in that war. Two years ago I was undecided. No more; I have read enough and seen enough in this city to be firm in my convictions. But something deep and strong inside tells me that the real and hidden content of the American psyche is playing itself out over there. That which remains unresolved, which is pushed into the unconscious, there to fester, is always and automatically projected. This applies to the collectivity no less than to the individual. Psychological contents, once projected, are lived out as physical events. America in Viet Nam is such a case. It is so palpable I can almost taste it! I have been reading and rereading Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul (required this semester for “Problems in World Politics”) in order to better understand the feeling about this. But I haven't got a clear picture yet. One thing is sure, though. That which really drives the American psyche is showing its true colors right now in Viet Nam. The best way to understand and measure a person is to watch him perform in high-stress situations (is that not what we are taught in studying group dynamics right here in SIS?). Well, I say the same applies to a collectivity, a national corpus. If one wants to understand America, look at what it is doing to Viet Nam. I am an American. I want to understand myself. I have to go to Viet Nam. How could I justify protecting myself from the laceration? What is it that Kazantzakis says? In order to be a true modern man, a contemporary Odysseus, one must keep the thought of death constantly before the mind and free oneself from everything: philosophies, religions, political systems. I sense this war will strip me bare of the last vestige of naïve faith in contemporary political systems. Would this not be a great service to my interior development? And don't tell me this war belongs to my generation. It is a war visited upon my generation! The sins of the father. The unconsciousness, the projected contents, the phobias are not of my generation; they belong to the generation that fought World War II.
Abdul Said taught “Problems in World Politics” that semester. The laceration spoken of turned out, quite appropriately, to be a testicle wound. A child does not conceptually codify all that he or she understands; the understanding is arrived at by diffuse feeling-toned judgments which may later be elaborated by other psychological functions: intuition, thinking, sensation. The first feeling-toned judgments leading to the position taken in 1965 were made by an eight-year-old standing in Tokyo's Frank-Lloyd-Wright-designed Imperial Hotel in 1953 watching American military officers and diplomatic personnel interact with Japanese shoe-shine boys. Over the next twelve years the other psychological functions were brought to bear in elaborating those initial judgments. By the end of 1968, the range of experience undergone had yielded considerable insight. When scholars and journalists read my article “Who Caused the Cambodian Holocaust, Anyway?” the inevitable reaction is “But that's all been said before: Shawcross' Sideshow” or “Quite frankly, doesn't make a bit of sense”. Reactions such as these, particularly from those of anti-war sentiment, are psychologically very revealing -- given that the article is not about the fact of the bombing of Cambodia, but about how fear of the implications of quantum mechanics metaphorically informed experience of the war in Indochina and subliminally motivated the involved bombing behaviors, behaviors implemented by personages observed at close range by those working in CICV-Targets. In reacting to the article, not a single reader has ever mentioned its central argument. This argument simply goes completely unregistered. And this has been the case for almost fifteen years. The article was written as a test impulse, and reactions to it have yielded considerable data to contemplate relative to present-day American behaviors.
Pol Pot was a primary perpetrator of the Cambodian holocaust, but perpetrators are rarely responsible for holocausts, rarely cause them. Acts instigated by Kissinger and Nixon were proximal causes, but more interesting and more generally “causal” was the act of Samuel P. Huntington in justifying the strategy of free-fire zones with the phrase he coined: “forced-draft urbanization” which directly linked Vietnam war policy to processes forced by economic globalization, and hence to subsequent holocausts. One of the most direct effects of globalization has been acceleration to massive rural-to-urban migration as the hinterland becomes an economic free-fire zone allowing subsistence land holdings to be amalgamated for use by industrial combines. The Khmer Rouge policy of forced-draft de-urbanization was an expression of what Jung would call “an unconscious compensatory mechanism” constellated relative to the policy Huntington facilitated, according to my thesis, as an expression of his subliminal fears of the social, political, and economic implications of quantum mechanics. I have explained this sort of observation so many times in so many contexts, I will not run through it again. The word “causal” is put in quotes, because the concept does not apply: Jung's term “synchronicity” is the correct word. If one has pursued a career, tried to move up in the prevailing institutionalization, one has facilitated Huntington's culpability. An “innocent civilian” is, indeed, a rare thing -- and that is why the central argument of the article goes completely unregistered. It goes without saying, that, though I did not pursue a career, I am personally culpable by virtue of being an American, and by virtue of having directly participated in the Vietnam war -- whatever the motivation leading to the decision to do so.
Today, editorial policies of Harper's and The New York Review of Books facilitate Huntington's culpability relative to actions perpetrated by the prevailing institutionalization. Regardless of how much they might criticize the perspectives advocated by Huntington and those similar, nonetheless, they facilitate by simultaneously advocating the principles underlying 17th and 18th century political economy. This advocacy literally drips off the pages of these two publications, and suffuses the editorial verbiage of Lewis H. Lapham. In terms of the real underlying issues, there is no substantive distinction to be drawn between Huntington's position and the positions taken by these two publications. All three assiduously suppress the social, political, and economic implications of quantum mechanics, and in so doing form the inside and the outside of the largely unconscious wall of the induction funnel leading inevitably to current behaviors of the prevailing institutionalization. Indeed, one can find no significant divergence in fundamental assumptions between those of Tom Hayden and those of George Bush: both have yet to cognitively enter the 19th century. Anti-war, pro-war: not a matter of consequence, as both sides are equally responsible for sustaining the prerequisite catalytic circumstance. This is something completely unregistered which will continue to be completely unregistered, as the “full catastrophe” continues to unfold.
How can you possibly doubt at this very late stage that there will be “the full catastrophe”? Every aspect of what is virtually certain to happen has repeatedly been predicted by many people, and not only predicted, described in considerable detail along with the myriad reasons why. No one knows the sequence of specific events that will be involved, or the relative intensity or elaboration of this or that factor, but the general features are quite clear: continued population growth; continued massive planetary economic- and warfare-related forced-draft urbanization and associated growth of the extra-legal sector; continued increase in income disparities; solidification of global insurgency against the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system as the informing 17th and 18th century paradigm continues to be evermore overthrown by scientific discovery, theoretical elaboration, experimental verification, and increased deployment of quantum-based technologies, until the insurgency movement jumps the barrier of Islamic extremism and coalesces with non-Islamic movements of other under-populations, particularly those of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America; accelerating oil-related conflict between failing great-power states and the power blocs created to shore them up; continued nuclear weapons proliferation; as the Asian Century unfolds, formation of a Greater China as a Mahayana Buddhist bloc, incorporating in one coalition form or another, by all the usual political, economic, and military means, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan; increasing difficulties with pandemics, climate shift dynamics, and ecological dyscrasias; as oil conflict builds, loss of the dollar's ability to dominate oil transaction denomination and the dollar's consequent fall from status as the primary international reserve currency; first use of tactical nukes, most probably as the U.S. undergoes actual existential threat due to loss of its capability to engage in “liability financing” as the dollar loses its supreme status in the planetary economy; as global conflict increases and confrontation between the U.S. and Greater China becomes more and more inflammatory, the European pseudo-consensus fractures and a Germano-Russian Bloc forms; Greater China and the Germano-Russian Bloc align themselves; France is caught in ambivalence between the Anglo-American coalition and its opposition; massed warfare begins with exploitation of China's greatest vulnerability at her rear; India may or may not find a way to stay out of direct military involvement; America's greatest proximal vulnerability, due to consequences of what it did to Latin America for 200 years, comes under assault; in aftermath, the informal systems associated with global insurgency and the extra-legal sector, which are regressed analogical embodiments of the post-quantum-relativity paradigm, are the most coherent social, political, and economic ordering factors in existence; slow re-building from that regressed base-state ensues. No technological solution to the full complexus can emerge because increased recourse to quantum-based technologies in order to resolve this or that specific difficulty further undermines integrity of the Westphalian state system. Something along these lines, though this may be overly optimistic in not assuming nuclear winter and similar virtually terminal events. This is not a scenario, only what is surely a partial list of cardinal factors and more or less likely events; a multiplicity of scenarios could be developed. Every opportunity to alter the outlines has resolutely been turned aside, and that is likely to remain the case, as even this late in the “game” there is no indication of nascent interest in actually doing what is required regarding the fundamental precipitants -- no interest even amongst those not part of the global “leadership” elite. Significant such opportunities were thirty years ago; now, remains only a residue.
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