What political revolution, including the American one of 1776, did not concentrate power, did not build the apparatus of the state? There has been none -- even including those associated with signing of the Magna Carta and the dropping guillotine. Derek Dillon has been arguing since the early Sixties that it is a waste of time, energy, and resources to attack the state by whatever means on behalf of people’s power. Not only is it a waste, it is highly counterproductive. Revolution, successful or unsuccessful, is one of the many means by which the state has been built.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was an unrevolution. There was a deconcentration of power, a dismantling of the apparatus of the superstate. Advocates of the American superstate, however, tell us that this unrevolution was a nonviolent people’s democratic revolution, that political action from below upon a failing system under prolonged internal and external economic stress and in crisis forced it to undergo fundamental change, forced it to dismantle itself. This is an apologia for continued building of the apparatus of the state -- another kind of state, to be sure, but the state, nonetheless. The Federalist Papers was not about sub-states’ rights; it was about agreeing to fusion of sub-states into a superstate. Today, we debate fusion of superstates into a hyperstate.

What privatization scheme, including that legislated for American telecommunications, did not concentrate power, did not build the apparatus of the dysfunctional mega-corporation? There has been none -- even including, if you will, deregulation of financial institutions, which unleashed their capabilities for mediating mergers and acquisitions. Derek Dillon has been arguing since the Goldwater presidential campaign, when he was a Young Republican reader of Ayn Rand, that it is a waste of time, energy, and resources to foment privatization and laissez-faire in a market environment that has an inherently low level of self-organizational competency. Not only is it a waste; it is highly counterproductive. Privatization, with associated deregulation, is one of the many means by which the dysfunctional mega-corporation has been built. What is the essential difference between a monolithic public utility and an oligopolistic telecommunications mega-corp? One takes three people to rotate the ladder holding the man changing the light bulb, while the other classifies this activity as a capital investment.

There was an unrevolution in the Soviet Union because communism -- being largely a back-reaction against capitalist excess, therefore derivative -- was the weakest element in the institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian world construct. Collapse of the Soviet Union was not the end of communism; it was the beginning of incendiary disintegration of the whole political and economic institutionalization of Descartes’ and Newton’s understanding of Nature. If ones reference frame is restricted to the period post-1945, one can perhaps plausibly regard the Soviet unrevolution as a people’s revolution; this cannot easily be done, however, if one takes a perspective going back to the beginnings of utopian socialism, or, better yet, the period in which Hobbes wrote the introduction to his treatise on social contract mechanisms of the democratic superstate: Leviathan.

“For what is the heart but a spring?” Hobbes proceeded from this 17th century European poetic formulation to outline the basic mechanism underlying democracy: force divided against itself. This was an analogical application of Newton’s then evolving laws of motion. And, similarly, John Locke, in Chapter VIII of his Second Treatise Concerning Civil Government, justified the mechanism of majority rule on the basis of Newtonian summation of forces:

For that which acts any community being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being one body must move one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body, one community…

Not only do we have here an example, in analogy, of vector analysis, but we have explicit statement of the Cartesian-Newtonian notion of “simple identity” of the corpus of discrete actors: “one body”. These are actors in one body acted upon, “whither the greater force carries it”, not participator parts directly experiencing a holographic part-whole transparency, which is the “relative-state” of bubbles in the quantum foam of relativistic spacetime curvature. Newton’s world is not a participatory universe, and John Locke’s democracy is not participatory democracy. The mechanics of discrete actors receiving action directives from the interplay of market forces -- supply and demand -- was elaborated on the basis of analogy with Newton’s laws of motion by Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations. One cannot quote the whole book, so examples are left to the reader’s discretion. The level of market self-organizational competency described by Smith and his successors on basis of analogy with Newton’s interplay of forces is a level of competency far inferior to that which would be obtained by a market functioning according to quantum principles of self-organization -- the principles by which holography functions, for instance.

Soviet scientists did not have to await nuclear bomb designers like Sakharov to learn that Einstein’s relativity theory removed the notion of force as a fundamental in physics and replaced it with spacetime curvature: Soviet physicists were applying relativity theory to meteorology by the early 1920s -- a feat not replicated in the West until the 1960s. Effects of application within the Soviet Union of post-Newtonian perspectives to the Earth and other sciences over the next six decades did not include emergence, by analogy, of new quantum-relativistic political and economic concepts. This may in large measure have been the case because the classical relativity and quantum theories were not so much the beginning of something new, as the end of something old. Nonetheless, these effects of the application of post-Newtonian science did include sympathy amongst the highly educated for growing doubts about validity of the old political and economic concepts developed, as they were, by analogy with the old physics. The numbers of Soviet citizens involved in this process of accelerating doubt increased from generation to generation. If old soldiers never die, that’s one thing; but if old scientists never die, God help us. The whole Soviet cultural synthesis progressively fell into doubt, not just the economic and political systems.

So, what are we, the vanguard of unrevolution, supposed to do? Sit around in smug confidence and certain knowledge waiting for the historical process to accomplish the inevitable: collapse of the evolved global institutionalization of 17th and 18th century physical theory? Are we to make this show of impotence, all the while counting the numbers that die prematurely in warfare and epidemics, noting the growing number of plant and animal species that are forever lost, decrying deterioration of the natural world all the way out into junked-up space, raging about the hacking and miscegenation of genome after genome, and on and on? Is there nothing that can be done to avoid the crunch or to speed up the process?

If we are to speak of action directives, it makes sense to look at the situation from the perspective of centuries, rather than decades, only if the situation is going to cusp, for it is in cusp and only in cusp that the long-term controlling variables reach their critical states, those states within which small nudges can have big effects. How can the controlling variables be identified? If the essential nature of the whole situation is the inadequacy of the overarching world construct, as it has evolved and been institutionalized through centuries, then the controlling variables most certainly must have to do with world view propoundment and institutionalization. Unrevolutionary action, then, must be undertaken in relation to critical aspects of world view propoundment and institutionalization -- not in the realms of conventional politics, normative or counter-normative.

Why, when, what, how, and whereto? These are the questions to which there are no consensus answers.

Macroeconomic Forcing of Corrupt Practices
Or What “transaction rent” has to do with quantum physics

Some Western urban planners and business people, who have lived and worked in Asia for a decade and more, have increasingly referred to corrupt practices with the term “transaction rent”. Why would they adopt a term of legitimation for what, clearly, undermines the system of rules commonly agreed to be responsible for an orderly economic environment? Newtonian econometrics -- the corpus of prevailing consensus theories of the capitalist marketplace and its resultant structures and functions -- prevent certain types of macroeconomic information from coming into being. Absence of this information creates systemic behavioral gradients affecting economic actors so as to demand from them corrupt practices which are the system’s attempt to repair macroeconomic dysfunction. As transaction cycle speed accelerates with global integration, effects of the dysfunction grow commensurably. Only a revision on the level of the basic principles affecting the very notion of what a monetary exchange unit can be, i.e., what kinds of information it can carry -- no mere prescriptive, moralizing, injunctive, or punishing legislation -- is capable of bringing the missing information into being, and thus obviating the macroeconomic forcing of corrupt practices.

This was written in 1995, two years before the East Asian currency meltdown. First thoughts only. Every attempt to discuss the idea led to one or another conversational hiatus. There being no apparent way to talk productively about this subject with anyone, there appeared no way to write it to any real effect, so I stuffed the idea away at the back of a folder. Now that Worldcom has become Worldcon, it is perhaps unfortunate I was unable to find the right person to talk with. And most people in the U.S. have conveniently forgotten that they so easily believed the East Asian meltdown was due to a peculiarly Asian moral turpitude that Westerners are immune to.

In the late 1960s, there was a German approach to political action called Systemüberwindung. This meant something like conquering the system by beating the man with his own cane, that cane being the consequences of his own values and beliefs. In a very real sense, today the man is beating himself with his own cane so expertly he requires no help to further undermine the system embodying his beliefs and values, no help at making the system more expressive of its intrinsic properties.

If there are to be consensus inducing answers for the vanguard of unrevolution to Why, when, what, how, and whereto? there must be found problem briefs that intrinsically involve all five queries. As the number of such problem briefs are identified and mount, are inter-related and analyzed, more and more general answers to the five queries will emerge from the specific cases. This can only effectively transpire as a mutual engagement, if it is to be a consensual process. Starting with general precepts and the coercive “we” and working back to particulars is the way revolutionaries work, not the vanguard of unrevolution. How about deconstructing a general precept of state building?

Law Is Criminal
Transaction Rent (“graft”), Omiyage Gift-Tender,
and Spontaneous Social Order in Decision-Free Contractless Societies
(circa 1995)

Emperor-king as empty-center, a central feature of the Japanese myth of creation, establishes the emblematic personage as exemplifying the functions of a physical-region singularity in a sociological quantum identity-field. Self-determined action of any sort by the Emperor-king -- decision, that is -- destroys the holographic part-whole identity transparency which the royal institution mediates-manifests by its presence as symbolic referent. Hard-wired hierarchies preclude the Emperor-king from fulfilling his role as empty-center: the very existence of military figures, politicians, and statesmen is lèse majesté: those samurai who are not ronin are not samurai. Those who have lost capacity to experience identity transparency, who claim separateness and autonomy, have, by this loss, by this claim, exiled themselves from the base-state of Nature, and have, therefore, adopted “foreign” ways, ways characteristic of a diseased state. This is not only a Japanese idea. The mandala that kingship at Angkor was based upon establishes lack of boundedness as a topology of identity transparency: nonorientability as the defining characteristic of kinghood: the King’s being does not stop here; that art thou as thou art that (the King’s divinity). Boundlessness is not a STAGE in the progressive development of boundedness -- as Western scholars eulogizing rise of the modern nation-state would have it. And sayeth He unto me: Be thy wrapped in boundaries, separate, ownable, acted upon, for in being thus bound will thee find thy freedom. Will the West never learn? that when it forcibly strips Asian states of identity from Asian forms of organization, it is left with “Asian despotism” and “Asian barbarism” and “Asian graft”: the West’s psychological projection of its own collective unconscious imago: Yellow Peril, Dark Continent (the worst excesses of the Tokugawa Shogunate, for instance, came in wake of Western incursions on Asia). Fluctuations of a power-vacuum center are at the core of traditional Eastern preoccupation in regards to organizational theory. Vacuum fluctuations are at the core of physicists’ preoccupation in regards to theory of collective and cooperative behaviors in quantum systems exhibiting spontaneous order like superconductivity. Forcing Western notions of civil law, sexual conventions, and procedural standards down throats of others is one way the West keeps its own internal contradictions in a state of collective psychological projection and thus insures that the specter of an unadulterated quantum physics is kept at bay. Will those “others” tolerate this behavior indefinitely? One might well ask how long exercise of force can keep a falsification of Nature in control of human institutions. Law is criminal because it is the necessary and sufficient condition of prescription precluding phase transition to that state of autopoiesis and self-organized criticality which is spontaneous social order.

In this case, I hardly bothered to talk with anyone; I just hurriedly jotted down a series of interconnected notions in mnemonic form and tossed the page into the bottom of the same folder as the other one went. No use really writing this stuff up. Writing up what should be consensually “worked” is a form of coercion apropos of revolution, not unrevolution.

These two briefs, though, are thematically related and intrinsically touch upon the five fundamental queries at issue. One can gather hints from them as to the controlling variables which must be “nudged” if an unrevolution is to occur. Nudged! The Newtonian nudging approach. See how much self-observational work is required to actually get into and sustain a new way of thought. The notion of borders. The fundamental nature of identity. The role of rules. How the properties of a monetary exchange unit are to be conceived. Is there a connection between gifting behaviors, empathy, and the quantum property of “relative-state”. Are contracts even possible in quantum sociologies? Are power centers (Newtonian gravitational analogy) more or less instrumental than empty centers (blackhole analogue of Einsteinian theory of gravity) in setting up and maintaining event gradients. Can a strange political attractor, an empty center, nullify decision need in a socius? Is politics necessarily a decision science? Do we even know what a decision is? This last question would immediately lead into another brief with orders of logical value beyond true or false at issue, as such orders apply to the issue of decision, the nature of information, the types of information a monetary exchange unit can carry, and so on. Unrevolution is beyond doubt, which is only the first feeble step. Lingering on doubt while entering a cusp is to choose a very poor flight path.

Look, its a strategy issue. As early as 1972, Derek Dillon was saying in his now published personal journals that the Newtonian nation-state system would reach its greatest level of lethality and oppressiveness at the very moment of its incendiary disintegration. The highly ordered state, quantum physics teaches us, is not the only thing that can spontaneously self-organize; so can collapse into apparent chaos. With understanding that utter collapse of the Newtonian nation-state system was in full process of self-organizing, all thought of opposing the state evaporated. In one way or another, collective psychological processes absolutely would see to this collapse, so why be overly concerned with the details or the time line? Other, more important, things were to be done, such as discovering ways to influence patterns of emergence from collapse. But beyond the discovery process, this is a hugely problematic undertaking. Overwhelmingly, people undertake “idealistically motivated actions” only to the minimum degree required to sustain their good opinion of themselves -- and they will have long since convinced themselves that, really, things will, after all, not become bad enough to warrant their changing their lives in significant ways. Of course, there are a few exceptional people. But can an effective synoptic strategy be based upon a reliance on the exceptional case? Those who have been deeply burned by the nation-state will act against the nation-state. How many will decisively alter their lives at present to act in relation to the need to influence patterns of emergence from a collapse which has yet to happen? The obvious answer to that question sets all the parameters. Whatever is accomplished in a timely fashion (i.e., before actual collapse) will be accomplished only under pretext. Pawns of the process, people predominantly are.

“With prejudices like yours, why haven’t you become a terrorist?” This is a very revealing question and Derek Dillon could write at considerable length upon what it reveals about the questioner, given the content of the MOON website which elicited it. But, instead, let’s set the record straight. Derek has asked well over a dozen one-time U.S. military personnel -- whom he judged to be widely experienced and highly intelligent, thus greatly skewing the sample into a very small minority -- how it could happen that an American gunboat could mistake an Iranian airliner for a fighter jet and shoot it down by mistake. Absolutely not a single one of these guys had the slightest doubt that that airliner was intentionally shot down in full knowledge that it was an airliner and not a fighter jet. After swatting gnats with outboard motors for months, the frustration level had grown and grown -- and here was a real target! Just like in Vietnam, with the right level of frustration, the door-gunner takes out whatever he sees.

One eventually realizes -- given coverage of this event and many, many others -- that people who work for the major media are amongst the most morally compromised on planet Earth. Day in and day out, they successfully set themselves to the task of fulfilling the daily lie requirement of their professional positions. Most professions require meeting a lie requirement, but one is hard pressed to believe any exceed that of the “foreign correspondent”.

Derek has yet to find a former U.S. military man who believes that the U.S. attack on the Chinese Embassy was a mistake: all agree that there are myriad factors of standard procedure that make such an occurrence as improbable as life in a universe governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is also very difficult to find anyone with a U.S. intelligence background who rules out the likelihood that the Korean Airlines flight shot down by the Soviets was on an intelligence gathering mission. Intelligent people who have been around the U.S. military draw the right lessons from the fact that the U.S. government released massive doses of ionizing radiation on its own population at Hansford. They might not talk about those right lessons in public, because “I just don’t know what to do about it”, but that does not mean they haven’t drawn the right lessons. These are not only Vietnam veterans, but those, too young to have seen action in Vietnam, who participated in the Panama takedown and the action in Somalia. Derek has stayed away from Gulf War veterans, because all attempts to enlighten their lobby groups on the long history of uses of depleted uranium -- going back to the Bay of Pigs -- indicating sophisticated governmental knowledge of its effects on the quantum wave properties of intra-neuronal DNA have failed miserably. Boy are these guys smart!

Derek has not ventured to conduct an actual survey on the more difficult issues. Nonetheless, people he has run across have spontaneously, unsolicited, voiced their opinion on these matters. Perhaps there is something in Derek’s demeanor that makes people feel they can safely voice their most hidden thoughts. Well, sometimes, Derek does throw out a leading remark: “I believe that the Third World War began with the First Persian Gulf War.” A statement like this often elicits unforeseen responses from former U.S. military personnel. As if there were a lacuna in the conversation -- over beer, naturally. Not an unpleasant form of research.

“Yeah? I knew something was really fucked when they started talking Arabs being behind the Oklahoma City bombing. What Arab ever heard of Oklahoma, let alone wanted to bomb it? And this guy they canned over it, Timothy something, hell, he wasn’t smart enough to pull off a thing like that. And if he had been that smart, would he have tried to bargain for his life? No way! He’d have been cocky as shit, knowing all along that if he did the deed he would eventually die. He’d have accepted that before finally deciding to do it. Don’t make sense, unless it was a pretext for the government to crack down on a bunch of stuff they couldn’t crack down on otherwise… I bet it was something like that with the nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. The government was under some kind of threat and needed an excuse. Even the craziest of cultists couldn’t believe that killing people in a subway was going to create a social revolution. Come on! are we all idiots or what?”

People who call in to talk to “The Rabbi” on L.A.’s rightwing talk radio are a pretty select group. Or, well, used to be a select group, before collective hysteria became the norm. It is not only institutionalization of Cartesian-Newtonian worldview construct that is at issue in the experimental verification of Bell’s theorem and demonstration that atoms -- not only elementary particles -- can be at more than one location at a given time, the whole of Judeo-Christian monotheism is under profound challenge by these experimental findings. A god that is at more than one place at a time sounds more polytheistic than monotheistic to me! So people call “The Rabbi” to aggressively attack whatever is attackable, in order to assuage their fears in face of existential denials issued by the physicists (who are themselves looking for ways to falsify their findings). World Trade Center attack or no World Trade Center attack, people would have called “The Rabbi” to attack whatever was attackable. Old time religion and holocaust hysteria have found common cause. What a wonderful world it will be.

“Those guys knew. And if they didn’t know, they didn’t care. The World Trade Center attacks were a godsend! They sat and waited for something like that to happen. Now they can do everything they wanted to do, but couldn’t do. Shit! I was a lifer. Twelve years in, focused on twenty. But the whole thing -- especially the training missions -- just got to be too damned weird. MEDCAPS are a thing of the past, dosing the tribals with broad-spectrum antibiotics as a political ploy screwing their immune systems in the Congo and Southeast Asia. It’s now gone well beyond that! My gut started to turn. Morally, I couldn’t stomach it. So I bailed out. But what does that mean? Nothing. More and more, they got recruits from Eastern Europe and Russia who just MERC it. Yes, sir! no matter what the order, no matter how noxious the task. Hard-assed machines these guys are. Not even any grumbling afterwards about how fucked it all was. Into it for the money, like some hot-twat blonde Muscovite on contract in Itaewon. Amazing how the Russians have gone for this: MERC’in their way into the U.S. special service corps, while their beauties fuck The Worst and the Dullest. It’s a travesty. How can they stand it?”

Then there are e-mail and snail-mail correspondents.

“Sure, I read that full-page clipping you sent from U.S.A. Today describing how Bush and his closest advisors arrived at their decision to remove Saddam. I've been thinking about the article's content now for about a week. Truthfully, I don't believe a word in it.

“I go largely with the internet piece I sent you from Miami soon after 9/11 (or maybe you sent it to me?) analyzing 9/11 and its implications for the future written by that ex-Special Forces guy in North Carolina who now is an anti-globalization activist -- except I don't think the whole thing is due to a looming shortage of oil in the ground in the next twenty years, as he does. Friday's speech by Bush and submission to Congress of the Bush administration's new national security strategy establishing pre-emptive war rather then containment as the primary feature only serves to further substantiate the orientation I have taken to this all along.

“No way I believe the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11. The Afghan action just used 9/11 as a pretext to justify something in the works long before 9/11. Same thing that ex-Special Forces guy said in that internet piece, where there was a description of a major buildup of preparatory covert activities in the Central Asian republics of the former U.S.S.R., going back three to four and more years prior to 9/11 -- which follows Afghan precedent, as U.S. covert actions against Afghan started five years before the Soviet invasion initiated that phase of the war there -- not to mention that creating a new AO from scratch in the former U.S.S.R.'s Central Asian republics takes a long time, not just a matter of months. I been there; what am I to think? Should I ask the sheep-dipped SF guys, who supposedly were there to train Bhutto’s Palace Guard? Ha-ha-ha! Cover and more cover covers less and less.”

Politically -- not talking the deeper collective psychological and intellectual history aspects Derek Dillon is most focused upon in MOON -- one must suppose the present NSC strategy is based on thinking ten years down the line about a mutual defense pact between what Derek has called a Greater China (including a Japan under duress, which is already full into transferring her heavy industry and most of her high-tech manufacturing base to China) and a Germano-Russian Bloc (China is already “colonizing” heavily north of the Amur River and there are many indications that, when things get rough between the U.S. and China, Germany and Russia will cozy up with each other). Derek looks at cultural and psychological stuff, primarily, in reaching his long-term assessments, but U.S. policy makers surely must be wondering if the recent Sino-Russian security pact has a secret protocol. Current Russian and Chinese moves in response to U.S. “counter-terror” initiatives, Bush's aside-type comments in the Friday speech indicate he regards as purely tactical. And there is no way the NSC thinks Germany will support the Anglo-American global agenda when what is presently thin gets thick.

If the U.S. sees itself in ten years up against a Greater China aligned with a Germano-Russian Bloc, what must it do right now to maintain hegemony (a condition it will never give up, will, like Sampson, choose to pull the temple down upon itself rather than sacrifice) through what is perceived as coming at it in ten years? It must, whatever the cost, take complete control over the world's most strategic wartime resource: oil. How else could it remain on top in a conflict with such a formidable assembly of foes?

One must conclude that the Saddam affair has nothing to do with terrorism, Israel, or WsMD. Saddam, like Noriega, a former U.S. client deceived and turned upon, like 9/11, is a pretext to proceed with much larger strategic plans having their origins quite awhile ago, and evolving into greater and greater concreteness since soon after collapse of the U.S.S.R. Probably the U.S. considers it necessary to get control of the whole of Middle East oil sooner rather then later (a five-plus year project in itself) because China and Russia are more likely to respond to U.S. initiatives in this regard with tactical accommodation earlier, and less likely, later, as China's military strength grows and Russia recovers from her recent travail. The crossover point will come when control of enough oil is denied that China has no option but to stop responding with tactical accommodation. Whether this transpires sooner or later is, at this point, anybody’s guess -- but it can’t be too soon, and it can’t be too late.

Regardless of the outcome of these tangents, in one way or another, collective psychological processes, which do not well tolerate extremes in cognitive dissonance, absolutely will see to self-organized collapse of the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system -- so why be overly concerned with the details or the time line? Moreover, how much can one arrogate in formulating strategy concerning all this? Given the full spectrum of problems humans have created on this planet -- multiple species immune dyscrasias resulting from turning the planet into a communications-driven microwave oven; hacking the genomes of hundreds of species a day under the false assumption that the quantum chemistry of DNA has no significant biological role; flooding the environment and the food supply with mimetic estrogens; forcing the world’s poor to consume GMOs along with its daily doses of MSG; and on and on -- who is to say that loss of seventy-five percent of the planet’s human population is not a necessary element of any actual solution? How many times in recent years have you heard equivalent statements made? Quite a few, I would guess. This is a read on severity of the collective psychological processes presently in control of human events on this planet. Anyone who thinks the price that is and will be paid a small one is gravely disturbed and severely disconnected from his or her context.

I hardly know what usefully can be said to an accusation like that. I see no general good to be accomplished by my concealing my sentiment on the issue. Quite frankly, I have a strong aversion to the contemporary WAY (singular) of life on this planet, where ever I have been exposed to it. Insofar as America has been responsible for imposing this way of life, then, obviously, I am strongly averse to The American Way of Life. Places which have retained a residue of the traditional, I find more amenable than those which have not. Given what you appear to regard as THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE, the good life, as Reagan liked to call it, I would have to agree with your statement: I, from early childhood, have always hated The American Way of Life. Everything I personally found of value in life in America has been destroyed by The American Way of Life, by this so-called good life. For instance, the least destructive thing the American fast food industry did to America was make a major contribution to destruction of the quality of food available in America. This INDUSTRY was one major instrumentality in destruction of the quality of experience once available in many aspects of life in America. In becoming a chief component in The American Way of Life, the fast food industry, in significant measure, destroyed life in America.

My personal experience is all I can base my judgments upon. One of the last bastions of “good work” in America was the small family-run tree, shrub, and flower nursery business. I worked in such businesses in various capacities for approximately fifteen years. In the beginning, it was wonderful. Plants were living things, plants -- not soup cans. They grew in the ground, not in tins. In transplanting them, one worried as to whether or not they would lose a year's growth, not whether or not they would die. And the very idea that they could be set on a parking lot for the rush sale season, those left unsold being plowed into a ditch, was beyond imagining -- because living beings simply were not to be dealt with in that way. Besides, to deal with plants in such fashion was to destroy all the primary reasons for working with them. My best time with the “good work” of tending plants was digging large trees alone, piece work, with only a pick, shovel, and spade, long hours, four days a week, in the early 70s. A plain, but adequate, living could easily be supported on the income provided from this amount of very demanding physical labor. I did two hours of walking meditation daily -- afternoons on off days, evenings on workdays. Each night I read several hours, using the act of reading as a context within which to practice detachment from mental functions. This daily meditative endeavor made it possible to transform the piece-work digging of trees into a means of learning inner separation from physical activities. I did this daily, rigorously, for approximately six years. It was a very full and rewarding life. Rhythm entrainment was its essential feature. Some of my most elaborate experiences of “identity transparency”, of “generative empathy”, were mediated by the trees I tended. Habitus in self-similar cascades, a state of consciousness wherein the “magic” of place, ones own space as place in the universe -- all the way “out there” to “in here”, largest to smallest, supra-ordinate to inherent and even inordinate -- is in the rootedness of a tree in its soil. Cutting those roots, therefore, is no small act of cosmic transgression -- if not undertaken ritualistically according to rules of a context far larger than mere human social and economic convention. How generative empathy can be learned in absence of the assistance of trees is beyond my comprehension.

Living in such awareness year after year in America was to not participate in The American Way of Life. But that way of life eventually caught up with anyone living in such awareness, such full engagement with context, such rootedness in physical surround, such habitus. In this case, my personal case, the nursery INDUSTRY, by adopting the techniques and values of the fast food INDUSTRY, increasingly made the small family nursery economically unviable, or made such nurseries use techniques that destroyed the primary value there was in working with plants. I had merely been a worker at the tending of plants. I owned nothing, but lost everything I considered to be of real value: the quality of my experience. This is a mere example. But, as far as I can tell, it has been so with everything The American Way of Life has touched, especially so in America, it seems. If people hate America for what it has done to their traditional ways of life, it is not hard to find the reason why: not everyone on this planet has been reduced to the cognitive deficit of believing that quantity of things is equivalent to quality of experience.

Okay, so let's focus down on exactly what you want: “…an anti-corporate cancer therapy that entrains the pleasure principle, democratic mythology, and the lifelong hunger for personal growth into a tidal wave of revulsion that could bring the Big Bodies down.” Let's see where that can be expected to take us, how all the odds fall, what the risks are, the expected gains. We start with this statement as the focal issue from which the scenario logics are to be derived.

The statement seems to breakdown into four parts: (1) an anti-corporate cancer therapy; (2) entrainment of the pleasure principle, democratic mythology, and the hunger for personal growth; (3) wave of revulsion; (4) capacity to bring the Big Bodies down.

Of the Big Bodies you mention as variously identified -- “the corporations, gov't bureaucracies, religious orgs, and military corps” -- you exclusively associate the therapy capable of bringing down the Big Bodies with corporations. Minimally, this implies either that the corporations are the actual power that sustains the other classes of Big Bodies, and that it is superfluous to apply therapy other than at the core of power because therapy delivered to the periphery will be successfully dissipated or the treatment process will be of such duration that the patient may die in the process; or that the corporations are the weakest class of the Big Bodies and therefore easiest to bring down, and that bringing them down will lead to a cascade effect that brings down the other classes of Big Bodies.

We are applying a method here so as to help us identify the factors at play and bring our tacit assumptions into full awareness so as to evaluate the probable outcomes of actions we might choose to take and, when in the midst of such actions, to insure that whatever tactical improvisation that is undertaken is undertaken with maximal cognizance of the likely repercussions. Already, in the paragraph given immediately above, we can identity quite a few scenario dimensions. Primacy of one class of Big Bodies over the others -- or not. This could be used to define an axis of a scenario logic, as can any identified binary opposition. We have also identified two general classes of primacy: the primacy of strength and the primacy of weakness. We consider primacy of strength first. On the primacy pole of the primacy axis, primacy of strength due to what: socioeconomic structural and/or functional precedence, explicit administrative control, covert administrative control, interlocking membership, financial leverage, threat (personal violence, public exposure, extralegal covert or overt expropriation)? Are any of these factors context dependent or class specific? If so, they should be removed from this list and considered later as the scenario building process becomes more concrete, otherwise, say, a context dependent action directive (a tactic) may be misconstrued as context independent (a strategy) and thus mistakenly applied regardless of the context -- possibly causing a complete disaster. Action directives are inferred from analysis of factors such as those given above. Each of these variables can become a scenario dimension leading to multiple contingencies and decision points. The primacy of weakness hinges on (a) vulnerabilities, and (b) factors facilitating cascade effects. Context independent lists of these two should be compiled, along with the reasons why any given item is included on a list. Each of these variables and the reasons why they are, indeed, variables relevant here can become a scenario dimension leading to multiple contingencies and decision points. Primacy, by virtue of the above given factors, of the corporation, of government bureaucracies, of religious organizations, of military corps? There will be reasons for ruling out the last three. These reasons, none of which likely can be absolutely on-or-off but must be matters of greater or lesser tendency, become scenario dimensions leading to multiple contingencies and decision points.

All of the factors thus far mentioned are associated with the primacy pole of the primacy axis and therefore will be factors at play in two of the four scenarios we conservatively choose to explore (intersection of the factors associated with the neighboring poles of two axes generate a given scenario, which can be visualized as lying in one of the four quadrants formed by the crossed axes: a given pole, therefore, participates in two scenarios). But we have four parts of our focal issue which could generate a large number of possible axes, so we must remember to look for ways of subsuming one axis to another so as to configure a logic set that generates only four scenarios, each with multiple dimensions. Were we to work with all axes we identify, we would need as an aid a very sophisticated computerized analytical and display system, which I have termed “VirFut Q-Pro”.

Continuing with part (1) of the focal issue, we can already identify several attributes of the required therapy: metaphorical cancer therapy; centrally applied in the case of primacy of strength and peripherally applied in the case of primacy of weakness; of short duration and presumably of great strength in the case of primacy of strength, of longer duration (because of the involved cascade effects) and presumably requiring less initial strength in the case of primacy of weakness. That the cancer metaphor has been chosen implies a characterization of the corporation as a cancerous life-form, as mentioned in your message. All attributes of the corporation that are common with attributes of cancer should be listed. All attributes of the corporation that are not common with attributes of cancer should be listed. Analysis of these two lists will help identify opportunities through which a therapeutic process could function, and means by which efficacy of that therapy could be undermined or dissipated. Comparative study of these two lists would be a form of SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. Again, these therapeutic factors become scenario dimensions leading to multiple contingencies and decision points. If there is a magic-bullet-type therapy to be found, the discovery process is likely to be complex, given the complexity of factors involved.

Dot, dot, dot… I had six hours into the above and at that point went to bed. Evaluating the totality of the focal issue on this level of detail is a labor intensive process and only the beginning of what would be involved in actually doing what is required. Directly carrying through such a process or something equivalent is the only way to master a domain of action. Without such mastery, there is no possibility of becoming an effective decision maker or an inspired leader in that domain. This is not to remove intuitive dimensions of assessment or "acting from the gut" because this process or some equivalent is necessary in order to learn the neighborhood so that intuitive assessment and gut response can be informed as opposed to misinformed. Undergoing this process or some equivalent cannot be delegated. Delegation separates the leadership from the details, thus preventing efficacious action from the gut which is informed by the intuitive recognition of connection between details that triggers sudden insight. Dot, dot, dot…

Continuing with part (1) of the focal issue. The question of time has arisen in relation to the therapy. Due to “the direness of the time”, as you say, your interest will be focused on arriving at a strong therapy yielding immediate effects and holding out the possibility of resolving the acute phase of the disease in a relatively short period. Here we have a confluence of fact with decision need and temporal forcing. It is a matter of fact (already determined or to be determined) whether or not the principle of primacy applies to Big Bodies, and whether or not we are dealing with a case of the primacy of strength or the primacy of weakness. Because of the direness of the time (the temporal forcing), there is a greater interest in primacy as opposed to no-primacy and in the primacy of strength as opposed to the primacy of weakness. “Direness of the time” becomes a factor tentatively justifying conflation of identified scenario logic axes such that we focus on primacy of strength, strong therapy of short duration (while keeping in the back of our minds that this expedient is based upon inadequately explored factual premises). In the case of a team approach to this strategic planning effort, the bulk of the team would extend confidence to this expedient while a sub-group would explore sufficiently in depth the factual issues involved so as to reduce doubt in validity of the premises below some reasonable threshold.

We have applied temporal forcing (“direness of the time”) to the task of delimiting the types of possible “cancer therapy” that might be effective in treatment of the disease, whereas the notion of “direness of the time” went unexplored. The judgment that the time is dire not only depends upon an evaluation of pattern in the patterns in march of global events (analysis of megatrends and microtrends in the external forcing functions) but upon an estimation of the motivations of the actors (personal and collective psychology); otherwise, absent either of these, there is no means by which to rate how dire the direness is, which rating is dependent upon futures projection. Estimation of the direness of the direness is a critical ingredient in determining the type of therapy relevant to the case. Another critical ingredient is the prevailing equation of microtrend nesting in megatrend: for instance, if corporate primacy of strength is a factual reality (and thus a determining variable relative to choice of therapy), that primacy is affecting the prevailing equation of microtrend nesting in megatrend such that an identification parameter of what you call a “tsubo”, or pressure point in the body politic, may be revealed -- if your implicit notion of the relationship of Big Bodies to the body politic is actually the case, i.e., that Big Bodies arise by some usurpation process (what are the characteristics of this process? identification of which may be critical to determination of effective therapy modality) out of what we might call the “zero-point-energy field” of the body politic. Big Bodies characterize megatrendsetting largely as the result of actions of actors acting through Big Bodies, not as behavioral gradients in the free energy flux of the zero-point energy field of the body politic. What pattern in the patterns of march of global events has led to the judgment that the time is dire? The prospective level of violence in projected likely or possible events? The rapidly accelerating implementation of population control mechanisms characteristic of police states? The behaviors of one class of Big Bodies? The combined behaviors of leadership elites in all classes of Big Bodies? Are behaviors of all Big Bodies equally involved in trendsetting, mega and micro? Say, upon investigation, it turns out that corporate Big Body behaviors, though affecting all types of microtrends and megatrends, predominately are involved in megatrends (say, in a negative vein, the immunological effects of biotechnology, the pathogenetic effects of accelerating commercial use of microwave technologies), while behaviors of governmental bureaucracies, though affecting all types of microtrends and megatrends, are predominantly involved in microtrends (say, in a negative vein, those currently associated with the Iraqi situation, the prospect of renewed North Korean plutonium production, or the Indo-Pak Kashmiri conflict), how does this equation affect choice of therapy modality? How does corporate primacy of strength jell with corporate megatrend dominance -- jell well or not? -- and what do each of these -- well, not-well -- imply regarding the requisite therapy, which must be strong and act within a short timeframe? Say, upon investigation, the micro-mega-trend case is found to be the opposite of that given above, how does that equation affect choice of therapy modality? We again have polarities for scenario building that would help in evaluation of one possible therapy as compared to another. Arriving at a notion of how these trending nesting effects affect choice of therapy would involve analyzing how Big Body trendsetting mechanisms are embedded in fluctuations of the zero-point energy field of the body politic from which the Big Bodies arose by a process of usurpation.

You mentioned another factor, or class of factors, involved in choice of therapy and timing of therapeutic intervention: “the hundreds of thousands already moving against the looming oil war, the unprecedented coalitions rising against corporate globalization, the increasingly acute challenges to corporate rule on the ground.” This observation indicates that the “direness of the time” is not the only factor in the present circumstance indicating that the critical moment for therapeutic intervention is, or soon will be, upon us; also to be considered is the size of the corpus of actors willing to become therapeutic agents in the therapy employed, their level of organizational flexibility (willingness to form coalitions being one indicator thereof), and the sophistication of legal challenge strategies emerging (which are best evaluated by SWOT analysis). You clearly also suggest, by virtue of the medical treatment metaphor chosen, and by statement of the preferred mechanism of action of the requisite therapy (i.e., “peri-pacifically shrink these bodies into submission and drain them of all metastatic vigor, cultural influence and political bite”) that the task to “bring the Big Bodies down” can, with the proper therapy, be accomplished while eliciting little violence on part of the Big Bodies being brought down, or at least with far less violence than the Big Bodies would engage in were the requisite therapy not applied -- and that this therapy, properly chosen and intelligently applied, will in large measure prevent the prospective exercise of violence by Big Bodies which is one critical feature of the direness of the time. One factor in assessing the likelihood of this evaluation of the potential effectiveness of the requisite therapy is the motivational framework operative amongst various classes of actors in Big Bodies, as these motivations will play a major role in determining their response to challenge. Historical studies may give some insight into the operative motivations. Also, by deferring consideration of issues of “reconstruction” until after the Big Bodies have been brought down, you suggest that either the prevailing disease state is so virulent that, whatever the condition of the patient in aftermath of the healing crisis, it surely must be better than the prevailing state; or that, freed of the usurpation process that birthed the Big Bodies, the free energy fluctuations of the zero-point energy field of the body politic will spontaneously move to a coherent state: it is in the nature of the case that whatever disorder follows the healing crisis cannot be of greater moment than the distress preceding it, and that whatever side-effects the therapy may have, they can largely be disregarded on the basis of the above given considerations.

This last paragraph provides a wealth of binary-type material for scenario logic construction. But this is probably enough for a first-thoughts response.

Relative to the comments on Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell (Basic Books, 2002), you raised the question: If we are currently in the grips of unconscious processes, how do we deal with the problem, by getting conscious? This issue is best addressed, it seems to me, in context of the discussion about strategies and multiple scenarios planning -- multiple scenarios being especially germane, as, hopefully, will become clear below. The conversation on this subject goes back to 1977 when Derek Dillon was pulled out of a psychosomatic medicine conference in Kyoto after presentation of a paper on autogenic brain discharges and the quantum wave properties of DNA, with their immune system implications. In MOON, Derek spews forth a wealth of scenarios (without so naming them) as he prepares for a final confrontation (in the last scene) with his Third Voice, wherein he acts out “how do we deal with the problem”.

A basso ostinato, a drone heard recurrently throughout MOON at the approach of the Third Voice (Holy Ghost), “Derek, Derek”, Derek always hears his name called, “Derek, Derek”, but there is never anyone there calling to him. Then, iterated into awareness is: “I am me and only me… I am me and only me… I am me and only me…” This is an allusion to: “I am that I am”, which is the proclamation of the Old One, the one regarded a vindictive god.

Derek formulates StratPlanOne as the last entry to his personal journals before he ritualistically prepares his SFOB (special forces operational base) for the life-or-death struggle with the Third Voice (warfare being an exteriorization of internal processes never brought into consciousness). In this case, the confrontation is consciously acted out symbolically, not in projection as warfare. StratPlanOne begins by defining the universe of planning discourse as the landscape of the collective unconscious. Derek sets up the space of contention by using animistic Shinto ritual taught to him as a child by an old Japanese woman; he delineates a ma, a sacred space, and as soon as this is completed specters of the operative autonomous complexes (personified as dead friends who embody aspects of the soul, the Holy Ghost) flood in upon him. He uses incantations and Homeric speech to protect himself. Not to recapitulate the whole scene, Derek in the end resolves the prevailing archetypal constellation in his personal experience by finally grasping the puzzle and doing what the Third Voice has all along been demanding: “number the numbering!”, by numbering Gödel numbers, numbers Gödel arrived at by numbering prime numbers.

What does this have to do with anything but an intellectual game, with anything real, politics, economics, looming war, whatever; what does it have to do with the concrete world of human actions and events, with gaining purchase on those actions and events? As Derek understands it, when the collective unconscious constellates archetypal gradients to govern group behaviors, drawing upon the full range of historical materials, trace memories, old battles, old hatreds, old feuds, old demons, and releases that material in projective identification such that it plays out in the material world like contents of a nightmare, it constellates according to thematic content. Depotentiating the collective power of the archetypal constellation requires bringing the critical repressed and regressed thematic content into conscious awareness and full social engagement, not merely increasing consciousness in general. Increasing consciousness in general, so long as the governing archetypal constellation remains operative, in no way resolves the collective pathogenetic state. The operative theme ordering the present global constellation of unconscious event gradients governing mass behaviors is, according to Derek, “I am that I am”, self-reference, the set of all sets including itself. We are in the culmination phase of a 2000-plus-year-long thematic evasion that has ebbed and flowed over the centuries and is now rising to the ridge of its cusp surface.

In years long before this common era, “I am that I am” was understood Cabalistically through gematria, with prisms of the mind (the cartography of ma, sacred space, number space, IHVH), in its full self-referential import: I am that I am I am that I am I am that I am… in circles inside of circles, cradles of the archetypes. The Tree of Life was understood to re-enter itself, to be self-producing, to birth from within through involutory decomposition. This was the Cabalistic understanding of a timeless, eternal Genesis. Similar understandings were held in other ancient cultures: the pre-Brahmanic Indra's net, for instance. But this amniotic cosmogony and concept of godhead was replaced by that based on taxonomic recursive generation, the notion of a class hierarchy and its extension through inheritance of attributes (one of the first notions taught in any good computer programming course). I am not speaking of social classes here, which were modeled on this, but of classes in the sense of collections, and collections of collections, categories and subcategories, what later came to be understood as sets and subsets: that which marched out of Noah's ark, or the ark in the wall of a synagogue out of which the scrolls of the Torah may be unrolled. Set against the circularities of the Cabala there grew up the rabbinate, and rabbinical law written in long linear chains of syllogistic discourse.

This transition was a logical fracture: the rabbinate could not understand the logic of the Cabalists, and the Cabalists could not tolerate the reduced logic of the rabbinate. It was in this circumstance that Christianity was born as reform Judaism. Heresy became any belief that resurrected the self-referential understanding of “I am that I am”, with its identity transparent, animistic, pagan overtones. The critical juncture for rise to the present cusp surface came in discovery during the 1820s of multiple valued functions with solution to equations of the 5th degree and higher, which cannot be solved in a finite number of steps. Such equations are called “transcendental equations” and “transcendental numbers” are often associated with them. Subsequent investigations of infinity led to set theory and a definition of a countable transfinite set wherein the part and the whole which contains it contain the same number of elements, a logical contradiction, a violation of the law, from the rabbinical point of view, and a resurrection of Cabalistic circularity. If a godhead operating within a Cabalistic cosmogony were to be vindictive towards those who violated the law, he would be acting vindictively toward himself, as part and whole cannot be absolutely distinguished. A class hierarchy replicating by recursive extension is the prerequisite of a vindictive god. Bertrand Russell's notion of “the set of all sets including itself” was the paradigmatic illustration of the Cabalistic illogicality of the transfinite, and the ultimate challenge to the rabbinical notion of godhead -- for what god is to be conceived as finite?

Self-referential statements give rise to multiple valued logics. “This statement is a lie.” Is that statement true or false? Orders of logical value are orders of self-reference. At about the same time Planck published his paper on the quantum of action in 1900, Russell argued that the greater the number of logical values implicit in a statement (the higher the level of self-reference), the less meaning it can contain. He surveyed this issue solely on the basis of the assumption that truth-value is the foundation of logic, whereas self-reference is related to identity, not truth-value. Orders of self-reference have to do with orders of Cabalistic reentry and, hence, with orders of identity transparency: quantum physicist David Bohm's enfolded implicate order. Central to m-valued logics is the relation of self to other, and to what degree other is self and self is other. This became a huge Cabalistic-rabbinical conundrum in quantum physics with publication of Schrödinger's wave equation, which involves m-valued functions and is correctly interpreted only with use of m-valued logics. The rabbinical dictates of a class hierarchy replicating by recursive extension, however, could only be met by interpreting Schrödinger's wave-function in terms of probability amplitude. Only thus could man save a vindictive god -- to paraphrase Kazantzakis' “Man must save God!”, penned in an Eastern Orthodox monastery only a few years later. When Schrödinger published his wave equation, Jewish issues moved to center stage in the collective unconscious.

Autoimmune disease (dyscrasia in self-reference) is an organic extension of the psychosocial disease named “genocide”. Both have to do most fundamentally with the relation of self to other. The century of genocide is giving rise to the century of autoimmune disease, autoimmunity expressing a greater degree of repression of Cabalistic self-reference than the expression named “genocide”. The multiple scenarios mode of thought is an easy way to begin entering m-valued identity states out of which to develop social applications. This is the only way to actually depotentiate the prevailing archetypal constellation. Such work has to be done across the full spectrum of applications from developing more insight into numerical maps of archetypal constellations to developing monetary systems that embody the involved notions. Whatever purchase one might get on actions and events that does not involve such work, and there are likely some ways to do this, can only have tactical utility, however necessary or useful that utility might be -- or such has been the conclusion reached by Derek Dillon. Any solution that leaves the fundamental cause in place can only be a temporary expedient. One has to observe, unfortunately, that there has been no apparent progress along these lines to speak of, and that, in fact, everything is still rushing in quite the opposite direction. Aperspectival modes of thought are anathema, let alone aperspectival states of identity and modes of being.

Thank you for drawing my attention to the 13 March (2003) New York Review of Books article “Art Under Siege” (pp. 32-4) by Robert L. Herbert, which discusses three recent books on the Franco-Prussian War. It is true that the actual precipitative factors relative to this war, which began during the summer of 1870, are involved in the thesis given in MOON concerning the deep-structure origins of WWI and WWII -- none of which are mentioned by Herbert, or likely even suspected by him. MOON makes no pretense to being an academic study, so little more than mere suggestions are made regarding origins of the Franco-Prussian War -- origins related to the gathering collective hysteria issuing out of the archetypally constellated forces of back-reaction set in motion by discovery of m-valued Abelian functions -- which back-reaction reached its first culmination relative to Cantor's definition of a denumerable transfinite set. These mathematical notions were the proximate engines of worldview transformation giving rise to 19th century collapse in relevance and viability of the key-signatured diatonic music system (which had analogically modeled the Cartesian-Newtonian world construct), this collapse being most profoundly registered with writing of Wagner's “Tristan chords” and, more generally, in the evolution of chomaticism leading to Impressionism and beyond. The “Cantor dust” implicit in the famous “diagonal proof” of the defining existence characteristic of a denumerable transfinite set was the generative element in the prevailing Zeitgeist responsible for the “pointillism” of Impressionism in both art music and painting, as well as the associated political anarchism which raised a fragmenting pointillistic call for “power to the municipalities”. All this came to cusp around 1870. Think of the richness of the period in terms of the involved thematics! It was only under the duress of the Napoleonic sword that the animistic Erdgeist-worshipping Germanic tribes had been forcibly amalgamated into modern nation-statehood (an enormous transgression of Germanic self-being and will, for which European civilization was to pay dearly in three great wars). And when Napoleon III declared war in 1870 on what the Napoleonic sword had wrought, Prussianism, the Commune of Paris rose up to challenge metaphysical validity and political legitimacy of the oh-so-centralized Napoleonic bureaucracy embodying the French version of the Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization that had forced Germanic amalgamation. Victor Hugo, Manet, Rosa Bonheur (each referred to directly or by allusion in MOON relative to these circumstances), and the Communard leaders: all were thoroughly conversant with more than the surface aspects of the precipitating factors.

What is the connection between this mathematical and art-related stuff, the individual behaviors of the involved artists and writers, and causal factors relative to the Franco-Prussian War? First of all, there are no causes of war. Historical events are not effects with causal antecedents. There are synchronistic thematic patterns associated with the origins of war: these are not cause-effect causes orderable according to the rules of single-valued binary Aristotelian-Baconian logic. If you believe that historical events are the result of simple antecedent-consequent relations mapped in a space and time or spacetime manifold, you probably should have stopped reading this pointillistic “fragmentary” long ago. The involved synchronistic thematic patterns have to do with the involutory march of Platonic forgetting discussed at multiple locations on the MOON website relative to an atemporal m-logically-valued reference space and its decomposition under 3-fold operator-time (universal consciousness, i.e., the collective unconscious, in its active aspect).

Derek in MOON outlined all this background to the Franco-Prussian War, WWI, and WWII in his Jittoku rant. Why should he spend the five lifetimes and beamtimes it would take to produce the bon ton deconstructionist literary and academic cant required to demonstrate it with the single-valued binary complicity required for comment in the New York Review of Books? And to what conceivable end, even in epochs between killing frenzies? It is not that the artists and Communards and their progeny were great heroes, and the lot of mathematicians and physicists, with the exception of, say, Abel, Cantor, and Schrödinger, mere scum. Most artists and composers ran scared, no less then did their more technically-minded co-conspirators. Mallarmé, Debussy, Schoenberg, Kandinski, Duchamp, Malevich, Rilke, most notably, were the exceptions: those who stared the monster straight in the face and did not wince. Yet their courageous work went uncompleted, denigrated in niggardly fashion following their deaths. Try to talk with any contemporary artist, art historian, composer, musicologist (excepting Wilfred Mellers: see especially his Caliban Reborn) about such issues and you will become educated about every manner of post-movement excrescence. If you want an unrevolution, pick up where the truly great artists, musicians, mathematicians, and physicists left off in the mid-1920s.

No, I will not read Ian Buruma's new book, Inventing Japan, even if you send it to me, as threatened. The review in Time Magazine (March 23, 2003) was quite enough, thank you. Not that I completely disagree with Buruma's body of work on Japan; after all, he is an expert and there is much that he says one cannot dismiss. But he would not have the relationship with Time Magazine he has if he had anything truly insightful to offer. Quoting Gerard Lussier, the Time reviewer:

But his diagnosis is subtler than most: he suggests that the reactionary forces that led Japan into World War II promoted myths of Japaneseness -- including the Emperor cult -- that were themselves based on ideas borrowed from the West.

Subtler than most, perhaps, but not so subtle as that argued by Derek in MOON, beginning, as extracted from his journals, in the 1960s: “State Shinto was animistic Shinto Westernized.” Generations of Japan-bashing gaijin rejected this notion out of hand when presented it in conversation over green tea and yokan served on chrysanthemum leaves-- and did so with considerable emotional intensity. Why?

Buruma apparently feels that MacArthur's decision to protect the Showa Emperor was his greatest mistake, a mistake “institutionalizing an 'infantile dependency' on the U.S.” But it was not only MacArthur who regarded the Japanese as children needing America's enlightened guidance. A whole generation of American anthropologists and virtually every American GI who “served” in Japan up through the end of the 1950s so regarded. To Derek, who lived as a military brat child in Japan for three years in the 1950s, the Occupation and its aftermath was no mere pre-school potty training exercise; it was a puppy dog training program where the mutt's nose was constantly being rubbed in the piss on the terrace planking: he could see no difference between the house breaking given his cocker spaniel and that imposed on the Japanese as a matter of course in everyday life. MacArthur's greatest mistake, and the Occupation policy with the greatest impact on the Japanese, was his decision to separate the sexes in Japanese public baths.

During the period of “self-imposed isolation”, when the greatest excesses of the Tokugawa Shogunate were perpetrated, the Japanese kept watch on what was transpiring in India and China from redoubts like Hoi An. Japanese response to Western colonial incursions in Asia did not begin in 1853. Animistic Shinto had survived largely intact in rural peasant culture the earlier incursions of both Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism, and the Shogunate was an attempt to sustain it in face of Western colonial expansion. With the events of 1853, however, it became apparent that no cultural adjustment would sustain the core of Japanese animism -- no matter how beloved that animism might be. If Napoleon's sword forced the animistic Germanic tribes to forge a national army, it was Perry's dreadnaughts that forced the Japanese to do the same. Thus was set in motion a process leading inevitably to a Westernization of animistic Shinto.

Separating the sexes in Japanese public baths was a brilliant stroke by MacArthur in service to the American national interest, but a dastardly deed relative to the larger human interest. Mixed public bathing had maintained a strong residue of animistic identity transparency in the urban quarter throughout cultural adjustment to foreign incursions. Its removal fetishized every aspect of Japanese life, profoundly disturbed relations between the sexes, and transferred the great mass of collective libido into what Buruma calls a “monomaniacal concentration on economic growth” -- a fixation at great variance with the whole drift of Japanese life over several thousand years. Imagine such a fixation in a people who process every percept, indeed, every cognitive input, in terms of spatial aesthetics!

Why was MacArthur's arrogant act so damning to the larger human interest? Why the emotive knee-jerk rejection of the notion that “state Shinto was animistic Shinto Westernized” by Japan-bashing gaijin agents of influence? Because animistic identity transparency is an expression of the “relative-state” of a socius, the “quantum potential” driving decision-free spontaneous social order. There is nothing that threatens more profoundly institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm then does direct conscious experience of identity transparency, which is the essence of unrevolution. The identity dyscrasia attendant upon fetishization of Japanese life has prevented the Japanese from fulfilling a collectively invoked duty vouchsafed them by historical resonance between past and present: no contemporary society is better situated to pioneer political, economic, and social applications in the quantum theory of self-organization than is the Japanese with its access to information technology and its cultural base still rooted in animistic Shinto. Perhaps the Japanese, deep down, do not want to resurrect their imploded economy. Perhaps they know that going into full-blown meltdown is the only way they can escape the karma of MacArthur's children and regain their animistic soul by finally fulfilling their historical debt to humanity at large: create an unrevolution by evolving the first example of spontaneous social order on a scale larger than the village.

However far removed one is, being a witness to the present war in Iraq, whatever its outcome and long-term consequences, is damnably depressing. But our discussions have become a catalytic engine. Your heartfelt observation that SARS is somehow related to the war in Iraq has triggered major breakthroughs of insight about the rhyme and reason of my thought over the years, breakthroughs facilitated by the readings I am currently engaged with. I can imagine no other circumstances in which I would be delving into this pile of esoteric tomes on clinical homeopathy. I am now starting to look at MOON as a record of “case taking” on the prevailing constitutional illness of the human species. Our last discussion might be characterized as an attempt to brainstorm the “repertory study” prerequisite to arriving at a “constitutional remedy”. What the correspondent above referred to seeks, “…an anti-corporate cancer therapy that entrains the pleasure principle, democratic mythology, and the lifelong hunger for personal growth into a tidal wave of revulsion that could bring the Big Bodies down”, which led me into that excursus on multiple scenarios planning of a couple of months ago, now seems to me to be a request for a constitutional remedy, though, by the way it is stated, it has a too allopathic overlay -- as does the notion of homeopathic mechanism of action given in Robert Becker's book Cross Currents (N.Y.: Tarcher, 1990) and the two papers I co-published on homeopathy. Truly getting a grasp on the homeopathic notion of illness, even for one well versed in Autogenic Therapy's model of medicine, is no easy task, given how inducted we all are into the military concept of disease: battlefield analogy for immune system function, the war on AIDS, the Surgeon General, and so on. Multiple scenarios planning is one approach to doing repertory study on a socius. The book you asked about is: Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, (N.Y.: Zone Books, 1999). I am currently into the second homeopathic tome: Homeopathy, Healing and You, a Modern Treatment by Vinton McCabe (N.Y.: St Martin's Griffin, 1997), which I heartily recommend. The older ones are much more work, much more technical, and I will get to them in due course. There is also a book I know I must eventually read, as my starting point for the mode of thought elaborated in MOON was my 1963 reading of Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul (his prognosticative analysis of the Nazification of Germany): Edward Whitmont, Psyche and Substance: Essays on Homeopathy in the Light of Jungian Psychology (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1991). What follows is why I, being into archaic Greek substantialism as I have long been, therefore in direct conflict with modernist and post-modernist anti-historiographic historiography, must read this last one (reputed to be difficult).

I don't know whether or not you noticed, but about two months ago I posted to the MOON website a few statements to the effect that I believe that more people will die of new diseases in the current global conundrum, than die of causes directly related to warfare. This was about the time that SARS was incubating, I suppose. I quote the account of a dream incorporated into MOON (in the sequence of run together most-significant dreams of my life) that came in the early 70s, before media attention to formation of an ozone hole, and a decade before the appearance of AIDS (p. 771, Vol, I):

I am taking a trip with a small group. We are walking across a barren stretch of land. I notice a strange phenomenon occurring in the sky and point it out to my companions. In a band across the overarching cloudbank, a boiling, bubbling effect becomes more and more distinct. It looks similar to photographs of the active sun. Under the influence of this phenomenon the cloud cover begins to burn away revealing an incredibly bright light. I become apprehensive and feel I should not continue the trip without eye and skin protection. I decide to return home to get the necessary protective items as the others continue onward, apparently oblivious to the phenomenon.

This was a “vivid dream” (in the technical sense) and it had a profound impact upon me. I found myself returning to it again and again, throughout the period I worked on the superconductant DNA ideas -- and it was directly catalytic to notions discussed in 1977 at the Kyoto psychosomatic medicine congress describing how I thought the immune system of a species could be undermined in absence of a discrete disease vector (germ) via electromagnetic processes involving the DNA molecule, DNA frequency response windows being immune signifiers. How, that is, a pre-existent frequency anomaly in DNA could be triggered into active disease by non-ionizing radiation. Those with the anomaly would be the first to succumb to diminished anti-viral immunity and, once the disease got a toe hold in the species, it would spread through the normal epidemiologic means -- the original precipitating factor going unsuspected. Robert Becker was then arguing that since WWII, the electromagnetic structure of the Earth has slowly been changed by electro-pollution on a magnitude similar to the rapid magnetic pole reversals responsible in geological times for species extinctions. Several years later, AIDS came on the scene. An extension of this idea was written into the co-authored homeopathy paper presented in Colombo: it was argued that what in homeopathy is called a “miasm” is a pre-existent DNA frequency anomaly. It was in Colombo at the end of the Persian Gulf War that Horst Günther was met, and I heard elaborate medical descriptions and saw hours of slides concerning all the horrible details about the biological effects of the depleted uranium projectiles used during the first war against Iraq. Günther was the founder of Yellow Cross International and a director of a children's hospital near Baghdad.

Regard AIDS and SARS as constitutional symptoms of the prevailing state of illness of the human species. The current war in Iraq is another such symptom, as are the growing number of instances of genocide. SARS is not CAUSED by the war in Iraq, but is an element of the prevailing constitutional type, just as is the war in Iraq. They are related in so far as they are elements of the governing symptom complex and expressions of the predisposing miasms or diatheses.

I will quote from McCabe (p. 26-7) a statement pregnant with regards to any attempt to arrive at a notion of a “constitutional remedy”, a statement that echoes Derek's approach to treating the socius:

The term allopathy comes from two Greek words, allos, which means “other,” and pathos, which means “suffering.” The concept here is that symptoms are to be pushed away through the use of their opposites. Therefore, if you go to an allopathic physician with a cold, with running nose and tearing eyes, you are given a medicine that dries up your eyes and nose.

Homeopathy is also formed from two Greek words: homios, meaning “similar” and pathos. Thus, homeopathy literally means “similar suffering.” The concept here is that we deal with our disease symptoms by treating them with more of the same. Some homeopaths say that homeopathy involves treatments in which you are given your own poison. Therefore, if that same person with the cold went to a homeopathic practitioner, he would be given a medicine that would make his nose run and his eyes tear, with the belief that this enhancement of the symptoms already being experienced brings about a rapid and total recovery from illness.

The allopathic notion is quintessentially Newtonian: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The homeopathic idea, however, at first pass, is a rather disturbing notion when applied to a collectivity, a socius, locked onto a frenzy of self-destruction, but when you consider that symptom suppression always gives rise to a worse fulmination later on, if involving some other bodily system (Franco-Prussian War; WWI; WWII), it may well be edifying.

A further homeopathic thought on your observation that SARS is somehow related to the war on Iraq. If homeopathic miasms (which I believe to be DNA frequency-response window anomalies) are transmitted from generation to generation and are as highly “communicable” (chemical pollutants, allopathic drugs, ambient radiation altered from the geological historical norm, radiational signatures of discrete disease vectors like viruses and bacteria, long-range phase correlation between organisms, i.e., sub-clinical shakti-pat) as the homeopath believes, what is it that homeopaths have observed to demonstrate that miasms are not collective properties of a given population corpus? Nothing I can identify. For, if miasms are collective properties of populations, there could be no complete miasmatic cure in a given individual independent of cure for the whole population corpus.

Joseph Campbell's four prototypic mythological types, as given in the Oriental Mythology volume of his magnum opus, i.e., Indian (Buddha, eyes closed), Chinese (Wandering Taoist Sage, eyes open), Levantine (Islamic Imam), European (Judeo-Christian Rabbi-Cleric) correspond to four Jungian archetypal figures (“gunas” in Sanskrit), each of which decompose to psychological, temperamental, physical, and homeopathic constitutional types. The mature expression of the archetype/type is a manifestation of the healthful dis-ease-free state. The suppressed-regressed (i.e., anomalous shift of DNA frequency response windows in the involved types of tissue DNA, i.e., collagen, muscle, epidermis, et cetera; proteomic anomalies derivative of the DNA frequency anomalies; and the effects of the proteomic anomalies on protein-protein interactions, protein-lipid interactions, and protein-ligand interactions) expression of the archetype/type is the miasmatic manifestation of a diseased state. Miasmatic correspondence on the level of the population corpus is as follows:

• Indic fundamentalism: psora miasm (itchy, vesicular skin irruptions)
• Taoist fundamentalism: tubercular miasm
• Islamic fundamentalism: gonococcal sycosis miasm
• Judeo-Christian fundamentalism: syphilitic miasm (according to the books I read, epidemiologic studies indicate that approximately 90 percent of sexually active Central Europeans between 1890 and 1940 had one or another stage of syphilis)

The Chinese unconscious knows that the war on Iraq is but one more step toward a war between the US and a Greater China: endgame of the current global “war on terrorism”. SARS may not be a type of laser, but it may well be a T-maser-a phenomenon: Tubercular-Miasmatic Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation-Anomaly.

Doris Lessing's sojourn in science fiction reveries is as responsible for the tragedy of Zimbabwe as is any other factor -- the “weakling”-ness of Mugabe, for instance. And her New York Review of Books piece, “The Jewel of Africa” (April 10, 2003) is on a par with the recent literary production of Oriana Fallaci. This is the Martha Quest who produced The Golden Notebooks? Just as one wants to know where the committed anarchist, Oriana Fallaci, went, the anarchist who wrote A Man, one wants to know what happened to the questing mind of Doris Lessing. Both women, clearly, abandoned serious endeavors decades ago, and this fact draws into question the value of their early works.

In A Man, Oriana produced an absolutely brilliant reportorial account of the archetypal gradients vectoring the man-woman level of the transference, but her subsequent literary behaviors confirm that she never actually “worked” this domain of experience, never really processed it, as the insightful reader of A Man simply had to suspect, because no reflective insights were offered in that text -- and there have been none since. The book, A Man, thereby becomes a negative contribution, a form of pandering, as it offers nothing but immersion, nothing in the way of a learning experience. Quality of writing, in and of itself, is not merely of no value, it is a depredation of the spirit in that it fosters a state of identification on the part of the reader only to foster a state of identification, and nothing beyond it. The state of identification is a limiting state, not an ennobling state; it limits the field of consciousness, rather than broadens it. Oriana was clearly in a state of identification concerning the domain of experience about which she wrote in A Man, and her literary product transmitted that state of identification and nothing more. That she produced a book that was not based on well-worked experience was her downfall as an artist. To do such a thing is to commit artistic suicide, because the act of such writing freezes the psychological state that produces it.

While ridiculing Zimbabwean imitation of the white wedding and its wedding attire, Doris, in “The Jewel of Africa”, states in an aside: “(It should perhaps be asked why a ritual invented by middle-class Victorians should have conquered the world from Japan to the Virgin Islands.)”. She does not attempt to answer this question, for to really answer it would be to explain the tragedy of Zimbabwe. Would Martha Quest have left such a question unanswered? Sometime ago, I would have thought not; now I would say, probably. Toward the end of the Martha Quest series, Doris provides an account of how Martha voluntarily and premeditatively enters more and more deeply into a sadomasochistic sexual imbroglio as a way to explore loss of the claim to separate self-identity. This culminates in a schizoid break, where Martha fully enters the state of identity transparency (the very state Oriana attempts to explore in A Man, but doesn't), description of which is Doris' single most brilliant piece of densely compacted writing. Only trouble is, Martha leaves it at that. She goes no deeper, moves on to more of her Marxist meetings, or whatever. Answers were never sought to the fundamental questions posed. The reader sustains the moral injury of immersion and nothing more -- just like with Oriana. Nothing, and so be it.

Unfortunately for the Zimbabweans, the state of identity transparency -- the mystical alchemical wedding signifying the transference, that is -- is the defining property of tribal animism, of what C. G. Jung called “participation mystique”, and had Martha Quest “worked” this area of experience, an area of experience she was directly exposed to as a child in Southern Rhodesia, Doris might have made a more fundamental contribution to Zimbabwe than that of shipping crates of books to villagers. But Doris was left with this level of political action because Martha opted out, returned to her textural Marxist tracks (which Doris vehemently accuses Mugabe of doing), her endless meetings, her picaresque intellectual and emotional wanderings. Thus did Doris commit artistic suicide in a manner similar to that of Oriana. And on the same issue: failure to authentically “work” the man-woman level of the transference. Having foundered here, neither of these women writers were able to fulfill their early promise in the realms of political unrevolution.

What in the world does Jonathan Schell's article (“No More Into the Breach”, Harper's, March and April 2003) have to do with this subject: unrevolution? The article is elementary school, the first lecture of Intro to World Politics, circa 1963. And it's a grievous imposition to ask me to read a piece by any onetime Vietnam War correspondent, let alone one who got famous by quoting someone else on the fate of the village of Ben Suc. This article is the same article that has been written a thousand times over, making exactly the same points, using the same quotations, following the same lines of argument as every other example produced by several hundred people throughout the last forty years: the piece never changes, and the writers of its many versions regard themselves as leading lights on the road to a post-violent future for humanity. How much malapropism are their self-estimation, the points they make, their lines of argument.

The article, in whatever version, is oh-so transparently self-deluding, so pat-yourself-on-the-back Americana. Schell says (p. 41) “…all of the empires that had existed in 1776, whether dynastic or colonial, or both, and all of the empires that subsequently arose, including those built on revolutionary foundations, were destroyed.” Derek Dillon asks: What about America? All this contemporary talk about America now deciding to become an empire, that it had only -- unlike the Europeans -- acquired a mini-empire on the backs of the Spanish in the late 19th century and is only now in the process of taking on a true imperial mandate. What bunk! The Union of North American States, the UNAS as opposed to the USSR, is itself an empire, has always been an empire, and as long as it persists will remain an empire. Westward ho! Natural right and growth, political gravitation, beneficent utilization, geographical predestination… (see Allan Burnett Cole, The Dynamics of American Expansion Toward Japan, 1791-1860, Ph.D. dissertation, U. of Chicago, June 1940, for an elaborate discussion of American behaviors in the early 19th century, many of which most of us today never heard of; see Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, U. of Minnesota Press, 1980, for an account going back into the early 1600s, an account of things many of us never learned about in school). Nature rape, pillage, genocide, slavery: animated by all their vivifying anti-animistic, sexually regressive psychodynamics. No empire? Was it mere happenstance, not a full-blown Jungian synchronisity, that UNAS's commander in Vietnamese Injun-cuntry was named West-more-land?

Schell says (p. 46): “The liberal democratic state systematizes nonviolence.” With statements like this, one must entertain the notion that Harper's is a UNAS black propaganda organ promoting 18th century political economy under the guise of critiquing 21st century UNAS policies. What of force divided against itself, countervailing powers: all that junior high school civics class stuff? Consent of the governed, you see, is obtained by systematizing nonviolence, not by threat of force exercised by the militia and a thin blue line. In order to experimentally test this thesis that the liberal democratic state systematizes nonviolence stand down the militia and disband the thin blue line. How many days will the government of UNAS survive? It's not a matter of force or no force, law or no law, consent or no consent; modulation of force relative to the index of legalistic prescription and the quotient of mass-mind-manipulated consent is the issue. Whoa now! That non-binary stuff is scary. Out, out! I say. The difference between this empire and that empire is how the pigments are mixed on the pallet of coercion: be the empire that of a township, a fertile crescent, a continent, a global region, an expanse where the sun never sets. Nature rape, pillage, genocide, slavery: animated by all their vivifying anti-animistic, sexually regressive psychodynamics: this is constitutional democracy in its normative state. This is inherent in the very idea of Cartesian-Newtonian Enlightenment democracy, not a failure of leadership, not mere symptoms of periods of moral slippage. Inherent to the basic notion, that's what they are. Fear of “each against all”: the tribe, that is, animism, the identity transparency of “primitive” participation mystique, of quantum “relative-state”. Fear of that which lies in the interval 0,l between the binary digits of force/no-force, consent/no-consent. Kill that animist! Kill the animist, I say, that fallacy of undistributed middle! Kill him before his psychological contagion, his embeddedness in nature, his tie to the land, his tie to his ancestors contaminates us with these illogical, evil, unAmerican, antiChrist threats to ego autonomy! My Jesus-plus-nothing right or wrong! Fear of the “dark continent”: projection of the Enlightenment male's unconscious. That part of his own mind that must be controlled, enslaved by the ego's regression in service to the superego. How to accomplish this slavery? The nation-state: projection of the bounded ego-sphere. This is the liberal democratic state in its origins and its historical behaviors. Such Freudianisms are passé? I know you! You're one of those postmodernist 18th century Enlightenment believers in the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state and its supranational agglomerations. The top-down imposition -- by consent, of course -- of another level of organizational hierarchy will save us all from ourselves in this age of non-hierarchical holographic quantum-relativistic technologies.

Schell tells us (p. 43) as so many others have: “The twentieth century had produced the most extreme violence that the human species had ever visited upon itself.” Derek Dillon, of course, does not agree. He says (MOON, Vol. I, p. 689):

The 20th century has not outdone past ages. Never before had so many been killed? You want to talk numbers, think about this: in the ten years that the Tibetans invaded China in the 8th century, the population of the country plunged from 52 million to 16 million. That's million now! During the 13th century Mongol invasion, the decrease in population was from 100 million to less than 60 million. A million people died in the siege of just one city.

The 70 million (Schell's number) killed in WWII, was far less a percentage of contemporary total global population than was 40 million during the 8th or 13th centuries.

Schell informs us that people's war transformed the face of warfare (p. 43) “by turning every section of the population, including women and children, into fighters and victims.” He does not tell us that the concept and reality of strategic bombing employed by liberal democratic states accomplished this transformation before people's war accomplished it by other means. For Schell, “the war system”, as he calls it, is somehow separate from the nation-states, liberal democratic and otherwise, through which this system's behaviors manifest. As if war could transpire without its participants! Wake me when it's over. Such globalony!

Schell points to Gandhi as an exemplar. This is what needs to be done; do as Gandhi did because the nation-state is founded on consent, whatever its political constitution. It will fall if consent is withdrawn. He does not tell us that the British decision to abandon the Raj was far more influenced by the specter of a resurrected INA (the Japanese-trained Indian National Army), British financial straits, and certainty the U.S. would not fund the British in India like the France in Indochina because communism was no significant threat to India. Nor does he mention the fact that whole columns of peaceful protestors were strafed by French fighter aircraft in Indochina. He just poo-poos the idea that force can successfully impose itself on nonviolent removal of consent. Consent/no-consent, force/no-force. Fear of what lies between 0 and 1. Keep that middle distributed, you fool!

Schell presents collapse of the Soviet Union as a revolution from below achieved by nonviolent means, absent any alteration in the balance of nuclear terror. Derek Dillon thinks Schell is uninformed and says as much in MOON: story line behind the murder mystery. Top-down decision to jettison Eastern Europe followed upon a fundamental alteration in the technology of nuclear mutual assured destruction, an alteration which removed the necessity for the Soviet Union to garrison Eastern Europe so as to threaten occupation of Western Europe in order to restrain American nuclear intimidation which began at Yalta and escalated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Standing down a 50-year-long occupation of a vast area is not an easy task to organize; it can get out of hand and lead to many unforeseen consequences.

The one interesting aspect of Schell's article is his discussion of Wilsonian “idealism” vis-à-vis the League of Nations. Quoting (p. 39):

On the one hand, there was the likelihood that the League's powers of enforcement would not be strong enough to overcome the danger of aggression latent in the war system. On the other hand, there was the danger that if the League did grow strong enough, it would have to become something like a world government. Yet a world government based on force would be a global Leviathan. No halfway house, no mere reformist program, could resolve this dilemma.

The problem succinctly posed, Schell offers no resolution to the dilemma. He counsels adoption of Gandhi's nonviolent removal of consent so as to bring about institution of the Enlightenment ideal: the liberal democratic nation-state (which was a party to formation of “the war system” he decries). Hopefully we won't tread another hundred-year historical loop on this one! What I fail to see is how Wilson's program of adding another level of Cartesian-Newtonian dominance-submission hierarchy to the international system could be called “idealism”. And the only way I can understand how the European 18th century came to be called The Age of Enlightenment is by recalling that Voltaire made a close study of Confucius. Enlightenment, indeed.

It never occurs to Schell that the root causes of war might not be socio-politico-economic or that politics might not necessarily be a “decision science”, that a system superceding “the war system” might have to be built from the bottom up, that it would have to transform Staatsnation (people as nation become state) into Kulturenation (nation as people become cultural lag) so as to overcome psychogenesis of war, that this could not occur so long as monetary systematics continue to be formulated on basis of 18th century notions of identity, natural law, and logical accommodation, so long as geopolitical boundaries mirror ego-sphere boundaries and do not take on fractal properties, so long as monetary units are not defined on fractal boundaries, so long as freedom and order are understood as opposed to each other and not in quantum relative-state, so long as… the reader is referred to the remainder of this website.

If one were actually to do multiple-scenarios strategic planning on the seed idea of m-logically-valued monetary units -- which requires an actual occasion to do so -- the idea you describe certainly could generate one group of scenarios. Hopefully, this would not become another “infamous 'Scenario C'”. If it were actually to go down in the way you imagine, I personally would not live long enough to see it, as it almost certainly would be an extremely late development, a development unfolding only after worst cases had already transpired. This, for two reasons: (1) the number and variety of WMDs in the hands of nation-states; (2) what comes out of a type of political action is always in the form of the action taken. Regarding (1), were criminal cartels and terrorist networks actually to transit sufficiently into global insurgency as to fundamentally challenge the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system, that system would not only attempt to rise to the occasion, as we already see happening, in all likelihood it would fragment against itself: there are other factors at play: oil, ethnic conflict, mass hysteria, mass clinging behaviors, faltering global monetary system, rivalries between blocs of nation-states, transnational corporate jockeying, water wars and other global ecological and bioregional problems affecting nation-states in conflict-enhancing manner, accelerating incidence of immuno-dyscrasias, the challenges presented by quantum-based technologies to Cartesian-Newtonian institutional formats, and so on. It is hard to imagine that under such circumstances WMDs would not be used in the resultant exacerbation of conflict between nation-states. It seems very unlikely there would simply be a progressive displacement of the nation-state system by an enabled globally-insurgent infrastructure emergent from a coalition between criminal cartels, terrorist networks, and the dispossessed rural-to-urban and cross-border migrant mass. The magnitude of the megakill associated with mass warfare between contemporary nation-states would be so grievous that no progressive development could possibly emerge out of it for a long time to come. One could perhaps imagine all sorts of highly improbable occurrences which could alter this expectation, but they would be highly improbable. As regards (2), if there is anything to be learned from the history of revolutionary warfare, it is that any system brought into being by application of force has as its fundamental premise some notion concerning modulation of force. This was true of constitutional democracy (force divided against itself; countervailing forces, et cetera), no less than it was of communism. Exemplary of the communist case was Taoist Mao, who entertained the notion that the vehicle he brought into being to accomplish national liberation (the insurgent apparat) would transit smoothly through a phase into an institutional format free of coercion. When it became apparent that this would not transpire, he incremented up in attempts to force the phase transition to coercion-less spontaneous social order: Great Leap Forward, Hundred Flowers Campaign, Cultural Revolution. Each and all were failures. Absence of coercion cannot be obtained by application of force: the Tao which is the Tao is not the Tao, and cannot be realized by any Confucianism imaginable, even the European Enlightenment Confucianism of a Voltaire.

It is true that certain aspects of the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units were arrived at through a particular take on the theory of modulation of organizational behaviors via changes in free-energy flows across boundaries (see discussions posted on the m-valuedlets website), and that this is integral to any successful transit between levels of organizational competency in any apparat, any institutional format, but this does not imply that there exists a means to achieve absence of coercion by application of force. The theory of autopoiesis is the theory of modulation of organizational behavior by changes in free-energy flows across boundaries in cellular biology; it discounts quantum biology. There is a general systems theory (theory of organizational adaptation) of such modulation independent of the theory of autopoiesis, which also does not take account of quantum-level organizational processes. Stephen Wolfram's interpretation of the import of cellular automata can also be treated as such a theory, which, however, does attempt to incorporate quantum concepts, quantum concepts understood in terms of probability amplitude, chaos and complexity theory interpretations (the last I heard, Bios Group, in Santa Fe, was attempting to apply some of the involved notions -- primarily those of complexity theory -- to specific cases, military and non-military). Any or all of these could be applied to the process of developing a group of scenarios related to the hypothetical storyline you raise. Much detail could be surmised. Insights into the present and probable future behaviors of criminal cartels and terrorist networks could certainly be thus generated. Were either side to employ such methodology, the effectiveness of their activities would be greatly enhanced. The Vietnamese communists undertook a mini-version of this at each echelon through their “Organization Section” which analyzed organizational transitions as an integral aspect of strategy. But, so far as Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, was able to discover, their efforts were sufficiently fractionalized that no authentically synoptic analysis actually transpired (for the information available at each echelon, including the highest, simply was not adequate to the task), and it was done largely on the basis of analogical modeling on a theory of peoples' war, not primarily on basis of experimentally-derived principles -- though one must admit that their overarching theory constantly underwent modification of detail through accumulated experience, even as the basic ideologically-explicated principles of peoples' war remained sacrosanct. Nonetheless, this was so disproportionately effective, by comparison to the U.S. military TAADS system, end-of-tour reporting, promotion evaluations, and the like, that it played the major role in overcoming the liabilities imposed by the extraordinary disparity of available force existing between the adversaries.

In the present conflict, were the insurgent to employ such methods, or some facsimile thereof, similar benefits as accrued to the Vietnamese communists would be forthcoming. If the counterinsurgent were to use such techniques, he would move away from self-defeating Phoenix-Program-type tactics toward activities adapted from concepts like those explicated by Hernando de Soto (The Mystery of Capital) in conjunction with settlement strategies as combat arms -- or a least develop such moves to supplement those of PGC, Phoenix Global Central. (Incidentally, I recently read a description of how closing of the Islamic schools in Pakistan has created out-migration of students and faculty to various portions of Africa, and that Special Operations teams have been beefed up in approximately a dozen African countries to interdict the probable consequences of this migration of possible insurgent actors hidden amongst the mass of paperless refugees. Given that the same interdiction methods were unable to maintain public safety in the Greater Saigon-Cholon Area, it is hardly reasonable to suspect, even given current enhanced capacities for electronic surveillance, IDing, and targeting, that they will be successful in application to an area so vast as that encompassed by a dozen African countries. This highlights the liabilities associated with geographical expansion of the domain of conflict. When you publicly proclaim the domain of conflict to be global, you tie your credibility to your ability to maintain public order over a global scale. And if dollar confidence is dependent upon your ability to demonstrate control over the global agenda, then this proclamation is a very risky one, indeed. This is no mere armchair retro-prediction, as the content of MOON elaborately demonstrates. Moreover, the international terrorists have yet [late October, 2003], even in Iraq, to transit to authentic insurgents, as can be seen by their soft-target targeting criteria: even when they hit a restaurant or bar such as in Bali, it is one frequented by foreigners, which means they are still engaged largely in media-directed acts. Imagine what is involved in protecting every restaurant used by locals in a city the size of Baghdad, let alone over an area so expansive as a dozen African countries. Restaurants used by locals alone were frequent targets of grenade and satchel-charge attack in the Greater Saigon-Cholon Area [as was the setting of one scene in MOON], the purpose of such attacks being to maintain omnipresence of the desired level of nascent mass hysteria [which periodically precipitates confusion behind enemy “lines”, requiring additional resource commitments and deployments]. The VC never once in the whole history of the war took the omnipresent nascent hysteria over their chosen threshold by blowing up the pipeline which was the sole source of water for Saigon-Cholon, and which ran above ground all the way from the pumping station at Thu Duc into the city. This fact illustrates how effective command and control was within their assembled forces.) Neither of the above-stated possible methodological applications by insurgent and/or counterinsurgent are of actual interest to me (because absence of coercion cannot be obtained by application of force) beyond their value as exercises in scenarios formulation. Consideration of such possible methodological applications would generate plausible scenario storylines. One must realize, for instance, that forced population movements, such as those associated with the Strategic Hamlets Program and free-fire zones, were employed by the counterinsurgent in Vietnam (modeled in part on Japanese Imperial Army pacification policies pioneered in China relative to the pao chia system). Given that the present global counterinsurgent has applied to current circumstances virtually everything he learned in Vietnam, it would be very surprising if he were not eventually to try forced migration, or modulation of the economically-forced migration already transpiring, on some scale commensurate with the geographical extent of the present conflict. This has occurred on a smaller scale in the Balkans, but not so much at the instigation of the global counterinsurgent. Forced-draft deruralization and cross-border migration on a global scale has long been transpiring, but it is only recently that the global counterinsurgent has come to understand something of the opportunity this presents to the emerging global insurgent. It is only a matter of time before the global counterinsurgent seriously begins to apply “wage and price controls” to the involved processes. There have even been some suggestions in the press that what Pat Buchanan calls “the war party” has entertained this notion on a massive scale relative to the Middle East.

Perhaps the biggest global problem is what people value, what they want. “People are pretty much the same everywhere; they all want the same things.” In this age of growing global monoculture, statements to this effect are heard more and more. No doubt this is due to “want creation” by the global media, due to the “revolution of rising expectations”, and so on. “America couldn't be all bad, otherwise everyone wouldn't want to live here.” This statement was more true of the day before yesterday than of yesterday, that yesterday being the day before 9/11. But it wasn't so true even the day before yesterday. More accurately: a certain kind of person from every culture wanted to immigrate to America, the kind of person with a certain framework of values, a certain constellation of wants. Non-economic migrants have always been a very, very small subset; and non-economic motivations have always been a very, very small component of any mixed bag of immigrant motivations. That framework of values, that constellation of wants is a major component of the failing energy foundations of the prevailing global civilization. They all want the same things. Wants unquestionably imply things -- and pretty much only things. We are faced with a demand-side problem more than a supply-side problem. And given that the gathering planetary energy crisis is exponential in nature, it appears that the demand-side is the controlling variable in the short and mid-term. Absent consideration of the “time shapes of total capital stocks” -- a quantum-theory-type calculation contemporary economists, on an ideological basis, are unwilling to contemplate -- natural resource supplies are fairly well fixed; whereas, effects of increments of growth in demand have exponential consequences, not proportional consequences. Any potential strategist of unrevolution should find it instructive to consider that just as this was becoming distinctly viewable to all, supply-side economics was brought on board by the state as the economic approach that would solve all problems.

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