Constructing a Chaotic Marketplace
This paper was written in September of 1995 following participation in a multiple-scenarios strategic planning exercise for the Thai Prime Minister's Office. What later became known as the “infamous Scenario C” described the crisis that would befall Southeast Asia in 1997. Numerous attempts were made in 1995 and 1996 to convince bureaucrats, advisors, and CEOs that local exchange units would insulate a national economy from the negative aspects of globalization. None of those approached had the slightest interest or comprehension. The paper was circulated widely subsequent to July of 1997, with similar results.
Can Global Integration, Driven by Quantum-based Technologies,
Sustain Itself in a Newtonian Macroeconomy?
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StratPlan CD-ROM Series Proposal
XYZ Group had recently been publicly accused of conflict of interest, in that one of its associated “Arts Department” NGOs had funded an urban development plan for the ancient capital of Laos and world heritage site, Luang Prabang. An American firm especially good at brown-end comprehensive planning was hired to produce the study. At least they didn't hire a Greek company like USAID did for Saigon in 1965! XYZ Group was moving into hotels in places like Luang Prabang and Lijiang, Yunnan. Producing the comprehensive plan, if only indirectly, might, therefore, some observed, compromise integrity of the plan and give XYZ Group unfair advantage. Indeed, from the perspective of strategic cultural resources planning, the very choice of a comprehensive planning firm was suspect for a location like Luang Prabang, the most preserved traditional “temple city” urban site in Asia -- not to mention the brown-end focus. But XYZ Group was several notches above the usual lumpen-capitalists: it was putting up satellite communications for Laos; it published several magazines, was starting a pan-Asia newspaper, had a CD-ROM production company. Perhaps it was acting out of… lack of being informed. I thought XYZ Group might be interested in an innovative approach, and if so, that it could possibly be seduced into helping implement a paradigm test in m-valued local exchange trading systems. I was wrong (apparently the president could not be approached with such ideas due to the prevailing array of preoccupations), and hence there was no pilot project in m-valued currencies on the scene to point at when the July-‘97 financial crisis swallowed the region: another opportunity for significant change missed.
(Generic excerpts, circa 1995, plus heuristic amplifications)
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Who Caused the Cambodian Holocaust, Anyway?
Following in the tradition of the ex-OSS-officer authors of EROS AND CIVILIZATION and LOVE’S BODY, Shawcross’ SIDESHOW offered conventional Freudian, sex-repression-type observations about the causes of American bombing behaviors against the people of Cambodia. The present article offers a deeper perspective kicked around amongst persons at Targets Branch of CICV, persons, that is, who were actually charged with picking sites of B-52 strikes on Cambodia -- and who were intensely opposed to expansion of the bombing campaign. The present thesis is that the deeper causes have to do with fear of a state of consciousness associated in the modern mind with sexual intercourse, a state which had its most elaborate expression in animistic societies as participation mystique: the psychological condition of identity transparency. This cognitive state is such a phobic fixation for the modern mind because: (1) of a subliminal recognition of connection between quantum nonlocality and identity transparency; (2) of the knowledge that the 17th- and 18th-century metaphysical justifications of the modern nation-state are violated by the 100-year-old “new physics”; (3) the structure of contemporary civilization is so seriously threatened by this fundamental contradiction at its foundations that any “reminding factor” becomes a focus of extraordinary psychological “projection” and irrational violent attack. The article was written at the request of a German war correspondent who spent many years on the ground in Laos, Cambodia, and Viet Nam. The request came following a statement made in public at luncheon: “The decision to increase B-52 strikes on Cambodia -- in spite of knowledge at CICV-TARGETS that COSVN was inherently unbombable and knowledge at SRA, MACV-J2 that such bombing was in the strategic interests of NVN -- triggered mass hysteria causing a holocaust, and was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize.” The initial implication of the argument presented here is that this award involves absolutely no contradiction and is an accurate reflection of the subliminal impetus motivating the war in the first place. The secondary implication is that, since this thesis has been argued in many quarters for 30 years, without receiving the slightest comprehension whatsoever, it is either utterly mistaken or the fixation described is so aggravated and repressed an attribute of the contemporary popular mind that an incredible enormity awaits us in the not distant future.
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ProCynergy Proposal
This basic idea informed many detailed proposals tendered over a five-year period (1994-98) on three continents. Managers of fitness and beauty spas, beachfront hotels, casino resorts, and of one-time Emperor’s palaces understandably, perhaps, did not understand what it was about. CEOs of conglomerates having both hotel chains and multimedia development subsidiaries are another matter. One can at least boast that Batman sat down over coffee to discuss the details of one such proposal.
The Basic Idea
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Conflict in hand-weaving between traditional practices and modern formalism cannot be transcended within any possible aesthetic of the loom. Only a theory of the meta-loom can provide a context complex enough to resurrect cosmological metareference in weaving from the abject reductionism which signification has become in the headlong rush to global monoculture. Notes for a Theory of the Meta-loom
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