A civilization cannot long endure when its world view construct greatly diverges from the assumptive framework upon which its institutional base is rooted. As the divergence increases, cognitive dissonance begins to soar and schizophrenogenic double-binds multiply beyond measure. Social capital is squandered; violent expressions increase. The population corpus becomes disoriented; irrational and dissipative mass behaviors more and more govern events. The greater this divergence, the more will social, political, and economic upheaval be necessarily involved in bringing the world view construct and the premises of the institutional base into proper harmonious relation. Today, in the era of global integration, we human beings have a problem from which all others originate: we know the natural world does not work in ways remotely related to the assumptions from which any of our social, political, and economic systems have been analogically derived. But we do not like to admit to ourselves that we know this, that we have known it for over a hundred years. Every manner of dissimulation has arisen to dissemble the actual case: for a century, now, technological innovation has evermore tapped into a world governed by quantum-relativistic framework laws, while those institutions most charged with managing the social, political, and economic consequences of this fact derive from Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions. Our most naively optimistic technological forecasting brings forth puerile visions like “The Future is Wow!”, without realizing that the more we resort to quantum-relativistic technologies within the existing institutional framework, or any framework that has been projected as evolving from it, the more does the divergence between world view and institutional base become. This is a recipe for disaster; the more simple cannot adequately manage the more complex.

Only on the most superficial levels did the Vietnam war have to do with communism. More fundamentally, it was a conflict between animistic peasants and various representatives of an international system operating on the basis of Cartesian-Newtonian forms of order. The French, the Americans, and the communists, from this point of view, were all on the same side -- Marxism, of course, being an exemplary case of a Cartesian-Newtonian system of thought. Marx had to leave Germany and move to Paris before mounting the full brunt of his attack on the romantic idealism of the “Young Hegelians”. And he did not for years daily trudge between his domicile and the British Museum library out of mere happenstance; his thought embraces the tacit assumptions of Newton's physics more than does that of many 18th century Anglo-Saxon deists. Contrary to popular notions about the war, a strong case can be made that the animistic peasants won all their battles, but lost their war. Indeed, an even stronger case can be made for the idea that these peasants militarily triumphed during the Tet offensive, but, in doing so, lost first to the imposition of long-resisted hierarchical rigidities within the Communist Party apparat, then psychosociologically to half-sight in the world's media, and later to the ideological axes being ground by historians both in and outside of Vietnam. These peasants promulgated their war through forms of order derived largely from traditional animistic sources. The decision algorithms employed, the generative conventions through which their institutional base was created, the transformational properties governing dynamic response of their system to a changing combat environment: each of these was deeply informed by animistic assumptions about the nature of reality.

Vietnam at war was, for us Americans, “Indian Country”, a place where the enemy could not be localized, where simple-identity seemed ever impossible to establish (no matter what sort of ID program we tried). The landscape itself was foe! Not only because of army ants, thorns, cloudbursts, mud, dust, leeches and punji pits: these were the least that Rome plows and dioxin were thrown against. Generations and generations of ancestors, worshiped abidingly, had all along imbued their soil spiritistically, endowing it with Taoist enantiodromia; each thing turned into its opposite as the tai chi wheel spun, making the state of anything relative to the state of everything. The physical surround wavered in the heat, like a mirage -- as did the social and psychological environments. It may well be that animism is animism is animism, whether that of Native Americans or Asian peasants; nonetheless, more than mere analogical modes of thought were involved in the subliminal recognition that combat in Vietnam was an extension of the Indian wars on the American frontier. Nonlocality, non-simple-identity, and relative-state are animistic properties associated with collective and cooperative behaviors in quantum systems, quantum systems like the corpus of electrons wavering coherently while in a superconductant state.

Little known, almost completely unknown, is the fact that the total apparatus of the communists in South Vietnam implemented, in the nine months preceding the 1968 Tet offensive, a vast and highly complex transformation necessary to successfully undertake that offensive. Concrete implementation started nine months beforehand, meaning that decision had been taken even earlier. Knowledge of this was acquired by American intelligence analysts and extensively documented during 1968, but this knowledge, for various reasons, was little disseminated even in American intelligence channels. That the most authoritative book on the offensive, a Harvard dissertation published by Cornell University Press in 1991, THE TET OFFENSIVE: INTELLIGENCE FAILURE IN WAR by James Wirtz, dates decision to have the offensive after much of the necessary target-specific preparatory implementation was already completed, speaks eloquently for how poorly understanding and documentation traveled. The transformational dynamics of this vast bureaucratic phase transition were awe-inspiring to all those in a position to contemplate them. Every identified bureaucratic variable underwent systemic alteration. The whole structure exhibited properties of organic plasticity, and virtually no one privileged to study the documentation contested that fact; intelligence analysts took to reading Watson's then newly published book, THE DOUBLE HELIX, describing the discovery of the replicative attributes of DNA, as a way of promoting their analytic insight into the organismic features of the Viet Cong Political Infrastructure (VCI). There were even occasional references made in conversation to the quantum-physics-like behaviors of the apparat, but no one on the scene had an opportunity at that time to pursue the analogy. And all subsequent attempts to comprehensively investigate it in the university environment were frustrated by academic myopia and refusal to allow studies that transdisciplinary.

The dynamic analysis of this systemic, non-equilibrium pre-Tet shift between bureaucratic modalities was undertaken by Strategic Research and Analysis (SRA) at MACV Headquarters, the supreme American military command in Vietnam. A year and a half earlier, SRA had been located at the Combined Intelligence Center and was then called POLOB, Political Order of Battle. This was the unit so deeply involved in the strength estimate controversy that eventually gave rise, via the courage and tenacity of Sam Adams, to the Westmoreland-CBS trial. Many individuals who worked in MACV Headquarters in 1968, not assigned to SRA, will be incredulous to read the description given here of the VCI, but the fact is, the perspectives developed by SRA did not travel well even inside MACV Headquarters itself. There were many reasons for this. Foremost was the fact that the bureaucratic entity being studied, the VCI, operated in a manner profoundly different from any political processes the analysts at SRA had been exposed to. Escaping preconceived notions sufficiently to allow insight was not easy. Indeed, just like in the study of mathematics, there was no royal road. If a given person did not deeply study the documentation and go through the requisite discovery experiences, no amount of secondhand learning during staff briefings would lead to insight. In the American command there were, like in any large institution, only a very few nodal points which received maximum raw data flows (in this case, from the whole Southeast Asia theater). Only individuals exposed to these maximal flows, and who simultaneously had direct access to sources in the field and could also freely mount self-designed interrogations, possessed the opportunity to garner genuine insight. All such individuals were fortuitously located in the U.S. command structure, but low in rank. In fact, it is certain that no individual over the rank of major ever attained any real understanding of the VCI. No one of rank superior to major personally studied enough of the raw data, personally carried out the requisite analysis, personally created sufficient number of discovery algorithms, personally developed schemata generating essential elements of information (EEI) based solely upon self-originated techniques of analyzing bureaucratic dynamics, personally bird-dogged informal networks to locate the sought self-originated EEI (which the formal U.S. intelligence system had no particular interest in). Those who did not engage in these activities persisted in their preconceived notions, and, being of higher rank, silenced those who had attained insight largely through self-motivated study (POLOB was not created through command decision; it emerged as a result of individual initiative and later was grudgingly acknowledged by the command). Authorities, requesting to be briefed, subtly, but clearly, indicated what it was they wanted to hear in the briefings sought. Eventually, the insightful analyses simply stopped being written up -- which is not to say that they stopped being done. Such analysis continued largely out of intrinsic interest. Moreover, no significant decision maker in that headquarters had serious interest in the theory of bureaucratic functions: after the fact, perhaps, but not on the scene. That circumstance, in itself, was sufficient to block understanding, and the transmission of understanding. Had key decision makers possessed such a theoretical interest, they would have analyzed their own bureaucracy, identified its nodal points, and established unfiltered contact with those points. This did not occur. Of course, there was also every manner of subterfuge, but that is not the subject being addressed here.

What is being argued is that this particular agent of what the Tofflers, in their book WAR AND ANTI-WAR, call First Wave warfare -- the VCI, that is -- produced an institutional base that more exemplified principles of quantum-relativistic framework than that associated with any current society or institutional format the Tofflers call Third Wave. Technology in and of itself is an insufficient indicator; more fundamental are the principles from which the technology was created. These principles can be applied to all aspects of culture, society, political-economy. Indeed, there has never been a time in history when the forms of order employed by a human corpus were not analogically derived from principles of world view construct. Implicit in the present assessment of the VCI is the contention that so-called primitive animism has more in common with quantum-relativistic framework laws than does sophisticated Cartesian-Newtonian physics. “Participation mystique” is the term Lévy-Bruhl coined to characterize animistic identity transparency. To use this term is to say that the spiritistic interlock between subject and object in the animistic mind establishes a transparency-of-state between the members of a population corpus, and between that corpus and its physical surround. This absence of absolute separation, of absolute distinction between the classes of identities signified by the categories “self” and “object”, is what animism is; this is the defining characteristic, whether mediated by spirit beliefs or not. Such absence is also the origin of self-organized collective behaviors; spontaneous social order, that is. A transparency-of-state is likewise the defining characteristic of quantum systems exhibiting critical behaviors: at the critical Curie temperature, for instance, the correlation length between members of the elementary particle corpus goes to infinity; no matter how far removed in space the members are, their behaviors remain coherently correlated. Transit to the critical state is a quantal shift to spontaneous order, an order mediated by nonlocality and non-simple-identity, which is to say, an animistic relative-state.

As late as the early 1920s, Vietnamese peasants still had minds-on experience of full-blown authentic animism. Traditionally, the Emperor's hierarchical mandate stopped at the village gate, and the elders often posed before that gate, a symbolic barrier, insuring the principle would not be violated. The internal anarchism of the village, its tradition of voluntarism, was held sacred. This continued in significant measure well into the middle period of French colonial rule, due to the French practice of administering the rural areas through remnants of the imperial mandarinate. It was in the late 20s and early 30s that organizational activity began from which the VCI eventually emerged. These efforts focused upon subverting the village voluntary associations, from which, over the years, the various national fronts were amalgamated. Two-thousand years, at least, of animistic conventions established the behavioral gradients of rural voluntarism in these associations. How could such gradients not have profoundly affected bureaucratic algorithms operative in the resultant national apparatus of warfare? Is there any place on the planet where an elite cadre of bureaucratic operators (communist revolutionaries included) have successfully overcome two-hundred years of institutional inertia, let alone two-thousand? If so, it didn't happen in Vietnam.

Tran Van Tra was in command of the forces who attacked Saigon in 1950, and again in 1968 he temporarily assumed direct command of the assault. His headquarters facilities on these two occasions were located only a few kilometers apart. Though there were many similarities between these events separated by eighteen years, 1968 was, in important respects, profoundly different: after the offensive, the headquarters was overrun by ARVN troops and its permanent commander, Tran Van Dac, eventually rallied to the GVN authorities. The document store possessed by this headquarters was captured intact; it was elaborate, and it contained much historical memory. SRA analyzed these documents in depth, many of which were the personal correspondence of Tran Van Dac. In the week-and-a-half-long, free-wheeling debriefing of Dac conducted by SRA, much was learned, but the most significant thing for the present argument was, at the time, a matter primarily of puzzlement, confusion, and argumentation. SRA's questions and Dac's answers, throughout this debriefing, were not about generalities or even tactical military information. The discussions were focused exclusively upon bureaucratic details. Why was this specific individual transferred to that particular position? Why was this functional element's mission statement reformulated in this particular manner at the time it was? What purpose was served by changing this geographical boundary to its present configuration? As the discussions became more and more elaborate, the analyst conducting the debriefing -- the present author, that is -- began drawing line-and-block charts of the VCI bureaucracy as an aid to the discussion. Dac was not pleased by these scribbles and at first more or less ignored the charts. But as they were increasingly referred to, his irritation mounted until finally he exploded. “That is no way to understand! Things do not happen in the fashion those drawings indicate. If you do not get rid of those papers, you will never comprehend what I am trying to tell you.” Words to that effect. This was disconcerting, to say the least. And there were many attempts during subsequent days to get to the bottom of it. Dac never concurred that the analyst finally understood. After numerous near arguments, it was left up in the air.

Superposition, a principle related to transparency-of-state, was decisively thrust upon quantum theory by Schrödinger's wave equation. Superposition is a bit like transparent overlays superimposed one upon another -- but more complex than that. Not only does nonlocality derive from this principle, so does non-simple-identity; the functional correspondence involved in superposition is simultaneously multiple, a multivalued mathematical function. This multiformity can be represented numerically, algebraically, geometrically -- or it can be treated as a probability density. A stack of acetate sheets (rather like a simplified Riemann surface) is, thus, something of a heuristic aid, particularly in regards to understanding the principle's bureaucratic manifestations -- which frequently are misunderstood and disparaged as examples of “parallelism” by Cartesian-Newtonian political scientists and Weberian sociologists. American intelligence analysts took superposition in the VCI and “rolled it out” laterally and vertically on line-and-block charts because their habits of mind required a linear, recursive explanation of the opaqueness which they regarded themselves as confronting. Non-Westernized Vietnamese, however, experiencing remnants of animistic identity transparency as persistent states of mind, had no need to flatten the complexity; they simply looked right through it, as tacitly it never occurred to them that absolute distinctions might usefully be drawn.

Every identified VCI bureaucratic variable underwent systemic alteration in the months prior to Tet. Redefinition of geographical areas of responsibility, creation of new echelons, boundary changes, reconstitution of multiple role and position assignments of a given functionary, institution of reverse representation, modification of forward representation, addition of new alternative information flow channels, addition of new alternative chains of command, creation of new agencies, reorganization of agencies within an echelon, lateral personnel transfers, widespread upgrading and downgrading, alteration of recruitment procedures, re-targeting the foci of the recruitment base, new forms of taxation, redefinition of functional element mission statements, creation of new types of front organizations: the list of categories of structural and functional modifications is, indeed, a long one. But for the VC cadres themselves, this involved nothing new in principle -- only the magnitude was unusual. Not since preparations for the August Revolution of 1945 had anything quite this grand transpired. But it was just an intensification of the normative behaviors of the apparat, which was geared for change. Indeed, degree of self-transformation was the primary criterion of judgment used by the cadres in evaluating performance of their bureaucracy -- of their whole conduct of the war, in fact. The strategic problem they faced was only tertiarily a military one. Marshalling manpower and matériel resources was the initial task, bringing those resources to higher and higher levels of self-organizational competence vis-à-vis the specific requirements of the domain of conflict became the all-consuming focus.

Self-organization was sought because it was in these people's animistic bones, and because it was the only thing that could possibly overcome the disparity of disposable force between themselves and their adversaries inherent in the type of conflict they were caught in. Where did the self-organization come from? Animistic transparency-of-state! And, by immediate extension, from how this identity transparency mapped itself as large-scale concrete process: superposition, parallelism, constant flux, multiformity, redundancy, tactical circumambulations as apparently random walks (deterministic chaos, if you will), boundary value indeterminacy (the VCI had internal letter box code numbers specifying cell locations as far away as the Shan and Kachin States of Burma). What was unique, what had never been done before, what was discovered pragmatically by trial and error over decades, was how to expand through institutional algorithms the critical radius, the event-horizon for operative identity transparency, beyond the confines of village life. Large-scale social self-organization!

Why should identity transparency drive a self-organizing process? Consider the fundamental variable. What is a superposition, if not a self-stacked event gradient, an automorph? Participation mystique means that the members of an animistic corpus do not experience absolute distinction between themselves or between their corpus and the physical surround. The degree to which this is so can be regarded as a measure of the self-organizing potential operative in the system. Identity transparency is a quantum-potential way of talking about the Cartesian-Newtonian notion of information exchange. A fairly common observation frequently discussed amongst American intelligence personnel was that VC units separated from operational contact with their embedding domains nonetheless often acted as if they were receiving information and guidance, though clearly they were not. That's animistic transparency-of-state! The correlation length is greatly expanded, though surely only under the rarest of circumstances does it actually go to infinity. When the state of anything is relative to the state of everything within a corpus, the resulting relative-state is inherently dynamic because any change whatsoever is omni-transforming. And the transformation gradient inevitably will carry the system to higher and higher levels of self-organizational competency as a result of internally, and microscopically, metabolizing the macroscopic system state (the instantaneous prevailing pattern of indistinctness) -- absent the intrusions of externally imposed hierarchy, of course. That's why the Emperor's mandate always stopped at the village gate. The quantum potential driving -- acting as a wave guide for -- social self-organization is an internally generated form of free energy, like a vacuum fluctuation. Conflict is inherent and nondisposable only in a corpus composed of absolutely distinct actors. In a self-organizing system there are no actors, only relatively indistinct participants. Such systems are not described by action-based sociologies.

America lost its war because Einstein and Planck beat Descartes and Newton. The animistic peasants lost their war for the same reason Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies no longer work: the planet had already, by then, become a very small place. Keynesian policies undertaken within a given national economy must pull against the drag of the whole world economy; the more so, the further global integration proceeds; the more so, the further removed the given national economy is from the status of dominant economy. The international system of nation-states is overwhelmingly a Cartesian-Newtonian system, as are the forms of order embraced by each and every given nation-state, as well as any possible global or regional federalistic agglomeration of nation-states. How could an animistic, quantum-relativistic peasant system -- or, in another context, relatively isolated animistic, quantum-relativistic tribal systems -- successfully pull against the dead weight of all that? Only by finding institutional algorithmic ways of expanding the correlation length establishing the event-horizon for operative identity transparency far beyond that which was then, or presently is, known.

This issue of the demise of the peasant system informing the VCI was debated with great intensity during the summer of 1968 at SRA. The National Front for the Liberation of South Viet Nam (NFLSVN) was then being aggressively replaced by a new format with very different institutional algorithms, algorithms minimizing local autonomy and maximizing hierarchical practices of all sorts. Calling the thing by the name of its opposite, a time-honored technique of black propaganda, was utilized in naming this new format: Autonomous Administrative Committees. Most of the older political cadres, who had created the self-organizing animistic system, died in the Tet offensive due to a systemic policy of lateral personnel transfers: prior to initiation of the offensive, these political organizers were reassigned to combat units. They died in great numbers during the offensive as some communist main force and NVN units stood uncommitted to battle and watched. Whether or not this was an intentional policy of the Communist Party was the issue hotly debated at SRA. No consensus was ever reached. Nonetheless, the peasant animists clearly won their battle by using it to drive the bureaucratic level of organizational sophistication much higher than it had ever been before, thus fundamentally altering the strategic balance of capabilities vis-à-vis the specific requirements of the domain of conflict (which, no matter what the human sacrifice, is a military achievement, even in Clausewitz's terms) -- but lost their war in the process. Those into prescriptive control, hierarchy, and centralization took over.

“The physics of collective and cooperative phenomena”, which is a branch of the discipline where quantum and relativistic notions are applied to consideration of critical and coherent processes, is not only theoretical; it cuts across, for instance, materials science and quantum biochemistry. And it is a controversial area of study because it is the area of contemporary physics most likely to analogically bleed over into social, political, and economic applications. Thus, it is the area of physics most dissimulated in both the technical and popular literatures. In the 1970s, there was an explosion of publications in this area, particularly as regards how the basic concepts of the field can be applied to various biological processes. The present author, for instance, co-published a paper in 1979 on the quantum wave properties of the DNA molecule. But in the early-80s innovation in this area of thought dried up, or journal editors, for whatever reason, were unwilling to publish what was being submitted. Recently, however, Roger Penrose, with his popular book SHADOWS OF THE MIND, has opened the area once again by drawing attention to research (primarily that by Stuart Hammeroff; see suggested reading at the end of this article) on coherent quantum processes in cytoskeleton -- the skeleton of biological cells, not the skeletal infrastructure of the cells of an underground political apparat. Penrose’s attempt to re-inject this area of thought into the publicly available literature was occasioned by intense institutional back-reaction, which is not at all surprising. There is much room for argument that principles of coherent behavior in biological organisms are the very same principles of coherent behavior in social, political and economic processes. This, of course, is the reason for the intense back-reaction. It is also the reason why scholars of the Viet Nam War assiduously avoid engagement with, and analysis of, primary documentary sources. Such engagement and analysis ultimately would lead to utterly new insight into origins of warfare in the 20th century -- and, clearly, these scholars are not psychologically equipped to deal with implications of such insight.

The fact of the matter is that David threw a stone in the Viet Nam War which struck Goliath in the temple. The immediate consequence was collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. The gold exchange mechanism defining Bretton Woods was terminated because of the way America financed that war: borrowing on the international market, rather than taxing, resulted in inflation which led to accelerating demand for gold in exchange for dollars until the temple of Ft. Knox foundered and Nixon was forced to separate the dollar from gold, thus ending Bretton Woods. Since then, there have been ever amplifying waves of instability periodically assaulting the post-Bretton Woods non-system, the last such being the East Asian currency meltdown. Goliath is staggering and clearly will eventually fall when a wave amplitude reaches the critical state (probably involving the euro and consequences of excessive deficit spending in Japan undertaken at threat of American sanction). But the stone David threw was not only economic. The large-scale self-organization achieved momentarily by the VCI -- a first occurrence in human history, as spontaneous social order had never before transpired on a scale larger than that of the village -- in significant measure embodied quantum principles in a human system. And in so doing triumphed in conflict with a military machine incommensurately better equipped with lethal force! This is potent history in the conflict between institutions informed by Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions and the economic, social, and psychological consequences of employing technologies developed on principles derived from quantum-relativity theory. Those who believe that continued application of force can maintain the existing institutional base indefinitely, assume that the American military will stand in unqualified support of the American state through thick and thin, and that, therefore, the conflict between world view construct and institutional base can be ignored. Other facts of the Viet Nam war little attended to suggest this may be an unwarranted assumption. A significant, if small, number of American troops viewed the conflict as analogous to John Henry taking on the big ugly machine, and acted at critical junctures according to the implied sympathy: intelligence generated was withheld; important files were destroyed; false intelligence was fabricated and disseminated. There were even joint spoiling operations run: at the Dutch Mill computer center for McNamara’s electronic battlefield (located in Nakhom Phanom, Thailand), for instance, Army Security Agency personnel subtly shifted into a slow-down mode as the battle of Khe Sanh unfolded. Anyone familiar with critical time parameters of the electronic battlefield will understand the import of this. Knowledge of the slow-down “strike” made its way through the enlisted underground of the American intelligence corps, if very few others ever learned about it. That this was far from an isolated event, that these sentiments were not rare, can be seen by reading, for instance, two Viet Nam war novels written by ex-“Green Berets”: THE BARKING DEER and A LITTLE SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL.

The currently reigning fantasy program is to reform Cartesian-Newtonian institutions from the inside using chaos and complexity theory as the model (mixed, perhaps, in some minds, with a little dab of Sixties-style street theater to get the attention of the leadership so that they might be reminded to act morally). Complexity activists have no pretensions to become “extra-institutional agents of change”: If it comes to that, well, its all over. Hi, guys! Here we are, thousand-dollar-a-day complexity consultants come to modernize your organization. Gain with no pain. All those who think they are threatened with loss of power and income, don’t worry, smile, be happy. We can do this without anybody noticing the difference: we just change the charts, use new names, rewrite the job descriptions, hold more meetings, talk it up, establish a better schedule to monitor the feedback suggestion box, create a multiplicity of interacting small units for the flat-management manager to manage. What the heck, organization is all in the mind anyway. Hey, now, let me hear it. One! Two! Three! This fantasy will evaporate with experience because Cartesian-Newtonian institutions cannot, in principle, be transformed into elements of a self-organizing process: the two are incommensurate and non-convertible. What has been said above about the VCI in no way contradicts this statement: the Viet Cong attacked Cartesian-Newtonian institutions, the framework of village administration put in place by the Government of South Viet Nam, while at the same time infiltrating the purely-local hamlet and village voluntary associations (carrying the residue of 2000-plus years of animistic identity transparency) and transformed them into elements of a large-scale self-organizing process. They took independent, pre-existent, already functioning self-organizing entities and expanded the event-horizon for spontaneous order within the whole ensemble, in the same way that pulsed radiation impinging on DNA sets coherent quantum processes in motion amongst the molecule’s p-electron parcels. This phase transition, in both cases, involves a fundamental transformation in the identity of the involved entities. In South Vietnam, there were some 2,500 villages and 12,000 hamlets, each village with ten or more pre-existent voluntary associations, each hamlet with three to four to five: that is some 25,000 self-organizing entities at the village scale-level and between 35,000 and 60,000 at the hamlet level that were interfaced with each other in extraordinarily complex ways. Beginning explicitly in the 1920s, it took 20-30 years of intense organizational effort to accomplish this transformation which was followed by another 30 years of warfare. In the end, the self-organizing ensemble created was lost in the process -- much to the dismay of many of those survivors directly involved.

But even if one were actually to transform an existing institution based on the prevailing chaos and complexity modeling perspectives, it would not work because chaos and complexity theory as it currently exists is an elaborate falsification of how natural systems function -- the falsification being undertaken to keep principles of quantum physics from being applied to the middle scale levels: atmospheric science, the biological sciences, and so on. Were quantum principles applied to the middle scale levels, they quickly would be generalized into the social sciences, and the existing social, political, and economic systems would be utterly sundered. Chaos and complexity theory is the latest incarnation of dissimulation going back into the 19th century. Moreover, both chaos and complexity theory are deeply Cartesian-Newtonian (another example of the black propaganda technique of “calling the thing by the name of its opposite”). For instance, nonlinear dynamics is “nonlinear NEWTONIAN dynamics”. Basically, instead of m-valued functions like in Schrödinger's equation, where for every value of the temporal variable, x, there are many values of the spatial variable, y, (hence, the particle possesses nonlocality), the nonlinear compatriots of chaos theorists keep one value of y for each value of x, but make the relation between the variables nonlinear, i.e., they add exponents to x, that is, x-squared, x-cubed, and so on, thus insuring that the nonlocality -- and hence identity transparency -- associated with the many values of y in Schrödinger's equation is removed from the model. In atmospheric physics they accomplished the same thing by removing “acoustically-modified gravity wave modes” from the models. In the popular science presentations, they almost always leave out the middle term of the phrase “nonlinear Newtonian dynamics”.

These people will tell you that quantum theory is not needed to understand biological systems: they have shown that nonlinear Newtonian dynamics can explain anything quantum physics appears to be needed for. And so on. Basically, they have convinced themselves that they have found a theory (that depotentiates quantum perspectives) which can be applied to “human systems management” which will modernize the old institutions while leaving the existing power structure intact, and the sacred metaphysical assumptions of post-Renaissance Western thought unscathed by the “Germanic” (read: animistic) threats contained in quantum and relativity theory. That is why all the applications contemplated involve going into the existing institutions and corporations and talking up the new theory mumbo jumbo. This applies even to the theory of autopoiesis which posits as its fundamental principle “incommensurabilty of parts and wholes”. The actual meaning of this phrase is not so much that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that no quantal-holographic part-whole identity transparency will be allowed to disturb the scale-hierarchy of biological organization. “Post-Newtonian” is a very interesting term: the equivalent of “strength” in the Viet Nam war. The term “strength” can be defined in such a way that no matter how badly you lose, a case can be made that you actually won. The real question is: HOW post-Newtonian? Hypercycles, feedback, non-equilibrium, non-linear, cybernetic information exchange, holistic are terms so Newtonian a post-Newtonian as to be little more than Newtonian physics crossed into biology. The notion that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” is a very nearly Newtonian post-Newtonian insight, as we know from the quantum physics of holograms that any part -- given that it contains all the information of the whole -- is more than the sum of the parts of its whole (and this is a 130 year-old idea, given that Cantor demonstrated it in set theory with his famous “diagonal proof” in the 1870s; actually, far older than that: “Every number is infinite”, Liber Al vel Legis, I4). And Russell and Whitehead developed their “theory of types” to build a wall against this discovery of Cantor! One might well regard advent of the new chaos and complexity sciences as a major behind-the-lines spoiling operation to prevent significant threats to the existing order. These sciences certainly have been enormously effective at achieving that end.

Consider how chaos and complexity theory have reached out to incorporate the seminal figure, Von Hayek. His central theme is a purported explanation of the market's “magic hand”: how the parts pursuing only their own self-interest, without knowing the needs of the whole or caring about those needs, maximize the advantage of all (in violation of the fundamental principle of holography). He basically argues that this is the result of rule-abiding behavior -- “economic” behavior, that is: behavior in conformance to the action directives specified by the interplay of supply and demand. His account of this, like that of Adam Smith, is still a generalization of Newton's laws of motion and associated vector sums, but is complexified in a manner similar to the complexification achieved by “nonlinear NEWTONIAN dynamics”: a world away from Schrödinger's wave function. Just as complexity theory is touted as a vindication of American individualism by Stuart Kauffman and others (discrete entities in random motion, without imposition of an overall pattern, through random behaviors alone, spontaneously generate ordered patterns -- without, however, an explanation of the physical origins of basins of attraction being offered), so is complexity theory mapped onto Von Hayek to further expand the purview of chaos theory: thus making it a more broad-based wall against entry of quantum perspectives. The Santa Fe Institute’s flirtation with yuppie Native American culture is a well-considered and suggestive act of disinformation. Stripped to essentials, Von Hayek's account of the role of rules in explaining the “magic hand” has little to recommend it. The real explanation for the “magic hand” is in quantum variables hidden from Newtonian observers: variables related to the identity transparency represented by Schrödinger’s wave function.

Everyone who gives clear, easy to understand, examples of spontaneous social order cites only special project cases or crisis behaviors. This includes, in many respects, the Viet Cong case. But the real thing to understand is spontaneous order under the normal day-in day-out life of a society. How do you take the principles learned in the unusual circumstance and generalize them to the normative? This is the real task at hand. Very few people on the planet at this moment of overwhelming Cartesian-Newtonian dominance are capable of any authentic identity transparency. What are the processes by which a social corpus engenders identity transparency in its norms of behavior? Cosmological metareference in artifacts, clothing, ritual, et cetera, is one such. There are others, and many more to be re-discovered. Without these, there can be no spontaneous social order in normative contexts: after the crisis is over, after the special project is completed, the old ways return. Mao’s cultural revolution was a large-scale attempt to forestall one case of a return to the old ways. This is why war remains so attractive: in combat, in mass killing, extremely high levels of spontaneous experience, comradery, self-sacrifice, embeddedness, and so on -- all the things that the day-in, day-out excludes at any significant level of intensity -- are abundantly available. The growing search for spontaneous bonding experience in contemporary American life has many analogies with the obsessions of Weimar culture: this obviously can be a double-edged sword, particularly if the principles by which spontaneous order can be generalized to the normative are not found -- more accurately, are not even actually sought.

Indeed, the situation is reaching a critical state. The divergence between the assumptions of the world view construct subliminally orchestrating human affairs and those of the overt global institutional base is widening, not narrowing. One could even reasonably speculate that it is widening exponentially, because everywhere there is retrenchment, a longing for the past in human systems orientation (in spite of a very few avant-garde exceptions), while technological innovation gathers steam in opening Pandora's quantum-relativistic box of goodies. This is not only alarming, it is ominous. Ominous because collective behaviors that are socially integrated are responsible for spontaneous social order, while collective behaviors that are suppressed, and hence regressed, are responsible for totalitarianism and mass violence. The suppression and consequent regression, authoritarianism, and massed violence are not results of “unconscious conspiracy”, which notion assumes an action-based sociology, i.e., a sociology rooted in a Cartesian-Newtonian notion of identity, but of “collective psychopathology”, which notion assumes a quantum-relativistic type of identity similar to that Pauli and Jung attempted to explore with the idea of synchronisity. The factor that most distinguishes between Cartesian-Newtonian and quantum-relativistic systems is the concept of identity involved: absolute separatism in the former, identity transparency in the latter. If the new technologies constantly push for identity transparency by their very underlying logic, while the social, political, and economic systems controlling their application always are at loggerheads with this basic defining characteristic, what will happen? The control systems will try to dress the new technologies in Newtonian clothes. This will be done with regulatory and legal prescription. The Emperor's new clothes, however, will be a sham; they will be a suppression driving a very dangerous regression, a regression calling itself a “New World Order” with consequences that will be counted in the hundreds of millions, rather than the tens of millions lost in the junior varsity encounter called World War Two. Already, in the collective violence seen daily emerging around us, these nascent consequences are clearly visible: the hedgehog is eating the fox.

SUGGESTED READING

• Paine, D. A. and W. L. Pensinger, “A Dynamical Theory Describing Superconductant DNA”, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, 15:3, 1979.
• Hammeroff, S. R. and R. C. Watt, “Information Processing in Microtubules”, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 98, 1982.
• Hammeroff, S. R., S. Rasmussen and B. Mansson, “Molecular Automata in Microtubules: Basic Computational Logic of the Living State?” in C. Langton: editor. Artificial Life: SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. N.Y.: Addison-Wesley, 1988.

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