Archive for October 19, 2020
WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENCY: Locked in by High Switching Costs
0
We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are plagued by dysfunction that is ‘built in’ to our cultural foundations, a phenomenon known as LOCKED-IN-BY-HIGH-SWITCHING-COSTS.
Einstein described this psycho-physical entrapment in terms of people who have laboured long and hard to climb to the peak of a mountain, but on reaching the summit and surveying the surrounding landscape, discover that they are not on the MAIN PEAK but only on a FOOTHILL. This predicament of LOCK-IN-BY-HIGH-SWITCHING-COSTS can not only trap people who have invested heavily in Microsoft Windows from switching to the Mac, it can trap WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS from switching from ‘reality’ based on RATIO-NAL intellection and its concept of GROWTH, to MODERN PHYSICS and EASTERN understanding of ‘reality’ based on INTUITIVE intellection and its concept of TRANSFORMATION.
For example while we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS understand as REAL, the language-inferred concept of GROWTH of a Town, EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS (and modern physics) understand this same physical phenomenon as TRANSFORMATION of the Landscape. GROWTH is a LOGICAL RATIO-based concept which is EFFABLE-because-LOCAL-and-EXPLICIT while TRANSFORMATION is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL-and-IMPLICIT and while graspable by INTUITION, lies beyond the reductions of LOGIC and RATIO.
GROWTH is a psychological possibility when we notionally SPLIT FIGURE AND GROUND INTO TWO such as when we speak of the MOUNTAIN and the VALLEY as if they were TWO SEPARATE things as in FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO. TRANSFORMATION does not make this split and is a mode of comprehension in which FIGURE-and-GROUND-are-ONE.
Language allows us to play around ambiguously with these concepts such that one person (a WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT) may say ‘The Town is GROWING larger and more productive’ while another person (an EASTERN CULTURE ADHERENT) may say ‘The Landscape is TRANSFORMING’.
WHICH IS REAL? Reflection will inform us that TRANFORMATION is affirmed by our sensory experience of inclusion in an all-encompassing relational TRANSFORMATION while GROWTH is a RATIO-based INTELLECTUAL abstraction which, as Nietzsche has pointed out, derives from the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING (to impute LOCAL thing-in-itself existence) conflated with GRAMMAR (to impute the power of SOURCING actions and development to the NAMING-instantiated (notional) thing-in-itself.
While TRANSFORMATION as in ‘the TRANSFORMING Landscape’ is the relational SENSORY EXPERIENCE AFFIRMED REALITY, GROWTH as in ‘the GROWTH of the TOWN’ is INTELLECTUAL ABSTRACTION.
Most Recent Comments