An inclusional worldview
APN
Global Warming? or Global Norming?
1December 7, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. – Robert Benchley
The notion of ‘global warming’ implies a ‘norm’ for the earth’s temperature that we are experiencing an ‘upward’ departure from. In order to ‘get our facts straight’ it seems that some investigation into ‘norming’ is warranted.
There are some important ‘clues’ in the following video (New Tang Dynasty News Report of 2009-1–28 9:39) that associate with ‘permafrost’, that are explored in this APN article.
Our western culture seems to have, ingrained within it, a habit of establishing and ‘policing’ local norms based on ‘what things do’. We apply it not only to human social behaviours, but to all manner of physical phenomena (e.g. the temperature of the air in our homes). (more…)
Author’s Subtext : The Tiger Woods Affair
0December 6, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
Writing this ‘author’s subtext’ didn’t come as easily to me, as it usually does and I have had to ask myself ‘why’?
I never write ‘from planned structure’ but instead I ‘explode a central idea’ that is essential ‘relational’. The ‘exploding’ is guided from the outside-in by certain thoughts that are in my mind at the time which are ‘bigger than’ the ‘idea’ itself; such as ‘why am I writing this particular article’, and a miscellany of thoughts that pertain to the act of writing it, and how it might be interpreted (or not) by the reader etc. etc.
After I have written the article, then I review what all of those ‘outside of the article’ influences were as I was writing. This is kind of like describing the movements of one’s fingers as one fashions a snowball in one’s bare hands. The shape and quality of the ‘content’, the ‘snowball’ is the thing that ‘persists’ but all of those wigglings and bendings of the fingers have disappeared. What were the shaping forces like along the rocky coast where giant arches persist just offshore, their centres having been ‘chewed out’ of them by the violence of the waves? As one regards ‘content’ (the ‘dynamical figure’) and lets the mind move back and away from it into the invisible-because-purely-transient shape-sourcing ‘dynamical ground’, one can only capture a few of the most ‘obvious’ ‘shapers’; e.g, there was the big storm of ’37 or the missing finger or etc.
Out of my early memories I remember my mother (daughter of Italian peasants who emigrated to Canada before she was born) expressing disgust and outrage over the brutal way in which Mussolini and Carla Petacci were ‘taken out’ and while there was no doubt of how firmly she opposed fascism and supported her brothers who had all served in the Canadian military, she could not support such vile vengefulness of those (perhaps all of us) who were in no way ‘innocent’ themselves. (more…)
The Tiger Woods Affair: Understanding Celebrity Worship
0December 5, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
When we give people God-like status, we are, ourselves, ‘playing God’.
We say that certain individuals have ‘command over the masses’ but this is the ‘tail-wagging-the-dog’ world view of western enlightenment society. The masses always have command over the individual; they are a continuing story while the individual is a ‘candle in the wind’.
Aboriginal physics can shed some light on this ‘tail-wagging-the-dog’ ‘illusion’ wherein the individual seems possessed of extraordinary powers.
And its not just ‘the celebrity’ that suffers when the masses who have ‘played God’ and given the individual his power, take it back and ‘bring him back down to earth’ so forcefully that he and those around him may be figuratively in not literally ‘crushed’.
[This article contains one picture and a video that may be offensive to some viewers. It has been included to underscore the ‘darkness’ that can be associated with celebrity worship ‘gone wrong’] (more…)
Author’s Subtext: AFGHANISTAN
0December 2, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
Though it is unlikely to show in the body of writing in these APN pages, I have been drawn to Barack Obama’s innate ‘potentials’. However, my impression from before he ran for president was that he was applying himself in the wrong place. As an ‘American’ in a world leadership position, YES, … but as an ‘American leader’ positioning the world, NO.
‘Wag-the-dog leadership’: If the tail is to the dog as the leader’s baton is to the body public, the job of the natural leader is to capture, articulate, nurture and sustain the resonances/rhythms emerging freely in the body public (the natural leader’s dynamic is the RESULT of the collective dynamic), whereas ‘wag-the-dog’ leadership is to make the body public captive of the leader’s own top-down imposed rhythms , the result of which is a kind of goose-stepping mono-rhythm (in wag-the-dog leadership, the leader is the CAUSE of the collective dynamic). (more…)
An Aboriginal Physics View on AFGHANISTAN
0December 2, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
But what are the underlying assumptions?
An aboriginal physics viewpoint on Afghanistan is on a level deeper than the mainstream news reporting. It is at the level of our basic understanding of dynamics. Any dynamic situation can be examined from the point of view wherein we no longer look at dynamics in terms of ‘causal agents’, but instead acknowledge that the causal agents are not ‘causal’ but are the ‘result’ rather than the ‘cause’ of the (turbulent) flow they are included in.
The analogy which has been discussed elsewhere in these pages is in medicine, where Pasteur and Béchamp argued that ‘the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything’. If we take ‘Al Qaeda’ and ‘the Taliban’ to be the pathogens, we would say that these pathogens are nothing, the global dynamic is everything. Their proliferation is the result of conditions in the terrain being fertile for their proliferation.
What are the implications of this ‘inverted’ view of the situation?
This means that one cannot examine issues starting from what the current ‘cast of players’ (Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the US, the other ISAF countries, the Afghan government and the Pakistan governments) are doing.
The Taliban is the ‘result’ of turbulence in the region, not the cause.
The historical origins of conflict in Afghanistan go back to the so-called ‘Great Game’ (more…)
Author’s Subtext – Representative Government
0November 29, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
In spite of the fact that many investigators of the social dynamic, from time to time, have suggested that politics derives from how we view ourselves; e.g. as in ‘social darwinism’ wherein we consider ourselves to be a member of a ‘favoured race’, politics is usually discussed in terms of an intellectual ‘world view’ … ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘liberalism’ etc.
What this does is to put the focus, MISLEADINGLY, on the intellectual architectures of these different approaches and into debates as to the ramifications and side-effects of each and judgements as to which will work out the best for the overall ‘system’ etc.
We even insist that government is ‘secular’, that ‘church’ and ‘state’ can be, and currently are, kept separate. This is evident nonsense, but it is politically correct to ‘go along with it’.
We all know that ‘religion’ is woven into the issues of governance even though we argue the case for this politics or that politics on ‘intellectual grounds’. (e.g. see Peter D’Errico’s ‘American Indian Sovereignty, Now You See It, Now You Don’t’)
But if we are honest, we would have to acknowledge that it is not all about the merits of our respective ‘social dynamics management systems’ that we build into our ‘politics’. It is more about ‘who we are’, how we give representation to ‘our selves’. (more…)
Who puts the ‘Representation’ in ‘Representative Government’?
0November 29, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
Evidently, there continues to be confusion over whether ‘representative government’ was intended to be the result of the social dynamic or the cause of the social dynamic.
Some representatives, and some leaders of groups of representatives, seem to feel that their job is to ‘direct’ the social dynamic in the manner that the ‘director’ of an orchestra would direct a group of beginner musicians that did not yet have a feel for how the music itself can become the orchestrator of individual and collective dynamical play. In this mode of ‘representation’ wherein the music itself, through the players becomes the primary source, the ‘director’ becomes the ‘mirroring back’ of the unfolding performance, so as to serve in a support role rather than as some kind of ‘controlling creator’ that must be followed meticulously, even if he takes the music to a place wherein the musicians are no longer inspired to play it.
This is an issue in the politics of nations. To what degree should the government of/by representatives have those representatives ‘direct’ (centrally-source) or ‘orchestrate’ (mirror back) the social dynamics of the nation?
It is clear that in the time of war, the social collective must become a ‘war machine’ and everyone accepts that this requires ‘centrally-sourced direction’, but in times of peace, this is where new symphonic works emerge from the self-organising dynamics of the collective, where a new collective persona arises that opens up new spatial possibilities for the blossom of never-before-seen creative potentialities.
For those politicians aspiring to use their ‘elected representative’ status to become leader-directors and to personally impose shape on the collective, the wartime mode is preferable, since it gives the leader the power to locally instigate and implement changes of his own preferred architecture. (more…)
Author’s Subtext: Poetry and Pornography
2November 24, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
Writing this article was prompted by dialogue with a friend who recalled our earlier dialogues wherein we both agreed that there was no way to speak literally to these foundational issues regarding culture, outside of poetry. Her note included the following;
“To me inclusionality is a feeling of being in the flow; as you say, it’s the Tao – and the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. … You or I (I forget which of us it was) once said that poetry was the only thing to get the Tao across – and probably haiku at that. Because real poetry sidles up on it sideways instead of trying to describe it exactly. That’s why your images of geese and fish and stormclouds and even cars on the freeway work, and mathematical or other descriptions don’t.”
But, at the same time, poetry can be pretty ambiguous, and even though most people love it, the world of the poetic and the world of rational prose go on unreconciled.
My thought was that there needs to be some ‘reconciliation’ here, (more…)
Poetry and Pornography: Inversion that elicits perversion
2November 24, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
What could the link possibly be between ‘poetry’ and ‘pornography’?
Imagine that ten different people were asked to make a movie that portrayed life in a small mountain village. What variants on this theme might emerge, and why?
‘Life’ is a four-letter word that can take on many different meanings; i.e. we can impute many different meanings to this little choo-choo train of abstract symbols that mean nothing in themselves, with the engine ‘L’ pulling them along and the caboose ‘e’ pulling up the rear.
Should we start the film with a helicopter shot of the morning sun lighting up the peaks of the mountains (majestic classical music in the background, with horns and tympanums, perhaps a soprano voice), the morning light descending down the verdant slopes to lift away the darkness that obscures, to reveal the village nesting comfortably in the mothering embrace of the nurturing landscape. In this ‘framing’ there is the sense that (more…)
Author’s Subtext – Sociopathic Epidemic
0November 16, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
The Sociopathic Epidemic – ‘Author’s Subtext’
There is a problem with the way we ‘present’ social issues in our culture and in our culture’s media, in that the presentations often start ‘in the middle of things’ and treat the middle as a local-system-in-itself. Can we understand the organism as a local system out of the context of the environment; e.g the storm-cell as a local system out of the context of the fluid-flow of the atmosphere? The ‘Sociopathy Epidemic’ article invites us focus on a problem WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, as if there were nothing to be gained from opening our inquiry to dynamics in which the US is at the same time included (the world dynamic, nature). The problem with ‘limiting our inquiry’ to the notional ‘local system’, as has often been pointed out by the systems sciences, is that it forces us to identify the source of all behaviours (functional or dysfunctional) as originating within the ‘local’ system. If we inquire into the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ functionality of a university, we will always be able to point to something in its operations that we can credit or blame for good or bad results. But as Russell Ackoff has pointed out, the system we call ‘university’ is included within the suprasystem of ‘community’ and had we started our inquiry at the level of community, we might have found that there was a problem that associated with the manner in which the ‘subsystem’ (formerly ‘the system’) called ‘university’ co-operates within an interdependent web of subsystems.
So, the author who would like to shift the ‘framing’ of the inquiry so as to look upstream’ from the nominal ‘local system’ has to hunt for some device to do so, and it may not be easy.
In the case of the ‘Sociopathy’ article, the framing is ‘the nation’ (the United States), and the contention of Robin of Berkeley is; (more…)
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