An inclusional worldview
APN
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…)
‘The Sociopathic Epidemic’: Commentary
0November 14, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
This newsletter/post is about an article by ‘Robin of Berkeley’ in the ‘American Thinker’ and comments submitted to that website, by yrs trly, from the ‘aboriginal physics’ point of view, a sort of a probe as to whether we could dialogue not just about things that are going wrong, but about potential flaws in the foundations of our Enlightment social architecture.
* * *
Whether we are talking about organismic ‘dis-ease’ or ‘social ‘dis-ease’, one is free to apply the ‘Aboriginal Physics’ view as an alternative to the ‘Enlightenment physics view.
In the following instance, I commented on the article ‘The Sociopathic Epidemic’ in the ‘American Thinker’ website, giving the ‘Aboriginal Physics’ perspective. First of all, in a condensed one third of a page format (at the bottom of this post). Since the website did publish it, I submitted for publication, the original comment that I had prepared which was one and a half pages long and using more colloquial language where the ‘underlying physics’ is not so evident.
I don’t know if they will publish this longer comment, but if they do, I will report that in a comment here on the Aboriginal Physics website.
That being said, the following speaks for itself if one first reads the American Thinker article ‘The Sociopathic Epidemic’
http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/467981.html
The following is the one and a half page comment version as was submitted for publication
* * *
Preview: This is how your message will appear in the forum.
Re: The Sociopathic Epidemic
Posted by: emile
Date: 11/14/2009 08:36PM
… what emile is saying in regard to the dynamo model of social dynamics can be translated as follows; (more…)
Author’s Subtext. . . . . APN #1
0November 4, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
Pandemic Preemption – ‘Author’s Subtext’ [see footnote in ‘Introduction’]
Contributors; Ted Lumley
In writing this first newsletter (APN #1, Pandemic Pre-emption) on the ‘H1N1 swine flu pandemic’, I wanted to try to deepen the view of ‘what is actually going on’, to capture how the sense of ‘being a participant in evolution’ (a ‘strand in the web of life’) does important things for us and for the way we engage with/in the world, that are absent when we opt for the sense of ‘being in control’, as associates with dealing in ‘representations’ and the ‘causal model’.
The remarks on community ‘seen’ as the ‘wild desert flower’ that spontaneously self-organises, rather than the community ‘seen’ as something ‘deliberately constructed’ as it may appear in ‘representations’, tries to infuse the sense that the relationship between ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’ can be ‘seen’ in two ways; in an ‘aboriginal/medieval’ way and an Enlightenment – representation way.
The approach attempted has been to infuse, by way of a ‘background awareness’, the sense that there is indeed a conjugate relationship between ‘inhabitants’ and ‘habitat’ (‘terrain’). In the viewfield of a notional long-term observer (the ‘eyes of the continuing evolutionary process’), the flow of people in and out of the oasis is relentless and so the occupants of the dwellings around the oasis are ceaselessly being replaced, not only by the immigration-emigration flow but by the birth-death flow, so that the dwellings (that we can capture as photographic representations) can be understood as a kind of ‘scale’ that develops along the periphery of the flow, in the manner that a silt-loaded river in the delta dumps out the material to build its own banks. (more…)
Pandemic Pre-emption APN#1
0November 4, 2009
by ted lumley
in APN
Perhaps nothing pre-empts minority views as effectively as the threat of a global catastrophe that appears to be avertable, if and only if everyone ‘gets on board’ the effort to ‘cut it off at the pass’. For example, if one believes that getting vaccinated will attenuate the spread of H1N1 to the point that it never reaches ‘critical mass’, then it becomes a ‘moral imperative’ for everyone to get vaccinated and, figuratively speaking, lower the lead rods into the about-to-go-supercritical nuclear core of global society.
Managing a pandemic counter-defensive requires a concerted effort by the media to mobilize the masses, and there is no time, under these circumstances, to open the media channels to hear out the ‘minority views’ which question a runaway logic that may be more effective in provoking pandemonium than countering pandemic. (more…)
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